On the 12th of November I went for the first time to one of the cities that has attracted my attention since I was a child, Venice. This time I didn’t go alone to discover a new city, I went with Almudena, a Spanish girl who lives in the same city as me.

The day started very early, at 6 am the alarm clock rang and at 6:30 I was on my way to the train station and very cold. The journey was long, about 3 and a half hours with a 45 minute stop in Bologna to change trains. Around 10:30 we arrived in Venice and the first thing I did was to buy souvenirs because they were very cheap. From the station there were already beautiful views and I loved it from the beginning. The way from the station to the most touristic area we had to walk for a while through streets and squares that looked like a Spanish mountain village but with water in every street. We went looking for known places to visit and the truth is that everything surprised me more than I expected. We discovered that it was the city of cats, there were many cats everywhere, apart from Spaniards and Spanish speakers… one of the things I like least about sightseeing and travelling is that it seems like I’m in Valencia with the amount of people I meet.

St. Mark’s Square, the Rialto Bridge, the Academy Bridge, the Grand Canal, the aqua bookshop, people dressed in carnival costumes, etc. Everything was as I imagined it would be and even better. It was all ultra crowded, so I see it as normal that you have to buy a ticket to go to Venice from 2023 to restrict mass tourism and preserve the city, as it has become a ghost town full of tourists but empty of inhabitants.

So much for my blog today, see you next time.
David G. Carrasco