Different Water, A Completely Different Outside

How features may change in a day—from parking lot puddles in Minneapolis to the always-vibrant Veneto lagoon outside our AirBnB room in Venezia.

So after 24 hours of stresses that didn't politely wait in line for their turn to pounce, but rather seemed to delight in doing a random dogpile upon us... here we are. It seems to me that when you find yourself in a place that is truly different, you either criticize its peculiarities ("My, I didn't know everybody would be speaking a foreign language") or, preferably, you dig deep within and enjoy the nuances of people no less human than yourself, but who express that humanity in different, wonderful ways. And so it is here.

Even the ride home after that sublime concert we attended, last night—a boat-trip unpredictably and sharply bouncy and punctuated with random noises as our vaporetto slammed its hull against unexpected waves in that vast canal (maybe they once called it a "grand" canal for grand processions of The Doge or his cohorts, and the name stuck?) or as the pilot exuberantly pitched the old boat's gunnel loudly against the concrete quay, where passengers always seemed to get on, never off. Thus homeward with fatigue upon tiredness upon weariness of octagenarian body, we still delight in being here.

More about the music event, another time.