Venice - Italy

Venice......Via Milan | 20 Jan 2006

Ahhhh Venice, the great city on the water and my first journey of the New Year. It was also my first trip with Petrie so was sure to be funny.

Unexpectantly, the trip was a real killer! All things going to plan we should have hit our hotel around midnight after leaving London at 7.30pm.... unfortunately things didn't go to plan. We couldn't land in Venice because it was fogged in and so we ended up landing in Milan at around 11pm. Ryanair organised buses to get us to Venice and they pulled out of Milan airport at midnight for the 4 HOUR!! drive to Venice. We got there around 4am and then had a 50 minute boat ride to get to the island of Lido where our hotel was. We hit bed at a bit after 5am! What a trip!

Our planned early start obvioulsy didn't eventuate and we ended up getting to St Marks Square around noon where we met up with Petries room mate, the Frenchman Yan who flew over that morning. The rest of the day was spent walking and seeing as many sites as we could. The weather was perfect and sunny (though cold) and you can cover a large part of the city in a day. Apart from St Mark's Square we checked out St Mark's Brasilica. Amazing inside but as with so many of those places these days, camera's are banned so you can't capture that. We covered most of the area around St Marks and then headed off for some lunch. Easily the best pasta I reckon I've ever had. Italian food lived up to its top billing. After lunch it was off to the Ponte di Rialto, a famous old bridge crossing the Grand Canal. We continued to wander the maze of streets (getting lost a couple of times) until we decided we were thirsty and in need of some night life (it was dark by this stage). Venice..... no night life at all!! We found an Irish pub full of drunk Poms and that was it! Very disappointing but one of the guys at work had warned me about that so no great surprise. After another delicious meal it was back to Lido for an enforced earlyish night.

The next day we hit the city much earlier. We headed on a boat down the Grand Canal, right through the city until we came to the area that incorporated the Jewish "Ghetto". There wasn't actually much to see there so we took off towards a famous church, the Basilica of the Frari. It seemed a fair way away on the map but seriously, Venice is tiny and it doesn't take long to walk anywhere. It's weird being in a city with no cars as well. Kinda strange. We continued looking around that area of the city. There are so many gorgeous old churches, buildings, gondola's everywhere (we didn't go on one) and shops galore. By this time it was getting late and Petrie and I had a plane to catch. We headed back toward the Ponte di Rialto and had some of the finest Gelati I've ever had (regardless of the cold) and then headed back to the hotel to get ready to head back to London.

Final thoughts on Venice. It was nice. I tend to find myself judging the cities that I visit on whether or not I could see myself living there. New York I could live in tomorrow. Paris too. But Venice was nothing like that. It was a gorgeous old city and certainly very different but it's not somewhere I'd look to go back too. Two days there and you've seen a lot of what there is to see. Mark it off the list and move on :-)

Locations Visited: London, Venice

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