this week in the odyssey
12.13.99 -- 12.20.99
prague, munich, salzburg, ljubljana, trieste, venice, padua, ravenna, milan, lake como, zurich

Holiday Bound

Everywhere we look these days, geese are getting fat. This, in of itself, is not particularly remarkable, but when you combine it with the recent rash of people putting pennies in old men's hats, it can only mean one thing -- people just really have no respect for old men these days. Well, that and Christmas is coming, I guess.

Since we had no intention of spending Christmas in Prague with the fat geese and the old men with the clinking hats screeching "if you have no penny, a ha' penny will do," Kristanne and I figured we'd better grab ourselves the first Munich-bound train we could find. There, we planned to rent a car and drive ourselves down to blissful scenes of Italian romance on Venetian canals much like that one pictured at right (except that if the romance was really clicking, Kristanne would be in the picture, too). Unfortunately, the first (and only) Munich-bound train we found happened to be bound for Munich at 6:00 in the morning. Ouch. Lack of sleep combined poorly with Kristanne's by-now-traditional bout of Departure Day Vomiting (see our departures from Edinburgh and Rome if your memory needs refreshing on this phenomenon), leading to some seriously flagging Extreme spirits as we limped into the Munich train station.

When your spirits are dragging, there are really only two things you need -- a piping-hot grilled bratwurst and a brisk twenty minute walk with a fully-loaded backpack in snowy weather to the garage where your rental car is parked. That'll pump you right back up! Fortunately for us, that's exactly what we got (minus, alas, the piping-hot grilled bratwurst). Our rental car, however, more than made up for the missing bratwurst and our mild case of frostbite. A miracle of modern Italian engineering ("modern Italian engineering" having just recently been removed from the Writer's List of Banned Oxymorons, in case you were wondering), a candy-apple maroon Fiat Multipla awaited us, the strangest looking car/van/whatchyamajigger you're never going to see in America. This is for good reason, too -- nobody would buy it. It's a tall, bulbous, four door, six passenger hatchback with more (and stranger) lumps and bumps than the race for the Reform Party's presidential nomination. Donald Trump would definitely not be seen driving a Multipla, however, so the comparison has its practical limitations.

After an educational, though unintentional, drive around some of the highlights of Munich's outskirts, we were soon on our way to Salzburg. Our more attentive readers will no doubt recall that Kristanne and I already gave Salzburg short shrift earlier this year during a visit that, though short, would have been shorter still had it not been for the really quite astonishingly bad traffic. This time, however, it was going to be different. This time, we wouldn't let the traffic get us down. This time, we were going to give tall shrift. First, though, we needed to find someone who could tell us just what the heck "shrift" was so we could start giving more of it.

Alas, after a few tentative forays into various Salzburg shops to ask "Was ist 'shrift'?", it appeared that no one in Salzburg had the faintest idea what we were talking about. This was not entirely unusual -- after eight months over here, we're both fairly accustomed to receiving the "drooling lunatic" treatment (though, to be fair, I do tend to get it a bit more than Kristanne).

Abandoning our quest for shrift as a lost cause, we decided that perhaps locating a hotel would be more up to our speed. After rejecting the first three we found as too expensive ($200/night being just a little beyond the bounds of our meager budget), we settled on sharing the bathroom with the riff-raff in the first $40/night Gasthaus we could find. Perfect. After breakfast, a shrift-giving walk around the downtown, and a nasty little parking ticket, we finally felt good about our time in Salzburg and able to be on our way to Slovenia, former jewel of Yugoslavia and quite possibly the home of shrift.

I'd been excited about visiting Slovenia (and, in particular, it's capitol, Ljubljana) ever since this trip started. Somewhere down the dim and dusty corridors of my memory, some less than perfectly recalled paragraph was telling me that Ljubljana was a "hidden jewel" of Europe, waiting to be discovered by intrepid European travellers unafraid of the advanced calculations required to master the somewhat daunting Slovenian exchange rate of 3.14159 million tolars and a Slavic hockey player to be named later per dollar. It may be instructive to note at this point that these are the same dim and dusty corridors of my memory that once told me it would be a good idea to dress exclusively in those large-print "Frankie Says Relax" T-shirts from the '80's while here in Europe. While Kristanne managed to spare me the potential embarrassment of this latter faux pas by burning all my T-shirts before we left for Europe, she was unable to dissuade me from continuing my fool's errand to Slovenia. This, dear reader, is how we ended up in Ljubljana.

