At this very moment, Mark and I and all of our stuff are crammed clown-style into a little red car, driving many kilometers per hour down a highway in the Czech Republic. How did we get here? How many kilometers are in a mile? Where is the Czech Republic, anyway?
I can answer one of those questions for you. The rest we leave to Wikipedia.
We left Poland today, after 1 week of traveling with BuskerBus, an international street performing festival. Oh, BuskerBus, how can I describe thee? Let me count the ways.
Weird.
Fun.
Actually, that pretty much sums it up. Two ways. I probably didn't even need to count them. Anyway, we met wild and wonderful people and performed in places that I'd never heard of and drank vodka with a Polish man on his 60th birthday. So much more to say about it, but we'd like to catch you up to date first. For now, the important plot point to note is that we met an Austrian couple named Philip and Petra (also performing at the festival), who invited us to come to their hometown and hike in the mountains and perform in another festival going on there September 2nd. They're the ones who Tetris-ed all our things into their car and that's how we ended up on this Czech highway.
But let's digress...
SOME THINGS THAT HAPPENED AFTER CINQUE TERRE AND BEFORE POLAND:
1. Marya got locked in the bathroom of an Italian kebab restaurant.
On the train ride from Cinque Terre to Ferrara, we had a layover in Florence. You may know it as the artistic center of the Renaissance, packed with paintings and statues and churches and architectural wonders.
Nobody ever mentions the sketchy train station packed with crazies on the outskirts of the city.
The layover was around 3 hours, so we moved our stuff to a little waiting area and settled in. The temperature was around 90 degrees. We had no food or water left. The bathrooms were all closed because of vandalism. The vending machine was broken. A band of 4 ragged looking crazies lurked near them, and every 3 minutes or so one of them kicked kicked kicked the machine until it spit out a coin (or didn't, judging by the noises he made). We sat in the waiting area with the other miserable Italians, all hoping our trains came soon.
Finally, we couldn't stand it any longer, so I went out into the surrounding area to look for provisions. Almost everything was closed (in August, everyone in Italy goes on vacation), but I found one open kebab restaurant. I ordered 2 falafel sandwiches in Italian, and successfully located the bathroom. Feeling pretty good about myself, I went to unlock the door and....couldn't. It was an old slide lock, with a bolt turned by a little screw, and the screw just wouldn't turn. At all. I pulled and pushed on the door, dried my hands, tried again.
At this point, I decided that the restaurant owner probably locked me in and was going to kill me as soon as he could close down the rest of the store. A logical chain of reasoning, I know.
I pounded on the door. I tried the window, but it was barred. Finally, I MacGyverer. I found Mark's little pocket knife and used it to jam a 2 cent Euro coin into the side of the lock, trying to push it back out. Only partial success. So, not panicking, I used the knife to pry the entire lock unit off the door. Total success.
When I finally emerged, after probably 20 – 25 minutes, the guy working there seemed pretty oblivious. I guess he thought I just had to use the bathroom really badly. He hadn't even made the sandwiches yet because I wasn't there to tell him how much hot sauce I wanted. As soon as he finished, I ran out of there with mediocre falafel and 2 bottles of water and Mark and I vowed to never again return to Florence. Art is for sissies.
After the harrowing adventure.
2. Venice
This one isn't quite as exciting, but infinitely more pleasant. We were going to Ferrara for a festival, but arrived a day early so we could spend time exploring Venice (about 2 hours away by train). After an incredibly late start, we stepped out of the Santa Lucia train station and into sunshine reflected off the Grand Canal.
We had read the night before that the thing to do in Venice is get lost in Venice, so we decided to make that our priority. It worked. We crossed tons of bridges, avoided thousands of tourists, watched dozens of boats, and I took two photos of a pigeon drinking out of a water fountain. Venice is beautiful, but also a strange experience. Tourists officially outnumber residents, and it's very obvious. I think the only non-tourists I saw were people working at identical stores selling useless things to tourists. It felt more like a theme park than a living city.
That said, we still managed to eat a delicious picnic lunch (bread, tomatoes, cheese), sitting on the steps of a bridge, listening to two street musicians play.
And at sunset, we took a vaporetto (a water bus) down the Grand Canal back to the train station. As you would expect, it was packed with tourists, but we got seats and spent 45 minutes watching the buildings float by. So to speak. It was great to bob along, watching awkward couples in gondolas and happy couples sitting with dangling feet at piers where streets dead-ended into the canal.
Late start, great day. Except for the part when Mark got really hungry on the train ride and we realized all the stores would be closed in Ferrara and we ate really bad falafel sandwiches with ketchup at ANOTHER kebab shop by the train station. C'est la vie.
Vaporetto station.
Sitting at the back of the boat.
3. Ferrara Buskers Festival
Our first street performing festival! Woo! It was quite the experience. Tons and tons of invited groups, not much organization. But for us, used to setting up on some street plaza, fighting for a crowd, and jumping at the sight of police, it was great. All we had to do to build a crowd was stand in our spot and open our box. Voila. Instant circle.
During the 2 days we performed, we learned how to do our show in Italian, met and shared a spot with the Austrian couple whose car we're STILL in now (6 hours after I started writing this entry), and ate pizza and drank champagne in the performers' area (courtesy of a wild English man). Pretty good time.
On our last day, Mark got into a long battle with one of the Italian women who organized the festival, mostly about how they gave us incorrect information and were awful about responding to our emails. His goal was to get our taxi fares to and from the hotel covered. No avail. In the middle of the 1 ½ long battle, tensions were running too high for me and I left to get into costume. I'm not quite sure what happened next, but somehow, by the end, we both got kisses and 2 free t-shirts and an invitation to return next year.
Ah, Italy...
Police? No problem.
The trick where we spin the kid. This guy was our friend the rest of the festival.
4. CRAZY Polish Bus
Mark already introduced this singular experience in the previous blog entry, but I'd like to add a few special details.
Like how every hour or so the bus stopped, the driver made a totally incomprehensible announcement in Polish, and everyone plodded off the bus to stand despondently in bathroom lines, or desperately smoke cigarettes. Oh, bus people. The same pathetic jumble no matter what country you're in.
Or how at one in the morning, the bus stopped and we looked out the windows to see an eerily lit castle, complete with dragons and wizards and what I think was supposed to be an Amazon. We left the bus in a daze, clutching our packet of crackers (we ate one at every stop as a way to stave off madness). Most of the lights were off, but a chorus of children's voices sang out in German from a darkened bumper car arena. It was at this point, wandering around this empty amusement park/ rest stop/ duty free shop, that we realized reality had abandoned us. We were on the crazy bus to Poland. First stop: Excalibur City, Austria.
Nothing else during the long night really compared to this, but things came close. A British-made kickboxing B movie translated by the droning voice of one Polish man, a 4am stop at the Polish border in which an officer came on board to check everyone's passports and we realized we had no idea if we were even allowed to just cruise into Poland on a bus, and a 7am unexpected bus transfer where Mark wandered from parked bus to parked bus asking hopefully, “Krakow?” And always the comforting dry mouthfuls of our individually packaged Saltine crackers.
We made it eventually to Krakow, and after a 4 hour long train ride, to Brzeg, tiny Polish town full of wild Gypsy children and the start of our BuskerBus adventures.
Our little red car has just entered Vienna. We have one quick stop, then 2 hours until we arrive in our Austrian friends' hometown. Until next time, Americanos!
The last package of crackers, eaten on the train from Krakow to Brzeg.
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