Today, we left the beautiful, quaint city of Bologna to the tourist, cliché canaled city that is Venice. It’s not that I don’t like Venice, but going from somewhere filled with so much charm and mostly locals to a place that I’d seen so many images of before that made me feel like a packed sardine in San Marco square was a bit much of a contrast in a single day. Bologna is one of those places that has so much charm, and as long as tourists stay away from it, it will continue to feel that way. You don’t have to worry so much about getting ripped off as a tourist, and you can rest assured that whatever restaurant you enter will be filled with locals eating local food, not menus catered to tourists and what tourists want (I immediately rejected a restaurant in Venice when I saw there was “spaghetti with meatballs” on the menu; that isn’t Italian… that’s Italian American).

In Venice along the canals, almost every restaurant had a cheap menu with fixed options – the usual tourist traps of spaghetti with this spaghetti with that, spaghetti nero (spaghetti with squid ink to make it black-color); some had a “no cover charge” sign, meaning no “coperto,” which is the tiny fee restaurants often will add to your bill just for your sitting and dining in (I think the smallest I’ve seen on our bill was 50 euro cents each; the highest was 2 euros each). It’s really not a big deal at all when you compare it to an expectation of 15-20% tipping in the U.S., but it was clear based on Tripadvisor reviews that so many Americans were so angered by this fee. Percentage-wise, it works out to be so tiny, far lower than 15-20%. But hey, I guess you have to have a reason to get angry and indignant when you travel when you’re an American outside of America, right? We stayed far away from those restaurants. I think it’s more frustrating as a tourist in the U.S. to be expected to tip 15-20%, especially when the service isn’t even that good. Why is it just so hard to pay your workers better?