The Eye of Patrick

The next stop after Florence was to Venice. Venice has long been a city that I have wanted to visit as a child. It is a city that defies any normal logic to exist. How can a city live in the water? But Venice is a city that has been doing that for a long time.

The train starts to make its approach into Venice and when you look out the window you notice that there is water on both sides. Which was a fun experience as you knew this train was going to Venice.

When we arrived in Venice it was a surreal experience, as it is Venice a city of its own. I had watched Casino Royale and saw Venice, plus other movies about the fabled city. But when we got out of the train station and made our way to the “taxi” area it hit me and I finally realized I was in Venice. There was a bridge and people were going over it to get to the other side where there were buildings and buildings. Then in the “roads” or actually canal area the life of the city was taking place. You had everything that a normal city would have, but on a boat, taxi, police and garbage were all by boats. This was amusing to see.

We made our way to our hotel. We were very lucky to get the hotel we did as it was a 5 star hotel that is normally really expensive. But we visited it during the one week that for it is considered a non-busy period, so we could get discount price. The hotel is an island of its own. You must take their shuttle boat to get to the hotel. It was a nice little wooden speed boat, I felt very elegant and Europe for some reason at that moment. The location of the hotel was on some island that was at one time or another it was a factory and a mental hospital. But they had invested a lot of money into it to make it a 5 star hotel.

Our time in Venice was mostly walking around, or taking boats to walk around. The city itself is very small and so you don’t need to walk very far to get anywhere. But it is one of the narrowest cities I have been to. I included some photos of the streets and it shows how easy it is to get lost in them. On one of our evenings hunting for a restaurant we got lost and every time one of the members of my family thought we had found our way out we discovered we had not. But then we realized that on the walls there were directions some what to the major points of the town. Once we discovered that we were able to return to our hotel.

By the time we had finished Venice I had started to get restless of Italian style architecture and was happy to find we were going to Switzerland.