We've done so much in such a short time that I'm starting to feel an internal pressure to keep up. The last dispatch covered Ireland, but we've already gone through Germany and are now in Italy; I'll try and get up to speed in this dispatch.
I'll be very arbitrary and try to gloss over Germany. Germany was a side trip for a small work contract with an American website devoted to digital cameras and imaging,
The Imaging Resource. Every two years a camera conference is held in Cologne, Germany: the Photokina. I've been to camera conferences with I.R. before, but in comparison to American shows the Photokina is massive: eleven halls in the Koelnmesse taken up by pretty much anything related to photography. My contribution to the website's coverage was video: my cohort Shawn and I can be seen in several videos here.
Cologne was fun: busy, but fun. For me, getting paid to cover a camera convention is a pretty big bonus, and it's icing on the cake that the guys I get to work with are really fun, too. In the end we put together twenty-seven videos of Photokina content, and I'm proud to say that's probably the most video coverage of any website. But more than just the conference, the actual city was very kind to us. Two of the meals we had in restaurants will stand out in my mind for quite some time, an Italian restaurant (The Arena) and an upscale bistro in downtown Cologne, "2 Cross". Both of these restaurants had one crucial ingredient in common: the service. It's my belief that customers come to a restaurant only partially for the food; mostly, they come for the experience. And part of that experience is feeling welcomed. That was certainly the case in both of these restaurants.
We left Cologne on October 2nd, taking a train through Germany to have a five-hour stopover in Munich, and then an overnight train into Venice. We managed to get into Munich on the last day of Oktoberfest, which you think would probably be a really neat experience, especially if you like beer. As it happens, I don't really have a big thing for beer - especially massive sopping tankards of it - but the Germans seem to. In fact, they get right into it, dressing up and imbibing as much beer as is humanly possible. And then rolling around the streets and singing, and bouncing off walls, people, lamps, each other. It got old a bit fast, especially when glass started getting dropped and breaking with some regularity and tempers flared. I think it would be fun to speak (and sing) German and get on the inside of the party, but much like being the guy who arrived too late to the all-night kegger and there's no beer left, it's not quite as much fun.
But visiting Munich was made completely worthwhile by exactly one random point of chaos: an old, grizzled, blues-piano-playing busker dude. The guy was probably in his sixties, a portly frame and dressed all in black; long, unkempt white hair that flowed past his shoulders and a beard that trickled past his biceps. But man, could he play his piano, and quite the sight that was too. It was the perfect accompaniment to him; a rickety upright piano anchored to a wide dolly, such that it could be wheeled in and out of places, and when he played it, the whole thing wobbled and slid from side to side, bouncing around so much at times that you thought it would collapse at any moment. And the piano, worn by years of use and misuse, strings broken, the tops of the ivory keys cracked and missing, probably not even able to hold tune. But the whole ensemble worked, and he made it work. The man could play the blues, peppering the keys with his fingers, swinging his body and tapping his feet to keep the time. His lyrics came out in German and broken English, slurred a bit either way. And the crowd loved him, filling his jar with change and bills. It just goes to show you that in most cases, it's not the instrument but the player, and this guy could play.
We hopped back on the train at eleven thirty and shared our couchette cabin with a Korean girl named Mini, who just happened to be studying in Calgary and was taking some time off to travel. She too was going to Venice, and we chatted for a while before settling in to be lulled to sleep by the gentle, cradling rocking of the train.
A bit of backstory. In my previous trip to Europe in 1998, I thought the idea of spending twenty extra dollars on a sleeping car was just a waste of good money. So I did a night train between Prague and Venice, sleeping in a seat that reclined quite well. As it turned out, this was a pretty dumb idea, because in each country you pass through, the border patrol wanders through the train, waking up people that aren't in sleeping cars and checking their passports. So during this one particular overnight trip, I was awoken, as I recall it, at least four times. And it wasn't the comfortable a sleep. So by saving a few dollars, I was a write off for the next day, where I essentially crashed on arrival at the first bed I could find.
But in the sleeping car, however, it's much more civilized. They hold on to your passport for you and do the presentation in your stead, and give it back to you in the morning. And you get an actual bed, six feet long and two feet wide, enough padding to get you through the night, a sheet, a pillow and a blanket. And yes, the rocking of the train did lull me to sleep. I even woke up before the alarm we'd set to alert us that we were probably getting close to Venice, but that probably had more to do with mental conditioning than anything else.
