I woke up early and slep like a stone from the long day I had yesterday.No one was up today, so I went to check Vietri alone.
Vietri sul Mare is a small coastal city, but full of personality and life.I started to climb the litle snake street to the centre.There were People going up and down transporting all kinds of things,pallets full of vegetables and fishes,plastic bags,bottles,babies,bikes,boxes; kids playng running arround,people delivering the goods late to the grocer, that created a reaccion in him already deep in his soul to talk loudly in a musical manner while conducting hard expressive handgestures,an italian barber shop where a man is greedily getting a shave by the good mood barber, the old man and woman seated on the entry stairs isntead of the porch as I usualy saw in Lisbon,people looking and talking and observing the food and buyng and smoking and walking.
Vietri as also great cult of ceramic tradition, with a great amount of ceramic art workshops, selling mostly ceramic with sea lifestyle, countryside and local landscape motives.As I was walking through the city, I saw cerâmic works that capted my attention, they were brightly original and diferent ,with vessels of diferent shapes and sizes, with drawings of a jester style kind of man.
I went in the shop and there he was, the artist making the art.I observed him for 10 seconds really built-in on his work until he snaped off of it and greet me up "buongiorno".I greeted him to and started to talk with him.He didn't speak much of Anglo Languange, but I said if he spoke "italiano piano", I would understand.He told me that he was a very fond friend of a portuguese cerâmic artist, that founded a museum in vietri and became very famous for that, Gargaeilio ( only later I found he's name was Manuel Gargaleiro, but I liked more the distorted form of the surname).The artist I was speaking too, Klàus, was pretty famous too, the pope had once visited his store and Klàus gave him one of his works of art.A friend of him came by and for the next 15 minutes we had an enjoyable talk about italian gestures, what they ment,italian vocabulary and italian and portuguese chicas.I learned that the hand expression to say "the food is good" in portuguese, touching the bottom pillow of the ear with the fingers ment "gay" in italian.after an animated talk in his workshop, he gave me a card, saying that if i went to Lisbon to the other museum of Gargaelio, to say to him that I was a friend of Klàus.I said goodbye to both and left the place.
I went through another unkown way to the nuns place.When I got there, the lunch wasn't still ready, so I asked the portuguese girls and the macedonians if they wanted to go with us to visit the beach.they said ok and we left the monastery to go down to the beach.Halfway to the beach, we got to a plaza with a balcony where you could see a beautiful view, with the mountains that surrounded vietri, it's cliffs going all the way down to the water, it's vulcanic rock hit by the water for eternity, now in gravelled sand on the shore to form a litle beach and up there the traditional houses of the region and the church.
We stayed there a couple more so they could take photos for facebook.
We went down in the step hill street, with motorcycles circulating all the time.
When we got to the beach, me and Filipa had a nice talk with a man that in the end said that when we would go to Cava di Tireni he would offer us an Icecream.OKê!
In the nuns place, almost everybody had arrived now, exept the Polish, so we started to make games to break the ice and meet people.One was to write your name in a balloon then throw it away and when music stops you had to catch anothe balloon and give it to that person. When they were in the air, the balloons and the jumping people created a fanfare look in the high ceiling room.
After a "molto buono!" pasta breakfast, we went seeing the next big city, Salermo.When we got there, we recieved a formal welcoming by the mayor and other representatives.It was a pretty interesting time of 1 and a half hour, exept from the fact that I didn't understood shit from what they said, exept from a nice 35 year old lady that spoke a nice compreensible italian.I wondered why.In the end of the lezione , the guy asked if we had any questions, to not be shy, so I went up and asked why I could understand the lady and not the other men, if she was from a diferent region or spoke a diferent dialect.All the people started laughing.The guy said she was from here and made a silly joke about it.
At the front of the mayor's house they gave us a pocket lunch and we ate there.Haha pocket lunch -why? can I stuff this in my pocket?I don't think so.Haha I laughed to myself, this is a lunch inside a plastic bag!
In the afternoon we had a tourist visit around salermo, with bigger houses than in vietri, and some silly small arcs between the short streets that served for the buildings not to collapse on each other.
At the end of the day we went back to vietri to have the Check Estonian Night.It was a lot of fun,presentations that preceded lots of salty food and harsh drinks, and fun drinking game where they would take the strainer off the vodka bottle and put sweet fish gums inside it, and people had to hook the fish in his mouth, while drinking absurd quantities of vodka.Awsome game that got everybody drunk.After that they offered even more drinks and made a litle disco in the outside area that we were in.
After a the starter party, with all the people walking strait in frowning soberty, we quickly walked to the bus that was going to take us to a city witch I cannot remember the name, but was like an hour or more from Vietri.
I was feeling really sick from the complete sober state I was in, so I went to the front of the bus and Marta helped me a lot, and I got to know that she had travelled a lot, she had made erasmus in Hong Kong and went visiting the regions surrounding it.
When we got there, we had to wait a bit till we went to the museum.We were a big group of people, only guided by a female italian guide which I didn't like her face right from the start.I kept quiet listening to her boring descriptions of vessels and ruined pieces of greek culture found there and when she stood right of an european map with arrows from greece pointed only to the inside of the Mediterranian, she said "(...)2500 years before crist the greeks had reached their peak in terms of navigation, arriving to Italy, cartagne, france and the mediterranean islands/"-"That's incorrect!" I said, coming from the croud with a wool smoking,angry and determined."You see,in their peaks the Greeks had passed the Gibraltar straight, arrived to southeast of Spain, Portugal and North of Africa!!"I said, pointing in the map to the areas that weren't even maked in it"they had established trade routes in all of these places!they left a lot of heritage and evidence!!What you're saying is premade bullshit of"- an arm quickly grabs me and pulls me, and I got sucked in to a spot behind the croud.Mario comes to me and says:"letsa go outsida, joáó"-he said calmly.I was pretty pissed of by then.
He offered me a cigarette and I told him why she was wrong.After a while i was calm and I started to say good things and compliments to everybody that now was slwoly leaving the museum.I started to talk a lot, about how much bullshit we listen and have to stand with everyday, how much the world is fucked up and people don't give a fuck and don't think, and how dificult it is for people to really think outside of their mentally exausting routines.
At 4 am we started walking to the show we would see.The entrance was like a disco ,only outside.When we enter the complex, and walked the clandle lit path, me, my cousin and Marta seated together next to the other guys in from of an ancient, beautiful,intact, WoW sized greek temple.The Temple was lit from below, with coroled lights that would change from time to time, but very soft change that most of the people wouldn't notice.After a time of not loud but not silent talks, with neither sober nor drunk people, a perfectly clear sound of a woman speaking beautiful italian like she was speaking to an ear,she told stories about greek gods,apollo and the sun ,the moon, the dances and the skies.It was a bit cold and I had brought 2 jackets but only trousers, so the jacket I wasn't wearing I wrapped around my legs to not feel cold.In the midle of her talk, the statues that were standing on the base of the forefront ionic colums of the temple started to move graciously, slowly,interacting with eachother.I wasn't expecting that and I became stupefied.Then the music paced up and a group of dancers came from the back and they started to dance gallantry, with faster moves,in contemporanic style.The colors changed faster, from cold to warm and vice-versa.I was enjoying the dance, but I was extremely sleepy, and after a while the dance became hypnotic to me and I just felt asleep.Carolina woke me up when the show was over, now the day was borning, and we went to the bus to Vietri to sleep.We said gooday to the nuns.
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