Italy Part Tre: Venice

When I checked my e-mail on the afternoon before I left for Italy I received this message from one of the professors going on the trip:

Dear all,

Venice is having a very cold and wet winter. They are actually predicting rain, snow, and flooding while we are there. You may want to get to WalMart and buy yourselves a poncho and some rubber boots that are about knee-high. I bought some last night and they cost me $19.99.

See you tomorrow.

Dr. M.

I went out and bought boots. They are brown and awkward and slightly too big because the store I chose didn't have any in women's sizes, but I didn't have time to run around town looking for the perfect pair. In any case I was glad I bought them. Here's why:

This is a mammoth puddle in front of St. Mark's Basilica with the Doge's Palace beyond. It is one of many puddles I encountered in Venice, most of them smaller yet surprisingly deep. One can see platforms in the background of the photo; these are used for walking when St. Mark's Square floods, which did happen a bit while I was there. There are similar platforms elsewhere in Venice, which was good because it rained off and on for most of our time in Venice.

While I was in Italy for school, the trip was very unstructured. Once we reached Venice we were basically told to go do whatever--just keep a journal and come to quick meetings about every other day. This was both liberating and mildly terrifying. The day after most of us visited the islands in the lagoon, however, we did have a bit of direction in the form of a challenge: Find the oldest restaurant in Venice (it's about 500 years old) and try traditional Venetian food. Hint: the staff is known for being rude, it's a bacaro (sort of like a bar that serves food), and the place is listed in most guidebooks.

I joined forces with Carrie and Tasia, my friends and two main travel buddies. We scoured our guidebooks for possible establishments and found two that fit the clues. (My mom gave me Rick Steves's Italy 2010 guidebook and it was invaluable. I've previously called guidebooks boring, and I stand by that if one is just reading one at home, but I now think them endlessly interesting and incredibly useful when figuring out the ropes for oneself in a foreign country.)

We considered asking someone on the street if they knew what restaurant the clues talked about, but nixed the idea since none of us knew how to say "500 year old restaurant" in Italian. We tried a tourist information office, but the woman at the desk just fluttered her hands and said, "A five hundred year old restaurant? It's impossible. Impossible." We went back to the hotel in defeat. One of the professors was in the lobby, though, and after one more hint we were sure which restaurant it was: the Cantina Do Mori.

It's a small place on the other side of the Rialto from St. Mark's, standing room only. The first bartender we saw didn't speak English (nor should he), and we had no idea how to ask for traditional Venetian food in Italian. Carrie pulled out her handy dandy Italian phrasebook from the 1950s (it tells you how to ask for typewriter parts and girdles) and we paged through it awkwardly for about five minutes. It was the noon hour and the place was filling up with locals; it was crowded and full of Italian words.

Finally, the other bartender--who'd watched the whole thing and apparently decided to let us hang for awhile--motioned at us and said that he spoke English. We asked him for something traditional and he gave us a variety plate of cicchetti, which are small snacks with toothpicks in them. The cicchetti we sampled included this slimy eel thing and a bunch of strange rolls and little sandwiches with whole (bony) tiny fish on top. It was all very salty, and while it wasn't my favorite food ever, it was good stuff. I wouldn't cry if I had to eat it again.

We did a lot of other things in Venice, but most of our time was spent wandering around lost. Venice is a maze and maps are only so helpful, since few list all the narrow streets (calli), and some streets change names in random places. Venice is comprised of six sestieri, or neighborhoods, with the southern neighborhood of San Marco being the most touristy. It's definitely worth heading north into San Paolo, Santa Croce, west to Dorsoduro, and beyond. After dark (and it was dark; many streets weren't brightly lit), there were many instances where it was just us on the streets or near the water. This was both eerie and peaceful. (And if you ever go to Venice and want to get away from the awful tourist menus around St. Mark's it's worth the walk to Muro in Santa Croce. It was So. Good.)

And now it's picture time!

