The city tonight is bathed in a dense fog. It gives me great anticipation for the morning’s photographs.
I am the world’s most unlikely travel photographer. I am horribly shy in the face of exotic cultures, I am congenitally unilingual, and I am as moody as an adolescent girl. The past two days I have been insecure in my ability to even feed myself. My mode in the daytime is the point and shoot method. That. I want that sandwichy thing in the case. And un espresso, because it’s the only coffee drink I know how to say, and I know it’s uncool to order a cappuccino after noon. Dinner is harder, particularly travelling with these new Canadian-valued dollars. A primo and secondo and a side, with no wine, is going to set me back $40 or more in a cheap place. I scan the menus posted outdoors, see if there’s anyone else in the place, and keep looking for someplace less dear. According to Rick Steves, there’s a way of grazing in the bars for cheap, but I have not begun to puzzle that one out yet. It might mean actually asking for my food without being able to point.
Much as I hate to admit it, my ability to navigate an unfamiliar culture is naïve even by Rick Steves standards. In the past, I’ve been smug about his “Europe Through the Back Door” approach, thinking myself an experienced world traveller, too sophisticated to need his handholding. I look through his Ireland guidebook every once in awhile (a country I know thoroughly), hoping he hasn’t found out about the good bits yet. But I have been leaning heavily on his Venice guidebook for how to navigate the culture. It’s too thick on the “What to See in the Doge’s Palace” mode for my taste, but invaluable in its orientation on how to use the phones.
But my failings in navigation make it unlikely to even find a listed restaurant, the one filled with the other Rick Steves cultists also clutching his guidebook like a security blanket. Tonight I crossed the Accademia Bridge and headed rightward toward a cluster of osterias he had highlighted. So far, the only way I have been able to find a destination in Venice is when I have not been trying to. If I actually want to get someplace (like my hotel), I need to allot an hour and a half. There is, as far as I can determine, not a square angle in the entire city. North on my compass (yes, I travel with a compass, for all the good it’s done me), lines up in a weird inclination to the city that makes no sense to my navigational barometer. It must be my American township and range mind that is so addled by this, but I could not make sense tonight how the sun could be setting over the Grand Canal from the Rialto Bridge. My mind kept telling me it was ninety degrees off.
I did find, by dint of sheer hunger and exhaustion, a busy little restaurant (Taverna San Trocaro) where some of the first courses were priced in single digits. There were many languages in the air, including Italian. The house wine was mediocre, but the rest of the meal was quite good. My body was craving bitter greens and I greedily ate the parsley and raddachio garnishes. The salmon (Norwegian Atlantic farmed, in all likelihood) was quite good, and the final salad verde course was two very fresh baby lettuces, whole leaves, mixed together. I felt contentedly full for the first time in days.
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