Ah, Venice!

Bye bye efficient Vienna, hello chaotic Venice! Vienna was nice--great metro system, tasty coffee, lots of Hapsburg history and whatnot. But I think it was just too, well, predictable.

After a 4:45 a.m. wake up call (the girls were real troopers), we headed out to Suedbanhoff for our 6:23 a.m. train. The City was just coming to life. We had arrived in Vienna on a Saturday in the middle of a rainstorm and the city was dead. Sunday was even more dead. Come Monday, it was like a different town altogether--glad we got to see work-a-day Vienna before we left.

We all enjoyed our train ride through the Austrian countryside and alps and into Italy. I’ve got to spend some time with a good map to see exactly where we went, but it was lovely. We spent the train ride watching the scenery, napping and snacking on a great big bag of pastries, sandwiches and fruit that we had grabbed on the way to the train.

Venice was abuzz with activity when our train pulled in around 2:30 p.m. When you arrive at San Lucia station, you walk out the front door and you’re immediately aware that you’re someplace very different. Right in front of you is the Grand Canal alive with water taxis, vaporetti (water buses), gondolas and barges.
After a time, we hooked up with our apartment rental guy and found the place. Our apartment is about a 5 minute walk from San Marco basilica in the Castello district. While it’s not the Four Seasons, there’s plenty of space for us and it’s very convenient.

We spent most of the first afternoon wandering through the streets around our apartment. It’s quite crowded around the main tourist sights, but things really thin out just a few blocks off the main drags. After spending way too long trying to find a reasonable trattoria that met Court‘s expectations (the family foodie), we ate pizza and drug ourselves back to the apartment to catch up on our sleep.

It’s funny how you come to imagine a place and how things are sometimes the same and sometimes different when you actually see it. In the case of Venice, I think it is about how I guessed it would be--just much more so. More alive, more intense, more Italian--especially after Austria. Tomorrow we plan to do what all the guidebooks tell us and “get lost” in Venice.