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My adventure has
begun! As I write this (
published the following morning from the hostel wifi
) I’m
on a train to Vienna, having travelled by coach from Venice into
Austria this morning. Austrian trains are great, but more on that
another time I think. I offer a slight apology for the length of this
post, but I know that if nobody else appreciates it my parents will,
and it’s been a great way to use up the time on this train.
Flying over the alps from the plane – they’re huge!
For the next
year I’m studying in Bonn (in Germany, near Cologne) as a part of my
degree – Law with German Law – on a year abroad/erasmus scheme, where
I’ll be studying German law in German like a first-year German
student (sounds fun right?). Term starts sometime near the start of
October and I’ll move into my accommodation (hopefully) on the first. Before I get there, I’m having a little adventure and doing a bit
of interrailing: Venice, Vienna, Konstanz, Paris, then ending up in
Bonn. It’s my first proper adventure, being as I’m travelling on my
own and putting myself out there a bit, which is pretty exciting.
Venice was the most important destination and what I expect to be the best part of the trip (and so this blog post is quite long!) – I went to a weekend parkour event which I found out about from facebook. On Saturday, there was a 10km chase game in the
city of Venice (called Journey to the End of the Night, see www.ichaseyou.com), and on Sunday there was all-day parkour training. I flew
out sometime early on Saturday morning having only got three hours
sleep (partly because I had to leave the house before five for the
flight, but mostly because I hadn’t completely sorted my stuff) and
landed at Venice airport. Not in any particular rush as the chase
didn’t start until the evening, I brushed my teeth at the airport and
headed towards the buses.
Instead of
actually boarding a bus though, I got distracted by a protest by a
local environmental group. They were protesting against the cruise
ships which visited Venice, complaining that they damaged the
environment and that they would prefer visitors to visit Venice
properly. They had blocked off the cruise ship booking room (more
like a marquee, it was outside) with some benches
The protest and crashed cruise ship
which they had
tipped to make it look like a capsized cruise ship (like the one
which collapsed in Venice last year), as well as taping over the
entrance and spray-painting the front of it. There were about forty
demonstrators with flags (“No Big Ships”) as well as a larger
banner; the ones who were actually doing the vandalism were dressed
in white bio-suits. One of the leaders had a megaphone too, and was
speaking to the crowd about the ships (it was mostly in Italian, but
a couple of things he said were “Venice is a real city with real
people living in it” and “we do not apologise for any
inconvenience caused”). There were about twelve policemen, some
with riot masks and truncheons drawn, watching from the side, but even when the protesters marched round the inside of the terminal they didn’t do anything apart from walk with them. An hour
later, the protesters left to continue their protest at the actual cruise ships in Venice, so I got on a bus.
Venice is really
nice, as would be expected, but I found myself a bit too tired to
appreciate it, especially with the heat (comparable to a good English
summer’s day) and a heavy bag. I walked around Venice for a couple of
hours, fairly lost for the first 45 minutes until I remembered how
to use a map, and ended up in the main square (which is nice, there’s a whole range of different stuff, and the whole square is a bit like a museum and you aren’t allowed to sit down in it) and bought a pizza. Then tiredness got the better of me and I
sat down in one of the other squares and napped for an hour, resting
on my bag, before wandering back towards the station to the
meeting-point (stopping a few more times on the way).
I met up outside the station (including Finn, a German from Cologne who
I’ll be training with over the next year) and we headed to the start
area, though it didn’t start for an hour so we chatted and I did a
bit of stretching and about five minutes of parkour. I wanted to
write more about the event as it isn’t every day that you do a 10km
zombie run across Venice, so that’s in a separate post! It was good
fun and tiring, and though I had woken up due to excitement for the
event, afterwards I was pretty knackered.
The next morning
we woke up at the weird fortress place (explained a bit more in the
other post) and got up, though typically we were ready a short while
before the room of Italians (to be fair, there were more of them
sharing a bathroom, but it’s always funny when racial stereotypes are
actually true). After splitting up for various destinations (as many
of them had only come for the Journey and not the parkour training on
the Sunday) we headed towards the parkour place. The plan was to go
to a supermarket to buy breakfast, but being an Italian Sunday this
was shut, so we had to make do with a couple of croissants and sandwiches
from a bar.
(apologies to
non-parkour people reading this next bit, maybe a bit too much
detail)
The parkour had
been planned to be a two-hour workshop led by the Italians, but we
arrived at the meeting point half an hour late (the organiser was
with us, so we weren’t missing out), so instead it turned into a
group warm up and then just free training. The parkour spot was a
large park which had a variety of things in it: we warmed up on a
tennis court; nearby were two different raised wall-platform-garden
things; there was a disabled walkway with walls and rails and steps
with a nearby roof; there was a greenhouse-like structure (no glass)
with walls and steps around it; and there were a line of railings
with some big steps one end of it. After the warm-up the Italians
played some ninja, so I went with one of the Germans to jump around
one of the platform-garden things. There was training from eleven
until eight, with Italians arriving and leaving throughout the day.
