Linsey & Mark go to Europe

Venice...

Sitting in an internet cafe in Zagreb now, but wrote this on the train from Venice to Slovenia in the "Captain Futuro" notebook Linsey got me for my birthday: I`ll just transcribe it onto here, but this Croatian keyboard has a Z where the Y should be, so I apologise in advance for dodgy typos....

I`m sitting in a compartment on an Italian train (TRENITALIA) on our way to the capital of Slovenia which is called Ljubljana. Yestaerday I lost our European guidebook "Rough Guide to Europe" in Venice, and Im going to have to get another one somehow (edit:managed to get one!) No accomodation booked in Slovenia yet, so we have to sort that out as soon as we get there.

This train leaves Venice at 9am and arrives about 1.30pm.
Here are the things we got up to in Venice:
Got lost for a long time going to the hotel from the train station, Venice is a maze of thousands of tiny little alleys and sidestreets and the map we had only decided to tell us about a quarter of the street names...the numbering system for the houses is incomprehensible too.
Linsey got chatted up by a seedy Italian bloke at the staion while I tried to buy tickets for the water bus, but I scared him away when I went back!
We eventually got on two water busses without paying and finally got to our hotel with the aid of a couple of local Venetians who were standing on a bridge just round the corner from our hotel (which we had walked past twice already).

The hotel had a "beautiful" glass flower lightshade thingy in our room and was decorated "eclecticly". It was a pretty big room compared to the others we`ve been staying in so far, but there were shared toilets and showers which meant quick dashes in pants for pees late at night...

Reception people were very friendly - the guy waited until we managed to find the place on arrival and checked us in at around midnight (after we went out to local cafe blue for some food) and when we had breakfast the owner came over to shake our hands and sat us next to a German couple with whom we made awkward polite conversation such as "yes" when they asked if they could have a roll....
German girl laughed when Linsey bumped her knee on the table - Linz wasnt too happy about that, but if German girl had hit her knee, Linsey would still be laughing now!

On our first full day we got up and went wandering through the streets towards St. Mark`s square, we jumped on a traghetti gondola to cross the grand canal and finally got there, where a million pigeons were out looking for corn... I had promised my mum that I would get pictures taken with some pigeons, as when we came here when I was a kid, we took loads of pictures of me covered in them but they didnt come out. Anyway, they looked a bit more intimidating than I remembered, but we went and bought some corn anyway and I held it in my hand while the crazy pigeons landed on me and munched away. Linsey didnt enjoy being with a million pigeons at all, but showed great bravery and took a lot of pictures of me wich are on the photo page now. I made a friend of one pigeon who sat on my shoulder and was so happy that he wouldnt leave - I took his picture a few times and eventually had to politely ask him to leave as he seemed to want to spend the entire afternoon on my shoulder. nice pigeon though. (PS Linsey says to thank her mum for instilling a fear of pigeons and any other flying thingys into her!)

I also tried to take pictures of Sesame Street Ernie with the pigeons, but they werent having any of it, so the best one I got was a pigeon pecking his head after Id put corn on him. Ernie has earned me a thousand strange looks so far on this holiday, and wandering around St. Marks square putting corn on his head and shaking him at pigeons is probably the pinnacle in terms of the sheer number of astonished onlookers I managed to accrue. Cheers Gordon!

We went to a "Scotland and Venice" art exhibition and were surprised by the contemporary ruler-dinosaurs and trays full of effluvia that we saw. I filled in a questionnaire but wrote a load of bumf in it as I really had no idea what to make of what we`d just seen...

We had a pizza slice and a mini calzone for lunch and walked around a bit more - visitng a mask shop and admiring all the Venetian masks (although we couldnt buy any as theyd probably crumble immediately in our backpacks).

In the evening we decided to go out and sample the nightlife in Venice, we were in the ST. Tomas area and found a guide in Cafe Blue then visited some places on it, Chet bar and Orange bar amongst others. We drank a fair amount really and stood on romantic bridges looking at Venice in the moonlight while swaying slightly. It really is an amazing place. The next morning we both woke up with Venetian hangovers that were like having your head pecked by a million pigeons to a Led Zep soundtrack.
We werent able to anything other than lie in bed and complain for a couple of hours, after which we ventured out for some food. In the restaurant/cafe place we went to I ordered some spaghetti al ragu and Linz chose a salad. She didnt manage to eat much of it though, and the frequency of her trips to the bathroom to be unwell caused an old man in the cafe to ask her if she was pregnant, to which she replied "yes" rather than attempting to convey the fact that she was about as hungover as you get. I was pretty unwell after the spaghetti, but you dont want to hear about that, trust me.

We visited the bridge of sighs in the afternoon after some miracle hangover curing ice cream - Linz had banana, me raspberry!
Walked around a fair bit, Linsey bought me some birthday presents and then we had a romantic meal in a tiny backstreet with a very cheery, friendly waiter who really wanted us to have some wine although we wouldnt have been able to look at it.

The food was great and we took a picture of Linsey and the waiter afterwards. We then walked round in circles for about an hour and a half as we tried to get back to our hotel - finally got there and then had a quick look around for an internet cafe that was still open - there werent any so we went to cafe blue in the hope of using their free computery machine to book Slovenian accomodation, but somebody was hogging the machine so we had a drink and a panini and then headed back to the hotel and to bed (after eating loads of pick and mix that Linsey had bought me for my birthday).

posted by Enid Blyton @ 6:51 PM