Saturday, January 30, 2021
TransEurope
Friday, January 29, 2021
Folkestone
We quickly polished off our scant breakfast and packed our gear ready for the off. George claimed a furry jacket that nobody appeared to own, and we set off for our final trek up the Boulevard de Magenta (named after the battle of Magenta, a battle fought on 4 June 1859 near Magenta in Italy).
We had a coffee in a glass-fronted establishment opposite the impressive statue embellished railway station frontage and watched the Vogue parade outside. The sculptural display represents the principal cities served by the company. Eight of the nine most majestic statues, crowning the building along the cornice line, illustrate destinations outside France, with the ninth figure of Paris in the centre. Fourteen more modest statues representing northern European cities are lower on the façade.
We walked about to kill another hour, ending up in a standing only O’Kitch café, sipping coffee and watching the video screen. Outside the Metro trains ran above the street on a raised platform reminiscent of the New York subway that we had seen in Hollywood movies.
We joined the train to London early and during the wait for the 12:20 hrs. embarkation we were forced to move by the abundance of soapy people accumulating around us. In our new position we were still unwitting spectators to an American chump verbally putting the world to rights (by American domination) for the benefit of two Maltese boys who were sitting behind him.
At the English Channel we transferred to the ferry with little fuss and soon pulled out for Blighty. The pedestrian transfer dashed speculation by the Yank and his new branchers (friends), that the train was going to drive straight onto the ferry.
The ferry crossing was turbulent but uneventful. We sat at a café table and looked out at a grey green seething sea and a dark grey bleak sky. At Folkestone I passed straight through Immigration and Customs and waited for George who had to answer a few questions.
We boarded another train and whizzed back to Victoria Railway Station in London in the company of a group of drunken pensioners who were returning from a day trip booze cruise to France.
Back in the London Borough of Hounslow we had two Whoppers each in the near deserted Burger King in Hounslow High Street. I arrived home at 166 Woodland Gardens in Isleworth at 21:00 hrs!
We had visited 16 countries:
Country and nights spent there:
Belgium 2
Luxembourg 1
Deutschland (Germany) 3
Austria 1
Italy 1
Jugoslavia 12
Greece 7
Turkey 8
Iran 3
Pakistan 6
India 17
Nepal 24
India again 35
Malaysia 2
Singapore 7
U.S.S.R. 1
Greece again 9
Italy 4
France 4
Arrived home in England on Monday 30th January 1984.
Thursday, January 28, 2021
Eiffel Tower
We paid 45 French Francs each for another night at the Youth Hostel and set off along the Rue de Turbigo (The name of this route perpetuates the memory of the Battle of Turbigo, victory over the Austrians on June 2, 1859.) down to the River Seine.
We were side-tracked into visiting the Centre Nationale D’Art ed de Culture George Pompidou. The Centre Pompidou, also known as the Pompidou Centre in English, is a complex building in the Beaubourg area of the 4th arrondissement of Paris, near Les Halles, rue Montorgueil, and the Marais. It was designed in the style of high-tech architecture by the architectural team of Richard Rogers, Su Rogers, Renzo Piano, along with Gianfranco Franchini.
It houses the Bibliothèque publique d'information (Public Information Library), a vast public library; the Musée National d'Art Moderne, which is the largest museum for modern art in Europe; and IRCAM, a centre for music and acoustic research.
It is named after Georges Pompidou, the President of France from 1969 to 1974 who commissioned the building, and was officially opened on 31 January 1977 by President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.
As a couple of peasants, we found it to be a horrific arty modern building that looked as if it was still surrounded by scaffolding. Acres of glass frontage and external escalators in glass tubes, together with blue periscope-like ventilators made the exhibition hall look like a giant animal cage.
We joined the crowd which flooded in at 10:00 hrs. as if it was the start of the Winter Sale at Selfridges on the opening morning rather than an art gallery. (Selfridges, also known as Selfridges & Co., is a chain of high-end department stores in the United Kingdom that was founded by Harry Gordon Selfridge in 1908. The flagship store on London's Oxford Street is the second largest shop in the UK (after Harrods) and opened on 15 March 1909).
We had a quick shifty at an Art Bookstall, but then spotted a pay booth which deterred us from further exploration. We left for a coffee in a Q-Burger joint and watched garish pop videos that seemed to feature prominently male transvestites.
