Volume 4: Pete in Europe Part 5. A young balding mans journey through 10 countries and back
Day 11 – Rome to Venice
Today was a day our bus driver, Joel, would show great endurance and probably break a few EU labourer laws by working a twelve hour shift. I saw a lot of artwork in Europe, but Joel’s ability to reverse park that bus into any park was the finest artwork I saw all tour. I wasn’t the only one who appreciated his work as many a time his parking was met with cheering and shouts of “You da man!” from my fellow tourers. One such masterpiece, in Joel’s Neo-parking-impressionist style, took place at our first major stop for the day, Verona. He reversed the bus into a 45 degree park, with a gap only inches wider than the bus, a gap so close the Italian bus driver watching in the bus parked next to ours was I’m sure saying a few quiet prayers to the Madonna about preventing his bus from being scratched. The Madonna or Joel’s great skill came through for him, I prefer to choose the latter, and the bus was parked on the first attempt without incident.
Verona, of course, is the name of my mother, and to a lesser extent is known for the fact Shakespeare set his Romeo and Juliet play there. The play is a great tale of a chick that fakes her own death in order to get out of an arranged marriage and claim a massive insurance settlement. Romeo is shattered when he finds out Juliet is dead, and that he doesn’t get anything in her will, and then tops himself. Obviously the phrase “there’s plenty of more fish in the sea” hadn’t been invented back then and Romeo feeling he would never find true love again decided to take drastic action.
The locals of course have cashed in on Bill’s play by building a statue and balcony to honour the great tragedy. Apparently its good luck and you’ll find love if you touch Juliet’s breast, so naturally I went and copped a feel, along with the other thousand or so people crammed into the small square outside Juliet’s house. She did come across as being easy, and I’m pretty sure her breasts weren’t real. Which is highly likely given the amount of restoration work that is going on to monuments throughout Europe. Maybe she had a bit of a lift. It’s also a tradition to write who you love on the front door of Juliet’s house. As I didn’t want to limit my opportunities on the bus I just wrote “Pete luvs Contiki”.
As I purchased a whole lot of paraphernalia with the word “Verona” on it for my mum, I received the always customary receipt you get in Europe no matter how small the purchase. It has something to do with the EU trying to cut down on the black-market by making sure you have proof that all the things you’ve purchased were from a reputable tax paying business. I’d gathered so many receipts on tour that I intended to sow them together to make a jacket, pants and tie whenever I had some spare time on tour. Another thing European businesses do when they hand you your receipt with your change, is put your change in what can only be described as a cross between a metal saucer and half finished ashtray. At home I’m used to them handing the change straight to me, so many a time on tour I was left with my hand hanging out only for it to be ignored and my change thrown into the metal-saucer-half-finished-ashtray.
Verona has a building very similar to that of the Colosseum, the Arena. For some reason its not as famous as the Colosseum as for some reason in Italy monuments can only be well known if large parts of them are missing or they are leaning. Never have I known a country to be so proud of shoddy workmanship. The Arena is pretty much still intact and I believe still used to this day as Verona’s opera house. Not a bad bit of construction work when you consider it was built in the first century.
A group of us spent the last three quarters of an hour or so sitting on the edge of probably my 75th Piazza enjoying a quiet drink. Verona came across as being pretty laid back with a youthful population. I spent no time checking for my wallet (except when I was at Juliet’s house surrounded by a thousand school students) and enjoyed watching the people go by. In fact, I’d found every city after Paris to feel quite safe. There was the occasional Gypsy in Rome, who some how could write in perfect English that she had fifteen children and five husbands and that they all needed shoes. The classic moment was in Paris when some middle-aged woman came up to a group of us using her son as a tool of sympathy, who couldn’t have been more than 10 years old. The fact that the tracksuit and shoes he was wearing looked recently purchased was enough for us to refrain from digging deep into our pockets.
We reached the hotel in the evening and checked into what was a nice hotel, provided you didn’t want to be able to open your room door. After I’d tried a crack team of safe breakers to try and get in, Todd H noticed I was having trouble, as he had, and he showed me the special way to turn the key to get into the room. The correct way involved a lot of swearing, turning the key about fifteen times anti-clockwise, followed by a short prayer to the Madonna. Once inside the room it was nice and spacious, it would be bigger enough for the Party Capital of Europe to be open that night. One of the first things I noticed, and then promptly ignored, when I entered the room was a set of rules about room parties and alcohol. We must have created quite a reputation in France and they had been forewarned of our arrival.