Lest I give the wrong impression, let me first say that Slovenia is a physically beautiful country, superabundant in a natural glory of mountains, rivers, and fields. It's just that there are probably some times in your life when you might be better off not visiting Slovenia. Let's just choose one crazy example out of thin air, shall we? Let's just say that perhaps it would be better not to visit Slovenia after living for, say, five or six weeks in Prague, particularly if you found yourself somewhat fed up with the darker side of the whole post-socialist legacy thing during the final days of your stay in Prague. Yes, that particular example does seem to ring true.

It's hard to complain too much, but after six weeks of Prague's scratchy toilet paper, absence of hot water, and relentlessly subpar food, we were ready for a change. We were ready for comfort, predictability, and -- dare we say it? -- maybe even a little fondue. In short, we were ready for Switzerland. Now, Slovenia may be a lot of things, but one thing it is definitely not is Switzerland. Still, as the poets have said down through the ages, "When in Slovenia, do as the Russians do and send some tanks into Hungary." No wait -- that's not it, is it? "When in Slovenia, keep on going until you get to Italy?" No, that's not it either. "When in Slovenia, make fun of the Slovenians?" Hmm. The dim and dusty corridors of my memory appear to require some rather urgent vacuuming.

Whatever the saying may be, we decided to park the car and give Ljubljana the benefit of a doubtful one or two hour stroll. Unfortunately, Ljubljana appeared to suffer from a mild case of the same generalized cruddiness that tends to plague most post-socialist cities. All the usual symptoms of this malaise were evident -- cookie-cutter blocks of gray concrete apartment buildings, palpable dinginess, old ladies with their hair dyed purple -- it was all there. While none of it was very bad, none of it was very good, either, so we soon found ourselves itching to jump back into the Short-Shrift Mobile (aka, the Fiat Multipla) and head to Italy. Before we did, though, we headed up to the still largely theoretical castle that dominates the Ljubljanan skyline. I say theoretical since it is a giant enclave that is almost entirely under construction with the exceptions of a smallish cafe' and a puppet theater. Since we were in the mood for neither a puppet show nor a watery cup of tea, we snapped that picture at right, a picture that neatly sums up the half-assedness that unfortunately characterizes what little we saw of Ljubljana. Yep -- instead of hauling in a Christmas tree to the big castle, they decided that, heck, we've already got this dead, barren maple tree...why don't we just throw some giant purple balls on it and call that Christmas? Humming a spirited rendition of "Deck The Stumps with Boughs of Whatever You Find In The Gutter," we made tracks back to the Multipla and headed to Italy.

Yes, that Italy! The same one we left some five months ago after our last sun-kissed days on the island of Sardinia and our final food-poisoned hours in the megalopolis of Rome. We were both fired-up to return, eager to taste good food, drink good cappuccinos, and drive in really bad traffic. Our first stop, Trieste, did not disappoint. After successfully negotiating the border crossing from Slovenia into Italy, we made our way into the exploding heart of Trieste's rush hour traffic, doing our level best to avoid pancaking the aggressive pedestrians, swarming scooters, and flat-out insane drivers that festoon its city streets. Despite having just completed the Pinky Tuscadero School For Driving With Uncontrolled Aggression (that's us pictured at left, finishing our final exam in "Modern Strategies For Using the Car As A Weapon"), we were still not quite prepared for the average urban Italian driving experience. I'm sure there are laws about driving in Italy, it's just that (a) I don't know them and (b) they appear to be much different than anything written down in the motor vehicle code (I know -- I always read a country's entire motor vehicle code before driving there. And, yes -- I do need to get a life). With Kristanne ably guiding me with a carefully chosen set of shrieks, gasps, and screams ("Honey, is it two 'Aggghs!' for 'turn left,' or only one?"), we eventually made it to a potential hotel while avoiding all major internal injuries and most external ones, save for a minor skin rash where I grabbed Kristanne's forearm in mortal fear of the taxi that squeaked past us on the sidewalk as we drove down a narrow one-lane street. Triple-parking like a good Italian, I left Kristanne to watch the car while I inquired as to the availability of a room.

