Hotel Piccolo is a very simple hotel that is located near Mestre station. Only one bus (numero 6) takes you directly to Venice and back, but it is fairly far. The breakfast is not included, but at 4 Euros per person, it gets you going in the morning. The coffee is not too shabby. This hotel has little rooms and horrible showers. Venice in general has nothing special about it. The people are rude and impatient. We found that we had to yell back to get better service. Italians tend to pay more attention if you act like they do. You can cruise the Grand Canal in about an hour. We even went to Murano island and to Lido on the one day. There is nothing special about Murano island and the glass art is overpriced. The sales people are very pushy and will ignore you once they know you won't be paying 4 to 5 thousand Euros on a piece of glass. We found that Granville Island in Vancouver has more creative pieces of glass art, better service and more lively entertainment (and it is closer to home). Beware though that if you buy some little glass trinkets, they give it to you and break it while they are wrapping it. Either watch them wrap it or open it right away before paying for it. They are mean-spirited only treating you well if they think you are going to buy their over-priced pieces of glass, even then, buyer beware. Anyway, the hotel does not provide you with a map or directions, so either bring your own or ask around.

Other tips that we learned about which you might find useful are: * Make sure you validate your bus/train/bartello tickets before getting on or you can be fined about 30 Euros per person if checked. * You might want to purchase the 12-hour (for 8.50 Euros each) or 24-hour (for 12 Euros each) global pass instead of paying 5 Euros for each one way trips along the Canal. * Bring some Euros with you until you can get to a bank or ATM machine in Rome - we didnt do this in Venice. * Check out the menus at restaurants before sitting down because prices vary considerably from place to place and you don't want to feel ripped off (we paid huge $ for places that looked cheaper and reasonable $ for great food at other places that had an expensive look).