I visited Venice in January and yes it was decidedly cold - the night time temperatures fell to about -2 and in the day time, it was no more than 7 degrees. It was cloudy but luckily, it didn't rain at all and there was no hint of any flooding whatsoever. It got dark at about 5 pm which meant you had to be quite disciplined during your sightseeing, no lingering around having a coffee after lunch, you want to make the most of what little daylight you have left. However, we were rewarded with a far less crowded Venice. Let's take the St Mark's Basilica for example: it is one of the most iconic and beautiful buildings in all of Venice and it is free to visit, however, in the summer, you can expect to queue for up to two hours to get into the building given just how popular a free attraction like that can be with the tourists. When I was there, there were no queues - sure there were some tourists there, but I literally didn't have to wait at all, I just walked right in without having to wait. The same can be said about Doge's Palace just around the corner, another extremely popular tourist attraction. In the summer months, they sell an expensive queue jump ticket (currently priced at €44, January 2020) for those unwilling to queue for 2 hours to get into the palace, but I simply walked up to the ticket desk, there wasn't a single person ahead of me and paid €25 for a normal ticket. You can expect to queue for everything in the summer months (in the sweltering heat on top of that) - take the Vaporetto (water bus) for example, this is a system of ferries that serve as public transport in Venice, in winter, even if there is a small queue, you would normally be able to get on the first one that comes along. In the summer, expect to queue for 30 minutes or more as Vaporetto after Vaporetto gets completely filled up. How do you want to spend your time in Venice, mostly waiting in queues in the sweltering heat?
I'm not promising that you won't have to queue in winter - let me give you an example. Venice is an expensive city as you have to pay 'tourist prices' for everything but one of the cheaper places to get food is a supermarket and there are quite a few in central Venice. However, I was often put off by the super long queues for the cashiers - there would be one or two cashiers trying to serve all the customers and either you resign yourself to waiting 10 to 15 minutes to pay for your food, or you cut your losses and give up. These supermarkets are not your massive mega hypermarkets that you might find on the Italian mainland, no they are contained in tiny streets in old buildings that don't have much space at all for more than two cashiers typically. So unless it is very early in the morning or late at night, be prepared to queue for quite a while just to make a purchase there even in January. Now imagine what it would be like in August, during the tourist peak season - the waiting would be absolutely horrendous. That's why there are two queues for public transport: one for tourists and another for locals, along for those who have bought a 'queue-jump' expensive ticket - there has got to be some kind of concessions for the locals if they are to continue living in the city during the peak tourist season, to make life bearable for them. There are far more tourists than locals on Venice in the peak tourist season: the permanent population of Venice is just 50,000 but it receives around 30 million tourists a year so with those numbers in mind, you really want to avoid Venice in the peak season if you want a nice holiday there - the same can be said about any major European destination!
Okay for those of you not familiar with Venice, allow me to give you a short geography lesson: Venice is actually an island, linked to the mainland of Italy by a 3.85 km long causeway called Ponte della Libertà (Liberty Bridge). The main island of Venice itself is tiny, measuring about 4 km from East to West and 2 km from North to South. The main tourists attractions are concentrated in the Western half of the island facing the mainland, whilst there are fewer points of interests in the Eastern half of the island. There are another 118 islands in the Venetian lagoon, of which a handful of them are truly stunning and worth visiting, whilst the rest of them are small and forgettable with many being tiny and uninhabited. On the other side of the Liberty Bridge is the small town of Mestre and the two airports of Venice. Mestre itself is an otherwise unremarkable town with a train station but has a massive number of hotels for such a small town. You are far more likely to get a bargain on your accommodation in Mestre than in Venice itself - so for example, I stayed in a rather nice 4 star hotel in Mestre whilst for the same price, I probably would have gotten no more than a basic 2 star hotel in Venice itself. Likewise, restaurants are far cheaper - I had a great pizza and pasta meal in a place run by Bangladeshi chefs in Mestre for a fraction of the price I would have paid in Venice and the food was just as good. Heck, you'll find a lot of migrant workers (mostly Indian but some Chinese) working in Venice as well - it seems that many of the gift shops are run by South Asians there. The journey from my hotel to Venice took approximately 10 minutes (with little traffic) and the bus ran every 15 minutes: at the price of just €1.50, this is really convenient and the buses do run on time.
