by Kyle James
“Trail is closed,” she said, a blank look on her face.
“Oh, okay, so we can’t get there by foot?” I asked.
“Yes, you can,” she said.
“Oh, I thought you just said it was closed?” I replied, not sure what was going on here.
“It is closed,” she responded.
Okay, hmmm, let’s try this again. “So the trail is closed, but we can still get there by foot?” I asked, trying to piece together all the clues.
“Yes,” she responded, still staring at me blankly.
I wanted to say, Do you care to elaborate here, or are we going to do this all damn day?
Instead, with my last bit of patience, I asked, “Okay, so how do I get there?”
“Take the red trail; it is way steeper than the other trail. Start here,” she said, pointing at the map.
I was perplexed at how long this exchange had just taken. I thanked her before walking outside to Ash.
Neither of us wanted to admit to the other that we were struggling one hundred yards into the hike. It was a blessing in disguise, and our stubbornness pushed us forward. We emerged around a corner to find a couple also moving sluggishly, and took this opportunity to pass them. I had the mind-set of a dog when it came to being the lead in the pack (and also when it came to finishing every last thing on my plate, even if it made me sick). Passing the couple made me feel better about our conditioning; at least we weren’t the slowest. The trail rounded off to a plateau at last, and I slowed down when the view came into sight. I could see why this was a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We stood on the edge of the rocky cliff surrounded by vineyards and attempted to soak in the views on either side of us.
To our left was the colorful village of Riomaggiore. It was breathtaking to see the dark-blue sea colliding with the cliffs. The surprising crash sent sporadic waves of water into the air in all directions and created a white-water splash show against the side of the rocks.
To our right was the second rainbow-colored village of Cinque Terre, Manarola. The vineyard that snaked up and down the mountain was hypnotizing. The village was nestled in the valley, surrounded by the hill of a circular vineyard. We prepared for our descent into the village of Manarola to refuel the caffeine tank with espresso. Before we started down, I captured a picture of Ash gazing down on the Gatorade-colored sea and Skittles-colored village.
“Ash, check this picture out!” I said proudly.
She took the phone, but the only thing she noticed was the small area between the bottom of her sports bra and pants.
“Kyle, I hate the way I look in this picture. My back looks fat!” she said, pointing to the only possible flaw on an otherwise unbelievable picture.
Again, we had been eating nothing but carbs and gelato for weeks now, and admittedly we had both probably gained five pounds in Italy. Had she changed physically? Yes, but that was nothing in comparison to the changes she had made mentally. She was truly a happier person now that she was exploring the world and indulging in the delicacies of the local cultures. I had never seen her smile more than in the last few months, and that glow from her smile overshadowed any slight weight gain.
“What? Why are you looking at your back? Look at how awesome this picture is!” I said, laughing, trying to lighten her mood.
“It just looks so fat, Kyle. It’s fine; don’t worry about it,” she said as she put her shirt back on to cover her exposed skin. She was also embarrassed because the two rubes we had passed earlier now walked past us on the plateau. I know, I know, slow and steady. But Ash still had a healthy-looking body, and although there were some soft spots, I think it was just the sports bra squeezing her skin. But whatever made her feel comfortable was fine with me, so we headed down to Manarola.
I’m not sure if it was the way she looked dejected walking down the hill, or simply the fact that I had spent enough time with her over the last two months to finally understand how her feelings worked, but it eventually hit me. This was my job. She isn’t going to know how beautiful she is, inside and out, unless I explain it to her. I constantly struggle with this, and it’s not that I don’t think she is the prettiest girl on earth; I just assume she knows she is and I think it rather than express it to her. Normally I would let it go and move on because Ash gets over things pretty quickly if I just give her some space, but this time was different. We were on top of a mountain in Cinque Terre, Italy, overlooking the Mediterranean Sea and colorful seaside villages. If I was ever going to make her feel as beautiful as she was in my eyes, she deserved it to be right now.
