North of Venice

At the same time I was leaving Korea, so was one of my colleagues named Colleen. She was moving to Italy to live with her boyfriend who is in the United States Air Force and transferred from Korea to a base north of Venice. I e-mailed her about 10 days before I planned on being in the area and thought that no response meant I wouldn’t be seeing her. Finally, when I was about to leave Freiburg, Germany, I got an e-mail and an invitation to stay with her and her boyfriend Josh.

The plan was set a few days later in Salzburg. Colleen and Josh picked me up in the small town of Pordonone on a rail line that runs from Venice to southern Austria. It was late and all three of us were tired, so Josh drove us straight to their place and we went to bed.

Josh and Colleen live in a townhouse in a small Italian town called Roveredo in Piano. The town is a few streets of stone houses crowded around a church and surrounded by fields and vineyards. There is a mountain ridge viable in the distance, although there were no perfectly clear days since I’ve been here to do it justice. The air force base is about a 10-minute drive toward the mountains. I’ve heard fighter jets landing now and then.

The first day, Colleen and I slept in while Josh went to work for 6:50 am. His job is to calibrate equipment to make sure that it operates precisely. Roughly his words, “We have missiles that we can shoot through a small window a hundred miles away. But, if they are mounted on an aircraft even slightly crooked then we miss. It doesn’t matter if it’s even off by a hair.” This week, Josh is stuck on the torque wrench. It is the most monotonous job, which includes a week of turning a wheel that turns a wheel that operates the wrench. When the bolt is tightened to exactly the right torque, the wheel clicks and Josh checks a digital display to make sure it did what it was supposed to. If he cranked the wrench wheel himself, it would introduce an element of human error and the bolt might be tightened too much or two little. Fortunately, members of his team only have to do this a week at a time in a rotation. It’s someone else’s turn starting tomorrow.

When Colleen and I were both awake, she made an awesome hot breakfast. We walked around her small town and drank wine until Josh came home at 4:30. He had an intramural football game so we all went on base (passport required) and waited in the rain for the other team, which didn’t show. Most of the team had better things to do than practice, so Colleen, Josh and I headed to the commissary, where groceries and other goods are flown in from the US and sold to service members tax free. I stocked up on toothpaste shampoo and a new flashlight, and almost got us into trouble when I handed him cash at the checkout. You aren’t allowed to buy for non-family members, and I clearly was not a wife or child. The cashier was clearly unhappy, but somehow we managed to pay and make it out the door.

On day two, I got up at the same time as Josh, who dropped me off at the train station at six am before he headed to work. I caught the first train to Venice, which I shared with local high school kids traveling between towns to get to school. The train crossed a long bridge and halted at the island city’s main station. It was raining and it was early so I picked up an umbrella and a map and headed out into the streets.










Venice is a fun place for a few reasons, but my favorite has to be that there are no cars. The odd boat here and there makes noise, but keeps it a pretty peaceful place. Few tourists were out this early on a Friday morning, so it was me and locals going to work. Waitresses were cleaning tables, porters were carting boxes around and the vendors in a produce marked already had their stands ready for the day.

I ran into a swarm of tourists on one of the three bridges that cross the Grand Canal, and then weaved y way into the smaller streets where I found an open café in a small square. For an early lunch I had a sandwich on fuccelli bread and an espresso. I wandered aimlessly for a while and stumbled on St. Marco’s Square. The church was beautiful from the outside, and I felt like I was finally in Venice. Children chased pigeons and some caught them. People were snapping photos everywhere. I got an old Scottish couple to take my photo in exchange for taking theirs. The poor old man was sure I was going to steal his camera. “Just a cheapie,” he remarked as he handed it to me. He glanced back as he and his wife took their position for the shot. I was still standing there.

After hitting tourist central, which was quite crowded, I wandered aimlessly for about two hours. I thought I would concentrate on the less busy northern part of the city and head west and then south back to the station. Navigating through the streets turned out to be like being a mouse in a maze. I ran into dead ends everywhere and fell upon squares with churches every few minutes. I went into one with a beautiful interior (no photography) and few visitors. It is so interesting to see all the iconography in old Catholic churches. I was impressed by all the frescos and tile work that covered the floors walls and ceilings.

Nearing the station, I passed through the worlds first Jewish Ghetto. Sometime after 1500, the city government ordered all the Jews to live on one island in the city, which had a curfew and was guarded at night. Due to this limitation, the buildings are built higher there.

In the evening, Colleen Josh and I headed to a BBQ for a soldier getting transferred. There were hamburger, steak, beer and horseshoes. I felt like I was in the US, save for the tile roofs and mountains in the distance.

