Created: 23 Mar 2005
A summary of what has happened in my life since the FOSDEM weekend.
Mr. Iain Nash, Sally and I went to the Aid Sri Lanka Foundation party in Elephant & Castle. An old-style night of trance and debauchery. Met many old faces.
The weekend continued with me having a slight accident on the way to Cowplain on Mothers Day. Sadly, a lack of concentration on my part resulted in me attempting to reshape my aged Volvo 440’s front offside wing by driving it into a Nissan Primera. Not cool. Thankfully, the car is practically valueless anyway; bought in a hurry for £350 to give me wheels for a few months, it’s actually lasted 18 months with very little expenditure.
Sally and I were lucky enough to be invited to Helen’s 40th birthday party in Venice on the following weekend. We booked a couple more days off and turned it into a four day trip. Having managed to book both legs of our flights while under the influence we ended up getting the Ryanair late-night specials to and from Treviso. The outgoing flight arrived at some ungodly hour and was followed by a 20 minute queue to purchase bus tickets, then a 15 minute wait for the bus to leave, followed by a 40 minute bus ride. Oh, and there were no seats available. So, we then arrived at Piazzale Roma, to discover that the next ferry to San Samuele, where we were staying, was another half hour away. Concious of the chap waiting for us to check in, we elected to catch an earlier ferry to Rialto and walk the remaining distance. My navigational skills did not disappoint Sally and we walked through the deserted streets and across bridges to Albergo San Samuele, a delightful and very reasonably priced hotel.
Having neglected to close the shutters, we were woken early on Friday morning by bright sunlight. San Samuele is a quiet qarter, which has a more residential feel than other parts of San Marco island. Just around the corner, we found the sunny Campo San. Stephano and settled ourselves in the gelateria terrace for breakfast. It felt so good to have full sun on our faces for the first time since our trip to Egypt, back in November. We then wandered down to the Gallerie dell’Accademia , a heavyweight collection of serious art, mainly depicting biblical scenes. Some of the paintings did appeal to me, but very few. The paintings are crammed into some of the rooms, which makes the whole experience quite oppressive. Inevitably we suffered the effects of our binge art-viewing session and left the building, hoping to find a nice bland expanse of soft tones to stare at for a while. We strolled around Dorsoduro, noting the snow (Lonely Planet said that it never snowed, the liars) and then caught a vaporetto around the North East of Dorsoduro and along the Grande Canale to San Samuele, where we eagerly awaited news of Ian and Justine’s arrival.
And boy did they have news to report. I think somehow they must have booked themselves on a special tour of the lagoon, with a souvenir stop in Lido. By the time they were vaguely in the Venice region, I had worked out two things. Firstly, there were no more ferries to San Samuele; secondly, one of the venice pop-out maps we had with us had outdated ferry route maps. Soon, however, we were all ensconsed in the hotel and preparing for a dinner out with some of the other lucky people who had made it over from the UK
And that, I fear, is all that I have time for tonight. I shall complete our Venetian tales in due course.