To Venice for Lunch

We didn’t have a lot of time and we had less money, so we had to figure out how to do this creatively. “An appetizer,” said Sabine, my friend, a resident of Tuscany and my Italian speaking guide for the trip. We would take the night train, spend the day in Venice, then take another evening train back to Austria. The idea was that a bed on the train costs much less than a bed in a hotel in Venice, especially at the opening of Carnival.

The trains we planned on using stubbornly refused to exist. For a brief while, it looked as though we would stop in Venice for only an hour or two. I surfed the web to see if this made any sense at all. Searching under “one day in Venice” I found any number of posts that said one should go to Venice for an hour, even. “Go to Venice. No matter what.” It was a persistent theme.

A day or two of judicious research turned up the itinerary we were looking for. Under a starry sky, we headed to the train station. A devastatingly handsome barista made my cup of coffee and we boarded the train to Rome.

Italian trains are dingy affairs, I’m sorry to say. The stations are dirty and dimly lit, the platforms disappear in to the dark. Panhandlers worked the only open café where we had a quick cup of tea. The barista sang, loudly and quite well, as though he was not behind a counter in a dusty train station. He smiled broadly at me when I took off my jacket, made some probably suggestive remark in Italian, then smiled again and shrugged when I said, I’m sorry, I don’t speak Italian.