by Emily Ser

Created on: March 15, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

I visited Venice last summer and I will never forget my first impression of the city. When you step out of the train station you are immediately confronted by the Grand Canal and the ancient architecture that lines it on both sides. Once you've remembered to breathe, roll your luggage several hundred feet along the uneven walkway and find a hotel. There are scores of them just around the train station and you don't save any money booking ahead. This is one lesson I learned the hard way.

The area along the Grand Canal is completely geared toward tourists and nearly everyone you encounter speaks better English than most native English speakers. Menus in the area are available in English translations. The food is excellent but if you desire a more traditional Venetian dining experience, follow smaller canals until the hoards of tourists taper off. You may need to learn a bit of Italian to be successful in this endeavor but, after all, you are in Italy.

One my favorite moments in Venice was when, after wandering a ways from the concentration of tourists, I found a residential area. The road turned to hard-packed dirt lined by rows of brick buildings. People were hanging their laundry on lines that ran from window to window, building to building. A man was working on his boat. A group of school boys were playing soccer on a fenced-in field with the sea visible at the far end, and a few girls were watching adoringly. It was a perfect display of universal humanity.

The waterways are often described as the roads of Venice but Venetians don't live the way we, in the United States, live. The sidewalks are more like their roads because they walk everywhere. The only people paying for gondola rides are tourists but seeing the city by water is certainly romantic, especially when the sun is setting. The rays reflect off the water and paint every building oranges and purples in a way that's impossible anywhere else, even oceanfront.

Venice is a city unlike any other in the world and if you wander from the beaten path you can still glimpse the Venice of old beyond the glitzy tourist center.

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