Venice: Entering The Trap

So, what is the appropriate amount of time to spend in Venice? I suppose that depends on what you are there for and how good the weather is. If it’s your honeymoon and you want spend a lot of time on the romantic gondola rides through the canals, adding in a few days probably isn’t a bad idea, particularly in the nicer times of the year. I wasn’t interested in that.

I spent four days in Venice, which was too much. I think that two days would have been sufficient to see what I was interested in seeing. A third day probably was in order because the weather was near perfect and the food was so good. But the fourth day was just more of the same in the most touristy city that I have ever visited, as well as one of the more expensive.

I stayed four days because I didn’t want to be on the road during the Real Madrid-Barcelona match, thinking that it would be played on Sunday. As it turned out, it was played late Saturday night, I only got to see half of it, and I could be in Nice already had I known last week what I know now. (Instead of on the train from Venice to Nice, which is my current location.) Oh, well. Venice was pretty cool; it just would have been cooler for three days instead of four.

The trip to Venice was a complicated one. I was in Zagreb and had to jump on a tram at 5:30 am to get to the train station on time. Jump on and arrive on time, I did. The train took me to Villach, Austria. (I didn’t even know Villach was in Austria until the guy who punched my ticket mentioned it to me.) The train passed through Slovenia, and I passed back into the European Union for the last time on this trip. Once in Villach, I had to get a ticket for the bus to Venice. That wasn’t a problem and I was on my way.

I have to say that the scenery on the bus ride from Villach to Venice, at least the Austrian part of the trip, was some of the most beautiful that I’ve ever witnessed. Snow-covered Alps and little streams filled the landscape, along with occasional pastures covered with sheep. I took some pictures through the window as we passed, but those never come out all that great from the iPhone.

We arrived at the bus station in Venice and I had to find my way to my hotel. I knew my way to the hotel from the train station, but not the bus station. Now, when I was reading about how to get to my hotel from the bus station, somebody online had stated that you could get a canal taxi to the train station and that is what I had been prepared to do until I realized that you could actually see the train station from the bus station and only had to cross a bridge to get there. Thank you for almost wasting my money and time, friendly online guide person (read: idiot).

When I got to my hotel, I dropped my stuff off and went to get something to eat. It was one of those intermediate times, around 3 pm, so I wanted to get something small so I would eat dinner. So, I had a slice of pizza and a beer and went walking around the neighborhood. Often when I do my initial tour of my new neighborhood, one of the purposes is to discover a place to eat on my first night. Here, that wasn’t a problem. There had to be sixty restaurants within a 100-yard radius of my hotel. Most served pizza and/or pasta, so I could tell that there would be a lot of both in my immediate future. (I think I’ll dedicate another post to food in Venice, so I’ll leave this topic for now.)

I took a look at my iPhone guides and the map that the hotel provided me and they led me to the conclusion that there were two places that I had to visit if I did nothing else in Venice – the Rialto and Piazza San Marco. I put those on the agenda for the next day and that’s where we will pick up in the next post.