Venice

My weekend away, before the Christmas weekend away, was to Venice, Italy!


When I look back at this year – and this has unquestionably been the Year of Travel for me – every single trip came about through some sort of chance, because someone asked, Hey, want to do this thing? and I said, Yeah, sure.

The fact that this has been possible at all, of course, is in large part because of the flexible nature of my work. But there's an element of simply being open and saying yes, too.

In this case, my friend K. told me she would be meeting her mother for a trip in Slovenia, and was thinking about swinging by Venice afterward, since she'd never been, and then taking the night train back to Berlin.

I'd never been to Venice either – one of those places I vaguely figured I wanted to go at some point, but it probably wouldn't happen until an opportunity arose – and strangely, I don't take many night trains in Europe, or even any at all.

So K. asked, Want to come?

And I said, Yeah, sure!

There's so much more I could say about Venice, but if I don't just write something now, I'll never get the chance. So here's what pops to mind:

VENICE ITSELF:

I've heard people say, "Venice really is how you always thought it was," and in fact...it is.

Tiny, twisting alleys, crumbling old buildings, canals everywhere. Really, you cannot overstate how much water defines Venice. Anywhere you want to go, you have to take into account where the nearest bridge to it is – or if there's one at all.

It all looks like this, except narrower and more twisty:


The entire city is pedestrian (cars have to park at the entrance to the city, how awesome is that?), so everything happens at a different pace – namely, a very fast walking pace, apparently dubbed the "paso veneziano."

GETTING LOST:

This is what people tell you you'll be doing all the time in Venice, and it's true. The place is a maze, and sometimes, there just isn't a bridge to where you want to go. Or the alley just ends in a wall...or a canal. I get lost even in normal cities, so in Venice I simply gave myself up to circumstance.

Which, it turns out, is exactly the right thing to do.

I'm now firmly convinced that Venice is the city of coincidences. If you're looking for a particular café on a certain street, you will not find it...but you will happen across it later, while looking for something else entirely, on another street of the same name in a different part of the same district.

You will also run into the people you know in Venice, randomly, even if the sum total of people you know there is two. The first evening, I met up with a guy named Josh from Couchsurfing (more about that later). K. didn't come – but we ran into her later, in a different part of town.

The next night, K. and I were wandering in yet another completely different part of town, hoping to find some live music or something – and instead ran into Josh and his friends. K. said to Josh, "Okay, I don't know exactly what role Ella plays in all of this, but clearly you and I were destined to meet."

Here's an alley conveniently ending in water:


PEOPLE:

I was recently at a party in Berlin populated by an even-higher-than-my-usual-average number of journalists and writers, and ended up talking to a woman who runs a blog about travel, food, and the taxi rides she takes to get there. She pointed out that the key to travel writing is having your own particular angle, the aspect you're passionate about.

At first I thought, I haven't found mine yet, and then I thought, maybe I have.

My angle is meeting up with people and learning about their place through them, whether they're friends, friends of friends, or strangers I contact through Couchsurfing specifically because that human element is such a crucial part of travel to me.

In this case, we met Josh, an American abroad who loves languages and is teaching and translating in Venice, and his partner Albert, who's from Catalunya in Spain moved here to teach Catalan, and then their friend Laura, also from Catalunya, who speaks at least four languages fluently, and interestingly prefers to read and write in Spanish, even though her native language is Catalan, but feels even more comfortable in Italian:


Then we met Benedicta, a French-German woman who lived in the U.S. for 10 years but then didn't get a green card extension, so she decided to travel for a year, came to Venice, met a Venetian, fell in love and is now happily living here. Didn't I say it was the city of coincidences?


FOOD:

Of course, you can't go to Italy and not have it be partly about food. K. has a particularly good nose for finding good places, and we ate, among others: at a very much local kind of place, where we first had to pass through a gauntlet of local guys drinking their afternoon grappa; at a restaurant where K. went twice, because she was so impressed by their squid ink pasta (I did not partake); various places where you can do the whole standing-up-and-snacking thing (why, Italy, why?); and...

Then there was this really classy place that K. had read about but regretfully decided was beyond our budget. We stumbled across it anyway, though, in that way that happens in Venice, and decided to go in just for a glass of wine.

It turns out they have an extraordinary list of rare wines, and not even at bad prices, and, being such a high-class place, they brought us free cicchetti (Venetian-style tapas) along with our drinks. When K. pleaded my vegetarianism (cicchetti are mostly deep-fried and mostly seafood), the waiter brought us squares of the best focaccia I've ever had, as well as incredible olives, and thin stalks of celery in an extraordinary vinaigrette.

What we'd thought was a restaurant far out of our price range somehow turned into nearly a full meal, for the price of a 5 euro glass of wine.

Cicchetti with claw – here I did not partake either:



JEWISH VENICE:

Then, of course, there was the Jewish Ghetto.

This is the actual source of the word "ghetto," a neighborhood in Venice named after a foundry and later turned into the-place-where-the-Jews-live. I won't go into the whole history here, because I just don't have time to do it justice, but we went on a very informative tour of the ghetto's synagogues, and it was pleasing to see that the Jewish community is still going strong – for once, a Jewish neighborhood and Jewish museum that are not just a matter of history.

On the main square, in the Ghetto Nuovo:


Nearby, we found not one but two Kosher bakeries. (K. texted me, as I arrived in Venice, with the words, "Just found hamentashen! I'm in heaven!")

During our tour of the Jewish Ghetto, I was amused by the sight of ultra-Orthodox men, in their hats and long coats, walking by with takeout pizza boxes (because it's Italy, see, and even the ultra-Orthodox eat pizza...) but it was K. who put that sight together with the Kosher bakery we'd stopped in before, which seemed to be devoted half to pastries and half to pizza.

Oh, right, because they're in Italy, but they're also Orthodox, so they eat kosher pizzas.


That's all about Venice for now. Full photo album will be up shortly!