Venice

Final instalment of my travelling trilogy

Venice

Ah, Venice. What a strange few days of my life. Already been to Dublin and London on this trip and by the time I land in Venice, I am virtually skint. Thankful to find a decent supermarket with cheap meat and cheap wine.

My first time in Italy. It’s thunderstorm season and the plane circles the airport for half an hour waiting for conditions to improve, which the pilot explains on landing are the worst he’s experienced in twenty years of flying.

It’s already ten o’clock in the evening and I’m panicking that I won’t be able to get into my hostel at night. Over the years it becomes a recurrent theme of getting into any Italian city late and not being able to find where I’m going. I blindly get onto a waterbus, which takes an age to get to San Marco Square, detouring and dropping off via the other Venetian islands. The crew play Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time through a portable CD player. I haven’t heard the album in years, but I’m on the water so long I get to listen to everything from Caught From Somewhere in Time, up to and through the eight and half minutes of Alexander the Great.

Humming Stranger in a Strange Land to myself, I disembark. When lost late at night in a country where you don’t speak the language, it’s always best to adopt a persona of friendly but pathetic. I diagonally cross San Marco with some vague homing instinct for where I’m heading, the rising waters of the lagoon seeping up through grates in the stonework. Once into the narrow streets though, I’m lost and stop strangers every few meters and point at the address on the printed reservation sheet I carry. Most shrug their shoulders, but I guess my features are Italian looking enough that most who don’t know the street find someone who does.

By some kind of tag team or tourist relay with me as the baton, late night walkers and late night drinkers get me to the right street in the middle of the city. The entrance to the hostel though is a nondescript and I manage to walk past it three times, my pacing only arrested by the water’s edge, until I chance upon the right door and ring.

It’s gone midnight, but there’s someone on duty and I’m shown to my room, everyone else already asleep on what are little more than camp beds. The adrenalin is pumping from having got here after the many delays since flying out of Gatwick, but there nothing more to be done but get undressed, find some comedy to listen to on my Walkman (MP3 players being in their infancy) and go to sleep.

More thunder in the night. Out here there’s nowhere else for the lightning to go and it explodes above our heads, jolting everyone awake. A first introduction to my fellow hostellers is half asleep, worried faces illuminated by brief bursts of white hot light in the night. No one sleeps particularly well, even after the storm has moved on. Still, it gives everyone something to talk about over breakfast.

I spend the best part of a week in Venice, but with little money to spare and still being the height of the tourist season in August, three or four hours of queuing has to be endured to get into anywhere worth visiting anyway. Under the circumstances, I walk from one end of the city to the other and back again, lost in my thoughts, reading from Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground in out-of-the-way piazzas, people watching at the train station, playing solitaire in the hostel at night and talking to the staff. Marco, who was on duty the night I arrived, is a frequent source of entertainment. The hostel is a family run business, he’s the youngest, tall and handsome, a cliché of an Italian man, well dressed and distracted by every pretty face that crosses his path. He’s good company though, curious and good taste in music. He brings in a guitar for us to take turns playing.

There’s a lot of Americans staying in the hostel, a middle aged couple from the Netherlands and a noisy, self important woman from Canada. In my experience when people talk about that brash American that was in the bar when they were in holiday, bumming everyone out, more often than not that person will turn out to be a Canadian. I’ve known many Canadians and while some of them have been dicks and some excellent company, they’re all mad. This Canadian definitely falls into the dickish end of the spectrum.

There’s also a couple of British people. I don’t remember either of their names, but there a girl who’s picked up or been picked up by Marco’s elder cousin while she’s been staying at the hostel. He’s taking her to Rome. The rest of the family, balding, fat middle aged men, are jealous that she’s not with them. The envy of others is always hilarious when you have no personal stake in the sideshow. Marco’s uncle introduces me to the phrase, ‘flying bitches’, which has no English equivalent I think. It’s like gold digger or something like that. Ain’t misogyny just tragic?

The other Brit here is a guy who works for one of the London radio stations. LBC if I remember rightly. The only bit of paid for culture I get to see when in Venice is spending a morning together at the Guggenheim Museum. Exactly what you expect from a Guggenheim Museum, lots of Cubism, Futurism and Pointillism. Then, after catching the matinee performance of Flying Bitches back at the hostel, I end up falling asleep on my bed listening to a BBC radio adaptation of The Big Sleep (in Dublin and London I’d read Chandler’s Little Sister and The High Window). I wake up in the early evening.

