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In leiu of the usual "why Spain is awesome and traveling rules," I would like to present something a bit different today. Something called
I may have eatten brains

For lunch today I arrived a bit late. It was raining out. In the dining room, everyone was finishing eatting as I arrived, and no one had bothered to turn on the ligths, leaving the gloomy gray sky as our only illumination. The meal started with spinach soup, one of the few Spanish dishes I cannot really stand. But I ate it all. I am not one to snub food that´s been graciously prepared for me. And there were fried potatoes and some sort of meat coming up for the main course, which pointed to brighter horizons.
If only it were so.
As my señora prepared a plate of food for me she asked if I thought she´d given me enough meat. "Of course," I told her sincerely. "There are a lot of bones in it," she explained, "maybe I should give you some more." I did not protest.
There were indeed a lot of bones in the meat, and removing them was made a bit difficult by the thick sauce which contained all sorts of vegetables and who knows what else. There was a subtly strange, slightly familiar taste to the food, which did not completely agree with me, but I cheerfully ate it anyway. Were I eight years old again, surely I would have cried or complained. But I´m 21 years old and I am no longer "picky."
Then I found a piece of meat that was stubbornly attatched to the bone. I had already been having a hard time distinguishing between meat and fat or skin or sauce or whatever exactly it was that I had been eatting, so I decided to fully uncover this odd piece of flesh and see what exactly it was connected to and whether it was worth eatting.
What I found was yellow, with slight ridges and a very defined, almost plantlike shape. It was squishy and I could not easily cut it with my fork.
But I´d seen tissue like this before. I the air had been thick with the smell of phermaldehyde, and I had a scalpel in my hand. Mrs. Ambert´s class, probably fifth grade, when we disected sheep brains. Perhaps there had been no smell underneath the preservative chemicals, but I was sure now that if the brain itself had smelled like anything, it was that strange taste I´d detected the lunch currently set before me.
I swept more of the sauce and vegetable bits away and saw that the bone was a vertebra. Which fit my theory exactly: on my plate, amid tomatoe sauce and aside fried potatoes was a very significant piece of SPINAL COLUMN.
Just to be sure, I asked my señora about it when she returned. She struggled a bit to explain the concept of "lamb" to me, since I did not know the Spanish word, then when I pressed her further, freely and cheerfully admited what I already knew to be true. I had been poking sheep brains with my fork. And then I had eatten off of the fork.
And who knows what other bits of spinal tissue I ate before I discovered this spoungey yellow bit.
I remember learning back in high school that bits of brain and spinal tissue that made it into hot dogs are what spread Mad Cow Disease to humans. Can anyone verify or deny this?
And can anyone wipe this incident from my . . . brain?

More Italy trip journal

We hit the streets of Florence with no plans and just as little time. I remember the city as cars, smog, rubbish bins, phone booths and tourist shop mannequins all blurring together beneath swirling clouds in a wide-open blue sky which, although obscured by the ancient buildings, I absorbed completely. To have finally left the train station and the underground mall which connected it to downtown and to finally be walking down the streets of Florence, Italy gave me a great sense of freedom and relief, even if the city itself wasn’t doing much for me.
We jogged past a gigantic famous building of some sort The Duomo, or something close to that, although I cannot describe with any sense of confidence since I hardly remember it. Someone snapped pictures. All I know is there were towers, it was probably too large to all fit a the camera viewfinder, which seems to suggest that I may have also snapped pictures as well, and I think it was painted in an interesting way. Upon learning that we were only in Florence for three hours, other travelers often asked, “did you at least see the Duomo (or whatever they called it)?” and I confidently assured them that we did. Although it was sort of like saying I’ve also seen Morocco. Which I may have seen from across the Mediterranean Sea while up in the Sierra Nevadas, because they say it’s possible, but I couldn’t tell you want it looked like, if I even saw it at all.
Our shutter-quick snapshot feet finally came to a full stop when our street unraveled into the open void of a giant plaza. Magnetically we were drawn to the cathedral at the end closest to us, where other tourists were gathered on the steps and at the door. A chat with the security guard revealed that we needed to pay eight euros to get in, and it would take about an hour to see the whole thing. All of us were centimo-pinching kids on a budget, so the four eight seemed a bit expensive, until we realized how much we’d spent on train tickets to just to get to Florence and decided that the price to actually see something in Florence was comparatively quite low. Even so, we left one spendthrift on the stairs as we made out way to the ticket booth.
Most of the cathedrals in Europe are dark, gaudy and guilt-gilded. It’s hard to escape the feeling of decadence, but in this one it was clear that our admission price went to keeping the sanctuary well-let, clean and relatively appealing. Sort of like a modern-day payment for penance, but without the pretense of salvation. There were shrines set up around the front with offer boxes and actual candles to light, unlike most of the electric night-light alter boxes in Granada.
More prominent, but without flickering candle light, were the secular shrines of this cathedral: the eternal resting place of the Italian Renaissance’s best and brightest. Michelangelo, Galileo, Dante, Machiavelli and other luminaries were buried in graves more or less built right into the cathedral wall, adorned with sculptures and Latin inscriptions. Galileo’s tomb was the oddest sight, as I seem to remember that he was imprisoned and basically killed by the Catholic Church, but I suppose it’s nice to know that they didn’t hate him forever. I wonder if his soul got absolved, too?
I didn’t know that Dante’s tomb was in the cathedral until I was standing in front of it, and I had a small literary freak-out. I’ve not read Dante himself, but I’ve read a lot of rad stuff one way or another inspired by The Inferno (Milton, Blake, C.S. Lewis), and let’s face it – the name Dante has a lot of pop to it. The words “Dante’s tomb” just sound cool.
After we’d sufficiently explored the corners and courtyards, admired the ceiling and the statues, we returned to the plaza to collect our missing member, and hit the streets of Florence once again, arriving at the train station three minutes after our train left.

