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Murphy’s Law or Weekend in Bari – Episode 2
Sunday
On Sunday my teenage sister broke up with her boyfriend. That couldn’t sound like a big deal for you, but it’s just because you don’t know what does being engaged when you’re 16 mean, in Bari. When you’ve been dating someone for let’s say, more than one month, you can already consider yourself engaged and this is true especially for teenagers nowadasys. While I still belong to that cute generation of girls who consider a chewed chewingum the most romantic pledge of one’s love and affection, my sister got for the “First Month Anniversaire” an Ipod. Moreover, as you start dating someone, you are automatically introduced to his whole family up to the most ancient granny’s aunt. Even though I’m sure that it doesn’t always work this way, my memories of my Pugliese mother in law still scare me. Maybe she didn’t like the fact I used to get dressed as a flea market had fall on my head, maybe she didn’t like my piercings, maybe she wasn’t very comfortable with the fact that at that time people at school thought I was a satanist, dunno, really. Anyway, I always sensed some kind of negativity coming from her, maybe because she used to meet the nuns ( did I ever tell you I attended a school ran by nuns? creepy people, really, they thought greek and latin till they were 80, after that they would retire in a farm in a village called Noci ( which means Nuts, can you see the beauty of it?) waiting to die….wwwwwh) in the school basement and spend their afternoons preparing Aloe potions and sorting out a way to defeat the devil in me.
Anyway, being engaged in my hometown is a pain in the ass, and it’s a hard work too, and I guess this is the reason why people get engaged when they are 15 years old and then just get married with the same person. I guess they reckon having an affair it’s easier.
So, now, you can understand why breaking up with V has been such a terrible experience both for my sister and us. Given the fact that I’m the working sister and that she’s the pretty one, we had given for granted that, sooner or later, V would have marry her thus relieving us from the what-the-hell-is-she-going-to-do-when-school-will-be-over? issue.
Now gotta, go, she’s calling me on the MSN messenger for some advices, and I gotta read very careful what is she saying, since the overuse of emoticons make the chat box look like a Picasso painting. God I’m old.
New Year’s Eve – Day 3
Whoo, just got back from the weirdest new year’s eve party of my entire life. As I already said, we couldn’t find a restaurant healthy enough to have a traditional new year’s eve supper, so we just wallked a little around Plaza Real, at last resigned to have just a little jamon ( ham) and a beer, but it soon became clear that it would be a mission as impossible as Tom Cruise’s when he gets hung upisde down like a jamon in some caveau. In the end, as a lighthouse in the cold Spanish night, there it was a small rotisserie called El Rey del Pimiento (Plaza Puerta Cerrada, 4 – Madrid) that lookd open and lively and we hurred inside. As you can see from the pictures above, the place could easily have been the set of The Lord of the Rings, as it was populated by the Spanish Freaks Association and its decor could leave without words even the leader of Kitsch Fanatics Worldwide.
After five minutes, Fulvio had already become waiter Mario’s best friend, while my mother got a little freaked out because of the smoke of cigarettes that occluded the possibility of seeing what we were eating ( croquetas!!!). My sister ( unbelievably still not whining) and I just kept singing our Give me hope remix, hoping some miracle to come and resolve the situation. The miracle came, and was sangria carafe shaped. After that my memories are a little foggy, all I remember is:
- us walking out the Pimiento place giggling
- us buying from the cutest chinese guy three little bags with 12 berries of grape each, to be swallowed at midnight in Puerta del Sol square, together with a bottle of champagne.
- us completely lost in the colorful crowd of Puerta del Sol
- me getting almost choked while trying to eat a berry for each toll of the clock at midnight.
Happy New Year to all of you, folks.
11.15 pm (Sangria Especial)
11.45 pm ( Puerta del Sol)
Nochevieja Madrilena – Day 2
Day 2 – December 31st, 02.00 pm
Well, I’m exhausted. This morning we went out aiming to increase our cultural level by visiting El Prado and Reina Sofia museums and thus to close 2007 a little more cultivated, but the cosmic energy must have decided that we’re cultivated enough, as you can see in the picture below that well summarizes our cultural morning trip in Madrid.
This is it: last day of the year Spanish think they had enough and just don’t go to work. We wandered for three hours ( following beloved Lonely Planet, mother keeping askin: almost there? almost there? almost there?) looking for something – anything - to see: El Prado was closed, Reina Sofia Art Center was closed, Royal Palace was closed, shops were closed, my feet were hacking and my stomach was starting to digest me from the inside. We decided it could be a good idea to have a little rest in a super nice quarter, called Chueca, have lunch and then decide what to do. Of course we didn’t tell Fulvio Chueca is Madrid gay quarter, so I think he is still convinced Spanish people are just friendly with Italian wine bar owners. We got into a very nice Cervezeria, and that was the best idea of the morning, cause, since it was a Cervezeria, it didn’t have a wine list that Fulvio can memorize, so it took only five minutes to ask for ( guess what?) cerveza y croquetas ( my liver is very much mad at me) and our first Italian-tasting coffee ( Italian espresso in Spanish = cafe solo, I know that because the waitress was from Brindisi ( 40 km from my home town) so we could ask her the meanings of the dishes in the list, but I had the impression she didn’t understand them neither).
