Venice

I’ve just had a quick look at my past 3 or 4 blogs and it looks like the only thing that I’ve blogged about since Venice is the fact that I am cold. Which is a shame because even though its been really cold we have had a great time in the past two weeks or so, so lets back track to Venice and I’ll try to tell a story from each place we’ve been since.
As we were in Venice on our honeymoon we couldn’t leave without going on a gondola ride. We opted for the long gondola ride (60 minutes) from a gondola near our hotel away from the all the tourists. Our gondola driver was reasonably young (in his twenties) and told us that he was the latest in a 500 year family business... From this point onwards we assumed that at least 67.9% of what he told us was made up on the spot. We affectionately nicknamed him Bender as he reminded us of the lovable robot from Futurama, spontaneously bursting into half a chorus of an obscure song, as if he was trying to avoid having to pay royalties (e.g., Relax, yeah baby uh huh uh huh), truth be told he probably just didn’t know any songs in full. We unknowingly timed it at the top of the tide which resulted in Ri having to run to the front of the gondola every time we came to a bridge to prevent us from hitting it, we have a photo which shows that didn’t always work (mustn’t of had enough gelato at that stage). He took us through the quite backwaters of Venice which was wonderful, past the Casanovas, Marco polo’s, Mozart’s and Johnny Depps house (who, according to Bender, goes through a couple of ‘grams’ a night... sniff sniff). At the end of it he set up shots of Ri driving the gondola and all in all we had an entertaining and romantic ride.