The next day, Saturday, Colleen and I left Josh to sleep in and relax and headed to Slovenia. About an hour and a half drive away, just across the border is a horse stud farm in an area called Lipica. I found the place in my guidebook, and immediately knew Colleen would love it. The famous Lipizzaner horses are bred here, which are trained to perform movements that verge on acrobatic. A trained Lipizzaner can stand up and balance on his hind legs and kick backward on command. He can also perform long jumps with the front and legs tucked in so that the horse looks like a UFO floating in the air.




The trainers were enjoying the Saturday with their families, so we didn’t get to see this stuff, but we did get to go on tour of the stud farm. Our guide was excellent. I asked a million questions about their breeding methods and the breed history and he responded with a million interesting facts.

It all started when the Hapsburgs (Austrians) had stretched their empire to the point that they became the kings of Spain. The Moorish horses were fast and energetic and held a lot of characteristics important in a new kind of combat. Gone were the days of heavily armoured horses and knights. The introduction of gunpowder required cavalry that could move with speed and agility.

The Lipica breeding farm started almost 500 years ago with the best horses from Hapsburg armies. They introduced stock from southern Italy, which would have pulled chariots once upon a time. When they felt that they had acquired the right characteristics, the farm isolated their line from all the others and began developing the Lipizzaners. Today, Lipzzaners are beautiful creatures that are born as ash coloured foals and fade into mature white adults. Properly trained horses can perform most maneuvers well into their twenties and commonly live to 30 or 35, well beyond other breeds.

The rain was still coming down hard as Colleen and I drove to our next stop. Fortunately the rain wouldn’t matter where we were going.

Somewhere in the mountains of Slovenia are the headwaters of the river. The river flows southward until it disappears underground and doesn’t come out for 7 km in Trieste, Italy where it spills into the Adriatic Sea. For about 3 km of the seven, the sea had carved a cave through the solid rock. Known as the Skocjan Caves.





Our group descended into the cave at around one in the afternoon. The first kilometre was passed through the section known as the silent cave. There were stalactites and stalagmites as in other caves, and we were both impressed. Then we rounded a corner and, as Colleen remarked, you could hear her jaw drop. We entered a room that was 30 metres high and 80 meters long. There was one stalagmite that stood over 10 metres and must have taken a long time to grow. Artificial lights lit the ceiling so that it felt like being in a the largest ballroom in Europe. After the silent cave, we entered the murmuring cave.

The murmuring cave is where the river I mentioned earlier still passes through. The river is swift and rocky and lies at the bottom of a 100-metre gorge, the largest one in Europe. The pedestrian walk way hugs the edge of the gorge at about 80 metres up and crosses a bridge at one point. The rock path was slippery and I felt like I was going to fall to my death if I wasn’t careful (no real danger, all psychological). I was comforted to know that Colleen was feeling the same way. We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside the cave, but could snap a few at the entrance.

By the time we were back at the parking lot, we still had half the afternoon left. We decided to find some beaches and headed out in Josh’s Jeep Cherokee, which I came to realize was the largest non-commercial vehicle we had seen all day. The military had shipped it to Italy when he was posted there and he gets gas at American prices.

We found no beaches in the small bit of Slovenian coast, so we decided to cross another border and head down the coast of Croatia a bit. The border control had made us both nervous but ended up being a joke. Some border guards wouldn’t even look at out passports. We saw billboards for beaches, but there was no free parking near these and I didn’t feel like parallel parking such a big vehicle. Instead we found a nice spot to sit by the water and relax for half an hour before heading back.




When we arrived back in Roveredo we headed over to Josh and Colleen’s friends house where Pat had made the best hot wings I’ve even had and his girlfriend Brook made deviled eggs and pineapple upside down cake. Today has been a lazy day so far where Josh Colleen and I have sat around. I did my laundry, organized my stuff and wrote this blog entry, and later on we’ll all head to Venice by sunset I hope.

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I was starting to upload this blog entry. Colleen and I were sitting outside the community centre on base with her laptop in range of the wireless network. Josh had run off to the video store to return some late rentals when soldiers approached us from the nearby entrance gate nearby. We were technically unescorted, so we got kicked off. Josh was lucky, he lost his privilege to take people on the base for the day and they didn’t report him.

We didn’t get to go into Venice because it was getting late, so we made a plan for me to stay an extra day so that I could get on the internet (and not get kicked out again).

Instead, we dropped by a local restaurant that serves both Italians and Americans. There was a large selection of regular thin crust pizzas, from which I chose one with a few cheeses, cured ham, fresh mushrooms, and freshly pressed tomatoes. There was also a selection of thick crust pizzas for the picky foreigners with such names as Big Boobies and Touch Me. Colleen and I had wine with our meal, while Josh had a whole litre of Coke to himself.




Before heading home, we stopped by a river that flows from an underground cave. We have plans to go to Venice tonight.