Somebody's Always Hungry: venice

To get to Venice, you have to go through Florence, and when Emma and I were planning our trip by the pool before we left, imagining every last detail and the timing of it all, she said we have to stop in Florence and get off the train. I said oh, we can see the statue of David!

There were only a few mistakes on our trip. Taking Bruce oh wait nononono kidding, mistake number one was not bringing my plastic berkenstocks, the slip on shoe crafted by heaven. The milan train disaster which is coming up shortly. The near robbery and the sexual assault of Rome, but that was not our mistake, it was given generously. So really, the David. Was the big one.

I've already seen the David, and my mom had talked nonstop about loving Florence and the Uffizi museum and so I just assumed without looking that this was the David museum, Who thought Florence had ANOTHER museum? I booked the Uffizi tickets in advance, and Emma and I moved on to continue planning the trip.

We get off the train in Florence, stow our bags at the train station for the price of a small car, and walk toward our museum. Nathan is searching for a tank top which they DON'T MAKE in Europe, we discovered. We pass the famous bridge with houses on it, over the river that looks like it's saying don't cry for me Argentina it's so brown and not healthy, and it is packed like we're all leaving a parade along the river street. We get to the museum, we barge in for our tickets, we get in an enormous line, we go in, it's hot, we climb hot stairs, like so many stairs like the staircases were doubly long and everything we had to see they decided to put at the very TOP of the museum. We see a line of people coming out of a room and I put the kids in line but I walk around looking for someone to ask is this where the David is. I finally find a guy and he says oh the David is not in this museum.

First of all, why is Florence so hot. I was thinking this blog and our trip would be alot more interesting if the heat had not oppressed the oppres. (get it?) We would have had more days of poking our heads through tunnels and playing if we hadn't been busy sweating like we were doing the track and field Olympics while wearing wetsuits.

So Emma and I scramble to bewilderedly look at the where the right museum might be on her phone and of course you have to have tickets months ahead there's no way. Luckily there is a fake David in the courtyard below so we go and take a picture with him, we are in FLORENCE, so at least there's one David. Who was this David and why was everyone sculpting him. And the kids are just as impressed with the actors that have sprayed themselves with gold paint and are dressed in togas and posed on the streets like statues for the tourists. They have these at Universal Studios and Hollywood Boulevard, but it's good we came all this way. And you know what? We're happy. Even with the mistakes. The best part about Florence is Emma finds a Brandy Melville store that is her favorite clothes store and I find an NYU tshirt because nothing says Florence like NYU. We are happy here in a tiny American for a second offshoot of Florence, where the style is like home and the kids can find treasures.

We have to eat so we head toward the train station and decide to eat in the famous Florence church plaza Santa Maria Novella. You've seen it on instagram. Girls in flowy clothes are eating in a window with blowing curtains and this black and white church is out the window. I guarantee those pictures were shot during January, because the only thing blowing in this plaza is Nathan as he paces and sweats. Emma has to find good pasta, so we sit at Satan's fireplace and have pasta and pizza in front of this church after our failed David attempt but with a bag of cool clothes Emma found. Our waitress is crying when we leave but not from us I think because she has to stay here.

We pay forty thousand dollars to get our bags and then we roll back to the train and Venice is upon us in two hours.

Venice, watery Venice, with a souvenir shop on every crevice that isn't stuffed with pizza or pasta or a watery canal - Venice is like Annapolis if it flooded. So nice to have water and bridges, even Jeff Bridges. Would like Venice.

So exciting to watch them walk out of the train station and see a watery city. We got our water taxi tickets from a nice lady in the train station booth and then we walked right out onto the shores of this unreal city.

It is satisfying to be on a water taxi with your beautiful kids (missing one, dammit), even in a mask and with a few too many people on it. Just seeing the weirdness and beauty of this totally different city, and then following Emma and the map over bridges and through winding tunnels to get to our little place right in the middle, over a chinese restaurant, up some stairs like we're in Venice's secret annex. No one lets us in, it's one of those code places which you'd think since I hate people I would like, but when traveling I find that we LIKE seeing a face at a hotel in a new place, it's like a human bookmark, you feel better. But we don't care this time, there's a shower here, there are beds, the room is very big and cold inside (the fridge is not, of course, who needs everything). We rinse off Florence, goodbye failed David down the drain we'll see you when we bring Bess to her semester abroad in four years.

