The Magic of Glassblowing tour: a rip-off!
We purchase tickets for a 'The Magic of Glassblowing' tour, where we were promised a 30 minute 'workshop' showing this ancient art, and then receive a small token at the end. There was even a promotional video showing people sitting down, watching a glassmaker demonstrating the glassblowing technique and making beautiful things in Murano glass.
What really happened: we were met near a well a few streets off St Mark's square, by a couple, who were the organisers of the tour. There was no one else taking part. There, the gentleman set up a mobile phone which he handed over to my boyfriend, and the lady got a headset with a microphone attached, set-up for her. We were then urged to follow this couple, navigating our way through the busy streets of Venice, while listening to a recording on the mobile phone, which sad the exact same stuff that was on the pamphlet for the tour.
After a while we arrived at a building, stopped and the lady said 'just let me know when you're done'! 'Done with what?' we asked. 'With the recording'? Yes, was the answer.
In the meantime the gentleman who had accompanied us thus far, left without as much as a 'goodbye' or 'enjoy the rest of the tour'.
We handed the mobile phone back to the lady and said we were done with it, as we couldn't really hear anything. She then asked what we thought of the experience of walking all the way there listening to a recording on the phone as it was an experiment they were doing. My boyfriend tried to be polite and gave her some diplomatic response. I was more blunt and said I thought it was useless, I'd rather we had met at the glassblowing place directly and skipped the rest.
I didn't enjoy having been made a guineapig to some odd social experiment without having been consulted first, but I decided to overlook that and instead looked forward to the actual experience of glassblowing.
What happened next was that a man, looking quite bored, was summoned and asked to do us the demo. We were then asked to stand as we watched him. We were not the only ones to watch the glassblowing demo, as other people who were going about other businesses, simply stopped to also watch, FOR FREE!
The whole affair was done in no more than 5 minutes, after which time we were asked to follow this other man who took us to a sort of show room, filled with amazingly looking glass pieces, where he proceeded to force a sales pitch on us which lasted a good 15 minutes, showing us item after item of 100+ euros glass pieces (whisky glasses, prosecco glasses, etc etc) and trying to persuade us to buy them.
We were stunned!
After all that, we simply thanked him politely, and excused ourselves out.
In sum, we wasted a good hour or so of our morning, got nothing like we expected, only got to see a few minutes of actual glassblowing, and realised we could have had that for free!
21 luglio 2019
Non scritta su invito
