Ah Venice...Venice is definitely one of those cities that you have to see in person before you leave this Earth. Uniquely beautiful, its character and personality are forces of nature, emanating from every mortared brick and from out of each murky green canal. From the second the train leaves mainland Italy and you are riding just feet above the ocean, you can sense how special this island city is. Wide-beamed powerboats, instead of big-rig trucks, bring in supplies. Not a single car honks as it speeds past; instead gondoliers paddle by and insist that you take a ride. Best of all, the impossibly narrow, forever twisting walkways intertwining with the dozens of convoluted canals inevitably result in getting lost, yet no one seems to ever mind.
We arrived in Venice at the main train station and headed straight for our hostel - after we stopped to eat, and shop a little :) Our hostel was a quaint little converted convent. The church was situated neatly between the Rialto Bridge and San Marco's. Surrounded by canals on all four sides, the views from the rooms were incredible. Some of the hostel rooms even had frescoes decorating their ceilings! The hostel was nice, if austere. They had several guestbooks, with signatures going back to the early 60's! There, I also met my soon-to-be-best-friend, Jemel, a drunk from Lebanon who hated everyone, except me, and really wanted me to drink with him. At 4 in the afternoon. I politely turned him down, met up with Heather, and went out to check out Venice.
We spent two days in Venice, and could have spent two weeks, if there wasn't yet Florence, Rome, Amalfi, etc left to visit. The city is electric, if hectic. Even in this cold, wintery, "off-season," there were wall-to-wall (canal-to-canal?) tourists. We could only imagine what the crowds must be like in the summer months. We did get off the beaten path a little, and explored some of the lesser visited sections where the aging local population lived. It was nice and quiet there, and it was fun to wander through the walkways and try to figure out where the heck we were, and how we would get to where we were going.
San Marco's church was of course incredible. I'm running out of ways to describe these churches individually. Each one is magnificent in its own right, and I wish I had the toolbox to adequately separate them. I do remember the floor of San Marco, undulating like a carpet being shaken out for dust. The sub-surface of Venice has shifted so much over the 500+ years since its construction and the floors have adjusted to reflect this. Even broad, strong columns, tilt in awkward directions, making you ponder their (and your) security. San Marco is the patron saints of the Venicians, his symbol is the winged lion that you see all over the city, in fact, we saw him all over Italy.
It seems like everyone came to Venice to shop. There are only clothing boutiques and restaurants. Every window either showcases leather boots, fur coats, ridiculously priced watches, and on and on. Heather scored a pair of "cheap" Italian sunglasses near San Marco, and the perfect pair of boots right before closing time in a little shop on the glass-making island of Murano. I bought a wine-stopper.
I did notice the absence of any nasty smells that I had heard people mention when talking about Venice. First of all, in the summer, when there are tons more people, and their trash, it must be hell to keep the city clean. Also, the heat must percolate the lagoon and bring out its finer odor. But after a day or so, I noticed what must have been a major culprit. For a tiny, cramped city with very little green space, there were lots of dogs! All over the place, italians were walking their fancy (not leather, thankfully!) dogs. In the morning, at almost every doorstep, you'd find a small plastic bag and a little puddle.
The dogs owners, having nowhere else to go, would let there dogs poo and pee right on the sidewalk, right in front of their house. They wouldn't clean it up, because the small army of people the city paid to clean the city at night while the tourists are dreaming of Pinnoccio and Versace, clean up the poo too! Sometimes though, they don't. And those little plastic bags get stepped on and, well, you can imagine. It got kinda nasty. [Ever since Beijing, I've noticed that people who live in cities where the govn't cleans up the streets, are generally really bad about littering and just don't care - someone else will take care of it.]
My favorite time in Venice was when I woke up early and went for a walk. The tourists had yet to arrive by vaporetti, the cleaning army was finishing up, and the locals were throwing down coffee and setting up their shops. I wandered around, dodging little plastic bags and yellow puddles, and found myself at the base of the Rialto Bridge. I took up residence on one of the platforms they use to navigate the walkways when the city floods (which is >100 times a year!), and just watched. [In the pic above, I was sitting almost right in the middle, in front of the restaurant, behind where that guy is standing.]
It was fascinating watching the mechanisms of the city work as she slowly came to life. Supply boats brought all the goods, from new shiny leather to vino rosso. Vaporetti, the water taxis, brought in the workers who couldn't afford to live in the city itself, (or just didn't want to deal with it). Even garbage boats faded in and out of the fog lifting bins from the sidewalk, and dumping their contents into their bowels. Just like the trucks back home, they were loud, stunk, and seemed to take forever to dump the trash!
Workers unloaded the supplies onto wheeled caddies, and then sped off on foot to deliver them to stores. Just so you know - if you ever got hurt in Venice, they'd load you up on one of these and scoot you off to the hospital :) After an hour of so of pensively watching boats coming and going in and out of the fog, the sudden swell of mad tourists was a shock to my senses. In no time, I was surrounded by people hurriedly walking in every direction, looking, pointing, smiling and generally having a great time on the day before Christmas. I quickly gathered my things, well really just me, and retreated.
In the interest of trying to finish this blog in a reasonable amount of time, I'll save these stories for the book - exploring the prisons at the Doge's Palace, the night at the bar with the guy from the Italian army and the scary one wearing the Mussolini shirt, buying wine by the liter from distinguished gentlemen who made it himself, getting lost in the marine fog trying to find Murano, drinking spritz' in a corner bar watching old men play the same old slot machine they've been playing together for years, Jemel losing his shit and me almost killing him, sleeping in the nursery, and more fun stories :)
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