We walked along the bank of the River Seine intrigued by the elaborate houseboats which ranged from monster barges to a floating potting shed. We reached the Eiffel Tower and loitered in the Parc du Champ de Mars waiting for someone who looked as if they knew what they were doing to get a photo of the pair of us in front of the tower.
Opened in 1780, the Parc du Champ-de-Mars extends from the École Militaire to the Eiffel Tower. A hotspot for national events, it can be accessed freely and offers the most beautiful view of the capital’s landmark monument. Parisians and tourists gather on its lawns to picnic, play music, and watch the Eiffel Tower’s twinkling lights at nightfall.
The Eiffel Tower is a wrought-iron lattice tower named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower. Constructed from 1887 to 1889 as the entrance to the 1889 World's Fair, it was initially criticised by some of France's leading artists and intellectuals for its design, but it has become a global cultural icon of France and one of the most recognisable structures in the world.
The tower is 324 metres (1,063 ft) tall, about the same height as an 81-storey building, and the tallest structure in Paris. Its base is square, measuring 125 metres (410 ft) on each side. During its construction, the Eiffel Tower surpassed the Washington Monument to become the tallest man-made structure in the world, a title it held for 41 years until the Chrysler Building in New York City was finished in 1930. It was the first structure to reach a height of 300 metres.
The Eiffel Tower is the most-visited paid monument in the world, but we opted not to pay and recrossed the River Seine. Jogging along the river seemed to be the order of the day and we dodged roller skaters in the grounds of the Palais de Chaillot, a building at the top of the Chaillot Hill in the Trocadéro area in the 16th arrondissement of Paris.
We continued north to the landmark Arc de Triomphe. The Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile is one of the most famous monuments in Paris, France, standing at the western end of the Champs-Élysées at the centre of Place Charles de Gaulle, formerly named Place de l'Étoile—the étoile or "star" of the juncture formed by its twelve radiating avenues.
The location of the arc and the plaza is shared between three arrondissements, 16th (south and west), 17th (north), and 8th (east). The Arc de Triomphe honours those who fought and died for France in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, with the names of all French victories and generals inscribed on its inner and outer surfaces. Beneath its vault lies the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I.
From here we trudged wearily back along the Boulevard Hausmann. We had a break in McDonalds which was well overstaffed. A girl was employed to write down your order on a card for you to present to the cashier, another to arrange the chairs and another in top hat and tails to act as doorman. Kids with flags and balloons squealed joyfully around us, dining at the expense of good old dad, as we watched through the big windows the passing fancy dress cavalcade passing by on the street outside. Everyone appeared to be dressed up to the nines for a winter walk up the overcast Parisian main street.
We returned to the Youth Hostel and dozed until dusk. Back on the streets again in the evening we headed for the Gare du Nord so that George could change up some more money into French Francs. On the way back from the station, which was cluttered with litter, we took on board a mega-slab of nutty chocolate, some walnuts and a cheap bottle of French red wine.
It was still raining when we got back to the Youth Hostel and returned to our room. We hit the vino and looked through my 35mm slide transparencies and realised just how much we had accomplished in the last five months. We had a brief chat with our roommate who was from Richmond in Surrey in England and got to a suitably drowsy state to blot out the loud brashness coming from the Aussie gaggle in the next room.
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Notre-Dame
Saturday 28th January 1984
Another dull day, trudging around in the drizzle of dismal weather visiting the remaining sights. Being cultural philistines, we felt that Notre Dame was good for a snap of the exterior and a cursory glance at the interior.
We failed to appreciate that Notre-Dame de Paris (meaning "Our Lady of Paris"), referred to simply as Notre-Dame, is a medieval Catholic cathedral on the Île de la Cité in the 4th arrondissement of Paris. The cathedral was consecrated to the Virgin Mary and considered to be one of the finest examples of French Gothic architecture. Its pioneering use of the rib vault and flying buttress, its enormous and colourful rose windows, as well as the naturalism and abundance of its sculptural decoration set it apart from the earlier Romanesque style. Major components that make Notre Dame stand out include its large historic organ and its immense church bells.
