Europe: Venice

Wednesday-Venice

We drove on the bus to the boat station so that we could catch a boat over to the island of Venice!

It’s overwhelming seeing EVERYTHING as boats and no cars. It’s beautiful and easily one of my favorite places so far. 

We saw a lace demonstration, and a glass blowing demonstration which were both fantastic! We filmed them both so I’ll show nana when we get home. I also bought some pretty handmade venezian lace for my craft group!

We had a walking tour of the city and bought venetian masks-awesome!

Dinner that night was one of the extras we’d paid for and it was an antipasti, then 4 serves of pasta (really 3 and a risotto) and dessert! It could have been nicer, but again, that’s what you get with 50+ eating the same thing. 

Kim, our tour manager, has a ‘Gelati Challenge’ where someone on one of her previous tours ate 10 cups of Gelati in one day (a cup has two scoops, so its 20 scoops). The challenge was to try to beat that record and take photo evidence of each one. Today was the last day for the challenge cause it’s our last day in Italy and Luke was up for it. I filmed it and made it into s video you can see below. He did 14 cups (quite easily actually), and was the winner! People on the tour started rumours that he threw up and was a cheater. They were really incredibly rude about it. They didn’t say anything to his face but would just whisper ‘cheater’ or ‘liar’ when he said he didn’t cheat. And when they were announcing the winner on the bus they were shouting down the isle. 
Luke took the microphone and asked everyone to speak to him privately, not just accuse him of stuff. I had spoken to Kim earlier about why people thought that Luke had cheated (another guy was throwing up/dry reaching in the toilet cubical next to Luke), and she quickly said something about him not cheating after Luke had spoken on the bus. 

The rudeness of the other people on tour pretty much ruined our night though and we just had some quiet time in the hotel and went to bed early that night. 

I was/am hesitant about recording the appalling behaviour of the other people on tour on my blog, here, but it’s an important lesson for anyone thinking of going on a contiki tour. Don’t go. Unless of course you like dealing with or acting like an idiot, drinking more then excessively and throwing up all the time. They should be paying me to be on this tour, not the other way around. 

-T

Flooding in the square   
Lace, glass, masks and Gondolas. 
The winged lion. 

-L

Europe: Hope

Tuesday- To Venice (Orvieto)

I think we’ve officially given up on the bus music and we just listen to our iPods now. Most of the stuff they play isn’t actually ‘music’ just computers pretending to be musicians and it’s pretty poor form. I can’t believe people listen to this rubbish by choice. 

Rome to Venice is practically all day in the bus. Our temporary driver, Filio, and Kim decided to take us on a little detour to Orvieto to brake up the trip a bit. Orvieto is a quiet little town in the region of Umbria

What an amazing little town! It’s truly how we imagined Italy to be, and completely different to any of the Italy we’ve experienced do far. It was certainly ‘redeemed’ Italy to us. 

We had lunch up there (it’s on top of a massive cliff- we got there by cable car). I’m not sure if it’s an Italian thing, or just bad luck with most meals we’ve had in this country, but they seem to forget stuff. I never got the wine I ordered with my foccacia, and they also had to be reminded to make my foccacia- they’d only brought Luke’s coffee and croissant out! Most meals we’ve had they’ve forgotten something and the other night they even gave us something completely different to what we ordered! It can’t have been a translation issue cause they sound completely different…. It’s happened to a few other people on tour (the forgetfulness) which seems a little too coincidental. 

Anyway, when we got into Venice we just had dinner and slept. I’m sick of service station food and cheap hotel food.

-T

Quiet cobblestones,
Mountain tops, and vineyard views. 
Real Italia. 

-L

Europe: Rome part two

Monday-Rome

Another day in Rome. Italy so far has been mega disappointing. It’s been awesome for seeing those famous sites, but the Italy I imagined was beautiful, relatively clean, groves around and well kept places. So far it hasn’t been any of that and Luke and I both agree that we’re disappointed. A lot. 
Rome has a distinct ‘Cairo’ feel about, which, if you’ve read my Middle East blog posts you’ll know what we mean!

Anyway, today we went to the Vatican City. The smallest country in the world.

Another mega crazy metro trip with 50+ people and we finally got there. The line to get in went round two and a bit sides of the ‘country’. It sounds long, and was, but the country is obviously not huge.

We got to skip the long line cause we were in a pre-booked group and join a shorter line. Only a few hours after we had left the hotel and we were finally inside. 

Catholicism makes me a bit queezy, so I was glad we didn’t spend heaps of time inside.  Just enough to see the main sites. No Pope sighting today.
We went into the Sistine Chappell, the one Michelangelo painted the ceiling of. What an amazing piece if art, even if it is a bit biblically inaccurate. 

Luke and I love pizza and have been perfecting the pizza bases at home for quite a while now. So when Kim promised us the best pizza in Italy after the Vatican City I was a little dubious. The pizza I’d had in Europe so far has been pre-packaged bases.  Thankfully though, she was right! We had a great selection of yummy, yummy pizza with fantastic bases (the secret to good pizza).

What I found to be interesting about the pizzas was that they only had like one-two toppings on them (plus cheese and sometimes sauce). We had margarita, eggplant slices (quite salty), potato (with parsley-so good), an onion calzone, and zucchini & anchovies. 
You buy ‘slices’ so you can get quite a few flavours. 

We wanted to get a feel for the city and read on the Lonely Planet guide of a street that was meant to be a bit hippy and very awesome. I’ve been looking for op-shops here cause I think you could find some fun things, buy Kim said Europe doesn’t really have any. This guide promised some though so we set off to find the area. 

We didn’t really find what we were looking for which was disappointing. We had to rush like crazy to get back to the station in time (lots of walking remember, and not very frequent stations). 

The night while everyone else went out for dinner and ‘all you can drink’ for €20 we went to a little place in a side alley. 

Originally we’d booked somewhere formal that the lonely planet had recommended as cheap and nice. When we looked it up on the ‘Rome’ app Luke has it said the prices for a meal were up to €98! We quickly changed our reservation!!

The place we ended up going to was pretty good, but poor service. We never got our bruschetta and we got randomly given a fried artichoke (which we had to pay for). The artichoke was yummy, but the situation was strange. 

€30 for a cab ride home is expensive when you start to covert to AUD but we’re not doing that anymore- it’s too depressing. We have all our Euros for the trip on the travel card so we just budget based on that. 

-T

Michaelangelo,
Secrets, religion, and art. 
Vatican City

-L

Tips for Travelers:
In Italy there is no free wifi without registering. This is due to post 9/11 laws…

Internet as a whole is expensive here (specifically Rome, but all of Italy included).