Packed up all our gear and headed to breakfast with our bags: two cappuccinos and two plain croissants, eaten the Italian way, standing at the coffee bar.
A painless two hour train to the watery city. The pain was getting the €7 Vaporetto or water bus from the central station, Venezia Santa Lucia, to the fairly far away neighborhood where our B&B was located. The water bus, which took us down the Grand Canal to the Arsenale stop (not kidding), was very crowded. You would think that the main form of transport in such a touristed city would have a plan for suitcases and backpacks. Nope. And this is not even the ‘High Season!’ Not a comfortable ride.
Having been to Venice before, I had one suggestion for Van: we avoid the masses of tourists. Even though we are traveling in the ‘off-season,’ Venice is known for its huge crowds and I know there are beautiful parts of the floating city where we can avoid them.
We had arrived a day early and had grab a last-minute B&B. It was in the Castello neighborhood. A nice place in a quiet part of town.
The next three nights we had a room in the Cannaregio neighborhood where our friends Jim and Lynn Willhite were staying. I knew this was the Jewish neighborhood but I didn’t know the Venetians restricted Jews in this ghetto for more than 270 years until Napoleon Bonaparte conquered the Venetian Republic in 1797. Wow, anyway, incredible neighborhood. If you want to be in an area where the locals really live and the tourists rarely visit, this is the place.
We bumped into Jim and Lynn a day before we were to meet them. We were exiting one of the many thin Callèttes (alleys) when we saw a bridge where many people were enjoying adult drinks in stemmed glassware. I immediately said to Vân, “We need to have a drink on that bridge.” As I looked around to see where to buy said drinks, Vân heard her name being shouted. Jim and Lynn had sniffed out the drinking bridge before we even arrived. Many glasses of Prosecco were drunk that night in the sunset and dusk.
There are approximately 340 bridges in Venice. As we tried to avoid the crowed bridges we found this cute, small, railless bridge. We should have gone in search of the “Bridge of Fists” and the “Bridge of Tits” but again, we were avoiding what we started calling “herds,” large groups of organized tours, often from cruise ships. We borrowed the term from what Rick Grimes’ group calls packs of zombies in The Walking Dead television series.
We discovered the ‘Spritz’ while in Venice. These nuclear red or orange looking drinks are made with white wine or sometimes Prosecco and a dash of some bitter liqueur such as Aperol or Campari. If made with white wine, some sparkling mineral water is added. Very, very refreshing on a hot day.
Older Italians seem to be much nicer that younger ones. Simple suggestion to the unhappy Italian Millennials working in the tourist industry: If you’re not happy at your job, get a job in another industry and stop being obnoxious to those you are paid to serve.
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