Blame it on the Dolomites

You know I made fun of the Americans who said Venice was like Vegas, and I stand by that. But now that I’m out of the city, I do see some similarities in the experience. Mainly that if you only visited Las Vegas you might walk away with the impression that most Americans are smoking, gambling, buffet eating, consumers. Not realizing that Americans only do that on vacation. Except for the consumer stuff. Well and the buffets, ok this argument is breaking down quickly. But my point is that if I would have left Italy after visiting Venice, I may have thought that all Italians drive (?) gondolas while singing proudly, or that it’s pastime of most countrymen to paint themselves white and stand motionless in squares – and I’d be dead wrong!

While I was waiting at the Venice train station, sitting on my enormous pile of luggage. A friendly face woman comes up and asks if I’m enjoying the book I’m reading. We started chatting and it turned out we’d be on the same train departing in the next hour. Her husband joined us and after introductions were made it turned out that they were Californians. Yeah for Californians! The both worked at UC Santa Barbara and were traveling around Italy and Europe for a month. Yeah for west coast liberal academics! We spent a nice time chatting on the train until it was their time to depart an hour outside of the city to stay with their friend. The conversation had killed an hour of my three hour train trip and renewed my love of my fellow countrymen. See people, stereotypes are bad! Unless they are stereotypes about groups you might like, for example: west coast liberal academics, then it’s just a handy shortcut.

I was going to go back to reading, but the next two hours I was transfixed by the scenery. We rolled through a valley with mountains on each side, the craggy, sharply cut, Dolomites with stone houses and castles balanced on the corners of precipices. Once again, I inappropriately reminded myself to come camping here. Like it was driving distance or something. I also thought about the camping gang back home and started to miss everyone.

I’m also glad I signed up for the post-conference hike on Sunday, it would be a shame to be here in this beautiful place and only stay in the town. And the town is surprisingly lacking in gondolas, motionless street performers, and hoards of pigeon feeding tourists. It’s pretty amazing, just winding streets, little shops, a handful of churches, oh yeah and a castle that will hold our conference’s welcome reception. I can’t wait until later when I can use the expression “see you later at the castle!” to someone I meet at the conference. Kind of like that feeling of when I was leaving on the trip and chatting with Beth on the phone and saying: “see you tomorrow in Istanbul” – unreal!