Detour to Venice

I have never been so close to not going on a flight. Through check in, past security, charging my practically dead phone sobbing for hours in public at 4am running on about 3 hours of sleep- this is about as real as it gets. Just the night before I had attempted to go to bed early because I knew I would be taking several tube trips to the airport and essentially spending the night in Gatwick to avoid morning busses to the airport. Just like life, this night did not go as planned, as I was woken up by disturbing neighbors at 3am, couldn’t sleep, and then woken again for class to a lot of unexpectedness. I was Exhausted. Blindsided. Confused. This is only 3 of the emotions experienced that morning. The three tube trips from East London to Gatwick airport are honestly a blur but all I remember is attempting to sleep on an airport chair while waiting for check-in to open and then pushing myself to get through security without falling apart. I needed this trip. I needed this time. And I couldn’t let anything stop me. Fast forward to 4am again and I was sitting there contemplating changing my flight or going right back to my flat in East London. When you carry emotions, however, you carry them wherever you go. And so I could choose to go home and carry this weight with me or take it with me to Venice.

Fast forward to 5 days later at 4am and I was on yet another bus coming home from Gatwick airport to my flat- my trip, memorable yet blurry, to say the least.:

So back to Venice. While I was asleep for most of the flight, I woke up just in time to get a gorgeous view of the Swiss Alps and was trying to soak in the fact that I, Abby Thompson, was finally fulfilling my dream of going to Italy, Venice of all places. Somewhere along the way of my running emotions and spontaneous trip, I had forgotten everything would be in Italian and unlike my usual travels, had not even attempted to learn a bit of Italian, which normally I would be prepared for.

So after navigating the fairly rude drivers who barely helped me find my hostel, I almost cried at just how nice the woman running it was and finally felt some seclusion. The hostel was essentially a nice trailer park so it felt like camping and getting away. When I arrived at my room I was greeted by two friendly faces named Luiz and Andrea, two Masters students and also artists staying at the campground. Luiz was from Valencia, Spain and Andrea from Chile and we soon began talking.

Before this trip the feelings of loneliness also stemmed from all these little problems others around me were experiencing that kept becoming conflicts for making travel plans with my group of friends. I wish I was making this up when I say that one girl had the wrong sticker in her passport and had to leave the country, one hadn’t gotten her loans yet and could’ve been sent home, another still had the wrong modules (classes) to transfer and was said to graduate in May, and another’s phone had just been dropped in a river. I felt like I was wearing a sticker that said “Please, anyone with travel study abroad problems come to me and we can be friends and stress each other out together.” So you’ll imagine the emotions involved when I found out that Luiz and Andrea were also stressed out as they had been looking for three weeks for a permanent place to live in Venice to study for the semester. Somehow, I became part of apartment hunting and moving in a new city, where none of us spoke the language. The last thing I needed was my brain to be even more confused because while we were all in Italy, Luiz and Andrea spoke Spanish and very little English so for the next few days, my brain as tested trying to leave the Danish from a few weeks behind and speak the best Spanish I could to communicate.

Due to the language barrier, I was told on my first night that the two would be switching to another campsite, so I thought we were moving from number “5” and “6” to another number down the trail path in a different trailer room. However, the next morning, when I was ready to help them move without my bag for the day (or prepared to be gone the entire day), I thought to clarify if I needed “mi mochilla” for the day and found myself helping them “move” from our original campsite to a totally different one across town. We split up and said we would meet later on in the trip but due to the stress of apartment hunting, we never saw each other again.

You were probably expecting me to tell you what I did in Venice. To be honest, the entire travel plans all happened very quickly and I went in with no agenda. I thought this would be a nice relief from life, much warmer weather, and some “me time”. However, I was not myself at all while on this trip and spent a lot of time in quiet places, strolling trying to escape hundreds of thoughts running through my head. If you know me well at all, you know I’m not exactly the quiet travel kind of person- I like to be on-the-go dancing or making friends or seeing all the big sights. Not this trip. So when people ask me “How was Venice?”, honestly, it wasn’t great. The city was great, sure, beautiful, marvelous, awesome, but my memories of Venice this time lie in the quiet moments and places I encountered and in the feelings surrounding me for the weekend. And I’ve come to accept that is just how it is. I might be back. I might never come back. But this trip specifically was about more than that, and though it was probably one of the hardest of my life, my memories lie in the little things, the quiet moments, the peace I felt on Sunday, and the rollercoasters on the other days.