Day 10: Villach to Venice

Tuesday, June 18

We left Villach at 00:12, so technically day 10, and six minutes later than scheduled, after spending an hour and a half sleeping in the terminal. Of the three times this week we've been in Austria, that was the longest.

Thanks to the mess up on the train booking, this put us in the mainland part of Venice at just after 3am. We didn't want to be on the mainland, though; we needed the island of Venice. The famous part. The part that is worth seeing. So we slept in that terminal for an additional hour and a half before a train came through to take us to Venice's main terminal. This still put us in the city at 5:30. What the hell to do at 5:30am in Venice? Well, the sun's already well up, but the people aren't.

We tried getting bus passes, but the ticket machine would accept none of our credit/debit cards for some reason. So i scouted around for an ATM. After fruitlessly searching for probably two laps around the entire thing, i came to a map, which showed exactly one ATM in the whole complex. Directing myself there, i found no ATM. Either it is nonexistent or it is inside of the closed shop found at that location. From the map, it seems like it should be outside of that shop.

The tourism office was also closed. The only thing we could come up with was to walk to our hotel, unsure of how far it really was away from the train station.

It turned out not to be too bad of a walk. The door was locked, the lights were off, and nobody could be seen within, so i rang the bell and a moment later a sleepy young fellow appeared, turning on the lights as he passed them. He let us in and allowed us to stow our bags in the back. They weren't in a locked luggage room or anything; just in the back of the hotel, down an employees-only hallway. I was a little insecure about it, but we really had no reason to distrust the hotel staff, so we abandoned them there and moved on with our day.

This consisted largely of wandering around Venice and just looking at the city. Merchants were in the process of setting up their shops to do business. Dogs were peeing right in the walkways wherever they felt like, while their masters looked on uncaringly; few were on leashes. Street sweepers were out sweeping the streets, and by street sweepers i mean people with brooms. And by streets, i mean the cobblestone walkways that make up the trails through the city which are not waterways, and are often only a few feet wide. Truthfully, i had expected much more waterway; i'd always believed every building in Venice to be accessible only by boat. That's not even close to true.

It was good to have our big-ass backpacks off our shoulders and the suitcase not trailing behind us, but still, we were grumpy. Amanda mostly because of the train issues and because she was very hungry but it was too early to get breakfast, and me because i'd slept very, very little and it was much hotter out than i'm comfortable with, and i hadn't showered in two days. I was embarrassed to be even walking on the same streets with other people, afraid they were saying in their native languages things like, “Oi! Get a whiff of THIS guy!” even though the streets themselves smelled largely of pee (another surprising revelation about Venice).

Our aimless meandering had to get us to an open shop with breakfast foods eventually, and it did, just before we had gotten all the way back to the train station. We got some pastries and water, and from there Amanda was much more agreeable; me, maybe not so much. There wasn't much to be done for me until 1pm, when we could officially check into our hotel and get into the shower.

Somewhere in that stroll, we stopped at an ATM to pull out some cash. The card worked just fine there, so we're not sure what the bus pass dispenser's problem was. Returning to it, since the tourism office still wasn't open, we paid cash for a couple of bus passes and then hopped on one, just to get a good view of the city from the water. See, in Venice, a bus is a kind of boat, because of course it is. I mentioned that there are far more streets than waterways, but what i haven't mentioned yet is that there are no motor vehicles on those streets, it's all foot traffic.

I fell asleep on the boat, a hot, sweaty mess of a man who couldn't take the sunlight anymore. Amanda let me nap for a bit, but then woke me up and got us off of the bus, thinking that the walking would help me stay awake. It did, but also made me more irritable about the sunlight. I was trying to stay in the shade as much as possible, which you'd think would be easy with buildings as tight up against one another as possible and most of the streets being narrow conduits just wide enough for two pedestrians to pass with minimal twisting, but it wasn't, not so much.

We ended up on the bus-boats a couple more times throughout the day, and i fell asleep every time.

Here's a weird note that i'm not sure where best fits in the story, so i'll put it here. We kept seeing this statue, probably a couple stories tall but we couldn't be sure since we never got very close to it, on an island out in the main canal. It's a giant, purple, naked, pregnant woman with no arms. Every time we'd see it, i'd mutter, “there's THAT weird thing again.” This has no bearing on anything, but we saw it so many times it should really be mentioned.

The next time we crossed the tourism office, it was open. So we set about getting information about the Venice Pass, which you'd probably expect to be similar to the very useful London Pass and the mythical Paris Pass. You'd be right. But it's cheaper at 30 Euros and good for an entire week. However, the travel agent actually talked us out of it since we're only in town for the one day, and into the much cheaper Museum Pass, which for 16 Euros gets us in to four Venice museums, including the Doge's Palace, which is apparently the main thing to see around here. So we headed there straightaway.

It's a palace, that's for sure. No photography or video allowed, of course. All of the walls are covered, floor to ceiling, with original oil paintings from the 1500s. The paintings are on canvasses, but the canvasses are probably 20' high by 50' long – just ballparking. I'm bad at estimating lengths and such, but what i'm getting at is holy hell, you guys, these things are enormous. One artist was commissioned to paint them all – there's got to be miles of paintings in here. And when i say floor to ceiling, i mean across the ceilings, too. All the frames are gold, naturally.

