5 May: Venice to Vienna

Today we travelled from Venice to Vienna, a journey that took the best part of eight hours. The first part was on an intercity bus, with only one stop until we got off. It was comfortable and we had good views of the countryside from the Italian autostrada (motorway). Some of the scenery through the Alps was really impressive, and even more impressive was that tunnels had been dug through basically every mountain so the motorway could go through. These were in addition to the tunnels for the train line and what was obviously the original road!
Shortly after we crossed into Austria we got off the bus and took a train through to Venice. On this we had a compartment to ourselves, which initially we thought was great, until the heating system got too much to bear. Eventually it was turned off externally, but it did make for a long ride through some very pretty countryside.

It was the very first part of our journey that was the most annoying, however: getting from Venezia St Lucia (main train station on the island) to Venezia Mestre (main train station on the mainland, where we caught the bus). It was nothing wrong with the train, losing anything, being fined for failing to validate our ticket, getting on the wrong train, etc. It was a group of about 6 American women who were in the same carriage as us.

Now I wrote earlier about ‘spot the tourist’. It’s very easy to spot Americans – in fact (note: gross generalisation coming up! I apologise to all my American friends who don’t do this!) you normally hear them before you see them. They’re usually the loudest people in a restaurant or on a train. They often have the biggest bags (although we have come across more than a few Aussies with enormous bags, taking up more than their fair share of the room and thinking they can sit anywhere they like when clearly there’s a seat reservation system for a reason). So these six women got on, and we heard every detail about their trip, the sights they had seen, their opinions about Venice – and most of what they talked about only showed their ignorance of the place. ‘We didn’t see a single tree or bit of grass while we were on the island, I think they don’t have any.’ (Well, Mum and I spent a lovely afternoon in a park with loads of trees and grass.) Approaching Venezia Margareta: ‘Where are we? I don’t think we’re in Venice anymore.’ (Um, look at the sign?)

This isn’t the first encounter with other tourists that has left us cringing. In fact, I’ve taken to calling it ‘the bubble’. Everyone takes their bubble with them wherever they go. Your bubble is your comfort zone – the way you speak: whether you’ll give the local language a go or only ever learn the phrase ‘Do you speak English?’, also your volume in conversing with your travel-mates. The bubble also extends to how much you compare everything with where you come from. For instance, Mum and I are making a concerted effort not to give in to getting McDonalds or Burger King on this trip. The point of travelling and seeing the world isn’t to see how similar it is to back home. It’s going to be different, so enjoy it. Don’t complain about the way that Germans queue or about how the seating system on trains doesn’t make much sense. That’s just the way things are: deal with it.
The bubble is also about how much you stand out as a tourist. Speaking loudly, taking photos of anything and everything, being obnoxious, means that you have a big bubble. Your bubble shouldn’t be so big that other people end up in it. So every time we’ve had Aussies putting their big bags in someone else’s allocated seat and expecting them to move, or Americans talking really loudly on trains about stuff they know nothing about, we’ve just sighed to ourselves and longed to be out of their bubble. And hoped that our bubble isn’t as big as theirs!