We had dinner at the hotel's casual restaurant, Cip's Place. The restaurant is on a pier in the lagoon, with fantastic views, although since our room is right behind the restaurant, we had already soaked in the same view for several days already. The food was pretty similar to the formal restaurant but had some casual stuff like pizza as well, although I can't imagine the look of the waiters if you ever actually ordered pizza here. Actually the waiters here were a bit younger and friendlier, the guests were still creakily old and dressed to the nines. (Food-14, Decor-12, Service-15)

After breakfast we took the hotel's sleek motorboat (skippered by friendly staff for a change) to Piazza San Marco across the lagoon. We first passed the baby island of San Giorgio Maggiore, pictured from the air and also from Piazza San Marco through the thicket of gondolas. It's been occupied by a monastery since the ninth century, and the church, which is probably the most photographed building in Venice since it dominates the view from Piazza San Marco, is from the sixteenth. The monastery is supposedly one of Venice's architectural treasures, but it's never open. The vast majority of tourists, including me, think the whole ensemble is pretty and that the view from Venice would be pretty boring without it. But one famous architectural critic disagreed: "It is impossible to conceive a design more gross, more barbarous, more childish in conception, more servile in plagiarism, more insipid in result, more contemptible under every point of rational regard". I think he needs to lay off the caffeine.



Five minutes later, we docked at the hotel's pier in front of Piazza San Marco and joined the tourist throngs.

Venice has a very strong reputation in Italy as having the country's worst food. That's partly due to the fact that ninety percent of the restaurants serve crap to tourists, but Italians speak disparagingly about the local cusine served in real restaurants as well. So we were less restaurant-obsessed than usual, but we did hit a good selection of places during our stay, enough to come to the conclusion that the Italians are probably right. The food is actually fine, mostly seafood based and very fresh, but it's lacking in spark, and doesn't really use such Italian basics as pasta.

For our first evening we at at the highly regarded hotel restaurant. This is a very old-school, formal place, with everyone extremely dressy, like a scene from Murder on the Orient Express. This is a bit odd, because the restaurant is outdoors, and looks relatively casual. The staff was very professional, very old, and spoke about twenty languages. I would say about two thirds of the guests were regulars at the hotel, and the staff has clearly known them for decades. (I have a friend who's grandmother has been spending a month at the hotel every year for thirty years, which is not uncommon here.) One fun pastime is to watch the waiters when they weren't serving guests, as they were constantly fighting with each other. I got the sense these arguments had been running since around the second world war, and there was no resolution in sight. Food was actually quite good, conservative Italian standards prepared expertly, and of course great views. (Food-14, Decor-16, Service-12).

The next morning we started with breakfast at the hotel (that's Somchai at the breakfast table). The food was pretty standard and generally tired, there's a different serving crew for breakfast, all old women. Unlike the old men working the dinner shift, these women seemed angry at the guests as well as each other.

I think these were photos of Venice taken while we were walking around Giudecca, but they're the same as the view from our room.

As you no doubt remember from the first Venice post, the hotel is on a long, squiggly island across the water from the rest of the city, called Giudecca. When Venice first started accumulating wealth from its Asian trade activities, the wealthy families built summer palaces along the waterfront, including the Vendramin, where we're staying. But in later years, Venice expanded on the mainland, occupying a big chunk of northeast Italy, and the upper classes went giddy with excitement that they could build proper palaces on real estates there. Giudecca languished at that point, and became Venice's version of the Island of Misfit Toys. The Jews were put here for a while, then it became Venice's industrial hub. Venice has long since stopped trying to be an industrial powerhouse, and the long abandoned brick factories are being renovated into some sort of art and living space, Venice's version of Soho. In the meantime, the walk along the waterfront is quite pretty and the best place to get killer views of Venice. There's also one famous church here, built by the city in the 1530's when the plague killed 40 percent of the city's population. Like so many plague-decimated cities, they then built a huge church in thanks to god for sparing the survivors. Of course, he also wiped out almost half the city, so it would seem odd to give him a big hug for that.

The Venice hotel decision process was very difficult for me. I knew the Cipriani was world famous and the preferred hotel for the jet set. I also knew it had a great location, lots of elbow room (for Venice) and a great pool, again unique for Venice. But the other high end hotels in Venice were all former palaces, whereas this hotel was built as a hotel in the 1950's, which sounded about as glamorous as an airport terminal. The deciding factor for me was the hotel's acquisition of an adjoining palace, the Palazzo Vendramin, which was incorporated into the hotel complex as a boutique, high end hotel within the hotel. Figuring I could get the best of both worlds, I booked a room here, which also promised "the best view in Venice".