Venice is a strange place, a place I need to return sometime and see a bit of the history, the Doge’s Palace and the Basilica and the like. I’d bet I could also spend a number of days just tracking down traces of Galileo’s life here. I’ve walked over the Rialto Bridge a couple of dozen times on my frequent perambulations. If you go out in the morning, the whole city smells of dog piss, because there is no vegetation and everyone lets their dogs piss in the streets, which evaporates in the rising heat and gives everything a pissy stink.

Venice of course has the advantage of no motor traffic and so it’s a good place to walk around, through streets sometime so narrow that you feel they will narrow down to infinity, or emerge into an entirely different city (or maybe I’ve just read too many Clive Barker novels). Virtually the entire island is stone, although there is a small park well to the east of Saint Marco that I would wander down to a sit on a park bench and watch the overlarge ferries motor by. I wonder how the ships get in when the advantage of Venice, the reason people fled to these islands, was that they were in waters too shallow for warships to invade. That’s a question to which I still don’t know the answer.

As it turns out, instead of catching a waterbus, I could have just got a bus from the airport as far as Venice train station and I would still have had only to walk as far as I did from San Marco. But what would have been the fun in that? The coming of smart phones and Google Maps may take a lot of the frustration out of foreign travel, but it also takes away just as much of the adventure. Part of the romance and the personal of travelling is allowing yourself to be lost and find something unique for you. Serendipity is magical. Knowing where you’re going, well that’s simply overrated.

Get it done.

 

Madrid

Second part...

Madrid

6am. Why is it whenever I arrive in a new European city, it’s always 6am? Amsterdam the first time. Amsterdam the second time (though the second time is a few years ahead of me at this point). Today it’s Madrid, having taken a night bus from Almeria. Nina is low on sleep, low on blood sugar, short on patience. We need to find somewhere to stay and get some sleep, but we don’t have any change for the phone to ring places and ask. I run back down to the Puerta del Sol to buy a copy of the Independent, a day old, overpriced  European edition that has half as much content as the home grown version.

That summer, Tim Roth was the face of H&M. We saw posters plastered with his face everywhere we went, in Manchester, in the papers, on the Paris underground. Nina went into full rant mode every time one materialised in front of her. Travelling on the Madrid underground we were spared the sight of him. “Thank fuck.” she exclaimed as we swiftly approached the city centre. Coming out of the subway at Puerta del Sol, I turned around and collapsed with laughter as Nina’s face fell. There, a hundred foot long by fifty high, Tim Roth’s face looking down on to the plaza from an enormous H&M advertising canvas. Her mood didn’t improve any.

After three or four phones calls in mangled Spanish, we finally find a cheap enough place right on the corner of the Puerta del Sol. Six stories up in a residential block, with no windows to the outside world, just a sash window to the corridor that I guess anyone could be looking in through if they stood on a chair (well we’d have given them a good show at least). The room, the only free room, has twin beds, a common theme ever since we arrived in Spain, having hitchhiked all the way from Lancashire.

We wake late in the afternoon, sallying out into the afternoon to take in the sights, drink tea and coffee in the cafes along the way there and share the first of who knows how many McRib meals. We lived on those things when we were in Madrid, two or three a day. We ate so many that McDonalds retired the combo in our honour.

It was the end of a three week journey from Blackburn to Northampton to London to Folkestone to Dover to Calais to Rotterdam to Paris to Nimes to Barcelona to Almeria to Madrid. Only Liverpool Airport remained on our itinerary. It was the most enjoyable journey I’ve yet taken with anyone. We spent no more than minutes out of each other’s company in all that time and yet failed to get on each other’s nerves, except during early morning arrivals in new cities. Paris we got dropped off in the arrivals lounge of Charles de Gaulle Airport at 4am and had to wait two hours to catch the RER into the centre of town. There we stayed in a Formula1 hotel in a rough part of Paris where the drug dealers tried to sell you shit in the lobby and where someone was stabbed in their room on our floor. We saw him lying face down on the bed inside his room. Nina was convinced he was dead, but I swear I saw his feet moving. The sheets were awash with blood however and we argued the toss about it for the remainder of our journey. The next day we moved out and got into a hostel in a better part of town.

Madrid is a blur, I can’t really remember what we did in what order, but we managed to fit a lot in. We drank in Hemingway’s favourite bar, ate tapas in tapas restaurants, went to Madrid’s premier rock club where no one danced. We went to Reina Sofia gallery, where we saw Guernica and Dali’s Great Masturbator. We got lost trying to find the gallery and ended up walking down a back alley which should have been called Dog Shit Alley, because you couldn’t walk ten yards without having to step over some deposit. It knocked Nina sick.

