CHAPTER 29: AIX EN PROVENCE, FRANCE
Saturday, November 27

We had a fabulous two days in Venice. It is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful city. Pictures can give you an idea of what it looks like, but they can't capture the spirit and feel of the place. Venice is about 1500 years old. It's built on a bunch of small islands just off the coast. The canals between the islands form the city's highway system - no cars, trucks, or other wheeled vehicles are allowed in the city (except for the train station and bus/parking plaza). People travel around the city by boat or by foot. The "streets" are narrow, winding, stone-paved alleys, some less than three feet wide. There is absolutely no pattern to the streets. They just wind around (or through) buildings. Walking in Venice is like negotiating a maze, and you better have a good sense of direction or you'll get turned around in no time. Small and large piazzas (plazas) crop up in the most unexpected places. The buildings are small, anywhere from two to five stories high, and shoehorned into the most amazing spaces. Some are typically Italian: square, rust or earth-colored, with green shuttered windows. Others are Byzantine in appearance. Some are 500 years old, others are brand new. The whole scale of the city is much friendlier to people than, say, the monstrous buildings of New York are.

We didn't really do anything in particular in Venice, we just wandered around, or took the ferryboat along the Grand Canal, looked in all the neat shops, and had a super time just being there. We found several nice restaurants. The best was a small one off a narrow alleyway (actually, that could describe 90% of the Venetian restaurants). We were there for a late lunch and the place was packed with locals just enjoying the afternoon out with their friends. Food was good, not great, but the atmosphere was superb. The weather cooperated for our visit: clear skies and not too cold during the day, although it got down to freezing after the sun went down.

Every city sells something that is unique to it, and in Venice it's Carnavale masks. The tradition goes back a few hundred years, when people wore masks for a good bit of the time. Many small craft shops line the alleys and sell their own handmade masks. Most are variations on a few basic designs, but some can get extremely ornate or develop their own character. Janis found a beautiful leather mask, but left it in the shop when it turned out to cost $4,000!

We did not do the Venetian gondola ride. It was a bit chilly, and these days the gondolas are strictly for tourists. Instead, we took a ferry bus along the Grand Canal through the city. The boat was jammed, but that just made it more fun, listening to all the Italians talking a mile a minute to each other and on their cell phones, hands waving in the air the whole time. Meanwhile, the Venetian buildings slowly slid by as we cruised through the city.

We got off at the Piazza San Marco. This is where all the tourists take their pictures with the pigeons. We didn't want anything to do with the “rats with wings”, but enjoyed watching all the other tourists snap pictures of each other with the critters. We just sat in an outdoor café in the Piazza, sipping on an overpriced cappuccino and enjoying the city.

We decided that, of all the places we've been in Europe so far, Venice is our favorite place to visit. We'd love to come back and spend a couple of weeks in either spring or early fall.

We left Vicenza early this morning and started our trek to Spain. This first leg of the trip went well. Italy was hazy and foggy until we got to the mountains along the coast. Once we punched through the mountains, the skies cleared and the temperature jumped 20 degrees. The drive along the coast was OH MY GAWD spectacular. The mountains plunge straight down into the sea. The autostrada is all tunnels and bridges because the mountains are too steep for the road to follow them. So you drive across bridges that span steep valley's hundreds of feet deep, then dive directly into long tunnels through the mountains.

The highlight of the trip today was Monaco. We decided to drive through the city and see what it was like, but we didn't want to stay overnight. Remember what I said a while back about packing and unpacking getting to be a pain? That still applies. In Monaco, Janis really wanted to see the Palace and I wanted to see the streets that make up the Formula 1 course. We were very impressed. Monaco is in an unmatched location, on the steep (and I mean steep) slopes dropping down to the Mediterranean. The place oozes class and money. Rolls-Royces are everywhere, as are fur coats (it was warm, but so what). Janis finally spotted the Palace and later the Casino and was trying to point them out to me, at the same time that I was babbling excitedly about "wow, we're on the actual Formula 1 course, and here's where the chicane goes, and ... OH MY GOD THIS IS THE TUNNEL THEY RACE THROUGH!!!". We were in heavy traffic, I was driving the Range Rover, and we were going the wrong way around the course, so no new lap records were set. However, it was exciting to actually be there.

