Ah Venezia

Skip this part if you want to avoid the rather long tale of woe regarding missed connections – aka John complains about yet another aspect of being overseas.

Here's a cliche I don't think we've used yet: The journey is the destination (or something to that effect). Meaning of course that the enjoyable part of travelling is actually the part where you get from A to B, and not so much what you do once you get to B. This can apply to things like the Flamsbana or the Transiberian (we hope).

In this case, the journey wasn't the destination. The journey was mediocre, and made us miss our train.

We'd got these free tickets for a bus trip on Meinfernbus – the German company which made us late to Berlin with a flat tyre. We were able to book tickets to get us from Zurich to Milano, arriving in Milano with 50 minutes to get across town to our train for Padova.

Fools. We of course thought that Meinfernbus wouldn't always be late. It's a German company after all, and it was leaving from Switzerland, so surely it'd be punctual.

The first worrying sign was when the barrier arm to let the buses out of the bus car park (buspark?) wouldn't open. There were more and more buses filling up the cramped space while we waited in line for someone from the parking company to come and let buses out individually. Tedious.

Once we were on the road we got to see some fantastic scenery. Seriously, the roads through the mountains to Italy are fantastic, with ridiculously long tunnels and views over lakes and mountains. Can recommend.

We stopped somewhere on the other side of the mountain in a place where they speak Italian, but isn't yet Italy. Presumably there was a reason for this 30 minute break, considering we must have already been running late – the best reason that I can come up with is union regulations stating how much rest a bus driver is entitled to, but it's a mystery to this day.

We arrived 45 minutes late in Milano, figured out the metro system and ticket machine in record time (refusing to purchase a ticket from the shady dude who offered us one as we were working it out) and arrived late for our train – hoping that it would also be late and we would be able to catch it. Overly optimistic.

We had to purchase another ticket – fortunately there was one more train trip that night, and the ticket could be bought easily at the ticket machine for the same price we'd paid for the others – and then contacted our accommodation to tell them we were going to be late.

We return to your regularly scheduled broadcast.

One thing I've found weird is that places will often have different names in English than in their native language. Brussels vs Bruxelles. Munich vs Munchen, Seville vs Sevilla. Whanganui vs Wanganui. Italy has an abundance of this nonsensical nomenclature. It's hard enough booking train tickets in foreign lands without having to convert place names to different languages too. It's not like these names are harder to pronounce either. Most of them are easy enough to decipher, but surely it'd be better to begin to refer to these places by the name that the people who live there use. I'll be using Venezia (Venice) and Padova (Padua) in this post.

Padova is around half an hour by train from Venezia. It's also around half the price to stay there.

Venice. I mean Venezia.

Venezia was crowded, fancy, dirty, damp, dilapidated, expensive, strange, and full of people, pigeons, pizza and puddles. It's cool having no cars on the roads, and little winding streets linked by bridges gave it a nice atmosphere. It's a place that it would be easy to get lost in. There are signs on some of the buildings pointing to main locations like San Marco, but none of the roads are straight, and it's hard to find out where you are on a map, let alone find a route to your next destination. It was a cool place to wander around though the crumbling facades, and we did rather a lot of wandering.

San Marco square was thronged with a throng of tourists trying to avoid huge puddles in the middle of the square. Venezia has a problem with flooding. It must be sinking, since no one would intentionally design a public space that fills with ground water seeping up from below whenever the tide comes in.

Huge puddles.

We were told off for sitting on the steps that line the square when we were about to eat lunch. For some reason we were allowed to sit on the edge of the clock tower.

We saw the Bridge of Sighs (which apparently is a thing). We walked past it without realising, assuming that the bridge we were going over was just crowded because it's Venezia. It wasn't all that great, so we didn't take a photo. Maybe the bridge of yawns would be a better name. If you want atmosphere, Venezia has it, but apart from the couple of different buildings to visit (Doge's palace included – which I can't take seriously because of this Doge) there isn't much to do other than wander, shop, eat, and sit in little boats while costumed men row you around. Actually, that doesn't sound too bad.