As the bellboy took us through the main building into a nice garden, I knew I had at least made the right decision in avoiding the main building, which was frankly dreary. We then got to the palazzo entrance, and he took us up to our room, which reminded me of a hospital room. It was tiny, only room for a bed, and even had a TV stuck on a pole jutting out from the wall, just like a hospital. It also came with a view of a brick wall, which I doubted was the best view in Venice. We then sat in our little dungeon, and, to cheer ourselves up, decided to open the complimentary bottle of champagne, which came with a welcome card which Somchai read with great excitement: "Welcome back Mrs. Robinson". Thank god we weren't Mrs. Robinson, although we did feel sorry for her, and had opened her champagne to add insult to injury. So we called back to reception, who of course apologized profusely (they're very good at apologies here) and we were transferred to our room next door. Our room did in fact have the best view in Venice, a bull's eye view over the lagoon to Piazza San Marco, with all of Venice's famous landmarks within view. The suite was roughly five times larger than Mrs. Robinson's, although unfortunately it shared the fairly pedestrian decor. The other Venice palace hotels really do up the whole palace trappings thing in the decor and public spaces, whereas the Palazzo Vendramin has no public spaces and I guess the Cipriani opted to remodel the rooms to conform to the crummy '50's decor of the main hotel. Bad decision.



Hotel Cipriani-4 (Room: 5, Facilities:7, Service:1, Wow factor: a fantastic view)

The fun started to fade when our water taxi pulled up to the not immediately appealing hotel. We were greeted by the hotel's doorman, who appeared to have been working there for about seventy years (a problem with the staff generally at this hotel). He was nice enough until he told me to pay for the taxi. I told him I was on some package which included the taxi fare, and he showed me a list of guests, and only the guests that he had put a red tick next to were on this package according to him. Still very politely, I told him that his colleague at the airport had us on the list for that package, and then I showed him a fax from the hotel confirming that the doorman at the hotel will pay the taxi fare. He then went insane, started screaming something like "I'm a poor working man, you're a big hotshot staying at expensive hotel, you make the poor man pay your taxi fare. OK, I pay out of my own pocket, you just go in and have a good time rich guy" and this went on in this manner very loudly for a few minutes, as a dozen other guests stared at us. The taxi driver chipped in to confirm that the hotel guy at the airport confirmed the hotel would pay the fare, and he got abused by the doorman in turn. (The fare was about $60 and I couldn't care less about it, I just hated this guy so much that I wouldn't back down, plus I had a pretty good set of evidence backing me up.





So we went into the somewhat frumpy reception area, and were very warmly greeted by the manager. I mentioned the issue about the stupid taxi fare, and he confirmed yet again that of course the hotel should pay and he'd straighten out the doorman. The straightening out was in some ways even more mortifying, since when we finished checking in, the doorman was there, and proceeded to beg for our forgiveness, practically in tears, and started to go down on his knees! I don't think I've ever been more embarassed than standing in the busy hotel lobby while a seventy year old man was about to kneel to me. I begged him to stop and confirmed to everyone that mistakes happen, no problem at all, please don't give it another thought, etc. (But actually I still think he's a total jerk.)

100. Venice

The following morning we took a short flight from Rome's dumpy airport to the more modern, but inconvenient, Venice airport. Of course, being an airport to a city without roads was bound to be inconvenient, like life in Venice generally. You have to take a bus from the airport on the mainland to a water taxi terminal, then catch a water taxi from there, with lots of walking in between, so heavy travelers have lots of luggage lugging to do. We were staying at the Hotel Cipriani, Venice's most famous and glamorous hotel. We were met by their airport representative at the taxi terminal who got us into our taxi and off we sped through the canals of Venice.

I put the aerial view of the city here because I was going to explain the layout a bit, but now realize this will be very confusing. The airport is off the photo to the northeast, and you can see the train station and port lumped together on the left edge of the city. The giant reverse "S" that runs through the city is the Grand Canal, with the city's thousands of smaller canals running through the city clustered on either side of the Grand Canal. The Grand Canal starts at the train station, and ends by opening into the sea just before Piazza San Marco, which you can see just beyond this point. (There's a big square field and, to the right, a bright white square that really stands out.) 90 percent of visitors to Venice are day trippers and never leave that square. Directly south of that square is the Hotel Cipriani, occupying most of the tip of the squiggly island underneath the rest of Venice.