It was a relaxed jam-style, not very intense (to last that long it
couldn’t be, so lots of watching other people or chatting or resting), with people trying out different things. The Italians
were pretty skilful, lots of fluidity, though I did feel that some of
them had progressed a bit too quickly instead of taking their time to
learn the basics: there would be a skilful route completed, but it
would finish with a heavy landing, and I saw lots of rail precisions
landed on arches (though nobody fell or came close to falling,
personally if I were coaching them I would have encouraged better
technique before jumping to rails, though maybe I’m a bit more of a
scaredy-cat). I took a break at 2pm to buy some lunch (thankfully a
cafe at the park was open, and we took our time), then trained some
more, then lay down for an hour or so. At about 5pm, everybody moved
onto the grass, so I got up and went with them, and while on the
grass people started practising a few tricks. I was able to help out
some people learning the butterfly-kick, as despite my pretty limited
tricking skills it didn’t seem the Italians in general had done much
at all (which is good as it meant they had trained more ‘parkour’
parkour!). The final two hours was spent with a smaller number of us
doing a variety of movements on a 1.2m wall-platform, and then going
along a bit to a set of steps with walls either side. This was
probably my favourite bit, because with a mixture of me, a German and
a couple of Italians we had variety in our experience and vision in
trying out quite a few different things from what would usually look
like a really rubbish spot.
Us in the park towards the end of the day
Finn, Davide and I then went
back to Davide’s house (Davide was the organiser of the event and was
also my host, along with Finn). He was 24 so still lived with his
parents, but they were great hosts: they immediately told us to treat
the house like it was hours, dump our bags and have a shower, then
cooked us a nice Italian meal. Italian food always has courses, so we
had a bowl of pasta (prima course, we didn’t have antipasti) before
the second-main of chicken, orzo and salad. In being great hosts and
doing all they could to look after us, the parents even apologised if
they used the bathroom when we wanted to and had a discussion about
whether it was alright to give me and Finn different meals (as Finn
was vegetarian and I can’t eat dairy), before Davide told them it
didn’t matter and to stop being silly. The parents didn’t speak
English, so Davide had to translate for the dinnertime conversation.
They were good at insisting we ate plenty of food, telling me to not
be shy and ask if I wanted anything else – his mum had even done
some parkour and said that she knew how hungry traceurs get after
training! Davide’s friendliness and hospitality was incredible, as he
offered to sleep on the floor to give me a bed (and he meant it,
though I politely declined and slept on a roll-matt), and when saying
goodbye he even thanked me for coming! They told me that anytime I
visited Venice I was welcome to stay at their house, even though
they’d only met me that evening.
In the morning I
got up at 7, had breakfast, and then got dropped off at the nearby
station to head back into Venice for my journey. As would be expected, I was pretty sore from all the jumping and running and had a slight thunderbird-walk. I was getting a bus
from Venice to Villach, just into Austria, to then get the train to
Vienna. Unfortunately, though I got to Venice twenty minutes before
the bus left, I didn’t find out that there was a separate coach
station for international buses until too late, and missed it by ten
minutes. The ticket office told me that the next bus, two hours
later, was full, and that I would have to instead travel by train via
a slower route and not make it to Vienna for twelve hours! Luckily, I
went to the bus anyway, and though the driver initially said it was
full, I waited until everybody had boarded and checked and he said
that there was a spare seat. So I was only two hours late, which was
my fault for not being prepared and much better than the longer delay
I could have had!
The coach drove
through some nice Italian countryside and through the edge of the
alps, and I sat next to a German woman who chatted with me, giving me
more of a taste of using German – though I had been
chatting in German with the German traceurs over the weekend, they
would swap into English too, and I had to explain to this German
woman what parkour was and how the college system in Oxford worked!
Thankfully she spoke English too, but she knew I wanted to practise
German so only used it when we had a complete misverstaendniss. It
was a bit intense and I felt a bit apprehensive about the next year
afterwards, but I know that it’ll be alright once I get into it and
pick up some more German, and I’m definitely better already than I
was at the start of the weekend having not used German at all since
June!
I wrote this
post on the train to Vienna, where I’m spending the next three
nights. I’ll be staying in a backpacker hostel and haven’t got any plans,
though I’ve made a bit of contact with a couple of local traceurs so
I’m hoping to be a lonely tourist and meet up with them a bit, before
travelling to Konstanz on Thursday for one night and then on to Paris.
It’s great that
my adventure’s worked out well so far and that my high expectations
for the first weekend were met, and I loved the friendliness of the
Italian traceurs and their hospitality.