Another interesting facet of this hotel, as with the other hotels, was the elevator. This one seemed to move fast enough, it was just the numbering for the floors on the buttons was all wrong. “1” represented the second floor and “2” represented the third floor. So if you’re room was say 232, then you actually had to press the 1 button to get to the correct floor. To confuse things more the button for the basement was “S” (later learned that Italian for basement is sottosuolo) and the ground floor button was “T” (still haven’t learned what the T stands for).
After dinner it was back to my room, The Party Capital of Europe, where we had a room party and Todd B and I finished off the last of our beer we’d purchased in the Rome supermarket. That night was the first night Todd H, Jennifer, and Brian had appeared at one of my now famous room parties. For some reason it was their last. They didn’t come across as big drinkers, so I know how boring it can be being surrounded by drunken people when you’re sober. My Italian liquor license ran out at 2am so I was forced to close the capital. I turned on the TV and was disappointed to only find six channels of porn. Disgusted by this lack of access, I went to sleep.
Day 12 – Venice
Today was our chance to check out the island city of Venice. A city built around the 5th or 6th century on the water in an attempt to defend the Veneto people from the Barbarian invasions. It’s now ironic that the one thing that protected the city is the same thing that is now destroying it. The problem you get when you build a city out in the ocean, unless it’s one of those bubble cities under the water you see in 1960’s sci-fi, is that they have a habit of sinking. Another major problem you get is flooding when the tide comes in. Last year San Marco’s square was flooded 90 days of the year. In an attempt to save the city from becoming the next Atlantis, the Italians have created the save Venice project. The decided solution is to build barriers around the entire city to stop flooding which will cost an estimated $2.9 billion. Surprisingly, not all Italians think it’s the best solution, but if the past is anything to go on I’m sure they’ll change their mind.
At breakfast the hotel owner must have had a bet with his wife. The bet was something along the lines of “I bet you I can feed 40 people on the one box of cornflakes”. There were so few cornflakes served in the bowls that a number of people decided to count them. When one person said they’d counted 98 in their bowl, they felt short changed when someone said they had counted 102 in their bowl. The hotel owner won the bet that day.
We caught a boat out to the city early that morning with our meeting place at Piazza San Marco. The piazza has such a bad pigeon problem that the city has decided to lace the seed they sell with a form of contraceptive. Given the large catholic population of the area, and the catholic churches attitude towards contraception (keep remembering the “Every sperm is sacred” song from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life), I found this to be in contradiction with the church. Fancy that, a major religion contradicting itself, who would have thought it possible?
Our first event of the day was a glass blowing lesson. What was really beginning to blow was these piss weak “lessons” which were just a cover to sell you more stuff. The old bloke giving the lesson took about 60 seconds to make a glass horse. Apparently he must charge out his labour at 600 euro an hour judging by the cost of those horses in the gift shop. There was supposed to be a lace “lesson” about half an hour later, but we skipped that as we were told there would be no Latino women modelling the lace in its most practical form, namely women’s underwear.
I decided to spend the day exploring Venice with Brad H. After about half an hour this seemed like it was going to be a bad idea. Brad had drunk around 600mls of Bundy the night before at the Party Capital and according to his roommate, Aalok, he fell out of his bed three times and said hello to himself in the mirror believing it was someone else at least one time. He wasn’t too interested in doing much walking that day. That said I did manage to drag him around to a few places. When navigating through Venice, it makes no sense to pay attention to street signs to find your whereabouts and where to go. Venice is essentially a giant maze. The only way to get around is to find some landmarks and head in the general direction of that landmark, which are nicely pointed to by big yellow signs.
We headed to the Academia that for some reason I thought was a museum. If I had seen a sign somewhere that the full name was Galleria dell’ Academia I would have realised it was a gallery for artwork and probably not entered. The appreciation I had gained for fine art in the National Gallery in London and the Louvre in Paris was now turning into a loathing. There are only so many pictures you can see of Jesus and his “virgin” mum before you just hit a wall and can’t see anymore. I hit that wall in the first room of the Academia, which had nothing but religious paintings. We made great pace through the gallery, taking time to see everything but just assuming that the bloke that appeared in any of the paintings was either Jesus, God, or Joseph (although it was rare for him to work his way into a painting so it was probably safer to assume the former two), and assuming that one of the chicks in the paintings had to be the Madonna (usually the one weeping).
From there I do believe we got something to eat. We stuck with the cheapest and safest option we knew, the Magherita pizza, as we didn’t both read Italian and you’re just not sure when you’re in a foreign country whether sheep’s testicles is viewed as a delicious topping.
