Back home on Isla Mujeres

At six in the morning I can hear the tired engine and the loud exhaust sounds of the muffler-less municipal garbage truck.  The crew operating the garbage truck are currently only two houses south of ours.  I have to hustle to get the can out on the street before they pass us by.  The guys wave and holler a greeting as the truck slowly rolls up to our curb.  One worker tosses the full can high into the air, towards his buddy who is perched atop the myriad of reeking plastic bags and cardboard boxes.  

 

Our can is emptied, and carefully placed back on the street right-side up with lid affixed.  They laugh, joke with each other.  One guy sings bits of a song that could be ribald, off-colour judging by the way it makes the others giggle. 

It's good to be back on Isla.

During May and June we traveled for six weeks through Dieppe, Vimy Ridge, Dunkirk, the Loire Valley, Paris, southern France, Cinque Terre, Tuscany and Venice before returning home via London.  We mangled several languages, speaking a combination of French, Spanish, and English with the odd word of Italian tossed in the mix for that truly continental sound.  We ate delicious food, but missed the 'heat' - the spice of Mexican foods.  Apparently our palates have adjusted to Mexican food better than we thought. 

We drank different wines and beers, enjoying Belgium beers and French wines a bit more than German beers and Italian wines.  We dealt with crowded underground transit systems, high-speed trains, city buses and commuter boats.   And the crowds.  Line-ups to see museums.  Line-ups to get on the trains.  Line-ups everywhere! 

The sights, the sounds, the smells - all different.  New.  Exciting.

Now, sitting on our street-side balcony we watch friends speed past on their motos or golf carts.  They yell hello, welcome back, and wave as they speed past.  Sue Lo, on her daily walk around the airport, stops to chat - recounting her recent adventures in Machu Picchu. 

Fashionista riding a bicycle in Paris - K Lock Photo

My sister Joann dashes up the street with her laundry bag in hand, coming for a morning coffee and to do her laundry.  She has misjudged the intensity of the scudding clouds - and is soaked with a warm deluge as she arrives at our house.
 
A motorcycle slowly putts past with two adults - the woman clutching onto a little one, so small that one tiny foot with a yellow bootie is all that is visible. 

A young girl, standing in the foot-well of a motorcycle turns to chat with her dad as he drives her somewhere special.  She is wearing a pink and white polka-dotted dress and a matching bow in her hair. 
Her happy smile is wide and loving as she looks at him. 

The contrast between the Isla motorcyclists and the Armani-suited motorcyclists or the beautiful fashionistas riding bicycles in Paris is startling to say the least. 

In the evening we sit on the east side of the house, wine glass in hand, staring at the turquoise ocean, aware that we missed this most of all.  The colours.  The sounds.  The smell of the water.

We will always be proudly Canadian, but, Mexico is now home.

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This is the last posting for this blog.  Please join us on our other weekly blog Notes From Paradise - living on an island in the Caribbean Sea on the east coast of Mexico.  

http://lynda-notesfromparadise.blogspot.mx/

 

Venice: Monday - work day

Our last full day in Venice; early on Monday morning the Grand Canal has morphed from a weekend playground filled with recreational boats into a working river.  The main canal and the side canals are stuffed with a myriad of boats, primarily all of a similar design – long and narrow, with an inboard diesel motor, and steered by a stern tiller reminiscent of a sailboat’s tiller. The operators are casually competent, scarcely looking where they are going.  They have traveled these routes – a thousand times over.

A black and red cargo barge is stacked with groceries to re-provision some of the many restaurants, hotels, bars, and grocery stores.  Two latter-day Romeos lean on the cargo, staring brazenly at the camera while I take their photograph.  They are muscled, and lean, and middle-age handsome, not in the least bit camera-shy. 


Aboard the “Marta”, a sleek black vessel with blue and green trim, the two workers heft ninety-pound sacks of cement onto a wheeled-dolly, stacking them tightly in bricklayer fashion.  Shoving hard to overcome the inertia they roll their heavy cargo towards a construction job.  The boat is loaded with still more building supplies to be lifted, stacked, and pushed to the final location. 

