Day: January 5, 2018

Domenica 31 Dicembre 2017

Tim has a penchant for supermarkets. He found a few in Paris he quite liked, although his favourite was M&S because they had a lot of English food and English food means he can read the labels and therefore avoid the nasty things that would make our trip most unpleasant.

But there is no M&S in Venice, so he had to battle through lists of unfamiliar ingredients to find products safe to eat. It’s the sort of challenge he takes seriously – and, what’s more, the kind of challenge he enjoys. He manages just fine though and returns with unfamiliar but safe foodstuffs. (More on the exciting topic of grocery shopping later – I bet you can’t wait!)

We make our way to Ponte dell’Accdemia where we meet Vinnie. He’s our photo walk tour guide for the morning and I won’t say anymore except that we had a fabulous time wandering through parts of Venice we’d never have found ourselves. Of course there are so many bridges and canals it’s hard not to take the sorts of shots that Venice is famous for.

Here are some photos I took along the way …

Samstag 30 Dezember 2017

We ate a huge breakfast as it’d be our only meal till tonight, then hopped on a tram for a quick spin around the city. We hopped off at a deserted outer suburban stop and hopped on another one going in a different direction.

Fortunately it was going in a direction we needed to go in.

We checked the board when we arrived at the train station – conveniently located across the road from our hotel – to discover our train was 10 minutes ritardo. We had 40 minutes to change trains in Milan, so still do-able.

This train was slower than other ones we’d traveled on in France and England, and stopped much more frequently. At each stop we became a little more ritardo, and there was mention of technical issues.

In between stops though we travelled through snow-covered landscapes and mountains in the distance that are far bigger than mountains back home.

I was glad to be travelling by train and not hiking!

At Monza we had a 30 minute delay (unspecified and ongoing ‘technical issues’ apparently) – Tim started investigating other options for getting to Venice from Milan, but we arrived in Milan with five minutes to run from platform two to platform five – plenty of time!

A steward came around offering free drinks and biscuits – but my Italian is so bad that I smiled politely and he moved on. After, I might add, an extended conversation with the three other people in my four-seater compartment (Tim was in the one next door – weird seat numbering), where I think they talked about the Australian sitting amongst them too stupid to learn some Italian for her long-awaited return to Venice.

Venice, and one more means of transport today … trams in Basel, trains through Switzerland and Italy, vaporetto in Venice.

Thankfully our huge breakfast had sustained us. Even more thankfully that there was a kebab shop next to our apartment because if we’d had to go further afield to search for food things might have started to get ugly!

Yes, even more ugly than a crowded kebab shop late on a Saturday night where the only option for eating in was standing at a small though tall red plastic table. Not our finest gourmet experience, it has to be said!