It’s day 12 in Italy and here are a few fun facts I’ve discovered on the open road:
My Italian is shit. But it’s not NEARLY as bad as my German. If I’m going to ever go to Bolzano again (which I hope I do) I’m going to have to work on both. Just a heads up folks, there are a lot of people out there who don’t speak any English at all. I mean we can’t be so arrogant as to think that we waltz into corners of the world and people know what we mean when we say “Is there an ATM near here?” or, “Can I have cream with my coffee?” or “Can you call the police for me please?” (that one was a joke) because guess what – I got a lot of blank stares but I knew *I* was the asshole for not bothering to learn the language.
I am a desperately stupid over-packer. I feel like a mountain climber who needs to start discarding items on the way to the summit. Three pairs of shorts? Nope. That short dress you’re too insecure to wear? Nope. A pair of culottes – no seriously ladies – culottes…? I’m not going to wear that. A toiletry bag with 14 kinds of hair products in it? WTF is wrong with me? I deserve every miserable minute of dragging that suitcase up and down the stairs of the canal bridges in Venice today when I got dropped off by the ferry 10 blocks from my hotel.
My bad Italian tilts enough towards Spanish that a cafe worker in at the bus terminal asked me today, “¿Habla Español?” Weird question in the middle of Europe, but I said yes, and I asked her in Spanish what made her think that I would speak Spanish. And she said I had inserted some very Spanish inflections into words I was trying to say to her in Italian. And she was Latina and so recognized that and knew I must be a Spanish speaker, and so we completed the rest of my order in Spanish! LOL. It was awesome.
Italian people can be so exceptionally kind. I’m a woman traveling alone, and I feel genuine concern from hotel operators and bar owners if I am leaving at night. They want to make sure that I’m safe and then I’m sober and that I know where I’m going. Paolo, my favorite barkeep from episode one of this travel blog – just made me a sliced pizza plate to make sure I eat enough to absorb the wine. LOL. It’s very sweet. I really have never experienced that anywhere in the world that I’ve been besides maybe No Name Bar in Winona. LOL. I have never felt safer than this trip in Italy right now. I feel grateful for that.
Did I mention that I packed too much stuff? Good lord. I was so proud of myself because I thought I had really scaled it down for this trip. But I understand now that I absolutely did not. I would like to grab a few backpackers walking past me and make them sit down at a table and show me what the fuck is in their backpacks. So they just wear the same clothes every single day? Because I don’t know if I could do that either. I left a small bag behind and Venice under the care of my new friend Niccolò and the remaining outfits that I had for my trips around Lake Garda, Verona and Bolzano just felt inadequate. But really, maybe I just need to change my head, not my wardrobe. Maybe I need to just plan to hire someone who runs my bags around for me. LOL It’s odd really, but I didn’t see anything like that available in Venice or anywhere else than I was for that matter. But in Venice especially because there are hundreds of canals with steps up and down that you have to pass, I don’t see any bag carriers or guys with carts that would tote your bags around for you even though I would’ve paid nearly anything to have somebody drag my bags 10 blocks to a hotel for me. I wonder if there are regulations against it, because otherwise, I think that I have my next million coming. Or, I mean my first million. But whatever.
sigh. Regardless, I do love this place so much.
Except, be honest, I checked into what I expected to be my most luxurious hotel of the trip today in Venice, but it is not. I decided that, after all of this roaming around taking photos of the Venetian palaces, that I needed to sleep in one of them and be like a real Venetian society chick, so I spent more money than I wanted to for a luxurious room with A canopy bed and a sweet sitting area and old furniture and not one but TWO balconies over a canal. It sounded so great. And I paid for it. But when I checked in, I’m sorry to say that besides the fact that my room looks super great for a photo and feels very decadent, the rest of the place is really totally a shit hole. That pisses me off a little bit. A lot bit. But this is why I come and do these trips before I would bring anybody else here.
For example, my two balconies overlooking the canal, I envision sitting out there with my coffee in the morning watching the gondoliers go by and snapping photos from a unique spot in this beautiful Venetian landscape. The reality is that they’re not really “balconies” so much as pigeon perches with about 14 inches – I have a tiny platform and flower boxes with nothing in them, and if I go out there I’m going to be like a giant pigeon sitting on the edge of the concrete balcony with nothing around me. And the entire place smells like mothballs. Yuck.
Still, because the universe is kind to me, I wandered away from that place and I wandered into my new favorite hotel here. And it wasn’t ridiculously more per night, although it was definitely like 50 or $60 more per night, but the place reeked of luxury and had this fantastic rooftop lounge and it just made me feel like I had been robbed on this other place with their promise of balconies and all that canopy-bed crap. But, because I was in that neighborhood, I found real luxury three blocks away at a hotel I have never heard of that I am now in love with after wandering in its doors – it’s the winner.
In my typically humble opinion (that was a joke) I believe there are basically two ways to travel. One is to skip and glide across the surface of a place, hitting the best tourist spots and taking what you want from it to fill your checkboxes, depositing nothing of yourself into it and leaving with little more than some good memories and nice photos, a stamp in your passport, and some visa bills.
And there is the kind of travel where you skid sideways into a place, army-crawling your way through its underbelly to learn its secrets and connect to its people, roaming around long enough to begin to believe this is your place too. People become real, places become your favorites, and the exchanges you have feed something inside of you. Opposed to the blissful anonymity of the first travel style, this way is dirty when it’s time to leave and you find yourself stricken, grasping ahold of good moments and wishing they wouldn’t end because they feel like they are now part of who you are and you don’t know how to live without them.
That is how this trip is ending. I am glad to be coming home, but it is bittersweet. New friends and experiences and places I love – they own a piece of me now and that’s hard to reconcile when you “travel deep,” as I guess I would call it.
To that end, I am sad to leave but THIS feels like why we travel – at least why I travel… because I come back different – better, broader, smarter, satiated but somehow hungrier, and my heart feels bigger and lighter but heavier at the same time.
👍❤️😢😍
