Frankfurt & Venice (from the comfort of Saignon)

If you have been following the international news, you might have heard that today in Italy there was a general strike in protest of the current retirement/pension system. One of the many areas of civil life affected was national transportation, especially trains. Thus I am excessively happy to report that while Val and I spent 14 hours yesterday navigating the Italian/French Mediterranean train network, by this morning when the strike began we were safely ensconced in the tiny town of Saignon, in Provence, France, and could observe the whole mess on CNN from the comfort of Dad and Linda’s living room.

Now that we aren’t paying by the minute at an Internet station (where are the public libraries in Italy?), I can start filling you in on where we’ve been in the last 10 days or so.

As you may know, we started out in mid-March in Frankfurt, because tickets on Lufthansa from Portland were so cheap. We spent one jet-lagged evening in Frankfurt, strolling the promenade along the River Main (watching out for bicyclists and roller-bladers) and had dinner in a nice café in Old Town, where it turned out that the reason our server spoke such great (if German-accented) English was because she was from Michigan. Our cheapish hotel near the train station had firm and comfortable beds but was impregnated with a cheap-perfume scent (we think it was a “cleaning” product meant to mask the smell of cigarettes) so chokingly potent that we had to throw open the windows and stagger blearily around the streets for two more hours before it became marginally habitable.

The next day, still thoroughly jet-lagged and smelling of tawdry perfume, we took a bus two hours to the other Frankfurt airport, caught a flight to Venice, took a bus another hour to the edge of the water, and followed the pointing arm of our bus driver to the vaporetto station, where we caught the first of a long series of these water taxis. I love vaporettos. They are like small ferries for people, and they serve the function of public buses for the citizens as well as the tourists of Venice. There is a cabin that seats about 30, an open deck in the middle where 20 more can crowd in, a few seats in the prow (you can’t stand in the prow or you will block the view of the pilot), and a little open spot in the back, behind the cabin, kind of like the little platform at the back of a train caboose, where 5 people (or 8 very friendly people) can hang out in the fresh air and diesel fumes and watch the huge old palazzos go by on either side of the canal. This back caboose/patio is my favorite spot, being more in the lee than the seats in the prow, although I liked sitting in front too when it wasn’t too cold. All the Italians talk on their cell phones on the vaporetto, and the younger ones make out, and the tourists swap stories about where not to eat and how many bell towers they’ve climbed, and all in all, the eavesdropping is terrific (and multilingual). Val and I gawked at the faded elegance of the palazzos, peered into the narrow canal alleys (canalleys?), and practiced Italian sentences from our handy phrasebook.

Venice is expensive, so we spent our first two nights in Venice in a youth hostel on the Isola, a less fashionable island across from the fancy-pants parts of town. Here we befriended a young woman from New Zealand and spent an interesting day wandering Venice with her and learning about innovations in the New Zealand electoral system. We also had a run-in with the hostel chef. The hostel has its own kitchen, so we bought dinner there our first night and were startled to find the food (in contrast with the beds) to be of such high quality. It was also expensive, so the second night, after having had a restaurant lunch in Venice proper, we picked up some slices of pizza for dinner and brought them into the hostel common room to dine. The chef, who had not yet begun serving dinner to anyone, came storming out of the kitchen to tell us, in Italian and French, how deeply affronted he was that we would bring pizza into his fine dining establishment. He informed us coldly that he hated people who ate pizza. As it was the only common room in the hostel, we were surprised to find him so territorial, and cringed in sympathy when, only five minutes later, another unwary and cash-strapped traveler sat down at a nearby table with her own pizza. He must have been just warming up with us, because he stomped back out and reprimanded her not once but three separate times. She protested weakly that she had asked at the office and at the pizza establishment next door, and both had assured her there would be no problem with bringing outside food to the hostel. But the chef begged to differ, and spent the evening glaring in our mutual direction. When a third pizza eater wandered in the chef chased him back outside before he could even sit down. He was barely mollified when vaporettos bearing the entire student population of northern France arrived around then to eat every last green bean in his kitchen.

Anyway, after ruining our backs on the swaybacked hostel bunk beds for a couple of nights, we decided we were too decrepit to hack it any longer and we transferred our Venice base to a cute little hotel on the Piazza San Geremia, where we could wash our socks in the sink and watch late-night CNN and a weird Italian gong show on the tiny television.

There’s lots more to tell about the wonderful weirdness of Venice, and our peregrinations since then, but it’s getting late and we hiked high and low today around Saignon, so I’m turning in. We’ll be here for several days so I should be able to write more soon. I hope you are all well and having fun.