Vacation in Venice

 

Since uni doesn’t start for another two weeks or so and my mother still had some vacation days left, she decided to take me to Venice since it has been on her bucket list forever and due to many factors visiting Venice in the future may not be as easy anymore.

Like always, on that day we took to the skies and landed in Venice hours later. In the air, it occurred to me how much I have a love-hate relationship with air travel. On the one hand, air travel harms the environment… a lot.

But on the other, you get to see fabulous destinations with different kinds of weather. Flying over the clouds always gives me a sense of calm. Seeing how small everything is below making me rethink the significance of my life. 

What I love most about air travel is how you have miserable weather on the ground but once you are in the sky the weather is the best there is. The sun is shining bright and below you is just a sea of clouds. It is tranquil and just brightens my day.

Whenever I am on a plane I like to play ‘spot other planes’. When they fly by they look ridiculously fast while the plane I am sitting in feels so slow. Frankly, I never was able to spot a plane but this time I realised that planes are small in the sky and that them being white doesn’t help. 

I spotted three planes unlike my previous record of zero planes. Turns out I didn’t know where to look. However, enough about my love-hate relationship with the transportation which brought me to Venice, let´s talk about Venice instead.

On the first day there, we took a speedboat to Murano, the island where we were staying on. Then we left our luggage at the hotel and walked around Murano. Frankly, I am pleasantly surprised by Murano.

If I can be frank, I always have this picture of Venice and its islands engraved in my brain, but I never thought that those islands would look anything like the pictures I had in my mind, therefore I was pleasantly surprised. The descriptions of Venice I have heard over the years are quite accurate.

The waterways and the boats. The people and the architecture. Nothing seems as if it was made specifically for tourists since every street you walk down, looks just like the pictures you saw. It was an amazing experience to see pictures in real life.

I know this is not relevant at all, but I just also adore the Italian accent. I find whenever locals speak English incredibly amusing even though it does take time to fully understand what they were trying to say. The accent is just beautiful, but I digress.

On the first day, we also went to the Burano and Torcello, neighbouring islands of Murano. We took the boat to Burano and took a connecting boat to Torcello. Frankly, there wasn´t much on Torcello, there was only one walkway leading to a church.

There wasn’t much else to see there. To be fair there were some restaurants and private properties on the island as well. If you are interested in the church on the island, then you will have plenty of fun discovering its history and the island´s history but there is not much there.

However, I did like Torcello since it gave me the impression of the quieter Venice. There were tourists too but in comparison, the number of people was nothing in comparison to the thousands upon thousands on the islands to come.

It was just a calmer place to get used to the Italian architectural style and the infrastructure without having to literally jump off the deep end. To be fair, it was a nice walk even though the path was small so make sure you don’t fall into the waterway.

The next island on the agenda was Burano and in comparison to Torcello, Burano was far bigger and far more crowded. However, in comparison to the main island Venice itself Burano was far smaller and far less crowded.

The weather wasn’t all too nice when we visited but at least it didn’t rain. Nevertheless, the picture did not turn out as nice as I wanted them to since the grey skies really damped the colourful houses. From postcard pictures, I could tell that everything would look so much better on a sunny day.

The main attraction on that island was the beautiful houses themselves where people are actually living in. Then I just started to wonder who chose the colours of the house, the inhabitants themselves or a governing body.

Since if it was a governing entity, and you didn’t like the colour of your house what did you do? Do you just move out since the colours are kind of really bright and somewhat really distracting if you don’t like the colours?

On the other hand, if it was the inhabitants themselves, how did they communicate which house should be which colour? Do the inhabitants just call dibs or was there a vote? Or was there an auction to auction off each colour?

What if your neighbour already had the colour you wanted since neighbouring houses didn´t have the same colour, do you just move? Why did they paint the houses in the first place? Was it a way to attract more tourists or was it one way to brighten the town a bit?

My questions and the weather aside, Burano was a beautiful island with beautiful views. The houses were so quaint and cute. There is guaranteed that there was a house in your favourite colour and finding that house is a fun hunt.

I mean that walking around the island was a tad hard since the walkways were narrow and there are tourists always taking pictures which meant that the walkways were blocked most of the time. Since most don’t want to be rude, they just wait behind the photographer which created a line.

Most of the people get embarrassed and only take a few pictures before clearing the way again and the line of people could quickly move forward. However, some tourists are just rude and occupy the way and would throw you dirty glances when they take too long and you try to pass them.

Other tourists aside, Burano is just the perfect place to get that perfect picture for your social media or just a great place to make memories with your family since who can possibly forget the island with tons of beautifully colourful Italian houses?

On Burano, we also tried Italy´s famous gelato. And the hype didn´t give their gelato justice. It was great. The gelato was so rich in flavour and there were so many flavours to choose from. Even the coffee flavour which I normally wouldn’t order was exquisite.