3. There are tickets inspectors, so do follow the rules
Here's the thing about public transport in Venice, you can get on a bus or a Vaporetto without paying - this is because you can buy a ticket via an app on your phone rather than pay the drive or use a paper ticket purchased from a machine. So bus drivers for example, can't be bothered to check every passenger for tickets because they are on a schedule and with a crowded bus, that then becomes nearly impossible. As for the Vaporetto, a small number of the bigger stations have gates where you need to scan your ticket, but otherwise in most stations, you just get on and no one checks if you have a ticket. So it may be tempting to try to dodge fares by simply traveling without a ticket, or 'accidentally' forgetting to validate your ticket so your ticket remains unused at the end of the journey. However, we did encounter ticket inspectors (who do speak English rather well, given the huge number of tourists in Venice) and they are merciless in terms of persecuting tourists who do not have valid tickets. I witnessed a heated argument between an American tourist and a ticket inspector (who was backed up by two policemen), the American claimed that she had validated her ticket but the machine malfunctioned, the inspector claimed that it was the responsibility of the American to check that her ticket was properly validated and thus regardless of the circumstances with the machine, adamantly wanted to fine the American €50 for traveling without a valid ticket. You can get a 24 hour pass for the Vaporetto + bus + tram system for €20, which will give you unlimited travel on the system so do get that - always make sure that you validate your ticket.
If you think that €20 a day for transport is a lot for a tiny place like Venice, yeah it is. Compare this to London where a zone 1-2 travel card which covers a much bigger area than Venice costs just £7 or €8.30, you'll start to understand how expensive Venice can be as a tourist destination. The alternative to that of course is to walk: in Venice, cars and even bicycles are banned. The bus would stop at Piazzale Roma, which is the main bus station just when the bridge reaches Venice and go no further. There is also a big car park there for anyone who has driven across and wishes to park there (probably one of the most expensive car parks in the world). But beyond that, even bicycles are banned, never mind any kind of transport like buses, cars, taxis, motorcycles or trucks. Instead you have gondolas, water taxis (speedboats) and the whole Vaporetto (water bus) network; by that token, the best way to see and appreciate Venice is on foot. So bring your comfortable walking shoes and be prepared to walk a lot - this was actually a problem for me as I am still nursing a knee injury from gymnastics and it wasn't ideal for me to walk such long distances! You may think, oh it's only 4 km across, how far can you walk on Venice island? Much further than you think! The thing is that this is a really old town made of tiny little streets and alleys with so many canals, so you're never walking in a straight line from A to B, but you're literally walking through an Italian medieval maze (but what a charming one it is). The only downside to this is that it is certainly not a wheelchair friendly city, some major bridges have been fitted with ramps for wheelchairs, but the vast majority of the smaller bridges do not have this facility. If you are a wheelchair user or have some mobility issues, then your best bet is to see Venice from the water by using the Vaporetto (water bus) system or paying for a private water taxi.
5. Speaking Italian isn't a problem, this is Venice
I pride myself in being able to speak Italian but this is one place in Italy that I found English was the most widely spoken. But given how Venice really isn't the real Italy as tourists outnumber locals, I suppose this is like going to Tokyo Disneyland and realizing that the staff there do speak English pretty well. Last spring, I did a grand tour of Tuscany and found that the locals in the smaller towns and villages barely spoke any English at all, thus it was vital that I spoke some Italian with them - but no, not in Venice. Practically everyone I dealt with spoke to me in English (I do look Asian after all) even if I would start the conversation in Italian. However, you don't have to go very far at all to find the 'real' Italy, to find real Italians who do not work in the tourism industry and hence don't speak any English. One evening, when we were walking back from the restaurant to the hotel in Mestre, I asked a local man for directions and whilst he was very happy to help me, he didn't speak a word of English and we had the entire conversation in Italian. Contrast this to when I tried to ask a man in the street for directions in Venice, he replied (in English), "I'm sorry, I'm actually a tourist from Germany, I don't know the area at all." Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, many of the shops and restaurants in Venice are actually staffed by migrant workers from places like South Asia (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan etc) thus they do speak English well.
