Reviving Memory: In Venice

by shz

2 April 2005

Venice is undoubtly beautiful. But like I’ve heard before, it’s true that it is too “touristy”. There were just too many visitors, and you couldn’t identify the real local of the island. When you were there, you know for sure that you will be in the pictures people take with their cameras, and vice versa. The hardest part taking photos there was having to disregard the crowd, but Fakhrul, Nizam and I were fortunate enough to see the real Venice when we went out at 1 am in the morning when the whole city was deserted. (Oh, Amer went back to hotel :D).

We were there for 4 days and God no, it wasn’t enough.

Ever since Amer wrote about his first backpacking trip, my hands have been itching to write the same – but not in a traveller’s context like he did, just sort of reminiscing the time when we were in Venice. I think Amer said it all in his post. None of us had ever really travelled before. I remembered the four of us sat in my room back in Oxford for hours, each with our own laptops or computers, refreshing Ryanair’s website over and over again, finding the cheapest tickets to anywhere in Europe, being really safe with our choices of destination, flustered to venture for the first time out of our comfort zone together. Until finally Venice made its mark on our minds.

I also remember, once we got to the “real” Venice from the mainland Treviso, we were unprepared about how expensive the food was. Well, what did we expect for such a touristy place during Easter break, right? So we walked for hours until I felt terribly exhausted (and terribly famish) and moaned about it in a way that apparently made Amer really snapped. He shouted something really mean to me and walked off. I was pretty shocked with it because I never saw him angry ever since I’d known him, and the first time I saw it, he was angry at me! After we had our cheap pizza and he came to apologize on a ferry, I was actually fighting back my tears. I managed to act like everything was cool because knowing Amer, it’s hard to stay mad at him.

We continued on our next 3 days really enjoying Venice and the companies of each other. I guess that was the starting point for me (or us, even) to learn how to tolerate with your travel buddies, to respect each other’s wishes or personal goals and gains because you’re not the only one paying for the trip. We might want different things out of the same excursion and travelling together make you see a different perspectives on each other. It can also either make you grow apart or bonded more.

Luckily for me, I think it’s the latter.