My second evening in Venice I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Harry's Bar, which made me think of Paul Theroux's line that "Nobody's ever described the place where I've just arrived."
Over the years I had read numerous accounts of the watering hole on the water, most recently in Jan Morris' new book Contact!, but it looked nothing like I expected it to. It was smaller, brighter, plainer, a world-famous and admittedly more refined variation on a rec room to which a small bar is added as an afterthought and then populated with punctilious men in white jackets and black ties.
The patrons, for the most part, were tourists in jeans. I took a seat at a small table against the wall, ordered a 15-euro Bellini, and received the celebrated cocktail in a champagne glass accompanied by a plate of green olives.
I took judicious and well-spaced sips.
At one point a couple walked in and the man said to a waiter in an American accent: "I know we came here for some reason, but I can't remember what it is. Is this place famous for something?"
Venice is a city of countless riches, and the poor man's head was probably so full of Titian and Giorgione that he had completely forgotten about Harry.
The nice thing about flying Iberia was that it made U.S. airlines look good. The Airbus to Madrid had no individual screens in the seats, so everyone (without laptops) was forced to watch the same movie. I had to squeeze my pillow between my left hip and the armrest - and hold it there, without moving - to keep the plug from my earphones in its socket. The food was uninspired and the crew was brusque, verging on unpleasant. No one seemed to be in a good mood.
The crew was better on the two-hour flight to Venice, but they came down the aisle about midway through selling not only food but sodas and juices. (I probably shouldn't write this as it will only give our airlines ideas.) I had to ask two flight attendants for a glass of water before one arrived, begrudgingly and lukewarm. (I complained while deplanning, and was told that this is now the practice of all airlines in Europe.)
Flying home yesterday was a little bit better. For the trans-Atlantic leg I had an aisle seat next to one of the only empty seats on the plane. And, for perhaps the first time in my life, I sat behind a man who didn't believe in reclining. My earphones plug fit in its socket perfectly. The crew was an improvement, if not the food. (You know the cliched rubbery chicken? I would have happily traded my chicken for it.)
But the cabin was freezing; -52 degrees Celsius said the information board, and though I know that was outside, it felt almost as bad inside. Yet, coming around at one point with water and juices, the flight attendants were unable to provide ice cubes. I guess it was enough that the drinks were free. And that we all got to watch Academy award winning actress Sandra Bullock in Blind Side.
But Iberia did do something nifty I'd never seen before: It showed on the screens views of take off and landing taken by a camera attached to the tail. As we lifted off from MIA it looked as if Christ the Redeemer had left his perch atop Corcovado and was now floating, Superman-like, over Miami Beach.
I'm going to be traveling this week, and the magazine that's sending me hasn't yet told me where. This may seem a bit odd, but as Martin Buber wrote: "All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware." I'll be back from ____ on the 26th.
I'm playing tennis again, after the longest hiatus since moving to Florida over 20 years ago. A mix of travel, pneumonia, and winter kept me out of action. (I have a finesse - some might say erratic - game that doesn't do well in wind.)
Sunday I played doubles with one of Holiday Park's old regulars, a genial, modest man with a nearly flawless game. Yesterday I played singles with a more recent regular, who said of my doubles opponent: "He learned the game under Jimmy Evert, when the goal was to get everything back. You only went for it when you were sure you had it. It worked for Chrissie."
After our match, the man, a flight attendant, told me he had switched his route from LaGuardia to Boston. "It's so much nicer he said. A totally different group of people."
"LaGuardia's bad?" I asked.
"LaGuardia, JFK, Newark - it's all the same. I hate to stereotype," he said sadly, "but those are the unhappiest people in the world."
This week I've been wishing I were an editor again.
In my travel writing group, Roland wrote a charming story about traveling around India, a large part of which featured the sanguine sexagenarian perched on his top bunk on a train and feeling blissfully at one with the world.
Then my friend (and former freelancer) Ericka sent me a story about looking for love - and failing to find it - in Fiji. "I have a thing for men in skirts," it began, before telling in equally arresting prose of her fruitless search for a local dancer she'd met at a travel trade show in Manhattan.
In a way, the stories were opposites - one about the joys, the other about the sorrows of travel. But they both looked at the essence rather than the practicalities of the activity. They were the kinds of stories I used to love to publish, and now there are very few places for them. Today newspaper travel sections, and the glossy travel magazines, ignore the humorous and the atmospheric in their obsession with tips and information. Their purpose is to help people when they get there, but they don't inspire anyone to go.
Tuesday I did the NPR show, joining an Oakland-based travel writer and the owner of a travel book store (ah, San Francisco). The interviewer never mentioned my essay - which was largely about literary travel writing - and the listeners who called in expressed interests in other aspects of travel and travel writing, namely the spiritual, the ethical and the female (ah, California). This last subject allowed me to state my hope that one day the Society of American Travel Writers' Lowell Thomas Awards will be renamed the Kate Simon Awards.
My little push for the literary.