This morning my head is foggier than the Venice airport on a Sunday morning in February. I feel like all the things that I need to think about have congealed into a big green jell-o mold in the center of my brain. It’s wiggling a little, but no pieces of pineapple are springing through.

I’m having selling my car anxiety this morning. The timing is what’s worrisome. How long do I give myself to sell it? Will it go fast? If so, how can I get around without a car? I don’t even have a happy safe place to park my thoughts right now–everything seems “Ack” worthy. Plane tickets- ACK! Laptop buying- ACK! Should I buy new shoes- ACK! I should be coughing up a fur-ball by now. I think I’ll hide under my desk for a few hours.

Happy Friday!

I had several Anthony Bourdain themed dreams last night. I don’t remember the substance of them, just that his buck-toothed smirk was in them. I shouldn’t have watched back-to-back episodes of No Reservations before I went to bed. I’m a recent watcher of the show and thanks to my DVR was able to collect some past episodes. What I like best about him is that he conveys the idea that who we are doesn’t really change when we are travelling. If he’s lazy and a smoker who avoids physical activity, he’s not going to suddenly relish climbing 274 stairs just because he’s entering a holy Hindu cave in Malaysia. He’s going to pant and complain. However, despite that, he’s very open to the various experiences presented to him and is very honest about his reactions. I aspire (rather skeptically) to be that open. It’s refreshing from a travel host and show. And the fact that they are willing to film him while he’s drunk is a definite plus.

That being said, he’s not welcome in my dreams anymore.

I have my first client! Yay! OK, it’s Eric’s sister but she’s an actual paying customer who needs me to do some HR-related work for her. I say it counts. At any rate it’s all forward progress, no matter how small, in the direction of people paying me to do things I know how to do.

Eric has also made some fantastic contacts in the Israel theatre world. Someone he has worked with here in LA produces a lot of theatre over there and knows a lot of people. Someone wants to meet with him when we get to Tel Aviv. Weee!

At some point I was complaining about how much harder it is to leave the country for several months at 35 as opposed to 22 (the last time I did it). One advantage about being 35 is that we know more people, have more experience and have a much broader network that we can try and tap if we need to.

It’s funny how emotions work. I mean you’re cruising along thinking that you’re pretty confident in your feelings about something and then things change, suddenly you start to get all wistful over a place you were pretty sure you didn’t like. OK, let me now substitute “I” for “you” in those sentences above. Let me own my contradictions.

When we moved to LA in October 2001, I had never been here. Well, I had been to Disneyland when I was 4, but I don’t really think Tomorrowland counts. There are things I like about LA. The quality of life here is better than NY, it was easier to carve out a nice little existence for ourselves in this sprawling mega-urb than we ever could on the tiny island of Manhattan. And that’s nice. Professionally, who can complain? Six years ago I got a temp job in an HR department in a bank and now I’m an HR Manager making 3x my salary when I left NY. OK, so what’s the problem?

I don’t like it here, don’t like the people, don’t like the game. It’s complicated and I even wrote a novel about it, maybe it’ll even be published one day. And yet, when my brother came out to visit us for my birthday last month I found myself getting all nostalgic. We drove up to Solvang to wine taste and I was getting misty eyed over Danish pancakes. I tried to employ my Venice Italy strategy: never think that you’re never coming back. But wait, do I really care if I never come back? What’s going on?

And now, my college roommate is coming to visit at the end of August and the best thing I can come up with to do is go to San Francisco. So maybe I don’t really like LA after all. I suppose now is the time to close that Danish pancake eating chapter of my life. There are many other kinds of pancakes out there. Did it matter that these pancakes happen to be near LA? Could they be anywhere and I’m just missing the tradition? That’s probably it. I’m sure that’s it. It most definitely can’t be LA I’m missing.

We’ve been germinating this nomad idea for awhile. We’ve kept it to ourselves though. It seems the further you get in life the harder it is to convince the world that you don’t necessarily have to live like everyone else. The Grand Plan has been hard enough to commit to on its own, explaining it to others was something we weren’t yet ready to do. Hence the lack of blogging for the past five months. Not that I delude myself that everyone who knows me is constantly monitoring my writings here, most don’t even know what an RSS feed is, but we just weren’t ready yet to go public, to unfurl the plans we’ve been weaving for the past six months and wave them around for everyone to see.

But here we are, essentially three months from when we plan to leave the USA. We’ve told our families, most of our friends. We’ve turned our living room into a war room, mounted a countdown calendar on the wall, we’ve started To-Do lists. We’ve found a new home for our dog.

