I guess this thought comforts me, knowing I can at least make it to Italy again in representation, because after living in a foreign city for six months (well, five and a half by now), it’s impossible to go to a new city, a beautiful city filled with culture and charm, and be content with being a tourist. I’m still a tourist in a sense in Seville, but my señora says I’m half Spanish because she’s my Spanish mother so I’ll go with that. I have seen so much more of Seville than I will ever be able to see in Venice in the 65 hours I’m here, at least 25 of which are designated for sleeping. We try though. While Vegas has a good representation of Venice, there’s no way to recreate the little things like the largest oil painting in the world (Paradise, Tintoretto, Doge’s palace), trying to speak Italian with my Spanish to Italian translation/pronunciation guide, the man playing wine glasses on a forgotten street (yes, like Miss Congeniality), the look on kids’ faces when they are attacked by pigeons in St. Marc’s Square, the gondola men, the taste of a fresh-out-of-the-oven slice of pizza margarita for 1.50€ as we’re winding through the darkening streets trying to find the bus station… I’m into lists today because even though we didn’t scratch the surface in 40 hours, we did quite a bit.
That’s the marvelous thing about student tourists, because we’re on a budget but not on a schedule and we like to learn. It’s okay to get on the wrong bus in Venice Mestre because we have nowhere to be, there are no protests to eating gelato before lunch at four in the afternoon, sitting for a half hour watching David’s bottom half flap in the wind, and skipping the art museums because we’re going to see more than enough of that in Florence. I guess the main idea of being a tourist is to take what one can from a city — what experiences, what pictures, what sights — and run with them. If I lived in every city in Europe I found interesting for at least a year, in 20 I’d be 40, unmarried, bankrupt, and an extreme mess of languages and cultures. Though an interesting experiment, not really where I see myself. So I do what I can while I’m here now and when I’m back in Santa Barbara scoffing at the Italian food on State Street, the cars, and the wide width of the streets, or in Las Vegas trying to actually find the Venetian charm at the Venetian, I’ll know that I did enough — at least for now.
I realize that I haven’t actually yet said anything of substance about Venice.
By the tail end of our second and last day there we had pretty much exhausted all the touristy things that could be done in Venice, so we were wandering without direction, waiting until it was dark enough for us to experience Venice at night. We came upon a plaza with a leaning tower in the distance (because Venice is sinking), and since we didn’t make it to Pisa this trip, we took advantage of the fun and picture opportunity to the laughs and strange looks of the passersby. We decided to get closer to the tower, so we crossed the canal and walked with our eyes to the sky until we ran into another plaza with a crowd of people and a group of musicians singing opera songs. It was a fun and lively show, the kind that would never exist in the States because most operas are in Italian and most people don’t have the time or the passion to sit on the street and play (that’s a bold statement, but I think it would be fair to say that I’ve seen more quality street performers in Europe than I’ve seen in the U.S.). Once we had clapped our enjoyment sufficiently we followed a group of older Italians to a closer view of the tower. Upon seeing us taking photos of the tower the Italians started chattering about how their leaning tower is better than Pisa and we smiled and nodded at the rest because though Spanish and French are similar, it’s impossible to catch everything in Italian when you haven’t actually studied the language.
In an effort to get more of a multi-cultural view of the city and Europe in general we also went to visit the Synagogue and Jewish museum. The old Jewish ghetto of Venice is one of the oldest in Europe and looks like a ghetto should with small tunnels through which to enter and skinny streets. Like most things we look for, we had trouble finding the synagogue and when we finally found it we were afraid to go inside because there were a crowd of people outside. So we instead browsed through a used book store that sold mostly English language books and approached the synagogue a bit later. A man outside addressed us in English and told us that the temple was closed that day because it was Friday, of course, but we were invited to come back for Shabbat services later that night. We didn’t return because we didn’t have acceptable clothing, but instead we continued on the “yellow brick road” of crowds, touristy shops, and 1€ public WCs.
Arguably the best Italian food we had while in Italy was our first night at a little restaurant in Venice Mestre. We ordered in Italian with the help of my Italian conversation guide and had a lovely romantic meal of a pannini, a pizza Capricciosa, and acqua naturale. When we got the check everything didn’t appear as cheap as it had appeared on the menu, so we tried to communicate to the waiter that we were being overcharged. He claimed he didn’t speak English even though he did and after trying to find language barrier answers in my Italian/Spanish guide and being told by an English-speaking couple at the table next to us who thought we were trying to speak Spanish that Spanish isn’t the same as Italian (duh), we paid the extra 6€ and ran, never again to return to a sit-down restaurant in Venice. Indeed, never again to have a similar experience. I still don’t understand why every European country insists on speaking its own distinct language. I would love to learn Italian, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, and Mandarin but the language center in my brain doesn’t have the capacity for me to maintain flawless English and Spanish and develop the others without making a complete mess of everything. I have enough trouble with two. And they all really start to sound the same after awhile. The ferry boat to Greece had five official languages for the announcements, Greek, English, Italian, German, and French, and I swear I could understand bits and pieces of all of them. Or maybe that’s just the self-fulfillment prophesy.
Anyway. De todas maneras. Alora. I think I’ll work on Italian next.
We had good wine everywhere, but I haven’t yet developed a taste for red wine so I really can’t taste the difference between Italian wine and Spanish wine except that it’s a bit more expensive in Italy. I could taste the difference in Greek wine because it was super red and strong, but I guess it has to be if it’s what Dionysus drinks.
I still haven’t really said anything of substance about Venice. It was our second favorite city out of the five we’ve visited together and compared to some of the ripping off and creepiness we came across in other cities, our visit was relatively innocent, safe, carefree, and uneventful. There are far too many tourists, pigeons, and gondolas in Venice, but if you don’t look at your map and wander around seeing what you can see, it really is very charming and refreshingly small.
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