Max's Summer Travel Journals: Days 30-37: the Dolomites

This is it. My flight to London will be boarding in roughly an hour. Paris was tranquil in the early morning. The ticket machines at the subway stop and the bus station only took credit cards, almost doubling the cost of the tickets due to international banking fees. The ride itself was efficient and uneventful. Soldiers armed with automatic rifles patrol Orly Airport. It has free, and relatively quick, Wi-Fi.

My arrival in Paris was much more interesting than I expected. I was overjoyed to be in a clean airport with clear signage and even a manned kiosk with information about Paris and travel to and from it from Charles de Gaulle Airport. I had an easy time finding the train to town and getting a ticket, and it left on time. Paris was pleasantly cool. I closed my eyes, the wind flowing through the open window along my face, and thought that the whole trip had been worth this moment. The city, based on the map alone, was full of life and cultural exchange. I saw people of all different races in my carriage. The people here were reasonable, the society in which they lived reasonably developed. I felt that I could spend a month here.

I mean to describe the Dolomites, but I have a few points of note from the train ride into Paris alone, which was, perhaps, more stimulating than all of my time in Croatia. Firstly, if there is racism here, I have not yet found it. People of Arabic, African, and Asian descent seem, at least on the surface, to all interact amiably and to be received by society. One sees interracial couples and young people of different races interacting. Perhaps it is naive on my part, but I see France, at least, based on what I have seen, as a racially integrated country (though I have been told differently, I admit, by North Africans. It is interesting what one sees as an immigrant worker and what one sees as a tourist). Paris itself is orderly and ruled by law: people drive when the light is green, stop when the light is red, and even apologize, be they older citizens or obnoxious young people, when they bump into one on the sidewalk. Street names are clearly posted, and the streets here are even straight and not obviously marred by potholes. There are sidewalks, on which nobody parks, and buildings of historic significance seemingly on every corner. Perhaps I got there at just the right time, before sunset, when the city was suffused with soft evening light; perhaps that is why it seemed so magical to me. (I forgot to mention that the air was great outside of town, when the wind was on my face, but that the subway started to stink as soon as we entered the city center.)

I developed a theory, on the train, that one could roughly describe Italians, Frenchmen, and Germans as follows: if an Italian’s showerhead breaks, he thinks, “Oh well” and stops showering; if a Frenchman’s showerhead breaks, he thinks “What a drag,” leaves it be for a couple of months, and eventually fixes it; if a German’s showerhead breaks, he thinks, “This has to be fixed” and fixes it within the hour. I do not mean to say that every single person in each country is as described or that such a strict division among those countries aptly describes all of the subtle differences between them, but I think that it captures some of the spirit of their different cultures. Even the advertisements here make more sense to me than those farther south: as soon as I left the airplane, while I was still in the passageway to the airport proper, I saw an ICBC sign about the future’s being full of possibility and the increasing need to cater to local demands. This, perhaps, is more a sign of what is familiar than anything else, as ads back home resemble French ones (or vice versa), but I think that it also taps in to my own cultural affinities.

My trip to the Dolomites was, as I may have mentioned in an earlier letter, a major disappointment. To summarize this (for I could describe it at length), we did very little hiking, instead taking buses (or, once, a cable car) up to near the tops of mountains, hiking the last few hundred meters (of elevation gain, not total distance), and then hiking back down. I feel that the trip was poorly advertized, as it was labeled “strenuous” and listed as involving five to six hours of hiking per day (rather than very slow walking with almost no elevation gain), and I partly wished that I had done more research into it, but I had signed up for it in the first place to avoid having to do research and ended up accepting that I would have to plan future such trips on my own (and learning how).

I will have to go through my notes quite quickly, as I only have thirty-odd minutes in which to write this (transfers in London-Heathrow are incredibly slow; I will not have time to write more there). I noted that if you expect yourself to be slow, you will hike slowly (i.e., if you think of yourself as slow, you will hike slowly; if you think of yourself as fast, you will hike more quickly), just as children who are expected to perform poorly in school will do so. I noted wanting to hike all of the mountains that I could see and looking down at the lakes from above, instead of taking the bus up to near a lake, hiking around it, and taking the bus back to the hotel. I noted the tension between Austrian and Italian culture here: while the buses ran on time and followed a strict schedule, they also sometimes broke down and started smoking, requiring that one take a different bus. I noted the appearance of the towns here, which would warrant whole pages of description: they are small, with broad sidewalks and hardly any cars, and one would be hard-pressed, as someone else on the tour mentioned, to find an uncomely building in them. Each of them has a church with a pointed spire; the walls of buildings are clean and whole; and many of the guesthouses (and buildings in general—even the bank, for example) have potted flowers on their windowsills and ornamented exteriors, reflecting a real commitment (perhaps because of tourism) to beautifying life.

