An incredible trip comes to an end

Early tomorrow morning I board a plane to fly back home, sad to be leaving Joe and this incredible country, but happy to head home again. Some final thoughts. These are some if the ways that Italy has changed since I was here 30 years ago: The lira is gone, you rarely see men greeting one another with a kiss, the women seem to be less domineering and the men less preening, and you don't often hear people speaking in a dialect. Ways that Joe is changing: He talks about being sad about returning in December and wanting to stay longer, today we visited the cathedral in Milan at his suggestion, he has visited 10 cities in Italy and can't wait to see more of Italy and Europe, yesterday he let a non-English speaking Venetian woman give him an Italian-style haircut, and he's proud to have cousins in Italy who now considers to be friends. How have I changed? I've learned that I can speak Italian even with a 30 year layoff and that I love the way it sounds when Italians speak, that travel can be so much more meaningful when you plan well but then reach out to create something unexpected, that my son is even cooler than I thought and that I haven't forgotten how to write! When I read what others have written or when I myself write, I'm always most interested in the questions, "What was it like to be there, in that place, at that time, in that situation? What did it feel like?" I hope, dear blog readers, that these stories of the little things that make up an adventure have given you a little feel for what these two weeks were like.

An open window in a blues club

The little bar near where we were staying in Venice had a blues band playing last night. Joe and I stopped in and enjoyed how the lead singer explained each song in Italian - getting the names almost right: Johnny Hooker, Sony Boy Williams, Little Richard in place of Little Walter) and then singing in flawless bluesy American English. We found a spot inside next to an open window, with people on the other side listening, drinking and smoking. As is often the case, we were observers, too timid to interact with the people around us. Finally, though, my curiosity got the best of me as I watched the young students hand-rolling perfect cigarets. I asked for a demonstration and the young lady summoned a young man, who was the expert of the group who had taught the others. He was a German architecture student, studying in Vienna along with his friends, who were Romanians. They had all taken an eight-hour bus ride down to Venice to attend the architectural exposition - the Biennial. Josef, the German, had led them to this bar and they would soon board a bus for the eight hour return trip. He let us try our hands at rolling a cigaret - hold the filter (he had a little bag of them) in your mouth, spead some tobacco evenly on the rolling paper with the glue strip away from you leaving room for the filter on the right, squeeze and roll the paper back and forth until the tobacco is compressed into a cylinder, then start rolling from bottom to top, inserting the filter as you go, just before you finish, lick the glue strip and squeeze to all together. Then we stepped outside to the smokers' side of the window to enjoy our cigarets with our new friends (who had to help us light them in the breeze). Promising to give up smoking after that night, we enjoyed our tutorial and were glad that we decided to not just stand and watch, but to talk with someone on the other side of an open window.

First impressions of Venice

I had never visited Venice on previous trips to Italy - somehow I had been put off by stories of unbearable crowds and smelly canals, but I'm here now and couldn't be happier about it. By avoiding Venice I had somehow also kept myself in ignorance about the makeup of the city - is it on an island? Are the houses built on land, or standing on pilings over the water? So here are my first impressions after having been here overnight. Venice is indeed an island, actually several of them, that were formed by deposits in the delta of a river emptying into the sea. The canals were built to drain the water so that buildings could be built on the land. The major island is shaped like a fish and the train (or cruise ship) brings you to the mouth of the fish. Our apartment is near the tail. To save a few euros and have an adventure I walked from the train station to the apartment the first time. This would almost have been a good idea if I had had a decent map to help me through the labyrinth of alleys (called "called" here), over the bridges crossing canals (all but the largest are called "rios"), through tiny squares (campi) to our apartment in the quiet Castello district. There I was greeted by the manager, Signora Argia, who speaks not a word of English which doesn't deter her from non-stop, lengthy, over-the-top warm, welcoming conversations with each guest in Italian, regardless of the nationality or language abilities of the guest-of-the-moment. In fact, she is such a treat that I need to write a separate blog post just about her. Yes, Venice is crammed with tourists - each of whom is wandering around town with an expression mixed with puzzlement and awe, glancing back and forth between the map in their hands and at the city around them - but it is a place like nowhere else on this earth. Parts of it - like some of the palaces along the Grand Canal - look abandoned and eerily beautiful and then their are neighborhoods of an actually working city. A motorboat driver honks his horn as he rounds a blind corner of a tiny canal, a young mother stops to pick up her baby and stroller to carry it up the steps of a bridge, tiny plastic bags full of garbage sit outside apartment doors waiting to be collected in the morning, laundry hangs on clotheslines suspended over canals, a shrine to Jesus hangs on the wall of the Communist party headquarters. There's a grandeur here with architecture influenced by the East and remnants of prosperity of days gone by, but there's also a delight in the details of daily life that are so very different from the way it is back home.

