Almost in Africa

I definitely did not come to Lampedusa to go to the beach. I planned to go so that I could finally, finally finish the photography part of my project for my Gallatin Senior’s Grant (months late, I should add). I’ve wanted to come to Lampedusa for years, probably since I first read The Leopard, before going to Sicily in 2002. But it’s not very easy to arrive. First I flew to Sicily, then to Lampedusa in a prop plane so small that we could watch our bags as they were loaded on: the luggage storage was in a compartment in front of the rows of seats. Somehow the airline still managed to lose some people’s bags. Not mine, luckily.

Lampedusa itself is a little scrubby island less than a dozen miles long. It’s part of a trio of islands called the Pelagie Islands – only two are inhabited. The third has just a lighthouse. Lampedusa is about 200 km from Sicily and 100 km from the north coast of Africa. So I was closer to Africa than Italy! (I read that technically the islands are part of the African continent because of the shallowness of the ocean between Lampedusa and Africa. But somehow Italy ended up owning them anyway.) The island itself is covered with bushes and rocks. My map describes it as “arid and wild”. It’s also a wildlife preserve protected by the Italian government. Apparently there are lots of dolphins, and sea turtles mate here.



Lampedusa’s other claim to fame is its detention center. Because of its proximity to the coast of Africa, it’s become a sort of landing pad for boats of people hoping to use it as a gateway to the rest of Europe. Unfortunately, though, a lot of those trips have ended in shipwrecks, and Lampedusa is the site of a famous detention center through which Italy tries to send refugees back to Africa (from what I’ve read, this backfires, because many of the boats that take off from Libya are not carrying Libyan citizens, but people who traveled through Libya to get a boat passage. The Libyan government, which is on bad terms with Italy anyway, isn’t interested in acting as a refuge for non-citizens). So I came to Lampedusa to take photos. Not of the detention center itself, which is a big forbidding building perched on a cliff, but the island. To get a sense of it in the photos.
I still have no idea if the photos themselves were successful. I spent some time in this weird boat cemetery-ish spot, at night, with my tripod. It was scary because I kept imagining that someone was going to pop out of one of the boats and yell at me (or haunt me). The boats were very dark inside.



Spiaggia dei Conigli!


To get a better sense of the island, I rented a bike (for which I paid 4 euros and 40 cents – it was supposed to be 5 euros, but I didn’t have the right change, so the owner let me go anyway) and rode around the whole island. I went to the most famous beach, Spiaggia dei Conigli, which closes at 8 pm so that sea turtles can climb onshore and lay their eggs. It’s a stunningly beautiful beach, and has the most amazing water I’ve ever been able to swim in. It was perfectly clear and I could see all the silver little fish darting around my feet. And I brought a pretty awesome picnic and ate melty cannoli on the beach.




This was also the first time I’ve taken real sun precaution, which sort of disturbed me and makes me think I’m inheriting some bizarre grownup characteristics. The problem is that I bought an issue of Vogue in the airport that, instead of teaching me about fashion, freaked me out about skin care. So I actually used 50 spf for the first time before going into the sun. And I bought the dorkiest hat of my life. It reminded me of Rosa, because I know she would never be seen with me if I wore it at home.



Despite the abovementioned diligent skin care, my stay on Lampedusa was not free from danger. A pack of wild dogs terrorized – and almost cleared out – the beach before disappearing up the cliff. A bee stung me on my butt (it was the bee’s fault for relaxing on my beach towel under the shade of my leg – thank God I’m not allergic). On my first night I ordered fish at a restaurant, feeling as if that was the right thing to do, being on an island. I received an entire fish on my plate. And this is not New York – no one is going to de-bone it for you. I felt like a failure, but I did manage to get the head and tail off and the spine out before I ate it. And my hotel, which was incredibly cheap because it’s off season, and very beautiful (that nighttime photo is the view from the TERRACE I had in my room), was totally empty except for me. It was like living in The Shining. I was actually given a front door key because there was no one working at reception. I came to breakfast on the first morning to find the owner on her knees on the bar, polishing liquor bottles and singing. She made me a really good coffee.



So, Lampedusa was beautiful. And it was very satisfying to travel alone. I’ve taken what feels like a million trips by myself, but this was the first time that I didn’t feel lonely and I didn’t want to leave. But now it’s back to Bologna to work until Thursday. On Friday I go back to Cambridge for a few weeks! I can’t wait! I’m downgrading: now I live with an asthmatic vomiting cat and a one-eyed vomiting cat – at home, there’s just a single one-eyed vomiting cat. Hello Dinkie!

Also, I should note that I shouldn’t have compared Andrea to a Belmont Hill boy on my last post. He read it and had a reaction that I feel sort of guilty about: he looked it up and found this. Also my fault, because I showed him the Urban Dictionary in the first place. He thinks I called him gay because he has pink on his shoes. (He’s not.)