Fresh from our less than luxurious stay in the Czech Republic, Kristanne and I had decided to treat ourselves to a night in a nice hotel in Trieste. The "Grand Duchy d'Aosta" seemed to fit the bill -- great location (that's the view from our room pictured at right) and a ridiculously high price. Great -- we'll take it. Unfortunately, my sense of Italian prices was definitely rusty after a five month absence. I was making the rookie mistake of assuming that a high price meant that I would be getting a quality experience. Alas, in Italy, the only thing a high price means is that they got you to pay a high price. This particular rule of thumb was driven home nicely when the bellboy showed us to our handsomely appointed broom closet, complete with a sagging bed. Ah, yes -- Italy. Just to make sure we remembered where we were, the bellboy then informed us that this hotel, though expensive, did not offer parking. Making my way downstairs to park the car somewhere onstreet, I figured that I'd better get some change for my large-denomination bills, thereby avoiding the traditional Italian disgust for any bill that's more than two or three lira over the asking price ("What, I look like some kinda bank to you, pal?"). Unfortunately, making change was definitely not in the job description of this particular expensive hotel. After being summarily dismissed by the desk clerk ("We don't do that.") and openly mocked by the bartender ("Get a haircut and maybe I'll think about it, pallie), I decided to take my chances with the parking attendant. After a 45 minute drive through Italian traffic to the parking lot visible some 500 yards from our hotel, the parking lot attendant mercifully agreed to make change. Less mercifully, he also agreed to cheat me out of 500 lira. By this time, however, I was back in full Italian mode and was only too happy to engage in a spirited ten minutes of shouting at one another before he gave me my 500 lira with a big grin, patted me on the back, inquired as to the health of my family, and invited me over to dinner at his place the following Sunday. Only in Italy does an argument over 25 cents turn into a lifelong friendship.

Though difficult, parking in Trieste turned out to be much easier than walking in Trieste. Unbeknownst to us, Trieste is pretty much perpetually assaulted by a fierce, back-breaking wind known alternately as the "Bora" or "that $#@% wind." Looking for a restaurant, our spirits were thoroughly broken after only about ten minutes worth of walking. Chastened but hungry, we settled into the nearest trattoria we could find, eventually tucking into the most delicious meal we'd had in months. After an equally delicious breakfast the next morning (prominently featuring the requisite two cappuccinos and -- wonder of wonders -- fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice!) we were on the road to Venice.

Unfortunately, the road to Venice is not without its detours. Our map showed a particularly promising scenic route tracing the Adriatic coastline from Trieste to Venice. We looked forward to basking in the brisk seabreezes and morning sunshine while drinking in a succulent series of sights. And so we did for the first ten kilometers whereupon the road abruptly ended at a sloppily erected set of wooden sawhorses, decrepit barrels, and a handpainted cardboard sign indicating that we should take the detour to the right. Umm...what detour? Closer inspection revealed that if we turned the car around 180 degrees, there was a semi-paved one-lane goat path of a road ascending the rocky cliff at an angle precipitous enough to give Sir Edmund Hilary pause. This, apparently was a detour. So, after making the three-point turn necessary to get onto this detour (too sharp for your average turning radius), we slammed the Multipla into first gear and made like a mountain goat. In true Italian fashion, there were no road signs after the first one -- it was a true "Dove' la autostrada?" detour. That is, at each turn you roll down your window and ask the nearest pedestrian where the heck the highway is. This, we figured, was the Italian Department of Transportation's way of encouraging neighborliness amongst the citizenry, forcing them to rely upon one another to find their way through a detour. After a half hour wending our way through impossibly tiny towns, squeezing down narrow alleys, and asking for directions in broken Italian, we found our way back to the autostrada and rolled on to Venice.

Venice, as most of you probably know, is an island. It's also almost entirely closed to cars or scooters. The only motorized transportation is by boat. If you arrive by car, you're allowed to drive over the bridge that connects Venice to the mainland, but you must park immediately thereafter in one of the two nearby gargantuan parking lots and take the vaporetto ("small, slow ferry") wherever you want to go. It's actually a pretty good system. However, if you don't know the system, it's very easy to become confused by the clutch of semi-official looking men waiting for you as you cross over into Venice, urging you to roll down your windows and accept their instructions to park in this nice clean lot that they just happen to have waiting for you. These guys, you should definitely give short shrift, despite their nautical uniforms, complete with gold braid and sailor caps -- they're just trying to take advantage of you. Ten seconds worth of conversation with one such ne'erdowell convinced us of his unreliability and we summarily waved goodbye, driving quickly on to the giant parking structure visible some 3/4 of a mile distant. After parking and locking the car, we were somewhat surprised to see this same nautical ne'erdowell come wheezing up to us, sailor cap in hand, having sprinted the 3/4 of a mile from his post to the parking garage to harass us further. Did we want a guide for Venice? A guard for our car? Some breath mints? His sailor's cap? This guy was definitely starting to be a pain in the keister. Fortunately, he got the message that his services were not wanted as Kristanne began advancing on him while brandishing the Michelin Guide (apparently, her reputation precedes her). He turned tail and sprinted back whence he came, leaving us to enjoy the 30 minute vaporetto ride to Saint Mark's Square (pictured at left).

