JOHNBLAWG

I awaken to my Ipod alarm clock-thing, delivering my soothing Saturday morning wake up call. Sweet sweet Saturday.

I swat the alarm clock and re-locate my corpse a few meters to the couch. Flicking on my sweet, sweet saturday morning rage. Hair special, eh. A little time is spent considering Cyndi Lauper’s freakish latterday haircut. But wait, it’s a pretty nice day outside. I’m looking at it, out the window there. Too nice to spend looking at Cyndi Lauper’s head. So nice, maybe I should go to the beach. Cyndi Lauper never went to the beach. Birds would have attacked her freakish hair.  Bird attacks. What a phenomenon.

Anyway Kelis comes on, and starts shriekin’ all over the place, sealing the deal. “Fuck this!” I say, turning off the TV, grabbing a shower and driving down to the beach. Note: I’m going to beach for the purpose of walking, not swimming here. Yes, I like long walks on the beach. They’re soothing, okay. Way more soothing than they are dorky, and vaguely suspect.

And I gotta say I’m pretty proud of my Woodman Point beachwalk, I’ve got a primo route figured out that means I never have to backtrack, and I can cut across the cape at several points  and shorten the length of the walk if I want to. The walk starts with about 20 minutes of bushland path, then it’s soothing beach back the rest of the way.

And there I am, walking through the bush. Everything is stereotypically delightful, the day is sunny, the bush in the full throes of spring, with flowers everywhere. The air is full of calling bird noises. There is a cool, almost air conditioned breeze blowing through it all. “Excellent call.” I think to myself. “You needed a break, doing that 4-day week of work, after being on holidays for a month.” Of course I do.

Despite the niceness of the day, the place is fairly deserted. I get through the 20 minutes of bush, only bumping into 1 other person – can I just take a moment to say how excellent that is, being able to see another person coming towards you for like 5 minutes, to add mental weight to the choice to either attempt ot exchange a bland plesantry or just ignore them. Today’s victim is some power walking old lady.

And let’s be honest, I look pretty out of place, walking down the beach. The mind of the at-beach-belongers must leap to such conclusions. But I’m not going to be the surly silent type! I beleive in a nicer time where everyone drove jalopies around at slower-than walking pace and waved cheerily at each other. So in my most cheery, not-a-serial killer voice (probably without intended effect) I deliver an even handed “Morning!” in this instance, I receive a guarded “How you going?”

“God dammit”, I’m thinking. I hate that. “How you going” isn’t a mid-stride reply! In my 1920 low velocity jalopy doctrine handbook, that is a question that demands an answer! But you don’t want an answer. You are just a rigid power-walking robot, playing pre-taped responses whilst reaching for your pepper spray. “Not today, lady!” I think, and just keep walking. Anybody else out there having these tiny daily panic attacks?

Anyway I finally set foot on the beach. The wind is a little stronger here, and the waves a little more unruly than usual. I look up the beach, just two other people plodding in the opposite direction, further up the beach. Nice, unless both of them break a leg, there’s hopefully no more awkward pleasantries involved for this stretch of beach, anyway.

About a hundred meters up, I notice the sky. Not particularly sunny anymore! In fact, dark ominous clouds are rolling in from the sea. As the light darkens, the wind that was pleasantly cool before starts to feel a bit chilly. I’m cool with that, I think. Maybe it’ll thin out the crowds, make the rest of the walk nice and peaceful.  I can deal.

But soon, I am looking at the telltale veil of grey haziness coming in from the sea. Mans ancient, sunny-go-to-the-beach-ruining foe, rain.

“Crap.” I climb up the bank from the beach to the road, looking to cut across the point, taking a shortcut back to the car. I’m feeling optimistic enough not to just backtrack though, I’ll forge on. Get in one good stretch of beach, and home dry.

“Gah.” I’m actually too far down the point as of yet, there’s a nature reserve fence blocking my way across the center. I’ll have to go a bit further up before going across. Well it’s not raining yet.

“Dammit.” A few more minutes up the road, the 1st inquisitive drop flicks my forehead. “No way man, this doesn’t happen to me, I’m luckier than this.” I think as the rain starts in earnest.I don’t mean generically lucky, in a win the lotto sort of way. But like, Rain lucky. It’s a thing I had. You know, where you get those few spitting drops, but I get under cover, just seconds before the rain gets into the swing of things. Then me and god secretly high five, confirming our arrangement. (Athiests please imagine Santa in place of God, and LAUGH at our primitive belief sets.)

John “Home Dry” Chillemi. That’s they call me, probably. But hey, actually; Ol’ Home Dry has run out of rain-avoiding luck lately.

*** A SEMI-RELATED STORY APPEARS

Hey remember this used to be a travel blog? Well here’s another story from back in Sicily. Getting home from Sicily involves catching a train, from Capo D’Orlando to Rome. The night we were set to leave was stormy early on, but it cleared up nicely by the time we went to wait for the train. Now Capo D’Orlando’s train station has 2 platforms: One main one with all the ameneties you’d expect. Chairs, lights, rooves, and a second, rarely used platform, that is a merciless strip of concrete, with a single light pole under the open sky.

But that’s okay. Platform two has got it’s own thing going on. And I don’t care cos my train is coming in on platform one. 40 minutes late, but platform one nonetheless. Skip forward to 10 minutes before the train arrives, and the announcer chimes in to say our train will actually be coming in on platform two. Hey, that’s fine right platform two? We don’t really talk much, what with me hanging around with the platform one crowd, but we’re cool right?

