It’s a small world~

It’s all a ride~

My father was in the Navy when I was very young and for a couple of years he was stationed in San Diego, CA. While my father was away in the Pacific for months at a time, my mother was at home with my sister and me. I am sure that was a daunting task to have been 23 and home alone raising two children under three. 

When my aunt would come out to visit us, keeping my mother company, we would go to Disneyland. I can vividly recall riding the teacups, or sitting in Dumbo as he rose up and down as we twirled in a circle, or pulling down the brim of my Donald Duck hat and making it squeak as we plummeted down the rushing water of the Pirates of the Caribbean. But the ride that seemed to ground us back in reality and return us to our sugarcoated, picture perfect lives was “It’s a Small World.”

Why that ride and this blog entry, which is about Venice, are connected in my head at the moment is beyond me. I think it might be the vibrantly bright colors that I associate with those singing peoples of the world and the colors bursting from the shop windows in Venice. It could also be that, like the ride where everything seems so small and compressed together, the streets of Venice feel more like sidewalks bordered in shops than actual thoroughfares where traffic blurs the window displays. In Venice, if you are not in a boat, then you are on foot walking everywhere. There are no bicycles, motorcycles, or mopeds. You either float along, like the Disney ride, past the brightly colored buildings and people, or you are walking through tight and narrow streets crowded full of people who “float” you by the displays of masks, trinkets, and restaurants.

Displaying how fresh and beautiful your food is happens to be what the Venetians do. Window after window, restaurant after restaurant, bar countertop after bar countertop had food displayed on it. Sometimes raw, sometimes cooked, it is always there for your viewing.

It is midnight, as I sit here finally eating my first meal since lunch earlier today—after a very long day at the theatre where I listened to beautiful singing, in a foreign tongue, by 80 people dressed in a wide array of clothes. Now if I was just sitting in a boat and wearing my Donald Duck hat…

I am looking down at my blandly cooked chicken over romaine lettuce that I quickly threw together and thinking of all the beautiful food I saw and ate in Venice. How I would kill for some calamari, prawns, sea bass, or cooked octopus right about now. I need some vibrant color–that is what I really need.

It might be a small world, but tonight my dinner plate and the plates I experienced in Venice are worlds apart.

Ciao e a presto~

Mark

**Enjoy the photos of some of the food sights of Venice.