15 go mad in Venice

Was tagged in Osteria ......... 

It used to be a case of wake up, see how you feel, drag yourself out of bed, mainline coffee and slowly piece events together.  Today thanks to facebook by the time your bleary eyes open the previous nights antics have probably been shared with a good couple of hundred people.  It’s with a very real sense of trepidation that you log on to the net, navigate to facebook and get ready to remove tags from photos your friends have kindly uploaded.  Last Sunday I woke to find my facebook page looking something like this:

Thanks to modern technology creating phones smarter than me every moment of the previous night seemed to have been documented and the list of bars I’d been tagged in was embarrassingly long.  Last week it was J’s birthday and in honour of the event a gang of us went to Venice.  The idea was a tour of bacari (traditional Venetian drinking establishments) and seeing that I am famed for knowing Venice I was entrusted with navigating the 15-20 of us to the best spots in town.  As ever getting more than four people together and on the same train is a feat of organisation and we were no different resulting in two of us arriving in Venice a full hour before the main party (we got the intended train I may hasten to add.)  When we did all meet up it quickly became apparent that everyone in our party was intent on having the same good time although I was dismayed to find at our first stop the British half of the table ordering prosecco and Italian side coffee – I mean geez guys. 

Taking in the beauty between bars two and three

Now to give you a bar by bar account of the night would be a little boring but as ever I was in my element taking people around this incredible city and Venice is the perfect place for a bar crawl – small enough to not need public transport, yet big enough to sober up between bars, in fact the only real drawback is the risk of falling into a canal.   This was the first time that I had shown locals around their own back yard and my Italian friends were most impressed by this Brit’s knowledge of Venetian topography and more importantly the best places to get a drink.  Venice is so full of history that inevitably almost every building has a story attached to it and one of the fun things about bar hoping in Venice is that you get to say things like “the next bar’s near Marco Polo’s house.”  I always get a kick out of saying things like that.    

    

The achievement of the night was getting our entire party on the last train back to Treviso – no small feat and although we all got on the same train we were not exactly together but that’s just a detail.  Arriving back to Treviso at 12.30 the sensible option would have been to wish J a happy birthday say our goodbyes and head home but we had been drinking for the best part of 7 hours and we all know ability to reason is directly linked to blood alcohol content so we carried on. 

Between bars five and six, err I think

Now let’s face it Treviso is not what you would call a twenty four hour city and most late night places close by two and by the appointed hour when most people called it a night there were three of us left standing and I found myself in Treviso’s very own slice of crazy.  They say that when you make it to the No1 bar you have been in Treviso too long.  It’s the only place to go if you want a drink at 7am.  Stepping into No1 bar is akin to walking into a David Lynch movie it is at once suburbanly normal, freakily nightmarish and surreally banal.  The decor is white- white walls, white floor, large white sofas.  My companions informed me that the place had recently been refurbished – prior the floors were covered in a red carpet that made the place feel like the red room.  The walls are decorated with cheap pictures on a native American theme in the corner entertainment is provided by an aging crooner singing hits from the 80s (that night it was Phil Collins and Peter Cetera)  with a tinny old casio keyboard that looks to be of the same era as it’s player.  As for the clientele, well that was the depressing part.  Sad middle aged men and over dolled up women for whose company payment is required.  There’s been a few times when I have felt myself straying into David Lynch’s world and I always try to attach the place to one of his works (thankfully I’ve never encountered easerhead and hope I never do.) No1 bar I would put somewhere between Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks.  

The next morning I work after a couple of hours sleep feeling a lot better than I deserved to (thanks in part to the drink ease and bottle of water I had left out for myself.)  Sunday would be about recovery.  Everyone seems to have their own recovery ritual and for me it’s coffee, water and a big bowl of nasi goreng.  There’s something about the greasy goodness of the fried rice, the chilli kick of the sambal oelek and the protein in the egg that makes the dish perfect after a big night.  My Italian friends can’t understand how I can eat such a meal at breakfast but it’s served the Indonesians well for years. 

Logging on the net to begin the remove tag ritual I was amazed to find that I’d slept through a rather significant earthquake.  The first of the (at rough count) 100 pictures of the evening were emerging as were stories of the morning after.  I spent the day much like everyone else snoozing, drinking lots and lots of water and declaring getting dressed a significant achievement.  That evening as many of us reconvened most people were accounted for and only one was missing in action that is, unable to get out of bed and all of us were operating on a low blue flame.  While I don’t think I can do a night like that again for a very, very long time it is worth noting that we only got through three of Venice’s sestieri so the crawl is only half done...