By Alexa Hansen, '04
Funding: Dickey Center
When I got on the bus that glorious November morning, I was happily without - without care, without the ability to speak Italian, without fitting in, without excess baggage. And as the ride progressed, I noticed that I was also without a Prada or Gucci bag the size of a small house. Questions flittered through my mind; but due to my inability to communicate in a language that anyone would understand, I remained mute, hoping that it wasn't all that important to know.
All confusion was cleared up when we finally arrived at our destination. As I walked down the steps from the bus terminal to water taxi dock, comprehension dawned. Those big bags held hip waders. Venice had sunk.
Like many of my junior brethren, I fled to Europe during the fall of my junior year; securing a research internship at the University of Bremen, in Bremen, Germany through contacts I made at Dartmouth. Living and working in Germany was completely different from my normal Dartmouth existence; a different kind of independence - I was living by myself in a room I was renting in a private residence, and working about 8 hours a day in a lab on my own research project at the Die Institut fuer Organische Chemie at the University of Bremen. It was also a time of simplicity, as mainly all I did was work and sleep. But perhaps the part most noticeably divergent from my norm was that I was doing all of this - all of the research, all of the day to day living - in German.
While even just being in Germany doing research was out of the ordinary, my time there was enhanced by traveling around Europe by myself. I went the single traveler route when I went to Venice. Trying to match schedules with friends was just too difficult - I could only go on weekends when I wasn't missing TOO much lab time, and those weekends never coincided. I had always wanted to visit Venice - to me, it was this mystical place of Carnivale and romance.
Those thoughts faded when I sloshed through my first street.
There were no open stores - Versace and Gucci were under a foot of water. The cafés were only partially open; the old men of Venice were leaning casually against the counter in their hip waders, seemingly oblivious to the water swirling around their feet, drinking their morning espresso. There were people kayaking across San Marcos Piazza. There truly were no roads - any that had been available before were now under more than 2 feet of water.
The foreigners were caught completely unprepared. Many were escaping, trying to get to the train station from their water logged hotels. I saw a very proper English man decked out in suit, pressed shirt, tie"¦ and boxers. I saw groups of tourists engaged in what looked like slow sack races as they tried to get from place to place using only garbage bags. I had worn boots that day, completely by chance. All day I kept getting looks from the Italians, staring pointedly at my shoes. When a man finally came up to ask me what my shoes were made out of, I realized that everyone thought that my 5 dollar plastic Target special boots were leather. Trust an Italian to worry about their shoes.
By 4 pm, the water had receded everywhere. Where San Marcos Piazza had held kayakers in the morning, by evening the pigeons were back at their usual haunts. Everyone was gone; the natives were holed up in their houses, and the tourists had left. I wandered up and down streets, never consulting a map, and never knowing where I was. It was one of the best times I've ever had.
The trip embodies for me what my term was about - doing something completely out of the ordinary, completely on my own, and with completely unexpected results.
