Slowly turn the tides
Rising through home and plaza
Filthying it all.
Welcome to Venezia! Strange that something such as this should exist... a port constructed of dirt and wood with parks and homes and shops, canals criss-crossing it at angles puzzling even to residents, roads that seldom lead from one place to another... It's an intriguing place to walk, we'll say that. But of course we didn't just arrive there this morning!
Due to Evan's unfortunate night of fever and nausea and exhaustion (we still aren't sure what caused it... as the first symptoms showed--just slight nausea and sluggishness--we wondered if it were because we had switched from mostly vegetarian to mostly carnivorous, but there's no way that such a thing would have such grave effects as these), as well as to the strange bike-and-train organisation we had to deal with, we didn't have a very restful night. We arrived to Mestre (the Venice mainland train station) at 06:45. We had looked up directions to a campsite nearby while at Gianna's house, but we got a little lost on the way and needed to ask for directions...
Anyway, we eventually made it to a campsite and set up. It was reasonably cheap, I guess; 18€ for the two of us per night. Ugh. Camping just isn't worth that much to us. Whatever; for a few nights in Venice, we decided that it was okay. The one awful thing is that there are signs posted in some areas that they've been spraying the grass for mosquitoes... sigh. We camp in that grass, you guys.
So we slept for a few hours to regain some semblance of consciousness, then hopped onto a bus to Venezia to check it out. Evan had been before, so he knew a few things that we should try to see while I was totally in the dark. The first priority, though, was food, since we had had nothing to eat since the bocadillos on the train platform last night. It took some time to find a supermarket on the Venice ("the mainland" is called "the mainland," but Venice itself is never called "the island" or "the islands" or anything, so we have taken to calling it "the Venice"), since as prime tourist space most square feet are taken up by hotels or shops. There aren't even proper streets; there is, in fact, only boat and foot traffic in the Venice. All cars are relegated to a small area containing effectively a parking lot and nothing else that is on the outskirts. It's amazing how peaceful it is to be in a place like that, actually, where pedestrians are never bothered by vehicles of any sort (rife with stairs, the Venice is also a forbidding place for bicycles, and a lot of it doesn't even have access for handicapped people). Most of the boats puttering through the canals are the famous gondolas, and so engine noises are uncommon, too.
We stumbled across a Coop after crossing several bridges and heading away from the canals. Lunch was pitas with baked potatoes, sun-dried tomatoes, and goat cheese. We also got some cookies and yogurt for dessert, and we were pretty well stuffed afterwards. We headed in the direction of San Marco, the main plaza of Venice which, mercifully, is well-signed.
Along the way, we paused to look in shop windows stuffed with colourful Venetian party masks and fine glasswork. Evan told me that on the island of Murano, part of the Venice, there are glass workshops where much of this stuff is produced. It was lovely and excessively expensive, as one might expect, so we only window-shopped. I doubt those things would survive even a day anywhere near our panniers, anyway.
We emerged onto San Marco in the shadow of the Cathedral. It was large and imposing and beautiful, as cathedrals are wont to be, but we decided that we were cathedraled-out from our time in Italy and that we would much rather explore the back alleys and attempt to navigate the canals. As we passed by the front of the cathedral, we saw a janitorial worker pushing his cart through a large puddle; because the Venice is actually sinking very slowly, parts of it are more and more prone to flooding. Tiles in sidewalks are uneven, and the evidence of rising water is clear in the levels of wood-rot on gates and doorways abutting the canals. When you think about it, that's disgusting. The water running through the canals in Venice, although it is sea water and has free access to the Mediterranean, is not clean. It has traditionally been the sewage dumping-place for those living on the Venice (which was constructed hundreds and hundreds of years ago), and these days it also receives runoff from the industrial areas of Mestre and the like. It has an unnatural, opaque-green-blue colour that is not particularly inviting. We took care not to get too close to the puddle.
A spin through the back alleys led us to some dead ends, but we could see a park and the real waterfront on the other side, so we navigated around some canals and headed there to take a seat. Along our route we encountered the city library, where it was not allowed to walk around unless you were already a member, so we had to content ourselves with looking in from outside. In front of the doors stood a small rack of tiny, thin paperback books that were free reading for the train. It was a nice idea.
We settled onto a bench in the park and drank the Campari Soda we had intended to drink on the train ride. Slightly buzzed, we strolled along the waterfront and spent some time playing on a rope swing we found in another park down the way. We wandered through neighbourhoods, where we got strange looks as the only tourists who seemed to stray from the area around San Marco. Eventually we found what we had been searching for: a boat bus dock!
The boat busses are technically part of the public transit in the area around Venice, and you can buy rides on them with the same card that you use to buy rides on busses and the like. However, the boat busses are obnoxiously expensive (it was 12€ for two roundtrip tickets to Murano, which was just a few stops away). Still, if you want to see the other islands, it's not a bad way to do it. We headed out to Murano.
We arrived around sunset, and many shops were closing or already closed for the day. We again took the back alleys approach, and we were treated to an open window that looked in on a glass workshop. There's a photo in our Picasa album (http://picasaweb.google.com/biketotheearth/italia) of what we could see, and the running furnaces made a tremendous whooshing noise that was cool to hear. From there, we explored part of an above-ground cemetery (obviously the water table in the Venice is too high to bury people properly) which held a lot of WWII victims. One strange thing was that each headstone held a photograph of the deceased--something I had never seen before on a cemetery-wide scale.
After that, we boarded a boat and then hoofed it back to the bus station to return home. We stopped at a grocery store on the way to collect zucchini and garlic and cheese to go with the shell pasta we already had for our dinner, and we plopped down on the grass to cook it before collapsing tiredly into bed. The few hours of sleep this morning weren't enough, and we're happy that we've decided to take an extra day in Venice. We'll go see more tomorrow, sleep over again, and make the 160km to Trieste on the 2nd, so we'll leave Italy exactly a month after entering it. That's cool. :)