You don't get experiences like this in Calais, Vermont.
. . . maybe there are bigger problems than too many tourists.
And I guess that would include me. I snapped this on a seemingly quiet little alleyway in Venice on the November trip. Truthfully, I can't blame the Venetians. Every year Venice has around twenty million tourists, which is a staggering figure, especially if you take into account that there aren't that many people who actually live in in the city on a regular basis. As I think I said elsewhere, if Venice sent me a note and wanted to thank me for being a good visitor by giving me a free trip to the city in July I think I'd say no.
Here's a shot I snapped at the famous Acqua Alta bookstore in Venice. The crowd had thinned for just long enough for meet to take this picture. It was right about closing time in late November, and it was so crowded you couldn't move. I'd love to go back there when things aren't so crowded (which, I suspect, isn't a time).
I'm pretty certain that I have a very similar post about getting lost in Sana'a, Yemen.
To be fair, it is Venice, and I think you need to be born there to have it successfully imprinted on your brain. I said the same thing about Sana'a and also Fez, Morocco and old Kasgar, China and Stone Town in Zanzibar.
The mad dash back to Indiana was an almost unmitigated disaster - more on that later - but there were some nice moments. Maybe the best one was, after my family (as is their wont) fell apart spectacularly in one day, I spent the night at my nephew Garrett's apartment in Cincinnati. He's a great guy and I wish I had more opportunities to hang out with him. I remember when he and Lisa visited me in Abu Dhabi and we went out to the desert at Liwa. She couldn't believe that I rallied him at 3:30 in the morning the head out into the sand dunes to watch the sun come up. I mean, I'm his uncle, of course he'd get up that early.
I don't pride myself on having a fantastic sense of direction, but I'm OK for the most part. I kept trying to, in my mind's map, to keep in mind the direction of the lagoon. That is, was I heading towards it or away from it or walking parallel to it, and I was generally correct. Now, that didn't mean that once I turned the corner that there would be a bridge, but in this case I was right.
I mean, well, why not?
I snapped this picture from the Rialto Bridge, once a bunch of wanker tourists snapping selfies had cleared out enough to give me this lovely view. If you follow the Grand Canal out that direction eventually you will hit the Lagoon. I'll post a story about our gloriously inept attempt to master the public transportation system in Venice soon.
I suppose I should have asked this gentleman for his approval to snap his picture as he was shining up his gondola, but I'm not planning on making any money off his image and am instead only celebrating it. This is the problem with me purchasing a more powerful lens for my camera.
On our next to last full day in Venice - and our last full day when we were both not suffering from food poisoning - we took a water taxi out to Murano Island to look out at (and buy way too much) glass. We were going to head out there anyway, but then the folks at the Metropole offered to arrange a water taxi ride out (as compared to the more circuitous route on a vaporetto). It was more than a bit of a set-up, since they took us to only one manufacturer and then back - and told us that there wasn't really much to see on the island (essentially, so that we wouldn't get a sense of how dramatically we were over-charged) - but in the end it was a lovely day, and I'll post some pictures of the glass craftmanship.
Venice is really a photographer's dream, even a poor photographer like me. As is well documented, Janet takes a more evolutionary approach to the day whereas I take a more revolutionary approach; essentially, I'm an early riser and she is not. The form that this takes when we're on vacation is that she devotes time to reading and meditating and preparing for the day, whereas I head out early and then come back to meet her. In Venice this gave me a chance to go out exploring and snapping pictures in the morning - oh, and, obviously, getting lost along the way.
One of the things that amazed us on this trip to Venice was how packed it was, especially considering that it was late November and the high temperatures only occasionally crawled out of the 40s. However, on the last day, which always seems to be the case, the sun actually shown, brilliantly.
My good friend Kerry likes to tell the story of when, years ago, she travelled to Venice, and ended up not going out at night because it was simply too creepy. So many times on this trip Janet or I would turn down some imposing little alley and say, "And this is why Kerry didn't leave her room."
OK, yeah, I was trying to be overly clever with this photo, but I still think it turned out pretty well. We were sitting in a little restaurant next to the Rialto Bridge watching the world go by.
As I've mentioned before, inexplicably, Janet had never visited Italy before. Considering that her last name is Pocorobba, and that her grandfather came from Sicily, this, of course, had to be addressed. She definitely loved her time there, and I'm sure it's just the first of several trips to Italy that we'll make in the next few years.
A week ago today we returned from Venice, although, truthfully, it feels like a much longer time ago than that. I'll definitely have a lot to say about the trip, but I'm still unpacking it. One of the reasons why it seems so long ago is that as soon as we returned I heard that my dad was fading badly, which led me to make a mad dash west, only to not make it before he passed away. That will also take a lot of unpacking, as, clearly, he and I had a very complicated relationship. In the short term, anyway, it gives me some comfort to dig into some of the pictures that we snapped while overseas.
