Sunday traveling from Venizia to Firenze 20111023

20111023 Sunday, traveling from Venice to Firenze. Slow filler day, waiting for a train, waiting for a seat, a 2 hour train ride, waiting for a taxi, sitting on Ponte s. Trinita, gawking in Feragamo windows, a toodledo around the blocks and a trattoria meal. Bells. CNN. Sleep.
Between saturday and Sunday I must have seen ten thousand faces. The tourists were pouring into Venice on Saturday, after days of wind and rain. At one point I could look down the pier between the three vaparetto stops on San Marco, and I had that swishy human stream feeling i get when I see television coverage on Mecca. Then the Doges palace was swimming with portraiture; saints, kings, queens, princes, pillars of society, the shoemakers guild, popes, sinners writhing in hell, cherubs on the ceiling, red cherubs, blue cherubs. I had bad timing, aggressively early, something like what my mother would do, and I sat in the train station and the cafe at ferrovia for a long time. People people people, with bags, with children, with baggage, happy, stern, coupled, alone, tourists gone italatroppo, Italians gone jersey shore, Germans, Brits. When i got to Firenze I found the official taxi line. Young friendly guy with a meter, just how I like them. He drove for blocks and blocks on a sunday best shoulder to shoulder full of people pedestrian mall to get to the hotel. I had images of being bashed like charles and camilla, but this tax just nudged them out of the way. The humanity was overwhelming, people shopping and eating, shopping, stuff stuff stuff, and people consuming it all.
I get worn out by going to a mall in Scarborough, and need a week to recover from people overload. When I came home from a whole sheeting week of a hundred yes/nos a day, I could go the mattress for a weekend without talking to one person. I don't know if my internal logic system is trying to fill in the blanks on all these people, but I'd want to know how and why they lived, who they loved, what they ate for breakfast, their shame and joy, blah blah blech. Instead they're flash cards being shuffled in my brain. I'm tired now. I must rest.