The cathedral's construction began in 1160 under Bishop Maurice de Sully and was largely complete by 1260, though it was modified frequently in the following centuries. In the 1790s, Notre-Dame suffered desecration during the French Revolution; much of its religious imagery was damaged or destroyed. In the 19th century, the cathedral was the site of the coronation of Napoleon I and the funerals of many Presidents of the French Republic.
Popular interest in the cathedral blossomed soon after the publication, in 1831, of Victor Hugo's novel Notre-Dame de Paris (better known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). This led to a major restoration project between 1844 and 1864, supervised by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. The Allied liberation of Paris in 1944 was celebrated within Notre-Dame with the singing of the Magnificat. Beginning in 1963, the cathedral's façade was cleaned of centuries of soot and grime. Another cleaning and restoration project was carried out between 1991 and 2000.
The cathedral is one of the most widely recognized symbols of the city of Paris and the French nation, but we dismissed it lightly before giving similar treatment to the Louvre, giving it a cursory once over which faltered at the ticket desk when we discovered that there was a charge. The Louvre, or the Louvre Museum (French: Musée du Louvre), is the world's largest art museum and a historic monument in Paris, France. A central landmark of the city, it is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement (district or ward). Approximately 38,000 objects from prehistory to the 21st century are exhibited over an area of 72,735 square meters (782,910 square feet), including the Mona Lisa painted by Leonardo da Vinci. A traveller staying at the Youth Hostel advised us “you need to spend 3 days in the Louvre to see everything”.
We gleaned more joy from the record shops where George increased his collection of disques from 3 to 9 albums. We stocked up for an orgiastic eating debauch in the Félix Potin supermarket that appeared to sell everything, including some super drinking yoghurt. Félix Potin opened his first shop at 28 rue Coquenard in Paris in 1844, at the age of just 24. This was followed by numerous other branches operating under the same name. In 1860, he opened the first two-level, large-area retailer on the Boulevard de Sébastopol in Paris. The following year he constructed a Félix Potin factory in La Villette, in the northern outskirts of Paris.
A glut of food and wine made us drowsy and resulted in a lazy afternoon. In the evening we visited the Gare du Nord Railway Station, one of Paris’ main train stations (there are six in total) and is conveniently located at the heart of the city, and invested in a copy of New Music Express (NME) to peruse in the worst rip-off burger joint yet. We were fleeced 2.50 French Francs for a cardboard thimble of nasty coffee.
The first Gare du Nord was built by Bridge and Roadway Engineers on behalf of the Chemin de Fer du Nord company, which was managed by Léonce Reynaud, professor of architecture at the École Polytechnique. The station was inaugurated on 14 June 1846, the same year as the launch of the Paris–Amiens–Lille rail link. Since the station was found to be too small in size, it was partially demolished in 1860 to provide space for the current station. The original station's façade was removed and transferred to Lille.
The Gare du Nord is the station for trains to Northern France and to international destinations in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom via Eurostar and the Eurotunnel. The station complex was designed by French architect Jacques Hittorff and built between 1861 and 1864.
21:00 hrs. found us back in our bedroom lazing around again with hopes of more fun tomorrow.
Champs-Élysées
Friday 27th January 1984
The Youth Hostel breakfast was a meagre affair consumed in the company of our favourite people, questioning trendy hostellers. After a much-needed shower we fled into the grey wet streets to do some sightseeing.
A pied, we steamed up the Champs Elysees for a second breakfast on a park bench in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe. As the central cohesive element of the Axe historique (historic axis, a sequence of monuments and grand thoroughfares on a route running from the courtyard of the Louvre to the Grande Arche de la Défense), the Arc de Triomphe was designed by Jean Chalgrin in 1806; its iconographic programme pits heroically nude French youths against bearded Germanic warriors in chain mail. It set the tone for public monuments with triumphant patriotic messages.
The Avenue des Champs-Élysées the famous avenue in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, France, 1.9 kilometres (1.2 miles) long and 70 metres (230 ft) wide, running between the Place de la Concorde and the Place Charles de Gaulle, where the Arc de Triomphe is located.
It is known for its theatres, cafés, and luxury shops, for the annual Bastille Day military parade, and as the finish of the Tour de France cycling race. The name is French for the Elysian Fields, the place for dead heroes in Greek mythology. Champs-Élysées is widely regarded to be one of the most recognisable avenues in the world.
