For a holiday respite, my Friday posts through December and
into January will tell of a trip I took to Venice
In my first four posts, I finished my first day in Venice,
having survived a trans-Atlantic redeye, wrangled with a clerk at Marco Polo Airport,
inadvertently crossed my landlord’s aging mother, bumped my head into
the beams of the converted attic I’ll call home for two weeks, and still found
my way to take the favorite photo of my two weeks in Serenissima.
Having used four posts to complete a single day, I need to
take a different approach to the remainder of my two weeks. Beginning today, I’ll write about individual
aspects of Venetian life, at least as experienced by an American visitor. This post will be about the challenges of
finding the necessities of apartment life in a city that where the familiar
organization and visual clues of U.S. city planning are missing.
The Test: A couple of years ago, I attended a
birthday where I dined at the same table with a Nobel Prize winner. He said something during the meal that stayed
with me. At the time an octogenarian (he
has since passed away), he said “Aging isn’t hard once you realize that the
systems that once worked on automatic now require manual operation.”
It was insightful advice.
And it has a parallel in being an American in Venice. The acts of daily life, such as getting on
the internet, buying breakfast, or doing laundry, that seem automatic in the
U.S. require a higher level of manual operation in Venice.
Internet Access: To be fair to my Venetian landlord,
he truthfully advised me that there was no internet access in the apartment he
was renting to me. It may have been the
last time that he told me the truth.
He also told me that there were multiple internet cafes in
the adjoining plaza of Campo San Polo. I
believed him. I shouldn’t have. Not only is there no Internet café in Campo
San Polo, I never found an internet café anywhere in the San Polo sestiere.
And I looked at length, taking several long walks in the
San Polo and Santa Croce sestieres, shown in these photos. Lovely places, but without tourist amenities.
(Quick political lesson: Venice has been divided into the
same six administrative districts, or sestieres, since the 14th century. There’s no gerrymandering in Venice. In addition to San Polo, there are San Marco,
Castello, Cannareggio, Santa Croce, and Dorsodoro. San Marco is the tourist center of town, with
the Doge’s Palace, St. Mark’s Basilica, Piazza San Marco, and much of the
lodging and tourist retail. In tourist
guides, my sestiere of San Polo is often combined with Santa Croce. However, there are no Internet cafes in Santa
Croce either.)
Admittedly, much of that problem lay in my
gullibility. As a character early in
“The City of Falling Angels” says “All Venetians lie, including me when I tell
you this.” Venetian landlords weren’t an
exception.
It took several days, but I finally found an internet café
in the San Marco sestiere, only a single vaporetto
Furthermore, I loved the location of the internet
café. Its windows looked out upon a
canal that was frequented by tourist gondolas.
There was nothing more fun than emailing an acquaintance in the Midwest
while a gondola glided past only a few feet away.
Computer Recharging: Next, I realized that that my outlet
adapter was only for use in Britain. The
camera store about forty feet from my front door sold me a voltage converter that
connected to the outlet and the computer, but had too little capacity for my
laptop and promptly burned up. My fault,
not theirs. It was clearly labeled.
It took another couple of days and two trips to the only
Venetian hardware store before I had found the correct adaptor. It was a marvelous urban hardware store, much
like Tomasini’s in Petaluma, only with all merchandise delivered by canal
barges to a dock at the back door and products that looked almost familiar, but
not quite.
Cash: Remember how my landlord duped me about
Internet cafes? Same thing on ATMs. His emails to me said
that there were several ATMs in Campo San Polo and that he did all his banking
there. I don’t know with whom he banked, but it was like no banking
I know. By actual count, the non-residential uses on the plaza were
a 700-year old church, two restaurants, a deli, and a store that sold Beatle
memorabilia (I just report it, I don’t explain it). No ATMs in
sight.
The absence of an ATM wasn’t much of a
problem, as I found one within a few blocks. But wouldn’t you think
that “I do all my banking there” might be hard to write when there are no banks
there?
Groceries:
But rising above the other searches for ATMs, internet cafes, etc. was the hunt
for food. I didn’t choose to eat all my
meals in restaurants. But coming from a
place where food generally comes from either 50,000 square-foot supermarkets or
15,000 square-foot specialty grocers, finding groceries in Venice was a
challenge. Simply put, it was a land of
convenience stores tucked into unlikely places.
(Think unmarked 7-11s on narrow pedestrian byways.)
My first two grocery stops where across
the lagoon in Lido. I stumbled across a store while exploring and
returned because I still hadn’t found a store in Venice proper. Eventually I came across a few stores closer
to my apartment, plus I made several purchases in the Rialto Market.
But I was still surprised to find a
grocery store only a few hundred feet from my front door on the day before I
was to depart. It was down a small
walkway off a bridge that I had crossed many times. But it was only open for a few hours perhaps
five days a week. Had I spotted it
earlier, I could have made good use of it.
But I survived regardless.
If the primary thrust of my trip had
been culture or photography, I might have been frustrated by the time required
to solve the puzzle of everyday life.
But as my goal instead was to see how to adjust to local life, I found
the effort fascinating. Urban
problem-solving as a daily puzzle.
As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated. Please comment below or email me. And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)
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