VENICE, ITALY

It’s not surprising, but Venice is a very expensive city and the hotel I reserved was to cost €70 per night. I could have reserved a place outside of the city for a bit less, but Venice seems like a city that you are either in it or out of it and for two days I figured it was worth the splurge. The hotel charges €130 for the same room during peak season so it seemed like a decent place to stay. The train left on time and arrived only a couple of minutes behind schedule after 3 hours. I have always heard that the trains in southern Europe are notoriously late, but I have found that every one leaves right on time and usually arrives on time as well.

Right away it is obvious that Venice is like no other city in the world. The train station is very typical looking, but right out the front door is the Grand Canal and its incredible views. My hotel was near the famous St. Mark’s Square and it could be reached by a 40-minute walk or a 30-minute ride in the water bus. The water bus itself is a major attraction so I paid the €5 and climbed on board the one going toward St. Mark’s Square. Rick Steves has a description of the various sights along the ride so I read along while the boat chugged its way from stop to stop for the next 30 minutes. The city’s most prominent palaces are all on the Grand Canal and the front façade of each one faces the water so there is really no other way of seeing their lavish exteriors.

My hotel was two stops before St. Mark’s, but the stops come so quickly and are on both sides of the canal so in reality you aren’t going very far with each stop. I jumped off and followed the instructions to my hotel and found it right away. It seemed very nice, but the most amazing thing was that it faces a very ornate and somewhat famous church and square. I checked into my 4th floor room and was amazed that some of the best statues were on display right outside my window. As I lay in bed it was like standing in a museum seeing the statues.

I had a lot of energy after the train ride so I hit the street right away. I headed for the most famous sight in Venice, the St Mark’s Square. Since the city is actually slowly but surely sinking I was sort of hoping that it was flooded on this day. I saw a long documentary about Venice a year or two ago and evidently the city sinks an inch every few years or so and the tides often flood several parts of the city, starting with St. Mark’s Square, several times per year, especially in winter. Unfortunately it was not flooded when I got there. There was a large patch of snow still in the area that gets the least direct sunlight, and the platforms were stacked nearby, but the square was dry. I was slightly disappointed by the square actually. It has such a reputation that I was expecting the most glorious place I had ever witnessed, but it was just a large brick square surrounded by government buildings on three sides with a beautiful church completing the rest.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s very nice, but on a trip like this your standards grow higher and higher and I’m not sure that is a good thing. Anyway, it’s very pleasant and I wandered around for a while and looked at all the other tourists present. This is another place where they sell birdfeed (spiked with bird birth-control formula) to the tourists so there is an enormous amount of pigeons who boldly assemble waiting for tourists to buy food for them. These two very pretty German girls bought a cone of feed, but neither one could bear the birds on them long enough to actually do it properly. It was probably even more fun to watch that way actually.

I went inside St. Mark’s Cathedral (free) and looked around then paid a few Euros to look around on the roof. Already I had completed my compulsory sightseeing for Venice and I had only been there an hour or two. It really is amazing the process I keep going through, which is probably very familiar to anyone else on a trip like this. You arrive in a city and it always seems intimidating and impossible. How can you possibly explore this large city in a day or two or three? Then you hit the streets and start connecting the dots and within a few hours you realize you’ve hit the major marks already and the earlier thought seems ridiculous. Now you have two more days (or whatever) to roam around and fill in the rest of your time. Places like New York, London, Paris, and Los Angeles aren’t quite so easy, but most of Europe’s famous cities have all of their attractions grouped together since they were usually small towns (comparatively speaking) when the layout was conceived.

Venice is a very unusual city, but in a great way. I am a huge fan of any place that minimizes the car situation and in that respect Venice is the ultimate destination. Not only are there no cars, but no bicycles or trolleys or golfcarts or anything else. Pedestrians rule the streets with no competition. I really loved that about my experience there. I know it’s a utopian fantasy, but it is extremely pleasant nonetheless. The city is very expensive partly because every last thing you buy or eat or drink needs to be shipped in and then handtrucked to its destination before you ever see it. The only traffic that competes with people on foot is the occasional tangle with a man shoving a dolly loaded with goods through the maze of pedestrian walkways.

Another great thing about Venice is that you can walk endlessly without the fear of ever really getting lost or wandering into a rough neighborhood. One drawback though, is there seems to be no nightlife at all. I wasn’t that interested in going to a bar anyway, but after a rest I left my hotel that first evening around 9 p.m. and almost everything was closed or closing. I just wanted to get a glass of wine and any kind of dinner, but every last one of the affordable corner bar type places was shut down by that time, and this was a Friday night! I wandered around for about 30 minutes in the crisp winter air and found almost nothing open. I finally happened upon a traditional place on a quiet street that was still about half full. I had a small pitcher of wine and a great pizza, but it cost €23 including the service charge. It was good, but that’s just too much money for me to spend alone, especially considering I am eating nearly every single meal out for months.