A light rain accompanied us as we went on to view the Eiffel Tower, a sombre advert for Meccano against a grey dismal sky. North Africans sold useless knick-knacks such as polythene flappy birds near the fountain array in the Jardins du Trocadéro across the river Seine from the Eiffel Tower.
We followed our noses around the shopping streets, looking in the shops that had sales on and searching for the ever-elusive cheap café. Outside the major department stores Vogue-ish women in fur jackets manned external stalls.
Small motorcycles whizzed about suicidally as we walked back passed the multitude of cinemas on Boulevard Hausmann, which is 2.53 kilometres (1.57 mi) long from the 8th to the 9th arrondissement, and is one of the wide tree-lined boulevards created in Paris by Napoleon III, under the direction of his Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann.
We munched spicy tuna rolls as we wandered along and eventually decided on the Q-Burger as the candidate for cheap coffee. Our final port of call before returning to the Youth Hostel was a supermarket where we got a bottle of French red wine each for 5.10 French Francs a throw.
Thus, the afternoon from 15:00 hrs. to 19:30 hrs. passed in a drunken perusal of the Daily Mail English newspaper and a dissection of the trivia reported therein before descending into a lengthy slumber.
At 20:00 hrs. we went out on the town in search of some “action” and again found ourselves on the Boulevard St Martin stretch. Despite being a Friday night there appeared to be little going on. We strolled passed many restaurants and cinemas and wound up on the Q-Burger again.
Along the road the illuminated Metro signs and leggy black-stockinged girls testified that we were in the French capital. The Paris Métro is a rapid transit system in the Paris metropolitan area, France. A symbol of the city, it is known for its density within the city limits, uniform architecture and unique entrances influenced by Art Nouveau.
It was nice to see a dog-shit clearing motorbike at work on the pavement. Modern telephone boxes composed entirely of glass and coin-operated public lavatory booths on street were other features of the Parisian streets.
We stopped in O’Kitch, another fast-food café after a fruitless walkabout which failed to reveal any nightlife (we were probably in the wrong area). We watched pop videos and cavorting young French black people before going home to bed.
Monday, January 25, 2021
Paris
We arrived at the Paris Gare de Lyon Station dead on time at 06:20 hrs. A multitude of train tracks beneath an intricate web of electrical wires led into a huge modern cavern of a station with all mod cons. The Gare de Lyon (Station of Lyon), officially Paris-Gare-de-Lyon, is one of the six large mainline railway station termini in Paris.
The station was built for the World Exposition of 1900. On multiple levels, it is considered a classic example of the architecture of its time. Most notable is the large clock tower atop one corner of the station, similar in style to the clock tower of the United Kingdom Houses of Parliament, home to Big Ben.
The station houses the Le Train Bleu restaurant, which has served drinks and meals to travellers and other guests since 1901 in an ornately decorated setting, and as our first priority was sustenance it was a welcome sight.
We had the best cup of coffee that we had had for months and buttered croissants put us in fine fettle for the day ahead. Fellow breakfasters ranged from arty Parisians, soapy European travellers with multicoloured rucksacks to alcoholics in for their reviving morning tipple at the bar.
We did a preliminary sortie into the cold winter dawn and spent a quarter of an hour pouring over a displayed city map in search of our location and a route to our destination. We walked back to the Railway Station and waited with a huge Aussie bird and her tiny mate for the Tourist Information Bureau to open at 08.00 hrs.
An old biddy managed to jump the queue and delayed us for about 15 minutes with her pedantic questioning. We grabbed a free city map and set off back onto the streets. The city was stretching and yawning, slowly creeping back to life as we walked happily northwards along the Rue de Lyon.
On the Place de la Bastille, a square where the Bastille prison stood until the storming of the Bastille and its subsequent physical destruction between 14 July 1789 and 14 July 1790 during the French Revolution. No vestige of the prison remains, but The July Column (Colonne de Juillet) which commemorates the events of the July Revolution (1830) stands at the centre of the square, was our first of hundreds of Parisian monuments that littered the city.
Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of Europe's major centres of finance, diplomacy, commerce, fashion, science and arts, and in testimony ornate historical buildings, cathedrals, art galleries, commemorative statues and elaborate memorials were everywhere.