“Ash, stop! Take your shirt off!” Jesus, Kyle, this is how you convey your revelation to her? You truly are an idiot.
“What? No, Kyle. It’s okay. I just don’t want to take it off. I don’t want to look fat in these pictures, and I hate how my back looks,” she said and continued walking.
I stopped her and grabbed her hand so she would hear what I should have told her a long time ago.
“No, it’s not okay, Ash. You don’t have back fat; you have a back. You don’t look fat; you look happy. You are the most beautiful thing on earth when you smile. You constantly preach to me about how much self-image ruins confidence in women and plays such an acidic role in how women feel about themselves. Take your shirt off and be beautiful in your own skin.”
She looked at me, confused for a few seconds, as if she were trying to figure out who I was and what Cinque Terre had done with her dork of a boyfriend. Then she smiled from ear to ear, took off her shirt again, and shoved it deep down into our backpack. It was a symbolic moment for us because putting that shirt on to cover up her back had represented all the times she’d covered up her self-consciousness rather than address it (or “undress it,” in this case). I was finally able to explain to her that she didn’t need to cover up anything about herself. How she carried herself and her happiness depicted how she should feel, not what she looked like to others. She proudly marched ahead, and I followed her beautiful back for the rest of the day as we traversed the coastline of Cinque Terre.
8/16/15
Genoa, Italy
As embarrassing as this is to admit, we both woke up sore today. Sure, we may have only hiked five to ten miles total yesterday, but we were far from prime hiking form. I wasn’t going to tell Ash I was sore, and I was sure she wasn’t going to tell me, but when I stood up from the futon, I let out a small yelp of pain.
She laughed and said, “Me too.”
Thankfully, for us, it was pouring outside, to the extent that we couldn’t even sit on the porch because of the squalls of sideways rain. We were (finally) leaving Genoa tomorrow, so we spent the entire day in bed, planning our trip to Greece and watching HBO’s The Newsroom. It was a lazy Sunday in the most honest sense, and it felt great.
8/17/15
Genoa, Italy → Venice, Italy
Our 6:30 a.m. wake-up call hurt at first, until I remembered I had a date with my German friend: Mr. FlixBus. We were having trouble finding a train from Genoa to Venice, and as a last-ditch effort, I checked the FlixBus website to see a new banner across the top, claiming they were now in Italy! How convenient. This new promotion in Italy included a direct route from Genoa to Venice for one dollar a person. We were traveling, I should note, for six hours on a luxury bus for less than it costs to pee in a public bathroom in many European cities.
I immediately fell asleep after we got comfortable in our seats on the bus. I woke up to the feeling and sound of the bus going over some bumpy road material that wasn’t asphalt. I didn’t even realize I had fallen asleep, but there was an ink blotch on my journal that gave away the precise moment of slumber. Ash woke up too and looked around, confused. It always takes her a few minutes to get her bearings after a six-hour nap. We had arrived in Venice and exited the bus to a hot blanket of uncomfortable moisture in the air that soaked my lower back in a matter of seconds.
Ash and I had only two days in Venice before we had to get back down to Rome to catch our flight to Gre
ece. This meant we had to pack all our sightseeing into forty-eight hours. Eager to drop off our bags and start exploring, we raced through busy sidewalks and over the many bridges connecting the blocks of water.
Our Airbnb was located in the heart of Venice and was really more of a bed-and-breakfast. We were paying an absurd eighty-five dollars a night for this place; it was the cheapest we could find in the city.
A small woman answered the door and told us to follow her. There were other guests scattered all over the place.
There were some pros and cons to this place. Pros: the bed was large, the AC worked, and we were in the best location in Venice. The cons included a defect shower (water everywhere), very minimal natural light, a single sheet as a blanket, and the fact that the ceilings were probably five and a half feet tall. I felt like Alice in Wonderland after she drinks the damn vial.