NEXT TIME: DANTE’S TOMB!!!!!!!!!!!!

Post-thankful reflections. + a contest!

I realize that for most people Thanksgiving is one of those reassurance holidays. You know, the kind where friends and familiars return to the same family dining room and eat the traditional meal that hasn´t really changed since the introduction of green-bean casserole in the mid-fifties. A heart-warming practice to be sure.
But Thanksgiving doesn´t really mean that to me any more. Since I left for college, each Thanksgiving has brought me to an increasingly forigen, yet always friendly, dining table, and I find myself looking forward to whatever bizarre holiday hijinx are in store for me next year.

Freshman year I ate at home in Dallas, which was not too odd except for the inclusion of Mr. Travis, my quiz team coach from high school, at our dinner table (appropriate since I spent three years of school eatting my lunches in his classroom) and my Great-great Aunt Rosana preforming a slightly racist skit from her childhood as we were all eatting mint M&Ms after dinner.

Sophomore year my Aunt Kathy and Uncle Gary invited me out to Palm Desert to spend Thanksgiving with them at their "spa," which fortunately was not a hoity-toity place where everyone wears cucumbers on their eyes and has a personal trainer, but a little desert community based around a few hot springs pools and populated by bunch of retired people living in mobile homes and driving around on four-wheelers. We ate dinner at a card table with the neighbors from the next mobile-home over, and in the morning got up early to hit golfballs across a makeshift course of dirt, rocks and coffee cans. We got one golf club each. I think I also almost killed myself on theif four-wheeler. But I couldn´t have picked a cooler way to spend my first Thanksgiving away from home. And they fed me all the pie I could have asked for.

Junior year I was deep in screenwriting assignments and couldn´t get away for a few days to spend with my aunt and uncle out in the desert again, but my old roommate Ed invited me to his grandma´s house in Compton, East L.A. This would not only be my first Thanksgiving with black people, it would be my first Thanksgiving without any other white people. Well, except that Ed´s last name is White, which is clearly instant comedy. But none of that really mattered -- I have never been accepted into another family more quickly. For dinner we had all the traditional trimmings, as well as maccoroni and cheese, which I thought was an excellent addition to the dinner-spread. I also learned how to make the best peanutbetter and jelly sandwiches ever, and Ed and I got to teach his grandma how to properly put on a backpack, something we were both amazed that she had never done before. Ed played guitar, I played with his cousins, we gave most of our leftovers to a homeless guy at the gas station, and I ate the rest of it for lunch the next day.

