Hendersoni Resumes Painting in Venice

Those of you who know and love me, or at least don’t despise me more than I deserve, know that I fancy myself a painter. In Baltimore I had a setup in the basement with a nice big easel that would go to any position, and lots of painting accoutrements. I was able to bring some paints and brushes with me, but not the easel, and no canvases. Now being in Venice I had to find a place nearby to supply me with such things, and I did. There is a lovely little art store in Campo Santa Margherita, right next to a very well stocked wine store (which even comes with a clerk who knows something about wine, and speaks God’s English). I bought an easel that, although not as good as the one I had in the U.S., was quite adequate, particularly in light of the limited space I had in my Venetian apartment. I shelled out the soldi and carted the thing home.

There is a substance in this world known as Venetian Turpentine, which can be had in small quantities in the U.S., and which has a consistency similar to warm honey. In Venice, however, the stuff is sold in hardware stores in a jar of about 8 or 10 ounces, and has a thick consistency, more like cold honey. This substance I like. It makes the paint dry to a very glossy finish, and when applied in heavy doses, runs very slowly down the canvas, entraining other paint that might be under it. This I have used to very interesting effect, which can be seen in the picture at the top of this page. There comes a time, though, when the running of the paint is to my satisfaction, and I need it to stop. This can be accomplished only by laying the painting down on flat surface. I started to do this by placing the first such painting on the drying rack used in this country to dry clothes, even on top of clothes that were then drying. Karen seemed to have a problem with this system, for reasons I cannot even now fathom, and gently relocated the painting to a drying place less offensive to her, and kindly suggested that the clothes drying rack was not where I should dry my paintings. I have observed this rule since.

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The Quest for Internet in Venice

The dog and I had some work to do . . . Not really. I had some work to do. All the dog ever does is beg for food and generate filth, a pattern he continued in Italy. I, on the other hand, needed to put my stuff away, figure out what was in the apartment, and what we would need. I was then to transmit a list to Karen, and she would bring what we needed if we had it at home.

It turned out that the apartment was completely furnished, and had everything we would need, including towels, sheets, pots, pans, dishes, and so forth. These were things that the prior occupants had used for years, and we might want to switch some of them for our own, but the stuff was here and we could function.

One of the big things I had hoped to accomplish prior to Karen's arrival was to get internet in the house. We both intended to work at our jobs from Italy, and that would require high speed internet. This proved to be a task that I could not complete. After weeks of trying I gave up, defeated by what, I don’t know, but the Italian Telecom company won that battle. I am taking some time here to tell the story, but if you wish to spend any time in Italy, and need to connect regularly to the internet, you will learn from it, and if you are able to read at any reasonable pace, will have spent only a few minutes of the time left to you on Earth.

Originally, I asked the owner to have internet service installed and make it part of the utilities. I had tried to contact a carrier from the phone book, but I could not get past the recorded message. It seems that I needed a phone number, which I did not have. (I had a cell phone, which is what I using to call them, but no residential service). I tried all the tricks I know to get past a recorded message and to an operator. I pushed “0," I stayed on the line without entering anything, and I entered garbage numbers. Rather than kicking me over to an operator, as it would have for such foolish people in the U.S., the message would jabber something in Italian that I construed to mean I had entered incorrect information, and it would hang up. No mercy, and no operator. I reported this problem to the owner, who promised to call the company and have them call me, which they ultimately did, but I had already made other arrangements, or so I thought.

In the mean time, I found a nice internet place not too far from my house, and which was not too expensive. After a while of trying on my own I asked the man there to help me get internet in my house. I saw the irony of this, but he didn’t seem to mind, he spoke very good English, and gladly helped me. He called a different company for me and arranged for me to get service and a DSL modem. They sent a text message to my phone with a code number, which I punched into the phone at home (there was a phone, but no service). This activated service and caused the modem to be sent to me. I got the modem, hooked it up, installed the software, and . . . nothing. That was as close to having DSL service as I ever came.

There is a help number, which I called. I got somebody who spoke a little English, and they told me it would take ten days. After ten days, nothing. I tried to call them several times after that, and either got someone who spoke no English, or got a story about what the problem was. “You are scheduled for March 1st” (this was the beginning of February), “there is a problem in your area.” And then they would say “goodbye” and hang up. No opportunity to inquire further, just goodbye.

I went back to the internet place and had one of the other people there call them again. This time, it turned out that no request for internet had been made, and that there was a problem in the area with the wiring, or something. At this point I knew that they had won. I resigned myself to going with plan B.

In the middle of all this, Karen had arrived. She was kind and understanding about the internet situation, as she always is in the face of my failings, and was even sympathetic about my struggle. But I could not help feeling guilty about it, and feeling that my failure had something to do with my lack of ambition and drive, or to a defect in my intellect, which not only contributed to my past failures, but also to the present one. We needed internet to do our work. We were dragging ourselves and our laptops to the internet café at least once a day, and sometimes more, and paying one Euro (about a buck and a half) for each 15 minutes. But I had tried to get a person well versed in the process of getting internet in Italy help me, and he could not. The internet man told me that it took them two months to get theirs hooked up when they were starting the shop. This was another factor in me losing hope.

Plan B was to go to the Vodaphone store and get service through their wireless network using a gizmo that attaches to the computer. Upside: one can connect to the internet from anywhere; Downside: it cost a boatload to buy the gizmo, and then you have to buy minutes. Well, we had no choice. We made an appointment and trotted down to the store and, after some technical difficulty with my computer, we each got a wireless do-dad and were in business. Moral of the story: if you plan to use the internet in Italy, just bite the bullet and go to the Vodaphone store, open a vein, lay out about 400 Samoans, and get the wireless thing. You will in the end, anyway, and your life will be much easier if you just do it at the beginning.