6. Go beyond Pizza and Pasta
Most people think about pizza and pasta when it comes to Italian food and don't get me wrong, you are probably not going to get bad pizza and pasta when you're in Italy. Even the ones that I got in the restaurant run by Bangladeshi people were amazing - they're not going to stay in business if they tried to serve bad Italian food in Italy. However, there's so much more to Italian food than pizza and pasta, let's take seafood for example. Venice is an island, there's a famous fish market near the Rialto bridge in central Venice, so whilst you can enjoy seafood in a pasta or pizza dish, there are so many other ways to try it. A typical three course Italian meal works like this: you'll have a carb-based starter which is often a pasta or a risotto dish, then you'll have a main course which is a meat or fish dish (with side dishes like polenta, fried potatoes, salad, cooked vegetables etc) then you'll finish with a desert. These are sometimes known as a 'menu del giorno' (menu of the day), a tourist menu or in standard English, a 'set meal'. There's also the cicchetti option which is often compared to Spanish Tapas - essentially, this is bar food but because we're in Italy, it is usually pretty good, you won't be disappointed. You'll go to the bar with your friends, order a number of cicchetti dishes with your drinks so you're not drinking on an empty stomach, then as you get the next round of drinks, you'll pick up more cicchetti and it is usually enough to add up to be a substantial dinner after a few rounds of that. This is a good way to discover other interesting Italian dishes that the locals enjoy - so just follow your senses and if something looks and smells good, go for it. You can't go wrong as each portion is relatively small and designed to be a snack to go with your drinks. And do make room for desert, everything from the cakes to ice cream is so stunning in Italy but before you place your order, read the next point.
I did already mention that Venice is one of the most touristy cities in Europe and that means it can be very expensive but how do you stop yourself from being ripped off? I would usually check two things: you can use either the price of an espresso coffee or a cappuccino, both of which are enjoyed the locals. So as of January 2020, I would usually expect to pay about €1 for an espresso coffee and roughly €1.50 for a cappuccino. It is required by law in Italy for bars, cafes and restaurants to display their prices thus the onus is then on the customer to check what they are paying for before ordering, so it is your responsibility to always check the prices! It is hard to compare prices with something like sandwiches because they vary in size and quality but a cup of coffee is pretty standard no matter where you go. I've seen prices for cappuccinos from €1.50 in small cafes tucked away in quieter streets to €3.50 near the main bus station to something as fucking ridiculous as €11 in Piazza San Marco - oh but wait, it actually costs more than that! There is a cover charge known as a coperto ('covered') in most Italian restaurants and there are no real rules about how much they cost: think of it as a 'service charge'. Some places charge just €1, others €1.50 whilst some of the more posh restaurants in central Venice charge a lot more - the cover charge is justified by the Italians to pay for the service as well as other things not included in the bill like the free bread you normally get with the meal, but the coperto can vary from place to place so always check before you sit down in a restaurant. Remember though that you are exempt from paying the coperto if you are standing up at the bar and you are only required to pay it if you sit down, so that is one way to avoid it!
Can I just have a bitch about the concept of the coperto please? It makes little sense: you see, when I go to a restaurant, sit down and have a big dinner, they would add a coperto to the bill which seems fair enough. It wouldn't be unusual to add some kind of service charge or tip for the service for a dinner like that. But when I was in one of the restaurants in Mestre, I noticed that the lady on the table next to me simply had a drink (whilst we had a nice big dinner), now according to the rules in Italy, she would have been expected to pay the exact same coperto charge as a flat fee because she had sat down and the waiter had served her. This is a rather blunt way of adding a service charge to the meal, whereas in London, it would be calculated as a percentage of your bill (roughly 10% to 15%). So if this had happened in London rather than Mestre, then the service charge that she would have been subjected to would have been much smaller than mine, as she spent far less money than me in that restaurant. However, you could argue that the waiter serving her is still spending the same amount of time whether he is simply bringing her a glass of wine or a big meal - she has the waiter's attention for the full duration of the time she is a customer and so she's paying for that service whether or not she decides to use it or not by making all kinds of requests, such as asking for a phone charger - which I have seen happen quite a lot in Venice when tourists find that their phones are dying on them after having taken so many photos and videos. So, do you think that there should be a flat fee coperto in restaurants or should it be calculated as a percentage?
