From Africa To Russia

Wake up, catch the boat to Venice, ticket is twenty euros for three days, unlimited trips. Families take pictures on the ferry, every little child has his own digital camera. We disembark. Venice is wonderful, it is all canals and alleyways, it is like time travel back three hundred years. But what is best is that there are no cars, just people ambling around on foot. Saint this, Saint that, the Catholics certainly were prolific. Churches, monuments, basilicas, soupy green water, canal-side palaces, shops, cafes, and of course the obligatory hordes of tourists with their cameras and tour guides. I see St. Mark’s square (where the pigeons almost outnumber the tourists) and Rialto bridge, then wander over to the train station to pick up my ticket for the next leg of the journey (where a nervy Italian tries to muscle his way in on the line – I stand my ground and decline him). Venice is a maze of narrow alleyways and squares, and without the helpful signs pointing you in a general direction would be a nightmare to navigate. I am walking around at one point, I pass by a restaurant in front of which a little man in a mustache is standing. “Prego, no servizo,” he says to me without any prompting, spotting an obvious tourist. A well-dressed Italian couple is following me. “Bonjourno,” he says with open arms, trying to draw them in to eat. I guess you just have to laugh. The irony is that without tourists, a place like Venice would be a third world island – that’s all they have, an endless succession of jewelry stores, trinket hawkers, cafes, clothes stores etc. I see a sign for World Cup and since I am tired I go in. Australia is playing and the place is full of Aussies in their early twenties on a tour, getting drunk and whooping it up. I chat with a Mexican girl and a girl from Chicago, both also on the tour, as well as a wacky kid from Los Angeles named Matt, who has multiple earrings and crazy hair and sweat bands on his arms, who is going to be an actor some day and talks exactly like Quentin Tarantino. The girl from Chicago is going to be a television producer. “It’s who ya know,” she tells me. I’ll bet. The whole world has gone completely mad. Where are the house builders, the pipe layers. I outlast the tour children, who go off for a pre-planned gondola ride, and get silly drunk watching the US lose to Czechoslavakia. I don’t really give much of a shit about soccer, but I find myself strangely upset at the result. I want the Americans to beat these pompous Europeans at their own game. When I go to pay the bill, the treacherous little cunts try to charge me for an extra beer (which are a full 14 euros a piece, extra large size). I call them on it and they relent. After, I wander back to the boat, traverse in blinding dying sunlight, find my cabin and collapse.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.