From there we walked up to Ponte di Rialto. Its claim to fame was that there was a big competition to design a bridge that crossed the Canal Grande which would be big enough for a fully armed war boat to sail under, and yet still appear very pretentious. I laughed with joy when I heard that one half of the super bitches of art, Michangelo, had entered the competition and lost. I can’t recall the winner, but that’s not important, what is important is that Michangelo was beaten (unfortunately, only figuratively and not literally with a club as well). At the Ponte di Rialto we watched what would be described as a Gondola protest float. The Gondola drivers were on strike and were trying to make their point, whatever that was, by parking their Gondolas across the Canal thus stopping traffic. Our tour manager had told us about the strike and she was amazed that the strike took place given that it required so many Italians to agree on the one thing at the same time. Apparently earlier in the day the Gondola drivers had dragged a Gondola onto the top of the Ponte di Rialto and when the police came they fled like, well I guess, like Gondola drivers caught in a raid. Naturally, I was devastated to have missed out on such a great photo opportunity.
After coming to terms with the devastation I’m sure the people of Iraq would have easily understood, we headed for the Basilica di San Marco. The basilica was built to house the body of St Mark, which was stolen from its burial place in Egypt by two Venetian merchants (who were no doubt pissed at the time from drinking too much Egyptian beer and it was either steal St Marks carcass or a flag). A great story is that the saint had been reburied several times inside the basilica, and on at least two occasions his burial place had been forgotten. How do you lose the body of a saint? It’s not like its something trivial like your house keys. You can just imagine the conversation:
Venetian #1: Oh crap, I’ve lost it again
Venetian #2: What? Your house keys?
Venetian #1: No! Bloody Saint Marks body again!
Venetian #2: Have you looked down the back of the couch?
Both Brad and I had shorts on, but luckily for us the Venetian’s aren’t as strict as the Romans so we could still enter the church. That didn’t stop me from pulling my shorts down to below my knees, or more accurately, closer to my ankles to ensure I got in. As I entered the church the guy on the front door told me to remove my hat. Something I found a little odd given the Pope gets around in one of the biggest hats known to man.
Our last tourist attraction we partook in was riding the lift to the top of the bell tower on the corner of Piazza San Marco. In an attempt to stop pigeons landing on the bell tower they had put up spikes on the ledges around the tower. I couldn’t help but notice a pigeon, with poor eye site or high on some seed that had been laced with the contraceptive chemical, had made an emergency landing on one of the ledges a few weeks back and now all that remained was its impaled body serving as a warning to the other pigeons. At the top of the tower there were great views that I’m sure someone with great photography skills could have taken advantage of. It’s a shame I’m not one of those people.
At dinner that night I really got into the wine in a big way. Even though I was drunk I was still finding it hard to believe they served six different courses of pasta. I wasn’t the only person to have consumed vast quantities of wine that night. Of course, the problem with drinking vast quantities of liquid of any sort is that at some time it’s going to want to exit your body. That time was the same time for everyone when our tour manager announced the bus would be another half hour before it met us at our meeting point. Our meeting point was at the docks just after we got off the boat and there wasn’t a toilet in site. Everyone then made mad dashes for anything that resembled a plant, tree, or bush, as that half hour seemed like an eternity to a person with a full bladder.
The Party Capital closed all of a sudden that night after someone offended a virgin. The most surprising thing was that it wasn’t me who did the offensive work. I’d stocked up on beer earlier in the day at a supermarket in Venice and had pretty much drunken it all, so I was in a happy drunken place when the comment was made to the virgin. I tell you what; nothing kills a party like watching an offended virgin storm out the room. I can’t even remember the comment, all I can remember is being in a drunken daze and thinking “what the f#%k just happened here?”. Everyone pretty much cleared out of my room straight away that night leaving about fifteen different bottles of alcohol in my room. I wasn’t looking forward to trying to explain this to a hotel that clearly stated no alcohol in the rooms. Luckily, we left early the next day and I was never put into the uncomfortable situation of trying to make up some lame excuse like “I collect bottles, they’re souvenirs”.
It was about 1:30am when I turned the porn off and went to sleep. To cap off a weird night, I woke up at 3am, took a dump and was about to ready myself for breakfast. It was only when I checked my watch that I realised what time it was and went back to bed. It was the first time I’d ever “Sleep Shat”, which probably isn’t that unusual when you consider there have been people in America that have used the “but I was sleep walking when I got in my car, drove, slashed my ex wife to death and then hopped back in my car and drove home and slept” as a defence strategy in murder cases.
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