High-Ho, the Glamorous Life (or) Hiding from the Weiner Schnitzel
A cordial hello to all from Vienna, the home of Mozart, Strauss, Beethoven, and truly undigestible sausage delicacies!
This is my last day here, and rather than stress out about trying to cram another landmark into my already dense itinerary, I have decided to loiter in the lounge of my moderately upscale hostel and visit my good friend the Internet. My train to Budapest is at 1:50 PM, so I have plenty of time to think of appropriate witticisms and anecdotes to share with you about this, my European tour.
Behind me already are the narrow, crowded medieval streets of Florence and the glittering canals of Venice, where I passed three happy days. Florence was remarkable chiefly for its stunning art treasures - and for the fact that it was a mere hour away from my apartment in Arezzo.
After my last visit to Florence I bid my dear landlady good-bye and set off by train for Venice, where I finally managed to find my night's lodgings conveniently located behind a tabacheria near the Grand Canal.
Those of you who know my love of water know how instantly I was enchanted by the floating city, with its narrow winding streets and paths of soft green water stretching away under narrow bridges of stone. I arrived in the height of the tourist season, but nevertheless, I found it surprisingly easy to sneak away into corner cafes and unfrequented side-streets - after the obligatory visits to Piazza San Marco and the Ponte Rialto (Rialto Bridge), I wandered around suburban Venice, sipping frequent coffees and watching locals park their boats, ushering children and dogs onto narrow stone docks as they took their lunch breaks.
Venice is, among its many other unique qualities, an entirely pedestrian city - there is no automotive traffic on the islands, which means that even the largest crowds can move relatively freely. It also means that any municipal traffic of any kind - ambulances, postal carriers, policemen - must travel instead by boat. For some reason watching the municipal boats gave me all kinds of delight, and I counted every single one I saw - post boat, red cross/ ambulance boat, police boat, taxi boat, and, of course, my personal favorite - bus boat. The bus boat, with its delightful open-air front sections, quickly became my preferred method of transportation, and I parked myself on the number 2 bus line for the better part of a day, getting spray in my face and collecting an entire photo essay's worth of amorous bus boat images on my camera.
Beyond the rhapsody of the bus boats, I find myself almost at a loss for complete sentences when I describe my time in the city - all I can do is to gather the disparate phrases in my head, like a patient old explorer with a butterfly net. The stifling heat, the searing hot incessant quality of the sunshine, the shining gold inlay of San Marco. The glittering water of the lagoon, the caps of waves like silver streaks in the heat. A black pinscher dog standing in the prow of a wooden speedboat, face forward into the spray.
There is only one memory from the city that I have tried deliberately to etch into my mind. Near the Bienalle Gardens there is a small public park, where an avenue of cypress trees terminates in a lovely fountain statue - a man in nineteenth-century garb, standing upon a pile of moss-covered rocks, looking out into the distance. Below him the water trickles tranquilly down into the open pool, nourishing water lilies and islands of floating greenery. As I visited the park, I circled the statue and found two signs - neither of which indicated the name of the statue's subject, which of course was what I wanted to know. The first mentioned that a Venice club had contributed to the statue's restoration. The second, typed in polite Italian on white paper and inserted into a sheet protector, read:
We pray you, please do not abandon water tortoises in this pool.
If you happen to have a water tortoise that you can no longer keep
Please contact us and we will care for the tortoise.
An e-mail address followed.
I put sail to Venice a day early, and mostly by accident, but I felt fulfilled by my time in the city when I left it. I consoled myself with the images of the bus boats and the sounds of the water in the lagoons on my long overnight train ride to Vienna, where our anxious conductor interrupted our sleep every quarter-hour, beginning at six in the morning, to let us know that the train might be slightly late. It is as well that the train was long and difficult to navigate, since I really didn't want to have to bother with trial and extradition after pushing him from the microphone onto the busy track below.
I arrived in Vienna footsore and tired, but feeling surprisingly well-traveled and capable, for all my mishaps. That was, of course, before the schnitzel, the Requiem, the museum fatigue, and the fish head - all of which will have to be the subject of another entry.
