Quick starter: How I ended up in Venice, Italy

Feel free to skip this part if you just wanna see the pics

Driving back from Heathrow Airport, England, my friend who picked me up informed me that he and 4 other old friends of mine had booked tickets to Venice for a bargain at about $50 for a return flight. They had a house booked for 2 nights so there would be no issue if I was to stay with them and I was welcome to join, without the need to pay for the accommodation, as long as I was happy to sleep on the floor or in the same bed if they were doubles (which they weren't). I was very happy to sleep on the floor and they were going abroad for the specific purpose of celebrating one of their birthdays.

I really wanted to celebrate his birthday, especially after being away for so long, and hearing that his last one was awful.

It turned out, however, after everybody got time off work, that birthday boy COULDN'T get time off because he had already used up his days being lazy or something. So what other choice but to go and celebrate his birthday without him??

I was quite unsure in the end, because by the time I looked, those cheap tickets had almost doubled and I felt I should be around locally for my friend's birthday. But after some discussions, and the fact that he wouldn't even get time off for his birthday (working 3 jobs, too), and that the holiday was more or less paid for me, AND that brexit was gonna happen at some point soon, I felt the best option was simply to go.

Unfortunately by the time I did make that decision the price of the ticket had gone up even more to somewhere around $120. But without needing to pay my $80-90 share of accommodation, I still came out on top so what the hell.

I had just collected my credit card which I have had for years but never used because it had always been in England, and decided it was time to put it and its $300+ to use.

So around 2-3am we set out, got ourselves through some beers and coffees (cancel each other out), and got on the worst, cheapest, nastiest plane I've ever been on, compliments of Ryan Air. It was like the opposite to the flight I took from China, Qatar air which is hyper luxury, but whatever I'm not fussy.

I used the opportunity to enjoy my QC25 Bose noise cancelling headphones as well as smugly yet solely enjoy the knowledge about the secret button under the immovable arm rest on the aisle seats. It was only towards the last 30 minutes or so of the flight that I figured out how to use my backpack on top of the tray to make resting remotely comfortable, but whatever .

By the time we arrived it was early morning and, after being awake for almost 24 hours, we had another 17 hours or so of fun ahead of us!

Venice

Venice, as the title suggests, is everything you imagine it is:

• Absurdly expensive
• Super touristy
• Gorgeous
• Clean
• Historically well kept
• Unique architecture
• Gondolas everywhere
• Good food
• Good wine
• Beautiful girls

Being one of the most popular tourist attractions in Europe, half of those are of no surprise, although the beautiful girl point was kind of painful to experience. I generally consider My home city and country on the whole to be particularly gruesome in the physical appearance department, so living abroad made me feel spoilt with a lot of lovely girls passing by making the places I lived seem more friendly and easygoing. Then Italy came along and... well, go find out for yourself. I'm not gonna start posting pictures!

The first thing that struck me was, obviously, the canal system. Now, referring back to China, there are cities and other residential areas built around rivers creating a similar kind of river-town. Numerous ones exist in Shanghai alone. Some of them claim to be 'The Venice of China' or 'The Venice of Shanghai'. After visiting, I realised that those who came up with these slogans had clearly never left China, because their little towns are disgusting compared to the real deal.

I originally imagined - and hoped for - a canal system full of sewage and bad smells, but it looks like they've gone to great efforts to clean the waters up with signs and rules galore, to the point that you can see pretty far down and with plenty of fish of all sizes enjoying it as much as ever. And why not? The colours were fantastic.

These are very different canals to England too, and to me, more like rivers, but whatever they were lovely anyway. There are, obviously, no cars in the entire area and anybody who is anybody owns a boat to get around. I can't imagine that's cheap though, because the gondolas had a price of 80 fricking euros for a small ride, which, as a five-some, we decided to go for. But as a romantic couple as it is meant to be? Get outta here!

For anybody else, you gotta walk. And boy did we walk. One day, we looked at a phone pedometer and found we had clocked up 12,000 steps... by 11am!

During these walks we found an interesting store. A Spar. But it was a little different...At first it looked more like a Cathedral.

But I mostly awed over the nice, fresh, well-sized bananas in store. I'm used to a random selection of browning, semi-peeled leftovers with bugs all over them, lest they be horribly wrapped in cling film, individually.

It was time to leave the tourist areas by this point.

You see, the key to enjoying Venice is apparently to get lost, and I don't disagree. The tourist areas were nice, and it was wonderful seeing the major architecture and performers:

But at this point it's hard to mask what it has become - A tourist attraction.

When you sit down at a restaurant and pay 5 euros for a bottle of water, 4 euros for a can of Fanta, you know you aren't in the right spots. So we got lost several times over the 3 days we had and found some wonderful stuff that I pretty much didn't take any photos of.

Basically, rather than spend 7 euros for each glass of wine, we stumbled across a residential shop that had in-store fermentation... thingies, and was selling ready-made wine for 2.30 Euros PER LITRE, bottle, glasses and all. And it was pretty good wine! (Not that I can tell the difference).