The next morning I got up and had the small, but delicious breakfast that was included at my hotel. The weather was clear, but it was still quite cold. The fact that there is virtually no wind unless you are on the edge of town really keeps it comfortable during the winter, but it must be a killer in the summer. I found a travel agency to buy my train ticket to Florence so I wouldn’t have to go too early to the station the next day. It was €26.60, but the guy told me it was €27 and then shorted me €1 more on my change. I looked at the coins he handed me for a second until he gave me the extra €1, but it was only after I left that I noticed he scammed me out of 40 more cents anyway. Evidently this seems to be part of the Italian philosophy, that getting the better of someone in a transaction is something to be proud of. The funny thing is that I was also looking for a plane ticket from Rome to Athens, but the sleaziness of this transaction made me not trust him when he said the fare he came up with was really good. He beat me out of 40 cents while trying to beat me out of €1.40 and lost about a €10 commission on a plane ticket.

After that I planned on doing two self-guided walking tours from Tourist Info brochures. They were really impressive looking tours called “Beyond St. Marks”. Apparently most tourists go immediately to St. Marks Square then walk back and forth to the Rialto Bridge and that is all they see of the city. These walking tours cover a string of sights through the quiet parts of town. The first one started in front of the Train Station, which was ironic because I bought the train ticket from the travel agency so I wouldn’t have to go to the train station, but the lines in those places can be really long sometimes anyway so it’s good to avoid them when you can.

The brochure was all in English and had photos, a good map, and detailed explanations of about 25 sights along a specific route. I started out and was not too impressed. The descriptions were pretty dry and the sights I was to look at were church facades and sometimes places where churches once stood. What? There are about a million old-looking churches in Venice so each one really gets lost in the shuffle and to point out places where previous churches had stood was ridiculous. The good thing about it was that it was a well-organized route through some less-traveled parts of town. The entire town is gorgeous so this was a great way to enjoy it without the constant stream of tourists and souvenir shops that chokes the main streets. I tried, but about two thirds of the way through I got bored with it and wanted to get some lunch.

I had two slices of tasty pizza and continued to walk around, but in a more random fashion. I never did finish the first tour or even start the other one. Nevertheless, I was really enjoying the scenery and just cruising through a pedestrian-only city. As I mentioned before, the number of tourists is really amazing. This is March and it is impossible to walk anywhere near a normal speed most of the time due to the clogged streets. Making things worse was a huge brigade of African guys selling fake handbags along the sides of the already thin walkways. Every corner you would turn you would see a few more selling the exact same thing on the next street. I would like to see the city get rid of them. Not many people were interested in the bags and the foot traffic is already terrible without them.

A couple of hours later and I was back in my hotel room for a bit of a siesta. I learned from my previous evening’s lesson and went out early this time. Around 6 p.m. I headed across town to a neighborhood where my guidebook recommended a series of non-touristy stand-up bar restaurants. The Italians have their own version of tapas, but the food is far better in Italy. A beer is around €2 and a wine is sometimes half that so it can be a pretty cheap way to rub elbows with the locals. The problem with that is that I will often roll into a small place filled with locals and they are just in their own groups and the bartender knows little or no English so I just order one thing, eat or drink it, then leave.

I went from place to place like this for a bit, but then I found a place crowded with younger people. I ordered a glass of wine and a Greek guy standing next to me helped me order some appetizers. I asked him for advice on my upcoming trip to Athens and he warned me that people aren’t civilized there. Hmmm… I have already heard that it’s quite dirty and as my friend Mark says, it’s the “Mexico of Europe” so now I am not sure how much time I might spend in Athens. One positive thing he told me is that Greece is far more like Northern Europe in that most people and virtually all younger people speak English well. Also, the movies and TV shows are subtitled rather than dubbed since there are only 10 million Greek speakers compared to well over 50 million for Italian, Spanish, French, or German. I am looking forward to finally being able to watch The Simpsons or anything else without the Godzilla-style dubbing into a foreign tongue. He also recommended going to one or more islands, even during the fringe season like this. After having a few cheap glasses of wine and some filling snacks I had enough so I went back to my hotel.

The next morning I checked out and took the water bus back to the train station for my 10:00 a.m. train. Once again I was astounded by the scenery of Venice and particularly the Grand Canal. It’s a shame that the city is sinking and dying and falling apart, but for the next few decades it should still be on any traveler’s must-see list. The hotels are understandably expensive, but I actually found that affordable food and drinks were very easy to find. Certainly there are a lot of very expensive restaurants, particularly the ones with canal views, but I found the neighborhood places to be priced similarly to those in Milan or even Spain. I expected a slice of pizza to cost €3 or more, but finding a great €2 slice is easy and washing it down with a €1 glass of house wine is just as easy. The train pulled out on time, again, and I was on my way to Florence.