October 31st, 2008
A little bit of everything
So I can’t be this tired. It’s just not possible. I worked four hundred hours in a month, over eight weeks without a day off and now I can barely keep my eyes open after being awake for only eleven hours. Am I really this out of shape?
No, I won’t believe that. I think we’ve just a number of factors colluding against me here. First, though I’m not normally susceptible to jet lag, I may be feeling it a little this time around. Second, I have technically had a cold all week, I’m just too stubborn to admit it and let it ruin my vacation. Third, I have been walking virtually nonstop and carrying around fifteen+ pounds of gear suspended on a single shoulder all week. Fourth, not by choice, but I’m eating a lot more meat this week. A LOT more. I’ve probably had more pork in the last four days than I’ve had all year. I am so not kidding. But, the Europeans love their buta (pig), be it bratwurst or prosciutto. The upshot here is I just don’t have the enzymes to break this stuff down anymore, so that takes energy, and I haven’t had natto, or fish, or tsukemono all week. Think about giving your Ferrari high-octane jet fuel and then all the sudden dumping regular in the tank.
So, I guess it’s not entirely inconceivable that I could be getting a little more run down than usual. I mean, it’s not like I’ve overweight or never do any aerobic exercise or anything. Still, I’m going to have to ganbare and have dinner tonight in an actual restaurant. I’m seriously worried though if I can handle the portions, though. I don’t want to be wasteful or offend. The other day I went to a Greek restaurant in Vienna and I couldn’t even finish my tzatziki, it’s just too much heavy stuff for a healthy man to finish (unless your Michael Phelps, I guess).
I got off track from my original topic, though. The key is that today was much more well balanced than yesterday. Admittedly I didn’t hit so many Frommer’s landmarks, but geographically and sociologically, I covered a much wider swath of the island.
In the morning as I said, I first took the vaporetto to San Michele and the cemetery. Then I continued on to Murano, where I passed about three hundred shops selling the same glassware. More importantly I got some photographs of a slightly different part of the city, architecturally. Then I took a string of vaporetto and made it all the way out to the other side of Venice in particular La Giudecca. There are not many shops there at all, mostly just blocks of Venetian apartments. Again, the buildings and the streets have a slightly different layout, so that was interesting to compare. Just as all practical ambient light disappeared I finished another roll of film and walked past the Venice Hilton, which to be honest is quite an eyesore, not fitting in at all with the rest of the island. The fact it occupies a ridiculously large piece of land doesn’t help either.
On the chain of vaporetti back to San Toma, I played hangman with some gap-toothed, little French girls. I could guess and understand the words they chose, but I realized I don’t know my French alphabet. I could guess the letter ‘r’, but I couldn’t properly pronounce it. I tried saying it and the little girl with glasses, she said “pardon?” in French, it just about killed me. They were sitting up on top of the life raft compartment by the window, but the younger one wasn’t tall enough to climb up completely, so I had to keep giving her butt a shove so she could climb up on the ledge every time they switched positions to draw on the window. After we got off the boat we cast glances at each other through the crowd, I mean we didn’t like say goodbye or anything, but it was a strange, mixed-up kind of feeling.
A little bit of everything, not a bad day I guess.
