Venice at night

The plan had been to take the train from Trieste to Venice in order to catch a ferry on to a Slavic beach town. Venice was never the destination. It was a connection point.

After all, the point of this vacation was supposed to be to find some shore where she could drink wine and engage with her inner dialogue. Her own company is her favorite, and they haven’t had much alone time together lately between the mad dash from her job at the hedge fund and her roommate’s revolving door of boyfriends (all of whom she refers to disdainfully despite allowing them to take up significant and precious air in their shared 400 square foot apartment).

Venice is synonymous with an amusement park in her mind: a crowded and obvious choice for a late summer Euro trip. Yet, the train she told herself she would be on was scheduled to depart twenty minutes before, and she is still finishing the entire contents of the Ariete Moka Aroma electric espresso maker in her airbnb. It's not a big deal. There is another train in two hours, and this way she has time to stop by the pharmacy for more of that rose face cream. Europe has been beyond agreeing with her energy and complexion.

The train follows the same line as the one in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which she finished in Slovenia just before crossing the border into Italy on foot via Gorizia. It all felt like a beautiful affirmation to her.

The magic is interrupted once she boards the train. It’s hard to find a seat, and it's steamy inside. The onboard ticket checker sternly charges her for not having time-stamped her ticket on the platform before boarding. The couple sitting across from her give their best effort to her defense as a clueless foreigner, but it doesn’t go her way.

The train sits on the bridge outside of the final stop for over an hour, and she is realizing that there is no way she will be able to navigate the tangle of crowds and pedways of Venice to the once-daily ferry that is departing in less than thirty minutes.

So here she is stuck in Venice for the night and angry at Italy and their trains. She tries to cancel her lodging for the night, trying not to dwell on the fact that this reservation would have been her first night in her own private apartment in months, but she is clearly in violation of the cancelation policy and will be charged in full. With that in mind, she finds the cheapest possible accommodations for the night via hostelworld.com. It looks like a very short walk from the train station to the hostel, but it ends up taking fifty five minutes to walk there with her bags on her back and shoulders. There is no way around the bottlenecks formed by the streams of tourists pulling their wheeled luggage over the narrow bridges.

She is soaked and feels the sunburn tightening on her face and chest. She wasn’t planning to spend the day in the sun, and her mineral sunscreen is packed in the bottom of her bag.

Her phone is on the verge of overheating, but manages to tell her she has arrived at her destination. At this point, she has escaped the crowds and finds herself in a bright and empty plaza. The enormous wooden doors that she should be going through are firmly shut and locked, and there is no buzzer in sight. She retreats to a bench to check the address and dates on her confirmation email, but her phone seems to have fainted in the heat.

Her eyes are stinging with sweat, and her glasses are sliding down her nose. She has a headache from the intensity of the sun, but of course she left her prescription sunglasses on the train. A breeze comes through the plaza. She inhales the breeze, and a potted plant catches her eye from a far shaded corner of the plaza. The pot holds a small tree that’s impossibly loaded with swollen fruit bobbing and swinging in the breeze. She loads up her bags to investigate.

As she nears the potted plant, she sees it is a pear tree that accompanies a small metal sign on a wall stating that the entrance to her hostel is around the corner.

The check-in desk is in a small, dark room. They aren’t busy, so the shared room she had booked will be all her’s for the night. They give her the key and point her through a door behind them, which opens to the bright and open courtyard of a medieval monastery.

She locks her bags in the unexpectedly modern and sterile third floor dormitory she was assigned to and spends the day in the courtyard adjusting her plans among more potted pear trees feeling unsure of her ability to get back to the monastery if she ventures too far into the floating maze that is Venice.

When it gets too dark to read her novel in the courtyard, she heads back to her room so that she can go to bed and get up and out of Venice early and successfully this time.

That’s when she runs into the architecture student. He’s here from Serbia for La Bienniale and wondering where to find a drink.

She always keeps to herself and on her guard in the hostels, meeting people when she is out during the day if she feels conversational. After all, she is traveling alone, and she didn’t come all this way to seek out other Americans or sit through painfully one-sided conversations — there were enough of both of those where she came from.

But, yes, she could use some wine after her day, and she might as well enjoy her last night in Italy. There are worse cities to be stuck in for the night than Venice.

The hostel bar is closed, so they venture outside the walls of the former monastery. Surprisingly, the same streets that had been packed with sweaty tourists earlier that day have emptied and cooled. The storefronts and cafes are shuttered. In fact, they can’t find a spot to get a drink, but the canals and passageways, even the plazas, are theirs. The moon hangs full and orange, somehow never rising too far above the lagoon. It’s rays sparkle on the lapping waters, and the lagoon throws the reflected moonlight up onto the adjacent archways and facades.

Venice at night is spooky and it’s perfect.