Flying out of Stansted with Ryan Air at 6am, approx 2 hours later we arrived at Venice airport. Safely through passport control, we collected our bags and enquired where the riverboat taxi departed. Perplexed to be told we needed the 1st floor we blindly followed the signs and five long travellators later descended some stairs to the waterfront.
The journey by riverboat taxi via Murano and along Grand Canal to San Marco took a while but was an excellent way to see more of Venice without additional effort. Our hotel is a 3 minutes walk from St Mark’s Square. The room is ok as we won’t be spending lots of time there but it’d definitely be described as bijou!
While checking in we met an American couple from South California who’d just spent a week in Croatia and hopped across the Adriatic to add one night to their stay before moving on to their next destination.
We started as we meant to go on by sharing a tasty margarita pizza for lunch (the only minor complaint was the pizza had no pineapple on it – lol)
After lunch we began to explore the narrow streets, but rather than following a set route from our guidebook we decided to leave that for tomorrow afternoon and instead ‘follow our nose’ and absorb as much of the city as possible. Although we discovered a number of dead ends (due to the street ending at the canal-side), we saw a lot of what could be described as ‘real Venice’, as opposed to limiting ourselves to the tourist routes. While exploring we saw umpteen glass, handbag and confectionery shops. The range of colours and variations in the glass and handbags was breathtaking. After being wowed by 6 or 7 stores we began to suffer from banner blindness and either ignored them or walked past with only a cursory glance.
The heat of the afternoon began to take its toll and we sought refuge in an ice cream parlour and then guzzled a shared 2L bottle of water and a little later supplemented it with two 500ml coke zero each.
Outside the shop where we bought our coke zero, Liz spotted a couple armed with a bag from ‘Venice Duck Store’ and a large yellow head and beak poking out of the top which made us chuckle as it seemed so unlikely. Armed with our Google Map, we tracked down the little shop and were soon looking at a crazy selection of rubber ducks in every design you can think of from ‘Statue of Liberty duck’ through to ‘Lederhosen duck’ and even ‘Chewbacca duck’!
It has been a strange day, largely due to the cripplingly early start (nobody should ever get up at 1:30am after only 3 hours of sleep), and the intense heat which whatever you think us Brits aren’t used to in our average day. But we enjoyed our exploring and rounded it off by dining in one of the many Italian restaurants we discovered this afternoon. (Liz had the Spaghetti Carbonara and I had the Italian set menu – a small portion of lasagne [6cm x 9cm] followed by a weird chicken steak in the crispiest breadcrumbs ever served with a cos lettuce and grated carrot salad. (Think Findus crispy pancakes but not running in sauce and you’re not a million miles away – yes a blast from the past…) We were upsold a garlic bread to accompany our dishes which was a great suggestion on the part of our server as it was amazing but only lightly garlic and after drizzling it with a little olive oil it became sensational.
While writing this in the lobby due to the crappy wifi signal in our room I’m hearing a massive selection of languages and accents. Everything from Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, English and American English; confirming the massive appeal Venice has with so many nations around the world.