The locals on that island are also incredibly nice and helpful. Some locals working in bakeries and stores speak many languages so they could help the tourist best of their ability. Frankly, I always appreciate nice people carrying a smile brightening your day even just by a little bit.

On the island, there are many stores for tourists to browse. As it turns out, the island is known for its lace and silks so on that island you would find a lot of exquisite dresses and scarves which are just lovely souvenirs to bring back to loved ones.

The price tag for a lot of those items may seem outrageous at first but when you take a step back and look at all the effort being put in to create those lace masterpieces, you would understand. That being said, there are also some sellers ripping off tourists so beware.

At the end of the day, we took a boat back to Murano. Since it was Italy, I wanted to try their iconic dishes because I want to compare the Italian dishes in Germany to the Italian dishes in Italy. Trust me, the Italians didn’t disappoint.

First, it came as a shock that most restaurants are closed pretty early since where do the tourist who don’t have kitchens eat? And frankly, I have to apologize to Germany since I did complain about their closing times too… a lot.

However, we did eventually find a restaurant close to our hotel on the small island. When we entered, the smell of freshly made pizza immediately reached my nose. That smell just made me hungrier for a delicious meal.

Much to my surprise, the interior design of the Italian restaurant in Italy was similar to some Italian restaurants in Germany. This was surprising to me because I thought the Italian restaurants in Germany chose those decorations to make up for not being in Italy.

Their decorations made me believe that they wanted to give off this Italian vibe without actually being located in Italy but here in Italy. The interior design was similar which convinced me that the Italian restaurants in Germany are trying to be authentic and were not trying too hard.

There are just some pieces of decorations that scream Italy and I found it quite fitting given that I was in Italy. One of the people working in that restaurant showed us a free seat and we sat down admiring the Venetian artworks hanging around us. The artworks just depicted what we saw over the day and it was just nice to see the artwork´s inspiration in real life.

We sat pretty close to the kitchen which I found quite nice because then I can spy the food coming in and out of the kitchen and most dishes looked amazing which made it pretty hard to choose. The smell coming from the kitchen did not stop my mouth from watering.

It did take some time to browse through seemingly thousands of options. There was literally every iconic dish Italy is known for and if you set out to try every single one of them, you run into a problem of some sort.

Another thing that I had to get through my head was that the menu was in Italian so I shouldn’t try too hard to understand the words in the menu. However, some words just seemed so familiar which urged my mind to read them.

Don’t worry too much, there were English descriptions below every Italian dish name. But the Italian just messed with my mind since it seemed similar to Spanish (the language I am currently learning) on the surface but below the surface, it is a completely different language.

First came the bread which seems like something all Italian restaurants serve before every dish. And I do adore bread with olive oil and vinegar. However, turns out that Italians eat their bread with a drizzle of olive oil or pure.

Eventually, I did manage to choose a dish. Since I do try to eat something, I have never tried before whenever I eat at a restaurant since life is too short to eat one single dish on repeat, I set my heart out to try spaghetti al nero di seppie.

At first, I thought I could make spaghetti at home but then I realized I was in Italy, the inventor of spaghetti. I had to try their spaghetti even though it was not homemade (since Italians value their homemade items and would advertise as such). Due to globalization, spaghetti was not too much of an eye-opener and I wasn’t counting on it.

Spaghetti al nero di seppie was as weird as it sounds spaghetti with cuttlefish ink. The pictures did not look too pleasant since it was completely black like a plate of worms but trust me it was delicious, and I was glad I tried it.

Believe it or not, I was hesitant to order spaghetti al nero di seppie because with seafood it is always hit or miss. And I was tentative about how cuttlefish ink would taste. When I was younger, I tried squid ink and it did not leave a good taste in my mouth.

Frankly, I also had a personal rule against eating seafood but that rule only strictly applied in Germany because Germans, and I say this knowing that I am part German, don’t know how to prepare their seafood. And seafood is sometimes hard to prepare.

However, I was pleasantly surprised. I know it is somewhat rude to expect something bad coming from a restaurant especially one located in Italy. But you do need to understand that I have had some bad experiences with seafood before.

Spaghetti al nero di seppie was amazing. Against my belief, the ink didn’t taste much of anything. It just helped enhance the flavour of the sauce and the sauce was pretty rich itself. The cuttlefish was delicious. The dish as a whole was delicious even though it did leave me with black lips.

As it turns out Italian restaurants do charge a fee for eating in the restaurant as opposed to taking out. Which came quite as a surprise for tourists and may seem like a rip-off but it was pretty standard amongst all cafes and restaurants so there was nothing that could be done about it.

That sums up my first day in Venice. However, there is so much more to discover in Venice and I didn’t miss one second of it.