Venice is truly like no other place on earth, an incredibly romantic city built on and of water. Narrow streets wend their way from spacious piazzas to opulent palazzos. Gondoliers ply their trade by moonlight on the city's myriad canals. Happy art historians sit on precisely sculpted chairs in front of the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery (like that familiar one pictured at right). Mercifully free of cars, Venice is seen on foot or by boat...you can spend hours walking along, blissfully lost, wondering what wonders the next turn of the corner will bring. This is exactly what we did, aimlessly wandering for the better part of five hours before heading to a hotel in Padua. We'd decided that instead of dealing with the prices and hassles of hotels in Venice, we'd just get a cheapo place in Padua and then commute the half hour to Venice by train the next day. It's a tough commute, but we're just Extreme enough to do it.

Though endlessly engaging, Venice also provided us with our first glimpse at a disturbing new phenomenon -- the angry young Japanese tourist. Stereotyped for years as pack-traveling, shutter-snapping, and well-behaving, Japanese tourists seem to have undergone some recent changes. For example, while checking out St. Mark's Basilica, we were somewhat surprised to hear a group of Japanese tourists talking loudly amongst themselves, despite the clearly marked sign (printed in Kanji, too) requesting silence. Apparently deciding that this wasn't quite annoying enough, they then proceeded to use their fingernails to scrape away at the gold leaf on the mosaiced walls. This was a little too much for Kristanne, who was left with no option other than to hiss "non toccare" at them (literally, "you touch that again and I'll be forced to get medieval on your tuckus"). Then, as we left the church, we were somewhat surprised to see a group of foaming drunk Japanese tourists stripped down to their skivvies and setting fire to a gondola they had dragged over from the Grand Canal. You never like to see that sort of thing, you know?

Venice is interesting traffic-wise since you are forced to get around on foot. This means that if you're in a hurry you don't really have any option to speed your passage other than to walk faster. Because of this, you'll often see businessmen in suits go jogging by, presumably late for a meeting somewhere. Even though the only traffic on Venice streets is people, you'll still see the pedestrian equivalents of all your standard automotive events -- the accident, the traffic jam, even the odd bit of road rage. It's actually kind of funny -- you'll be walking along one of Venice's astonishingly narrow streets and suddenly find that you can't go anywhere because of all the traffic. Naturally, as soon as you stop, the dude who was tailgating you runs right into your back, delivering a neck-bracing blow. Then, when you're finally able to continue on your way, everyone will go extra slow, rubber-necking their way past whatever accident caused the whole mess (usually an old lady who was walking too slowly in the fast lane and ended up mowed down by a tourist who didn't know where he was going). Meanwhile, people in the apartments above the streets do their best impressions of traffic helicopters, leaning out their windows and talking on their cell phones to the radio stations who broadcast the current conditions to all the waiting Venetians out there ("This is KVEN and here's your traffic report...we've got a rolling slowdown on Lido street thanks to a slow-moving group of Canadian tourists windowshopping for leather goods. Meanwhile, expect delays of ten to twenty minutes over on Canal Street while Giuseppe and Simone finish saying hi to one another and deciding who owes money to whom. Lastly, we've got an overturned shopping cart just off Saint Mark's Square. It's going to be about another twenty minutes before the pigeons have the spilled vegetables cleaned up, so you might want to allow yourself a little extra time if you're heading over that direction...see you at the top of the hour for another KVEN Action Traffic Report...").

One of the best things about wandering Venice is that you never know what you'll find. For example, simply by chance we found ourselves wandering a district where real Italians appeared to be living real Italian lives (as opposed to the scripted lives played out for tourists daily at all the major attractions). That market pictured above is from that district, featuring real produce at real prices. Really.

Still, real Italian life can get to be a little much sometimes, so it's good to head on down to the Venice carnival and take a ride on the Enterprise (pictured at right), a surprisingly lifelike ride that lets you shoot fake guns at your fellow passengers while zipping around in speedy concentric circles and jerking up and down. Nothing makes you feel more empathy for your fellow man than being shot down with fake guns by a father showing his six year old son the ropes for the first time. Ah, the pageantry of Venice!

