Venice
I was re-reading all of my posts from the last year and realized something very important: I never finished my account of traveling through Europe! (otherwise known as Drunken European Adventures)
Sorry I left you dangling for more than six months tumblers (after all, I know you’ve printed out all of my posts and placed them next to a candle that’s perpetually lit). Just be grateful that this is no where near Chinese Democracy or Duke Nukem Forever status. The end of this nostalgic, booze-drenched saga will have to satiate you until I find new adventures when I visit Europe again in the summer. Just as a refresher, I last left you in Bolzano, where I was preparing to board a train to Venice with my friend Armin.
Note: my memory has grown weaker with the passage of time. I should be careful because I don’t want to cast doubt on whether previous entries are real. Getting stopped for being a suspected drug smuggler in Munich? Yeah um, it happened. I wish I didn’t bear a slight resemblance to Spicolli (to be fair, I’m like 50 percent Michael Cera and 20 percent Jesse Eisenberg in the looks department), but such is life.
Venice
Armin and I arrived right as the sun was going down in Venice. Isn’t that just so European? We we never arrive on a cloudy day as people were running for cover as the rain pelted them. In fact, looking through past entries, I unintentionally arrived or left numerous places as the sun was rising or setting. I definitely didn’t time this - Europe must be inherently more romantic than the U.S.
Speaking of wooing the ladies, before visiting Venice I was skeptical of it’s romantic reputation. I automatically equated it with other supposed “romantic” things like Valentine’s Day or diamond rings. The former placing unrealistic expectations on men everywhere, the latter being partly responsible for enslaving much of a continent.
When I stepped outside of the train station, Venice hit me. The resentment I felt for faux-romance was pushed into the dirty, oil slicked water that envelops the city. The setting sun burned gold and yellow hues into everything. A line of boats traveling in one direction slowly parelled the outline of the waterway, occasionally coming to a halt to pick up tourists. Small waves pushed up against the cracked, yellow buildings, leaving a water mark that seemed to be incrementally falling. Flowers were in unlikely places. Growing in sidewalk rifts. Red pedals scattered on benches. Some kind of erotic symbolism? A sign of good things to come? A sign that Armin and I were destined to fall in love in Venice? I think you can guess which two of those I was hoping for.
Still, I wasn’t completely sold on Venice. For one, to be attune with the romantic vibes Venice was throwing out, I needed a girl to share the city with. A fact I was acutely aware of given that my sole companion was a sweaty Italian dude (ha, sorry if you’re reading this Armin). Not that I hadn’t had my fun, it’s just I was looking for a girl who I could exchange addresses with. We could write back and forth. 40 years from now we would break down and admit how miserable our lives are and how we should have stayed in Venice together, sipping wine and counting gondolas as they passed.
I mulled over this as Armin and I took a boat to the famous Piazza San Marco. We waded through what seemed like a bazillion tourists - surely ending up in at least a dozen pictures - to get to our hostel. We quickly changed and went out on the town. Thank God I had Armin to help me navigate through the labyrinth that is Venice. Even though we had a map and Armin speaks Italian, we still stopped and asked for directions at least once every two blocks to follow the zigzagging trail. Street names would inexplicably change names, cease to exist for two blocks and then become the same street again or lead to a dead end without warning. Not even hunting dogs following a scent could have plotted through the maze without taking a few wrong turns.
Armin told me beforehand that the late-night scene in Venice would be different from all of the prior cities I’d visited. Seeing as how I was generally exhausted, a downshift in gears toward sobriety was welcome. Instead of chugging pints and swaying back and forth to native German songs (otherwise known as Hasselhoff’s body of work), we sipped wine outside of an Italian cafe, watching locals unsuccessfully try to pick up on American tourists (I swear that overly aggressive Italians ruin it for the rest of us dudes). We stood up and decided to walk around the streets of Venice.
