Catégorie : Travel

Left Venice this morning. Got to Riomaggiore in the early evening. Speechless. Amazing studio with terrace overlooking the water. Walked around the village as the sun set over the ocean. Weather is perfect. Had the bad idea to check my e-mail before dinner. Got disappointing news about a potential job. Oh well. This has to be the best place on earth to get some bad news, shrug it off and find a nice place to go eat dinner.

Which I’m going to go do right away.

Le petit poste internet ou nous sommes à Venise fermera dans quelques minutes alors je vais faire ça vite. (Moi? Faire ça vite?)

Si je fais ça vite, ça veut dire que je ne peux pas vous décrire Venise… J’hésitais à la mettre sur notre itinéraire car j’avais peur que ce soit un Disneyland atroce mais comme on m’en avait dit beaucoup de bien et que Blork n’y était jamais venu non plus, nous avons pris une chance. Et c’est tant mieux. Oui, c’est un peu un zoo, quand on se retrouve coincé dans une rue étroite ou sur la place St-Marc avec des hordes de touristes qui marchent dans toutes les directions. Mais mamamia! Que c’est agréable dans les petits coins un peu plus éloignés, là où on peut voir les vénitiens se promener (ça se promène beaucoup, des italiens), faire leurs courses ou nous engueuler parce qu’on touche aux fruits avant de les acheter (on ne le fera plus jamais, promis).

Nous avons eu une expérience tout à fait vénitienne aujourd’hui: une partie ratoureuse (mangeuse de touristes) et une partie petite extase. Je ne peux pas entrer dans les détails par manque de temps mais disons que nous avons eu deux tours de gondole – cadeau de deux généreux amis montréalais – pour le prix d’un. Le premier tour (le seul prévu au départ) fut décevant mais le deuxième (offert en compensation) avait une touche de magie que j’espère vraiment avoir capturé en photo.

Oh, et il fait toujours beau… jusqu’à maintenant!

I am writing from an « internet place » in Rome, surrounded by youths checking their e-mails, while our clothes are being boiled into a strange soup by a mean machine back at our rented appartment. Blork and I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out the instruction manual for the supposedly highly efficient washer and dryer that came with the place we rented. The instructions were so convoluted that we ended up washing white, basic clothes, for fear of serious color blending and permanent damage. We started the machine and left to go visit St-Peter’s cathedral.

5:30pm seemed to be the perfect time of the day to be at the Vatican since there was no line at all and the place wasn’t crowded. I wanted to ask the pope some laundry advice (his stuff is always so white and clean) but since he’s not Italian he wasn’t at his balcony to hang his clothes so we decided to go to dinner. We went to a great pizza place (yes, enough pizza for now) and walked back home 3 hours later to find the washing machine still running. The water was so hot I could barely touch the machine. Oh oh…

Blork dove into the instruction manual again, swearing like a madman. See, he makes a living as a technical writer and this was a very lame manual and very lame instruction manuals make him very impatient. We stopped the machine without knowing if the clothes were rinsed or not and we started the drying cycle and then left to come to the Internet place. I’m expecting that our clothes will still be wet by the time we have to pack them tomorrow morning to leave for Venice. Oh well. I hear it’s a pretty damp city anyway.

I saw true beauty in the last 6 days, places so stunning you can’t believe you are looking at them. Yet I know that when I’ll think back about that trip, it’s the crazy little adventures I’ll remember the most. Like that stupid washing machine story. Like the way we entered a big post office today and could not for the life of us figure out how to get stamps for a postcard. We kept being sent from one counter to the other until we decided to use an automated stamp machine. Ha! How arrogant of us to think it would work!

Actually, it did work… for the first postcard. But by the time we felt confident enough to buy a second stamp, the machine took our money, gave us a receipt and refused to give us the stamp we had just purchased. We ended up asking a security guard for help: « We put money for the postcard, did everything right but no stamp came. Nothing! ». He was a friendly guy who barely spoke a word of English but finally understood our problem and pointed to the machine with a big smile on his face and said, triumphantly: « Ha! Money for nothing! Dire Straits! » Finally, he had to call two other people for help. They argued in Italian around the machine for a few minutes but they ended up telling us that this was a new and very stupid machine, took our postcards from us and promised to mail them.(Message à ma soeur: si mes neveux ne reçoivent pas leur carte, il faudra accuser la poste italienne…)

Another story I’ll remember for a long time is the way we got lost on the outskirts of Rome yesterday, trying to return the scooter we had rented (before the cut off time of 7pm). We kept going in circles and when I begged Ed to stop the scooter because I was convinced he was going in the wrong direction – Naples was not our ultimate destination after all – we got the map out and realized that we were lost at the corner of Via Marco Polo and Via Christopher Columbus! How appropriate! Just like us: great explorers, bad sense of direction.

When we finally found our way back towards the rental place in the city, we got stuck in a freak Sunday night traffic jam. Turns out there was a protest going on and the carabinieri had blocked the streets. We finally made it to the rental place and arrived at 6:59…

The scooter allowed us to see parts of Rome where tourists don’t hang out, grittier, more modern areas with regular people going about their business. Since this was my special day, being my birthday, after the scooter ride Blork treated me to a fancy, non-touristy restaurant which didn’t serve the usual tourist fare. We drank an amazing bottle of wine (Gaja) and I almost died of pleasure when I took the first bite of my appetizer: pecorino flan with a pear coulis. God. I wish I could give you a taste! We walked back home, got lost again (yeah, my fault this time) and arrived at the hotel happy and exhausted.

It was a great, memorable birthday! Thanks to all of you for the good wishes. It was nice to find all of your messages tonight.

I better go check on that laundry now…