Day 32

Grundlsee to Venice

The view from the window this morning

Once it started snowing in Grundlsee it didn’t stop with which, as you know, I’m totally cool (ha ha, excuse the pun).

The train pics give you  bit of an idea how much snow has fallen in the last couple of days.

 

I was so sad to leave this morning. I thought I’d just not be happy without my wonderful friend falling all around but here we are in Venice – no snow – but I am not missing it too badly because, as I said ... Venice!

When I think about our time in Germany and Austria I think snow, scenery, history and cake. Venice, for me is mostly about food, all sorts of food. Before you get your knickers in a knot I know ... there’s history here, the hotel we’re in (right near the Rialto Bridge) is in a 500 year old building.

 

After we checked in we had to be escorted to our room because when we offered to see ourselves to the room the concierge laughed and said you’ll never find it by yourselves. He was right, of course. We followed the bell-boy up hill and down dale around this corner, down another narrow hallway, round yet more corners to be delivered to our room. Much like the labyrinthine streets of Venice itself finding our room again was so doubtful we weren’t too keen to leave it all.

But leave it we did, we were starving after a long day that started out in Grundlsee, saw us drive to Munich airport, take a flight to Marco Polo (Venice) Airport, catch the bus (which I almost missed it helping out a poor fellow tourist who was struggling to work out the public transport - gave MGM a real fright, poor thing), then a vaparetto (like the Manly ferry) to the hotel. We managed to squeeze lunch in the middle of all that travelling but it was very rushed airport food – not very sustaining.

So we arrived in Venice, starving, around 6:30pm. We bravely set forth in search of food and to generally wonder in the wonderfulness that is Venice, brave because it is so easy to get lost in Venice, but food we found...y-u-m! Germany and Austria seem to be big carnivorous countries. You can get an endless variety of pig-based products or sausagey things. You can get vegies but they don’t really do it for me either, but Italy? Well it’s my kinda place, so many things on the menu for fussy me to eat, YAY. MGM had a plate of seafood and I had pasta..not all cream based stuff you get elsewhere, just pasta some oil, basil, garlic and pine nuts with a bottle of red wine, followed by an espresso in the land of good coffee... so so so happy.

Then we faced the challenge of returning not only to our hotel (all the streets & bridges look the same) but also finding our room! We got gelato (to-die-for gelato) on the way to maintain our stamina.

So Venice has good food, coffee & desserts, that would almost be enough but it does also have scenery, history and the unique water ‘roads’ which we’re going out into tomorrow... molto bene!