Good evening and welcome from Thomas in Slovenia. Very bice to be back in a city with iinternet access that isnt ridiculously overpriced! Plenty annoying, confusing and down right strange things have happened over the last few days so let me fill you in.

Firstly i will start with the Ferry incident as it will from now on be known. We arrived down at the ferry terminal as instructed at around 5 ofr departure at 7. Queued up and got our boading pass. We had checked after buying the ticket that we got what we asked for. A room for the three of us, the amount paid matched that for the room so we were confident. We were then told to wait outside for the bus to the ferry at 6. We went out at 10 to 6 and were still there by 7.10 having been repeatadly told that the bus would be "five minutes" as you can imagine this did not put us in a good mood.

We were ushered off the late bus quickly onto the ferry to make up for time and this is when Anna realised ourboarding passes had seat numbers. Strange we thought but no matter maybe you get a seat and the room. We then found our way to our "room" and it turned out to be a room of seats. Well we were furious not only had we not got what we paid for but the seats were not even together! After a few laps of the ferry to make sure we were not wrong we went to information and asked. They told us we had paid for the seat. Then we were informed an upgrade would cost us 20 euros we couldnt believe it after specifically asking for a room we now had to pay more for it.

The room was very hot and the upper bunk which i got felt like it could give way at any moment. All in all none of us will ever travel with Grimaldi ferries again. Now thats been recounted ill pass over to Steve for an update. bye for now and hope everyone is well.

Hi all. First of all thanks for the birthday messages, i had a good day in sunny venice!! Secondly i have now calmed down after my tantrum at the colloseum, and yes dad i did feel like throughing the man who sold me the ticket to the lions!!!

Right then, back to whats been happening to the 3 of us. We arrived safely in Venice saturday evening. We had an interesting train journey which due to a ridiculous numbering system saw us change seats a number of times. We had been given seat numbers 61, 62 and 64. We assumed these would be round a table and oh how wrong we were. We found our seats and were suprised to see that the numbers round the table were 61, 62, 63, 68. Thats the crazy italians for you. The train we got to Ljubljana today also had the same numbering system but thankfully we had seats round a table. Anyways enough about the italians and there crazy numbering systems (i have documented it on video so can enlighten you all when im back!). When we arrived in Venice and after finding our hotel, we set out to find St Marcs square. Due to some splendind map reading from a certain someone we made it in now time! It was fairly impressive but not up to the standards we have set after seeing the likes of the colloseum and gaudis cathedral. The city in itself is completely different to anything we had seen before with all the winding streets and canals and no cars or other transport. The sunday was my birthday and we went again to st marcs square, this time however 2 things were different. It was in the day light and also there was a matter of buying presents in one of the numerous jewelery shops which lined pretty much any street we turned down. We eventually got to st marcs square a fair bit out of pocket due to all the presents we had brought (buying presents for other people on my birthdqy, whod have thought it!). We then went to the Santa Maria della Salute which would have been a fairly impressive church if it werent for all the scaffolding all over the place. We got the water taxi back as we had absolutely no intention of being ripped off going on a gondola after being told by many people that it certainly isnt worth the money. Now fast forward to dinner. We thought we would treat ourselfs to a pizza and a couple of bottles of wine as it was my birthday (the big night is to come in Ljubljana!) and this is where we all got done due to another italian quirk. All 3 of us ordered the Peperoni Pizza off the menu (notice the spelling of Peperoni and how similar it is to Pepperoni) and as you may have guessed we thought we would be getting a pepperoni pizza. But oh no no no, how wrong we could be. The italians have decided that they will call peppers peperoni just to confuse us, so when we got our pizzas much to our bemussement they arrived covered in peppers, not pepperoni. Thats now italy two, us nil. We spent the night drinking wine, playing cards and killing mosquitos. The next day we had a little wander around before catching the train to Villach (adding Austria to the countries we have visited on our trip.). We changed trains there and had a nice little booth type seat on our train (a cabin consisting of 6 seats which we had to ourselfs). You may think we had left the dodgy numbering systems behind in italy but you would be wrong. Austrias are just as strange. In our booth we had seat numbers 61, 63, 64, 65, 65, 66, thats right two 65s and no 62. How odd. Anyways we arrived safely in Ljubljana and found our hostel without a hitch and thats the journey so far. I shall now pass you over to anna for some of her insights. Bye for now. heya anna here, just a quick note to say get well soon to my mum, trust it to happen while eds at uni and me and dad are out the country!! anyway hope your feeling better give me a call sometime when your back home for a quick chat. lots of love x bye bye - more updates coming soon