After a romantic dinner in the oldest trattoria in Venice, Kristanne and I wistfully concluded the Venetian part of our trip with the train ride back to Padua. Though we could easily have stayed much longer, it was time to put the Short-Shrift Mobile back on the road and point it south to Ravenna, definitely the most frustrating of all the Italian cities we've visited. Oh, to be sure, there are loads of amazing mosaics in Ravenna -- it's what makes it famous -- it's just that you'll need to break at least thirty major traffic laws to have any hope of seeing them all in a single day. To start with, the main road bisecting the city was completely closed to traffic for a street market. This means that if after seeing the sights on one side of the city you decide to check out those on the other side, you'll need to leave town, get on the freeway, and take the exit on the other side of the town. Sheesh -- I like colorful markets as much as the next guy, but only when they don't interfere with my ability to drive to major tourist sites and park directly in front of them, y'know? Compounding your problems in Ravenna will be the somewhat confusing "Package Ticket" the city is only too happy to sell you. Theoretically, this ticket grants you access to all the major sites in Ravenna, except, well, it doesn't. It's only a theory. In reality, you buy the comprehensive Package Ticket and then continue to buy individual tickets to each of the subsites around town. If you are so bold as to try to get into a site with the Package Ticket that doesn't accept it (which is to say, each and every site in Ravenna), the desk clerk will immediately scream "Stop, thief!" at you and wrestle you to the ground. Then, he'll stick a knee in your back while a burly man extracts the requisite four or five thousand lira from your wallet. Finally, you're unceremoniously yanked to your feet, subjected to ten minutes of public ridicule, and thrust into the site with a spiteful sneer. Needless to say, the Package Ticket is not a very good deal (and slightly dangerous to boot). We're still not exactly sure which sites the Package Ticket does get you into, though we think that some of them may be in Slovenia. Still, we're definitely saving our ticket stub (oddly enough, I kinda like the public ridicule).

Ravenna was sort of a personal hell for us, so we decided to hit the autostrada for Milan. Stopping only to eat dinner at one of those nifty rest stop restaurants that sit suspended above the freeway, we made Milan in a cool four hours. Then, we spent another cool four hours looking for our hotel, eventually determining that it wasn't in Padua's Industrial Zone, Genoa, or, in a memorable mistake, on Runway 2 at Malpensa International Airport. Exhausted from our long day's travel, we fell into bed and slept the dreamless sleep of the bushed Italian tourist.

We needed a restorative. As much as we love Italy, still it was beginning to get on our nerves. So, like Henry David Thoreau or George of the Jungle, we looked for our solace in nature. Fortunately, Lake Como was nearby, a glistening gem in the Italian Alps (pictured at left). We drove nearly the entire way around Lake Como, marveling at its elegant resorts (such as Bellagio), its picturesque vistas, and the giant buses driving down the narrow streets. In one memorable instance, we turned a corner only to find one such giant bus reversing its way down the narrow main street of a typically tiny lakeside village. By this time, I was completely attuned to Kristanne's coded driving signals -- one long shriek followed by three staccato blasts of "Sid!" means "oncoming bus in reverse" -- so I was able to avoid the hazard with minimal damage, psychic or otherwise. Phew.

Having survived our drive through Italy (and around Lake Como), we were relieved to finally return to the Land of Fondue, passing into Switzerland near Lugano and heading on to Zurich. Ahhhh...Zurich! We celebrated with a nice big bratwurst and a couple Swiss beers. Then, we checked into our ultra-modern hotel and marveled at the two phone plugs, the hot water in the shower, and the fact that the price was exactly the same as the one posted on the board in their lobby. I even went down to the lobby and got change...just because I could. We definitely weren't in Italy any more! Comfortable in Switzerland at last, we set about resting for a few hours before the deluge of holiday visitors would be upon us.

Ah, but that's a story for another day! Check back next time on the Odyssey as the entire Bohner clan makes its way eastward to Switzerland for holiday hijinks high atop the Swiss Alps! See you next time on the Odyssey!

Last Week's Front Page Picture

As for that picture at left, that's a somewhat shaggy-domed yours truly, hopping the vaporetto (literally, "small, slow ferry for shaggy-domed tourists") to Piazza San Marco in Venice. Don't let that blue sky in the picture fool you -- when you take the wind chill into consideration, the temperature in Venice when that picture was taken was approximately absolute zero degrees Kelvin -- the point at which all molecular motion stops. By the way, there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that the reason all molecular motion was stopping was because of the four giant Italian doughnuts (ciambellas) we ate for breakfast -- it was the temperature, we swear.