Wednesday, leaving Rome & arriving in Venice 20111019

Wednesday 20111019. Spectacular magical day. Foot was better. I left Rome for Venice, and I didn't have any surprises at the checkout. The taxi driver took me to this gleaming Roma Termini which didn't look like anything I had seen when I arrived. I think I inadvertently went out the back door when I arrived. Of course the goofs are out back on smoke break looking for a hustle (I had vaguely wondered why the main terminal looked so rough). But this nice man's meter said nine euros, and I gave him fifteen just out of ragged relief. Though I did jettison some extra clothing to lighten the load a bit (of course I packed too much), the bag was still heavy and barely manageable. After I saw a group of hobbling elderly American tourists, many with canes, heaving their bags onto the train I wasn't about to moan about anything. One of them even called me kid. I think my dad was the last person to ever call me kid. It made me warm to them. I sat with a honeymooning Indian couple from Dubai, and we had a good conversation about how we self-identified as immigrants and what defined home. I took out my knitting, and I became the oddity of the train car, except to the wistful knitters who had left their sticks at home. The Indians were particularly perplexed and took a lot of pictures of me. Train ride was relatively quick, and included lots of tunnels. It went from mostly mountainous to flat plains. This was a high speed train, so your best view was deep background because you couldn't hold any foreground images. So it was often just easier to knit and talk. I had no concept of our arrival time, and at one point I looked up and I could see huge tall and heavy industry cranes, like commercial ship cranes. And then the sea was right there. Even on a spitty gray day, i felt the aqua blues from the horizon to the sea.
I exited the train station, and I was looking at Venice across an eight lane water highway, like it just popped the picture frame. It had a diesel sea smell and a clanking industrious sound. The boats were moving back and forth in a big chop, just churning through it. It was a take your breath moment away, even with all the tourists and chaos on the wharf.
I got on a vaparetto (water bus), trying not to maim innocent appendages with my huge bag (yup I really did pack too much). The French tourists I sat beside gave me a crash course on vaparetto navigation, and the upsidedowness right left south north of the line 1 & 2. I basically got that if you stayed on long enough, you'd be circling back.

At San Marco square where I disembarked, another I can't breath moment: a massive square overlapping worn, gilded, ornate, renaissance (?) and 19th century; gondolas swaying; and palaces on magic islands rising from the mist offshore. Surreally, a massive cruise ship that seemed about 30stories high was leaving port, and it just moved quietly out to sea like a whale slipping through a school of fish. It was raining lightly, which made all the colours glow, the neon umbrellas, the blue and gold of the St Mark's lion, the shiny ebony and red velvets/leathers of the gondolas.
I tore the wee district map out of my tour book, and cursed my lack of reading glasses. I had a sense of how to get to the hotel. When I was out of the square, I just kept consulting the map, checking at every navigation point, my thumb pressed firmly into into my last confirmed position. Ugh. Steps and bridges with a huge bag. My ankle doesn't do the "down" stairs terribly well, and I just didn't want to double back needlessly. It's hard to believe they map narrow dark closets, because that's what it felt like I was walking through sometime, unlit, barely shoulder wide, stone canyons. Yes I was relieved when I got to the hotel, and when the deskclerk mapped out the easiest fastest way back to San Marco, that wasn't my route!

This was a city I wanted out into right away. This hotel is next door to La FENICE, so i immediately went to their box-office and got a ticket to tomorrow night's performance of Il Figaro, which I've already seen a couple of times. Score! Then I crossed the little square and went into what effectively must have been a small chapel, dark worn stone, wood doors painted sixty times over barely on their hinges. It reeked of mourning fevered deaths. It was being used as an exhibition space for one piece. Twenty plus feet high, they had made a mosaic of a Russian Orthodox icon (long face deep dark eyes bearded and crowned) with high gloss Ukrainian hand painted Easter eggs. The only light in the chapel was on this piece, and a soundtrack played this combination of Russian liturgical music of bass voices interspersed with muttering (or prayer or curses or incantations). It was stunning, and all the better because it was exhibited in a way that made you feel you had it to yourself.
I continued onto St Marks square, just looking into shop windows at leather goods, an exhibition of manual typewriters at Olivetti's, shops that displayed exclusively a rainbow of leather gloves or pastel cashmeres or scarves or murano glass, and the ubiquitous Venetian masks in leather, glass, hand painted, bejeweled, stiff with lace and feathers. When I got to the square I took another one of those deep breath slow and quiet 180 degree turns, just taking it in; pigeons, students, the gold lion against a blue half circle, the dome, the marble, the arched galleria, this tower, that spire, that person with a gelato in a tiny perfect cone. I sat at a table in the covered galleria, because it was really raining now, cold, and had a little bite listening to a four person ensemble that played something that sounded like waltzy-tango music to me. It was insanely expensive, but I didn't care. I was wrapped in my shawl, warm and dry, drinking another cappuccino, free of the crap that's been rattling around in my head of late. Happy? Yup.
A continued stroll around the covered galleria, more shop windows, ruing my already heavy suitcase that would definitely inhibit shopping opportunities, out to the ocean side again. A gelato. Ahhhhhh. Light was fading. It was time to turn back. I decided to try the concierge's route back. And I got hopelessly lost. Maybe one hour lost in all. I felt the panic rising when I thought I saw a landmark I recognized, but now it was another bridge, another Venetian mask store. All those blank faces looking at you. Than g@d I don't suffer hallucinations (much). The gondola revellers singing Beatles songs faded, the alleys were more sinister and narrower, the light was almost gone, and even shops were starting to close. I was aloner and aloner, dead ending on canals, unable to make any sense of my stupid little map. I laughed to myself when I heard another couple obviously experiencing the same distress. She was scared and starting to go shrill, and he was trying to calm her down with logic in a quiet sure tone. If that had been me and Clive, I would have definitely been the one to take it up a register, and start talking fast and high, of course blaming him. So I broke down and asked for help. Two shopkeepers later, pointing out the general direction I was back. Marvelous! Nice light dinner, warm bath, falling asleep to music warbling from outside, rain. Perfect day.