Venice: I am not making this up

Lost your bag? Just keep walking…

November 18, 2010 2 Comments

If anything has ever happened to you which was totally not your fault, but for which you are going to be massively penalized, read on.

We know that air travel can sometimes seem like a penalty in itself. Missed connections, or canceled flights, or harassed cabin staff, or getting stuck sitting next to a drunk, just-divorced cement mason whose wife got the dog. Oh, and lost luggage too.

I'm assuming his bag didn't look like this.

Yes, if you check your portmanteau you may have worries bigger than crying babies and overpriced beer. Especially if you’re a 25-year-old Serbian tourist who may not have developed the finely honed instincts of a frequent flyer when it comes to finding the best way to resolve any problems.

I refer specifically to a young man whose initials are D.V. (perhaps you know him?) who was flying from Ankara to Venice via Vienna a few days ago.

He checked his bag. But his bag did not arrive on the carousel at Marco Polo Airport when he did. Obviously he couldn’t know which leg of the itinerary had snagged his valise, but he wasn’t happy.

And I'm sure it didn't look like the Henk Travelfriend, at $20,000 the most expensive suitcase in the world.

So far, so normal: Long trip, check. Being tired, check. Huge annoyance on arrival, check. So he went to report it, and also made it clear just how hugely annoyed he was. Do you people not know how to do your jobs, fer cripes’ sakes? Or however they say it in Serbian.

Good news! They found it! It only took four days, but they got it. They notified him and he went straight to the airport to claim it.

Bad news! They looked inside it! And there, all bundled up safe and sound behind a fake panel, right where he’d stashed it, they — the Guardia di Finanza — found 2300 grams (five pounds) of pure heroin. Street value: One million euros ($1,369,480, or 107,171,684 Serbian dinars).

Back to his question about job skills: I’d say that while the baggage handlers at one of the three airports were pretty incompetent (including the fact that, unlike baggage handlers in many places, they didn’t look inside that lonely little suitcase sitting there all by itself), the gendarmes at Marco Polo were at the top of their game.

So now D.V. has been arrested for international drug trafficking and is looking at a probable 8-20 years in the bastille. Plus he doesn’t have the doojee anymore, which is now a whole lot more irritating to his employers than it is to him. It is a situation compared to which sitting next to a depressed cement mason would begin to seem, as they say here, a Carnival ball.

This is at least an interesting twist on a depressingly routine subject; drug runners arriving at the airport usually have stomachs full of condoms crammed with cocaine. The latest, a few days ago, was a certain M.R.A., a 19-year-old Pole, who was caught with nearly 2 kilos, or 4 pounds, of the stuff inside him. Or else you’ve made the journey via ferry from Greece, origami’ed inside somebody’s vehicle with no food, water or air for two days.

An empty carousel, a sight to freeze your follicles if you're waiting for something worth a million euros. This is Dubai airport, but the same type of carousel as Marco Polo airport. (Photo: MoHasanie) — No bags at all, a sight to freeze your follicles if you're waiting for something worth a million euros. This is Dubai airport, but Marco Polo has the same type of carousel. (Photo: MoHasanie)

Just a note about the Polish kid: He was admittedly waving a fistful of red flags, to so speak. He was visibly nervous. He flew in from Istanbul. He had no luggage. He had very little cash. His roundtrip ticket was booked for a very short stay in Venice. Is he coming to visit his dying aunt? Only if she’s in the next cell.

So many, many questions and thoughts roil through my brain on a cold, foggy afternoon here. Such as:

While it’s obvious that attempting to board a plane (or two) carrying heroin in your hand luggage would be infinitely stupider than checking it, I keep wondering why his employers wanted him to fly. Aren’t there trains? Rental cars? Dogsleds?

A Finance policeman (here patrolling Malpensa airport) is an even less welcome sight than an empty carousel. (Photo: Massimiliano Mariani)

And: If he had to check it — which he did — why didn’t he borrow the defensive stratagem of photographer I once knew, and stencil the outside of the suitcase UROLOGY DEPARTMENT VISNJIC (or whatever his last name is) HOSPITAL?

And: Does he realize how very, very lucky he is to be in jail now, where maybe his extremely irritated employers can’t get at him? He must be doing laps around the rosary hoping to get the maximum sentence.

If he wasn’t religious before, I bet he is now.