The modern world vs. traditional ways

"It's prohibited to wash your car with drinking water". Resources are carefully used in the Cinque Terre. For the most part, there are no cars in the five villages. Service vehicles are allowed into the towns are there are parking lots above each town with shuttle busses to take you back and forth to town. As prosperity came to the village of Vernazza, locals began buying cars, despite the fact that it was more convenient to take the frequent trains that stop right in the center of town. The town built a larger parking lot, on top of an abandoned dump, and when the floods came, both the cars and the garbage were washed downhill to the sea. As the village rebuilds it will be interesting to see if the cars will return.

The terraces of the Cinque Terre

The steep hillsides of the Cinque Terre have been painstakingly terraced over the years to carve out some precious land for growing grapes. The building of the draw walls - stacked stone with no mortar - is something of a lost art. The woman would collect in preparation for the building of a wall - each size and shape had a specific name. The men would build the wall and - like a surgeon asking for a scalpel or forceps - would request the perfect stone for a given situation. They used no mortar so that when it rained, water could pass through and continue downhill rather than being built up behind each wall. A year ago there was a terrible flood that deviated the area and the villages, trails and walls are still being rebuilt.

Just ask a question

I took the picture of the cats while hiking from the Cinque Terre village if Corniglia to Manarola. At first I was disappointed that the coastal trail was closed due to landslides, but when I took the higher trail I saw some amazing sights along the way. At an Internet cafe in Manarola I asked the manager, Francesca, if my translation of "Two Cats in the Cinque Terre" (Due Gatti Nelle Cinque Terre) was correct. I showed her some of my photos and asked her for the Italian terms. The amazing little tractors on rails that transport the grape harvest are called "monorotaie". The tiny alleys of the Cinque Terre and Genoa are "carrugi". With only a little more questioning, though, she supplied lots of fascinating opinions about the area and Italy in general. The best focaccia comes from a certain neighborhood in nearby Ka Spezia, people who live near the coast are more open than people from inland places, once they get to know you. The Milanese, for example, have personalities that are as grey as their city. When I told her about the name if my blog, she showed me a picture of the decidedly impractical shoes that she had recently worn to a performance of La Boheme at La Scala in Milan. Despite her reservations about Milan, she said that being in the opera house, thinking of its history and listening to the music reduced her to tears even though they had "pigeon loft" seats and the shoes only made it through the second act.

Why "Practical Shoes"?

When I was 13, I took a summer vacation trip with my family to the east coast. My mother, the daughter of an Italian immigrant, had an old-world sensibility that included the belief that a person should dress up for special occasions, such as taking a trip on an airplane. I had my plaid sports coat and nice slacks in the suitcase when, on the drive to the San Francisco airport my mom asked, with a note of concern in her voice, if I had packed my shoes. "Yes," I answered timidly, glancing down at the scuffed tennis that I was wearing. My mother's reaction was very similar to how most kids' mothers might have reacted had they casually mentioned that they had left one of their major organs behind. WHAT? Those aren't shoes!!!!" It was Sunday and surely no stores would be open. We would fly in shame to New York. The trip would be ruined and it would be Mark's fault. We could exit in Salinas and pray for an open shoe store or maybe just head back home. As it turned out, God did intercede and a shoe store was open. We purchased a nice pair of stiff leather wing tips and the trip was saved. Today, I look to Rick Steves rather than my mother for packing advice and brought one pair of practical shoes. As fate would have it, though, it turns out that wing tips are all the rage in Italy in 2012....Shoulda listened to my mom.