Just a quick story on the city of watery streets where the prices are always high and the scammers never sleep.
We arrived in Venezia the afternoon before yesterday, truthfully I don´t know what day it is anymore so sorry if that sounds a bit strange. We stayed out of the way so didn´t see that city that night but waited until yesterday when we arrived back in the city, dumped our bags and decided to explore.
We´d read that you should prepare to get lost in Venice because the street names and numbers don´t make sense and it´s all such a maze so we were prepared and that was fine by us. We split up and had 7 hours to ourselves to explore.
My first experience was on a water ferry thing when I took my hood off and then a moment later an old man was holding his hand over my seat....
"What´s this..." methinks "maybe he´s just saying hi... they´re probably really friendly"
But oh no, seemingly I had committed a foul misdemeanor as he was holding up a strand of my hair with a very accusing look on his face, and very scolding Italian on his lips suggesting that I had ruined his day by allowing a strand of hair to fall down (obviously too daft to realise I had no idea what he was saying). Yeah I get you don´t want to be covered in someone elses hair but is it me or is that maybe a massive overreaction??? Oh well you all know me, I go out of my way to make life horrible for others...
So I apologised in bad Italian, in fact I may have even said grazie (Italian for thanks)... and then I got into a bad mood. It just continued too with shop keepers telling me off for looking at their beautiful wares, one woman wouldn´t even turn on the light in the display room so that I could even look- and I was buying! Aarrgh!
To top it off we ended up meeting up for dinner and paying €45 for a meal we thought would cost us €10... and then the guy had the cheek to try and keep the change from a €50 - no way we would take no more!
The city and glass (Murano glass for any jewellery buffs) was beautiful but the people ruined it all for me.
So the motto of the story is ´Screw Venice` - they screwed us all day!
That said we did have one really genuine experience of niceness - as we got out of the station an American couple came up to us and offered us their daypasses on the ferry system for free. Then they left leaving us a bit stunned by their generosity. God bless the Americans.
