We were up early again this morning and decided to use the ships shuttle. Venice was so much more crowded this time as there were 8 ships of varying sizes here today. As the vaporetto made its way around to St Marks we passed many of these new ships... the funniest sight was 2 semi trailers on barges, goodness knows where they were coming from and off to.
As I mentioned before we had our tickets booked for the Secret Itineraries tour of the Doges palace and our quick entry tickets into the Basilica.... The Basilica is lovely but very dark and even though we paid just 1 euro each to get quick entry tickets quite a few of the sections once inside wanted more payments of 4 – 5 euro’s. We did look into doing the afterhours tour which we had heard was stunning, but we could not get tickets for the Sunday night.... Princess was running a tour at $150 per person. Online the tickets are 28 Euro each.... go figure.... though we did hear it was really spectacular.
It was now time for our Doges Palace Tour. Little did we know that Broom Hilda herself was going to be our guide..... Red Hair and all.... Her introduction was laying down the Law... no photo’s , no videos, no backpacks, all bags are all to be worn to the front!!! And she checked each and every one of us....
Whilst we were waiting for the backpackers to take their bags into storage, Arnold raised his video camera to shoot the square we were standing in, allowed as we were still outside. But hang on Broom Hilda roars at him “ you are not allowed to take my picture , in this country you need to have written permission before you are allowed to take anyone’s photo, we had a guide whose picture they took and then she found out she was on a pornographic site ..... Delete your photo now” she barked.... poor Arnold hadn’t even turned the camera on...
Though we should have let her know that no one would put her photo on a pornographic website.... on saying that unless that other guide did her tour in nude I can’t imagine why she would be.....LOL...... Bark and Bark she did... “you are not allowed to lean on anything, You are not allowed to touch anything, you can hang onto the rails walking on stairs as they are new”.... and if she spotted you breaking any rules she growled at you .... So apart from that she was very knowledgeable. She took us to the cells where prisoners where held and told of their conditions. She relayed the story of how Casanova managed to be the first to ever escape these walls. When we had finished she ushered us back through one of the secret passageways into the palace where we could continue exploring the public areas on our own.
After this trip we had a spot of lunch and some last minute shopping until we made our way back to the shuttle and back to the ship.
One thing to mention, the public toilets... They have WC and arrow signs all over telling you where to go to find them... sometimes they can be just around the corner and other times they can lead to the other side of the island... ask us how we know!!!
We sailed out of Venice under the cover of night... not quite as glamorous as I had hoped as I thought that the city would be more lit up than it was.
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