Following Monaco, we pushed on for several more hours to Aix-en-Provence. This was Paul Cezanne's hometown. We're not going to do any sightseeing here, though. We'll just stay the night and hit the road early in the morning.

Some random observations:
- We saw a truck on the highway with the label "Bizzarro Transporti". This falls into the "I don't wanna know" category.
- We loved listening to the Italians talk. They can cram more syllables into a cubic centimeter of air than anybody else on the planet. It's a very melodious language, too, and requires a large amount of body language. They gotta get those hands waving, even when they're talking on their ever-present cell phones.
- Driving in Italy continues to be .... "exciting", I guess is the best word. Every green light in a city is like the opening lap of a NASCAR race: everybody is going for that same spot in the road, whether or not somebody else is already there. The boat drivers in Venice are the same way: they'll cut each other off in a heartbeat. One guy even cut between our ferry and the quay that we were approaching!
- American and Japanese tourists are everywhere in Europe. Americans tend to travel in small groups of two to four. Japanese travel by the busload. I would swear that the same two busloads of Japanese tourists have been following us all over the continent.
- Everywhere we've been, we never know for sure what's going to show up on our table. Sometimes it's due to having a menu in an unreadable foreign language and we just take our best guess. Other times, we think we make a pretty clear order, but something breaks down in translation. In Venice, for example, we ordered a spinach salad, and got instead a mound of steamed Popeye food. I ordered "green beans" in another restaurant and they came out looking amazingly like peas. Then there are the plates of stuff that you're not at all sure what it's supposed to be. At that point, it's “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” For the most part, the unidentified food turns out to be good, although certainly we've found some that were inedible to our American palates.

Janis here:

Skip has allotted me a few precious moments to give my perspective on Florence and Venice from the woman's point of view. He's oblivious to most of the world around him other than art and old buildings and cars.

The women in Italy pride themselves on dressing well. There are no blue jeans on anyone my age (horrors, what a thought!). I saw mink and sable coats in both cities at every turn. Every time I saw one that I thought was nice, I'd turn the corner and see one I liked better. To no avail, unfortunately, Skip would NOT buy me one no matter how much I whined (and at this I'm quite skilled). Even woman older than I (yes, there are a few of those left in Florence and Venice) look like they are off to lunch with the Queen. Women don't wear quite as much black as in other cities we have been to, but definitely great attention is paid to coordinating outfits for the day. Women walk around arm in arm just enjoying the day. I guess a "girl thing" is a "girl thing " no matter where you are.

Shopping is naturally world class. Florence's main attraction is 18K gold. Venice's are masks and Murano glass. I cannot begin to tell you the selection of all the above. I found a pair of earrings in one shop on the Ponte Vecchio and looked around a bit and found them much cheaper three shops down for the exact same earring. I never connected Venice with masks before, but now (as I recall) it was the place for Truman Capote's famous Masked Ball in the 60's or early 70's. Masks are, for the most part, paper mache and there are so many to choose from it could take you forever to decide. Court jesters, Scaramouche, Cyrano de Bergerac, sun, moons, leafs, and an infinite number of others are all made into masks. They are topped with gold leaf, silver leaf, and finished both with and without sparkles and bauble. I found a leather jester mask that I loved the first day but figured I'd see more of the same. I didn't see any, so we found the shop the second day (a major chore in itself in the Venetian maze) and priced it. The mask cost (OUCH) $4000. It was superb in craftsmanship and the colors were wonderful. I saw several others that were nice, but this particular one was a beautiful. (Oh, we didn't get it. Skip nixed that as well. The man is just no fun sometimes!)

Murano glass is all over Venice. I got sick of looking at the staple “tourist” pieces, but in some up scale stores they had some one-of-a-kind pieces that were wonderful. But who wants to pay big bucks and have it break when you ship it? These pieces are too big to carry home and too heavy to cart around. Even the tour guide book said that Murano is overpriced and the quality is less then optimal at this point. However, some of it is still quite lovely.

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