Gone on a Gondola

It’s corny, and expensive, but we thought a ride in a gondola with a gondolier - wearing a striped top and one of those funny hats - was something we had to experience. We can’t be sure that we’ll ever see Venice again - maybe it will sink before we do; maybe the gigantic cruise ships will finally overwhelm it completely with tourists; maybe the Aussie dollar will sink against the Euro again and European travel will be prohibitively expensive once more - all of those possibilities persuaded us as much as the sheer romanticism of the concept of a ride in a gondola through the canals of Venice.
Our gondola was plush with velvet lining on the inside and sleek and black and decorated with golden horses on the water side and our heads were at ease reclining on the cushion’s velvet lining, as Edgar Alan Poe may have said if he’d ever been in Venice, which I doubt, but I digress..

Our gondolier wasn’t the most ebullient chap and he certainly didn’t sing to us but he did his gondoliering in an efficient and smooth manner and pointed out all the interesting things we glided past, like the birthplace of Marco Polo:

And Casanova’s house:

Casanova, of course, means “new house” and, as the Gondolier said, “He had many houses, a different one every night!”
It was fun to watch the passing traffic and see the quotidian life of Venice unfolding for the day:

And the Gondolier gave a sort of smile at the end; he wasn’t as handsome as the one Annette had encountered on our second day but he was a decent sort of chappie:

Transport in Venice is expensive unless you walk: a one-way ticket on a vaporetto, the cheapest boat - a bit like our smaller harbour ferries - costs 6.5 Euro per person, which is over $9 Aussie at the moment, and we didn’t bother with the water taxis, as we assumed they were much more pricey; and the gondola certainly isn’t a way to get around the place unless you’re a millionaire.
It was sad to think that our stay in Venice was coming to an end, because we’d both fallen in love with Venice - imagine: one of the most ravishingly beautiful cities in the world and it’s a city without cars!