And it feels good, like we’ve finally shifted into first gear and can move forward. Responses from those we’ve told have ranged from jealousy to doubt. Some people haven’t quite grasped what we’re planning (as evidenced by someone telling Eric’s sister that we were moving to Israel, whoops). I think that those out there who worry, those who want to make the argument for the mainstream, that want us to buy the house and buck for the promotion and stay put, are worried that we will regret this decision. I’ve run the numbers in my head, conjured up a what-if scenario that would result in the outcome that we somehow failed at this “thing” we are attempting. Even in that scenario, some crazy world where we have to move into my parent’s basement and temp as receptionists, I still can’t imagine regretting leaving more than I would regret not.

Five months since Italy, sigh. Returning from a trip to Europe makes me question the way I’m currently living my life. How do I know this? Well, I’m still trying to recover from Paris last year. Going to Italy didn’t help the re-entry malaise. Suddenly I hate my job, my house, my car. I hate spending so much time sitting in this window-less office staring at my wall. I feel like the time is seeping out of my life while I sit here–and I resent it.

I read travel blogs, look at websites and photographs. I try to console myself by looking forward to planning the next thing. But a seed has been planted in my brain. I don’t want to be an HR professional in Los Angeles California anymore. I’m burnt out, tired, and I just don’t care. It’s hard to spend 40 hours a week doing something you don’t care about. I’ve been doing it for the past 7 years it seems, and I’m tired.

So it looks like we’re going to take some time out of our lives and travel for awhile. We’re picking some places and staying 3 months in each. Hopefully we’ll be able to figure out a way to sustain ourselves while we’re out there, if not, well I didn’t really want to use that money I’ve been saving to buy a house anyway.

The thought of settling somewhere and buying a house and staying put just doesn’t appeal to either of us right now. And my career? Well, I feel like this, what I’m doing here, will always be here. Sure it will be in some other company and some other state but I’ll always be able to come back to it. So I’m giving up on my meteoric rise in HR. Maybe I’ll have to start over again a little lower on the totem pole. But since the way I feel right now I’m hoping this is my last HR job, good riddance, I say.

I’ve been thinking about Watermark today. Before our trip to Venice, I read 2 books to get me ready: John Berendt’s The City of Falling Angels and Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark. Both are terrific books to rev your excitement for a trip to Venice. Berendt is more anecdotal, interesting stories, interesting history. The whole time we were in Venice we kept trying to identify the different Palazzi and monuments he wrote about in the book. When we went to La Fenice, I wanted to walk around the back and see the canal the fire boats came up to try and put out the fire 12 years ago. One of the first sights we saw on the aliguna from the airport was at the Murano stop, you could clearly see the Archimede Seguso glass making studio.

Watermark is more philosophical. Brodsky was a Russian immigrant who taught at university in Michigan and spent every winter in Venice for 17 years. He is one of the few Non-Venetians buried on the cemetery island of San Michele. I love Brodsky’s description of his eyeballs like fish flopping around on the ground as they try and take in all the beauty of Venice. Where it gets poignant is when he discusses how, even after 17 years, he was an outsider in this city that he loved. He talks about how love is a one way street and that it is only his own love that is reflected back to him from the shiny water of the canals. He often describes himself as an outsider, looking in. He tells a wonderful story about how one night he finds himself in front of Caffe Florian as it is closing. He talks the waiter into serving him a drink but he must stand outside to drink it. The fog is rolling into San Marco behind him and he’s looking in the window of the Caffe and he pictures WH Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis and some others sitting at a table inside. I love that image because I often feel that way when I travel, I’ll never really belong in this place, there is this whole world about it that I can only look through the glass at.

I thought of this during that long trip on our first night on the aliguna from the airport. A businessman got on at one of the stops and sat there reading the newspaper. It was about 6 p.m., so clearly this was his daily commute, and I couldn’t help but be fascinated by him. And then I thought to myself how many times I had done that, sat on a subway in New York reading a newspaper on my way home and how it was so mundane and nothing to me. So maybe it is better to be the outsider. I can’t imagine ever not feeling a little giddy to take a boat home from work, or not be tickled by the UPS boat or the police boat. I guess that’s one of the reasons I love to travel. I get to see myself in something that is so different then myself and yet so much the same. It’s like holding two contradictory thoughts that aren’t so contradictory. It’s looking for the things you recognize in a landscape that is completely unrecognizable. It’s also a little bit of looking in that window, of not having to participate in that part of life, but just appreciate it and elevate it somehow so that maybe when I get home and the next time I get on a bus and open up a newspaper I may just enjoy it a little more.

