As part of Greta’s birthday we needed to get her to a party that the friends she made in France were having. The venue was a hall in a town called Spinea off Venice island. A quick Google map search found that it’s not somewhere public transport would get us to easily.
Googling came up with a limo service called Venice Group Services and after a few emails from Domenico we had a ride. So the plan was to take a vaporetto to Piazzale Roma which is where is the main bus station and get picked up. Domenico will then drop off Greta at Spinea and then drop Kim, Mia and me off at a nearby restaurant called Do Ciacole which was selected by looking on Google maps and seeing what was the closest restaurant. As luck would have it Tripadvisor confirmed that Do Ciacole had a few good reviews so we chanced it and booked for dinner. The food turned out to be really good. There was a fish menu and a meat menu. We all selected items from the meat menu which had a focus on tartufo. The tartufo tagliatelle was superb and Mia and I shared a beef filet with tartufo sauce:
Washed down by a delightful Barbera:
Getting home was also seamless apart from having to wait for a vaporetto on the N (night) service for 40 minutes.
Blog
Getting off Venice island and a nice surprise
Use TIM and avoid Vodafone in Venice for PAYG SIM
22 October. Had to get a local prepaid SIM card while in Venice. All the research suggested TIM, the Telecom Italia mobile carrier. But the letting agent’s Andrea suggested we look at Vodafone as he said they had the better coverage. So next day I went to the Vodafone store next to the Rialto vaporetto stop but when I got there the agent said their provisioning system was down so I couldn’t buy a card. Just as well as he said the only prepaid SIM cards they sell was a 35 Euro pack. Knowing that Vodafone has a 10 Euro pack didn’t help as he said that his store only sold the 35 Euro pack. This is clearly a profiteering strategy as I suspect 95% plus of their prepaid customers are tourists who are in Venice for a few days. I don’t need a mobile for a month, just the few days. Anyway, he suggested I go to the other side of the Rialto bridge and check out what the TIM store has in PAYG SIMs.
So I did and ended up with a couple of TIM micro SIMs for 13 Euro each. The pack was the TIM CARD INTERNATIONAL LIMITED which has a great package of 60 minutes of calls to Italian numbers, 100 local SMS and Unlimited Data at 250 MB per week. After you consume the free stuff there’s 5 Euros of credit included. Not sure if this shop was making a super profit on these because it’s hard to find the street price for this pack. Anyway, 13 Euros was a lot better than the Vodafone offer.
Venice
22 October. The mid-term school holiday has arrived and we’re off to Venice. We were here in 2004 and everyone was keen to rekindle our memories of this amazing city. This time we flew into Venice whereas in 2004 we arrived by train from Verona. We also rented an apartment this time versus staying in a hotel. Through a convoluted set of emails we were recommended a place on Venetian Properties by Truly Venice and the instruction was to take a water taxi from the airport to the San Samuele pier. All very cryptic and a leap of faith that their representative will be waiting there. It’s a perfect plot for an episode of Hustle. All was well and Andrea from Venetian Properties greeted us and took us to a lovely property called Porta Sola San Samuele just a few streets back from the pier. He also spent lots of time with us telling us about his favourite restaurants and wine bars. So we went to Cantinone Storico for dinner and it was truly good. Excellent produce like a sea bass cooked simply over a charcoal grill. Bellissimo.
The next morning we were able to see our street properly. Most places in Venice aren’t really identified by street names – but our place is in the Corte de la Vida. Our first task was to get some Vaporetto (water bus) tickets. The informative web site Europe for Visitors has an excellent summary on the options and we chose two 7-day passes for the adults and the Three-day Young Person’s Travel Card for the girls. The nearest place to get these was at the Accademia Vaporetto Station. Armed with the tickets we floated off to the Rialto area and lunch at Trattoria Alla Madonna, a place we remembered fondly from 2004. The food and ambience was just as we remembered and we had a great lunch of pasta and fish. One of their specialties, the seafood risotto, was fabulous. They even have a web site now.
A view of the entrance to our apartment.
There’s a battery eating monster in my iPhone
Since upgrading to ios5 on my iPhone 4 my iPhone’s battery goes from 100% to 85% in 6-7 hours overnight. This is pretty bad as its not really doing anything. So I’ve tried to figure out why this is happening and I think I’ve killed the battery eating monster in my iPhone4:
- Turn off all notifications (you have to do this one app at a time) if not these just purr along in the background sucking juice
- Turn off all Location Services except for the apps that really need it eg Camera, Foursquare, Maps
- In Settings/General/Restrictions – turn off Ping
- Turn off Bluetooth unless you really need it
- Turn off automatic checking of Mail unless you really want it
- Finally, shut down all the open apps that run in the background like Twitter and Facebook
So far, the iPhone has used 1% in 3 hours, which is a lot better than before.
Greta’s soccer club in the news – BBC
Was on BBC Oxford new as well. Click to read the story.
