Monday, 26 September, 2022 – Elias is in Venice tonight. If he sticks to plan, he’ll be there another three nights.
I think he is staying in this hostel: Anda Venice Hostel. It has a weird website. I am not sure what “one-of-a-kind design hostel” means exactly but any place that says I should “party like there’s no tomorrow,” and gives me one measly free drink is suspect. There are no pictures of Venice! Weird.
The neighborhood looks nice, I mean, I think it’s a neighborhood but I am not sure. Ha! Just as I wrote that, I thought of a way to find out what the neighborhood is; it is actually more like a suburb of Venice. This travel writer seems pretty credible and says that Mestre – where Elias is – is unremarkable but notably cheaper than Venice proper.
While Elias sleeps in Venice, I am in Nashville at a conference sponsored by the Society of American Archivists. I did not realize it would be a gathering of mostly archivists when I submitted the proposal; my presentation is only archive-adjacent. In any case, the point is I am traveling alone to a new place and seeing everything through the prism of what Elias has been experiencing the last 63 days.
I think travel must be a little like childbirth – you remember the good stuff and (usually) push the bad stuff down and away. Or, at least enough to want to do it again. It’s not that I’d forgotten the things I’ve noticed today, but imagining Elias experiencing them day after day made me more attentive to the details.
Even a quick, 3-day trip can feel so long. There’s the packing, getting up early for the flight, taking an uber or driving to the airport, going through security (I got patted down quite specifically in my crotch today because the scanner showed red in that general area. I almost laughed when she said, “I need to touch you in your crotch.”), sitting waiting to board, flying an hour, sitting waiting to get off, getting luggage, finding transportation to the hotel, finding food, figuring out where to go next, wandering around in search of something simple like a drugstore, scoping out a food plan for later, since there’s nothing appealing in the 5-block radius I just walked and then had to backtrack my way to the hotel because I got further afield than I intended. I am not complaining, but I took note of everything I was doing and pictured doing it every 3 or 4 days and it suddenly felt a lot more challenging. Not unpleasant, necessarily but tiring.
I also notice how hard it would be to travel if I did not speak English fluently. Or, if I had any sort of disability. (I know they are not the same thing.) The instructions the flight attendants announce to everyone about when we’re landing, or if there’s a delay, or to not stand outside the bathroom on the plane…. It is a long list, really, when you think about how much we rely on our hearing and command of the language to navigate one trip from Kansas City to Nashville. I understand why how we g here and change is hard. And I understand that Elias is learning a great deal from having those same experiences while he is traveling. But Elias chose to go somewhere else to be challenged. The person who needs to see your lips to understand what you are saying, or cannot see the “Women” and “Men” signs on the bathrooms, or doesn’t know the words, “Baggage Claim” without the baggage icon associated with it, or cannot walk the two freaking miles it takes to get to the gate at the end of the terminal – they did not go somewhere foreign to have those experiences. I had the thought today, in the airport at 5:30am today, if we could stand in someone else’s shoes for a minute, we could see a few of the ways we could ease their struggles, just a little.
The funny thing is, that person who could use some easing is me, at some point in the future. Sometimes I think about how long it will be before I can’t carry my suitcase up a flight of stairs because the elevator is out of order, as it was today. I understand English but if I am in a big room of people all talking and music blaring over the loudspeakers, and I miss some crucial piece of information about my gate changing, I know I will blame myself and feel bad that I am not like everyone else.
Hmm, well, I have wandered off from trying to imagine Elias’s life right now. I guess the point is, as I looked around at everyone waiting to get on the plane this morning, it occurred to me that I do not need to go to Venice to feel like a stranger in a strange land.