Task 2
Sam Newton
Unless you are from a very hot place or are reading this in a blast furnace you cannot conceive how hot the city of Venice is in mid-summer. If it was this hot in Sydney most of my family, with the exception of my brother, who is so resilient he could live on Mercury, would shut themselves up in an air conditioned room until the worst is over. I, of course am included here, but in Venice, me, my step-mum Emily and even my dad were prepared to put up with this heat to see the famed city of canals. I was thinking about this as I waited in the blissfully air conditioned lobby of our hotel while my dad dealt with the tedium that is checking out.
We had come to Venice to board a cruise that would take us around the Mediterranean. Cruises are a most wonderful way to travel, or would be, if the Venice port had not been designed by someone who had wanted to leave the foreign visitor hot, confused and, if all went according to plan, dead. We, however, were blissfully unaware of this as we left the hotel and met Emily outside. She had been shopping for magnets to add to her collection. I am sure that half the European economy depends on her.
We boarded a crowded ferry, ferries in Venice are always crowded, and set off down the Grand Canal like a tin of sardines with an engine. Boarding a board in Venice sounds easy. Venice is, after all, a city of boats, but boarding a cruise ship is, to say the least, life threatening. The problem is that cruise ships are too big to fit into ordinary ports and least of all Venice, where the canals are big enough for boats, as long as they are boats for mosquitoes. Venice fixes this problem by building concrete docks on the outer edges of the island. Docks that, we were soon to find out, turn into vast frying pans during the day. This is where our trouble started.
When we got to the concrete desert that is Venice’s car parking lot we saw two taxi drivers busy doing nothing. They were obviously part of the evil Global Taxi Driver’s Union because when we asked the fare to the cruise ship they told us a sum not dissimilar to that of a moon launch. So we decided to walk, we could see the ship, it couldn’t be that far away.
The taxi drivers gave us simple directions, walk down the road and turn left. So, we went down the road and turned left. Here we found ourselves only ten metres from the ship, oh joy! But…. right in front of us was a strategically placed cyclone fence, no doubt paid for by the taxi drivers, which prevented us form getting to the check in point. We turned around and made our way back up shadeless path. At the top we could just about see the smug taxi drivers, smiling the look of men who had just successfully wreaked revenge on someone they were unable to rip off.
We thought about going back up the hill and paying the money for a lift but we had two very good reasons not to; 1) the taxi fare would send us bankrupt, and 2) we had the brains of eggplants. This time we went the correct way to the boat, however, when I say correct, I mean trekking over hundreds of miles of concrete while all you can see in the distance is heat haze. Finally the cruise ship began getting nearer, and we no longer passed the skeletons of previous cruise passengers who had never made it, and the flock of vultures, that I swear had been following us, dispersed. We checked in to the cruise ship and spent a week of relaxation seeing beautiful sights but I’m sure no matter how many glasses of water I drink the fluid level in my body will never be the same again.
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