Back in the day, there was a boy called Carmen who thought he was all that and a bag of potato chips. Carmen was big headed with a massive ego. He always tooted his own horn so to speak, so the people of Venice, even the blind people who were referred to as the Venetian blinds, started to call him ‘tootencarmen’ behind his back. When Carmen found out about this, he cried for fifteen days straight, consequently flooding the town of Venice. From the day he started crying all those years ago, the streets of Venice have been filled with his salty egotistic tears.

With this very historically accurate background of Venice fresh in our minds upon arrival, we accidentally got off the train at the wrong station. The realization of stupidity hit us when we couldn’t see any year drops around us in the streets and the station was like a ghost town. Reaching the part of Venice with water, we dumped our crap at the hostel and walked no longer than two minutes before laying our eyes on a super yacht of which we found out costs around $150K to hire out for just one week. After contemplating our daily budgets, we came to a single minded agreement that 1) we could be going over our budgets and 2) if we ever have that much money sitting in the bank, we wouldn’t be spending it on only seven days aboard a super yacht.

It’s only about a ten to fifteen minute walk from our hostel to San Marco Square, the main square in Venice. I came to Venice seven years ago for the first time so it was strange as some things triggered my memory and some did not.

We woke up the next morning to the nearby church bells playing a song that went for a solid four minutes or so, followed by someone playing their own bells as though they were taking the piss.
Walked to San Marco Square an then through to the Rialto Bridge, a bridge with markets and shops over it. The Battlers went to the fruit markets, the real deal fruit markets, where we continued to indulge on our new profound love of peaches followed by the impulse purchase of a massive ten centimeter cubed bucket each of what we thought were blueberries. The only doubt I had as to whether they were actually blueberries or not comes from the fact they had seeds in them and were really sour, something I haven’t experienced with blueberries before. (feel like writing that I thought I was some kind of blueberry connoisseur). Regardless of what they were, they still made my poos run faster than Usain Bolt in the one hundred metre sprint combined with Sally Pearson in te hurdles winning a gold medal for Australia; an event we saw live the previous night at dinner.

Eddie and I met up with Inez and Claire-Ellen (who I now refer to as Clarelan), the two girls from Mykonos, Ios and Florence, and we spent the day with them. Inez had an awful flu and was feeling real crook after lunch so she went home for a siesta. Clarelan, Eddie and myself went wondering about the streets of Venice and just did nothing in particular. Getting lost and just roaming around taking in the major subtleties of a completely different environment is what I loved most about Venice.

Old man Perksy sent me through a photo of me on a bridge with some monument in the background. Clarelan, Eddie and I went on a search to try and get the exact same photo except seven years later. We manage to stumble upon the bridge and after several shots of trying to get it perfect to the original photo, we all but got it perfect.

With the girls, after picking up Inez from their hotel when she was hemorraging less, we went and had dinner then gelato before just chilling and then going home.

The Backpacking Battlers woke up again the next morning, as we have done every day since emerging from our mothers wombs (for those who may be reading this who don’t know, Eddie and I are mates not brothers, unless you are referring to it in the was black homie yo people refer to it in which case we are brothers but both still have different mothers, not the same mother with two wombs. Now thinking about that, imagine a woman with two wombs. That would be really weird. I’ll keep the rest of my thoughts on that topic to myself. More safe that way). We checked out on the hostel and went to the train station where we battled to finalize tickets on an overnight train to Liebnitz in Austria via Vienna and Graz.

Really enjoyed Venice again and definitely hope to return one day