Germany to Italy

Crowds of tourists in Venice.



Ah - the lengths I go to for the blog. Including a bus ride with 45 Russian Esperantists from Munich to Padua via Venice. And in the interests of research I even signed up for the Esperanto tour - though in this case the best they could come up with was a Russian tour guide.

On the bus I had the seat directly behind and above the driver. On the one hand it meant that in an accident I'd go flying through the window, on the other hand it was a great seat because of the huge front window I was looking through with no-one to block my view, plus it was interesting watching the interaction between the Polish driver and his side-kick and the Russian (Esperanto) tour organisors. The Poles just spoke Polish and the Russians Russian and they seemed to understand each other.



Esperanto tour through Venice with that aweful green flag.



Venice is a pretty spectacular city when viewed from the water but once you get off the ferry the extent to which everything has been taken over by tourism is pretty overwhelming.

All the main squares are wall to wall people with any empty spot taken over with stalls selling postcards and we won the world cup t-shirts. As for hearing Italian!

There is constantly a huge number of tours being conducted. Basically these tours consist of up to fifty people following someone around holding up a flag (the language of the tour). It was so hot the day we were there with no wind, but for two hours it's on and on. Brief stops for the guide to give an explanation about something, make sure no-one's got lost - then onwards, criss-crossing with other tour-groups now and again. It really is a mystery to me how anyone could enjoy this sort of thing. It really is a case of being able to say you've been there.

Oh, by the way, I've been to Venice - a wonderful city!



Here I am enjoying Venice...

Onwards from Venice we took off to Padua where they had arranged to stay the night in a youth hostel whereas I'd decided to push on by myself to Florence by train. Getting to Padua turned out to not be so easy. We kept on circling the area on the autostrada like a plane coming in to land but we kept being on not quite the right bit of freeway.

I had to laugh though when at one truck-stop we stopped for directions and the first bloke to wander over to give help was a Polish truck-driver. As we're driving off our driver says to his side-kick - 'They and their Esperanto! You can get by anywhere with just Polish!'