We found the International Youth Hostel at 8 Jules Ferry Boulevard, just off the Place de la République with it’s central statue boxed in and hidden behind scaffolding. Apparently it is a 31 feet (9.4 metre) bronze statue of Marianne, the personification of the French Republic, "holding aloft an olive branch in her right hand and resting her left on a tablet engraved with Droits de l'homme (the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen)."
The statue sits atop a monument which is 75 feet (23 m) high. Marianne is surrounded with three statues personifying liberty, equality, and fraternity, the values of the French Republic. These statues also evoke the three medieval theological virtues. Also, at the base is a lion guarding a depiction of a ballot box. The monument has been described as "an ordinary one, acceptable to a committee in the 1880s and inoffensively unarresting today."
Our spirits fell when we saw the “hostel full” sign on the door but we went in to see if we had received any mail, as we had used this as a Post Restante address. We were delighted to find that space was available if we left our IYHA membership cards and returned after 13.00 hrs.
The Youth Hostel used to be a regular hotel and had a modern bar and common room. Yanks and Aussies exchanged the usual travel banter over breakfast as we took to the open air. We duplicated our breakfast in a nearby brasserie which cost 26 French Francs for 2 coffees and 2 croissants, before carrying out our preliminary recce of the French Capital.
We walked down to the Louvre, across the Place de la Concorde with it’s myriad monuments, glimpsed the Eiffel Tower and headed back in search of a Burger King (we were real culture vultures)! We found Burger King near McDonalds and felt cheated with an insubstantial Whopper in surroundings reminiscent of a “Blade Runner” film set.
We walked along the main thoroughfare which changed names by the yard, from Boulevard Hausmann in the west to Boulevard St Martin in the east. Back at the Youth Hostel we paid for 3 nights and got an unexpected windfall. They gave us 100 French Francs too much change.
We moved into a 4 bedroom on the fourth floor but before long we were out pounding the pavements, following our noses and looking for the “bright lights”. We were amused by the obvious prostitutes that infested the Rue St Martin and browsed through yet more record shops.
At dusk George pounced on a rare Bob Dylan boxed set and we had a coffee in another fast-food cafeteria before seeing “A Clockwork Orange” at 19:30 hrs. Orange mécanique (A Clockwork Orange) est un film d'anticipation britannico-américain écrit et réalisé par Stanley Kubrick, sorti sur les écrans en 1971. “A Clockwork Orange” is a 1971 dystopian crime film adapted, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name. It employs disturbing, violent images to comment on psychiatry, juvenile delinquency, youth gangs, and other social, political, and economic subjects in a dystopian near-future Britain.
It was a film that I had always wanted to see but was too young when it was released in the UK as an X-rated film for over 18’s only. In 1973 A Clockwork Orange was withdrawn from circulation in the United Kingdom, at the request of Kubrick himself and it would remain unavailable for distribution or broadcast in the United Kingdom until Kubrick’s death in 1999.
Although it is often reported that A Clockwork Orange was ‘banned’ in the United Kingdom, the removal of the movie was actually Kubrick’s own choice. In the year after the movie’s cinematic release in 1971, a number of disturbing crimes were reported that seemed to have connections with some of its most infamous and disturbing scenes. It appeared as if some copycats were on the loose, donning bovver boots, white clothing and cod pieces, bowler hats and one false eyelash.
In perhaps the most shocking of these incidents, a group of men from Lancashire assaulted a 17-year-old girl to the tune of “Singin’ in the Rain”, mirroring the brutal scene near the beginning of the movie in the abandoned building. In addition, a 16-year-old boy was found guilty of killing an elderly homeless man, after claiming that he had heard about a similar scene in the movie. The association of real-world acts of violence with the movie was deeply upsetting for Kubrick, and he decided to pull “A Clockwork Orange” from the British market.
The movie reinvigorated an old debate about the potential societal impact of depictions of graphic violence. Kubrick himself had anticipated many of these critiques in the early publicity for “A Clockwork Orange”, and he was initially adamant that his film could not be responsible for so-called copycat violence.
Despite it being dubbed into French we thought that it was visually stunning and packed a punch with its use of classical music and electronic synthetic music composed by Wendy Carlos. It was shocking as it left nothing to the imagination on the sex and violence front.
