Adventures from my Eurotrip: Venice

So we've come to the last blog post about Europe. By this point we'd had more adventures and less sleep than I'd previous thought humanly possible in three weeks. We'd slept in bunk beds, train beds, fold-down tray tables and even in the Freud Museum. We'd visited eight cities (if you count Hamelin, which I'm not entirely sure anyone does) and now we were heading to Venice.

We arrived in the city early in the morning, which is lucky because it took us a good while to lug our cases up and over a good many bridges. I might have enjoyed the novelty of the canal and its pretty little bridges more if they didn't all have so many steps. And this would be the perfect time to point out that not one man offered to give us a hand. Where was the Italian chivalry I'd heard so much about? That's the first and last time I base my preconceptions of a country on a Mary Kate and Ashley movie. 

That said, I couldn't help falling in love with the city, with its creepy masks in the shop windows, winding alleyways that we got lost in, and the general tattered and yet beautiful architecture. I resented the fact that there was a seat tax everywhere we went to get a drink, but I could look past it because the sun was shining and all the men had accents like Gino D'acampo. 

Being the highly cultured people we are we went on a gondola ride. Being the Brits on tour we are, Hayleigh and I couldn't help but hold onto the gorgeous Italian man a little too long as he helped us into the boat. The night got less cultured as it wore on until we decided to drink a 3 euro bottle of wine in our hotel room and, on finding to our horror that it had a cork, spent an hour trying to open it with nothing but a thimble, a hair brush, a broken pair of scissors, and a toothbrush. At last, Hayleigh the Girl Guide pulled through and we happily drank down a wine that would have been disgusting enough without the added unpleasantness of having to pick bits of cork out of our teeth as we drank it.

We went out for cocktails in a quaint little square and watched all the people coming and going, ordering their meals and sipping on their wine. It was a beautiful, tranquil evening...until it was't.

It started when some Italian guys who worked in the restaurant next to our preferred cocktail bar started to holler at us. 

"He said they want to buy us drinks when their shift is over because we're beautiful." I explained.

"He didn't say that." Bethan insisted.

"He said they wanted to buy us drinks. The beautiful thing was implied. You don't buy drinks for ugly people."

So that night we sat in a cocktail bar with three random Italian men. Hayleigh was trying to read something of out a phrase book to one, Bethan was arguing about the football with another, and I was foolishly believing every lie the third guy told me.

"This guy has a gondola!" 

"No Aimee. No, he really doesn't." Bethan insisted. 

"I'll think you'll find he lives in Venice. Everyone here has a gondola. That's how people get places."

And so it came about that somehow we were following the same three random Italian men through the streets of Venice in search of a gondola. There was no gondola.

 

Oh, and some kind of mention should be made of our hotel. The entrance way was piled with children's bikes, prams and a broken washing machine, the windows were held open by bricks, and I almost knocked myself out in the shower when the shower head became detached from the wall and flew at my head. Needless to say, two nights were quite enough and, although I was sad that my Euro adventure was over, I couldn't wait to get back to my own bed!

We tried to keep the drama to a minimum on the way home. That said we still managed to entangle ourselves in some kind of train scam, which we refused to pay for, I lost the last of my Euros and had to depend on  the kindness of the cashier to pay for my lunch, and Hayleigh kissed the man in the airport shop, just so she could pay by card. And all of this took place while we were wearing matching Prague pub crawl t-shirts, despite the fact that we were in fact flying home from Geneva. 

So that sums up (in a very brief way) our fantastic, crazy, random, ridiculous, hysterical Euro adventure. And now I must return to the real world.