We parted ways with Mini at the train station, getting ourselves situated as has become our pattern (swing by the tourist office, get some maps and flyers) and then headed off for the same hostel I stayed at when last I was in Venice: Archie's Rooms.
I didn't take any pictures at Archie's, but it's probably kinder not to. It really is one of those places that has to be seen to be believed. I don't think it's registered in any guidebook, making it one of Venice's best-kept secrets. Where most hotels start at fifty euros per night, you can get a private room at Archie's for twenty-two euros per person, with access to cooking facilities, free internet and (recently, apparently), a ping-pong table. It's a bit removed from the main action in Venice - the Piazza San Marco - but if you're willing to spend the half hour walking, you can really get anywhere in short order.
Archie's is a two-story building; you enter from a non-descript side entrance that doesn't do much to advertise the presence of the hostel. You are alerted to the fact that it's a hostel by the word
"R O O M S" painted onto the corner window, but not much else. Your first impression of the interior of the place is unmistakeable: it's a mish-mash of different styles and decorations, mostly cheap, put together in a hodge-podge, year after year, until it has finally arrived in its current state of organized chaos. You climb three short sets of stairs, turning at right angles until you reach the first floor, walking around the ping-pong table on the main floor as you go.
The owner, Archie Baghin, has a lot less to do with the operation than he used to, having turned over the day-to-day running of the hostel to his two sons, Uri and Ambri. I told Archie, to his great delight, that I had stayed in the hostel six years previously, and returned because I'd had such a nice stay, but I only had the opportunity to tell him when he breezed through the hostel en route from one engagement to another. Archie is well educated: he has (at least, he says he has) two Doctorate degrees in literature. When I asked him where he was going he said he was now teaching english to students at the local school, which he found greatly satisfying.
Our room was number eleven, a double bed made up of two singles pushed together, and an assortment of furniture that looked as if it had been found on the curb. A desk lamp hung suspended in the corner to provide some additional light to the single fluorescent bulb on the ceiling; however, the lamp didn't work. A table with three mis-matched chairs sat in the corner, and an old Ikea convertible sofabed sat opposite. Rounded out with a sink and a mirror, it was all we needed for Venice.
Venice. How much have I missed it: the filthy, green dishwater of the canals, that produces suds in the wake of all the boat traffic; the complete lack of cars and scooters; the bustle of October tourists, smart enough to wait until the summer tourist season has ended; the labyrinth of alleys, canal bridge crossings and handful of major streets, designed to enfold you into the city's stoney bosom; African immigrants selling knock-off Fendi bags on the tourist drags, having spread them out onto neatly pulled white blankets; the ludicrously priced gondola rides, complete with impossibly macho gondoliers; the pastel-hued buildings, with the waters of the Mediterranean sea lapping at their bases; the high tide, flooding the streets and causing complete disarry in the Piazza San Marco; so many things. In short, a city unlike any other, and yet somehow it thrives on the constant flood of tourists and their dollars, each seeking to drink in the atmosphere that is Venice, to have their picture taken on a canal. The perfect counterpart to the small army of trinket sellers, buskers and restauranters that happily inflate prices to meet the market demand.
And yet, it was still cheaper, in many ways, than in Paris.
It's the small moments that I really enjoyed in Venice, like getting lost. Just when you think you have the city's design figured out, or at least how to follow the map to get from one place to another, you take a wrong turn and are in some empty Campo (courtyard) with nothing to guide you but a water fountain and thousand-year-old buildings. You walk around for ten minutes, thinking your destination is just around the corner, and then suddenly you come upon the edge of the city, looking out of the water. To take a wrong turn in Venice is to go completely off the map - unless you've got one, and more importantly, one in colour. The canals don't show up as well in black and white.
In short, I loved Venice - and I'm sure the hundred thousand other tourists that were there loved it as well. It's also a popular destination for humongous cruise ships, and we met several American and Canadian tourists who had either just arrived on, or were about to embark on, the Grand Princess, a boat that could probably fill a couple of football fields, and probably use up an oil field's worth of gas just getting out of the harbour. I hate to generalize about tourists, especially American ones (as I've indicated previously, I've met plenty of good ones), but the ones in Venice were some of the worst. No patience, little tolerance, and very demanding. We saw Americans walk out of a restaurant because it was going to cost an extra Euro to have a bottle of water at their table, rather than get it at the take-away price. In their defence, having talked to the other of the pair, they'd had a long travel day, but our experience was just so much different than theirs. Other tourists told us that they'd forgotten to read their Rick Steves guidebook the night before their first meal in Venice and had broken some of the "rules" - namely, that they should only ever get the house wine, as it's all the same, and that if the restaurant has menus in more than one language, it's going to be too expensive. Perhaps we've already grown accustomed to the fact that things are just different here. I hope they have a better time on the ship.
