This is going to be a long one, a very long one. It’s hard to cram 2 weeks worth of experiences into few words. I would’ve set it out in separate posts, but it would come out in the wrong order. (Yes I know about timestamps, but I’m lazy) I’ll try not to get boring, but I’ve found it really difficult to start writing about feelings instead of just the usual, ‘we went here, then there, then back here again’.
First Impressions
So where did I disappear to for the past two weeks?
It’s a small little town about an hour’s drive north of Turin called Locana. It’s in a small valley surrounded on both sides by mountains which give setting for some really amazing backdrops to pictures.
It’s fairly remote, and still very laid back, which is nice. London is great with the amount of stuff always happening all around, but it’s great to be able to relax and have more freedoms to go out completely safe and not have to worry about all the crap thats going on in the rest of the world.
Being as cut off as it is (it’s not the fucking medieval ages, the houses are better than what you get in London, believe me, just the sense that it’s not part of a major world scene; no one in the rest of the world would care really what’s going on there.) it allows you to lose track of the anxieties you may have from London life and the only time you’d ever hear about the rest of the world is in the news. But since that’s in Italian, and I still don’t understand most of it, you can easily turn a blind eye to all the terrorist plots and airport chaos that is happening if you wish.
Also, being so small, many people living there have lived there all their lives, and apart from the last generation who are now being taught English at school, almost no one else can even understand the tiniest bit of English; which has it’s joys as well as faults. You can speak about someone right in front of their face and most likely they won’t know a thing, they might even smile and nod graciously as if you were politely mentioning the beautiful weather.
The flip side of this is the obvious problem. After a sort of two week crash course in Italian, I probably know more know than I’ve ever done in my life, but it’s still pitiful, and I have no chance of keeping up with any kind of normal conversation. The only chance I have is when they slow down and speak only a few distinguishable words, which I’m pretty sure must be in the wrong order for them, so that I can translate and understand. Fortunately, the few people who knew no English but wanted to speak to me realised this and changed accordingly.
As for trying to find some kind of relationship, its easier in the sense that if she hates you, you probably won’t have to see her for at least another year, if ever. Although, why the hell is it that out of all the teenagers, its the boys that can speak the better english?
Thankfully there were really only two really beautiful girls in the town. (Yes, its that small that you can pick out only two) and I at least had a nice walk and chat (kind of) with one of them. (I’ll mention her later) As for the other, I know there’s a lot of stigmas in London attached with liking people younger than you but she was the most stunning 14 year old I’ve ever seen. Think tight black dress with tanned skin and pretty face and you’re not even half way there. And no, she’s not the local slag, in fact it really surprised me that her parents even let her wear that dress. As for how the rest compare, you’ve got your mix of Italian chavs (which is pretty funny coming from the country that invented them), you’ve got no rude-boys, but you’ve got a kind of mix of chav and rude girl in many of the girls. Most of them smoke, because its more acceptable there, and they generally have extra piercings and are fairly ugly. (Bad genes) But maybe its an Italian-wide thing as my cousin said he preferred these chavvy-esque looking girls compared to a more refined look.
I’d like to end by saying that they have some really odd sense of fashion. In the relatively cold mornings, most people go about in shorts. Then when it’s hot in the afternoon that’s when they put on jeans. Then when its cold again at night, they wear shorts again. WTF? Oh they also have a thing for three-quarter length shorts/trousers.
Grand Hotels and Isola Bella
‘Isola Bella’ translated means ‘Island Beautiful’ or as we’d say; ‘Beautiful Island’. And while yes, the island was very nice and pretty, it’s a shame it’s become a bit too overrun with touristic features, and the fact that one of it’s most famous parts (the gardens and palace) you have to pay €10 to enter, then you begin to feel disappointed. But, it was a nice day trip out, and it was situated in the middle of the largest lake in Italy ‘Lago Maggiore’.
Uhm, there isn’t really much else to write without becoming boring, so here’s some pictures of the Island, one of the hotels on the mainland facing it, and a charming village located up on the side of the mountain.
Family Reunions, Crazy Uncles and Drowsy Cousins
This is my family. I think the pictures say all I have to say.