Think of Venice and you would probably picture a gondola ride down a canal - but did you know just how expensive a gondola ride is in Venice? A 40 minute ride costs €80 (that is €2 a minute) and that goes up to €100 after dark. Oh and if you want to be serenaded in Italian during your perfect romantic gondola ride, that's going to cost you even more. The reason why they get away with charging such ludicrously high prices is because so many tourists are desperate to have their gondola ride in Venice and are willing to pay these high prices, so the prices just keep going up and if the tourists are still willing to pay, they are just going to laugh all the way to the bank as the rich tourists are just queuing up with wads of cash to pay for those gondola rides! If you want to save on costs, bear in mind that the capacity of a gondola is six people, so that €80 can be divided by 6, making it €13.33 per person - a far more reasonable figure and there's even an app to find other tourists to share that gondola with called Kishare. But are you prepared to share your gondola with an obnoxious family with noisy kids or a couple who are arguing throughout the ride? Otherwise, there's an even cheaper alternative known as the Traghetto ('crossing') - this is a very short gondola ride that costs €2 and you're literally just crossing the grand canal in Venice very close to the fish market at the Rialto bridge. Get your phones ready for that selfie in the gondola or the video, because it literally takes just one minute for them to row you across the grand canal! I did this and to be honest, I'm glad I did it because I didn't see the point of the longer version of it - been there, done that, got my selfie and video, yes I have done the gondola in Venice, even if it was just the Traghetto; a gondola is a gondola after all.
9. Go to the islands: Murano and Burano
As mentioned earlier, there are a total of 118 islands in the Venetian lagoon and I did visit quite a few of them when I had my 24-hour Vaporetto pass. Some of the islands are a lot more interesting than others - I found Lido especially boring in winter, given that it is famous for its great beaches, but that's hardly something that is going to be of interest to me in January. Two islands did stand out for me: there's Murano which is famous for the many glass work factories there. Back in 1291, fearing a major fire hazard, the glassmakers of Venice were ordered to move from Venice to Murano and hence that has become Murano's raison d'être ever since. This tiny island is charming and has quaint canals lined with shops selling mostly glassware souvenirs. The other island that I liked was Burano - this is a great lesson in marketing, in order to attract tourists from Venice to Burano (a good 6 km by ferry from Venice), every house along the main canal is painted a different colour, creating this somewhat surreal, super colourful look that is quite different from the quaint, old buildings you typically find on Venice. It was an island designed for the Instagram age, where tourists flock there to take pretty photos. Otherwise, if you get tired of walking, cruising around from island to island on the Vaporetto on a nice day can be a relaxing way to see the Venetian lagoon - do make sure you get a window seat then just sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. Many of the more interesting islands in the Venetian lagoon are accessible by public transport on the vast Vaporetto network, thus you don't need to book any kind of special expensive excursion with a tour agency to access these islands.
This is one thing I hate about Venice - there are public toilets everywhere but they cost €1.50 to use each time. That's more expensive than any other city that I have visited! That's also kinda dumb because you can do what I did: go to a bar with a toilet, spend about €1 or €1.50 on a coffee or a piece of pastry, then as a paying customer, you're free to use the toilet in the bar. So I got something to eat/drink and I got to use the toilet at the same time, instead of paying €1.50 to go to the toilet. I have also seen some people just urinating in the streets, but I don't recommend that - Venice is such a densely populated little island full of tourists, you're unlikely to find anywhere private enough to get away with it. There are a few fast food restaurants and cafes which can get quite crowded in central Venice and in those places, nobody is going to check whether or not you are a paying customer or not but be prepared for long queues to use the toilet. There is nothing consistent about this policy of charging people to use the toilet - so if you want to use the toilet in the main Venice Santa Lucia train station, yes you have to pay €1.50 but then there is a cafe in the station itself which offers free toilet facilities to customers of the cafe (and there are few checks, especially during busy times). If you are paying to visit a museum or a tourist attraction like Doge's Palace, of course there will be free toilets in there. This is one aspect of Italy that really sucks because forcing people to pay for the toilet would only encourages men to just urinate in quiet street corners and that is quite unpleasant when you walk down the street and the putrid stench of stale urine hits you - yucks. Whilst I don't mind paying a small amount of money to visit the toilet but €1.50? Come on - now that's just taking the piss.
