Monday

It was 01.30 p.m. and there I stood in the street, with my suitcase next to me, waiting for my friend V. that was already half a hour late to drive me to the station. As she arrived ( 01.35 p.m.) she claims: ” Trains in Bari always leave in late. Trust me, it will never leave at 01.42, you’ll see”. What I saw, as soon as I flew to the platform and almost died for a heart attack, was a regional train that had no intention to bring me to Rome, as its destination was Enziteto Catino ( that sounds funny also for an Italian). Slowly, I walked back to the car parking where I found V., who was supposed to wait for my ok to leave, was stuck in her beautiful, whipped-cream white, brand new car, as a dozen unauthorized valets surrounded her screaming loudly gesticulating ( an unauthorized valet is a man you pay to look after your car even if he hasn’t an official authorization from the municipality. Of course you can also choose not to pay him, but you wouldn’t be sure that your car will be there when you’ll back).

I hesitated couple of minutes, wondering if it could be safer just running away and leave her to her destiny, but then friendship prevailed so I reached the car and jumped in, holding the suitcase in my arms like a baby. After having locked the car, we had an amazing conversation with all those  nice guys that, as I could understand only after V. translated for me, were trying to explain us that some homeless guy that lives in the train station had gone nuts and decided to chill out kicking my friend’s car. In fact, as we decided that the Car Parking Gang didn’t want to kill us and slowly got off the car, we could se the footprint of the above mentioned nutty guy on the crushed body of the car.

Couple of minutes later, a man that looked ( and smelled) like a bandit asked my friend her documents, and she was about to ask him to go screw himself when we suddenly realized he was a desguised policeman, who made her park her injured car in the police parking and asked her to follow him to the POLFER ( railway police) to inform on what had happened.

Half a hour later, as we drove out the parking, a traffic officer asked us to pull up and started to explain us he had to sanction us because we came from a street whose access was denied to civils. Weird thing, in the beginning, was that he didn’t look very impressed when V. told him we just got off the UNIPOL office and that it had been his UNIPOL colleague to tell us to park over there (we realized only later why he didn’t look very much sympathetic : the thing was V kept mistaking between POLFER and UNIPOL, which is the name of an insurance company).    

In the end, I reserved a seat in the 18.30 train that of course left with a 45 minutes late and arrived 1h and a half in late, so I missed the last metro and I had to call a cab, I didn’t have the money to pay, so I had to phonecall M. ( who bravely was waiting for me even if it was o1.30 a.m. ) to lend me some money. As she was already wearing her pijamas, seh put the money in a small, chinese-like wallet, and threw it out of the window. The wallet fell on the floor, rolled and rolled and rolled until it reached a small hole in the wall and fell in it as I stared at it incredulous. Sometimes life really surprises you. Sometimes bad luck is just too strong. Some days you’d just stay in bed till the day after.  

Whatever can go wrong will go wrong,

 and at the worst possible time,

in the worst possible way

Saturday

I went back to my hometown ( Bari, south of Italy, right in the heel of the boot, just in case you didn’t know) for the weekend. In the avarage stereotype, the weekend at your parents’ is a golden time when you basically are feed, dressed and hugged all day long. Well, in the beginning it actually worked this way. I spent a beautiful Saturday with my mother: we had breakfast in a super awesome coffee shop, then we went shopping ( I bought my 20th pair of boot. Maybe I should stop, but they costed only 15 euros, can you believe it? How couldn I leave them all by themselves on that crappy shelf? ), then we went to a beauty farm and did sauna and a relax massage. For dinner we went out to a very nice bio restaurant and had smoked salmon, and angus steak, and an awesome slice of orange flavoured cheescake. Can you image a better day? I can’t. After such a perfect day I decided to go out for a beer with my best friend D. and his girlfriend so I drove with my mom’s car till D’s and then we went downtown with his car looking for the rest of the gang. After half a pint I was ready to go to sleep, but I parked my car at D’s, and so I had to wait 01.00 p.m. before reaching it. I love driving back home at night, smoking my last cigarette and singing my head out listening to Virgin radio. Everything is nice and calm as I drive coasting the sea. As I drove across the rails and turning right to reach my street, I realised all of a sudden that a car was driving against me reaching 200 km/h speed and with its lights turned off. I sheered desperatly trying to avoid the impact, thus ending up in a flower bed and scratching my mom’s car against a wall. I tried to explain my mother that she should be happy because her beloved daughter is safe, but I’m pretty sure that, if it wasn’t for the insurance, she’d lovingly kill me.