No, of course I’m joking, my uncle is a bit crazy, and he does smoke like a train, but he’s ok really. My cousin’s a hyperactive maniac with far too many stuffed toys, but it’s really funny just to watch him go off into his own world. And no, he doesn’t have down syndrome, despite what he looks like in the picture.
Believe me everyone is fairly sane, and they’re a great family to have.
Photograph Competition and Hounds
Put up a poster saying that you can win €200 for taking the two best photographs of Locana, and you can be sure that it will invoke a crazed drive in my father to go out and start taking many photos, mostly similar in composition and focal point (mainly because the only true focal point in such a small town is the church). However, he still hasn’t quite got his head around the capabilities and limitations of digital photography and uses it en-cumbersomely. For instance, digital gives you the freedom to shoot basically as much as you want in many different ways until you get the one photo you really want. Film was limited to the fact that you only had 36 frames and you didn’t want to go around wasting it unless you were sure of a good shot. Also, he insists a lot of the time on trying to frame pictures using the measly viewfinder. Really unless it’s pitch black or in blinding sunlight, the screen should still show a better picture than the viewfinder. But no, he doesn’t believe me when I insist on this point, and instead he ends up with a cut-off photo, if I haven’t re-done it properly for him. In these respects he’s still very much from the old-school of photography.
Anyways, it also gave me the chance to take a few photos of my own, and while I may have repeated the virtues of taking lots of photos just for choice, sometimes the very best photos are one-offs. You either are in the right place at the right time, or you don’t have a photo. The picture of the dog can be found larger here.
This was one of those, and similar to the picture of the man thinking on the Giant’s Causeway, I believe this to be one of my best. I love it because of it’s colours and the graining of the wood, but more because I spotted the dog through the slit in the doors. I stood there waiting for it to stop barking and stay still. And ultimately, because I took the photograph. I must say, there is a real sense of enjoyment when you view on a large scale a picture you took only one of, and it comes out as perfectly as you could’ve wished.
Still not perfect, but I guess there is at the very least signs of continued improvement. As for the rest, my dad’s form of composing photos (i.e. some flowery crap in the foreground and the subject framed behind) seems to have got into my head that little bit too much.
Locana by Night
Have you ever seen a crowd of devoted Catholics holding a candlelit procession while chanting out various prayers in Latin and Italian at night in a small town that can look fairly creepy where the light doesn’t stretch.
Believe me when I say that it’s not at all a beautiful sign of devotion. It’s creepy, that’s what it is. Weird and just a touch on the scary side if you let your mind fall into Resident Evil 4 mode. (Yes that bunch of scary villagers really are going to kill you and fry your brains for dinner.)
But of course, in truth, in such a small town, the fact is you feel much safer walking into the unknown than you’d ever feel standing outside your own home in London at night. And if you look hard enough, there’s even an alluring quality to the night lights.
Shame the nightlife isn’t quite up to scratch.
Torino 06
Turin has beautiful streets you know. And it’s got many more different ethnicities than you might at first think. Actually, traveling in some of the more dodgy parts of Turin feels just like home. Just that obviously at home, you get that same feeling almost all the time, whereas it’s still limited to a few areas in Italy.
However, where the city is good, it really is amazing. Most of the main streets are doubly wide the main streets in London, and because they have the tram and bus aisle down the centre of these streets, they feel grand and bold, like you’d find in only very few streets in London; Regent’s Street springs to mind. Turin’s main tourist attractions are centered around the main sqaure of Piazza Castello. It a large square filled mostly by an old castle. Although the winter Olympics took place there at the beginning of the year, there no longer remains many remnants in the city centre’s squares. But if you travel out just a bit further to where they have left bits and pieces, you can see the aging remains of how they treid to enliven the city for the Games.
It seems that the Olympics were a real catalyst for renovating parts of the city. For example, the airport used to be fairly shite even just 3 years ago. But now they’ve extended and built new, modern, glass-fronted additions to it, to make it look very ’21st century’. In addition, Turin now has it’s first ever underground railway line. Yes it’s clean, modern, and has the coolest exit to anything I’ve ever seen, but it’s still not a patch on the London Underground. It has no character, no drivers, and unlike even the modern Jubilee Line Extension, has no grandiose buildings outside to signify where it lies. It’s nice, but that’s it.
