the day

that killed my feet.

Now I remember why Italy drove me nuts.

It all began when I put on my high-heeled wedge shoes - my only shoes now that my nice flat boots decided to shed their bottom sole and go kaput - to wear to the conference.  

Oh, this is the conference/exhibit in pictures from a month ago (my camera won't be as good, so why try): much better pictures than mine

I can't decide whether it's boring or interesting.  I find myself fascinated by certain parts of it, and then I admit to myself that I'm a dork.  Then I look at other slides and think, "Oh my gosh, this is duller than rice and beans every day for a year," and feel hip again.  Until they say something cool again.  It depends.

So anyways, about 3 talks into the thing, my boss gave me a free pass to go take care of my shoes/find new ones.  So I took it.  And started off on what I used to call a Roman wild goose chase.  Except now it was a Venezian wild goose chase.  With roads that end in water.  

Praise the Good Lord, I still remember Italian and have not lost my ability to think of a wide array of words-I-know to describe words-I-don't-know, effectively translating things like: my boots crapped out on me, where's a fixer-upper store?  to My boots broke and I'm searching for a store nearby, help (and btw, I'm cute!!!)

BOO-YEAH.  

So, I found a nice guy and two ladies in a tourist kitsch store who pointed to a map after sparring gently back and forth.  So I put my pride away and kept my map out (HATE using a map in Italy solely because I never wanted to look like a tourist in Rome - I know, it's ridiculous) and wound my way past 400 variations of Roman stores, finally finding the little piazza next to the Church of the Twelve Apostles that they had pointed me to.

Yep, here's that little piazza.

And here's a hardware store, and an "Articles for Dogs" store, and a real estate agency.  

And no shoe stores.

By this point, my lovely high-heeled wedges are making my feet feel like little demons are pressing marble rolling-pins with ever step forward I take.  But I'm kind of stuck, so I walk around the church.

Nuthin.

So, I decide to go into the dog store to ask where the store may be.

Apparently, the ladies there can fix my shoes.  I just need to come back on Thursday.

I don't know if I hit the jackpot, or if I just got HAD and I will never see my awesome black boots again.  

But I reassured myself that should such a thing happen, I will happily set the police on the two dog-articles ladies using my awesome Italian synonyms. 

I hobbled back to the conference, trying to find shoes along the way before I had to go to lunch.  No luck.

So after two more talks, I set out again to find shoes.  And ended up at the exact same spot before I found something.  

I now have cheapo China-made flats with poofs on the front to tide me over until Thursday when my boots WILL BE DONE.  Ugh.

I'll try to upload some fotos from Venice tonight after dinner.  I was such in a on-a-mission mode that I didn't really take that many.  And Venice is hard to capture in one frame.  It's more the hard breeze going over the water while the boats and gondolas go by and the Italian scream at each other in the background that make it.