Sunday, September 21, 2008

Venice

After 2 nights we hit to Vienna. Near the border with Italy I finally started to feel Summer. I had to take off my warm clothes and exchange them with light summer ones. It was such a great difference after half year in gloomy UK. We were about to spend one night in a water city. I was a bit afraid that it will smell horribly, because few years ago when I was visiting Venice I was shocked with the smell of the water in canals, but it wasn’t like that at all. I fell in love with this city. You will too. All you have to do is to go a bit further from Saint Mark’s square and it will be enough to see calmer not flooded by tourists Venice. However there were still few surprises waiting for us at the begging of the sightseeing.

We were closer and closer to the city Tom Tom was showing only 500m to the parking recommended by the hotel in which we were about to stay. Everyone was excited and started to look around, then we realized that we are on some suburbs where buildings are falling apart and homeless people are enjoying the sun outside them. There was also a railway station so I went to ask in Information how to get to our hotel. The lady said: ‘Ohhh dear! Your hotel is on the small Island and I can’t even find it on a map.’ I thought this is a bad sign But we came back to the car and decided to go further in direction of city center. After few minutes the views begin to remind Venice I remember with canals boats and huge queue to parking. At the beginning we have joined the queue but after that we decided that maybe we will try to go further after all it was still about 2km to Saint Mark’s square. We did what we thought and then we end up on a parking for buses where you cannot park the car. The problem was that we couldn’t go any further and we couldn’t stop, so the atmosphere started to be a bit tensed. For our luck there was another parking on the right. We just had to get there without breaking any rules. It was about time to split and me and my mum went to the information to ask about the map and directions, and my dad with my brother went to park a car.

In the information they said there is no free map (like our guide wrote) we have to pay 5euro (yuuupi tourist prices....). They also said that we have to park a car and move by boats to wherever we want because there is no other way to travel from this point. It was quite inconvenient information, since we had huge amount of luggage and we didn’t want to leave everything in a car at the parking. But it seemed that we don’t have much choice.

In mean time my dad was trying to park a car on a parking to which of course was a huge queue. He was waiting and waiting. Than a policeman came to him and showed that he has to go around the queue and try to enter the parking from the right side. He drove a bit further and stopped in front of the entrance like policeman suggested but it was still like getting into the queue without waiting, so the parking guy came and said: ‘uuuuu! Polako bandito you wanted to get without waiting.’ My dad said: ‘no no. The policeman suggested that I will do that.’ The parking guy replied: ‘No no the policeman couldn’t said that. Go there and wait a bit’. heheheh he put my father in donkey corner to punish him for trying to enter the queue without waiting hehehhe. After my dad has finished his detention he drove to the parking and parked a car. It seemed to be the end of wired situations and then came another parking guy. He gave a receipt with time my dad arrived to him and said that he has to leave the car open. My dad was in shock. How can he leave the car open with all the luggage inside! He said that the alarm will turn on automatically after 1 minute if he does that. So the guy replied OK then please leave the keys too. Can you imagine?! My dad was in shock and started to ask how come he has to do that. Than an American guy came and said: ‘Don’t worry mate. Everyone has to do it here. It’s completely safe although it looks like they would have a huge mess in here.’ My dad decided to trust guys opinion and left the keys. We were sleeping not entirely calmly that night but nothing bad happened and next day we got back our car with everything inside.