Italy 2010 - Day 1 - Venice
Generally, I have relatively trouble-free travel. I plan ahead, I pay attention to schedules and can find my way around a strange public transport system after a minute or two to read the signs and work out the ticketing.
I guess, then, I was due for a fall.
I'd arranged to meet my brother David (hereafter known as D) and my sister in law Eva (E) at their hotel in Venice's Maestre district at 12:30 p.m. on July 10, my flight arriving at midnight the night before. Imagine my confusion and then rising concern when the sun refused to set during the flight! I arrived at Venice's Marco Polo Airport at 12:30 p.m., the very time I was supposed to be turning up on a certain hotel doorstep. By the time I got through Customs (remarkably casual, they just looked at my passport and stamped it, no forms, no questions) and collected my baggage (which took forever), it was 1:30 p.m. and I still had to check into my own hotel. Cue panic stations and the purchase of a phone card I couldn't make work, before sanity returned and I decided to go to my hotel, check in and call E's phone from there.
The plan worked - I called E's remarkable cell phone and managed to track them down - they'd got tired of waiting for me and had gone into Venice proper for lunch. We made plans to meet in an hour, giving me a chance to sort myself out before going to meet them. The weather was hot and steamy, with 85% humidity. I started what became a holiday habit with a shower in the afternoon, and headed out with some very helpful advice from the lovely girl at my hotel's reception desk with regards to buses, as well as a return ticket.
A pause here, while I talk about my first Italian hotel. Hotel Appogia Sorio Venice was fairly generic-looking, nice but nothing amazing. The staff, however, were for the most part excellent (apart from the grumpy night clerk). The room was tiny, about 3 by 5 metres, but clean and comfortable. And there was a toilet in the shower cubicle, which actually came in handy after a day of walking - I'd sit down and use the hand-held shower nozzle to massage my feet. ;)
But enough of my hygiene habits and onto the part I'd dreamed about as a high school student learning Italian - Venice.
Venice is a dream. Slow-moving gondolas drift down canals of murky green water. Narrow streets - more corridors sometimes than streets - wind around buildings marked by time and tides and held in as close to original condition as possible. Wide open piazzas shimmer with the summer sun and life - at least for the 59,000 localxs - moves at a slower pace.
For the tourists, tings are a bit more frenetic, sights and sounds luring you in. At the central bus depot, tourist stalls line the pavements, selling everything from Carnivale masks adn t-shirts to knock-off Murano glass bracelets and over-priced water bottles and panini with the local prosciutto and mozzarella. I met D and E next to one such mask stall and in the way of my brother and I, fell into a comfortable conversation despite over a year having passed since we last saw each other. After the spate of apologies for misreading my flight information and D's teasing response, that is.
We wandered along the small alley-like streets and over the arching spans of the bridges, taking in the city around us. The air was hot with mid-summer sun and heavy with humidity and not for the first time I would find myself sweating through my shirt with seemingly little effort. We paused at various buildings, mainly churches or churches that had been converted to museums, often unprepossessing from the outside (aside from the ones with ornate white facades and sculptures in marble!). The interiors, however, were stunning - tall vaulted ceilings decorated in gold and white, the curved expanses of the domed ceilings acting as canvasses for masterpiece paintings of the Gospels or the lives of the saints. There is no charge (beyond a donation to the poor box) for entering the churches, but there are strict rules of etiquette: no hats to be worn, no bare shoulders, no bare knees. No phohtos. There are over a hundred churches in Venice (no-one we asked knew an exact number) and if the sample we saw is any indication, they're all beautiful.
By about five-ish my lack of food since breakfast on the plane hit and we found a little trattoria off the main tourist drag (okay, to be honest, we had no idea where we were!). Our first meal was eclectic: the traditional appetiser plate of cold meats, pasta, pizza and three different desserts that we shared. The waitress, amused by my fumbling, decades-old Italian and my brother's very Australian manner, kept us supplied and at the end of the meal, brought us complimentary shots of limoncello, the local lemon liqueur.
Getting back to the bus station became an adventure. Our mental compasses upside down, D ad I managed to find San Marco Piazza, which happened to be in completely the other direction we wanted to go. Eventually we gave up and caught a water taxi up the Grand Canal to the station, which was packed, sweaty and expensive, but faster than wandering the streets of Venice all night.