Coming to Venice? Visit our website at www.TheVeniceExperience.com

Arrival and First Month in Venice

After a couple of years of talking about it, and shooting our mouths off to our friends and on our website about doing it, we finally did it. On this topic people are divided into two camps: those who understand it, and those who do not understand it; those who think it’s a marvelous idea and exciting, and those who think it is insane and will lead to our ruin. I’m pretty sure I’m in the first camp.

Without belaboring the point or the history behind the decision, which I may undertake to do later, we picked a day for our departure and did it. For logistics reasons I arrived ten days before Karen and tried to set things up a little, and to make sure the apartment was fit for the two of us and our dogs. I arrived in Venice on January 15, 2008, with Leopold the Corgi in tow, along with four suitcases loaded with my stuff, including a fair number of cook books and cooking utensils.

Getting the dog there was a lot less trouble than one might think, and was certainly less trouble than I expected. We had done everything we thought we were supposed to do with respect to getting the dogs into Italy, but I am a skeptical old man, and I had visions of some irate Italian bureaucrat refusing to allow the dog in. (It had never occurred to me until now that the opposite might have happened, that is, they let the dog in, but not me). I spent considerable time thinking about what I might do were they not to let the dog in. As it turned out, my fears were unfounded.

Upon arrival my luggage came out without a problem, but I did not know where to get the dog. I wheeled my stuff toward a man in a nice suit who looked like he might know something. Before I could say anything, he asked me what was in my suitcases. This question surprised me, as I was obviously a tourist, although I might have had more suitcases than the average visitor. So, I took the question to foretell trouble. Slightly worried, I told him that they contained clothes and personal items. He said OK, go ahead. This was the extent of Italian customs. There was not even a passport check, which I attributed to having first come into the EU through Frankfurt.

But he had not addressed my question, as the question was not yet asked. I told the man that I had a dog, and asked where would I be able to pick him up. He told me back behind the luggage carousel where my luggage had come down. I went over there and saw a roll-up type metal door with a little ramp out of it, with a sign saying something to the effect of “oversized luggage.” After a couple of minutes the door opened and out slid the crate containing one fat Corgi.

A word about the Corgi, Leopold (Leo). I have had a total of three Corgis. One liked to eat and play ball, the second existed only to play ball and did not care about food, but this one cares only about eating, and does not play much. I can get him to do anything for a biscuit. He insists on having food in his bowl, even if he is not hungry, and will push it around the kitchen until somebody does something about it being empty. Quite simply, he is fat. Too fat. He has his own gravitational field, and I have seen things orbiting him. But he is cute and I spoil him, I reward bad behavior, and I am an enabler. But I know it and acknowledge it, and isn’t that the first step?

I digress. I put Leo, still in his crate, on a second luggage buggy and wheeled it and the one with my suitcases on it to the door. The same man who gave me directions before stopped me and asked for papers for the dog. I had papers, of course, but I never had a rosy feeling that there would be all the papers he would require. I took them out of the envelope and gave them to him. He pretended to look at them for about five seconds and waived me through.

Waiting for me on the other side of the door was the father of the owners of our apartment, and a woman with whom I was not familiar, but I took her to be the rental agent. I am not sure even now what her role is, but she has been generally very helpful. One more aside: this woman is a real estate agent, and has a cell phone and an office phone. I have called her on both, and there are times when she answers, and times when she does not. In any case, I was never able to leave a message. She has no voice mail. I learned later that voice mail is not really used in Italy. This, like the fact that there is no take-out coffee, is an example of the hardships that an American needs to come to terms with in Italy. There are others, which I shall describe later.

The people who met me were very nice and very helpful (not an Italian personality trait I had hitherto observed), and they had a car waiting to take me to the apartment. The man even had a nice big station wagon, instead of the usual Italian car, which is something one would expect to see clowns popping out of at the circus. We took Leo out of his crate and headed for the car. My host was able to load all the stuff, including the dog (which we put back into his crate), into the car, and off we went. There was going to be one problem, however. The auto workers were on strike, and to make their point, were blocking the roads. After a while of driving around looking for an alternate route, we arrived in Venice at the Piazzale de Roma, unloaded my stuff into the hands of some men with a big boat, and got it to the apartment, which was only a short walk away. The men delivered my stuff about fifty yards from where they had picked it up for the modest sum of 50 Euros. We got the stuff in the house and went up to look at the apartment.

Remember that we had never seen the apartment in person. We had seen pictures of it, and we had sent our Venetian acquaintance Marco to see it, who said it was ok, but that was it. I was apprehensive, but hopeful. I was pleasantly surprised. It was a little shop-worn, not having been renovated in a few decades, but it did not smell, there were no unusual noises, and it had character. We were used to living in an old house with uneven floors and a little shabbiness here and there, so those features did not bother me. In fact, I liked it very much. And to add icing to the cake, it has a huge garden that is only accessible by us. After a big process of showing me how to work things, and making sure the keys worked, my hosts left and Leo and I were on our own. I promptly reported the good news to Karen, and took some pictures with my cell phone and e-mailed them to her.

Now the dog and I had some work to do . . .

Coming to Venice? Visit our website at www.TheVeniceExperience.com