Arriving in Italy

We flew out from Athens early on July 17th, arriving in Venice around 10am. As opposed to our flight in Amsterdam, this flight was extremely easy.

We had a bit of an issue finding a taxi to take us into the center of Venice from the airport, but quickly found a bus and were on our way. By 11:30am we were sitting at a pizza place by the Grand Canal diving into our first Italian pizza.

Neither Emilie nor I had been to Venice before. I was a little worried it would just be one big tourist trap, and our first 5min of walking seemed to indicate this was the case. As we moved away from the train station and moved off of the main tourist routes, we started to see a different side of Venice and one that is very appealing. The way they live with the water changes how life moves and makes me want to understand more. We walked around, checked out side-streets and sat on canals for about 2hrs before getting tired and overheated so went back to our hotel by the train station for a quick rest. The hotel is by the train station and is an old Abbey. It's quite beautiful and has a great feel to it.

During our rest Emilie and I were commenting that we were enjoying Venice so much we wished we had more than one day.

After our rest we set out to find the best Gelato in Venice, see the big square, then grab dinner. We had upgraded Emilie's data plan so now she could be navigator as well and she let us through the streets to a Gelato stand just off St. Marks square. We ate our Gelato while watching Gondola drives "paddle" (?) past. After exploring the square, we had about 30min until dinner. Since the kids were tired, we decided to catch a waterbus back to the train station which was close to our reservation.

The water bus was a disaster.

1. As our bus arrived the locals started screaming and pushing to get on. It appeared that there had been delays and now there was confusion over who should get on first. Unfortunately, we got caught up in some of the pushing. We wrote it off as experiencing another culture and moved on

2. We didn't have COVID masks on, which we didn't think was a problem as we were in an open-air part of the boat, and we really hadn't seen people wearing them. However, the people on the boat felt very strongly and vocally and in a personal space invading way, that we should be wearing them. Everyone managed to stay calm but being screamed at and told that we were going to have the police called on us and were going to have to get off at the next stop (an island), was not great. After what felt like a lot of yelling Ruby remembered that she had put some of her masks in Emile's purse and Graham found one in his pocket so we were able to find masks and no police were called

3. It turned out that the boat unloaded from both sides, which was something we didn't know. We pulled up to a station and were slightly in the way of the disembarking passengers. The boat attendant took it as an opportunity to scream at us in Italian until she had chased us to the other end of the boat. We got off at the next stop.

Dinner was delicious, but not delicious enough to take the taste out of our mouths. We had heard that the locals didn't like tourists, and we probably should have thought about that before getting on a bus full of locals on their way home from work. Still, a saying I'm fond of goes, "If someone tells you what they think, believe them." We were pretty clearly told that we are not welcome in Venice, so we won't go back. Beautiful city though.