Venizia

On the train from Rome to Venice, I sat in one of those stereotypical European family-style carriages where everyone faces each-other. Those things seriously freak me out. Now, it's fine for a short trip or one where you know everyone can speak the same language, but when I know that I'm gonna be there for a long haul and the person sitting across from me very clearly doesn't speak English, then I start to get a bit nervous. There are two reasons for this:

1) I like to hear myself talk, so it's rather inconvenient to have a completely captive audience staring me in the face, but not be able to communicate.

2) I have recently discovered one of my very limited number of talents: initiating moments of awkward eye contact. Ya'll know what I'm talking about. You just zone out for a second and find yourself staring at whatever object happens to be in your path — usually another human being — and that person happens to look up and lock eyes for just a hair too long. Normally, this might be diffused with what is sure to be a rather witty or charming remark, but you know that you don't speak the same language. So, further trying to salvage the situation, you try the universal smile, but the other person just giggles in response. Now you've really done it and made a harmless situation much more awkward because you may have very well just inadvertently flirted with someone who is going to be facing you for SEVEN hours from only 2 feet away.

In this case, it was a grandmother in her mid-to-late 70s so I really wasn't too worried about it, but you can imagine that under different circumstances, this could have been very bad. That's what I call "pre-emptive lesson-learning" — from now on I shall direct my blank stare out the window. Anyway, this woman ended up being hilarious. She is clearly very popular. Her phone was ringing off the hook. The best part, however, was that her ringtone was "Wish You a Merry Christmas." So during this train ride I probably heard the Christmas carol ten times. And her reaction time was impressively slow, so each time I heard the song nearly in it's entirety. Not even Costco starts Christmas in August. Aggressive.

After 7 hours of Christmas carols, I was understandably delirious so when I heard the conductor announce something with the word "Venizia" in it, I just assumed it was my stop. When I hopped off the train and saw no canals around me I began to get a little suspicious. I may not know much, but I've seen every single Johnny Depp movie, including "The Tourist" (you know, that terrible little Venetian gem with Angelina), so I had a pretty strong hunch that there were supposed to be canals. So I showed a cab driver the address that I needed to get to and we had a little chat where I pretended to speak Italian and he pretended to speak English and somehow it worked out enough that I realized that I got off at the wrong "Venizia." How am I to know that there are two Venezias? After a couple more broken English/Italian miming games, I found my way to the bus that took me into the city center.

From the waterbus! Gondolier in the foreground.

Eventually I reached the correct "Venezia" and the next challenge was actually finding my way to the hostel. Venice is a bit complicated to navigate since the streets aren't on a grid, many aren't labeled, and usually when you finally think you're going the right way, you run into an uncrossable canal. At this point it was 11:30pm and I was getting a little worried since my general experience of Italians is that they're...well...mean, and my hostel's reception was closing at midnight. Closing your reception office at all, by the way, is nearly unheard of in the hostel world, but I guess when you run one of only a handful of hostels in one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, you can do whatever you want.

View from Ponte dell'Accademia

Once I got to the bus station, the only people around who did not look like fellow utterly confused tourists were the water bus (re: a metro system on water) operators. They were all 40+ and didn't speak a word of English. Thankfully, I'm well practiced with the 30% English - 20% Italian - 50% miming game and they were incredibly patient and helpful. One of the men was about to begin his shift on one of the water buses so he just took me along with him and then made sure to let me know when it was my stop. Mind you, this was a fully-packed water bus. Marry me.

I don't even know where this is...

At 11:50pm, I finally arrived at my hostel. I seriously would still be lost in Venice if it weren't for a slew of incredibly patient locals. Their wonderfulness almost briefly stunned me into re-arranging my entire stereotype of Italy as a country filled with only snooty and mean people, but that would have been far too rational so I decided to just make an exception for the Venetians. The hostel-owner himself was an overly-friendly, somewhat creepy, but totally harmless man who had recently taken over the place and was trying just a little too desperately to boost their ratings. I was greeted with a hug and three kisses on the cheek but since he insisted on carrying my bag up the three flights of stairs and turning the fan directly on me when I walked into reception, I decided that he was the hero of the moment so I just really didn't care. Additionally, he upgraded me from a 5-bed dorm to a 3-bed dorm (that's some luxury stuff right there), so really this guy could do no wrong.

Shortly after I arrived in my room, my fellow dorm-mates — two sisters from New Mexico — also showed up. They were adorable. They've literally been planning to travel Europe together since they were in elementary school and now that one has finished college and the other is going into her senior year, they finally thought it was time to cross the pond. "Yeah, we both took out the maximum amount of student loans each year to pay for this." Couldn't be prouder to be an American.