Culturally enriching information: Fulvio, who must have lived in Spain when he was younger ( dunno for sure, his past is a little foggy) explained us that the dirt on the floors of every cervezeria, restaurant and wine bar we’d been in, is proportional to the fame of the place. It’s pretty easy, actually: lot of success= lot of people = lot of dirt on the floor. Now I understand why I saw couple of times waiters throwing waste on the floor. That was marketing. Cool.
After a little tour to the Atocha train station ( the one in wich there was the terrositic attack on March 11th 2004), that has now become an indoor rainforest ( you could expect a monkey to pickpocket you all of a sudden), we started looking for a restaurant to greet the Last Day of the Year from. It’s useless to tell you that the same philosophy that made Spanish people decide to have a rest in the very only day we were there was applied to restaurants, bars, bistrots, cervezerias and post houses the Lonely Planet suggested, and the few ones that were open ( we didn’t miss any of them…almost there? almost there? almost there?) of course had something that made my mother change her mind about ten thousand times. There you are a list:
- Cheap menu
- Cheap restaurant
- Cheap table place in nice restaurant
- Unappealing waitress
- Don’t like the way the barman was staring at my sister
- Don’t like the material the tables are made of
- Don’t like the way the table is set
- Don’t understand the menu
In the end none of the place we visited was good, and we went back to the hotel a little concerned about our destiny ( Mother in a nihilistic attitude, Fulvio not caring about it, Sister and I singing at the top of our lungs a remixed version of Give me hope, Joana and Feliz Navidad). On the way to the hotel, we had a little tour in El Corte Inglés, a huge Galeries Lafayette and Harrod’s looking shopping center, that was surprisingly open.
Now, as I told you, I care very much about signs. If this last day of 2007 is a metaphore of the old year that is coming to an end, well, there are a few word to describe it:
- feet ache
- useless wandering
- nerves increasing
Hope the next one will be just a little better ( at least no more feet ache).
Nochevieja Madrilena – Day 1
Day 1 – December 30th 2007, 5 a.m.
We’re going to Madrid for the New Year’s Eve. Since we had to leave at 5 a.m. from Bari airport, I thought it was useless to go to sleep and decided to stay up till 4 with my friends and then go and wake my family up. Look at my face and guess who had the crappiest idea on earth.
So, there we are, ready to go, each one of us bringing those things that couldn’t absolutely be left at home:
Me: camera and cigarettes
Mother: Lonely Planet guide
Fulvio: himself and cigarettes
Sister: life size ugly disney cartoon monster ( boyfriend’s present…looks like we are going to share the bed, the monster, my sister and I) , two ( two !!!) albums of pictures of her boyfriend and her ( Is she afraid to forget the face of her boyfriend during the neverending three days lasting trip ?)
The reason why we had to leave at 5 am is that to go to Madrid straight from Bari we reserved seats on a charter flight.
Charter: special flight that is scheduled when lots of people from the same town go to the same place in particular periods, like Christmas or summer holidays.
Charters from Bari: more or less the same thing but with some slight differences:
1) People from Bari only move in hordes, so the avarage leaving family includes: Mother, Father, three or four ( or five) overweight kids ( if older than 15, you have to add the respective boyfriends and grilfriends), the octogenarian granny ( that the rest of the family always forgets on the plane since it’s too concentrated in remembering the duty free bag) and some more relatives and friends. Leggi il seguito di questo post »
So that was Christmas…now, what’s next?
Well, Christmas is over, Santa brought us a new heating system, the penguins left my bedroom and I’m now approaching a new critical period of these holidays: getting started for the New Years Eve trip to Madrid with my crazy, crazy family.
Partecipants: Me, Mother, Mother Fiancè (Fulvio) and Little Sister ( Cristina).
Activities:
Me: I packed my camera, a pair of blue jeans, couple of sweater and some hideous red strings for the 31st midnight ( fine, I’m superstitious…so what?Anyway, since my boyfriend will be faaaaaaaaar away, no one will see it anyway)
Mother: since she’s a virgo ( like me, actually, but I must have some crappy ascendant, maybe llama, or goat, in fact I’m ways less organised than she is) she bought the ultimate Madrid guide ( bible-sized, weights a ton and a half, includes the detailed description of every single street, square, stone and inhabitant in town and in the neighborhoods) and has already started drawing complex itineraries with the aim of making us visit the whole town in three days. I bet that, if she could, she would also rent some bulls to free in the streets like in Pamplona to make us walk faster…crap, I wouldn’t have write this, now I gave her a great idea….
Fulvio: I’m pretty worried about him, think he got pinched by some tsetse fly because, as he sits no matter where, he falls asleep…maybe he’s narcoleptic, dunno.
Cristina: she’s been gargling for three days, in order to get her voice ready to annoy us with a list of complainings ( I saw her writing it: I’m angry, I’m thirsty, I’m tired, I miss my boyfriend, this place sucks, the paeilla sucks, it’s too cold, it’s too hot, the sky is too blue and Madrid is too Spanish, just to name a few).
Wish me luck.
