111 (Day 24)

I walked to work early today, to get some things done before the city gets busy and noisy. I’ve started to enjoy late nights and early mornings much more, when I can have the city to myself.

I finally found out how the house numbers of Venice work. Until now I’ve wondered how they seem to follow no particular order and it seemed like houses were numbered from 1 upwards over the whole city, not down each street. The apartment I’m staying in, for example, is number 5670 but there are maybe ten houses at the most in the street. There are also house numbers where no doorway exists anymore.

Apparently the numbers run upwards from one to whatever across each of the six sestieri. So in San Marco the Doges Palace is number 1, and then it goes on from there. I was thinking I might go to the other five sestiere and try to find property number 1, or number 111 (the same number as my house at home). I like the idea that in Cardiff there will loads of houses numbered 111, but in Venice there are only six. It means you have a much smaller chance of your post getting lost I suppose. About a year ago, obviously when we had nothing else better to do, me and my other half were thinking of attempting to go around Cardiff and photograph all the other houses numbered 111, so this poses an opportunity to (sort of) fulfil that ambition, provided I don’t get lost. Enough of my rambling, if I do it I’ll post the pictures up.

Another thing I like about the house numbers here is that they are all painted on in the same style, I’m guessing by the council. There’s something very lovely about the style, shape and the colour of them, although the Venice branch of B&Q can’t be doing a very good trade in little metal numbers.

Other than this minor obsession, the day went by rather uneventfully and in the evening I headed to the Wee Red Bar to say goodbye to some more friends.

Walking home I saw a poo floating past in the canal. It just looks like a blur as my camera decided that I wasn’t allowed to use flash, but I can confirm it was definitely a human specimen (apologies for the apalling photoshop skills). I probably shouldn’t dwell on it too much but it did conjure up images from last night’s ghost tour and what Venice would have been like in the not so distant past, when all household waste went straight into the canals.

I also came across a one-way sign. I don’t know why this was so unexpected, it makes perfect sense to make narrow canals operate in one direction only, but for some reason it seemed quite novel. There are also two sets of traffic lights somewhere to be found, again a mission for another day.

As I was thinking that I didn’t really have enough to say about my day and that this would trump my other blogs for the dullest yet I did a double take, in that ‘am-I-drunker-than-I-think’ kind of way. I seized the opportunity to make a film blog, something I’ve wanted to try for a while. It was actually quite a freaky sight, late at night catching a mannequin moving out of the corner of my eye. They’re quite eery, and I’m not sure I like the thought that while everyone is tucked up in their beds these four characters are rotating round and round. What made it spookier was that it was deadly quiet except for an owl tweeting (I didn’t know owls liked Venice, not many trees?) and some distant footsteps getting closer and closer. Unfortunately my camera doesn’t have a microphone so you will just have to imagine that part. Anyway, take a look at my first foray into film-making. I won’t give up my day job.