Venice, Sunday 10th October
I look out of our hotel room, across a misty grand canal, to Ferrovia, the main station. It's 07:30, and there's already a few drab-anoracked, pack laden young tourists around - perhaps heading out of town. Wooden poles in the water - treetrunks stripped bare of branches and leaves - look out of place until you notice one or two gondolas, nose it, between some sets of the poles and realise that they're mooring controls. Bright blue plasticised covers add a morning brightness to the gondolas, which otherwise and during their working day are predominantly funeral black. Lisa stirs, takes out her camera and is now photographing the bathroom, but that's a whole other story.
We flew from Bristol to Venice yesterday - an EasyJet flight which is only a year or two old, but nearly full. Good, efficient "Flying Bus" service. Venice Airport was smaller than I expected. Luggage came through quickly, entry was just a wave of our passports at an official, and we caught the bus down town. Like Bristol Airport, Venice isn't well connected into the local road / rail network - we realsed this as our bus turned onto the single carriagway road as we left the airport and headed through towns on what would be a typical A road in the UK. They say that the excitement of a journey is in the travel rather than the getting there, but I have to say that Venice is the exception.
[Phone rings due to Lisa's bathroom activities]
From our hotel, a maze of back alleyways leads a mile or so through an old town where tarmac is replaced by water. Bridges jump you from section to section of the town. Very occasionally you can forget that you're in this strange place as you pass between high buildings up an alleyway, but more often you're in sight of bridges or waterside. The Grand Canal threads its way through the area like a letter S splitting the area into two inner quarters, joined by the Rialto bridge, with each quarter spilling into outer areas. We're staying in one quarter and it's the less commercialised.
We walked through to the other quarter last night, over the bridge, ate at a fish restaurant there, where the passing traffic was not cars but Gondolas and motor boats and saw St Mark's square with quartets playing outside each of the cafes. All very good, and the area so huge that there were areas of silence rather than areas of interference between, even though the music in each area was perfectly clear to hear. And, to round off the evening out, a ride on the water bus all the way around the "S" back to Ferrovia and our hotel.
