Venice - Friday 22nd April

Our first foray into Italia began at 2am on Good Friday, we had elected to get the cheapest flights possible as always and this meant ridiculous flight times which involved the Bandits getting a couple of buses to actually get to the airport on time for our 6.30am flight.

After some much needed breakfast and coffee at the airport we were perked up and ready to hit up Venice. We flew into Treviso airport that is Venice’s secondary airport to the main airport – Marco…Polo. Treviso is situated about 30 miles outside of Venice and the feeling you get when you land there is like landing in NZ for the first time at New Plymouth airport - slightly backward. The journey over was really great as it was a clear day and we flew over the Dolomites still covered with snow.

We arrived in to Venice itself after another bus journey and then checked into our hotel that was about 100m from the main rail station. It was a cute little place – we were on the top floor and they didn’t have a lift. This was possible a blessing in disguise to work off all that pizza and pasta… 

The view from our hotel room

The first mission we encountered was how to get money out. In every other European city we had been, we had just got Euro’s out of a cash machine but this didn’t seem to want to work for us. Eventually we had to get money out of the Forex office at the station and were charged 15% commission!!!! We think it maybe intentional you cant get money out easily as everyone there is a tourist - Our first experience of blatant ripping off and rudeness by Italian customer service people.

The weather was nice and summery so we went out exploring. We were staying in the Cannaregio area which is in the top left of the circle shape, we wandered in the vague direction of St. Mark’s square were affronted by the waves of tourists in all directions (50,000 tourists on an average day). It seemed every shop was either a restaurant with an overpriced tourist menu, a shop selling “authentic” Venetian glass and masks or gelato. The streets and bridges are so narrow it’s a bit claustrophobic. It was quite stressful really, but once we stepped into St. Mark’s square it was quite a “wow” moment. 

Maps don't seem to help in Venice

 The Basilica itself is massive, it takes up one whole side of the square and is different than a lot of other churches we have seen due to its colourful mosaics in each of the dome bits, it’s nickname is “the church of gold”. It was built in 828 to house the remains of St. Mark and was meant to be the chapel to the neighbouring Doge’s Palace. The Palace, the clock tower and lots of restaurants take up the rest of the square. We had heard rumours that these restaurants were expensive but charging 8 Euro’s (NZD$ 15) for an little espresso is just a little over the top… 

The Bell Tower in St.Marks Square

We then decided to grab some lunch and so began the carbo-loading. We had paninis and bought some fresh strawberries from a fruit and veg market that were amazing and sat by a canal watching people take gondola rides, a very nice experience.

We had read about a tour that included a walking tour of the St. Marks region as well as a gondola ride so we signed up to that and off we went. The tour in English was probably the worst one we have been on. The woman could hardly speak English!! She stated only obvious facts that an 8 year old could tell you such as “Venice has canals…. umm yes Venice has canals” and “Venice gets flooded sometimes because of global warming”. Really?? We learnt nothing new on the tour but we persevered and hopped on a gondola for a ride up the Grand Canal, which was really really cool even though we did share it with 4 others from the tour – its about €80 for a half hour trip! The lagoon area is so busy, with ferries, gondolas, water taxis and private boats zooming everywhere with no obvious sense of the rules (if there are any!) 

After our gondola ride we headed back to our hotel to get into some warmer clothes and recharge the batteries before dinner. We went to a Lonely Planet recommended cheap eatery called Brek. It’s a chain of self-service restaurants where basically they have 4 or 5 different pasta dishes that change every day and you get a bowl of pasta for about €5. Bargain! So we set ourselves up a little Italian dinner for 2 with salad and bread and a carafe of red wine (that came out of a tap!!! All class). The bottles of olive oil that was on each table were absolutely delicious, like unbelievably good, and so was the pasta. Their style of cooking pasta is very minimal, most dishes had only one or two additional ingredients but it tasted so good. And no Italian dinner could be complete without a nutella-flavoured gelato to finish…as we had been up for about 20 hours at this stage; we staggered back to our hotel to get some much needed sleep.

Highlight: Seeing St. Mark’s Square and the gondola ride – cheesy but for a reason! Lowlight: Getting money out, blow out. 

Interesting fact #1: There are 409 bridges in Venice, and I think we got a photo of 86% of them.
Interesting fact #2: Venice is a group of Islands and has canals (copyright curtsey of our highly qualified tour guide who takes money from tourists and walks round speaking less than 100 words in English).