Senior year (that´d be this one), I spent in Granada at a fancy Spanish resturant where the staff tried their valient best to serve us a real American dinner. My study-abroad program set the whole deal up and they told everyone to "look nice," which isn´t exactly a formal dress code, and was interpreted in many different ways, from tee-shirts to ties, from prom dresses and shalls to mini dresses and go-go boots. It was my first Thanksgiving served with Fanta and bi-lingual blessings. For many of the kids there it also seemed to be their first Thanksgiving served with as much wine as they wanted, and there was a lot of giggling and a ridiculous ammount of picture taking. I didn´t even know everyone who I ended up being pulled over to pose with. But the dinner was pretty good. The best part was actually the quiche, not surprising since the Spaniards can do amazing things with eggs. We were also served chunks of tuna, broccoli soup, and each person at the table got a different, (often unidentifiable) chunk of the turkey. One of my friends sitting next to me was too distressed about being away from home and familiar food to eat much of anything except bread and mashed potatoes, but I told her that a forigen Thanksgiving just something I was used to by now.

I called my family when I got home around midnight, and was happy (thankful?) to find that Thanksgiving hasn´t settled into a run over there, either. The dog was running around with stitches on her nose from being attacked by a squirrel and our dinner guests included not just Grandma Betty, Aunt Rosana and Mr. Travis, but three Japanese exchange students from my sister´s school.

And I´m thankful that there are always some things you can count on, like turkey and mashed yams and friendship. But that´s not what this holiday was always about. The first Thanksgiving was celebrated by strangers in a strange land who were able to get by thanks to the kindness of people they hardly knew. These past few years have brought home that point to me -- Thanksgiving isn´t completely about the familiar, it´s about the strange . . . and the stranger. I think every table should have at least one.


ALSO!!
I´m starting to get tired of my beard, which just made its Internet debut yesterday. So I´m starting a new contest. Just tell my what I should do with my beard (keep it? shave it? shave one side of it? braid it?) and why. The best answer not only gets to see their fashion advice come true, but I´ll send out some more Spanish comics to the winner. Game starts now!

Holiday Pictures!

Feliz día de gracias, everyone!



I´m thankful that I can grow a beard!

And for my home country!

And for the country that I´m living in now!

I´m even thankful for the ocean between them!

There´s just too much excellent stuff in the world to not be thankful. Totally thankful.

between classes.

More Italy coming soon. But for now a quick update:
-this is the first month since July in which I haven´t traveled to another country, but next month will see me traveling between five.
-today was the first time I ever had to look up a word in Spanish to remember its English spelling (the word was language).
-I ate at an Indian resturant last weekend with two Spanish guys, a German and my Indian-American friend Ronak. The food was so spicy I had to keep running to the bathroom for water as there was only one waiter for the whole resturant, and he didn´t seem interested in refilling my glass. I got to explain to the Spaniards that we do not eat pizza or ribs on Thanksgiving.
-For Thanksgiving (that´s soon, huh?) I will be eatting at a fancy resturant with all the American kids in my program. There will be turkey. There will be cranberry sauce! As far as I know, there will be no ribs or pizza.

More from Italy! We go to Flourence! Hijinx ensue!!

We got up early to leave Venice and promptly realized that although our spacious camping bungalow had two showers, neither of them worked particularly well. Took the bus from the campground to the city center and took our time strolling to the train station, where we sat on the sunny steps and ate breakfast purchased from the train station cafeteria. I ended up with yogurt and a very sugary donut that I wanted to wish away almost immediately after eating it.
As we waited for the train to come, I snuck glances at the American newspapers some fellow travelers were reading, looking for news of the election. It took me a few slightly conspicuous passes to get the gist of the main headline: trouble in Iraq is bad news of Bush reelection campaign. I was hoping for something a little juicer, but with Internet access costing close to seven euros an hour in Italy, I would take my homefront news any way I could get it.
We got relatively comfy seats on the train, heading to Florence, and pressed our noses to the windows as we crossed Italy, green and sun-spotted in mid-morning.
Once we arrived in the Renaissance capital we had a bit of business to take care of: we needed to call the hostel we had booked for that night in Cinque Terre and find out how late we would be able, and then based off of that figure, we had to buy train tickets, hopefully late enough in the day that we would have time to enjoy Florence. This seemed simple enough, until I was found that the number I had for the hostel was . . . well, something was very wrong with it. I could dial it well enough. That was no problem. But after I dialed the number I only got a dial tone. I tried adding the Italian country code prefix. I tried subtracting it. I let others try as well. But we could get no human being on the other end of the phone line. Heck, we couldn’t even get a robot! And if we could have, it probably would have been an Italian robot, and that wouldn’t have done any good either.
So we’re stuck in the train station in Venice. I wait in line at the Custom Service station for a good twenty minutes as family with crying kids try and negotiate their tickets, then finally get to talk to an agent whose English is about as good as my Spanish. Of course feel very stupid asking her if she can just tell me how to make a call from a payphone. But she can’t get our number to work, either.
It is at this point that I came to face the painfully obvious truth: there was no technical difficulty, no language problem, no question of the right amount of change in the pay phone. Only that I had forgotten to write down the last digit in the phone number.
We had been in Florence for over an hour by the time we finally left the train station – in search of an Internet portal. Forking over a euro for ten minutes of time in a crowded cubbyhole crammed full of websurfers, I was able to access my e-mail and get the full number -- turns out I had only left off the zero at the end. And when my friends asked to see the number as I had correctly written it on my hand in purple pen, I sheepishly realized I forgotten the zero a second time.
Back at the train station I was finally able to talk with someone at the hostel. After I stammered, “uh, hello. Do you speak English?” the man explained that we had to be there by eight o’clock. Which gave us about three more hours in Florence before we had to catch a train. By the time we got something to eat at the train station’s beyond-awful food court (where they sold the greasiest, blandest pizza I have ever put in my mouth, and featured a McDonalds offering some sort of Japanese promotion that included “Samurai Shakes” and “Zen Nuggets”), it was clear we were not going to have time to see The David. Or much else for that matter.
But we were bound to see everything we could.
NEXT TIME: all we could see were a few paintings, a cathedral and a morgue.

