Porn Stars on Venetian Gondolas

Wrapping up my spring trip, I found a few stay observations and lessons gleaned from my time in Spain and Italy. When I’m researching my guidebooks, I pick up lots of fun bits, but they don’t all make it into the books. As I never know what will find a niche in a book until I work over the chapter, I tuck every thought that flutters by into my satchel. Here are a few fun fragments from the cutting-room floor:

Chatting with the owner of a thriving new eatery in Madrid, I commented on the speed at which the restaurant scene can change here. He noted, “Before the Internet, it took five years for a restaurant to get off the ground. Now, you can kick-start it with an Internet promotion, and it’ll be full in a month.”

Discussing the difficult aftermath of the Spanish dictator Franco and marveling at how everyone wasn’t against his fascist policies when it came to personal liberties, I asked my friend, “Who wouldn’t want freedom when Spain was evolving from fascism to democracy in the late 1970s?” The answer was brilliantly simple: “Only those who didn’t want others to have freedom.”

Flying from Madrid to Barcelona on Iberia Air, for the first time in my life, I was really mad at an airline. They had configured the seats so tight that I literally couldn’t fit my knees into my space. The experience reminded me of an evening I once spent alone with a wrench on a tour bus. I was meeting a tour group the next morning, and the bus I hired came with too many seats jammed into it. The seats slide on runners tightened into place by bolts. I spent several hours loosening each seat, taking out two sets, and rearranging the positions of the remaining seats. We did that tour with half our storage area under the bus filled with bus seats — but plenty of legroom for all on board.

Stepping off that too-tight Iberia plane in Barcelona, I realized I hadn’t even considered taking the Madrid-Barcelona train, which is now a nonstop bullet connection of less than three hours. In this case, the train would have saved me time, if not money, and given me plenty of stretch-out room…not to mention a delightful look at the countryside.

A good indication that a bar is a colorful local hangout is that it has the local football (soccer) team poster on the wall — a way for the staff to let customers know who they root for.

In towns with lots of foreign-study programs, you can see American teenagers poaching Internet signals on the sidewalk in front of American chains like Starbucks, KFC, and McDonalds. (These are more likely than European chains to offer free Wi-Fi for customers.) Students, who collect and share passwords and tips, are expert Wi-Fi poachers.

Riding out to the airport in Barcelona, my cabbie was pulled over and fined €50 on the spot for being slow to stop for an ambulance siren. He explained that, with the economic crisis, cops are coming down hard and fast on drivers in Spain.

I enjoy picking up little bits of folk wisdom in my travels. A local guide in Barcelona marveled at the low caliber of leadership in his country, saying, “En el país de los ciegos, el tuerto es el rey.” (In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.) Talking about pain-pleasure ratios between cultures, another friend said, “He who gets up early is helped by God.” His wife countered, “No, getting up early doesn’t speed up the sun.” Later, in Italy, when a restaurateur wanted to give me more and more food, I said I was stuffed. He told me that in Italy, you say, “Sono pieno come un uovo” (I’m full like an egg).

After one of my researchers commented on how people were not that friendly in the Cinque Terre, I asked some locals about it. They talked about their experience in restaurants, saying, “Friendly is not the currency here. Waiters don’t want to know your name. They’re working hard. They’re grumpy to all. I just want them to get my food right.” The humor here is flavored with sarcasm, which can come off mean-spirited.

I enjoyed more time than ever in Venice. And it occurred to me that you could pause anywhere in Venice, observe, and, from that single viewpoint, write an article. Leaning against a church’s leaning bell tower as a flock of birds flew just in front of my face, I jotted down a few notes: A group of Russians wandered by — rich men with their platinum-blonde trophies. They were silent but hooked up to their guide with ear buds and a “whisper system.” The crowd in the restaurant looked intentionally disinterested in the music as a roving Romanian accordionist pumped away while sussing out the potential of getting any tips. A solitary local waved his hands while pacing back and forth across a bridge and talking on his cell phone. Next to me, litter was growing out the top of a garbage can like a bum with a bushy head of hair.

As far as I can tell, there are no porn stars on Venetian gondolas. In fact, there are not even lovers on gondolas. Everyone is too busy reading their iPhones or looking into their cameras. Desperate to get someone kissing on a gondola for our TV show, I walked briskly along a canal to get ahead of what I thought was a potentially romantic couple. I got their attention, and motioned to our cameraman and did a charade of kissing as if to clearly ask them to give each other a little kiss as they approached. The man, pointing to the woman next to him, mouthed with silent yet exaggerated motions, “She’s my daughter.”