I arrived in Venice very late in the night. With the help of a friend from Cambridge who knows Venice, who by sheer providence just happened to be on the same flight as I was (she was heading to a conference), I arrived at the main bus station to meet Deborah with no hiccups. From there we caught the water bus which took us all the way down the Southern side of Venice to our stop at the other end of the main Island – Giardini Bianale. The water bus took us past a lighted Venice at night. Ancient buildings built right on the water. This is something I did not quite understand until I got there – there is no side walk or step, in most cases just a door. One could just open it and step out into the water. It’s an beautiful sight – a massive stone building jutted up against… the end of the world. Some buildings still had there lights on and you could just see the inside of them. The beautiful homes of the wealthy.
We arrived at our stop and our gracious host (we used airbnb) met us there and showed us the way to his place. Thankfully it was only a few “blocks” from the water bus so we did not have to remember too many details about how to get there! The host’s name is Luigi. He and his son live together in this less touristy part of Venice and have a constant flow of people staying with them. Our room had a couple of single beds on the main floor of the house. It was simple but nice, and we also had access to the kitchen. That night he poured us a small glass of wine before bed. The wine was taken from a water bottle at the bottom of the fridge. He mentioned to us that around the corner there is a little shop that sells wine from the barrel. He says you can bring a bottle of any kind and they will fill it up for you, and hands us a 2L empty water bottle. Crazy! I’ll tell you about “tomorrow” in the next post.
We finally got to sleep around 2am and I slept hard. Poor Deborah did not though. She had been up for almost 2 days from travel and jet-lagged. I think by the end of our trip she finally adjusted. She was a real champ even so and we got on really well touring around together!
Getting off the plane
Oosterhoffs in transit 