We toured all around Venice: north side, south side, the islands (Murano and Burano), the Rialto, the Piazza San Marco, and finally the Biennale Venezia. The Rialto and Piazza San Marco you've seen in photographs; Murano is great if you like glass and all things made from it; Burano was as pretty an island town as you can get. No two adjoining houses were painted the same impossibly bright hue of every rainbow colour you can imagine. But the Bienniale captured us for the entire day.
The Biennale Venezia was suggested to us by a new acquaintance, a German architecture student by the name of Leif ("pronounced Life, not Leaf"). The Biennale is a permanent exhibition site in Venice, a series of pavilions sponsored by various countries as well as a grand one for Italy, and in each pavilion, an exhibition of some sort pertaining to the theme (which one assumes changes every two years, hence the name). The current theme was Changing Cities, so each country took its own stab at it in more or less interesting ways. Some made static displays, such as Switzerland, which documented the change occuring in the Dominican Republic, in a series of pod-like platforms which combined images and text. Others, such as the British pavilion, were very hands-on and encouraged you to get in there and move things around, and basically, play. The British effort concentrated on the scales used by architects in their work: 1:1,000,000, 1:10,000, 1:100 and 1:1; how changing your perspective can change your point of view. In one example, they had a table set up with different wooden objects, each marked with its relevant scale: a dog at 1:10, a windmill at 1:100, a building at 1:1,1000. You could move them around on the table, which was more or less fun in and of itself; but the more interesting result (which we only discovered later, we were so wrapped up) was that a video camera was projecting what we were arranging onto a screen behind us, so you looked across the whole table with a very different point of view.
Canada's entry was a bit disappointing for me: it was entitled SweaterLodge, and while it was a pretty impressive effort, it didn't take long for the point to be made. The two Vancouver artists took 10,000 plastic water containers and recycled them into a thread from which they made a giant polar fleece sweater, something in the order of 40 feet wide. This was suspended from the ceiling, making a sort of canopy, with scale models of it set about. In the middle of the pavilion were three bicycles, attached to video projectors; the idea was you sat on a bike and pedalled, and the presentation would play at the speed to which you pedalled. Amy and I both wondered what was going to become of the sweater at the end of the presentation.
The Spanish pavilion was really quite something; three halls of ordered video displays, all presenting three-minute videos of the women of Spain and how they interact with their cities. While the occupational precentage was pretty high on architects in terms of representation, there were women from all walks of life: professors, police officers, nurses, punk rockers and skateboarders, gallery owners, homemakers.
The French pavilion was a constant work-in-progress: "meta-ville". A group of artists from various disciplines had been assembled to work, eat and live together in the pavilion space, so their exhibition was essentially that the world could come in to visit them as they went about their daily life. When we visited they were just getting into a meal, so we really didn't get to see what types of art they were working on, but we did see a guy with a oxyacetalene torch doing some welding before we arrived. To be honest, I thought it might be closed for renovations; all part of the show, it turned out.
The Finnish / Swedish / Norwegian pavilion profiled "arctic cities" of which each country has at least one, and how they are designed differently to operate effectively in the constant snow conditions. Apart from the pretty models of houses and buildings, I must admit that by this point we had absorbed so much information in only a few hours, I couldn't tell you what made each so special.
There were a couple of other notable pavilions: a few examples. South Korea exhibited a design for a new type of graveyard that uses vertical space and allows the left-behinds to send text-message "virtual flowers" to the dearly departed. China showed a design of a new city area in Shanghai that will allow the people that live there to get from one transit station to another in no more than five minutes, and is shaped like a big hill cut up into smaller chunks, to allow for efficient distribution of wind and solar power. The United States exhibited a tribute to the devastation of Louisiana by the Katrina hurricane, showing in words, pictures and video the resulting catastrophe, as well as some designs that are being put forward for solutions to what make become a regular problem (that is, massive hurricanes).
The Italian pavilion showed a plethora of different projects, including a room devoted to the changing situation in Ireland, given its ongoing economic boom and the problems it is having with development; a room devoted to the phenomenon of "shrinking cities," where somes cities, due to problems such as the environment, changing work models, and an aging population, are losing their people and even their grasp on the land. Venice is a fitting place for the discussion; the city is waging a battle against rising water levels (it's the opposite of the perceived problem, that Venice is sinking), but with differing opinions on how best to spend a large budget devoted to halting the flooding, nothing of substance is actually yet being done.
