October! Fall has set in; not the cold blustery rot-scented fall that we are used to back in North America - but the days have grown shorter, the winds colder, the rains more frequent. We are now 3000 km from our destination, with some seven weeks remaining until our flight out of Istanbul...
...but who cares? That is still far away. For now, we are in Venezia for the second day, our spirits lifted by a night of good rest and recovery; my general malaise seems to have disappeared, which is welcome after the fitful sleep aboard the overnight train into Venezia Mestre. We still have half of Venezia's main island to explore, so we hop the bus into town once more and set about meandering through the alleyways and across the innumerable canal bridges. We pass by the architectural institute, returning back into the main tourist section by a convoluted canalside path; from there, it is along the promenade roughly halfway to Piazza San Marco before turning in and up past the Academy of Arts and Sciences, where they have an exhibition of Kubrick photographs. In typical Venetian fashion the admission price is out of our range, so we content ourselves with reading through various books about the exhibition; in any event, the exhibition itself merely displays the photographs without any informational context, so that we actually learn more this way than we might have shelling out 9€ apiece to see slightly larger framed copies of the same images...
...and we arrive at Zucca, a pumpkin-themed restaurant recommended to us by various online reviews, entirely by accident shortly after passing by the outdoor food and fish markets. It is not yet open, and so we sit in a canalside staircase opening out the back of the restaurant for a few minutes before trying again - and soon we are eating no fewer than four pumpkin-based dishes, each one thoroughly delectable: a pumpkin-lentil stew, a tortina of pumpkin and potato and grated cheese, a lasagna of pumpkin and mushrooms, and herbed chicken with pumpkin on the side. Of all, the chicken is perhaps the least remarkable - a reminder that vegetarian cuisine forces one to be inventive, whereas it is relatively easy to slap any meat together with any side and call it a meal. The soup and lasagna are especially delicious; the former is made with a greenish lentil that lacks the overpowering flavour of its darker counterparts, enabling it to blend better with the less forceful pumpkin flavour. The latter is slightly sweet, which is at first strange but quickly grows on you as your taste buds explode with sweet creaminess from the filling and sauce. It is not every day that we eat out; as the trip has worn on, we have tended to cook more and more, so that we now cook or at least self-prepare 95% of our meals. As such, our standards for restaurant food are high: if we're going to pony up the extra cash for a restaurant meal, we expect it to exceed our own steadily improving culinary skill. Fortunately, this meal does.
But enough about the delicious lunch; on with the day! Rain has set in; we sneak aboard the train back into Mestre out of some desire to give the much-maligned mainland its due, and perhaps out of a parallel yearning to escape the uniform canal-apartment labyrinth of the Venetian islands. We wander around towards downtown Mestre and happen across a bookstore; since it has started to rain by this time, this is a perfect place to seek shelter until the rain subsides. We get wrapped up in The Girl Who Played With Fire (Stieg Larsson) and Eating Animals (Jonathan Safran Foer) for a couple of hours before setting out onto the streets to wander a bit more - but there is not much else of interest besides the city centre, and there is little incentive to slog back into Venezia itself in this rain under the slowly darkening sky, so we head back to the bookstore and read until closing.
- It is dark; we grab litre glasses of beer in a nearby bar (8€ each, which is far less exorbitant than in beer-hating France) and take bus 10 back along SS 14 to our campsite on Via Orlanda. Time for sleep; after all, our extra day in Venezia has left us with a burning desire to get to the Slovenian highlands near Trieste, where we will be hosted by another kind soul from WarmShowers...