I haven't been on a trip with my family since forever so when my mum found this cheap tickets to Venice I was really excited to go. I've been to Venice before but it was a long time ago so I don't remember anything. Venice is so fascinating but at the same time super crowded and unpractical. I loved visiting it and I hope to go back there one day.
We started our journey at Piran when we boarded a catamaran which took us to the port of Venice in approximately 2 hours. There was also an organized tour of the city but I convinced my parents not to join the tour and explore the city on our own. We walked through the little alleys looking for gelato and pizza and we also window shopped at the Le Mercerie. I was able to see Gucci's Dionysus bags in person and they're honestly breathtaking. I documented it all on my instagram stories (@aliciasimonic). We also saw the new Louis Vuitton collection in collaboration with Fragonard which made me fall in love with LV's monogram that I was not the biggest fan of before. Walking past those stores really made me realized how broke I really am. I decided that I will spend my first big paycheck on a designer bag. Preferably Gucci or Chloe. I could talk about Gucci all day long, they're really killing it with their latest collection ugh I'm so in love!
In case you're wondering what I wore: an emerald green shirt from Topshop, black boyfriend jeans from Primark, a leather jacket from ZARA and black converse because I really wanted to be comfy and warm.
Enough about me raving of fashion, let's talk some more about Venice.
Unfortunately I can't tell you how amazing our gondola ride was because we didn't go. We had an unpleasant experience with the agency that organized this trip. We booked our tickets for the gondola and the water taxi on our catamaran on the way there because they guaranteed us that if we tried to organize those rides on our own we would pay much more. As I said previously we didn't decide to take the tour with them because it wasn't obligatory. The meeting time was at 2pm at ala Napoleonica. Because we had no idea where that was and even though we asked like 5 different gondoliers no one could help us get there. We were walking around the St. Mark's square, we even asked 3 different gondola companies if the tickets we had were for their gondolas but they all said no. We ended up calling the SOS number that they asked us to contact if we got lost or if we couldn't find the meeting point. There were three numbers listed on the brochure that they gave us and none of them seemed to work. The number that was listed as the number on our ship didn't even exist. We then went to the box office and asked if they could help us locate our gondolas but they said that because the tickets weren't purchased at their company they can't help us with that. We were looking for our group for at least 30 minutes. There were some asian tourists dressed in orange just like our guides so we thought we finally found them but that wasn't the case. We ended up sitting down at the park, waiting for an hour and half till our taxi ride back to the port. We were all very disappointed and sad because we didn't get the full Venice experience that we hoped for. I've always wanted to go for a gondola ride and I was really looking forward to it. Later when we finally found the group at our next meeting place for the taxi ride we asked for a refund and told them our story. We got a full refund for the gondola ride thank god but we were still kind of bummed because of the whole situation. We also found out that the gondola ride is 80 euros per gondola, meaning we would pay around 13 euros if there were six of us on the ride but they charged us around 30 euros per person and also filled the gondolas with 6 people. I guess we overpaid the taxi ride as well but I'm just glad they were professional enough to give us a refund for the gondola ride.
Anyways, we still enjoyed Venice very much and got to experience it on our own even though next time we won't even think about going anywhere with a tourist agency and I advice you to do the same. You can get around Venice just fine with an offline map and a little bit of research done ahead of your trip + the bus to Venice from Ljubljana is like 20 euros I believe. Overall is was a good trip and I'm glad I went and spent some time with the family.
Thank you for reading x