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.