Eric has this compulsion, I’ve know about it for years, where he has to do those things that one does in a certain place. It doesn’t matter to him if it’s a good idea or not, it only matters that it must be done. I’d been through it before, taken the picture of him in Morocco with a monkey on his shoulder, so I wasn’t too surprised when he insisted on feeding the birds in San Marco so I could get a picture of him covered in birds.

It was our last afternoon and therefore our last chance to get the bird shot. I told him from the beginning that I would stand as far from him as my zoom lens would allow. Pigeons are disgusting and after a week of trudging through their shit on the sidewalks of Venice, I wasn’t too keen on having them perch on my shoulder. So we took the vaporetto down to San Marco again sitting on the deck so we could absorb as much of the sights as we could. I got my final palazzo pictures while Eric mentally psyched himself up for the contest ahead.

I should mention that the other thing I’ve known about Eric for years is that he hates birds. Whenever we see them he gets a little grossed out. I used to mention getting one as a pet and he would vehemently protest. We entered the square and found a feed purveyor, gave him a Euro and Eric stood ready. I backed away and turned on my camera. He asked me what to do. I said: “Put some feed in your hand and hold it out. The birds know what to do.”

As you can tell by the pictures, Eric couldn’t quite stand still with the birds fluttering around him. When they would come near he would freak out and run away from them. Finally he stood still long enough for one to perch on his shoulder. He kept asking me if I got the shot. I wanted to say no because this whole spectacle was hilarious, but I put him out of his misery. Eric is a slave to kitsch, have no doubt.

Our evening ended with sandwiches from our favorite snack bar, prosecco from our favorite wine guy and our teddy bear plates from Padova. It was a fitting end frequenting the neighborhood places that had become our own in the short time we were there and one of the best meals of my life.

The best way to view the pictures (in my opinion) is to click on the first one which opens a larger view, then click Next in that new window. This way you can also read the captions.

Our train from Ravenna dropped us back in Venice at noon. By the time we walked back to our hotel (with a stop in the Piazza del Roma to figure out where the airport bus stopped so we wouldn’t have to worry the following Sunday), I was tired of dragging my poor suitcase around Italy.

We set out in search of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, a small church in the Canareggio district that has recently been restored by the American organization Save Venice. We were curious about it because we had both read John Berendt’s “City of Falling Angels” before we came and he talks a lot about Save Venice. Anyway, we took a wrong turn and ended up in Campo Santa Maria Formosa instead.

Rudy Maxa and Rick Steves both recommended taking the gondola rides from S. Maria Formosa and we had intended to check it out. Now, by some sort of serendipity we were here and it seemed that the fates were telling us that it was time to take the gondola ride. I was extremely reluctant. Despite my father’s best efforts, I’ve never felt completely comfortable on a boat, especially not a small low boat like a gondola. I was also most concerned about getting in the gondola and getting out. I was a little terrified.

We approached a gondolier and he pulled out a map. He showed us where he could take us and what he could show us and for how much. We asked to see some interesting things. He said “Casanova? Marco Polo?” We said “Let’s do it.”

According to our gondolier, February is usually the lowest tide month for Venice. That was funny because before we arrived we had read and heard horror stories about the dreaded “Acqua Alta” or floods that can occur. The canals were terribly low which means that the boat is very low, which means that the distance between the steps down to the gondola and the actual gondola is very large.

I got in to the gondola ok, but I was terrified about getting out. I thought about it the whole ride. We glided through Castello and Canareggio, 2 of the oldest districts in Venice. Our gondolier pointed out houses where Casanova had trysts and the house where Marco Polo grew up used to be. We returned to our starting point. Somehow at the expense of my knees I pulled myself out of that boat. I was shaky, all I could think about was climbing out of that boat. That was my storyline about the gondola: ha ha, I almost fell in the water. Thank God that was over.

The other night I was going through the pictures I took during the gondola ride. I was surprised by all the beautiful things we saw. All the little doorways and the quiet little alleyways. Venice was meant to be seen by the water and these were the little waterways that are hardly seen. How interesting, after my experience in Ravenna where I had to stop myself from taking pictures so I could be present and enjoy the experience I was having, that now I had pictures that were better than the experience. I suppose sometimes you don’t always have to be present in your life as long as you have a good camera.

The best way to view the pictures (in my opinion) is to click on the first one which opens a larger view, then click Next in that new window. This way you can also read the captions.