Ignorants Abroad III—Venice

     Imagine a big cornfield where some farmer has cut a maze for the entertainment of kids and adults in October.  Now flood the field with water.  Then, substitute three and four story buildings constructed from ancient brick and other building stones, some of which have been stuccoed over, for the corn stalks.

       You have an idea of Venice.  Or ven-AW-chee.

     The “streets” are mostly narrow, hardly alleys by our standards.  They aren’t really streets because there is no wheeled traffic in Venice.  I don’t recall even seeing a bicycle. 

     Traffic is pedestrian over cobblestone (not really cobblestone but stone nevertheless) sidewalks.  Instead of being walkways beside roadways, the sidewalks are mostly beside waterways or canals.  There are many bridges across canals.  Most of the bridges are arched so boats can pass under them.  For the pedestrian, that means stair steps, lots of them.  We walked a lot.

      Boat traffic supplants auto traffic, but we didn’t see a lot of boat traffic, either.  Venice is about walking. 

      You have about four ways to get from the airport to the city.  You can take a boat all the way.  You can take a bus which will take you to a depot where you can take a boat the rest of the way or walk from the depot, towing your luggage.  Or you can take a water taxi.

      One of our tour group did take a water taxi.  He had to ask two or three taxis before he found one that would deliver him to the exact location of our hotel.  The water access for our hotel was on a rather narrow “alley” which many taxis were not willing to negotiate.  We took the boat all the way, which dumped us at a dock near our hotel.

     The Goodwife kept mentioning that they must dump some kind of coloring in the water of the canals to get that dark blue tint.  I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the water had the cast of the stuff we used to pull out of the cesspool to water the garden or when the sewer backed up.  There were occasions when the canals smelled the same, too.

     However, fish live in the canals.  You can see them.

     And Venice is probably the cleanest city you will ever see—no trash anywhere, well with the possible exception of the places the tourists crowd.  But that is all cleaned up during the night and ready for a new bunch of litterers the next day.

      We witnessed two embarrassing moments in Venice.  One was an American woman (judging from her accent) who was hanging around the hotel lobby.  At first, I thought she was part of the staff because she was trying to help guests negotiating the place.

     Push came to shove when our tour group held its first meeting in the hotel’s breakfast room and she kept interrupting the tour guide.  He tried twice firmly but gently to get her to leave.  On the third try, he got rude and drove her out.

     The next morning, the hotel clerk told one of our number that the police had come in the night to take her away.  She had given all her money and her credit cards to a thief who had asked her for them.    What happened to her after that, no one knows.  She was obviously unhinged.

     The second embarrassing incident, also involving an American woman, happened one day as we were approaching our hotel room to take a rest before the evening activities.  We heard a lady yelling at someone, first in Italian, then in English.  She was in a boat that had just crossed under the footbridge that we had to take if we went to our room from the hotel lobby.  The bridge served just the hotel lobby.  Going toward the hotel, you had to go into the hotel.  You had to ring a bell and the desk clerk would buzz the lock and you would swing the gate open and step down into a small courtyard.  Two steps up and you were in the lobby.

      Going out of the lobby, again, you rang and the gate was unlatched.  Over the footbridge, you turn left or right, or go straight ahead.  To get to our room, go straight ahead to the first door on your left.   Ring another bell and the hotel clerk would release that lock.  Up about 20 steps was another locked door which was also released when the street door opened.

     So we were approaching the footbridge on “our” side of the canal when we heard the ruckus.  The Italian lady in the boat was giving a woman at a window one story up h-e-double-el for having thrown a bit of trash out of the window into the canal.

      The woman in the window was an American (judging from her accent) who kept apologizing and vowing not to do it again.  She still got a at least a thirty second lecture on keeping trash out of the canals, disposing of trash properly.  The lecture wasn’t in polite terms, nor a pleasing tone of voice.

      When the lecture was done, the man in the boat backed it up slightly and the lecturer reached down and picked the piece of trash out of the water.  The boat sped off and we went on about our business.  Needless to say, we were acutely aware of trash disposal after that.

       Everything coming into Venice comes by boat.  Trash and recyclables leave by boat.  Some mornings at the dock by our hotel there would be commercial-size dumpsters full of trash or recyclables.  Along would come a barge with a small crane that would pick up the dumpsters and take them away.

     Our guide said that even the hotel and restaurant laundry had to be done off-island, thus explaining why when you went to a restaurant, the first item on your bill was a “cover charge”.  It was for tablecloth and napkin laundry, so he said.

     Anyway, Venice is clean.

     Venice sinking, or water level rising?

