Pandemic Diaries - Italian Interlude 18-22 October 2022 - Venice to Trieste

18 October 2022 – Venezia, Italia          

 

I awoke to a foggy morning, and had a quick breakfast.  I checked with the hotel clerk to be sure I had the correct information for the waterbus to the airport.  He told me to eat some breakfast, that I’d be waiting at the airport for hours.  How he knew that, I have no idea!

I headed out to the vaporetto stop, buying my tickets from the nearby newspaper kiosk.  One round-trip ticket for me, one one-way for “il mio marito.”  I could barely see the bridge about a block away in all the fog!

 

But I caught the waterbus, and we headed off into the lagoon.  NO idea how our captain navigated his way – there were markers in the water, but they were far enough apart that with this dense fog, I don’t think he’d be able to see one marker until he was nearly on top of it! 

 

However, we arrived at the airport in good time, and docked.  Right at the airport!  Really, I walked off the boat, took an escalator up one flight, and I was inside the airport!  The gates were a bit distance away, but there were “people movers,” the flat escalator sort of things, also called moving walkways. 

 

I found the arrivals area, and check the board.  Richard’s flight was due in about 30 minutes, so I had the requisite cup of cappuccino.  I went back and checked the boards.  And waited.  And waited.  Flights that were due after his flight arrived.  People came and went.  His flight was expected, but periodically the arrival time would change, and still it didn’t land.  (So I had a second cappuccino.)

 

Finally, maybe an hour or more later, he came through the door from Customs and Immigration.  It turned out they had been circling for that hour or so, unable to land due to the fog, and how busy the airport was on this super foggy morning.

 

We finally were able to get through the airport with the help of a really kind and friendly porter pushing Richard in a wheelchair (given the distance, and his back injury), and we were moved to the front of the line for the vaporetto.  Sometimes having someone in a wheelchair helps!  We had a nice ride back to Cannaregio, and I showed Richard around our new neighborhood.  (And all the good places to eat, plus introduced him to some of the friendlier waitstaff I’ve met in our area.)

22 October 2022

 

We spent four more days in Venice, with some walking around, eating, and catching each other up on what we’ve been doing.  Also printing documents for the cruise, because we need their luggage tags and boarding passes.

 

When I first booked the cruise back in April, the ship was due to depart from Venice.  But the movement of huge cruise ships through the Grand Canal, or even in the lagoon, is damaging to the small islands that make up Venice.  So Venice finally has limited the number of cruise ships allowed to dock there, or perhaps has banned them completely, it isn’t clear.

 

Upshot is, our ship is now leaving from Trieste, way to the east of Venice, near the border between Italy and Slovenia.  The cruise company made arrangements for buses to take us from the cruise dock (the Tronchetto) to Trieste – but it was quite an adventurous morning getting to the dock!

 

First, we hired a porter to take the luggage from our hotel to the vaporetto stop.  He had a giant trolley that was sort of a cross between a luggage dolly and a wheelbarrow.  (He only charged 5 Euros per bag, so it was worth the expense.)  I bought our vaporetto tickets, and caught up with Richard and our friendly assistant.  He checked on his phone and said that the next vaporetto to Tronchetto was coming in half an hour.  But, if we wanted, we could get a different vaporetto and go to the bus station, the Piazzalle di Roma, and from there take a taxi directly to Tronchetto.  We opted for the second plan, and everyone was very helpful getting our luggage and ourselves onto the vaporetto, and off again at Piazzalle di Roma. 

 

I found a taxi driver who spoke English very well, he loaded us up, and took us to Tronchetto.  He managed to find the buses we needed, and unloaded us with our luggage.  (While checking that these were the right buses, I talked to some people who needed a taxi back in to Venice, so we helped our friendly driver by finding him another fare!)

 

Eventually our luggage was loaded and we climbed on a bus, and were handed snack packs and bottles of water.  Cruise companies know that hungry passengers are grumpy passengers!  We had a two hour or so trip to Trieste, chatting a bit with our neighboring passengers, and munching on our snacks. 

 

Trieste is a lovely old city, but we were tired and hungry and ready to settle in our stateroom.  Of course, there was the usual bedlam at the registration, and we somehow went to the area for the wrong cruise company.  So on our way back, being told to go up the stairs, I asked one of the young men herding us around “Posso la acensore?”  (In my broken Italian, that literally means “can I the elevator?”  I really don't have many verbs.)  He asked how I knew Italian and we chatted while his partner grabbed someone to get a wheelchair for Richard.  Yup, just three words in ungrammatical Italian got us special treatment through the lines, up and down the elevators, and onto the cruise ship!

 

Our room is well laid out and comfortable, although our “semi-obstructed ocean view” is more obstructed than I had expected.  I knew our window was between two lifeboats.  But somehow, I forgot about the structures that hold the lifeboats in place.  And the winches and pulleys and rolls of rope (or wire?) that raise and lower the lifeboats.  Oh well.  On the plus side, we have two huge windows the size of sliding glass doors.  On the con side, they don’t open, and we look out on all that mechanical stuff for the life boats.  At least everything is holding tight, and nothing creaks at night!  (Turned out on stormy nights, things were quite noisy!)

Yeah, it was rather funny to have this as our view!

 

However, the crew does need to do some occasional maintenance on the lifeboats, or checking that everything is working, so every so often we see someone out on the platform lowering and raising the lifeboats.  Wheels turn, things whir and whoosh, and we peek out to see what’s happening.  After a sea day, the crew comes by and washes our windows.  Yeah, we try to not walk around the room without clothing on, now that we know there’s occasional activity out there!

 

Okay, end of the photos of Venice, just because it's such a gorgeous place, and I don't think there's ever too much Venice.  Up there with my top five favorite Italian cities!