Back at the Youth Hostel we wrote up our daily logbooks despite prying American bozos and the attention-seeking bores in the common room. Feeling knackered after an extra-long day we went to bed and succumbed to a deep slumber.
Sunday, January 24, 2021
Salute
A clear blue sky and a warm sun put a new complexion on things as we packed our bags and went for our final walkabout. It was not financially viable for us to linger here, and this seemed a shame on our morning stroll.
George had retreated, stunned at a quote equivalent to £10.50 Sterling for development and printing of a 36-exposure film on Monday. Last night we had seen an expensively dressed lady in a felt fedora hat purchase a quite useless mirrored metal fish in an overpriced emporium.
We walked quickly to the Piazza San Marco where the pigeons flew at us like swift plump missiles as we crossed to the waterfront. We followed this in an easterly direction passed a fun fair and onto a park full of busts and statues (This would have been the Biennale Gardens or Giardini della Biennale to the locals).
A macabre sculpture on the waterfront appeared to be the washed-up body of a woman. However, it is the monument to the Partisan Woman, designed by Augusto Murer (Falcade 1922 – Padova 1985) in 1961. It is a bronze sculpture representing a reclining figure of a female World War II resistance fighter amid a series of stone steps. The monument is just beyond the seawall on the waterfront and is most visible at low tide: When the tide is high, the statue is likely to be partly or fully submerged, as it doesn’t float as the artist intended.
We came across an open-air market selling fruit and fish, and imagine our surprise, we saw people who were actually engaged in the mundane pursuit of everyday living! Laden clothes lines hung across the canals and boatloads of stores were busily being ferried in and unloaded. Most of the shops here seemed to be top notch delicatessens, but once again we were amazed at the cheapness of vast flagons of wine, often in ornate basketed bottles, which cost less than £1 Sterling.
We headed back looking across at the scenic historic buildings around the mouth of the Grand Canal, one looked like St Pauls Cathedral. This was the Santa Maria della Salute (English: Saint Mary of Health), commonly known simply as the Salute, which is a Roman Catholic church and minor basilica located at Punta della Dogana in the Dorsoduro sestiere of the city.
In 1630, Venice experienced an unusually devastating outbreak of the plague. As a votive offering for the city's deliverance from the pestilence, the Republic of Venice vowed to build and dedicate a church to Our Lady of Health (or of Deliverance, Italian: Salute).
The church was designed in the then fashionable baroque style by Baldassare Longhena, who studied under the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi. Construction began in 1631. Most of the objects of art housed in the church bear references to the Black Death.
The dome of the Salute was an important addition to the Venice skyline and soon became emblematic of the city, inspiring artists like Canaletto, J. M. W. Turner, John Singer Sargent, and the Venetian artist Francesco Guardi.
The banks of the Grand Canal are lined with more than 170 buildings, most of which date from the 13th to the 18th century, and demonstrate the welfare and art created by the Republic of Venice. The noble Venetian families faced huge expenses to show off their richness in suitable palazzos; this contest reveals the citizens’ pride and the deep bond with the lagoon.
A tiny tugboat was pulling a colossal Yugoslavian ship out to sea. Everywhere people were taking photographs. People queued to snap a kitten perched on the head of a stone lion which formed part of a war memorial while girls struck up poses for their boyfriend’s photo albums.
One of Venice’s charms is the amount of winged lions that you can spot about the lagoon city. The lion represents San Marco, Venice’s patron saint however you will find lions with books, goddesses women, men on horseback and even on tombs.
This particular monument seems to attract sun basking cats and is dedicated to Vittorio Emanuele II first King of unified Italy in 1861. On either side of the monument is a woman and her winged lion - one is posed as if in battle with a lion gnawing at his chains, on this side is a women dressed in royal garb and a roaring lion with his claws upon two closed books. On top of this monument is an equestrian statue of Emanuele II.
We stopped for a coffee at a pavement café writing up our logbooks as retired Italian citizens chatted around us. Boatmen in ribboned boater hats touted for water taxi customers or water bus trips taking in all of the islands.
We did some shopping on the way back to collect our bags from the hotel, gathering the ingredients for our favourite meal. We devoured the resultant mammoth sandwiches, refuelling our energy banks and boosting our spirits by packing nuggets of raw onion, red pepper, cheese and meat between crusty layers of bread.