I also made a note about future hikes that I would like to take through the Alps.

My roommate for the trip was a retired analytical chemist whom I liked as soon as he said, in response to my point about the variety of trees here, “Yes, it’s much prettier than a monoculture, isn’t it?” He was retiring and very friendly and said, “Hm. Yes. Ah.” a lot. My trip leader, Joe, made some interesting points about the geology of the region (a couple of continental shelves collided here, an African one and a European one, resulting in fascinating stratification and, if my memory holds, tied in to the formation of Dolomitic limestone) and about changing ideas in aesthetics: before the 19th century, the mountains were seen as threatening and inhospitable, whereafter people began to take the mountain air to try to cure various physical ailments and, after some more time, it became fashionable and romantic to try to climb the mountains. He also noted something interesting, which was that we learn to find mountain views aesthetically pleasing; having taught in schools for a long time and gone on field trips with his students, he said that children did not show much aesthetic appreciation for landscapes until they turned around 16 years old. This reminded me of my own aesthetic development: when I first visited Europe in 2010 and one of my hosts there pointed out a Roman wall to me in Zurich, I was completely uninterested and considered it just a wall. Now that I am hooked on Greek and Roman ruins, I am ready to travel halfway across the globe to see them. Changes in ideas about aesthetics are crazy.

I noted the wildflowers here, which were incredible—I will not try to describe them except to say that they carpeted the hillsides (and came in scores of varieties). I noted researching other hiking options and being frustrated that I could not plan my hikes (outside of the Greater Vancouver Region) so easily, though I learned, over the course of the trip, how to do so. (I also noted that, while it became my dream to take a four- or five-week hiking trip through the Alps, what really interested me was the hiking itself, and, while it is more pleasant, due to the level of human development here, in the Alps than the backwoods of B.C., I would be able to do more or less the same thing back home as I could do here if I did not have the money to return to the Alps in the near future. I think of camping and, to an even greater degree, backpacking as more of a duty than something enjoyable—I figure that one should do it because the local mountains are so beautiful, and it would be a pity not to see them.) That was a long parenthetical note. I noted finding ways to distract myself from my blog and finding the hiking itself on this trip unfulfilling—I had paid a lot of money for this trip, yet our first hike was more or less as hard as Bunsen Lake. I noted trying to learn trail maps, which I would eventually learn to do enough to get around. I took a fantastic hike on my own on the third day of the trip, our free day, on which I managed, in a safe environment, for the hike was not that long, there were other people around, and one is never too far from towns, to test my ability to orient myself in the mountains. (I would test this again, briefly, in the Bavarian Alps and discover that I had, in fact, learned enough to get around.) I noted wanting to be in a plae surrounded by trailheads and take off hiking each morning instead of having to take buses to other towns and hunt down the trails.

There are images of Christ on the cross everywhere here—I saw dozens of them on this trip. (He looked like a pretty stoic figure, as he did not appear to be in that much pain.) There are tiny chapels here, in which only a half-dozen people could fit, and lots of stone churches outside of the towns, where the churches have white walls made of whatever it is that walls are made of. One church had a list of the dead from both world wars, which brought home their horror a lot more (to me) than reading figures in textbooks, which are too big to comprehend; knowing that a hundred or so people from a tiny village died, and seeing their names and dates of birth listed, hits home, especially on such a spare memorial. There are trenches, barbed wire, tunnels, dugouts, and bunkers in the mountains from World War I, where fierce fighting killed thousands of people. I noted wanting to hike the mountains rather than just look at them through the window of a bus, which struck me as psychologically interesting, since, when I planned this trip, I thought that I would be content with mere scenery and not as fussed about the physical act of hiking (I suppose that part of me knew that it would not be as strenuous as I would like.).

I noted the wildflowers several more times and wrote that Austrian desserts might be the best in the world. Again, I have only ten or so minutes to write; in brief, they heavily feature thick custard and layered cakes. (Creme patisserie, by contrast, is often spread thinly, making French desserts inferior.) (The dinners that we ate here were good. I have no time to describe them (or the joy of spending one’s evening in a hotel after a day of hiking).) The knelling of the church bells in such a quiet environment was phenomenal. Cowbells rang on many of the hills, near and far away—the area was rich in pastures. I noted the little wooden extensions to buildings that overhung many of their first floors here—a lot of the buildings here were made of wood. I called the area heaven but also noted wanting, at the end of the trip, to smash my camera against a rock, throw out all of my luggage and fly home. I also noted that only fish was served on Friday because Catholics do not eat meat on Friday, that I enjoyed crossing the Austrian border (by foot, where the dividing line was marked in the mountains) despite having expected it to be an empty symbol, and that I loved the mountain huts (where we would sometimes eat) and the abundance of places to fill up on water.