Venice was a completely different scene at night. The humid, bustling streets transformed into to an empty city fit for exploring —a post-apocalyptic movie in which Armin and I starred as the only survivors. Unoccupied gondolas languidly bobbed back and forth in the nearly sheet glass water. Occasionally distant sounds from the ghosts around us would break the complete silence, but we never saw or came into contact with any of them.
The next day we tried our best to impersonate uber tourists. Armed with cameras and maps, but sans fanny packs, we set out to see all the historic shit we could. Besides speaking Italian, Armin has another skill that he demonstrated in Venice: Slipping into museums and other tourist related things without paying. As I joked in my Salzburg post, I would chastise Armin for being a drain on the American economy while he was studying here for nine months because of the countless places he snuck into. Prior to Italy, I would always demand reparations for the Americans and the fine people that conducted the Coachella music festival. Well, my case was significantly weakened in Venice. First, because Armin’s cheapness isn’t biased toward foreign lands; he even thumbs his nose at paying in his own country. Not only that, but with his help sliding unnoticed into several museums, I was siphoning money from a foreign country’s coffers too.
Then again I didn’t feel any guilt in the slightest, especially since my attention was fixated on what was inside the museums. My favorite was a former palace that once housed all of Venice’s kings (can’t remember the name). In every room, really cool fresco paintings covered every inch of the walls and ceilings. Not wanting to miss an opportunity to get something for free, Armin nonchalantly trailed behind a couple who were lead by a pay-for guide. I laughed and hung back, drinking in every image I could. The art in every room, although stretching a period of two or three centuries, seemed to adhere to a basic formula: royalty + angels + symbolism + plus more religious symbolism.
Walking from room to room, I had a good idea of what was coming next. Yet I couldn’t help but be blown away by the talent and scope of what I was looking at each time I shuffled inside a new room. The themes and styles overlapped (whoever the king was at the time gave them strict guidelines for what they could paint), but each artist didn’t seem to mind coloring inside the lines, so to speak. Apparently more than 50 artists contributed to the collective paintings. Each one injected their own subtle, yet groundbreaking take into a tried and true theme. After perusing all of the artwork, the only place left to explore in the palace was the basement, which interestingly doubled as a jail. Yes, apparently in ye olden times, the rich and the jailed shared the same quarters.
That night Armin and I had a nice Italian dinner. During this trip I learned a lot of things about etiquette that generally escape someone who has attended SDSU for more than two years. Armin piled another tip onto my plate bye asking in his heavy accent that’s equal parts German and Italian “How can you know about books and shit, and eat like a caveman?”
Harsh words coming from someone who doesn’t believe in entry fees and was known to wear socks and sandals at the beginning of his stay in San Diego, but I walked out of the restaurant with the ability to properly hold a wine glass and eat pasta.
Our next stop was a bar, where like all Italian bars, wine reigned supreme over shots and beer (no wonder we never saw anyone on the streets beer and hard liquor couldn’t fuel any late-night parties).
That night we walked in the same dead streets. The sounds of people surrounded us. Occasionally we would see a long shadow dancing on the wall, but that’s the closest we came to catching a glimpse of them.
The next day was more of the same. More touristing, more accidentally stepping into pictures and more exploring in the humid Venice air. Three weeks of traveling, coupled with warm Venice weather, had drained all life from me. I slowly shuffled back to our hostel as though a fat, sweaty man was clinging to me and weighing down my every step. Armin and I took a nap to prepare not only for not only my last night in Venice, but my last in Europe. We decided to pull an all nighter for the occasion.
The night began at one of the millions of Italian restaurants that populate Venice. Before leaving, I signed their guestbook “Thanks for the food, as we say in San Diego, it was off the richter, sincerely (our names) *proud members of 5755” (our old house number)
Once again, we went to one of the few late-night bars in Italy. We struck up a conversation with two Italian girls, eventually asking them to join us in a walk around Venice. I’m sure you’re all like “oh, all that rambling about romance earlier, I’m sure you were setting me up for some kind of dramatic finish. Meeting two Italian girls on your last night? Way too convenient.”