We weren't halfway through the Italian pavilion before being advised that the site was closing in fifteen minutes. Clearly you could spend a lot of time here, but by that time we were ready to go; five hours in what is essentially a large outdoor museum is probably about as much time as you can realistically devote. All in all, a pretty great way to spend an afternoon.
We left Venice on Saturday, heading for Perugia, with a goal of actually spending more time in surrounding towns such as Gubbio, a medieval hill-town, and Casteligano de Lago, a city nearby Lago Trasimeno. Some beach time is now called for, as we spent the better part of two hours today walking around Perugia looking for our next place to stay with our packs weighing us down.
Which brings me around to the end of this dispatch, in which I'll relate exactly why I've titled it "Misunderstood across Europe". As it happens, you can be absolutely confident in knowing that what you're saying is technically correct in another language, and still confuse the pants off the person to whom you're speaking. Here are two marvellous examples.
In France, we stopped our driving trip across the Loire in Orleans to have some lunch and stretch our legs. Deciding to get back underway, we dropped by a nearby hotel to see if we could use their bathroom before heading off. In my best French I asked: "Est-ce que c'est possible d'utilizer la salle de bain?" Which, translated in France-French, was me asking if I could perhaps have a bath. I wish I had my camera ready to capture the look on her face, a complete stranger coming off the street asking if they could have a bath. It was marvellous, and given that I thought I'd said the exact correct thing, I had no idea what I'd just asked: thankfully, Amy was alert to the difference and amended my request for "la toilette".
And just last night, our first night in Perugia. Bruce Springsteen played last night, which meant that pretty much every hotel room for miles around has been booked. We started off by calling a few places, then just decided to see if the Tourist office could set something up, which they did; a room in a farmhouse just outside the city. Before you go thinking that we were away in a manger, no room for the night, "agri-tourism" is actually a big business now across Italy, if not most of Europe, where farms have figured out that tourists will actually pay to get away from big tourist centres, rather than stay right in the centre of them. So we took a quick taxi to Olivetano Agritourismo, and were immediately glad to have spent the eight euros to do so - the place didn't have a sign. Even if we had navigated the bus system to get there, we'd probably have walked right by it. As it was we eventually found our way in and into a room with Silvio, the establishment's owner. On his way out between his broken English and our broken Italian, he asked if we wanted something to eat. We said we might be down, and later decided that we could probably use something small and perhaps a glass of wine. We should have figured out that this was not going be the typical restaurant experience when we saw no sign, no menu, and tables full of locals when we entered. We sat down blissfully to have our glass of wine, and say, a dessert.
Well, they had other plans. Turns out on the weekends, they have a complete five-course meal, at a set price, so when we asked the pleasant girl who came by to offer us the antipasti if we could just have some "dolce", you'd think I'd taken off my shirt and started twirling it over my head. She quickly called over Antonio, the head waiter, a swarthy guy in a white dress shirt and pin-striped jacket, and eventually Silvio, to figure out exactly what the heck our problem was. Between us in our linguistic conference we figured out that we were in fact going to stay for the whole meal, and that we were going to need a few vegetarian options. It was probably the most chaos they'd had in the meal hall for some time, and we decided we were just going to sit there and let them put whatever food they could imagine in front of us, and we were going to enjoy every minute of it. It wasn't like we had much in the way of options: we were sleeping just above, and that could have been more than a touch awkward the next morning if we just up and left. But in the end we had a really great meal, complete with a vegetarian main instead of the traditional meat-fest that was to follow.
Amy and I could only imagine what would have happened if some of the tourists we'd seen in Venice had happened into the same situation; probably an incident worthy of diplomatic intervention.
At first glance, Tavernello Vinodo (tavola rosso) isn't much to look at. The packages are opened by pulling off a single shiny plastic silver tab, allowing your waiter to ask perhaps, "shall I rip it open a container or two for you?" After wiping up the spilled droplets of ruby-coloured liquid that have spurted from the container to your shirt sleeves, you are rewarded with a bouquet of deep earthy tones of mushroom, berry, and prune. As well, slight hints of pomegranate, raspberry, and camomile are evident after the wine has been allowed to breathe, and these scents are best accentuated by swirling the wine around in a plastic cup.
