The Scroop's European Holiday: Day 30 Venice:

After a full on day yesterday we are hoping for a better day today, our first full day in Venice. The first thing that is apparent is the apartment is nowhere near as good as any of our previous accommodation. When renting holiday accommodation there are a few simple things that you should be provided with like, a hair dryer, globes that work when you turn the lights on, dunny roll......how about 1 spare dunny roll!!!! At all our previous accommodation we would open the pantry and there would be basic provisions, some cereal, jam, band-aids, tea, coffee, soap.......a spare bloody dunny roll!!!! Not here, it’s like some dude has just been evicted and the place has been stripped of anything useful. They have a 14” TV!!! Who in the hell still has a 14” TV????? And, the bloody thing doesn’t work. They have no instructions for anything in the apartment and they have no information about Venice at all. When you are staying in holiday accommodation for 2 or 3 days you need an immediate leg up regarding tourist information so you can hit the ground running. In Munich for example, the owner had a huge map with about 50 coloured pins in it describing where all the restaurants were, shops were, pharmacies were etc. Fantastic!! She had tourist brochures, books about Munich, public transport information, exactly what you would expect in holiday accommodation. Not here though. Also, all our other accommodation has provided free WiFi and not having it provided here has made it even more difficult to get quick and easy information about Venice. This apartment is fair dinkum shizenhousen!!! This has increased my disappointment with Venice and Italy at this point so it’s time to get amongst it and try and resurrect my impression of the joint. We leave the apartment and go for a wander and basically try and get a feel for the place. Kris is in love, she is instantly taken by the place and this is one place she was really looking forward to but I’m having a hard time with it all and at this point Venice is sitting at the bottom of the pile as far as destinations I have been to so far. I’m finding the place to be a bit same old same old. It seems if you’ve been up one little alley way you’ve been up them all and if you are sick of walking up alley ways there is bugger all left to do, not to mention the place is on the pong!! I think that maybe I’ve been spoilt by all the amazing places I have seen so far and I need to view Venice in isolation. We go back to the apartment and I wash my brain of all previous thoughts and we head back out for another go. We find a place that sells pizza by the slice. Beautiful stuff, that’s more like it. We walk down to the Grand Canal and eat it while watching gondola’s float by. We continue walking and we come across a place selling gelato and we all give it a shot and this stuff is beautiful. We give the kids the reins and they lead us to god knows where because this place is like a rabbit warren. We get lost numerous times before we eventually found our way back to the apartment. We managed to find a place selling take-away wine on the way so we grabbed a bottle for home. We set the kids up in front of a movie on the computer and Kris and I set about guzzling this bottle of wine on our balcony overlooking the canal. This proves to be a bit of a turning point and when that’s gone we get ready to head out for dinner. We walk for a while but end up back at the same restaurant as last night just around the corner from our apartment. We had a fantastic meal and we all sat around talking and cracking jokes and we all laughed so hard that we were in tears and I nearly spat red wine all over the place I was laughing so hard. It was something we all needed because 4 weeks of travel together had got us all a bit stressed. Tomorrow we will be going on a gondola ride so we are looking forward to that.