Monday morning in Venice and we were faced with the pressing task of being ready to check out by 11am.
We managed OK, left our bags in reception (did I mention that the reception is about the size of a broom closet and has no windows, making it feel somewhat like a Captain’s cabin, and that the hotel only had about 7 rooms, accessed via a door in the side of the alleyway that felt like you were disappearing?) and went exploring.
Just near our hotel there was a supermarket so we bought some crappy cheap snacks to take with us (resolving to return later in the day for more crappy cheap snacks to take on the train with us) and then attempted once again to dissolve into the maze of back alleys.
In fact, while Florence felt like (again compared to Rome) a whole city of backstreeets, Venice is composed almost entirely of alleys. There’s no cars. And there’s no bicycles – and additionally there’s no ‘getting from place to place’ if you’re in a wheelchair, or pushing a pram, or even using both arms to carry a half-full wheelbarrow over a bridge, which you might do if you were a builder.
Given the situation with the tiny alleyways, the indistinguishability of any one from any other, and the fact that the whole city is based on a system of several alleyways leading to a tiny public square with a church in it, followed by more alleyways, a tiny public square, etc, Venice is surprisingly easy to not get lost in. Not navigate exactly, but not get lost. More like ‘Well, let’s walk this way for a bit.’
And that works pretty good because Venice itself is tiny.
So from 11.30 ’til about 2.30 we just ambled from Campo San Lio (next to our hotel) round the edge of the Dorsoduro and into the next suburb (they call them ‘Sestiere’ here), which although it didn’t feel like that far, or take very long, was almost all the way back round to the train station we came in on. And then (drum roll) we ambled back, stopping of course for pizza, where we discovered that the razor blade principle applies in Italy as well. That is, the only thing better than a pizza with 4 cheeses is a pizza with… 5 cheeses. How long before someone comes up with a revolutionary new 6 cheese pizza? Nobody knows. Research and development are continuing.
So yeah… the 5 cheese pizza was pretty tasty. Then we walked back past the route that would go to San Marco and attempted to get lost over in that direction as well. The funny thing about it is that with Venice being so small, and with us not having a guide book of any kind, we ended up coming across most of the ‘sights’ that we would probably have gotten lost attempting to find, if we had been attempting to find them.
Also we discovered that there is a surprising amount of fish/crabs/ and other small sea-life in the lagoon, that the Venice Theatre is pretty well hidden, but spectacularly ornate for such a small building, that the line for the toilets in McDonalds (yes…. even in Venice) is hilariously long unless you have a Y chromosome, and that both in the toilets themselves, and the pavement out the front McD’s, smells like some kind of major sewerage leak.
After a final stopover in Piazza San Marco, which really is worth seeing (ignore my comments about rubbish and pigeon crap, even though they are accurate), we bought fruit and snacks and whatnot for the train, as well a lemon fanta which Alice couldn’t resist and a large can of Heineken for 1.80€ which I couldn’t resist, we picked up our bags, strapped everything in on and under, and bumped and shuffled our way back through the main island, over the bridge to the railway station.
Luckily for once we had arrived hopelessly early, so we sat on the edge of the canal in the shade of said bridge, ate some high-quality savoury biscuits and said goodbye to Venice. (‘we hardly knew ye’, etc etc.)
Readers may have detected by now that things seem to be going along a bit too easily. Upon presenting our tickets and passports for the train – to get in and out of Switzerland from Italy you need a passport, but you don’t have to wake up for passport control, the guards keep your papers and do it all for you while you sleep – but not now, now the guard says that there is a problem which is that we shouldn’t have been booked in the same cabin together, that the cabin we are in is supposed to be for men and that there is in fact a third person (a man, ‘uomo’ it says in the ticket) booked in our 3-person cabin. So… he scratches his head but can see that we are obviously dumb flat-foot tourists and there had obviously been some mistake and so he says that he will speak to the Head Guard (or whoever) and that they may have to move Alice to another (all-female) carriage but we won;t have to buy another ticket.
There are some pretty roundabout ways to score another night in Venice but this wasn’t exactly the one we were looking for…
Luckily they didn’t ask her to move (which probably means the train was completely booked so there would be no all-female space to move to), and also the guy that got on in Verona was a young Brit named Tom, who had been travelling around Italy and Slovenia for a few weeks with a friend, and living on bread and jam for quite some time. So when we said that we’d been eating what was cheapest (gelato and pizza) he said ‘Oh so you’ve been living it up!’ Anyway the train kept on rolling and we had a great time talking about respective trips to here and there, benefits and drawbacks of Florence and Venice, and concocting scams for British tourists leaving the continent to save money by selling-off their half-full ‘pots of jam’ to other British tourists who are arriving on the continent, and think that the first thing they should do is acquire some pots of jam to live on, but who don’t realise that half a pot of jam is more than they will ever want.
It turns out going to sleep on a train is surprisingly easy (what it will be like on Russian and Vietnamese trains remains to be seen, but this was an encouraging practice run).
Greg
