I feel like Venice has never been a place that was on my radar, in the sense that I know it exists but it has never been on a 'I need to go there' list of mine, but our trip was incredible. I surprised the boyfriend for his 21st birthday with a weekend holiday, only I didn't know where we were going. I booked a Surprise Trip with Expedia; a fairly new concept, but it meant that I knew when we had to be at the airport and that was it. After packing at 1am we headed to Gatwick for 7am when we received our email letting us know our destination. We were both expecting to go somewhere neither of us had heard of, maybe a small city in France or somewhere in Spain, but when we saw the word VENICE written across the screen we both looked at each other, mouths wide open. Arguably the most romantic city in the world, I felt like we hit the jackpot and I had very little to do with it - thank you Surprise Trips.
With no knowledge of our destination, there was no time to plan or research where we were going and so when we arrived at Venice airport it was time to pick up a phrase book and a map and figure out where to go and what to see. It will come as no surprise that we got lost several times. Venice is made up of cobbled streets, we could never figure out which street we were on, we walked past our hotel three times before we figured out where it was but we didn't really mind, Venice is probably one of the nicest places to be lost. Even though at times we didn't know where we were there was always incredible views, history to learn about and so much adventure to be had.
This was the first time that I had been to another country since having a vegan diet and I admit I was rather nervous that I would struggle with language barriers and not be able to find food to eat. I was overwhelmed as to how helpful the staff were in all the restaurants we went to, everyone was happy to discuss the ingredients in all of their dishes and even offered up making something new for us. On one of our walks we found a health food store that had lots of vegan treats and snacks. We managed to have pizza, pasta and we even found some vegan gelato...we definitely did not miss out at all when it came to food in Venice.
We were relatively unlucky with the weather on our trip. It poured with rain for almost all of the first day which we hadn't prepared for and although the wet weather did back off it was still incredibly cold and so I kind of lived in the 1 jumper I had bought because the information we had about the weather was clearly wrong (we were expecting 16 degrees sunshine and so we bought clothes for that). It was however incredibly foggy all weekend, which in one way is frustrating because we couldn't see all of the pretty views but it also felt like we were walking around a Film Noir set, especially at night. We even walked past a guy in a trench coat who was smoking and I got all giggly and excited because...films.
We didn't ride on a gondola as they were super expensive for such a short trip, plus I imagine going around the canals on a gondola is much nicer when the weather is warmer. Instead we mostly walked, somewhat aimlessly, sometimes we had a rough destination in mind, and one night we got the river taxi around the canal and back to our hotel. I am not the most confident of people when it comes to boats but for the floating city of Venice, I kind of felt like I had to.
Other than getting lost and eating there seemed to be a lot to see and do in Venice and with only a couple of days we didn't get around to seeing everything. We did however go to the Museum of Natural History, walked over the Ponte di Rialto (a bridge that is famous for its pretty canal views), went to the Basilica de San Marco which was oddly more exciting on the outside than it was inside - I don't know, maybe that was just me. We got to see the sky painted purple as the sunset, we saw the Basilica dei Frari where we learnt a lot of history and both felt very uncomfortable looking at a huge statue of some black slaves holding up white men....*sigh*. We saw the Han Meilin Exhibition at the University which was really stunning, we walked around the Jewish Quarter and looked around what felt like endless Venetian Mask shops (and yes, we did purchase a mask and it is now happily hanging in our lounge).
Being in Venice really felt like being in another world, the architecture was incredible and nothing looked like something I would see in Brighton, it was refreshing that there were no cars and in fact we weren't too bothered by the hundreds of people around us. Everyone was just enjoying being in Venice. I can't imagine living in a place that felt so relaxed, so romantic with out trying, a weekend trip to Venice was exactly what we needed; we could celebrate the boyfriend's birthday and completely detach from 'normal' life, no thoughts of work or chores, it was certainly worth the anxiety of not knowing where we were going.
No comments
Post a Comment