On the way back home, I saw the worst torrential downpour of rain I think I’ve ever seen in my life. And living in England, you’d think that at least that record could probably stay here. But so fierce was the rain, that it knocked out the electricity of the shopping centre we were trapped inside. What was so amazing was that at one point, you thought it impossible for the rain to come down any heavier than it was, yet somehow, by more than just a fraction, it did. And it did so for the next half hour. Driving home (eventually) was even more hazardous. Have you ever driven through a river that was a road that same morning?
Luckily, the time we spent actually in the city was nice and fairly sunny, although it’s a real shame that a kind of smoggy haze covered the city and the view of the mountains in the background.
The shot of a fountain in front of Palazzo Reale was good though (and yes those are my parents), and I also liked the imposing look of the pillars of the church on the hill. In the third photo, you can see what I mean about the haze, but at least you can see the iconic building of Turin; the Mole Antonelliana.
Music on the Move
Don’t you just wonder if sometimes there is something else out there? I’ve given up most hope on the fundamental Christian/Catholic beliefs, but I think I had a vision. Or it could just be serendipity (Lucky coincidence for all you small vocabularied people).
For you to see the same ‘amazing’ effect, get in a car, get someone to drive you to a place which has sufficient denting in the road every couple of hundred meters, plug in your headphones to music of your choice and voila. Happening for only a minute or so isn’t that amazing. Its when you get a span of four or five tracks, each with different tempos and beats that work with the bumps, that you begin to think; what the hell?
p.s. On the way back home, I found out it works with trains too. Bumpy trains.
The News
Is one thing that you definitely don’t want to miss when you come to Italy. Not because of worldly issues that you might want to keep track of, not because it’s useful for learning the language, but because there is hardly a single news bulletin, day or night that doesn’t feature at the very least a quick shot of a beautiful woman very partially clothed.
The level of nudity is on a sliding scale differing with the amount of other news items and the weather. So basically, the less terrorism there is, and the hotter it is, the better. It seems as if there are no strict rules on when you can show nudity here as on a lunch time news bulletin they had a nice piece about topless women sunbathing in the south of Italy.
I don’t know your pre-conceptions of Italy, but if you’re a strong feminist, I probably wouldn’t advise you to watch any T.V. in Italy as it’s fairly packed with various assortments of women in various stages of undress, on all programs, channels and commercials. Beware, not even the news is safe anymore!
Funeral Woes
A Dead Man’s, Niece’s daughter.
I think that’s the third funeral I’ve been to, or at least that I can remember. The first being for my grandfather, the second for a woman I can no longer remember, and on Saturday 19th August, the funeral of a man I briefly met only 48 hours before his death , Rino Bertolino.
Out of respect of this fact, I was in attendance at the funeral. Now not being particularly close to even knowing this dead man, feelings were similar to those I felt at the last funeral - i.e. solemnness and a fixed sorrow/empathy look on my face. Without having any connection with a dead person, you view them simply as ‘another dead person’. However in this case, I did have a slight, if very similarly new found connection to the person; the dead man’s niece’s daughter.
Ha! you may think, what kind of long-assed relation are you trying to claim. Well, it’s a long-ish story, but it mainly revolves around a major crush.
So the funeral car passes once. I pull my solemn/faux-sorrow face.
The coffin later passes two feet away from my face as it comes out of the church. Again, hardly even a recognition in my brain of any true sorrow, just an instruction telling me to look how you should had you really gone to the funeral of a lovely old man you could very well have known.
I watch as the priest gives the coffin it’s final blessing before being passed to the cemetery workers to pack into the tomb.
Up until now, not a single real thought of serious sadness has passed through my mind. Then I see her eyes. Wide-open, red and filled with a tear in each. Had I not looked up to the misted, green mountains, high up above the proceedings, that would’ve been the first time in over four years that I would’ve cried. The only thing preventing a similar release (for reasons little to do actually with the dead man), was the thought of that macho-ness. Not that I’m a one for all that manly rubbish, but it just seems to be one of those things; I find it hard to cry now. So when I came that close just from staring at her tearful eyes, christ, that’s one heck of a power.
It was a bit better when she stopped crying and every now and then she’d look up to where I was standing, and I’d try and look sorry and yet all I could think about was her from the other day. Uhm , yeah, I guess I’m shallow, eye-flirting with a girl at a funeral.
:D:D:D