Events, Problems, Water

Acqua alta? Real floods create real problems

November 16, 2010 6 Comments

The big water event in the Veneto region in November has had nothing to do with Venice and high water and the temporary walkways and how inconvenient or amusing the tourists find it and how aggravating it is for the merchants to deal with some water on the floor for a few hours.

Part of downtown Vicenza, a part of the world which is not accustomed to seeing water in its streets. — A scene of downtown Vicenza, a city which, unlike Venice, is not accustomed to seeing water in its streets. (Photo: Stampalibera.com)

The real story, which is still unfolding in all its drama and grief, has been the catastrophic flooding in large areas of the region caused by diluvial rains and overflowing rivers.

I mention this as part of my modest personal crusade to give acqua alta some useful context for people beyond the old Bel Paese who read the endless and fairly repetitive articles on Venice. I’d like to provide some recent perspective on the subject of water in these parts.

On November 1 the sky fell on the Veneto region. I actually can’t remember whether we got acqua alta in Venice — if we did it couldn’t have been a problem. But what happened out beyond the shoreline showed, at least to me, that anyone living near a river is going to be facing bigger and uglier problems than anybody does in Venice when the tide comes in.

The town of Caldogno has declared 80,000,000 euros in damage. (Photo: Stampalibera.com)

Areas in or near Vicenza, Padova, Treviso, the mountains of Belluno and the countryside around Verona have been declared disaster areas. In a 48-hour period 23 inches of rain fell on Belluno, 21 inches on Vicenza, 15 inches on Verona, 14 inches on Treviso. Roughly the amount that falls in a normal year.

The total damage to houses, property, municipal infrastructure and agriculture in the Veneto has been estimated (this will undoubtedly increase) at over one billion euros ($1,365,530,000).

Garbage: Many of the Veneto’s 200 km (124 miles) of beaches, usually covered by vacationing Germans and other families, are now covered by seven million tons of garbage deposited by the swollen rivers emptying into the Adriatic. By “garbage” I don’t just mean bags of coffee grounds and orange peel but plastic of every sort, sheets of metal, uprooted trees.

Experts meeting in Treviso are trying to figure out not only how to remove this amount of material, but how the sam hill to pay for getting rid of it, seeing that this type of trash costs between 170 and 180 euros ($232 – $245) per ton to destroy. I’ll help you out: That comes to more than one and a half billion dollars just for the garbage. I’ll send them a contribution but it probably wouldn’t pay for destroying more than a shopping-bag’s worth of detritus.

Mudslides: That amount of rain has drastically undermined the character of the land in many places. Cleaning up and consolidating the areas of mudslides is another entire problem which will cost an amount of money I’m not going to bother calculating.

Businesses: On their knees. Loss of merchandise, damage to buildings and interruptions in transport have immobilized many businesses. Parts of many roads are still under water.

A scene of the countryside outside Vicenza, where traffic has ceased to function. — A scene of the countryside outside Vicenza, where we see that traffic has run out of road.

Agriculture: Fields and crops destroyed. Some 500 farming operations are now at risk of going out of business. The government has estimated the damage at 25 million euros ($34,138,250).

I realize that you can replant sugar beets and chardonnay grapes but you can’t replant the Doge’s Palace, should water ever inflict comparable damage on this incomparable monument. But still.

Very recently, but before all this happened, Giorgio Orsoni, the mayor of Venice, took a trip to Rome to make the rounds of government ministers and rattle the tin cup. He didn’t come back with much, and now the future will inevitably be even more austere. It’s not hard to picture how urgent it’s going to seem to preserve a couple of palaces and churches to a government struggling to help an estimated 500,000 people get their lives back.

These are the most recent figures on the damage, which probably need no translation. The numbers will undoubtedly rise. Among other items is the damage to the Prosecco vineyards, so don't expect an excess of this delicacy next year.

Events, Tourism

Running around Venice

November 15, 2010 1 Comment

And they're off: another handful of orienteers has just grabbed their maps and the clock is running.

I started scribbling this yesterday to the sound just outside the window of a lot of people going by in a hurry. Sometimes a large hurry. I could hear the thudding of feet, the puffing of lungs, and incoherent voices of various ages and genders that sounded either baffled or urgent, or both.

This went on Saturday and Sunday. “This” was the 31st edition of the Venice Orienteering Meeting. Each year, on the second Sunday of November, our neighborhood is besieged by people who’ve come from all over Europe (though I’m sure you’d be welcome no matter where you live. Pitcairn Island? Cool!). They are competing in a timed race armed only with a map and a compass, and a list of checkpoints to cover in the correct order in the shortest time possible. That’s my homespun definition of orienteering, an undertaking which has now reached the level of a sport. It even has a federation.

