8, 9 & 10 July 2010
G’day from Venice.
There is little to report on our visit to Venezia.
We arrived by train from Assisi mid afternoon and walked from the station to the apartment and of course managed to get lost on the way. Venezia is a maze of streets and alleys and when you come to a square or piazza, it is difficult when 3 of the 4 streets that lead from the piazza all have the same name.
I have to say that this set the scene for the next two days – trying to navigate our way around the place. However, the beauty of this was that we saw more of the city than we had planned...
Then we arrived at the apartment - to be greeted by a locked door and nobody answering the bell. That's OK we thought, we got lost and were later arriving than we had advised - we will ring the owner and tell him we are here.
Surprise number 1 - this number is disconnected! This situation was met with some alarm - we are stuck in a foreign country and we now haven't a clue how to contact the owner. The next door neighbour was no help at all - he just shrugged his shoulders. Gloria spotted a real estate agent down the street and wondered aloud if they knew him, given he was renting his apartment out. No they didn't but....
Surprise number 2 - they knew his mother !!!!! So there was a number of phone calls backwards and forwards to confirm that we had paid for the apartment and, lo and behold, a key was produced. Apparently Mumma must know her son well and he probably has a track record for this sort of thing, but that didn't matter - we eventually received access into the apartment.
Our first disappointment was that we rented an apartment for 3 nights that was supposed to have WIFI connection availability. It turned out that the promised WIFI was in fact the Venice citizens network – free to Venetians. We were given the logon and password just this morning (day 3 and our final day of our stay) and soon discovered that we could not access the network from the apartment – we had to be out in the street to gain sufficient signal. On top of that, it is incredibly slow and it drops out all the time.
This has been very frustrating because I chose this apartment on the strength of the internet availability.
The second disappointment was that the Bridge of Sighs was still blighted by enormous billboards that absolutely destroy the vista. Unfortunately, commerciality comes first.
The third is that Venezia is also undergoing restoration such as was happening in Roma – scaffolding that was shrouded in canvas (plastered with the inevitable advertising) to contain the dust and debris.
We have done nothing but walk around checking out the place and seemingly have peered into every shop window. It has been very warm with little breeze and the place is absolutely full of tourists – thousands of them!
Other than that there is nothing to report except that we are tired, have sore feet, are sick of the heat but are actually enjoying ourselves – we find that we have to rehydrate every night and as water is hard to find around here, we have had to settle for wine, beer etc. The food is bloody awful too – we can’t understand why we are putting on weight!
Anyway, that’s all for now, my beer is getting hot
Ciao
