The morning started like our others here in Venice, unaware of the time due to the blackout conditions of our apartment, groping for a phone and discovering it's past time to get up. No biggie. It's a vacation. We ate across the canal this morning as the rain poured down on the city. The food was decent, but Alex wanted to go back to the apartment for some respite from the rain. So our morning outing was short and delicious, consisting only of a meal and gelato, of course.
Back in our sanctuary, we listened to the rain fall, read and for me, napped. It's lovely to have the freedom of so much time on this trip. We have three and a half more days in Venice, so giving my cold a rest mid-day is no big deal. Around 3 PM, I ventured out to see the soaked city. Alex elected to stay behind, not wanting to be part of the rain games. I wandered for a good three hours through the tiny streets of this lovely city, getting quite lost on purpose. Many times I found myself alone on a street not wide enough to accommodate two people walking side by side. One particular street like this led to a cute little piazza with houses all around. I walked to the other side of the square, sure I had hit a dead end, but unseen until 3 feet away from it was another, smaller street. I ventured down that one and came to a real dead end. Then, because this is exactly what my brain does every time, I thought, geez, this would be the perfect trap to rob a tourist. There's no one around and no way to escape. It took maybe 2 minutes to retrace my steps, and all the while I was on the lookout for phantom muggers.
For most of this self-guided walking tour, er aimless ramble, it rained down upon me. I escaped into several churches, including one spectacular one that I remembered being in last time I visited Venice, Santa Maria dei Frari, where the remains of the Italian sculptor Canova are interred, with spectacular marble sculptures adoring his crypt. The cough and I battled in Frari, with it trying to assert its dominance in the very echoey church and me attempting to squash it like the putrid little bug that it is. The duel ended in a draw.
Close to dinner time, I decided to figure out where I was in Venice, with the help of Maps and the blue dot. Huzzah! I was close to a vaporetto stop. And, lucky me, the good old line 1 showed up as I arrived. I even got on heading in the right direction. And that's where my vaporetto luck ended. I've been using this sketchy app on my phone to plan my vaporetto trips and it misinformed me about which stop to get off at in order to transfer to my local line, the 4.2. Let's pause for a minute here to talk about the vaporetto. It's my favorite. All the grittiness of public transportation combined with the pleasure of a boat ride. But it's really lacking in its naming conventions. There's the N (night), the 1 (which goes in both directions at a stop so you have to be certain which way you want to go before getting on), the 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, and 5.2 (these are two lines, the 4 and the 5, but brilliantly, they are giving a sub-number to indicate which direction each one goes. It would sure be convenient if there were a 1.1 and a 1.2. Just saying). I don't know what happened to 2 and 3. They don't exist. And I think there's an A line in there somewhere. If anyone understands this scheme, please enlighten me. I'm so confused. So back to the story. I get off at Salute, the clearly wrong stop I know now. It was raining hard and after I worked out my new vaporetto plan, I explored a bit. Lucky me, I landed at the Punta della Dogana, the tip of one side of the Grand Canal near Venice's lagoon. It was beautiful in the rain. What a happy accident. Back on the vaporetto, I skillfully made the correct transfer, rode the good old 4.2 to our stop, Guglie, and met Alex for dinner.
We randomly picked a spot on the street that runs on the canal near our home and were a bit surprised to be sitting down to finer dining than we're typically used to. Splurging seemed appropriate after the day of rain, so Alex ate fine steak and I had freshly made pasta. So good. The bill was presented to us, the second most expensive on our trip after the Funky Gourmet in Athens. I paid by credit card but forgot to ask them to add a tip to the charge. Unlike in the U.S., you have to tell your waiter to add extra to the charge before it runs in order to charge a tip. Of course, the service was excellent at the restaurant and so I looked in my wallet for cash to tip the waiter, who was standing right there finishing the credit transaction. An appropriate tip would have been 5 to 8 Euro, but all I had was a twenty, so in a panic (my default state), I handed him the 20 and said, "this is for you." The waiter looked shocked, Alex looked shocked, and I think I looked shocked too. It was uncomfortable for all of us. Seconds afterwards, the waiter and his manager approached us as we were getting up to leave and gave each of us a business card, offered to pour us a glass of limoncello, which we declined (no booze due to cough) and then, as a last attempt to please their weirdly generous patrons, made us take cookies with us as we left the place. It was a muddle and Alex and I agreed we probably shouldn't go back for fear of being found out as regular people and not "big tippers".
Damp from rain, tired, and unsettled by panic-tipping, I settled into the Snoopy sheets for bed. Cough decided to come with me and we wrestled much of the night.
looks beautiful in the rain.
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