Venice Part 1

Hey all,

We enjoyed our first class train trip to Venice very much, and it really is quite amazing in that you walk out of the train station and there it is – the grand canal.  For all that I was not personally wild about going to Venice, and if K had not wanted to would probably not have, I am so glad that we did.  It really is as beautiful as everyone says it is – magical, even though it was the middle of the night and I was still pretty ill.

Unfortunately getting from the train station to the hotel was a little less magical.  It was the middle of the night.  We went to the wrong water bus stop.  We waited.  Were told to go to another one by the attendant on the waterbus that showed up.  We went to the wrong one.  Repeat.  Missed the last regular service.  Figured out the night service to get.  Went to wrong stop.  Waited.  Told again to go somewhere else.  Waited.  Did not actually get on water bus until about quarter to one, by which stage even K had, after either our forth or sixth set of incorrect instructions, thrown what is for K a massive tantrum, and said, and I quote, “F***ing Hell!”  Which pleased me no end as in this particular relationship the volatility does not usually come from her...

The water bus ride in the middle of the night was, eventually, quite lovely, and although we didn't have a map I used the magic usb stick and google maps to get some clue where the hotel was in relation to our stop, and we eventually found it, which was a fair effort, given that some of the “streets” we walked through to get there are so narrow that they would not even qualify as legal gaps between buildings in Australia.  Arriving, we asked the guy at the hotel if he had a map – he was shocked that we had found the place in the middle of the night without one, impressed, even a little fearful – we were obviously in touch with the occult.

A nice little hotel – not even that expensive.  Admittedly the drain in the shower did not work, and we had to get in and out quickly before water flowed out on to the floor, and admittedly the “panoramic” views turned out to be panoramic in the sense that, if you stood on a chair, the window afforded you a 180 degree panorama of a scruffy looking building, but still.

We slept in and woke to what K describes as “lovely silence and panoramic views.”  The silence I didn't really notice until K pointed it out, but it is a wonderfully quite place, especially at night – there are no cars, none at all, none of that random background noise we just take for granted.

Photos.  1.  First view of Venice at night.  2.  Our hotel street, at night.  3.  Our hotel street, during the day.  4 and 5.  Inside our hotel.  6.  American Express sign in Venice.  Mosaic, of course.  7.  The kind of streets we had to negotiate in the middle of the night without a map to find hotel.

Cheers, B.