old italia

I have a sore throat. I´m not sure if it´s becaue I am getting over a cold, because I am just getting a NEW cold, or because I am surrounded by people smoking cigarettes. Either way, I am eatting a Twix bar, the first American candy I´ve bought here, and hoping it will make me better.
Somehow.
I dropped the Italy travelouge a few weeks ago, but I´m just going to pick right up and pretend like nothing happened. Call it the weblog version of the five second rule. If there are germs floating around, I can deal with them. They´ve probably all already found their way to my throat anyway, but I have my Twix bar! chomp. chew. etc.
Anyway, Venice! We quit the monuments and waterfront in hopes of finding ending our night with the cheapest Genuine Italian Resturant we could find. In Venice cheapest does not equal cheap, however, and we gave up the bargain hunt at a ristorante patio where strings of colored Christmas lights shown softly in the Venician, haloing us worn-out and miss-matched Americans with the sort of romantic light that attracts presumptious and insisten rose vendors. I explained that the three girls we were traveling with were like sisters to me and Ronak, but I don´t think the rose vendor spoke Spanish. Or English.
Our waiter was an old Italian man and I think the rest of his old Italian family cooked our food. I don´t remember what I ordered at the resturant, except that it wasn´t really that good. I´ve never been huge on Italian food though.
After dinner at the mostly-deserted resturant, we returned to the main canal and hopped on a water bus to take us back to the (land)bus station. I wish that more cities had canals just so there could be more waterbusses. As I stood on the open deck and leaned into the wind of our velocity, Venice spilled out before us in black and light, hotel billboards and monuments illuminated with a curator´s reverence.
We passed by a cruise ship with green and blue portholes, a swimming pool lit like a disco and at least five resturants that I could count. To this small-town boy who took a 2nd grade field trip to see them put in the McDonalds that would legitimize my pueblo as a real Town, it looked like science fiction -- a whole floating city of steel and glass, bigger than my school in the states, bigger than Mount Rushmore.
Bigger, it seemed, than anyone ever claimed the Titanic was.
When we were on dry land again we sat down by the canal and waved at the gondolas passing by while we waited for our bus to take us back to the hostel. It seems now that I look back, that almost everyone in a gondala was an old person, floating along beneath past the cathedrals and beneath the bridges, smiling at us with a bit of a confused suspicion. But maybe that´s just me remembering the city. Past its prime, coasting on history. Watching us more than we were watching it as we ran around with our cameras and guide books. Venice was a kind city, I´d say. Tired, but tolerant.

False start, excuses, etc.

I was just going to update, but now I have to go eat lunch.
This has happened more times than you realize.