Getting About

Last weekend my choir had a concert in a town called Argenta. We had a very raucous bus ride (which reminded me a little bit of elementary school, but worse) and then we had about three hours to kill before the concert. We drank coffee, then rehearsed. Then we were hungry. And what do you do if you're hungry and don't have time to go to a restaurant for a real dinner? Aperitivo!

That meant multiple glasses of spritz (which is prosecco, a bit of water, and a bitter alcohol, like Campari), and healthy foods like potato and corn chips, popcorn, and bizarre little sandwiches made with prosciutto and spicy ketchup. I don't know how everyone else managed it, because when we left (5 minutes before the start of the concert) I felt both tipsy and nauseous. And after we had listened to the children's choir and all-male choir, we got onstage. By that time - after about an hour and a half sitting in a darkened auditorium - I was tipsy, nauseous, and sleepy. But somehow the concert turned out really well. (Well, not according to our maestro, who hears every mistake. But I thought it was great.) We looked very snazzy in our all-black outfits and colorful scarves.
Speaking of which, you can find the choir here.
If you want to see the current photo and listen to some songs, you have to enter the site in Italian. After the intro, click the Italian flag, then the "media" bar, to listen to songs we recorded in March - I sang only a couple of them because I didn't know the words yet (though I do now!).



Not much else has been going on here. We had no hot water for week and I woke up every morning to the sound of my roommate yelling in pain in the shower (yet he wasn't very quick about fixing it). I finished my English teaching on Thursday, after giving Andrea his final exam. He was happy to finish because it's the beginning of summer - I was sort of sad. And I felt guilty, because he had trouble with the exam (which I didn't write, but still).

Translating has been fine. Tourism texts have lots of words like "crystalline", "splendid", "excursion", and "tranquility". I actually wrote an email yesterday describing a night out as a "grand excursion", and then felt very ashamed. This website is infiltrating my brain. (It's not in English yet, but it will be when I'm done.) But I do like the office and the people I work with. This week I taught Andrea (who's sort of like the Italian version of a Belmont Hill boy) the myriad meanings of "get". When he asked me the difference between saying that something "rocks" or something "rules", I was totally stumped. Any ideas? It's all very educational. But we agree on who is the hottest female Grey's Anatomy character, so he gets bonus points. (It's Addison.)

What other English phrases are worth passing on?

Edelweiss

Switzerland! Country of chocolate, cheese, mountains, and lots of other great things. That’s where I was last weekend. I spent three days in Bern, with my mom’s best friend from college, Kim, and her family (her husband, Peter, is Swiss, which is how she ended up in Bern). The entire family proved to be terrific tour guides, including their 14 year old son Tommy, who is amazingly bilingual. A (bilingual) friend at NYU once told me that there’s a certain kind of conversation that bilingual people can have, referred to as “code-switching”, when they go back and forth between their two fluent languages without missing a beat. It’s pretty cool to watch.



Kim, Tommy, and Peter took me to a beautiful waterfall that was inside a mountain. They also took me to see two (or was it three?) castles, an adorable medieval city named Murten, a modern art museum, and toured me around Bern.





Plus, I ate my first pork roast. But one of the most momentous meals (alliteration!) I had was rosti, which is characteristic of the German-speaking part of Switzerland. This was basically a bunch of clogged arteries sitting on a plate. That is, shredded potatoes, bacon, and onions, cooked and topped with an egg and about twenty pounds of Swiss cheese. I left some bits of cheese on my plate to make myself feel better about the fact that I ate the whole thing. Notice that it’s plate-sized, and it’s also about two inches high. I’m actually surprised that I managed to get up from the table. (But notice that there are two small slices of pickle sitting on top of my rosti! My first dill pickle since January. It was terrific!)



When I told my Swiss friend Felix about this meal, he reminded me that he’s always said that Swiss food is barbaric. It’s true: he’s repeated this to me many times. In his words, after eating it, “you stink, you sweat, you can’t move, and all you can do is smoke”. Note that he’s giving up his beautiful skylight-filled Bolognese apartment so that he can complete his final semester of university at home, from Switzerland.



After Bern I went to Geneva to spend the night with my friend Talya, who’s working there. We grew up about five blocks from each other, and it was the first time we’ve ever explored a different country together. Actually, we’ve only seen each other one time out of Massachusetts, and that was in New York City for coffee. So a Geneva excursion was a big step for us! Talya was also a great guide, and, after pirating wireless internet at her apartment, I was sad to leave.

However, I really did have to leave, because this week I started a new job. Until the end of May I’ll be translating the website of a tourism marketing firm in Bologna. Despite the fact that it can be incredibly frustrating, I really enjoy the challenges of translating. So the work has been pretty interesting so far (after translating 12+ pages on Sardinia, you can ask me anything about the whole island – I can practically recite all of its main attractions from memory).

I did make the mistake of giving my boss this blog address, which he passed to the person (Andrea) whom I work with most directly. So I can’t reveal everything about them. But it is nice to work with young people – at Coop I was the youngest person by far in the entire building. So far so good.