One of my besties is trekking around a few of the places GM and I visited throughout our 
Exit Strategy. It occurs to me, sitting here in Blenheim, New Zealand in my pyjamas, peanut butter toast breath eeking out my mouth, that I’m wasting precious moments to record my own memories of these places that we saw. I risk these colourful bright memories decaying in time and mind to being shadows of their former selves. Time to write!
It felt so normal to be moving through that part of the world, but on reflection, plenty of people don’t get to see what we saw, don’t get the opportunity to get out there and see what’s happening over there. How lucky were we to be there. Well, maybe not lucky, just well placed to see some pretty cool things.
One of the most prominent memories is of our Air BNB host. A lady with pitch black dyed hair, walking throughout her house in slippers (prescribed to her guests as well), clothed in what I’m fairly certain, was a child’s nightie. She had two inside cats, six outside cats, and a sick father who stayed on the couch in the living room all day as she swept up after the cats. Her English was very thickly accented, frequently incorrect, but always helpful. She was very intent on ensuring that we saw the very best that Venice had to offer. She built us an itinerary for our three nights there and because of her, I think we saw more than we would have without her.
The Air BNB house was out of Venice itself, on the mainland Mestre and a quick and inexpensive bus into Venice took only twenty minutes. Mestre is not particularly pretty but it is busy and we found a wonderful little cafe that served us the best evening meal of our stay – fresh, flavoursome and delicious.
We spent our first day wandering around Venice, fighting against the large bustling crowds with their obnoxious cameras and obnoxious voices and obnoxious tourist-ness, jumping on water taxis to get from one canal to the next, from one tiny island to the next. It was exhausting. You can absolutely see why Venice is a huge tourist destination. Now that it isn’t a major port, it’s the money spent by the tourists that saves it literally sinking into obscurity. The architecture is spectacular, and the novelty of the canals, the singing gondoliers fighting to be heard over the taxis, the rolling waves and the crowds, is certainly something to see. But I just felt that it was being spoilt by all the other people like me: tourists. I couldn’t see past them to get up close and personal to San Marco, its piazza heaving with dirty great swarms of pigeons and people. The piazza is fed by multiple little alleyways, one of which we slipped into in an attempt to make our escape away from the people.
The alleys were my favourite part of Venice, little shining gems of skinny lighted shop 
windows brimming with luxury and colour, obscene Venetian masks and obscure little cat galleries, that suddenly open up to another surprise piazza and yet another church. It was down one of these alleyways that I played paparazzi to the most fashionably dressed woman I’ve seen in a long time. Her hair was cropped very short and she wore dangling heavy earrings with an ease that makes me confront my own fear of brash, loud jewellery (confront and then hide from). She wore a shin-length dress of light blue lace over a bright orange base, handling a bag of a slightly different shade of blue, and beshoed in perfectly complimentary orange mules. Such perfection.
My leggings and hoodie put me to shame. Shame, shame, shame.
We had one day dedicated to visiting the nearby islands of Murano and Burano, both renowned for quite different reasons. Murano for its glasswork and Burano for it’s gaily painted buildings. The water taxi to Murano was another bulging mass of tourists, out to tick off the box of bringing back a piece of glass from Venice (quite possibly an overpriced Chinese knock-off, apparently it’s a big issue there). Murano was a pleasant escape from the convulsive crowds of the previous day but we struggled to find an operating glass work doing demonstrations and quickly got bored of the shops selling products that looked all very similar to the one next door.
We decided we needed to move on to Burano.
Our host had suggested that Burano was the nicest of the islands, quieter and more interesting to look at because of its buildings. We were quite ready to be impressed. We were.
Burano is a very small area made up of four islands connected by bridges over canals, and a 40 minutes water taxi ride away from Venice itself. The island is entirely identifiable by its brightly painted buildings and is absolutely enchanting in every way. Since the islands development, locals have had to follow a process of application to the government if they wish to paint their houses. They’re then offered a few options, all of which are rich and toy-like options, totally unsuited to anywhere but Burano.
It was while we were at Burano that a call for pizza and limoncello was made, and oh what a wise call that was. We stopped at an oddly decorated little spot, right on the canal, and were treated to an exceptional example of a Margarita pizza, and the most delicious, sweet, sour, tart, limoncello cocktail sundae that man ever invented. I want to go back, if only for that. Has anyone built a reasonably priced teleportation device yet?
We lingered in Burano until the sun began to drop and then went off to the taxi stand where people behaved oddly like animals, feeling unnecessarily threatened with being left behind or god-forbid not getting a seat, as they shoved us both forward onto the taxi, some running in order to get a seat (there were plenty FYI). In our self-righteous ‘thank goodness we’re Kiwi’s’ manner, we lumbered as slowly and calmly as we could onto the taxi, spitefully slowing people down behind us thinking ‘chill the funk out, you crazy ass fools’ to ourselves as we took our seats upstairs.
The trip back to Venice was blimmin’ hilarious as we discovered the people next to us were Aussies on a bus tour around Europe with some Kiwi’s and all of us Southern-Hemispherian’s laughed and made fun of all the silly tourists (naturally ignoring the fact we ourselves were tourists), and made fun of all the silly idiosyncrasies and practices of the Northern-Hemishpherian’s (charging someone for a loo when it turns out all they needed to do was a fart – Thanks Aussie Grant for supplying us with that nugget (or rather not nugget) of a tale).
I suspect you’ve picked up my general thoughts of Venice. You must see it, but plan better than we did and find ways to ditch the incessant crowds. Make sure you get to Murano for a glass works tour, again forward planning important here, and then to Burano for the buildings and a limoncello sundae. Oh, that sundae.
exploring.life.with.me 