When an activity passes from being a game to a sport, things get serious. (A shout-out to Ernest Hemingway, who said “There are only three sports, bullfighting, motor racing and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”) Frankly, some of the orientators didn’t look so serious to me.

The famous division of labor: The men do the hunting, the women talk about clothes and makeup. — The famous division of labor: The men do the hunting, the women do the talking about clothes and makeup.

In a way, much more than boating or swimming, orienteering is the city’s natural sport. In fact, I’d say it was Venice’s destiny to present itself, not merely as the repository of historical and artistic magnificence, but as a serious challenge to the brains and legs of people who are looking at it as terrain.

However willing your team may be, doing anything as a group always takes large amounts of time, as anyone who has traveled with a couple of friends or relatives can attest. These girls are about two minutes from the starting line and already there is discussion and doubt.

What, after all, are mere forests and torrents and ravines compared to the seductive complexity of dark, narrow streets, canals, dead ends, and bridges to everywhere? Any newbie who has ever set out for a specific destination armed only with the primitive map the hotel gave out can tell you that there may be moments here when negotiating forests and ravines would be simpler.

Two things about the course: First, it was designed by a German man. I don’t comment, I merely note it. Make of it what you will.

However, being on your own doesn't appear to make it any easier.

Second, there were many different courses, divided according to the gender and skill of the orientizers. These courses varied in length and in “dislivello,” a complicated topographic term which I can only manage to remember as being the distance in the difference of the heights of any two points. (Perhaps a humorous idea in Venice, but deeply meaningful in the mountains. If you’re running in the mountains, it probably interests you much more to know how far up and down you’re going to have to go than the kilometers to cover. If you live in the Lincolnshire fens or downtown Houston, it is a totally foreign concept.)

The longest course was, logically, for the serious athletes in the Elite Category. For the men, it covered 10,500 meters and 80 meters of dislivello (six and a half miles and 262 feet). Winner: Alessio Tenani of Italy, who finished in 1 hour 9 minutes and 51 seconds. The last in this category came in at twice the time: 2:20:23.

For the women, the Elite course covered 8,700 meters and 73 meters of dislivello (five and a half miles and 239 feet). Winner: Sarka Svobodna of the Czech Republic, who made it in 1:08:27. Last to come in here clocked 2:00:41.

Behind all these paladins were large squadrons of students of assorted ages, and a richly variegated quantity of people — couples with small children, some of whom could race like the wind, or quartets of young adults, or pairs of roundish older people taking the whole thing at a pace that could have been calculated in phases of the moon.

Three cadets from the Francesco Morosini naval college forge ahead. John Paul Jones would have been proud.

But while we’re talking about walking, you should know that there is another annual event that might be more appealing, or at least less competitive. It’s called “Su e Zo per i Ponti“ (Up and Down the Bridges), and groups turn out in hordes. Here too there is a laid-out course to follow, but no need at all to use your brain. I’ve seen pods of people as they go by and most of them seem more interested in laughing and talking than in getting home before dark.

Next year’s “Su e Zo” will be on April 10 (2011) and if you’re going to be here it could be a very diverting and different thing to do. After all, if you’re going to be tramping around from hither to yon anyway, why not join the masses of people who are so cheerfully blocking the streets? You’re going to have to mingle with a lot of them anyway, and if you register you get refreshments and a medal, which you can’t say every day in Venice.

If there are tickets left you can register the morning of the event, at the departure point in the Piazza San Marco. It costs six euros, less than a vaporetto ticket. I think you should do it.

A runner punches his ticket at whichever checkpoint this is and is off again.

I myself have never thought of participating, mainly because walking around Venice takes up so much of my daily existence that it would seem bizarre to do what I do every day with a batch of people who regard it as entertainment. I’m not saying I don’t love walking around Venice, it’s just that I usually do it in second or third gear. I need to get places.

If I had any free time on a Sunday, I’d be taking a nap.

No rules against participants carrying their beloved stuffed creature.

A checkpoint symbol that missed the pickup at the end. I wonder how long it will stay here before somebody does something.

Lost your bag? Just keep walking…

Acqua alta? Real floods create real problems

Running around Venice

Saint Martin strikes (Venice) again