More Venice

So we finished our pizza, were laughed at by some Italian kids and took a few pictures by some historical looking Roman columns, and headed back to the bus station where we zeroed in on a group of grungy looking American kids with backpacks, who were unsurprisingly headed to the same campground as us grungy looking American kids. A bus picked us up, and the driver informed us that he´d take us to the campground for free, but if we wanted to get back we´d have to pay, which made me glad we already had reservations. The ride was about half an hour long and at one point stretched over a bay where the only land in sight was the long, thin stretch of road we were traveling on. It reminded me of the train scene in Spirited Away.
The campground itself was in a small town outside of Venice and looked like your basic tourist campground. Wooden rails, gravel roads, unheated pool, all that. We got lucky and ended up in a five person "bungalow," esentially a mobile home with a kitchen/dining room, two bedrooms and two bathrooms, for less than 20€ each. There were mosquitos everywhere outside and the showers only ran two temperatures: scalding and freezing, but we were pretty happy and impressed with our humble abode.
We paid the three euros or so to return to Venice on the next bus and scoped out the city.
Our goal was to find the big, famous main plaza, which I have now forgotten the name of. We followed the signs on the corners of buildings pointing toward the plaza, which ended up being a pretty good way to get a tour of the whole city as the route we followed was anything but direct.
We stopped to get gelato from an old Italian man who had reggae blasting from his shop and Bob Marely posters on the wall. I went out on a limb and got kiwi, a privelage I would not have had in the United States. It tasted fresh and tart, although having the seeds in there was pretty cool. Not sure I´d do it again.
Also stopped at plently of tourist shops (including the Venice Disney Store!) and a few beautiful views -- watching the lights of houses and boats reflect on the dark canals after the sun went down, that sort of thing.
When we finally arrived at the huge plaza, there was some sort of luminous blob floating about 20 feet in the air, and a small crowd of people gathered around it. As we got closer I realized it was lighting for a film set -- they´d blocked of quite a lot of the plaza and old palace and in the distance we could see dozens of actors in 16th Century aristocrasy garb preparing for a ball scene of some sort. Somehow the grips had rigged up a nine-foot-long inflatable balloon with lights inside of it to create a nice diffused source, perhaps to get a daylight effect. Elsewhere a huge spotlight had been rigged up to a high clocktower and shown down on the famous palace (I think it was a palace) that was part of the scene. From a couple of extras in the crowd we learned that the film was a Disney production called Casanova, which imdb tells me will just be on TV, not in theatres.
At the other end of the (really quite large) plaza we found a 50-year-old German man sitting on some cathedral steps doing a water color sketch of the palace for his own notebook. Although none of us spoke any of the same languages, we were able to communicate a little. He seemed like a very nice guy. Nearby, locals hired for the film production dashed around doing who knows what else and at opposing resturants across the plaza, two famous dueling orchestras kept the music going strong . . .

Venice

Venice is more or less what you expect -- a little labrythine patch of snow-globe caliber Enchantment neatly crisscrossed by bridges, canals and laundry lines. There are persistent flower vendors, ornate fountians and vines overflowing the banks of the canals. There are all sorts of small boats tied up to docks next to the sidewalk. The streets twist together in a way that seems to deliberately encourage losing yourself in the city -- nothing goes directly anywhere.
The city is sinking, of course, and the canals are rumored to be so polluted that if you fall in they have to take you straight to the hospital. Add to this the facts that hardly anyone can afford to live in Venice any more and the local economy is entierly dependent on tourism and it becomes clear that Venice is a dying city kept on life support -- now a novelty resort.
But while it might not be more than a bauble now, just a shell of what it once was, it´s certinally a charming bauble.
The biggest thing I can fault it for is having payphones with never give change, but that seems to be pretty consistent all over Italy.
After contacting our hostel and making sure a bus WOULD be coming to pick us up later in the afternoon we hit up the pizza scene for lunch. The pizza in Spain has been uniformly bland -- possibly 80% of the worst pizza I´ve ever eatten has come from there, so I was excited for Italian pizza. It wasn´t bad. They put a lot more oil on their pizza, offer more toppings than just ham and cheese and the overall effect was pleasing.
However, the last pizza I had before coming to Spain was my first taste of deep dish pizza -- straight from Chicago -- and I´m not sure if any pizza in the world, even those from the "homeland" can compare.

Oops, cafe is closing again! I guess the bus story will have to wait until next time.

At Last! Italy Trip journal . . . part one.