Our final night in the hotel, Nina got all dolled up to go out to the club, then took a tumble on the stairs down to the elevator in the hotel, collapsing and falling down three or four steps in comic slow motion. She bounded up in high speed and insisted we carry on, even though a lump the size of an egg was forming on the side of her shin. Lots of vodka took the pain away.

That was the zenith of the brief time that we were together. The death throes of our relationship took longer than the relationship itself. We spent our last night in Madrid sleeping rough in the airport, having failed to blag a cheap flight home. We ended up on an Easyjet flight, but it didn’t leave until the following evening. As always, I could sleep anywhere, but Nina spent another disturbed night on the metal airport seats. “I just want someone to put a sign on it that says ‘bed’.” she said. “Then I’d be fine.”

She had a mortal fear of flying and it took half a bottle of vodka just to get her on the plane. Even then she freaked out as we were taxiing to the runway, shouting that she wanted to get off, that it was her ‘human right’ to be let off the plane. I somehow managed to calm her down and once we were in the air she was fine, staring out of the darkened window at all the lights below for much of the three hour return flight.

Many years later I went back to Madrid. I found the door to our hotel and sat writing in the Starbucks at the corner of the Purta del Sol, as it was the only place where I could get a half decent cup of tea. I went back to the Reina Sofia and greeted Guernica like an old friend. This time though, I paid a visit to the Prado to see Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Goya’s Second of May 1808, Third of May 1808 and his black paintings. Another woman was on my mind, waiting for me back home. Instead of drinking in Hemingway’s favourite bar I would sit in internet café’s talking to her on IM while listening to BBC radio on iPlayer. I took the train to Gibraltar and back, went on a day trip to Morocco, flew out of Madrid Airport and on to Milan, Florence and Rome. You get more done on your own, but it’s much more fun to experience the journey with someone you love, even if that love lasts only a day. It’s quality not quantity that counts.

Get it done.

Amsterdam

Went completely off the boil over the weekend, so to make up and catch up, here's the first part of a travelling trilogy:

Amsterdam

We went to Amsterdam by the scenic route. My cousin was studying music in Totnes, Devon at the time. She’d won a free trip for two to Amsterdam and knowing that I was planning on going backpacking anyway, invited me to be her plus one. I was in the north west, so the first stage was to take the train from Preston, a six hour journey.

I arrived in the mid afternoon and had a night to kill before the twenty three hour coach journey to Amsterdam via London, Dover and Calais. We spent that summer evening taking a trip out to Teignmouth, where Keats wrote much his epic poem, Endymion:

A thing of beauty is a joy forever,

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness, but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams; and health, and quiet breathing.

A fine place to spend a last evening in England, nestled there on the east coast of the Devon peninsular between Exmouth to the north and Torquay and Paignton to the south, wandering down to the beach the shape of a crescent moon, flanked by the River Teign to the west and the English Channel to the east. We ate fish and chips at a fish and chip restaurant and skimmed stones and gazed in awe at the orange, pink and red sunset that set the gathering clouds ablaze and burnt them black. I still have pictures of that sunset that were developed in Bruges with the rest of the roll of film.

We arrived back late at Helen’s student digs, a train having caught fire during the evening and delayed all the other trains. We traipsed back from the train station gone midnight, walking between flower boxes that filled our senses with aromas rarely noticed in the daylight. I tried to sleep, but it was a fitful slumber, filled with strange dreams and constant wakings to check my watch.

The first leg of our journey was to leave just after nine. We got to the coach stop well in time. The driver took our belongs to pack beneath the coach and asked where we were going. “Amsterdam.” I blurted out, not thinking. We may have been going to the Netherlands but the driver was only going as far as London.

It was four or five hours to London, with various stops along the way, but the time flew by as we chatted and read and listened to music and had a picnic along the way. London seemed to come all too soon. We had three hours to kill before the evening journey out to Dover. We stashed our rucksacks in left luggage and went on the tube to Camden Town. Helen, being the hippie she is, wanted to visit the market and other shops around groovy Camden Locks. We sat out by the canal and got talking with a group of lads who shared a joint with us and told us to check out the Bluebird when we got to Amsterdam.

We ate dinner from fast food stalls in the market on picnic benches, then caught the tube back to the coach station. Left luggage couldn’t find where they’d left my luggage and not having long before our coach was leaving, I had to climb under the hatch and hunt down my rucksack. By the time I had convinced staff that it really was my bag by giving them a detailed rundown of what was in it, we were at the back of the queue for the Amsterdam coach and had to sit in the only seats left, up at the front of the coach like the uncoolest kids in class.

