Marshall in Strange Places: Venice

The days are are still short, the dark is still coming earlier than wanted – Hungary still resembles Mordor this is the time of year, and so my mind goes to brighter times during the summer.

The original plan was not Venice. It was Trieste. But at the last minute, we fought the Hungarian bus service bureaucracy and changed our tickets for the overnight bus to the Floating City.

We arrived all bleary eyed, found our way to our penzione, which was in a 200-year-old building, where we got a late breakfast on the lovely terrace. Then we set out to explore. Venice is a strange, almost fantasy land. The city is old, there are no cars, great food and so romantic that even I noticed that it was romantic. It also helps that we had a Baroque-fairy-tale-style room.

The city feels Medieval and, at times, smells a little Medieval, but it lives up to all of its hype. It really is a beautiful place, and we were lucky enough to have incredible weather the whole time we were there, except when we overextended our visit and missed our bus to Budapest, then it thunderstormed.

There are a lot of cliches about Venice, but when you're there, not too many of the cliches are unpleasant. We ate plenty of gelato and sipped wine at cafes. Dolce vita stuff. We also found the Indiana Jones church and I took way too many artsy photos.