Ash had made plans for us to meet up with her friend from high school, Annalise, and her boyfriend, Stephen. When Ash texted Annalise to meet up, they chose St. Mark’s Square as a meeting point. When we got to the square, it quickly became apparent this was a poor choice for a rendezvous.
This happened to be the biggest square in Venice. Unfortunately, the thousands of people in the square weren’t the bad news; the bad news was the pigeons. There was easily a thirteen-to-one ratio of pigeons to humans. The amount of pigeons was beyond sickening, and the worst part was the hundreds of people feeding the pigeons from their hands or letting them land on their limbs and heads. We made our way cautiously through the square, trying not to kick the flying rats. I went back and forth between disgusted and concerned for these people, who were letting these disease-carrying birds lounge all over them. I was busy dodging a low-flying pigeon and cursing under my breath when Ash pointed to a couple waving in the distance. She ran up to hug Annalise.
Annalise and Stephen had just finished law school at UNC and were traveling for a couple of weeks while they awaited their bar exam results. After making the initial small talk with Stephen, I discovered that he’d lived with some people from my hometown while he’d been at UNC.
Shooting the shit with Stephen was far easier than I had imagined. We instantly bonded over our strong dislike for pigeons, Duke, and the current lack of beer. There was nothing we could do about Duke right now, so we set off to handle the other two issues.
Corner stores were everywhere, so we were able to arm ourselves with tallboys. We took our beers to a pier on the Grand Canal, swapping stories from our prospective journeys. They were only here for a day before heading to Florence, so this was the only night for all of us to go out. We agreed that a ride on the gondola was the sole thing we had to do while we were here, so we found a gondolier and asked how it worked.
Well, it turned out that the gondoliers also knew it was the one thing all tourists had to do in Venice, and they charged 120 euros for a thirty-five-minute ride through the canals. Even at sixty euros a couple, this was almost as much as we were paying a night for our Airbnb. But the girls had their hearts set on a ride, and frankly, if we were in Venice, I wanted to check this off the bucket list as well. So we set off to get wine for the trip. If we were going to pay this much to ride on a boat for half an hour, we were going to be heavily inebriated while doing it.
We drank a few more beers, our wine in hand, and Stephen and I decided to break the seal, so we peed into the canal. The girls were cracking up, but it seemed pretty normal to us. Just a massive urinal everywhere you go. I imagined people did this every day. Yet another reason no one was swimming.
When we arrived back at the Grand Canal, we spotted a gondola station and walked into the small hut on the water. It was similar to catching a taxi outside of baggage claim at an airport. The manager in the hut called over one of the gondoliers from across the canal. The man arrived in a matter of seconds with a few swoops of his massive paddle. He invited us in, and we all gently stepped into the large boat and took seats on plush pillows. They have the decor down; I’ll give them that. Stephen passed out plastic cups of the wine, and we started our tour through the streets of water.
To be honest, I was slightly disappointed. I’d expected a singing Italian man with a curled mustache wearing a striped shirt and a scarf. We ended up with a clean-shaven man who, when asked if he was going to sing, replied bluntly, “I don’t sing well.” He was knowledgeable, though, and pointed out Marco Polo’s childhood home as he kicked off the wall to keep the boat from slamming into it. We passed under footbridges and banked sharp turns, holding on to our Chianti for dear life as our boat fit through tight spaces. Luckily, we had the entire canal to ourselves this late at night.
With the thrill of being on a gondola with my new friends, the Chianti was quickly going down the pipe. I zoned out from the sound of the gondolier’s voice as he told us about Canaletto’s home, and tried to absorb what was going on. Being on a gondola in Venice with my beautiful girlfriend, who was beaming and holding my hand tightly with excitement, was something I’d never imagined would actually happen.
We neared the Grand Canal once again, and I assumed he was going to take us to the other side of the large river, but the gondolier pulled back into the dock. We looked at one another, confused. We had paid for thirty-five minutes (already a huge rip-off) and were back in nineteen minutes. The gondolier explained that with no traffic, the route goes much faster. I wanted to tell him we didn’t pay for a fucking route; we paid for thirty-five minutes, and we paid a ton of money, but I didn’t want to make a scene in front of our new friends.