We look up places to eat and then we just wander, getting the first pizza we see offered, walking along the grand canal, over the Rialto bridge which is so packed Nathan is announcing Bridge is Closed to everyone as we pass. We go down little corridors and more little corridors, whistling Pirates of the Caribbean, and we see a small pasta place with a big window, people cheerfully making pasta and looking like they're having a good time. We get their pasta and Emma gets the pesto she's been wanting and you could live for a week on the amount and thickness of that pasta we get but it's so fresh. We sit down on the stoop of someone's house, on a quiet canal, in the most beautiful place we have rested our feet in.

We ate peacefully and after we were done and leaving, a lady came back who lived in that door. She had her grocery bag and she just walked into that door like it wasn't amazing that this was her door and her house and that's where she came out every day. To that.

Later on we wandered past our hotel the other direction a few bridges and there was the Plaza San Marco where Nathan felt the most magical. At night, with music playing, outdoor restaurants with sparkly lights and linen tablecloths. Water everywhere. This was a gorgeous night for us all. Nathan got a glowing look on his face and said this is elegant. You know you've made it if you're old and sitting in this square at a nice meal and listening to an accordion in Venice. We just nosed into little shops, and popped across bridges with gondolas, and got some bread from a girl named Anna who was the kids' age and had lived in Sussex but was now back in Venice working. She would have been our friend, wandering into our house back home. We wandered until we were ready to go lie down. I couldn't imagine living here, you'd see no sunlight in your house it would be like Idyllwild back home, the mountains blocking all the light most of the day. But to be lost in little alleys in Venice, because you didn't have to belong anywhere, was a great way to lose a day.

Traveling with kids where you want them to see, more than yourself, all the things, is what makes it more of a pressurized situation. Maybe I could've done better at sitting DOWN. I was rabid by the newness everywhere, I had to fill their minds and hearts, our time was so limited so I felt all this purpose to the lugging and settling in of bags up stairs into rooms, and showers, and there was food that was needed and looking. I was on shoveling mompower supernanny mode. B was right, we needed to rest and feel the place too. When we stopped to look we felt the best. But there was just so much, and all of us.

I think traveling by yourself or with a person you've just recently broken up with but already had the tickets so took the trip anyway (my last trip to Venice, at 25) (sorry, Dave), we were really good at wandering and stopping. It was quieter. It wasn't crowded, it was November. We would get food and walk. We didn't think very much. Maybe it was being 25. Also I only had one brain then, not four I felt in charge of. So I felt this pressure to not stop, ever. Our biggest family squabbles on this trip were other people wanted to sit down and eat for 20 dollars each and I didn't understand waiting for food when you could just grab the freshest bread ever off of any tiny market and maybe some chocolate or cheese or an apple and then keep walking, like by a river. The beauty in the trip, for me, was the feathering into the world, like a duck leaving three ripples as those invisible feet keep chugging it along.

I guess I learned alot about ducks this trip.

But I hear you, fam. It will be good for us if I can STOP. Relax more, next time.

Back to sweating,

In the morning we decided it was swim or die, so we looked up Lido beach and grabbed a water taxi and boated out 10 minutes across the water to the island of Lido. So nice to walk through a beach town and wait for Nathan to get a falafel for 400 minutes while Emma and I made videos of what he looks like when he's hot and walking. So funny. Then we get to the beach and the free beach is a hundred million meters away it's like back in Florence, so we first start walking then change our mind then go to a paying beach which is full then getting worried we go to the next paying beach which is romantically called Lung Mare, and we get in line to pay to get escorted onto a beach.

This is certainly not how WE do it, in the states. We had slow long line anxiety so while waiting we booked in italian an umbrella on this beach and then went to the window with no line that said online reservations. She informed us that we had booked the umbrella for tomorrow. We said it was in ITALIAN, and Nathan said we won't be here tomorrow. Looking plaintive.

