LI AND PAUL

This is being written in Munich, while eating Swiss chocolate and celebrating the arrival of some other early-sleeping Aussies to share our room. So, Venice, what did we do?

Saturday the 28th June we arrived at our seemingly fantastic deal of a campsite only to discover it had no kitchen, the restaurant was way beyond our budget, and we were miles from anywhere with a shop. So, a little frustrated with the place, we settled down to tuna bread rolls for dinner and resolved to do all our eating actually in Venice so as to deprive them of the potential profit they were looking to make from us, the captive audience.

In a further act of defiance we caught public transport rather than the shuttle bus into Venice. Once there we planned to walk along the Grand Canal, then discovered that all of those photos with houses backing onto it weren't lying, and so instead weaved our way through the narrow alleys in some of the least touristy and nicest areas, occasionally popping out to a jetty or short boardwalk along the canal. It was on one of these occasions that we found a lovely place to eat our newly bought pizza-bready-calzone thingy while sitting right on the edge (feet over the water) of the Grand Canal and enjoying some fascinating people-watching.

We continued our rambling finding along the way a shop selling hand-painted Venetian masks which you could watch being painted. Our first major stop was the famous RialtoBridge. We've discovered there are 2 things which let you know that you're getting close to a major attraction. The obvious one is the crowds (tourists and hawkers alike) and the other, more useful because of a larger radius, is the steadily increasing price of gelato! The RialtoBridge was lovely, but absolutely packed with people browsing in the souvenir stores lining both sides. After checking out the markets here we headed to St. Marks Square. Here we saw the amazing buildings, including the Doge's Palace and the slightly over-decorated St Mark's Basilica, and the resident million pigeons. Just around the corner we found the Bridge of Sighs - so named because prisoners were led over it to their execution (or prison, or both - we're not exactly sure which).

Next stop on our wanderings was the Jewish Ghetto which was quite boring because everything was closed being a Weekend. Then, after a quick bite to eat we headed back to our camp site to have a swim, spa and get ready for the next day.

Having seen most of what we wanted to in Venice, we spent the next morning retracing our steps to the great little bakery we'd found the day before. Crossing the Grand Canal was our next task and since both swimming and private gondolas were out of the question for different reasons, we made use of one of the traghettos, public gondolas used for transporting up to 20 people at a time across the canal because there are only 4 bridges. The journey was over in under 2 minutes, but well worth the 50 cent fee. A real Italian espresso drunk standing up kept li going into the afternoon and our final Venetian experience was to find a little wine shop that allows you to make good use of the now empty water bottle in hand by filling it with wine for around 2 Euro a litre (doing the maths, a sample of Italian wine for 1 Euro).

We really enjoyed Venice and were stoked that we'd managed to discover a bit of its real character away from the well trodden paths.