To be honest, I’ll warn you right now: That wasn’t foreshadowing. There are no literary devices here, just the straight facts as only a freelance journalist can give them to you. There were no wet kisses on long Venice bridges, no pressing up against someone as the sun came up.
Timing through a chink in Armin and I’s potentially romantic evening (no, not with each other). We sat with the two girls on the steps of a bridge, laughing as we passed a bottle of wine back and forth among us. Electric feeling in the air. Before we knew it, Armin and I had to leave. Sometimes there stars align, the right conditions assemble to form something bigger than themselves. I’m just happy I felt that in Prague - can’t fall for someone in every city.
At four A.M., Armin and I stepped outside of this perfect little world to join back up with reality, finding it much less ideal. For one, the clocks dictate where and when things come and go, and unfortunately the small hand of Armin’s watch was pointing lower than we would have liked. We only had an hour to find our hostel, round up our bags and catch a boat to the train station. We frantically ran through the streets of Venice, trying our best to recall the instructions the Italian girls gave us. Through some kind of miracle, or possibly a divining rod in my brain that’s activated by healthy amounts of wine, we successfully made our way back. Well, not before Armin pee’d off the most famous bridge in Venice. I laughed hysterically - maybe it was the wine, maybe it’s the fact that a million tourists snap photos on that bridge everyday - or maybe because it was such an Armin thing to do (well he didn’t sneak on the bridge, but it did show his penchant for disregarding authority by aiming his stream off of it). Either way, it’s a small memory that will always stay with me, one that never fails in cracking me up.
Hustling around paid off, with 15 minutes to spare, we caught our breath and walked across Piazza San expecting the same empty, echoing streets. When we saw a girl dancing with herself, spinning with a bottle of rum in her hand, it registered as an apparition in our minds. A spirit devoid of form. The closer we walked, the more we heard her say the word “cunt,” the more the spirit began to seem like flesh and blood. Finally the realization hit that she was more female than ghost.
She looked to be 23-years-old. Her age is an approximation, but one fact about her was irrefutable: she really, really drunk and really, really excited to see us. Fellow ghosts in the night. She kept telling us that she wanted to “glass some cunts.” Given that she was holding a bottle within striking distance of me, I’m just glad she didn’t perceive me to be a “cunt.”
We bid her farewell and boarded our train at 4:45 a.m. A small memory that didn’t mean much at the time, but nonetheless, like Armin peeing off the bridge, makes me laugh.
We stepped onto the boat and began the short journey to the train station at a tortoise’s crawl. The water shimmered against the yellow streetlights. As soon as I sat down, a wave of drowsiness hit me. I suddenly became alert when we passed underneath the bridge Armin pee’d off. I prayed he didn’t inspire throngs of other amoral Italians to piss off it.
I nodded off for a few minutes and awoke to the sound of the boat smacking into the cement. Jarred awake, this was it. Goodbye Venice, goodbye Europe… and goodbye Armin.
Fuck, mentally I’d be preparing for leaving Europe. But I’m ashamed to say that was one of the first times I’d thought about leaving Armin, effectively ending our bromance. That’s the thing about international students, they’re easy to take for granted. Low on responsibilities and prior engagements, they’re pretty much always there for you, especially if being there for you means doing anything that involves alcohol.
In my rush to board the train, and because of my gender’s general inability to express feelings beyond hunger and other primal emotions, I articulated this by saying “Um, wow I won’t see you any more, christ. Well umm, hug it out bitch.” We hugged, I stepped onto the train, and headed back to the U.S. in roughly the same state as when i entered: not entirely sober.
Slightly tipsy or not, that trip will always stay with me. Only three weeks of traveling ignited something in me. It wasn’t an awakening. I didn’t have an epiphany and make important life choices. It was a small, subtle change in outlook, something I carry with me to this day.
Thanks for reading, although I’m guessing the only person who reads this will be a nostalgic 70-year-old me looking for memories to harvest and share with my grandkids - but really only finding material that isn’t suitable for anyone under the age of 12.
