Hi folks,

OK - anxiety aside, it was lovely. My partner and I are budget travellers, and we did it on the cheap.

We stayed in Cannaregio, the working class district on the North of the island, and had the pleasure of walking through narrow alleyways full of clothes hanging out to dry and pot plants festooned around the windows and balconies. The locals were very friendly, as we were outside the tourist area and the tourist season.

On the first evening it snowed heavily, and was so romantic in the darkness, with the canals illuminated by lonely streetlamps. The lamps are white, not sodium, as in the UK and the empty streets look like theatre sets, waiting for the action to start.

Not many Italians live on the island, but those that do are quite old, in some cases very old indeed. Maybe the Italian diet is helpful with longevity, and of course the strong family culture. In a restaurant we saw a whole extended family eating together, four generations, and everyone happy and smiling. That is a very unusual sight in the UK.

As tourists, it wasn't the important historical sites that mattered most to us, although we did them, but the atmosphere of the whole place. On the second day the sun came out and we were enchanted by the sunlight and then the sunset over the lagoon, painted by so many famous artists over the years.

We circumvented the entire island on a 'vaporreto' boat and visited nearby Murano. The water is blue green and amazingly the lagoon is only one metre deep on average. You can see the occasional fisherman standing in the water, a long way from the shore.

A final discovery was a public park on the Southern tip of the island, at the very end of the Rialto. In the park it felt like any Italian city, Rome or Torino, with children (even very young) running around freely, without a care in the world.

If it's OK to mention this, I have put an article on a travel site -
which can be found at Travelblog.com, then > Europe> Italy and my article is under the pseudonym e. There are a couple of quirky photos as well.

I feel a bit guilty writing about holidays, kind of off-topic, but then why not lighten things up sometimes? It's a nice feeling.

Cheers, Myzen.