The motto for today is no good deed goes unpunished. OR never take them if a guy tries to hand you roses. Or ALWAYS buy a bottle of wine if you pass a convenience store because you don’t know when you’ll need it. But yeah, that’s too many mottos. Let’s just start with this: Today was a weird one – fasten your seatbelt.
I’d like to think I’m hitting my stride here in Venice. I’m wandering as far and hard as I can, and I think I’ve taken at least 3,000 photos and I’m not even close to done. I’ll never even look at them all – I will just will them to my kids like a Sisyphean Ball to wrestle… haha. But God – I love the photos. What I see is just so beautiful.
And walking the streets is interesting. People make eye contact with passersby here. And sometimes they even smile. Think about it – people in the United States almost never do this. Italy has a truly lovely culture and I enjoy the people. Most of them… but I’ll get to that.
Tonight I decided to rub elbows at the swanky Gritti Palace bar and see how the other ½ of 1% lives. So I got all dressed up and sashayed in like I owned the place – or at least owned enough money to buy a drink there. Mmmm – it was so beautiful – I sat on the deck in the twilight of night and watched sleek speedboat taxis come and go, jetting dinner guests off to their Venetian mansions. Or wherever rich guests jet off to. The nice waiter brought me a $17 glass of house wine (!) plus little snack bowls with nuts and chocolates in them. It was all very fancy but the place was pretty much empty so I sashayed back out after I dumped the bowl of chocolates into my purse. Okay, that’s not true, but I did think about it.
I strolled down ancient stone streets lit by lamps while lovers and families and groups of friends rambled by. It seemed like I was the only person alone but I didn’t care – I felt pretty and I was enjoying the promenade as people made eye contact with me and occasionally smiled. I was wearing one of those dresses with a plunging V-neck front and open back so it’s impossible to wear a bra with it (no doubt designed by a man) – which is fine for some girls but not this one. Thank God for those rubber stick-on bra cups, which were working pretty well, because otherwise, I’d never be able to pull off that ridiculously plunging look.
Venice has been downright sweltering well into the evening, so even in my summer dress, I was sweating balls, as they say. Still, I was earning a few appreciative looks – or at least what I thought were appreciative looks – until I looked down to see that my left boob was lilting badly after the sticky cup slid down. Shit. But I was surrounded by people so I just crossed my arms. Ha. It was late and I was on a walk back to my room anyway.
All over Venice, there are flower sellers trying to hustle couples into buying a rose. I see people almost universally ignore them, so as I passed one late in the evening with three roses in his hand, I smiled and said, “Good evening.” They never pester me because how pitiful do you have to be to buy *yourself* an overpriced, half-dead $10 rose? But this guy came up to me and said, “Here, madame. Take these. I am done for the night.” Awwwwwwwww. But then he said, “Could I just have a little something for them?” Hmmm. I fished out some coins – maybe $3 – and gave them to him, at which he paused and said it wasn’t enough. Damn it. I told him to take his flowers back then and he said, no, it was okay, that he wanted me to have them. It was kind of sweet. But then ANOTHER rose seller saw me with my clutch of roses and knew exactly what had happened, so he came up and tried to hand his roses to me as well. “No. Nope. No. I don’t want your flowers,” I told him. Next thing I knew I had seven roses in my hand and was another five euros lighter.
So there I was, this strange spectacle in ancient Venice walking around all dressed up and alone at 11 p.m. with seven roses and one boob that had given up for the night. Even so, I was feeling of generous spirit, so when I passed an older gentleman playing the guitar and singing badly, I dropped a 2-euro coin into his open guitar case. I saw him look down to see what I’d given, but the coin rolled under some American dollar bills (which had probably been a prop in that case for years, but I digress). I kept walking, and then I heard him stop playing. And next, I heard the coin go flying against the pavement and he started shouting. SHOUTING. At first, I couldn’t tell what he was saying, but then it became clear that it was a profanity-laced mixture of Italian and English directed at the lady with the roses. Um, that was me. It went on – he was losing his damn mind. I heard him kick what was probably his guitar case and shout that he was going to “fuck me like an American,” whatever that meant, and fuck my roses too. I stopped walking for one second as I tried to understand what he was saying, but a gentleman on the sidewalk who was obviously on his way somewhere passed me and said, “Keep walking. He’s crazy.” LOL. Jesus.
I passed a convenience store a minute later selling gelato, cigarettes, cans of beer and overpriced wine. Yup, I‘ll definitely take a bottle of your shittiest chardonnay for my room, please. As I reached to take the bag from the clerk, my other boob gave up the fight and dropped four inches. The clerk didn’t even bat an eye. Standing there at the counter, I broke and I started to laugh hard – like really hard – about it all, but the guy deadpanned me because he probably thought I was insane. Actually, I might be.
But what is the definition of insane anyway? Haha. Buena sera, friends.
