Metamorphosism

The best thing I ever ate

Nice place, Venice. We took the night train down, arrived 8 in the morning. A few minutes later Alpha was showing me around the market there, crabs and octopi and fruit and all that good stuff. We sat by a canal and drank €5 cappucinos (which I thought was expensive until we had coffee at St. Mark's Square the next day, sheesh).

We sat by the canal and had coffee and watched various boats go past. Brides and grooms in gondolas. Gray-haired/grey-bearded George Lukas-looking guys, there were a lot of them when we were there, maybe something to do with the film festival over on the Lido, which was ending that day. Various transport boats. Police boats, one with its siren.

People walking around. Venetians. Tourists. Mostly tourists.

For a city that has made its living from ripping people off commerce for centuries, for all of its existence, Venice is a nice place. You know this.

We had a hotel on the Lido. Nice place. Gave us an upgrade for a discount, as I mentioned. I had to pay the difference in cash, which made me think this wasn't going onto the books. Any of you in the hotel business? Is this a common thing?

The Lido is quite nice. Cleaner than Venice proper, with streets instead of canals, and cars instead of boats of course but otherwise similar. Plenty of movie stars that week. People in the stores were all very kind to us. Everyone was nice. Later, we heard George Clooney had been there that same weekend so maybe they were being nice to us in case I was him.

Big hotels along the beach, with private beaches that Alpha shamelessly crashed, and little huts on them and stuff. Hotels on the Lido cost about half what they do over in the Venice part of Venice, but they're actually cleaner, which has its pros and cons if you're one of the people who goes to Venice for the slime and decay, like me.

We got cleaned up at our hotel and took a boat back to Venice where we went to the Danieli for a drink and to scoff at the American tourists. The Danieli is a very, very beautiful and classy hotel. We briefly considered staying there last weekend, but they had no rooms available and if they had, they would've cost around €600, give or take. So we sat in the bar, Alpha drinking a prosecco, me drinking a dry martini, watching people come and go. No idea what nationality they were, but a great many of them were dressed in short pants, tee shirts or polo shirts, baseball caps, drank water out of plastic bottles in the middle of the lobby and spoke loudly with American accents. They can afford that hotel and yet they dress like that? Where's the fun in that? Don't they care about how we are perceived abroad? Iraq and Afghanistan are bad enough, but this is unforgiveable.

We walked past St. Mark's. It was closed to tourists and there was a guy turning people away. Alpha told him she wanted to pray and darted inside. I waited outside for her. She was just too quick for me.

We went to a restaurant Alpha likes. Everyone else there was speaking Italian. We ordered various things and ate them. Seafood. A sardine on cornbread covered with sauerkraut. Half a little octopus stuffed with something I was afraid to ask what. Little crunchy round things, which I figure were tiny crab bodies. Really hard to eat, I tried cracking them open and then eating whatever was inside, but they were mostly shell so I just cracked them open and moved them around on the plate so it would look as if I had made an effort. Rings of calimari. Other things. Alpha and I were splitting it, the antipasti plate, and the recognizeable things were gone pretty fast and it was up to me to finish the other stuff.

All in all it was pretty good. The wine was good and luckily not too strong. Not too expensive either.

The next day, Sunday, before taking a day train back to Vienna we went to see the Lucian Freud exhibition at the Museo Correr. I like Lucian Freud, he is one of few painters whose paintings I actually recognize when I see them, but the man inhabits one cold universe. Afterward we had our expensive St. Mark's Square coffee. Did a little shopping. Walked back towards the train station.

What is that bridge near the station, the Rialto? Nearby is a pizzeria you'd not notice walking past. We went in there for a glass of wine before leaving town, on impulse, and it was there that I had the single most pleasureable experience of my life.

Just like that. We ordered a bit of cake to go with our wine, this nut torte thing they had. It didn't look like anything special. I won't tell you what it was like for me, not exactly, because my kid sometimes reads this. It was like, I guess, think of the most desireable person you know. And they are in love with you. And you are doing whatever your favorite sex act is with them, and it's significantly better than it ever was with anyone else, for both of you, and you're feeling both parts at the same time, the physical and the emotional components, for both people.

I was going to ask them for the recipe, but I figured they bought it from a bakery somewhere, and we had a train to catch.