From Firenze, we headed to Venice which was our last Italian stop. Again, it was a pretty short and economical train trip and we were there in no time.
The weather was divine when we arrived there and everything felt great! We had a drink at the train station while Matt asked the lovely information people how we should get to our hotel. Apparently, the easiest thing to do was walk so we decided to go for it.
First thing to do was walk over one of the big ol' bridges spanning the Grand Canal. Our hotel was apparently “very close by and easy to find”. Well, it wasn't exactly that easy but in about 45 mins (for what should have been a 10 min trip!) we found our way there. We walked into reception and dumped our backpacks on the floor with glee.
“Hi!” I said (perhaps a little too enthusiastically because the reception dude looked slightly startled) “We've got a booking here for the next couple of nights”. I gave him my surname which he was unable to find. Eventually I was like “oh yeah, I booked on expedia.com”. Suddenly he was all types of helpful “Ah yes! Your booking has been cancelled!” he announced happily. “Ummmm what the?!” Apparently, they'd been unable to verify my credit card number so had cancelled my booking and had sold all the rooms about 2 hours earlier!!!!!!!!!! FU&&&&&KKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!!! Thankfully, he was a super helpful man and found us a room at another nearby hotel. It was somewhat more expensive but by that stage we would have probably paid $350 a night just so we could dump our bloody bags somewhere!!!
So, with the promise from the hotel guy that Hotel Alex was only about 5 mins away, we put our pack back on and headed into the Venetian wilderness. Let's move forward to about 1 hour later. Whilst still in about the same square millimeter that we'd been in all freaking day, we'd managed to get lost 4000 times and NOT find our hotel! This called for some vino so we stopped at a bar to ask directions! Eventually, after another half hour, we stumbled numbly in what we thought was the wrong direction, only find our hotel!!!! Luckily, it was run by the nicest people ever and we had this big, beautifully decorated room which made it all seem ok! We dumped our stuff and realised that we hadn't had lunch yet so we went off for a bit of a reccie. Within about 2 mins we stumbled on the coolest bar ever! It was packed full of people speaking Italian and had a display case full of divine looking sandwiches and snacks. We shared a toastie and a beer and headed back out into the world feeling almost human again. We walked around some of the nearby narrow laneways and got a bit lost before returning to the hotel to get ready for dinner.
We went to a nearby restaurant which felt a bit touristy but the food smelled great and it was well priced. Whilst we were eating our Prima Piati (of delish pasta!) we realised that the people at the tables near us were Aussies. We got to talking a bit and two of them were from Bungendore and two were from Sydney and they'd met at the restaurant that night. By and by the Bungendore couple went home and the other couple came over to join us. They'd had a couple of bottles of red by then so were very chatty but such lovely people! Arthur and Kathy, while about 10 to 15 years older than us, were a total blast and we had a great night just sitting there chatting I think we really pissed the waiters off in the end coz we were there for so long! Heheheh Great night though!
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