nawl

Last-minute trip to Venice. I seem to be doing a lot of traveling on a whim these days.

When our flight landed in Milan, the weather was *balmy*. It must have been at least 15 C. This winter thing is destroying me. We made plans to start a Florence Semesters in Mathematics, or perhaps the Bahamas Semesters in Mathematics.

Also on our flight, or at least on the silly bus that took us from our plane to the actual terminal were three absolutely exquisite Italian women with nearly identical black leather calf-high boots and expensive-looking tans. They flirted with the security as we went through more metal detectors (Budapest's security must not be up to snuff) and made incredulous noises in Italian about having to remove their boots. I haven't seen any women like that in Budapest.

We arrived in Venice in mid-afternoon with no hotel reservations, no plans, and only Jonah's fat all-Europe guidebook for a reference. I didn't actually realize before arriving that Venice is actually an island in the middle of a lagoon, so that you have to take a bridge from the mainland to get there. Second, it is also almost entirely covered in stone. The very little green that is there is fenced-off and looks expensive. So much for Diane's grand plans to find a park to sleep in. Third, there are no cars anywhere except for a small area around the bridge to the mainland. And finally, it seems that Italy has banned smoking inside.

We promptly walked off in a random direction and lost ourselves until evening. As far as canals and beautiful buildings go, it was everything I could have hoped for. You can't walk very far before finding yourself crossing some adorable little bridge over an adorable little canal surrounded by adorable stone houses.

Many houses bordering canals had doorways leading directly to the water, yet few of them had boats tied anywhere nearby. I was somewhat puzzled.

We filled our first two days with wandering. The streets are as narrow and twisty as you like, making it exceedingly easy to lose yourself when that is what you want to do, and exceedingly difficult to find yourself on a map or guess the correct route somewhere even if you know exactly what direction you need to go. The first two nights, we lost our hotel. The second time, we were actually afraid we wouldn't find it again.

There's also the grand canal. The bridges across it make for nice pictures.

After the canals, the second major thing that Venice is famous for is pigeons. In San Marco square they sell little bags of feed for 1 euro to tourists who feel like being besieged by the most fearless pigeons I've ever seen.

On Saturday morning, the city changed. The tourists arrived for Carnevale. Sure, there were quite a few around before, but for the most part things felt pretty serene. No more. I've never felt so crowded in my life. Tourists everywhere, streaming in every which direction, speaking every sort of language. San Marco square filled with people.

Those cute little streets became bottlenecks for the hordes of people. I don't normally have a problem with crowds, but this time I honestly couldn't handle it.

The Carnevale bit itself was, well, not quite what I expected. For an idea of the ambiance, think of a cross between the Castro in San Francisco during Halloween, Paris in the middle of the summer (except there were quite a lot French people in Venice), and a Renaissance faire (to be more accurate there was a decidedly 18th-century bent). We did see people in fabulous costumes, but for every person with a fabulous costume, there were 50 tourists shoving each other out of the way to get a picture.

Many of the people in costumes just stood around in San Marco square to be photographed. We weren't quite sure who these people were: official city-sponsored people, Venetian residents with a passion for costuming, random tourists with a passion for costuming. A cafe on the border of the square advertised costumed happy hours, 45 euros for hot chocolate. Tourists lined up outside to photograph exquisitely costumed people sipping their expensive hot chocolate.

Costumes ranged from the rather spooky plain-masked abstract to incredible historically accurate outfits with full makeup and wigs to random Halloween-type affairs, particularly for kids. I'm sure if I had shown up in my full Renaissance nobles, picked up a random mask, and stood around for a day, I could have made it into thousands of people's vacation albums. The big thing to do seems to be to coordinate with all of your friends. We saw groups of at least 20 dalmatians, almost as many penguins, people in sombreros, fro wigs, and curlers and trashy makeup.

There were obviously real parties going on for people with money, and there was free music every night in San Marco square for the cheapskates. Jonah is the previously mentioned ballroom dancer. The first night was predominately salsa, the second swing, the third disco. So we danced. And crowds formed around us as various people filmed us or snapped pictures. Of us dancing sloppily in sneakers on concrete. Well, as the weekend progressed the thickening layer of confetti coating the ground made it easier to dance. I wonder how many people noticed that I don't even know how to lindy.

So that was that. The dancing crowds seemed to be rather into smashing bottles on the ground. Things ended early on Sunday. We spent all of Monday flying home. Budapest is gray and cold and nobody eats parmesan. We met a Chilean guy on the bus from the airport who was spending his summer break doing the backpacking through Europe thing, and had apparently just spent several days trying to get into Hungary after being turned back at the border.