The first of a few post about that bizarre weekend in Venice. Please forgive me.
I've finished Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and have been reflecting.
There are things they never tell you about Venice.
They never mention the high cost of the water boat, the only means of transportation. Or if they do, they don't tell you that if you're wearing sunglasses and not smiling–looking like you belong–you can slip onto the boat. They never tell you that in the hundreds of trips the ferrymen make each day, they forget to check your boat pass.
They never mention the rain. Not really. Not its temperament, not its finickiness, not how much it adds to the labyrinth of side streets that make the city's main island. They never tell you that if it is raining before noon, Piazza San Marco is empty. You can hide in a museum, look out the window and feel abandoned, post-apocalyptic. There are no chairs out, not even pigeons in the early rain, and certainly no merchants.
They never tell you that you need to be, even if only the slightest bit, selective in your choice of Italian restaurants. I'm not saying just restaurants in Italy. I'm saying restaurants in Italy serving Italian cuisine.
Jon, my good friend and traveling partner that summer, and I had shared a bottle of crisp white wine in the lobby of our hostel while listening to a girl try to seduce three European men. She was American. Her parents had money. She talked like a Valley. We felt justified and superior, almost sophisticated and European, as we listened in an judged her, drinking our warmth straight from the bottle to save a euro on disposable wine glasses.
We'd spent the morning in the Piazza, in the rain that left the city gray and sinking. At this point in my time abroad, my umbrella that I'd been so proud to buy and carry hooked in my arm had already been stolen. I had huddled next to Jon through the streets, the puddles filling my yellow flats and turning me brown from the knee down. My bangs hung limp across my left eye. My bones ached. I was sure I would never be warm.
I had forgotten these things by the time we finished the bottle. It was late. Still early by European dinner hours, but we were hungry and wanted to cross from our hostel's island back to the Piazza's island before the sunset. We headed out of the hostel and walked along the water's edge (not so much for dramatic effect as there is no way not to walk along the water's edge in Venice) until we found a small, family-owned Italian restaurant with low lights and red-and-white checkered tableclothes.
The sister approached our table and asked what we would like to drink. She spoke English to us. We ordered tortellini (Jon) and grilled vegetables (myself). She turned and shouted the order to her brother in–this sounds terrible–an Asian language. I wish I could say that they were Chinese or Korean or, well, any nationality rather than the horribly vague Asian.
Even if I understood the continent better, I'm not sure if I would have been able to concentrate and figure it out in that moment. An Asian family-owned Italian restaurant in the heart of Italy. I was startled. I was more startled when my vegetables were placed on a grill similar to the George Foreman. I was most surprised when Jon's tortelinni was placed in a bowl of water and microwaved, then tossed into another bowl of sauce.
This is not to say the food wasn't delicious. We ate slowly, sipping water to calm our blood that was not only warm now, but a bit flushed with Chardonnay. We ate in a comfortable silence, reminding
ourselves where we were, while the music from the half-euro slot machines filled the restaurant and floated out the open door where it blurred with the lapping waters of a moving tide.
We sloshed back out to the ferry under an orange sky and headed back to the Piazza, one of so many pigeons on the ferry cooing about the romance of it all.
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