Friday, August 16, 2013

The Italian Job

Unfortunately, even being in an exciting historic place does not exempt you from necessities like eating, sleeping, drinking and doing laundry.
Especially if you are in an exciting historic place where it is 90 degrees with extreme humidity. Laundry quickly goes from being an optional nicety to a dire necessity. 

Which brings me to some of the less glamorous parts of our trip. Our Venice hotel was a great location and a fairly nice, large space, but had several quirks, beginning with the duct tape finish to several fixtures in the bathroom. I had a really hard time figuring out how to work the sink and the shower. On our first night there, after arriving in sweltering heat, I really needed a shower-- a cool one at that. But I could not figure out how to get the water to any temperature less than almost scalding. 

By day two, Venice's heat and humidity had finished off any semblance of clean clothing and we had to do laundry. The thought of dragging our clothes up and down bridges to find a laundromat was just too much so we decided to wash our clothes by hand. This wouldn't have been a big deal if our sink was a normal size (i.e. more deep than it was wide) and equipped with a stopper.
Luckily, Megan is an engineer at heart as figured out a resourceful way to stop the sink using a plastic baggie and the lid to a bottle of mousse. 
Just finding laundry soap at the store was a bit of a challenge, given that my audio Italian lessons did not cover the vocabulary for discerning between "laundry soap" and "dishwasher soap"-- or even between laundry soap, fabric softener and stain remover. We looked for something soap-like with pictures of clothes and not too much emphasis on the scent. 

When in Venice do like the Venetians, right? We didn't have a line outside our window (although we did later when we stayed in Vernazza...) so we rigged one up across our room. 
On our last night in Venice, the power went out. We woke up with no air-conditioning, no lights, and no hot water in the shower, resulting in the coldest-- and fastest-- shower of my life. All part of the adventure, right?

1 comment:

Kelly(M&M) said...

I love this travelogue! Glad you are keeping it real. Sounds amazing!!