A red, yellow and white barge the “Luca” slides past with boxes of new air-conditioners, and pipes.  The driver is nonchalantly texting a friend, while he steers the boat with the tiller placed between his legs.  All I can think of is; what if he hits a wave?  That's gonna hurt! 

 

Another flat-decked craft cruises past with bulk wine deliveries.  Stacked on the deck are numerous wicker-wrapped fifty-litre flagons, looking like oversized Chianti wine bottles suitable for fairytale giants.  "Do the green tags indicate white wine, and the red tags indicate red wine?"  We wonder aloud.

Garbage scows piled high with the previous nights' trash slowly work their routes, the crews collecting boxes and bags stacked along the narrow side canals.  

Scrap dealers aboard the black and white “Morodi Venezia” chug along the waterfront headed away from the busy centre of Venice.  Their boat is loaded with the unwanted broken bits and pieces of a modern life – rusty drums, rotting bits of metal, and a collapsed bicycle.  Different boats deliver the replacement purchases: a refrigerator, more furniture, and a new red bicycle.

At seven in the morning several boats are moored at the fish market; workers toss wet, dripping boxes onto the wharves.  The boxes are full of still-wriggling fish and mysterious sea creatures.  A few I recognize such as calamari, eel, sardines, and octopus.  Others are unidentified species, things that I couldn't imagine eating. 

In contrast to the sweating workers – we watch a finely dressed bride and groom slowly pick their way through the smelly, wet, fish-market.  They are headed for a small romantic bridge that seems to be in vogue for wedding photos.  This is the third bride that I have seen, dress hem held high, stepping delicately in white satin-covered shoes around the leaking boxes of fresh fish.  A compliant groom and photographer trail behind. Whatever the bride wants...



We enjoyed seeing the two sides of Venice; the touristy side and the working side. 

Both Lawrie and I are boat-lovers.  Watching the crews and the work boats ply the canals of Venice was a great way to spend our last day in this fabled city.

Venice: Sunday is fun day

Sunday morning six people stand in a purple gondola, stripped of all of its ornamentation, pulling on long gondola-oars from alternating sides of the boat.  The oarsman in the stern yells out a cadence, a rhythm for rowing, steering a safe course through the flotilla of boats using the Grand Canal in Venice.  

 

This particular boat holds what appears to be a family of four kids and two adults out for a Sunday on the water.  The side canals are choked with pleasure crafts, plus sight-seeing gondolas, vaporettos (large transit taxis) or individual water taxis.

It's organized bedlam. It's noisy, and colourful. It's fabulous.

 

As we work our way towards St. Mark's Square at the entrance to the Grand Canal we are swamped by crowds, tour groups faithfully following their leaders with earphones plugged into a wireless system listening to the explanation of what they are seeing, and what famous person lived in which house.  The languages are from a myriad of countries with Chinese groups being the predominate factor.   

People jostle, and squish their way through the narrow winding streets of a city that has an ancient history.

  

Built on a collection of 118 tiny islands the city eventually grew to over 270,000 inhabitants. The first of 120 churches is San Giacomo on the islet of Rialto was dedicated on March 25th 421 AD/CE.  Sadly, as our third-generation Gondolier recounted to us - due to exorbitant land prices, the high cost of restoring the ancient buildings, and the lagging Italian economy - most of the workers of Venice live elsewhere.  The city population of Venice is now around 63,000 giving the back streets and side canals of the city a ghostly, deserted feel at night when the tourists have returned to their hotels and cruise ships.



Lawrie, with his sister Linda and Richard G.

We spend our first day in Venice riding the vaporetto system, up and down the Grand Canal, then out through the harbour past the cruise ship terminal, out to famous glassmakers on Murano Island, and around to St. Mark's Square again.It is an easy and cool way to view the city, to avoid the crowds and with a 36-hour pass we can hop on and off as we wish; stop for cappuccinos to listen to live music in St. Mark's Square; a stop for lunch at a waterfront restaurant on the outer rim of the city; a stop for a glass of wine on the canal. 

So civilized.



By the end of the day we are tired.  Happy but tired.  With 425 bridges in this city crossing the myriad of canals we are sure that we have trekked over at least 400 of them.    Time to head back to the hotel to nap, and later we will join our travel buddies for a glass of wine before dinner. 

Ah, Sunday in Venice.  Quite, quite lovely.