Anyone that has ever been to Venice will tell you it’s one of the most romantic places they have ever seen, meaning it’s got all the elements required: water, high prices and corny rides. That said, I can tell you by experience Venice is perfect for single ladies looking for a good time. Unless they’re two Capricornian Film students with mother issues, previously called “troublemakers” in a London nightclub by two American guys who had evidently been huge nerds in their teens.
How you manage to have two Capricornians in the same trip and none of them has done their travel research is beyond me. Maybe it was the romantic side of our writer’s sensibility that called for spontaneous walks to see what would happen. Maybe this whole zodiac think is pure rubbish – although there is something different about people who have had holiday birthdays their entire life, with few or no friends coming to their parties; some call it trauma, I call it independence practise. The fact was we had seven days ahead of us and no plan.
The first day was entirely spent sleeping in our cute chalet designed for adventurous couples in their honeymoon. I don’t care for your judgement.
The second day, we woke up still freezing from the night before. It was unusually chilly for spring and the hostel was environmentally friendly, so the radiators were a private staff joke. The whole trip had been planned at the last minute, so we were staying fifteen minutes away by bus from Piazzale Roma, where the island actually started. It was incredibly cheap, but, like Cinderella, we had a midnight curfew for the last bus back to the hostel.
I could describe to you in detail every single stunning wonder we saw walking aimlessly around the island, but you can see – and I dare say feel – all that beauty by looking at any photo anyone has ever taken in Venice. It is that amazing. It is that pastel-coloured. It is that packed with tourist every minute of every day. However, not everyone will be able to give you full account of these other things:
First of all, there’s no ugly Italian in Venice. Apart from an old waiter who worked in a restaurant near Rialto and kept asking us to join him on a roadtrip across Italy and yelling “thank you Brazil” because we were just “too pretty”. But really, you can instantly tell the difference between an Italian man and a tourist in that city. Vanessa and I accidentally entered a university’s premises at some point and it was very difficult to get out, not because Venice is a labyrinth (it really is), but because there were too many gorgeous faces in one single place and we couldn’t move.
Once we were able to resume our wanderings, we saw plenty of awesome stuff sprayed on the walls. Like “Luca, capriccio infame!”. Or “coglione, ti amo!” – ‘coglione’ means idiot, and that sentence is actually quite relatable to anyone. We saw many beautiful giant dogs, too. Like, who would bring a regular dog to Venice?
As the afternoon was coming to an end, we came across the most wonderful piazza ever, full of immigrant children playing ball games and incredibly good-looking Italian students drinking wine, because once again we were accidentally close to a university. We bought a bottle of wine from a supermarket and just stayed there, making wiiiiild… eye-contact. Once we emptied our wine bottle (yep), we decided to buy some more in one of the bars around the piazza. The bartender spoke Portuguese and she had lived in Fortaleza. And hated it. Too much prostitution – Can you blame her?
I had studied Italian online for a while and was ready to ask this very complex question to the most handsome Italian man we could spot whenever the time came: “Which way to Piazzale Roma?”. Of course, by the time the clock struck eleven-thirty, I just walked inside the bar again and asked the bartender for detailed instructions in Portuguese.
We took the very last bus back to the hostel. Some dude started making conversation in English with Vanessa and I was half carefully observing them and half paying attention to our stop. Which we missed. I immediately pulled the cord so we could take off at the next stop, but the son-of-a-bitch driver decided he wanted to drop two young ladies alone in the middle of an empty road at midnight.
We walked for about half an hour without reaching anywhere. We had no idea how far from the hostel we were anymore, as there were no signs and the road made a weird turn at some point. Then we got to a residential complex and there was a car parking in. I waved frantically when one of the most handsome people I have ever seen in person came out of the car. But there was no time to admire his beauty just then. I just asked the lifesaver sentence I had learned on my online course: “Do you speak English?”. No, he didn’t. My moderate to highly drunken mind tried to put some words together to explain our situation. I wanted to tell him we had missed our bus stop on our way to the hostel, which was called Camping Rialto, and wanted very badly to know how to get there. What I said was something like this: “We… bus… no… Camping Rialto… where?”.
He shook his head. Obviously. But then he mimicked a ride offer. And just like that we realised Handsome Italian Guy was actually our guardian angel sent to Earth to help us in a time of need.
He found the hostel, we said “grazie” about a million times and, when we got to reception, there was a (non-environmentally friendly) portable radiator for us that the reception lady had managed to arrange.
Now, isn’t Venice romantic?