She talked to her boss who didn't seem impressed but somehow we were paying our 7 dollars and then getting escorted to the COOLEST PLACE ON EARTH that we could get to that day, the Adriatic Sea.

We were put at an umbrella and he dragged one of the lounge chairs off cause I guess it only comes with one lounge chair (we later "borrowed" two from empty umbrellas next to us), and we dumped our stuff and went to visit the sea.

The most shells ever, the shell gods must have dumped all their shells here, they were all intricate and beautiful, and we all got directly in the water, while worrying about our stuff getting stolen. We floated for ever, Emma went back to lie down and be guard and in charge of resting, and Nathan and I floated in the non waves, and floated in the center of our trip, and floated in the not hot. We were not hot. We were wet and it was summer. Finally.

We missed Bess here the most. She would have really liked the beach, and Venice.

We moseyed to get burgers and fries at a cool hamburger stand, a little afraid of how crappy they would be since burgers had tasted pretty bad in europe. But these were cheap and amazing. I had a veggie cheese melt thingie because I had been missing actual vegetables. We ate at our lounge chairs looking out at Croatia in the distance (you had to imagine it) and Emma said I feel like I'm at a resort.

We did not rush out of Lido, we stayed to around 4. We decided we could wander back slowly and not have to worry about everyone leaving the beach at the same time crammed in the same water taxi. From the water we could see wayyyy down the beach where the free beach was and Nathan was like, it is shoulder to shoulder people down there, man. So we felt luxury that the 7 dollars had bought us. We were rich that day.

Nathan met a Nigerian guy in the water who couldn't swim and when we were leaving we passed by them and took a picture with them and got their instagram. Their names were Blessed, Pedro and Justice. I'm sure we'll see them again some day when we invite them to stay at our house in LA and they come to murder us because we don't know them at all we met them at a beach in italy. I recommend handpicking your future murderers.

We were so happy to be walking back waterlogged, and back on the water taxi waterrelaxed and back to Venice, Venice chugging up to us like it's been there all along and will continue to be there forever

That night we saw the plaza again with the music and it was sprinkling and then raining a bit and we saw it emptier and quieter. We yelled for Carol across the Rialto bridge. I finished Rowan's christmas stocking there and started a new sunset one. We had to leave early in the morning, we had to catch a train to Milan and then a quick change to a train to Bern, Switzerland. This was going to be the scariest half hour of the trip. But for now, we had Venice.

The sleepy streets of Venice at 8 am on a morning in August, when you're leaving, after having been at the beach and in the warm Adriatic the day before - this is the way we imagined the trip would be, the whole time. We forgot that there would be other adventure seekers and last minute summer travelers, in fact that every place would be crammed with people who wanted the same exact summer as us, just they could afford it maybe and they didn't have dementia at home or maybe they did. Maybe everyone darting through tunnels in Venice were hiding from something like real life and that's why it helps to have those guys in red striped shirts hanging on the corners offering you an 80 euro ride in the gondola. They probably have all the answers to everything if you just get in their life boat, but who has 80 euros for all the answers to life.

Venice was a bath for many reasons. We bathed off the attempted crime of Rome. We bathed off the sweat of a thousand peasants in the Sea. We sat DOWN for a few hours. We wandered in the land of Pirates of the Caribbean fake, with shutters and arches and echoes. All I remember from my last time in Venice as a kid was getting there at night and it was so quiet and dark and all the streets seemed the same and it was like a puzzle you would never solve because who needs to solve things with a basis of spaghetti, spaghetti is never not going to be swirled and knotted, that's what makes it beautiful and delicious.

There was such beautiful colory glass, from the merano glass situation that I guess is an island city nearby and in every shop for cheap but we knew we could not pack one piece of glass to take home. If we could crack a t-shirt in half, we were definitely prone to doing that so there was no chance for glass. I'm keeping all my glass in Venice, just want you to know, and it's all for you. I thought of you.

In Venice we didn't have to go UP in things or explore the history of things, we just looked from the outside.

The wind on our faces from the water taxi, even though we had to wear masks, we were outside and there was wind in a hot, still, world, and water under our feet.