I was, despite having disliked the hiking trip, terribly unhappy to be reentering Italy, and the reality of my doing so hit me more with every passing mile. The rattletrap that took me from the Venice airport to the train station shook so much that I could not read and let me off at the wrong station. The outskirts of the city smelled of manure; there was nowhere to sit in the train station (at all), and the train itself was 30 minutes late. Interestingly, I managed to get on the wrong train (on the advice of a railway employee), having sat down on, say, train 9744 to Bologna rather than 9734—something like that. The man checking tickets told me this when we were almost all of the way there, and, seeing as I was bewildered and the two trains had left at almost the same time for the same destination, he let me off without a fine. It was one of the few acts of kindness that I observed in a country in which kindness generally seems to have little currency.

Before I end this on an anecdote to give it a sense of finality—my flight is delayed, though the display screen does not say how by much (meaning that I may miss my connection to Vancouver), so I should have time to write this—I should mention having noted an obsession with the Alps and an acceptance that I would miss a great many other places in order to see them. I may never see Australia, New Zealand, the Pyreness, the Andes, the Himalayas, Corsica, Sardinia, the Canary Islands, and multitinous other places of theoretical interest, and I am OK with that, as I have accepted that one cannot see everything but should focus on those places for which one feels the greatest affinity, and I feel, somehow, at home in the Alps. I would not like to make more than one more trip there, as they are expensive, and we have plenty of good mountains back home, but I would love to see them one more time as a sort of fairytale ending to my trips to Europe.

I realized, as my trip began to wind down, that, for all that Italy and Croatian were foreign to me, I was only touching the tip of the iceberg of foreignness compared to, say, Thailand or India. Still, I had one experience that was so foreign as leave me in utter perplexity. At the first hostel at which I stayed in Sicily (in Catania), one of the bathrooms was labeled “Italian style.” Thinking little of this, I entered it and saw, next to the toilet, a sort of poorly designed, runt toilet, the function of which I could not fathom. Since the bathrooms were, if I remember right, for either gender, there were no urinals, suggesting to me that the undersized toilets were a chauvinistic way of saying, “See? Men don’t have to sit down,” so I figured ‘To hell with it’ and urinated in it. After that, I waited for something to happen; nothing did. I figured that I had to flush the thing somehow, so I turned on a little tap, and water started spraying everywhere. This was so unpleasant that I resolved not to use the deficient toilets next to the real ones anymore. I continued to see them but gave them little thought until I visted Dima’s, my Russian friend’s, friend in Bologna, where the bathroom also had one of these vestigial toilets, a sort of appendix of waste disposal. “Why are there two toilets in Italian bathrooms?” I asked. He smiled a little. “It’s the Italian way,” he said. “Yeah, but why have a defective toilet next to a perfectly good one? What’s the point?” I asked. “It’s a bidet,” he said; I looked at him blankly. “You know, for when you go to the bathroom,” he said, and I continued to look at him blankly. He stumbled around his explanation for some time—I will not record all of our utterances here—before explaining that Italians preferred to wash themselves with water rather than using toilet paper. This mystified me. “How barbaric!” I declared and admitted that I had pissed in one. We burst out laughing, I hysterically, as, for some reason, this seemed like the funniest thing in the world at the moment. One hardly ever speaks of waste elimination due to concepts of propriety, but it is an essential function of life, and it turns out to be executed in vastly different ways in different parts of the world. I have heard that there are squat toilets in parts of Asian and all sorts of barbarisms in other places, for which I will have to prepare myself if I plan to travel further.

This did not turn out to be a very graceful way to end my blog after all, and it was somewhat crude, but I have nothing else to say at this point, and I would like to figure out when my flight will be leaving. I expect to find a way to see still less civlized parts of the world that contain buildings and other monuments that I would like to see, which may force me to adapt my way of looking at the world and try to understand other cultures rather than condemning them as inferior to my own. While I do not look forward in the slightest to such adaptation, it might be part of what is called maturity, and I may come face to face with it one day whether I like it or not. This also seems an unapt ending to my letter, but I have completely exhausted all of my thoughts, so I will end this with a “goodbye,” or, to use the unabbreviated phrase, God be with you (especially if you are Italian, in which case you take God very, very seriously). Goodbye.