London drifted past the window in perfect filmic cliché, the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, the MI6 building, before we turned right and headed down the coast. Dover came hard upon and before long we were rolling into the belly of a P&O Ferry and I, who at 27 was about to leave mainland Britain for the first time, excitedly jumped up and down up on deck as the mooring ropes were released from the dock with a plop into the water and pulled up the sides of the ship. We watched until the White Cliffs had shrunk away on to the horizon. Then we went and had a drink or two at the bar.

First time in a foreign country and yet now I had to cross two countries just to get to my ultimate destination, though I would see plenty of Belgium and France in the next few weeks. After the adrenalin rush of not being in Britain wore off, I realised that the continent was just the same, with its rain and road signs and I pretty much slept the rest of the way until morning. I vaguely remember that we stopped at a service station in the middle of the night, somewhere on the border between Belgium and the Netherlands. I wondered around in a zombiefied daze, grabbing automatically at drink and food that I didn’t really want and hoping that they would accept Guilders, as that was all the currency I had.

It was half five in the morning by the time we reached Amsterdam. We stopped at some random location outside of the main part of the city, where the driver extorted an extra two Guilders from the passengers to take them all the way to Amsterdam Central. Our hostel was not far from the station, near the Red Light District. Helen’s university had made the reservations and given Helen cash to pay for our beds. We arrived a little before six, where the only person on duty was the night attendant who could find no record of us in their books. He got us to hang around for the manager, who arrived around seven, a rude Dutch man who said we had no reservations, he no spare beds, and kicked us out onto the street.

We were in trouble. It was Saturday morning in Amsterdam at the height of the tourist season, so we had no chance of finding another hostel at this late stage. Our only hope was that Helen had brought a tent with her, planning to do a bit of backpacking of her own after we parted company. The night attendant, a pleasant guy from Sheffield, told us there was a campsite north beyond the train station. There was a free ferry which took you over the water and then a bit of a walk up to the campsite.

It’s a good job the Dutch are such notorious multilinguists, because the instructions we were given were vague and once over the water we had to keep stopping every five minutes to get new directions from sleepy locals. Eventually though, we found the campsite, paid bargain prices, spending the rest of the hostel money on food, booze and pot, and at little after eight in the morning, in the pouring rain, we pitched our tent, climbed in our sleeping bags and got a few hours precious rest.

The alarm was set for twelve, but upon sounding we engaged in a brief, barely understandable negotiation to get a couple more hours shut eye and both went back to sleep until 2 in the afternoon. I needed it. For the last two nights, I’d merely been going through the motions.

The showers were an adventure. You hear lots said and written about the toilets in French campsites, but less about the showers in Dutch campsites. There’s a metal disc where the tap should be and to get the shower to work you seemingly have to place your fingers in an equidistant circle around the disc. I have small hands and can’t manage it. I found a faulty shower instead and manage to wash myself beneath a dribble of water. It’s a bit like that cheap washing up power that you buy as a student that doesn’t quite wash your clothes, more just gets rid of the smell.

Having been to the Netherlands on many subsequent occasions, I can state with confidence that nowhere in Europe, including the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, will you find a better example of what is commonly called the Full English Breakfast than here. They did a great one at the campsite, even at three in the afternoon. We fill in postcards to put in the on-camp post box, leave some stuff in their safe, then catch the bus back into town. Helen wants to do some busking, so I leave her on a bridge near Waterlooplein, then end up wondering around the market nearby. She’s made next to nothing by the time I come back, so packs up her guitar and we end up wandering back through the market and coming out, by pure accident, right next to the Bluebird café. We explore a bit more of the centre of town, then double back to the Bluebird. I get my first taste of a Dutch coffee shop.

We meant to pop in for an hour or two. But there’s an enormous leather sofa in the Bluebird, and once people leave and we upgrade from the chairs flanking the tables around the arc of the sofa to the sofa itself, it’s virtually impossible to get up again. We’re there for five hours, smoking increasingly strong skunk. It’s one of those nights were not a lot happens, not a lot is said, but you’re happy to just exist in the moment. It was a long time getting here, but finally I have arrived where I want to be.

We leave at midnight and stumble our way back in the dark to the ferry behind the station and up the same residential streets to the campsite. Camp fires are burning in the darkness. Stoned faces seek answers in flame. We have a last smoke and go to bed. Not a bad way to spend your first day abroad.

Get it done.