Where Have All the Venetians Gone?

Venice,

There is the feeling that you exist solely for us, the tourists, and that deep in your watery heart you are sleeping and dreaming of your former days of grandeur.

I didn't find you spooky, like others have. The sun was so bright, there was so much noise and heat and voices, even in the churches, which are normally always always the quietest most solemn and musty of places.



From top left: inside the Basilica di San Marco; the queue outside the clock tower; the Piazza San Marco; view from the Basilica.

Who are you, Venice? Where are your people? All I can see (and smell) is tourists, for miles and miles. Getting lost down your alleys and lugging bags of purchases from your glitzy glass, lace, antique and paper shops. Tourists with deep, deep tans, long legs, gigantic sunglasses. Looking for places to sit. Devouring gelato with something almost like desperation. Clicking photos with little silver digital cameras, angles that can never be original.



From top left: Restoration workers; gondoliers arguing; gondolier waiting; the only way of transporting goods - no cars here.

It cannot be that your people are only here to serve the tourists. But however hard I looked, all I could see were people wedging gelato into cones, pushing carts to carry boxes through narrow alleys, paddling gondolas, sanding away at old buildings only to put on layers of preservative to keep them precisely in their crumbling state.



I get the feeling, Venice, that you keep your real heart hidden. The real Venetians are hiding away somewhere inside and all we tourists can hear is the sound of their televisions humming and the scrape of forks on plates.

Venice

This is the first photo I took in Venice. We'd just got off the overnight train from Munich, arrived in all bleary-eyed. Stepped out of the station and onto this bridge somewhere near 7am. Aha! Just like it is in all the photos. Venice is one of those places that is, in real life, incredible.
I have more to say about it but am still thinking over all the places we visited before I try to put it into words.

I Was Here

Maybe this has happened to you.
You're on holiday, and it's that one day you decided to wake up at 5am because you suspect that if you get up earlier than everyone else the city will be secretly more beautiful, and reveal its beauty only to you.

But getting up at 5am, it's hard, and you're grumpy and you argue with your boyfriend because it's 5am and humans aren't really meant to wake up before the sun.

The sun, which while you're busy being crotchety, is rising quietly over the tops of the buildings and poking yellow rays into dark shadowy corners.

So you take a few photos and forget all about it. And a few weeks later, you're back home. You have to go shopping for milk and it's raining on the washing and your boyfriend is sitting on the couch talking to your flatmates about flexinodes and content types.

You open up your photos on the computer and there's that photo of the Old Town Square in Prague, that morning you got up really early.
God, that's beautiful! Didn't I notice that? Was I ever really there?

From Venice

Buon giorno. I am in Venice! Its fascinating, exactly as I had imagined and intriguing in a lot of ways. Pigeons take off vertically from alleyways, just like helicopters. People are deeply, deeply tanned. Gondoliers really do wear boater hats, black trousers and blue and white stripy tshirts. It is just like all the postcards. And no, it doesnt smell particularly, nothing beyond the normal watery smell and the odd waft of sewerage that appears in every city Ive ever been in. I will write more when Im back in London... after Vienna, Prague and Berlin. Ciao!

How (not) To Travel Light

There are two types of traveller: those who like souvenirs and those who do not.
I am not a person for souvenirs, having bought a few over the years and ended up throwing them away because once I return home they collect dust and become kind of useless.

For more than a year I have resisted the urge to Buy Stuff. I came to England with just a backpack (weighing less than 20kg) and intend to return home with a backpack of a similar size.

But there is this need to collect, to make a place a home and somehow I have tricked myself into finding a few exceptions to the rule of "I cannot accumulate Stuff."



Like postcards. I find it interesting to scan a few racks of postcards in a new country, checking to see if they have any historical ones or ones that are more stylish than the usual type. And how much do they weigh? Nothing! I can always post them home to myself when I return.



Like guidebooks. I've been given a few, have purchased a few from op-shops. They are useful. Clearly they are not to be classified as souvenirs.

There are other collections, too. A little pile of maps, about a zillion photos, a stack of paintings I've done on paper.

Is it really possible to live somewhere for a long time and not accumulate Stuff?
I'm beginning to think not.

What did you do at school today?

I took this photo at work today. It is a picture of a man, a duck and a girl, according to the extraordinarily artistic four-year-old who drew it. Note the abundance of glitter surrounding man, girl and duck.

Today was all about the three little pigs, the Big Bad Wolf, and showing children how to fold stuff to fit it into tiny envelopes. Some of them thought the best way to fit their pictures in envelopes was to cut them into strips. Some of them took great pleasure in cutting off long pieces of sticky tape to stick all over things. And all of them could not resist the glitter.

There is glitter up my nose, I am sure of it.

The Crush

Alice's, Portobello Rd

Dear London,

There is no other way to say it: You need to be bigger.

We have lived in your quarter-of-a-house-with-very-small-kitchen for more than a year now and I am gradually going mad trying to force more and more stuff into your tiny little oddly-shaped nooks and crannies. The kitchen is bulging! The bedroom drawers will not shut! The windows are just not big enough!

Also, your tube needs to expand. Its belly is bursting with people and I am tired of smelly men who take up all the elbow room.

And while I'm at it - I do not know about the toilets in all your cheapish restaurants. What is it about there being barely enough room to stand up in them?

Luckily Lauch and I are going to escape your crush, London. We are going away in two more weeks, on a train journey around Europe. Onwards to the squish of train carriages, backpacks and hotels. Maybe when I return you will have become mysteriously bigger.

Love,
Lexonline

Steam

I have winter nostalgia. It has crept up on me as I've noticed Londoners doing their usual stylish thing of wearing scarves even in the middle of summer. The weather has quietly become "Will I need a cardigan?" and not "I must put on my thermals, woollen jumper, woollen coat, gloves and scarf." And I LOVE this warmth, but somehow there is the odd feeling of missing wearing a coat and scarf, watching my breath turn white in the air and watching steam rise from tea.