But I had a feeling they were in the same boat—ha ha. Had we not been with them, they probably would have raised hell too, but we had just finished two bottles of wine in nineteen minutes and were having too good a time to bring any negative energy into the mix.
Would I advise you to pay 120 euros to ride a gondola when you visit Venice? No, there are much better things to do for that much money. Would I understand if you did it anyway because you were in Venice and riding gondolas is what you go there for? Yes, absolutely. Despite overpaying for an underwhelming gondola experience, our night with Annalise and Stephen was far more fun than I’d imagined. We made plans to see them when we got home, and we meant it. There aren’t too many friends who you get to pee side by side with into the Grand Canal. We’d drunk far too much wine and had spent far too much money, but we didn’t feel too far from home.
8/18/15
Venice, Italy → Burano, Italy → Venice, Italy
The semiconscious thumping in my head was replaced with the sound of pills ricocheting off plastic walls on the way to Ash’s palm. Ash took some ibuprofen down the hatchet and turned to see that I was blinking awake and offered me some.
“Sure. Can I have some water?”
“No,” she replied, and lay back down with a groan. She isn’t the nurturing type.
It took us a while to get going as we both rolled around in pain from the wine and budget beatdown from last night. As we strolled along the sidewalks, the annoying tourists became unbearable. Crowds of people were either trying to look at something, find something to look at, or find their kids. I had to bulldoze through numerous groups of people who didn’t respond to “Excuse me” due to the language barrier. Ash stuck closely behind me and apologized for both of us. When my temper had reached the tipping point, Ash offered an idea.
I think Ash had purposely taken us to the most congested area of Venice to get me to this point. She had her heart set on going to a place she’d found out about from travel bloggers called Burano, but it was an hour-long ferry ride away. She’d mentioned it the other day, and I’d said it would be a pain to travel all the way out there, but today I was ready to head back to Rome a day early if it meant getting away from the crowds. We bought tickets on the east side of Venice and boarded the yellow ferry to escape.
Burano is an island off the coast of Venice known for the color of its buildings. Every piece of property looked like its owner had spun a color wheel, and whatever color it
had landed on, they’d painted the entire property that color. It gave the place character and uniqueness.
Neither of us wanted to leave Burano, but we were traveling to Rome early the next morning, and it was already 10:00 p.m. We both bobbed in and out of sleep on the ferry ride home.
Venice is a really cool place, but the amount of people who go there in the summer is quite overwhelming. Not to mention, Venice is a giant tease. It was scorching hot here, yet we were surrounded by water that we couldn’t cool off in. That being said, I loved Burano and having to cross streets of water via bridges to get around Venice. There is something magical about Venice, and we were both glad we’d made the trip.
8/19/15
Venice, Italy → Rome, Italy
The soft sound of the rain was broken by a piercing Apple alarm. Ash and I were both so mad that our nap was over that we groaned and kicked the sheets off in a tantrum. Italy had been full of travel days, and this one in particular was going to be a pain due to our lack of sleep and the shitty weather. We reached the Santa Lucia train station on the island and bought our dollar-fifty tickets to travel inland to the Mestre station to meet our BlaBlaCar driver Karim.
Karim was a happy-go-lucky guy who was one-third Italian, one-third Moroccan, and one-third Spanish. He called himself a “Mediterranean mix.” He was an Italian army ranger commander who oversaw a unit of 120 men. This surprised me because he seemed like such a gentle, goofy guy. He must have sensed my surprise, because he laughed and quickly let us know that he was more of the brains of the operations than a fighter.
Karim drove BlaBlaCar when he traveled to and from Rome and Venice for the sole purpose of having company on the trip. We started heading out when he told us he had to pick up two more people, a small Italian guy named Matteo and a small Chinese girl named Anna. With our melting pot of passengers safely on board, we set off for Rome once again.