Ana Raspini is a traveler, besides being an English teacher, and a writer.

Minha foto
Brasileira, professora de Inglês, escritora, mas acima de tudo, viajante.
Lyrical Travel Journal

A personal, slightly lyrical, point of view on the places I have been to.

terça-feira, 21 de julho de 2015

Venice, the unreachable

Venice is hard to reach, for various reasons. Cars, buses or trains, none of them get there. Forget taxis or subways. Not even bicycles exist on the island, given that most of the bridges have steps, not ramps.

In the continent, paid parking lots are stuffed with cars. When you get out of the parking lot, you see a small bridge, connecting the continent to the island. It is a very modern bridge, made exclusively for pedestrians, as almost everything in Venice.

For us, walking the whole way was not an option, as our hotel was on the opposite side of the island and we were carrying bags. Besides walking, the only other option to get to the island is by boat: you either take a ridiculously expensive water taxi, or you take the famous Vaporetto.

Vaporetto is the cheapest way to get to Venice, however, once you get there, you learn that the words "cheap" and "Venice" never go together. A Vaporetto one-way ticket costs 7 euros per person. Not bad for a public transportation, right?

Venice was, by far, the most expensive city I have ever been to. It is expensive to book a hotel, very expensive to eat, and even expensive to walk to the supermarket to buy water. Once you get there, you understand why.

All types of products are transported by boat, and that includes things we don't usually pay attention to, like garbage removal, the dry cleaner's delivery of fresh sheets to our hotel, the delivery of the beer or the wine that is consumed by thousands of tourists every night. Everything depends on the boats. That is why the gondoliers are rich and envied, and boat models are showed off as Ferraris and Lamborghinis are in the rest of Italy.

But, oh damn it! How can a city with such difficult logistics and such inflated prices be so romantic? Would "unachievable" be a synonym for "romantic"? I hate this tacky idea of romance. Romance suggests that you are special, and that the other person also is, and that, for some reason, you are special together. Come on! We are over 7 billion people on this planet, why would I think I'm special? Romantics exhaust me...

But, oh damn it! Walking through Saint Marcus square on a hot summer night while a small orchestra at a café played one of the songs from The Phantom of the Opera was absurdly romantic! I was so touched by the scene of an old couple looking into each other's eyes with sweetness while they both whispered the chorus of "All I ask of you"...

Venice is as unreachable as it is romantic, and being a little tacky once in a while is good for the heart...

...

For the Portuguese version, go to Diario Lirico de Viagem











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