Day Twelve

Venezia"It was as if all the angels in heaven had fallen asleep at once and Venice were their collective dream."
The Old Contemptibles by MarthGood day, and welcome to day twelve.


The buses left early, and I slept a lot of the way. I know I should have paid more attention to the countries we were driving through during the whole trip, but the schedule was so packed that sleeping on the bus was really necessary sometimes. After a few hours we stopped at a rest stop in Italy, and I paid 500 lira (about a quarter) to use the restroom. In many places in Italy it's strongly recommended that you leave a donation when you use a bathroom.

We got to the vaporetto port at 11. The city of Venice is a series of islands in the Venetian lagoon. I think it is possible to drive there, but it was impractical to take buses, so we parked and rode the vaporetto or water taxis over. Venice seems like a strange place to build a city--the land is not really stable and has been shored up with posts for hundreds of years, and the city may still be sinking. Even today when it rains hard the city floods. But Venice is near the Adriatic Sea, and was a prime port for trade from the east to come into Europe. Venetians were well known as traders in the Middle Ages, long before the city-states' consolidation into present-day Italy. And Marco Polo called himself Venetian, so that's all you really need to know.

It's a very dreamy place. I would have designed a city like Venice when I was little. I think many people would have; kids love the idea of a city where you can get places in a boat. By the same token, it's a little hard to believe that people live there every day.

We took a brief walking tour of the city as a big group, and our guide pointed out the church where Antonio Vivaldi was baptized, and the doge's palace, and the Bridge of Sighs. We also cruised through St. Mark's rather quickly; I remember there being an awful lot of gold leaf. Then we went to a glassblowing demonstration. Murano is one of the islands in the lagoon, and Murano glass is famous for being pretty. It was amazing to see a man start with a lump of thick, molten glass, and in the space of a few minutes to make a delicate vase. In the adjacent store I bought a millefiore pendant for my mom for 70,000 lira. That was one of the best things--the exchange rate was about 2,000 lira to one dollar. So the necklace was only $35. I liked being able to spend thousands of lira at one shot.

I and two others were determined to take a gondola ride. The guide told us all beforehand not to pay more than 12 to 14 dollars per person (and not to stick our hands in the canal water), so the three of us set off to find a sympathetic gondolier. The first man we talked to wanted 100,000 lira apiece, and suggested that the price our guide told us was about 20 years out of date. As we walked away, another man came us and asked what we would pay; we told him and all he said was, "Bye." We happened on a group from our bus, and they told us which gondolier to talk to. He told us that for three, four, or five people we would pay 150,000 lira; so we rushed off to sucker some other people into coming with us. We found two people who agreed to join us, and we rode around the canals with our gondolier. The best part was when we passed another gondola and heard a cell phone ringing. The other gondolier answered the phone, spoke a few words, and hung up. We joked that he'd said, "I can't talk now, I'm driving."

Then I ate a ham, cheese, and mushroom calzone. We waited for the rest of the group in St. Mark's Square, and as I was leaning against a lamppost, being all cool, a pigeon defecated on me a little. At least it happened toward the end of the day, rather than the beginning. Then it was back on the vaporetto, back on the bus, ciao Italia, and back to Austria. And now whenever I see a painting of Venice I cannot help but point out, "I've been there."

Tomorrow: a visit to Dachau and on to our final town, Rothenburg