This is my last day here, and rather than stress out about trying to cram another landmark into my already dense itinerary, I have decided to loiter in the lounge of my moderately upscale hostel and visit my good friend the Internet. My train to Budapest is at 1:50 PM, so I have plenty of time to think of appropriate witticisms and anecdotes to share with you about this, my European tour.
Behind me already are the narrow, crowded medieval streets of Florence and the glittering canals of Venice, where I passed three happy days. Florence was remarkable chiefly for its stunning art treasures - and for the fact that it was a mere hour away from my apartment in Arezzo.
After my last visit to Florence I bid my dear landlady good-bye and set off by train for Venice, where I finally managed to find my night's lodgings conveniently located behind a tabacheria near the Grand Canal.
Those of you who know my love of water know how instantly I was enchanted by the floating city, with its narrow winding streets and paths of soft green water stretching away under narrow bridges of stone. I arrived in the height of the tourist season, but nevertheless, I found it surprisingly easy to sneak away into corner cafes and unfrequented side-streets - after the obligatory visits to Piazza San Marco and the Ponte Rialto (Rialto Bridge), I wandered around suburban Venice, sipping frequent coffees and watching locals park their boats, ushering children and dogs onto narrow stone docks as they took their lunch breaks.
Venice is, among its many other unique qualities, an entirely pedestrian city - there is no automotive traffic on the islands, which means that even the largest crowds can move relatively freely. It also means that any municipal traffic of any kind - ambulances, postal carriers, policemen - must travel instead by boat. For some reason watching the municipal boats gave me all kinds of delight, and I counted every single one I saw - post boat, red cross/ ambulance boat, police boat, taxi boat, and, of course, my personal favorite - bus boat. The bus boat, with its delightful open-air front sections, quickly became my preferred method of transportation, and I parked myself on the number 2 bus line for the better part of a day, getting spray in my face and collecting an entire photo essay's worth of amorous bus boat images on my camera.
Beyond the rhapsody of the bus boats, I find myself almost at a loss for complete sentences when I describe my time in the city - all I can do is to gather the disparate phrases in my head, like a patient old explorer with a butterfly net. The stifling heat, the searing hot incessant quality of the sunshine, the shining gold inlay of San Marco. The glittering water of the lagoon, the caps of waves like silver streaks in the heat. A black pinscher dog standing in the prow of a wooden speedboat, face forward into the spray.
There is only one memory from the city that I have tried deliberately to etch into my mind. Near the Bienalle Gardens there is a small public park, where an avenue of cypress trees terminates in a lovely fountain statue - a man in nineteenth-century garb, standing upon a pile of moss-covered rocks, looking out into the distance. Below him the water trickles tranquilly down into the open pool, nourishing water lilies and islands of floating greenery. As I visited the park, I circled the statue and found two signs - neither of which indicated the name of the statue's subject, which of course was what I wanted to know. The first mentioned that a Venice club had contributed to the statue's restoration. The second, typed in polite Italian on white paper and inserted into a sheet protector, read:
We pray you, please do not abandon water tortoises in this pool.
If you happen to have a water tortoise that you can no longer keep
Please contact us and we will care for the tortoise.
An e-mail address followed.
I put sail to Venice a day early, and mostly by accident, but I felt fulfilled by my time in the city when I left it. I consoled myself with the images of the bus boats and the sounds of the water in the lagoons on my long overnight train ride to Vienna, where our anxious conductor interrupted our sleep every quarter-hour, beginning at six in the morning, to let us know that the train might be slightly late. It is as well that the train was long and difficult to navigate, since I really didn't want to have to bother with trial and extradition after pushing him from the microphone onto the busy track below.
I arrived in Vienna footsore and tired, but feeling surprisingly well-traveled and capable, for all my mishaps. That was, of course, before the schnitzel, the Requiem, the museum fatigue, and the fish head - all of which will have to be the subject of another entry.