René Seindal

In the five years I’ve lived in Venice, I haven’t had any one home for long. It’s been a lot of moving around, and basically camping out in the various places, hauling along a bare minimum of stuff to reduce the burden of the next move. Every time I thought I had found some kind of stability, something happened to mess up my plans.

I have lived for periods in a tent on a camp site, with a friend on the mainland, in a shared room in an apartment in Venice, in a small apartment on the Lido where the rain came in through the outer walls, and in a shared apartment where my flatmate suddenly left for whatever reasons, and left me with a double rent for the remainder of the contract duration.

A home is a basic thing in life, and living for prolonged periods without the stability and certainty of knowing where you’ll sleep the next night, or next week, or next month,  can be very burdensome.

I have now, however, found a place I believe will be a home for the next years to come. At the very least I’ve signed a contract for a place I like, in a fantastic location, for a rent I can pay.

The location is in the centre of Venice, on the Campo S.S. Giovanni e Paolo (shown in panorama above), which is one of the major squares in Venice, and one of the most beautiful too, in my opinion.

The apartment is small, but on the third and top floor, accessed from a courtyard on the main campo, with windows on an internal courtyard. That means light, air and little noise, all properties that are very hard to find in Venice, at least at an affordable price.

The previous place I lived was on the first floor, windows on a calle about 1 metre wide, where drunk tourists often roamed up and down, howling as they fought to find their way around the labyrinth of the calle, rughe and salizade of central Venice.

None of that here, though. The only noises in my new home are the nearby church bells a few hours a day, and my landlady across the courtyard singing along with the radio or trying to get her kids to do their homework.

The building itself is old, even by Venetian standards. It originates in the 14th century, and was originally the embassy and hostel for tradesmen from Brescia, hence the name Bressana of both the front courtyard and the adjacent calle.

(this painting is from the mid 18th century – little has changed)

Most important, I have a contract for at least two years, and extendible to four years.

Its good to have a home.

I imagined that spending half my life kayaking would be good for my health, and then this news appears:

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/confirmed-he-who-sits-the-most-dies-the-soonest/256101/

maybe its time to look more into stand up paddling, or rather, given my current residence, Venetian rowing.

What does a cat do with a mouse?

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Between this and that it was late January before we got the kayaks out on the canals of Venice. It was before the cold set in, so there was no snow or ice on the canals. We had much of the city to ourselves, as most other boat people in Venice are having a slow period in January.

Every once in a while you do something silly, only discover afterwards that your “good fun” could have had other consequences.

In November last year there was an alert for a high tide in Venice. Nothing extreme, a forecast of 115cm which will flood mayby 20% of the city with at most 20cm of water, much less in most places. It should, however, give some 20-30cm of water on parts of St. Mark’s Square, at around 7.50am.

So, we headed out to the lagoon island where we have our kayaks real early, got on the water and paddled down to the canals behind St. Mark’s to see if there was a passage into the square. There was a way in, with only 5-10cm of water, but doable, so we headed into St. Mark’s Square, just to take a few photos and then head out again.

Not so …

Just a few seconds after we were out in the clear, we had a handful of photographers running through the water to get photos of us, and for a time we were surrounded by 10-15 photographers all keen on getting just the right shot of these two kayakers on the square. After a short while a TV cameraman from national Italian television came over and started filming, and even interviewing my companion.

When one of the photographers jokingly asked us to hang around until the local police showed up, we decided that we’d better stop while we were still having fun. Apparently the fine for taking a boat – any kind of boat, even a completely innocuous kayak with a wooden paddle – into the square was worth a €1000 fine each.

We headed out to the normal Venetian canals again, watching for policemen or women over our shoulders, but we got safely out and enjoyed a nice paddle around the city, with very little traffic due to the high tide.

Then, when we came back home, Facebook and our email was full of messages of the type: “what have you two been up to now?”. Our little stunt had earned us a cameo appearance on a couple of afternoon national news broadcasts, repeated in the evening, even with an interview with my companion on the regional news, where they did not miss the occasion to underline that “all boating is severely forbidden in the square”.

So now we’ve even been reprimanded in TV.

The day after the photos were all over the regional printed news, and in some of the national newspapers as well, not to speak of the ones from Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Brazil and probably a whole bunch of other places we don’t know about.

We just wanted a few photos for ourselves, so we could say “been there, done that”

I’m not quite sure what to think about this, but I’m fairly confident a lot of Venetian rowers wouldn’t like the way these gondolas are punted rather than rowed.

http://www.gondolagreg.com/2011/12/more-gondolas-in-egypt.html

Unless you’re in the police

From above  (or below)

If it is possible to truly love a kayak I love my Skim Dex. It is probably the seat I sit in the most from April to October.