Someone boarding a vaporetto (right) from the vaporetto stop at the Accademia Bridge (left). Since I keep talking about water buses I thought I'd show one... Most of the important streets are decorated with pretty lights, which we found both beautiful and incredibly helpful.

There were a lot of people in Venice who really wanted to sell us handbags. We didn't want any. Here are some street salesmen hounding passersby on the Accademia Bridge.

Graffiti near the Accademia Bridge. Does Venice have a faery problem? Could that be why we were lost all the time? Other notable graffiti included the phrase "Thief Cause". It was all over Venice.

We saw many people--all of them speaking Italian and probably not tourists--coming out of a gelato shop down the street as we wandered. We decided that we should go in too, and were glad we did: one euro for a large scoop of gelato in a waffle cone. Yummy and wallet friendly.

I came across this scene as we walked through Dorsoduro, and I promise that the dogs were playing, not fighting. Venetians seem to like their dogs; we saw a lot of them, and many people took their dogs into stores, even big ticket designer ones. (Note the flood platform.)

I deeply appreciate signs like this. We used them frequently.

Beautiful graffiti art on a payphone.

The view from our hotel's cozy little lobby.

Carrie and me obstructing the lovely lobby view on a rare sunny morning.

Ciao,

Tune in next time for pictures and tales from Florence!

Italy Part Uno: Unexpected airplane soap opera

**Blogger isn't letting me put spaces between paragraphs where I want to, so I'm sorry for the unwieldy blocks of text below.**

On January 5th, 2010, I traveled to Minneapolis and boarded a plane from there to Amsterdam. From there I--and seventeen other students and professors--flew to Venice. (Here's why.)

I sat by an elderly woman with curly blonde-ish hair and a wrinkly, craggy face on the big flight. We exchanged first names. She called herself Bert, short for Bertha. (I would probably go by Bert too.) Bert told me that she was going on a European cruise starting from Rome with a friend and her daughter, who has MS. Cruises are the easiest vacations for the woman with MS to take. I told her I was headed to Italy on a school trip and then the plane took off. We kept talking.

What started as fairly ordinary small talk, however, became an enthralling story that unwound over the eight hour flight between movie watching, plane food eating, and Bert's settling in with her sleep mask. Turns out Bert wasn't just going on a European cruise--she was also going to Paris to meet a long-lost niece.

(!!!)

When Bert's brother was stationed in Germany in the 1960s, he went to Paris and met a woman named Cristiana. (Bert didn't say she was beautiful, but I'm sure she was.) Cristiana got pregnant but didn't tell Bert's brother about the baby. He went back to the U.S. not knowing that he was a father. "It's just like one of those crazy soap operas," Bert said.

Bert said that her brother talked about bringing Cristiana to the states, but that never happened. He married someone else, had two kids, and died twelve years ago.

Last year Bert got a phone call from a woman named Barbara, a Search Angel. Years ago Barbara was reunited with a long-lost relative and was deeply touched by the event. Now, she volunteers her time as a Search Angel, helping others find their long-lost relatives and loved ones.

Barbara told Bert that she was about to hear something strange and told her about her niece. Bert almost hung up, but she heard Barbara out, and Barbara left it up to Bert to follow through. After some careful thinking, Bert hesitantly contacted her niece, who is now forty-eight years old. The niece sent photo albums from her childhood; she looked just like Bert's late mother.

The icing on the evidence cake was a picture of Cristiana with Bert's brother. (Bert's brother brought one home just like it.) The niece lives in France and has a sister in Paris who speaks English, which is helpful since Bert doesn't speak French.

I asked Bert how she felt about the upcoming meeting, and she said she was excited and anxious: this was likely to be a closure-filled emotional event. The niece originally searched for her father, but since he's dead, Bert is standing in for him.

The flight landed in Amsterdam, we parted, and I hope her meeting went well.

