We had a very nice train trip from Paris to Venice. The views of the countryside in France and the spectacular scenery of the mountains in France and Switzerland were fantastic. We walked to our hotel and were pleasantly surprised by how nice it was. It was basic of course, a pension, but it had a really nice courtyard area where we had breakfast. The first day we saw all the big-ticket sights - San Marco, the basilica, the Doge’s Palace, all around that area. We caught the vaparetto down the grand canal and walked over the Rialto of course. That evening we got a gondola trip, which was just wonderful. We got an amazingly cheap bottle of Chianti  - one of those chubby ones with the basket on it - and a couple of plastic cups to take on with us. Crystal would have been nicer but we were on a budget. It was a very memorable ride and our gondolier was a character.

On the Wednesday it was a bit wet, but we managed to get around to a lot of places. We went to Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery and looked at all the modern art there. We visited Salute, the cathedral across the Grand Canal from San Marco, where I unfortunately sat on a not-quite dry seagull poop. It was a day for that, because Jen had got bombed by a pidgeon earlier on, just after we’d bought our Venetian masks from a place near the Acadamia. In the evening we had dinner at a nice pizza place by a canal bridge. Great atmosphere, and our table was outside with a view of the small canal and the bridge.

On Thursday we went to some of the streets less strolled in Venice - the back areas - and found some really nice spots. We checked out the Arsenal and saw the equestrian statue of the Condottiore Bartolomeo Colleoni, among many other excellent sights. That night we had cheese and bikkies and a bottle of red in a square - our first ‘square meal’ ever!