Classic Oriënt Express 2009: Day 2

I recently found my old travel diary again and started reading it.  Seems that I made 2 very nice trips in the past, which I think may be very interesting for my blog.  Thus I decided to copy what I wrote about these train journeys through Europe on my blog.

This is the second day of my Oriënt Express Journey.

They say that Venice is a really beautiful city, but when I arrived there this morning, I rather felt disappointment.  Especially when I crossed the Rialto bridge and walked over the heads of all the tourists on the Piazza San Marco, I was even happy that I would leave this city in the evening.

From Piazza San Marco I continued eastbound and noticed less and less tourists.  As I was advancing further east, my initial disappointment was making room for amazement.  When I started walking through the small Venetian streets and alleys, crossing bridges over canals, I saw how truly beautiful this city is and I got the famous Venice-effect.  Somewhere in these streets, I met the handsome Brazilian Ricardo, with whom I spent the rest of the day.

He knew quite a lot about Venice and told me that it currently was Venetian Carnival and that was the reason why it was so busy in downtown Venice.  Together we crossed the Canal Grande on a ferry-gondola, which only costed us 0,50 euro.  On the other river bank we visited the Basilica Santa Maria della Salute and then continued our walk through alleys, crossing bridges over the canals, arriving in hidden squares, until we got to a boat-busstop.  The boat-bus took us back over the Canal Grande to the Jewish quarter.  We passed the synagoge and sat down at a place where we could see the sunset over the sea.

When the sun had well disappeared, we started to feel a little peckish and went on for dinner.  I ate a nice portion of Tortellini with cream and ham.  The food gave me the necessary energy to walk through all the busy squares full of people celebrating carnival to get to the station, where Ricardo and I had to say goodbye, as I was going to board the EuroNight "Venezia" to Belgrade and Ricardo was taking a sleeper service to Rome.  That's how this very special day in Venice ended.