I stumbled off the big flight feeling absolutely exhausted. It was about midnight my time, and I'm terrible at sleeping on planes. It was about 7 AM in Amsterdam. We had a connecting flight to Venice, but first we had to go through passport control and security screening, and I've got to say that Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport--besides being beautiful and possessing random doors in the middle of hallways that open to nowhere and entertained my friends and I to no end--has the happiest security workers I have ever seen. There was smiling. There was small talk. There was a man in an important looking uniform bellowing out, "Old MacDonald Had a Farm". I can still hear him singing "E I E I Oooo!" in my head.

In Venice the vaporetto, or water bus, that we took to reach our hotel landed near where I'd seen the accordion player in July 2007, but he wasn't there this time. Hardly anyone was. (People aren't kidding when they say that January is Venice's slow month, when it belongs to Venetians more than to tourists.)

I have lots more to tell, and many pictures to show (I didn't even get to that today) but the Bert story is probably enough for now :)

(In other news, I highly recommend visiting Stephanie Perkins's blog. She is in Paris researching for her novel, Anna and the French Kiss, and recently crowned the hottest guy in the Louvre. (As in the ones depicted in the art, not the living visitors.))

Travelduck

Tomorrow I'm getting on a plane and going to Italy, and I'll be gone for the better part of two weeks. There will be an ocean between me and my laptop, and I will miss you all. I'm scheduling the Musical Mondays I'll miss to post automatically, but other than that Bookduck will be a pretty quiet place while I'm gone.

I wish I could say the trip is for a vacation, but it's actually part of a travel course I'm taking this January: Italian Culture in Context: An Interdisciplinary Study of the Travel Literature of Florence and Venice. I'm excited but nervous because so much of the itinerary is left up to us, and we've basically been told to take walks, talk to people, and get lost. I'm not good at not having plans, but I also don't like travel planning. A part of my brain shuts off as soon as I see a guidebook.

If you're wondering, my university offers classes like this every January, when we have J-term and students take one class for the entire month. It can be something fun that stays on campus or it can be a travel class like the one I'm taking. My roommate, for example, will be in Nicaragua with the Social Work department while I'm busy getting lost in Italy. (And I probably will get lost; both my sense of direction and my map reading skills are hilariously terrible.)

This won't be my first time in Europe, or even in Italy. In the summer of 2007 (right before my senior year of high school) I went to Europe with the Midwest Ambassadors of Music.

We had three buses. I got to ride on this double decker pink--excuse me, fuschia--bus all through Europe. This picture was taken in Paris.

There won't be a bus this time (we don't even have an itinerary), but I checked the weather forecasts and there's sure to be rain. There was a lot of rain in 2007, too. We zipped through London, Paris, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and swung by Venice for a day, and that day was the only dry day.

A typical umbrella huddle near the Eiffel Tower. Note our chic blue jackets. They had our names handily embroidered on the front, made it easy to spot each other, and were impermeable to rain. But I'm probably never wearing mine again.

The group included a choir and a band; I was in the band. The choir sang in lovely old churches. The band played outside in parks and town squares...where it rained and we got wet.

Following are pictures I took in Venice in July 2007. I'm wondering how different it looks in January.

We saw (and heard) these gentlemen as soon as we stepped off the boat. They sounded lovely.

Masks!

These children may look like they're playing nicely together, but they weren't. The boy was playing keep-away with the ball, and the girl was not happy.

Hurriedly snapped picture of a gondolier. No, I did not ride in a gondola. Too expensive...

Venetian glass!

Excited/nervous/happy/terrified and leaving my winter coat at home because it's not in the single digits and below zeroes in Fahrenheit in Italy (yay!),

P.S.: If you have not e-mailed me before and are not on my contact list and e-mail me between January 5th and 18th, your message will end up in my Junk e-mail folder and will be automatically deleted in ten days because that's how it's set up, and I can't figure out how to change it. Normally I'm able to rescue such e-mails, but I won't be able to at this time. Just so you know :)