welcome to Venice this is my first trip here with my girlfriend Alice who has
very kindly bought me this as a Christmas present this is our hotel the Ai Mori d'Oriente
hotel a moorish style accommodation four-star absolutely
amazing base from which to explore this city of canals
like all boaters I love a good hotel room
and this is ours
it's also got a minibar and it's
not that expensive I've gotta say so yeah we might
drink some of that later but that's for me to know and you to find out - or not find out? I don't know what I'm talking about
Now you have to remember this is our first holiday as a couple so obviously our
priority is having a lovely romantic time but I've still got time for pub
of the week — always got time for pub of the week — or in this case 'Bacaro of the
day!' I didn't realize this at the time but afterwards speaking to one of the
locals apparently this is the favoured joint of Italian men when picking up
American girls! thankfully my girlfriend is from
Yorkshire so she'll 'ave none o that!
I should have known it was a seedy bar
from all the bras hanging from the ceiling but it's all good and the food
it was expensive (it was a tourist place) but it was delicious! Pizza... pasta... that's
Spaghetti al Nero and yeah it was lots of fun to try and
eat this! My first taste of squid ink (or cuttlefish ink) pasta
It's very nice - very black! look at my teeth!
cheers!
after eating enough pasta and pizza to sink a gondola we were treated to a
couple of shots of limoncello Italian liqueur it was free so yeah down the
hatch! Grazie! ciao!
Alice: stop filming me!
we are trying to find a way back from
the 'pub of the week' — but you get lost in Venice that's the whole point but
now we've gotta find a way back to the hotel can we do it?!
The reality is Robbie knows where we're going — but he drank all the Limoncellos
so no one knows where they're going!
the next morning Alice and I decided to take advantage of this free trip that
the hotel had put on for us to go to the island of Murano where they're famous
for glassblowing and yeah we just thought we'd be interested in seeing it
when we got there we realized that it was a one-way situation so we'd had to
pay for another ticket to get us back to the to the main part
of Venice but that was great because it really pushed us to be a bit more
adventurous and explore the island by boat passing other sites like this
cemetery where lots of people from Venice are buried
we saw that from the Vaporetto the bus that you take around Venice
it goes up the Grand Canal it goes around the island and yeah you just treat
it like a like a bus basically. The locals pay a lot less than we did
(we paid 20 euros each for a day ticket) but when you think of Venice you think
of gondolas and now these things are really expensive I was quoted 80 to 100
euros for just a couple of hours trip so yeah I thought I'd give that a miss at
this point in the journey I started daydreaming wondering if I could get my
own narrowboat down these narrow canal passageways but I think a) it's too shallow
and b) those bridges look far too low but never mind because mostly people
in Venice walk and here we are walking into the piazza San Marco or Saint
Mark's square which is the number one tourist destination in Venice I've
decided to come to the piazza san marco just to make sure I'm ticking all the
tourist boxes off but this place is quite interesting because right in front
of this Palace is the lowest point in the whole of Venice so if it's gonna flood
it's gonna flood here and that's why they have these gangplanks all set out
ready for people to walk along when it's high tide
especially during 'Aqua Alta' which happens every so often but that's a whole other vlog
I can't get into right now!
we're not gonna hang around here because it is so expensive so I'm going
to try and walk outside of this Piazza and find something nice to eat mmmmm
somewhere nice and warm because it is cold
in a moment I'm going to cross over on Rialto bridge and it's just
incredible the way it's been built to support so many shops because obviously
beneath Venice is built on a lot of pieces of wood
This incredible 16th century
bridge has stone foundations but below that there's basically a lot of tree
trunks just driven into the mud that lies beneath and if you look
closely at some of the buildings you can imagine the problems that Venetians face
with all the erosion that might happen but for us it was time to stuff our
faces once again with all the lovely pasta and pizza on offer
after our lunchtime meal we headed back out onto the streets it was still
raining so we ducked down a few alleyways looking for our Vaporetto stop
so we could get back to our hotel and it can be quite challenging navigating
these narrow streets but it's also a lot of fun as well
we hopped back on the vaporetto and journeyed back up the Gran Canal and as
we did we saw all the different types of boats - there's a canoe there's a speedy
little boat there's a even a wide beam barge that people would transport goods
around but no narrowboats
I looked into hiring a private boat but the
seasons all wrong in January the tourist scene sort of slows
down a little bit so I think I'd have to wait until spring to do that
back at the hotel Alice and I
sheltered from the rain and
it wasn't long before we had to go out again to find the Bacaro
of the day - also known as...
one of the things I wanted to try whilst in Venice was 'cicchetti' and that is just
little bits of food like tapas and you have that with a nice drink
and this place specialised in organic wine so just absolutely fantastic place
to eat and drink and chat and from that bar we were actually given recommendations to
head on to a nearby restaurant that served contemporary Italian food and
more organic wine so we were very happy by the end of that meal
as it was
our last night in Venice we decided to just pop back to a hotel because the bar
there was quite cozy and we were just able to relax and chat to other guests
sample Venetian beers and espresso martini cocktails but it was the
bartender that really made this experience because he was just so
good-natured and the service was just impeccable you are expected to tip in
Venice but we all thought the bartender was worth every penny
it's my last day here just about to take the water taxi back to
the airport from the hotel and I've just had such an amazing time here I owe it
all to my girlfriend who bought this whole holiday as a gift
as a Christmas present but I've fallen in love with this city
the city of canals
no one in Venice lives on a boat well at least when I've talked to the people who
live here yeah it's just used for transport so all of these boats they're
like cars you know a lot of people do live in cars but there's so much water
everywhere you are pretty much on the water if you're living in a house anyway
I did see some mooring rings but my guess is that these are for picking up passengers
loading, that sort of use - whereas if you leave your boat overnight in Venice
(because it's tidal) you need these mooring posts
in terms of the water levels
here it's all tidal right now we're near high tide and in about four and a half
hours it'll be low tide so you can see it gets to about that high so it's not
really flooding here and the water's not too low either so it's fine!
it's all lagoon water it's not canal water essentially it's all from from the sea
so you got that smell that salty smell of the sea side as well as all this
beautiful architecture everywhere it's just amazing I'll definitely be coming back