Wednesday, July 07, 2004

In My Next 30 years Part 4: Azores, Italy, Roses and Italian chicks.

My 2nd assignment in the military was to the Azores from April 1993 to June 1994. The Azores is a set of islands in the Atlantic Ocean owned by the Portuguese. I was on Terceira. This was a great assignment. The Azores was beautiful but Terceira is a small island to spend 15 months on. It was about 50 minutes drive from one side to the other. What made this assignment great was the people. I was part of a close-knit group of friends. I've lost touch with all of them but would love to track them down again.

I’d been on the island for about 13 months at this point and was getting ready to PCS (Permanent Change of Station) back to the US. But I wanted to take advantage of my location while I was there. On Friday nights a military charter flew in from Philadelphia and had about a 3 hour layover and then continued on to Aviano, Italy, arriving there early Saturday morning. Then that Saturday night it would come back, make a quick stop in the Azores and continue on to Philly again. It was called the Spaghetti Run.

My best friend Chris and I decided we wanted to make that one day trip to Italy and go see Venice. So we each took 1 day of leave (that Saturday) and planned to leave that Friday night. The only bad thing is that our flying status was called Space-A. This meant that if there was room on the flight, we could fly along for free. It’s a military privilege overseas. But if the flight filled with people who HAD to be on the flight, we’d get bumped off. I had to work that Sunday so we had to make sure we’d get back in time for that. You also had to sign up at the earlier possible time that day. So if we wanted to fly out on Friday, we’d have to sign up at 0001 on Friday (that’s 1 minute past midnight for you civilians).

We both worked on Friday but we stayed up late Thursday night to sign up at just past midnight. Chris worked the early morning shift and I worked a midday shift on Friday. Once I got off work, we went to the base terminal and waited. It was about 10 PM (I’m recalling as best I can) and we found out that we were able to make the flight. So we got on the flight and waited for takeoff. At this point, we had been up for about 12 hours. Not a big deal.

We were both pretty wired about the trip so there was no sleeping on the flight. I think we landed about 0600-070 Italy time. So now we are at Aviano Air Base in Northern Italy. But we really don’t have any idea of how to get to Venice from where we are. I think our plan was to ask some people on base (normally I’m a MUCH better planner than this). Well found some people on a walk and they told us about a travel agency right off base that could help us.

We got to the travel agency and they were very helpful. I think it was only going to cost us about $40 to get from Aviano to Venice and back. It’s about a 50 mile trip. First we had to take a bus to a train station and the train would take us in to Venice. We walked about a mile to the bus stop and still had about 45 minutes before it would arrive. Right across the street was a big church. One thing to keep in mind is how old everything is in Europe. Here in the US, we have a bunch of over-obsessed busybodies who go nuts if an 80 year old building is going to be torn down. That’s nothing. In Europe, many buildings are over 400-500 years old.

So Chris and I went across the street. We walked in and there was a 2nd floor right above us that was overhanging the entrance, like many traditional Methodist churches have. There were frescoes (thank you Mrs. Lewellen) on each side of the church, about 5 on each side. It was dark and an organ was playing. There was no one around as far as we could see so we walked around the sanctuary and looked at everything. As we got into the middle of the sanctuary, I turned around and looked back up on the 2nd floor that was overhanging the entrance and saw the huge organ up on the 2nd floor. And there was a nun sitting there playing it.

We wandered back outside and caught our bus. It was about a 15 minutes bus ride to the train station. It was an interesting train station. It had a lot of brush outside growing up around it like it wasn’t care d for much but the building looked new and was that peach color that a lot of Italian buildings seem to be painted. The best part of the train station was a beautiful Italian girl, probably in her late teens or early 20’s. She was standing about 20 feet away from us and Chris and I were quietly commenting on how beautiful she was. I mentioned that it would be cool to walk over to the rose bush next to her, pull off a rose and give it to her. He said “OK, I dare you to do it.” I thought about it and decided to do it. Why not? How many times in life would I have a chance to give a beautiful Italian woman a rose for no reason? So I walked over to the rose bush, pulled off a rose (and clumsily cut my finger open at the same time), walked over and gave it to her. She got this big smile on her face. I felt good. She smiled at me. Of course, it was probably more likely that the smile was the “get away from me you stupid arrogant American. What makes you think a rose can win my heart you war-mongering piece of crap” smile. But, like I said, she politely smiled and that was that. She either didn’t speak any English or was content acting like she didn’t. At this point we'd been up for about 20 hours straight.

More later on the train ride and Venice…

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