The Kookaburra's Kackle: From boats to bikes

Written on Sunday, 24 May 2009: Day 5 from Ferrara, Italy at 5:10pm

Yesterday (Saturday), our last morning in Venice, Seth woke up a few minutes earlier to beat the heat and get an early start to the day. I ran to the supermarket again (since we didn’t have a refrigerator, of course), worked on the journal entry, then realized I forgot the lap-top’s power converter at the library yesterday (we would later have to grab it on our way out of the city). We checked out of the hostel then spent a little while unsuccessfully trying to call Andrew, our friend from Johns (Australia) who was spending 3 months in Rome for graduate studies. From the pay phones we faced the heat and took the much dreaded hike, bags and all, against the tourist flow several miles back to Santa Lucia Train Station to catch the next regional train to Ferrara (pop. about 130,000).

A little nicer view of the hotel room (and the smashed mozzies)

I'm still trying to figure out how the latrine is used. Note the soap dish.

The city of Venice; our hostel is circled with pencil on the middle left. (The image is actually rotated so west is facing up -- not that it would make too much of a difference in terms of navigating the city.)

Gondoliers are a surprisinlgy burley crowd. They must be trying to overcompensate for that hat they wear.

We left the city feeling like it was time to go—Venice, about 1400 years old, is remarkably beautiful and intriguing. The vast majority of the buildings are soaked in history, and for any individual structure it is amazing to think what took place there at any point in time during the past (at least) several hundred years. It takes a little imagination to see the city before tourists took over, but during our morning runs and our late night walks, it isn’t too hard. This aside, we both felt as though the city didn’t have much to offer—besides the library, there was no place where we felt we could relax and spend a few minutes reading or working without feeling obliged to fork over money or break loose from the gobs of travelers. Even the hostel didn’t provide an escape from the heat and mosquitoes. So much revolved around tourists that it was hard to get a strong sense of the true culture, and not just the culture that the city was trying to sell, like the Venetian masks, the Murano glass, Burano lace, or the Menu Turistico offered at many restaurants. This is not helped by the fact that the population of Venice Proper (about 61,000 and shrinking) is dwarfed by the hoards of tourists. There is little incentive, it seems, for the continuation of local hangouts. Of course, Seth and I could have been looking in the wrong places, but we did look hard.

We took a nice slow train to Ferrara (about 120km southwest of Venice). We walked to the Student’s Hostel Estense and checked into our private triple room (with five beds). The hostel is in a very old building, of course, but was renovated and turned into a hostel about a year ago—like a brand new model home, it is extremely clean, open and airy, and well-run with all the conveniences, which is the opposite of the place where we stayed in Venice (called Ca Venezia but actually owned by Hotel Linger). Our large room, however, is in the top floor, below the thin roof and with three skylights, and the heat pours in, making it absolutely unbearable between 10am and 6pm. It also lets in many mosquitoes at night, but not nearly as bad as in Venice. The temperature has been in the mid 90s (about 35 degrees Celsius), which is actually about 15 degrees above ‘average’ for this time of year. I can't imagine how warm it is in our "attic" dorm room.

We took a walk to the nearby supermarket, which is always a wonderful experience (for some reason I enjoy supermarkets in general, but I LOVE foreign supermarkets). Since now we have a kitchen, we stocked up on pasta, breads (including a Tuscan bread and a special Ferrarese bread, which is twisty, crunchy, and shaped like a four-point star), asiago cheese, kiwis (less than €2 per kilo!), cheap boxed wine (€1 per liter!) and some interesting looking vegetables (apparently one was chicory). We headed back to the hostel for a pre-dinner snack, then tried again to get in contact with Andrew. While we were being helped by the receptionist, Andrew walked in! It was great he made it, especially since we never designated a time or place to meet, besides letting him know we booked a place to stay.

A piece of that Ferrarese bread

The three of us walked to the city center for a much improved Italian dinner—pizza and the local specialty of cappellacci di zucca (fantastic and particularly unique sweet pumpkin-stuffed ravioli with Bolognese sauce). From here we rushed over to watch an annual parade through the city. We are fortunate to be in Ferrara during this time, because next week in Ferrara is Il palio, a 750 year old horse race, claimed to be the oldest race of its kind. The city was traditionally divided into 8 districts and each one competes against each other. During the weeks leading up to the race there are different events, and in each one the participants wear Renaissance style clothing. This week is the parade and involves over a thousand costumed drummers, trumpeters, flag throwers, maidens, noblemen and women, and miscellaneous ‘extras’ such as jesters, fire-breathers, philosophers, archers, and knights to represent the 8 districts. It was very, very cool, and lasted well into the night. The neatest part of the event is that people of all types seemed to participate—little children, old folks, youths—and everyone takes it very seriously. Interestingly, it didn’t appear to be a huge tourist event and as far as we could tell it was mostly locals putting on this parade for themselves. There weren’t those typical tourist vendors trying to sell crap, no food stalls or t-shirt booths, etc. It just seemed like the thing they do, and have done, for over 750 years.