We did this in the bright sunshine on the steps of the modern Venice Railway Station. Opposite us was the Grand Canal that separated Venice in a broad reverse “S” shape. It is 3.8 km (2.4 miles) long, and 30 to 90 m (98 to 295 ft) wide, with an average depth of 5 metres (16 feet).
The station is one of Venice's two most important railway stations; the other one is Venezia Mestre, a mainline junction station on Venice's mainland district of Mestre. Both Santa-Lucia and Mestre stations are managed by Grandi Stazioni and they are connected to each other by Ponte della Libertà (English: Liberty Bridge).
The station was a model of modern efficiency and with full stomachs we found our train on Platform 4 and settled in a 2nd Class carriage which would put most British Rail 1st Class carriages to shame. We sat sipping (understatement) fizzy red Italian wine in our luxury compartment looking at the photos of famous European landmarks portrayed opposite.
At various stops along the way we picked up further passengers and inevitably our privacy was breached. One fellow, a drunken Dave Allen look-alike (David Tynan O'Mahony (6 July 1936 – 10 March 2005), known professionally as Dave Allen, was an Irish observational comedian and satirist. Initially becoming known in Australia during 1963–64, Allen made regular television appearances in the United Kingdom from the later 1960s and until the mid-1980s. He said, “I’m an Atheist, thank God!”) was pissed as a parrot and proceeded to ruin the jovial atmosphere of the carriage by insulting us in Italian.
Our fellow passengers looked on in disgust and apologised for him when the nasty fellow staggered away. It was the shame that the fun-loving female with a soapy boyfriend took her leave as I’d become quite enamoured with this likely nurse (she was carrying medical books).
London seemed like a vortex pulling us in towards kith and kin, like water gathering speed as it poured down a plug hole, as night fell and the lights faded. The carriage emptied at Milan, leaving us the sole occupants of the compartment for the rest of the journey.
At the Swiss Border there was a perfunctory passport check and we rumbled on at high speed through the night. It had been snowing heavily in Switzerland and deep drifts covered most of the passing countryside. The Swiss towns looked modern and typically European with neon lit signs.
The writing on signs was replicated in four languages: French, Italian, German and English. Stops were brief and the stations looked clean, modern and efficient. At the French Border we were simply asked our nationality. At last, we folded up the arm rests and stretched out to grab a few moments of sleep while we were able to.
Rialto Bridge
Tuesday 24th January 1984
The sky was a miserable shade of grey when we came to. Out on the streets the rain was teeming down, making my choice of footwear extremely foolhardy. My black cotton Chinese Kung Fu slippers soaked up water like a thirsty sponge as we made our way to the only sensibly priced café that we had encountered so far.
We picked up some postcards along the way and spent an enjoyable age writing one of our best batches of postcards yet and sipping Cappuccino coffee. We moved on to the General Post Office which appeared to be a converted cathedral with pillars and arches in a range of tiers which advanced to a barely visible roof.
Internet research today shows that this was The Fondaco dei Tedeschi (Venetian: Fontego dei Tedeschi) which is a historic building in Venice, northern Italy, situated on the Grand Canal near the Rialto Bridge. It was the headquarters and restricted living quarters of the city's German (Tedeschi) merchants. In the 20th century the building served as the Venice headquarters of the Poste Italiane.
The Rialto Bridge (Italian: Ponte di Rialto; Venetian: Ponte de Rialto) is the oldest of the four bridges spanning the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy. Connecting the sestieri (districts) of San Marco and San Polo, it has been rebuilt several times since its first construction as a pontoon bridge in 1173 and is now a significant tourist attraction in the city.
The present stone bridge, a single span designed by Antonio da Ponte, began to be constructed in 1588 and was completed in 1591. It is similar to the wooden bridge it succeeded. Two inclined ramps lead up to a central portico. On either side of the portico, the covered ramps carry rows of shops. The engineering of the bridge was considered so audacious that architect Vincenzo Scamozzi predicted future ruin. The bridge has defied its critics to become one of the architectural icons of Venice, especially when a gondola is passing underneath with the gondolier singing “Just one Cornetto”.
If the image of a man in a gondola whipping an ice cream cone out of the grasp of a pretty girl in a passing boat makes music burst unbidden into your head, you are perfectly normal. A survey of the top 10 catchiest advertising jingles ever has just put the long-running 1980s Cornetto advert on top.
