Birthday blog

Hi all, a little update for those of you who want to know what I did to celebrate my birthday on Saturday. The "celebration" really occurred from Friday through to Sunday, although Sunday evening was the hangover if one could apply a Bacchanalian analysis to the events that preceded.

Since getting back from Germany about mid-June the hot temperatures and dense humidity of Venice has been stifling. Wanting to get out of it for a bit, I'd started to think about spending the weekend out of Venice, up in the mountains and somewhere I hadn't been before. As it happened, the girls from my climbing course were planning a similar thing: Claudia proposed a weekend up in Alto Adige, her regione of origin, to go climbing and walking about this quite autonomous and unique part of Italy. Autonomous in the sense that it's autonomously governed and unique in the sense that the regione (state) has german as it's first language, was a part of austria as recently as the start of last century and happens to be smack-bang in the middle of the Italian Alps.


The weekend started early on Thursday night, when Francesca, Marta and I caught a train to Verona in order to take a regional train up through Trentino to Bolzano, where we met Claudia. Her home town is Lajen, set at 1100m a.s.l. and overlooking Ponte Gardena and a couple of nearby valleys 600m below. On Friday we travelled up Val de Funes to the Odles mountain chain where we went climbing for the day, on an outcrop of sitting around 2000m, at the feet of the mountains! We'd walked a few kilometers from the car to the mountains, past a meadow with a refuge and cows and their bells ringing persistently - reminding me of Raphael's birthday party up in the Swiss Alps. The weather was spectacular - warm and dry and a little cloudy, which ensured that we weren't too sunburned by the time we got back at the end of the day. Dinner was Knodler (an accent should be in there somewhere), a fist-sized ball of bread, cheese, garlic, greens and herbs which was cooked in a goulash-type broth. Delicious!

On Saturday we were up early again to go climbing at a wall near Bressanone, the next city up the valley after Bolzano. The climbing was different because the rocks were different. Compared to the dolomite of Friday, Bressanone was a rock wall (falesia) of weathered quartz, with fewer holes and more cracked, craggy and diagonal fissures which required a completely different mindset. From an analytical point of view it was interesting to see how climbing a different kind of rockface required a different approach toward what was acceptable as a handhold or a foothold. I had a nice sense of closure as the first climb we did was a chimney-pipe (4b) which was similar to the first climb I'd ever done in Tasmania, and I completed a really challenging 5c lead climb that involved a few voli, but I was glad to have stuck at it. In the afternoon, Ali came up from Venice (she'd been teaching on Friday) and we spent the arvo wandering around Bressanone, a fairytale-like town which instantly reminded me of the old-town of Munich, with it's southern German/Alpine style of buildings and small laneways. That afternoon we caught the bus back to Lajen and had a barbeque, celebrating my birthday with delicious strudel. We then did some drinking and dancing in town centre, where the local fire brigade where putting on a fundraising party. The only thing missing was the themesong of our 2008/2009 european experience: Opus' "Live is life".

Sunday we slept in and eventually went for a hike/walk/passegiata around the hills near Lajen, wandering past dairy farms and sunbathers until we got up to another refuge with a fantastic vista. It was nice to be able to practice some of the German words I'd learned in Bremerhaven and Munich: Hallo, choos, schlussel, kase and abfahrt, among others. By the early afternoon the weather was turning grey and nasty so we went back to Claudia's and had a nap until our train which was due to arrive at 16:15. We spent 50 minutes at the Ponte Gardena train station, listening to the pouring rain and watching a kid have fun with the rain while her stressed mum tried to keep it together. It was at that point that the hangover of the weekend party came to its head-splitting synthesis: the trains were striking.

It must be understood that in Italy and Europe, strikes are a part of daily life. In South America, strikes and protests seem to be occasions of solidarity and socialist advancement whereas they seem to have an overall dulling effect, at least for me. People on the trains and in the bus stations get frustrated over something that they have no control over - they can't get out and push the train, they can't step out and take over the switches, so instead they get frustrated and complain loudly about something that they can't control. My attitude is to prepare for a train trip that could be double the expected duration: a reasonable book and the ipod is enough to keep me occupied for any travel on European spatial scales. The 16:15 arrived at Ponte Gardena at 17:00 and suffice to say, we arrived in Venice 3 hours late about 11:00. The whole experience did provide a few laughs, such as the people who jumped off our train as it took an improvised 45 minute rest at Descenzano, deciding to run over to the Eurostar sitting on the other side of the platform. The murmurs of class angst at the well-lit Eurostars on the other side of the station which seemed to zoom on past while our cheapo regional train remained firmly set in the station waiting list. The funniest part was the three young chainsmokers trying to suck as much out of their cigs as possible between when the doors open at the station and when they close again - the boys were jumping over one another trying to get back onto the train before the doors slammed shut, dropping their cigs on each other in the mad rush of mixed loyalties between being on the train, deep lung smoking and not getting cigarette burns on their clothes...the Marx brothers couldn't have done better.

Sorry for the cynicism - it's 23.42 and I'm going to bed now.

Ciao, Paul.