We found a school-family area where we sat early evening on the floor using one of those giant cable spools as a table, and played the evening away with Cards Against Humanity, which was much funnier than it should have been due to one of us being rather drunk and utterly incapable of reading properly, before going over to a very public pile of garbage to pee in it, only to be grumbled at by an old man and then an old woman, still mid-stream, who told him he should be peeing in the water fountain (which was literally in the middle of the street), which is why it was there (which it blatantly wasn't).

We found all kinds of cool, narrow, creepy dead end lanes, peaceful walks, weird bra bars, and more.

We also stumbled across a natural history museum clearly left out of the common tourist eyes, given that we were the only people int he entire place. It was pretty good, given its size, though not much in English. The google translate feature that allows you to translate photos instantly was a big help where needed, but it was mostly cool to see all the dead stuff:

Here's one of those translations of interest, while looking down at a mummified girl/woman surrounded by stuffed crocodiles:

You see in the glasses, a mummy with a golden face. This was found in the cave opposite Manfalut, above the Arabian Chain, where millions of embalmed Crocodiles are found. As I walked into this cave I found human bodies buried among the great reptiles as you can see here. Since it was stripped here, so we know that it is a woman's mummy, so I think it was one of the priestesses, remembered by Herodotus, who fed sacred amphibians, and when they died they were buried together. These mummies had no cash, only a table held the double-wrapped corpse and kept well. The great crocodiles that were on their sides were also dressed and covered with palm leaves

Weird stuff.

When night came, an amazingly thick fog covered the city. It was marvelous. At first, it took me right back to being in China, but this was clearly not pollution. The air was fresher than ever and it was a pleasure to walk around. Being at night in such peace, it was also wondrously creepy which I tried to capture as best I could with my cheap phone:

On the final day I was hooked on buying one of the masks that 40% of all stores were selling, but I wanted a proper one.One that I knew was made here, by the person in the shop, and not some plastic garbage shipped over from China in their bilions, like so:

We made some effort, but hit the jackpot. We stumbled across a humble looking man, greyed but un-jaded, wearing a heavily used apron and hands built to last. He was nonchalantly in the corner of the store, casually aware of any customers coming in, but never looking up. He was busy with his craft. Papier Mache-constructed masks, painted and glued by hand, right there in store. He commented on my talk of cheap Chinese models and offered to show me his process, which was very genuine, enough for me to make a purchase and take a business card. His name isn't on the card as far as I can tell, but we called him Giovanni because that's obviously his name. Either that or Geppetto:

Great guy, great little memory.

We also enjoyed a lot of the religious spots like the cathedrals, which is where we started to experiment with vertical panorama shots just because:

And then we continued with more...

The part where you get ripped off

This should always happen once in every holiday, whether it's paying too much for a taxi or paying $20 to a guy who forcefully rubbed aloe vera juice on your legs because you were too young and naive to understand currency (but not too young for that to be illegal), or paying $20 for two weird Nepalese guys who buddied up to you with their cool snakes, took photos and then charged you for it after a suspicious group of people started to surround the area. It's just one of those things that should happen.

In the case of Venice it happened twice between us. Some friendly looking posers dressed in the Venetian style dresses and masks were standing around and offered to take one of us to have a selfie with them. I've seen this dozens of times so swiftly moved on knowing their trick, but one of us didn't and was more than happy to oblige before we could blink, and suddenly they were charging him 5 euros for the trouble! What fun.

The second time, our last meal was meant to be nice, so we stopped off at a nice looking place but didn't think to note that the owner and waiter were both Chinese. This should have been an instant red flag but I guess we had our rose tinted glasses on.

After noting a price of about $17 euros each, we couldn't help notice, right outside the bathroom, a pile of ready-made packaged spaghetti meals next to a microwave. Well. That explained the suspiciously gross looking slop they served us! So, if you ever go to a restaurant there, stay away from any of them near the bus station/taxi place on the outskirts unless you're particularly fond of microwave meals.

The rest

There were thousands of memories and moments that I could go on about un-photoed, since we were out all day and all night and my phone could barely keep up with a few hours at a time without charge, but I made sure not to ruin the whole place here, leaving lots of the great secret spots un-mentioned. The night-life is somewhat lacking, with everything seeming to close down by around midnight or earlier, possibly due to every building being at least partly apartments.

I genuinely felt like I could live there, if only steemit somehow blew up and made it easy to live off my time spent on here. I'd find a spot away from tourists and just enjoy the river canals and cheap wine every day, and the cheap flights back home every few weeks. I mean, the Italian language sounds amazing and is such a wonderful change from all the harsh Asian languages I've been surrounded with all these years and I could see myself learning it pretty quickly after being around such unfamiliar languages for so long.

Anywho, after a bunch of other stuff we returned and basically nothing went wrong. We were, again, up for an incredible number of hours to the point that I'm sure we ALL slept on the drive home... including the driver, since I was woken by some cat-eye bumps once or twice, but hey, we're all alive.

Next time, Visiting the beautiful countrysides of England!