Then you go downstairs, and there are actual dungeons. After that, you cross the Bridge of Sighs, which has a great name and as such is a good place for some vulturing.

Yeah, very few people who are going to read this are going to get that reference. Sorry.

When we were done with the Doge's Palace, it seemed like it was late enough, though we didn't have a watch and couldn't read most of the public clocks (most of them have all 24 hours listed on their faces, which is cool, but there's no hand, per se. There's a giant sun that rotates in the middle and we don't know what the heck it's pointing at). On the way we stopped for lunch. Amanda got a genuine Italian lasagna and i got pizza, which seemed disappointingly American. I thought pizza in Italy was radically different from the item we gave that name to in America. This one was not.

The shower in our room at the Hotel Bernardi is weird, and sucks. But it is a shower! We cleaned ourselves well, and then headed back out to enjoy some more Venice.

First thing we did was stop into St. Mark's Cathedral, since going to cathedrals seems to be what we do when we go abroad. There's no photography or video allowed in there, either, but they pissed me off so i took some anyway. Here's the story.

St. Mark's Cathedral requires women to cover their shoulders and legs to enter. I found this to be degrading enough, but if you don't happen to have such coverings with you, they provide shawls to cover yourself with...at the cost of one Euro each. Amanda required two, since she was wearing both a tank top and athletic shorts, and they are only big enough to cover either the shoulders or the legs. At this point i was willing to say fuck these guys, let's just leave, but Amanda seemed intent on seeing the interior, so i went along with it.

With her offensive body parts now covered, we entered the nave to see virtually every single other tourist in the building taking shot after shot with their cameras, flashes on. I saw a couple of other video cameras go by. Not one single person got called out for violating this sacred rule of their holy place of worship. We've been obliging in other religious institutions which have requested no photos or video taken, such as Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, and the chapel at the London Tower. It's their place of worship, we're the guests, and we can follow rules. But the sexist, archaic standard that they chose to crack down on, on ladies' heathenistic display of shoulders and – God forbid! - knees, but their failure to make even a token attempt at enforcing a much more pressing rule of no flash photography, since frequent flashes of light actually damage the art and ancient relics in the cathedral, got me so mad that i just went with the flow and whipped out my camera. I wasn't very careful with my camera work, though; i was aiming more for stealth than framing, since – even with literally every other person to use as a meat shield – i didn't want my device taken away. It doesn't matter. I think i got a pretty good shot at all of their gothic ceilings, gaudily dressed up in more gold than any other cathedral we've seen in Europe.

We didn't stay long in St. Mark's. There's a box just outside the worship hall for ladies to discard their used wraps, but Amanda instead slipped hers into our bag, with the intent of symbolically burning them when we get home. She paid for them, after all; the things couldn't possibly have cost that church even half a Euro, they're pretty cheap-looking. I've covered earlier in this log how great it is to have religion in the world, to inspire people to create great things, but this a major point on how religion is bad for the world. Pushing misogyny and over-the-top standards of modesty on a society that has no need for such things.

Amanda later said that if it bothered me that much, i should have said something, and we'd have left without entry. She was expecting it, though, having been forewarned by a friend who's visited this part of the world before, and since we are the guests, she was ok with adhering to their standards. Besides, we're going to have to go through this again when we get to the Vatican.

I guess that, between the two of us, i'm just the bigger feminist.

We got through the other three museums covered by our passes within an hour or two. There's not really anything particularly noteworthy about any of them, other than the sheer volume of paintings of Mary and the Baby Jesus. Hundreds of paintings, all depicting the same scene, taking up an entire floor of a building.

By that point we'd been on the streets of Venice for 12 hours, minus the showering time. I was pretty well ready to be done for the day, the heat and exhaustion combining to make me one miserable Trevor. I posited that it was time to return to the hotel, grabbing dinner along the way, and Amanda was pretty easy to persuade to my line of thinking. She'd kind of wanted to stay out longer, but with no specific goals, agreed that we had probably gotten our fill of wandering Venice.

There's a nice pasta place just two doors down from our hotel. Amanda had already voiced her preference for having real Italian pasta for dinner, so that's where we went. The only other patrons in the restaurant happened to be a group of school administrators from Wisconsin. Strange, that. We didn't say anything, but eavesdropped on their conversation throughout our meal. It was kind of interesting to us, at the time, but maybe not worth writing down in this journal. Something about trying to fire a creepy gym teacher.

I must say, my spaghetti was easily the most delicious pasta i've ever had in my life. It sure didn't look like much when he first brought it out, but the simplicity may well have been the beauty of it. So yes, having pasta in its own home country is an experience worth having. Amanda's four-cheese pasta was maybe not as heavenly, but definitely worthwhile.

After dinner, i conceded one last walk down the street to get some ice cream. This was our second round of ice cream cones today, but Italian ice cream is far superior to anything i've eaten in America. What can i say, Italians know food. Here's looking forward to eating in Rome tomorrow.

Alright. It is 9:00, and today that's my bed time. I'm honestly surprised i made it this far.