Bonus! The free Venice roof top experience with panoramic views.
I promised you a bonus if you got to the end of the article and here it is: there is a rather posh department store right by the Rialto bridge called Fondaco dei Tedeschi and it has an awesome rooftop viewing platform, offering panoramic views of central Venice. This is free but because the viewing platform is relatively small, they have to restrict the number of people who access it for health and safety reasons. The platform is open from 10 am till 7 pm and if you want to access it during some of the more popular times, such as lunchtime on a Saturday, then you need to book in advance either in person there or through their website. Like I said, this is completely free and the 15-minute slots are allocated on a first come first serve basis - however, if you are already in Venice, then I suggest trying your luck during the mornings of the weekdays when there will be far fewer people looking to access the viewing platform then and the staff are quite happy to let people to access the viewing platform without a reservation on those very quiet mornings. But for weekends, public holidays and special occasions like Valentine's Day, then you definitely need to have a reservation. The building itself isn't that high but bear in mind the fact that the historic center of Venice is pretty low - these are all extremely old buildings and there are no tall buildings on Venice, so the view from the rooftop is pretty awesome and your 15 minutes on that rooftop will fly by before you know it. Therefore this is definitely worth doing, especially since it is completely free.
Yo LIFT. Now that UK is officially out of EU what are your thoughts?
ReplyDeleteHi there, thanks for your comment Choaniki.
DeleteTo be honest, nothing has changed because we're in a transition period now, so despite all the headlines about Brexit yesterday and today, little has changed - I'm going to Greece on the 8th Feb and I'm still going to waltz in like an EU national when I get to the airport in Thessaloniki. My EU friends in London are still here, nobody's being kicked out - well not till the transition period is over anyway.
The transition period is meant to be a buffer zone to give both the EU and the UK enough time to sort out what Brexit actually means in practice and my boss predicted yesterday that if we do not get it done by the end of the transition period, then the solution is simple: extend the transition period. The hardcore idiots who want Brexit have already had their party last night, we're out of the EU, they can fuck off and shut up now - whilst there is little to stop the politicians from extending the transition period again and again (kinda like how we put off Brexit for quite a while), it is just a different form of procrastination until we get everything sorted out and nothing much has changed in the meantime.
I did have this conversation with a friend on Facebook today: he was posting a story about how a sign went up in a block of flats in a council estate (ie. where the poorest of the poor British people live) and it was about Happy Brexit Day and how all foreigners who don't speak English can now fuck off from the UK. Then I compare that to my experience at my gymnastics club last night where it turns out, one of the new gymnasts is Spanish and barely speaks English - I quickly gathered up a group of Spanish speaking gymnasts (none of us are actually Spanish - we're just extremely well educated multilingual people who do speak several foreign languages) to give this Spanish gymnast a welcome and to send out a message: it's okay if you don't speak English in London, we'll gladly speak Spanish to welcome you!! Fuck Brexit!
So like I have said so so many times in my blog before - the UK is a deeply divided country. You have the poor people rotting away in poverty having fucking miserable lives, they think voting for Brexit will change everything, bwahahahaha yeah right, they are going to be so disappointed. Then there are the rich people in places like London where we are rich, cosmopolitan, liberal, international in our outlook, speak several languages and love the EU nationals in our midst here in London. Fuck the poor, the rich will get richer in a post-Brexit UK, the poor will get poorer. Life goes on and the poor get no sympathy from me.
Well many of the poor wanted to send a message to the 'establishment'- in essence they believed whatever Farage and his ilk told them- regardless of whether it was utter bullshit- by believing that the 'establishment' would start to listen to them because of Brexit.
DeleteThat's not going to happen. The 'establishment' are just going to continue not listening to them.
In fact, the class system is the one screwing them over. It's existed way before the EU came about. Perhaps they should try to change that. You know, know your enemy before you go to war.
Well you've hit the nail on the head. It is instances like this when I feel that the poor deserve exactly what they're suffering because they voted for it. Tough shit. I have no sympathy for them.
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