We managed to find the Postage Stamp Vending Window amongst maze of windows and paid a reasonable 400 Italian Lira for each postcard. We came out onto the Piazza San Marco for the second time, this time devoid of the flocks of pigeons who were as much a part of the tourist attraction as the domed church and the closeted walkways surrounding the square.
The Patriarchal Cathedral Basilica of Saint Mark (Italian: Basilica Cattedrale Patriarcale di San Marco), commonly known as St Mark's Basilica (Italian: Basilica di San Marco; Venetian: Baxéłega de San Marco), is the cathedral church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Venice, northern Italy.
It is the most famous of the city's churches and one of the best-known examples of Italo-Byzantine architecture. It lies at the eastern end of the Piazza San Marco, adjacent and connected to the Doge's Palace. Originally it was the chapel of the Doge, and has been the city's cathedral only since 1807, when it became the seat of the Patriarch of Venice, archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Venice, formerly at San Pietro di Castello.
The building's structure dates back to the later part of the 11th century, and the most likely influence on its architecture and design is the Hagia Sophia. Much work has gone toward embellishing this, and the famous main façade has an ornamented roofline that is mostly Gothic. The gold ground mosaics that now cover almost all the upper areas of the interior took centuries to complete. In the 13th century the external height of the domes was greatly increased by hollow drums raised on a wooden framework and covered with metal; the original ones are shallower, as can be seen on the inside. This change makes the domes visible from the piazza. At the time we were there it was covered with dust sheets and scaffolding!
Old looking figures waited with old fashioned hooded box cameras to fleece the tourists. We went on down to the waterfront where the main canal came out into the open sea (Santa Maria della Salute, Venice, where the Grand Canal opens into the San Marco Basin.) and took photographs of the restless empty gondolas that were buffeting about on their moorings awaiting the summer season. I took a few photographs despite the flickering of the red “low light warning” signal on my camera.
We went into a Travel Agent that dealt in Transalpino tickets and booked our train ticket to London with a Paris stopover. Once these had been paid for it was a relief to know that all of our travel expenditure was over and that all of our remaining funds were just for day to day living. The tickets cost us 113,300 Italian Lira which was about £47 Stirling each, and a £100 loan from George was added to my debt to him.
Nearby an Aussie girl grizzled as the Thomas Cook Cambio Desk refused to acknowledge that her Irish Pounds were a valid international currency. At one of the other Travel Agents that were not Transalpino Brokers we encountered a beautiful girl in a puffy-sleeved jumper who beamed at George with an amorous smile that exceeded the call of duty.
We took in a 1.5 litre bottle of red wine enroute to get us ready for the afternoon siesta, a snip for less than a quid (£1 Sterling), but far from sleepiness an almost manic mood afflicted us on this afternoon. We made the vino disappear in double-quick time and George had a shower while I launched into a frantic, frenzied dance routine, which almost resulted in the destruction of the white fishbowl lampshade, to the musical accompaniment of the B52’s Party Mix cassette (Rocking to Rock Lobster!).
At 18:00 hrs. we went back on the town. The only favourable point to note was that Venice was totally a pedestrian city. The people promenading on the narrow alleys presented a comic picture of wealth and indulgence which bordered on pantomime.
The shops seem to major in such useful items as Halloween-style masks, false plastic tits (women’s breasts), glass animals and elaborate pipes for smoking. Every sidewalk café appeared to be a small film set with mirrors and dicky-bow-tied waiters and elaborate silver optics to dispense measures of exotic spirit bottles.
At each square that we came across people in fashionable dress who appeared to be competing with the ubiquitous central statue for attention. Inane chatter was the order of the day. We gave up in incredulous disgust on our way to the Piazza San Marco and returned to our room with another flagon of wine.
We noticed more of the muzzled dogs that we saw all over Venice and guessed that a local law must be in force to prevent dog bites. Back in our room we adopted a mood of sanity that was soon distorted by another 1.5 litres of cheap red wine and the monotonous whining dirge of George’s Bob Dylan cassette tapes. He sat cross-legged with the wine bottle clasped phallically between his legs and did his best to match the tuneless wail from the tinny-sounding Walkman speakers.
At 23:00 hrs. we passed into oblivion.
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