Getting Lost in Venice | Part 1

We drove from Munich, Germany to Venice, Italy, which took us about five and a half hours, and took us through Austria. In some parts of the US, five and a half hours gets you to another part of one state. Someday we'll live in Europe and road-trip to a new country every weekend... 

Renting a car is usually our favorite way to travel, but of course there are no cars in Venice. We left our rental car on the mainland and took a bus to Venice (there is a bridge that connects mainland Italy to the islands), then a water bus to the island where our hotel was. By the time we arrived and found our hotel without internet, it was around midnight and we were starving. Our first meal in Italy? Pizza at an empty hole-in-the wall spot run by an Asian couple, the only thing open at that time.  We got our pizzas to go and ate them in our wooden-boat themed hotel room, happy to have found something to make up for our missed dinner (and it's pizza, so you really can't complain). 

While planning our trip to Italy, a few of our friends said to not even bother going to Venice! We were shocked by that advice, since it's such a quintessential Italian city in such a unique setting. We heard over and over that Venice is extremely touristy and extremely over-priced, that nobody actually lives there anymore but just come to the island to work in the tourist playground. I actually don't know how true that is, but it was indeed very touristy and the first place we saw how infiltrated Italy is with selfie sticks (and we visited in April, the very beginning of peak season). However, if you go away from the main square and the canals with gondolas for hire, it's actually really easy to find yourself all alone in a maze of narrow streets that make no sense, up and over canals on little foot bridges, and sometimes end up at a dead end at the water's edge. There's something about tightly stacked colorful, worn buildings and water that make a city so darn charming and a photographer's paradise (it reminded us a bit of Havana, Cuba in that way). We had no regrets about coming to Venice. But then again, it was on the way for us, coming from north of Italy, and can be a bit out of the way if you're flying into Rome.

Even though we were in Venice for a day and a half, we have sooo many photos. We have another long post from Venice coming up, with a few suggestions of what to see.  

- Julia & Yuriy

P.S. Today is our 7 year wedding anniversary, and roughly 7 years since we started this blog(!) when we traveled around the world for 6 months... that was fast. If you're reading, when did you first discover our blog? Way back when during our honeymoon travels or more recently?