Finally I´m posting my adventures in Italy. I´ll try to keep this flowing quickly and reguarly so the whole thing is completed within a week or two. The trip was spun directly out of an AIFS trip to Madrid, so we´ll start from there. Now, without further ado:

ITALY part one.
Starting point: Madrid.
Destination: Barcelona.
We caught the night train for a eight hour trip that would take us from the heart of Spain to the coast. The idea was that we could sleep on the journey and arrive in Barcelona fresh and rested for more travel.
We ended up in a compartment like they have in the Harry Potter movies – a little room with four seats on each side facing each other. There were five of us traveling together, plus three girls from South America, who we chatted with for a while, appreciating their accents, which are actually clearer and less slurred than the Andalusian accents we have had to adjust to. Eventually, however, we were ready to sleep.
And we could not. The seats we were in allowed us very little leg room, did not recline and had no headrests. We tossed and turned for a long time, leaning on each other, resting legs here and there, trying to get comfortable in any way possible. The hours were long and restless. Eventually, someone kicked the bottom of my seat and it slid forward a little bit. This was a startling discovery. I found a lever, which I could pull and make my seat move in a way none of us had thought possible. In a sleepy staccato I managed to get the word out: “Seats . . . recline!”
Soon we were all a little more comfortable, but I also found two pairs of legs resting on either side of my seat. There was hardly enough room for me to sit much less rest comfortably. But other people were sleeping at last. I got up to walk around the train and call my girlfriend. When I returned, my seat had been completely taken over. I nudged people out of the way and collapsed stiffly. I may have gotten an hour of sleep before we arrived in Barcelona.
We stumbled into the station needing to find a bus to the airport, somehow we did. I don’t remember much except being exhausted and the fact that most of the signs weren’t in Spanish but in Catalan, the Northern Spanish dialect. It felt like we’d already stepped into another country. And then we stepped onto bus.

Destination: Gerona
We got extraordinarily cheap plane tickets to Italy thanks to a discount European airline called Ryan Air which operates out of airports close to, but not actually IN major cities. The trade off is that you have to spend more time and money on ground transportation – I have no idea how long it took us to get to the Gerona airport, but I know I was slightly more well rested when we arrived there. We may have had to take two busses, actually. All is a fuzzy fog in which I blink to stay awake. I do remember my eyelashes pretty well from this period of travel, but they didn’t look any different than they usually do.
I suppose we got through the security check at the airport without any real trouble. I just had my backpack and had not brought any swords with me. The only real danger was that the limited amount of clothes I was brining might start to smell after I wore them for a few days, but that was far from my mind at the time.
I do remember eating some sort of breakfast in the airport cafeteria. I think I just bought some immunity-enhancing yogurt, which did its job, and maybe ate a few cookies that someone else had.
Then we waited at the back of what could very liberally be called a “line” to board our plane. Apparently order and anti-mob devices are a luxury Ryan Air bypasses in order to pass the savings onto us.
Here are other things they skimp on:
Beverage services.
Honey roasted peanuts.
Reclining seats.
Seatback pockets.
Emergency cards (all information is printed on the seat in front of you).
Manners.

It didn’t matter. I slept instantly.

Destination: Venice
Oh, also skimped on were landing terminals. We just climbed down the stairs and walked into a converted warehouse which now served as our airport and first taste of Venice and Italy.
Of course we didn’t land in Venice exactly. We landed in some little town a few hours outside of Venice. So we had to catch another bus to actually get to the canal city.
But first there we had to claim our bags, use the restroom and make it through customs.
I had not checked a bag, so I didn’t worry about that.
I did worry that inside the men’s restroom was only a porcelain hole in the ground with a chain above to pull to flush. No seat. No toilet paper. Just a hole with food grips on the side. This seemed like a particularly ominous sign to me.
Others found more ominous the fact that customs basically was nothing more than a doorway leading through a hall leading to Italy. Nothing to stop us, no one to stamp our passports, no one to even check our passports, not even a warning sign or cardboard cut out of a security guard we could pretend to talk to and be hassled by. We just walked through confused and possibly carrying dangerous items, not that anyone would know.

I finally had gotten enough sleep on various modes of transportation that I remember some of the ride into Venice. If Spain at first seemed very brown to me, Italy seemed very green. We rumbled through past vineyards, orchards and houses overgrown with shrubbery through a countryside that looked no different than it must have when they first started putting pictures of the Italian countryside on the labels of wine bottles.

Venice, of course, is a completely constructed city that although ancient, feels as far removed from the countryside as you can get. In the middle of the bus station we tried to get our bearings . . . busses were everywhere momentarily, but once we ventured into the city proper all motor vehicles would be vanish’ed, replaced by boats and walkways hardly used for anything except tourism any more, and perhaps a few bicycles. But before we hit up the canals in earnest, we’d have to find out hostel, which would involve . . . surprise . . . a few more bus rides.

NEXT TIME: I promise only a short paragraph about busses.