     We heard both theories, though the first one came from one of us Yankees.  Most Venetians agree that Venice is indeed sinking but at a rate of a millimeter or two per year, while the water level has risen more than a foot in the past couple of decades.

      Many of the buildings lining the canals were originally homes for the wealthy.  The “ground” floor, accessible by water, was where the servants worked to take care of the family.  The first floor up was a gathering place for hosting guests and friends, maybe for meals.  The next floor(s) up were private places, bedrooms, and the like where the family lived.

     For years, coming and going or taking deliveries of groceries and other supplies was achieved by pulling a boat up to the gate and taking two or three steps up to the doorway, or down the steps from the doorway, if going out.  Now the water covers the steps and reaches the doorsill.

      On being a tourist.

      Wheatie.  Smokey.  Tourist.  Probably a few others.

        I was a wheatie when I worked on a harvest crew in Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado.  We came in to restaurant or motel dirty (no cabs on combines in those days), tired and hungry, probably stinky, too.  As a smokey, I came in to grocery, drug, or liquor store in a mountain town smelling like wood smoke from being beside the fire at our campsite.

      Tourist.  Tourists get conflicting messages from the folks in the land you are visiting.  You are welcome because you spend your money and boost the local economy.  But in another way, you are made to feel that you are intruding, that you are not really welcome as a guest, but tolerated as an economic necessity.  Not unlike the way my father felt about livestock.

     In Venice, there are categories of tourists, the lowest of the low being cruise ship tourists.  Why?  Because cruise ships dump a thousand or so tourist ashore about midmorning.  They wander all over, blocking footpaths and bridges, stopping anywhere to take selfies.  Maybe they buy a meal or two, maybe a memento of some kind.  As the sun slowly sinks in the west, they depart to return to the cruise ship, leaving a mess in their wake.

      What the cruisers leave behind in economic value doesn’t sufficiently compensate for the cost of cleaning up after them.

      We were a step above the cruisers, as we stayed for five nights, taking all our meals on the island and buying tickets (through the tour) to some attractions.  We didn’t reach the highest status, however, since we bought almost nothing else, like clothes or mementos.  (You have to lug the stuff you buy all the rest of your journey, and what do you do with it when you get it home?)

     The highlight of our Venice trip had to be the gondola ride, as corny and touristy as that sounds.  The ride, about 80 euros (close to $100), was part of the paid tour.  Sixteen of the 26 folks in our tour group opted to take the gondola ride.  Each gondola held six passengers.  Three gondolas were necessary to take us all.  That left one gondola with only four folks.

     Our foxy guide made a show of selecting which of us got to be the lucky four.  We were chosen first because we had been married longest.  The second place couple also had been married a long time.

      When we were all seated in the gondola, we began to see why it was such a big deal to be the lucky four.  A man with an accordion accompanied by a beautiful young lady stepped down into our boat.  We were to be serenaded on our ride.

     As we started on our journey through the canals, we met up with other gondolas with musicians in them.  They would belt out a song and the music echoed off the “canyon” walls.  Our lady waited her turn, until we were out of earshot of the others.  The other singers were all men.  She sang in Italian, so we had to appreciate the music, not the poetry.  She did sing “Volare”, so most of us could join in on a least a few words.

       It was quite a pleasant ride, taking place just at dusk.  We were able to get right in, avoiding long lines, since the “cruisers” had all gone back to their ships.

      We did some other tourist things, tours of Saint Mark’s Cathedral and such like.  Most of the other activities involved churches and great works of art.  We missed the Doge’s palace.  We were worn out with the cathedral (many steps up and around all the while listening to our local guide).  So we thought to walk back to the hotel and rest awhile before attempting the palace.

     We managed to disprove what our guide told us:  “You can’t get lost in Venice.”  We managed to do just that.  My plains compass, dependent on being able to see the horizon to find my way, was completely discombobulated by the canyons formed by the city buildings.

     Misery loves company and we were not alone in losing our way.  We stopped at every intersection and studied our map.  A few others studied their maps, but most of the other lost souls had their noses buried in their cell phones.

     It came to pass that all 26 of us (we lost two the second day to a bad back, rendering the poor fellow unable to walk—did I mention Venice was all about walking?) boarded the city boat which delivered us to the bus depot where we boarded a chartered bus and headed for Florence.

     In addition to “bus” and taxi service all being by boat in Venice, they also have police and ambulance service by boat with only an occasional helicopter for emergencies.

      Finally, my apologies to art lovers.  Somehow the art bone is totally missing from my body.  I cannot do justice to all the great works of art we saw, so I am not going to try.  Sorry.