And yes, we are. For about one minute. Then the rain starts back up. And it gets heavy. Storm heavy. And it’s stand out here and catch the train, or run back under cover and miss the train. So we stand there. Once the announcer sees that we and our baggage are thoroughly soaked, he says “No wait, it’s actually coming in on platform one again now. The good one with a roof.” We drag our luggage back to the other platform, and board the train a minute later. We dry off as best we can and get changed.

Ironically I’m wearing exactly the same clothes at the train station as I am at the beach, a week later getting soaked again. Including my favorite, apparently rain-attracting shirt.

*** ENOUGH OF THIS OTHER STORY HEY BACK TO THE FIRST ONE

So here we are again, stuck in the rain on the beach. I follow the road up, looking for the point near a little boat ramp that I can cut across to the last beach. I’m reasonably soaked by this point, and at least 30 minutes or so from the car. I find a firebreak demolished around the edge of a fence, giving me a shortcut into the boat yard.

In the edge of the boat yard, I cower  under a bunch of trees for a little while, steeling myself to go back into the rain. Nearby there’s a camper van, I eye off for a minute. “Maybe they’re friendly Hippies. With friendly umbrellas. Nobody bad has ever inhabited a white van!” I stare at it a bit longer, but there is no sign of movement, for good or ill, so I go marching down that last stretch of beach.

I walk and peer down to the far end of the beach towards a jetty, the finish line. Normally full of people fishing on the weekend; it’s barren except for two figures. Fishermen, I guess, standing rigid like pillars of justice, unphased by the rain. “Yeah” I thought. “Me and you, fishermen. We know what it’s all about. we’re real men.” We knew Brandy may indeed have been a fine girl, bur our life, our love and our lady was the sea.

We take a moment to mourn the diminishing fineness of girls named after hard liquor, and we get back down to consumating our un-erotic oceanic wedlock. I don’t even know what I’m saying here.

Walk walk walk, rain rain rain. And then I am halfway down the beach. I look back up at those fishermen. So it turns out they were just two exceptionally long poles on the pier. Damn rain mirages. Apparently. Near the jetty however I see there is an actual  family swimming despite the rain, but they came to the beach specifically to get wet. I can’t poesy them up to the status of working class heroes so I can relate myself to them. The fisher-poles however, had nobler ideals.

And finally I am near the end of the beach. The rain has actually calmed a bit, a bunch of actual, non-wooden fishermen are tentatively returning to the jetty. As I casually walk past a flock of gulls, relieved to be on the home stretch. One flaps over me, but is caught by the wind, hovering above my head, cawing. It is when another two join in that I realize they are swooping me. Yep. The parting shot after being rained on for 40 minutes, is being attacked by birds.

I brokenly whisper “Why” to my vengeful Santa-God, and break into a short defeated, drenched fat man run up the beach, out of bird-range, trying to remember if I had absent mindedly murdered an albatross or badmouthed posiedon earlier on in the week. Surprisingly the fishermen don’t seem to see my little jog of shame, or that nature apparently hates me. This is a small kindness, perhaps.

I head up the path to the car. In the car wringing out my socks I notice in my hurry to pick up my coat on the way out of home, I’ve grabbed a shirt at the same time; Of course, it’s the same shirt I changed into on the train. Nice. I change shirts quickly in the car, and drive home in wet pants. Great day.

Yep! It’s been good, but I’m packing this showboat and makin’ like a tree, in a horrible mixed metaphor that will echo through the generations. So how about some bullet points of things I learnt in Italy! Sometimes also pictures. I went to the beach, or something. Also that door photo i’ve been promising all along.

Yep! It’s been good, but I’m packing this showboat and makin’ like a tree, in a horrible mixed metaphor that will echo through the generations. So how about some bullet points of things I learnt in Italy! Sometimes also pictures. I went to the beach, or something. Also that door photo i’ve been promising all along.

Things!

• Here, you deal and play cards in reverse, counter clockwise. They also drive on the wrong side of the road. Perhaps it’s related? Cannot verify if toilet flush is inverted, do not remember how it flushed back home.
• In public bathrooms, you’ll usually see sinks with little foot pedals to run the water faucet, instead of taps. The first time I encountered this involved a frantic 90 minute search for the taps, also waggling my hand furiously around the faucet, attempting to trigger a non-existent infra-red beam. I’m pretty crafty like that.
  

• And of course, the elephant in the room. Specifically the bathroom. This thing! No, I don’t know how it works. I could sort of maybe guess? I considered somehow trying to google it, to make this more fact filled, but I sort of don’t really want to do. These are in bathrooms in houses here sometimes! Yep. Don’t really know what to tell you.
  

• I’ve mentioned Padre Pio, Italy’s totally favourite No. 1 Saint. You’ll find pictures of him everywhere. He is a particular hit for religious calendars and the like. What makes Padre Pio extra great, is his preference for fingerless gloves. And not the hobo woolen variety that I use, like you’d expect. But the biker “I punch dudes all day, and don’t want chapped knuckles cos I moonlight as a hand model” kind. Super great. Picture included for reference!

• So apparently Sicilians eat horse. Found this out the hard way, accidentally ate a slice o’ horsemeat before someone filled me in on what it was. No I didn’t like it. And no, I did not care it is a specific brand of horse bred for eatin’. Horse is not a flavour sensation, as you’d imagine.

• Booze is all over the place here. Every store supermarket and local deli sells it, and it’s reasonably cheap to boot, for example 1 euro local beers in Rome. It’s a culture that drinks often but in moderation.

• Occasionally here, especially when bad weather is expected, the military reads out the weather report. And then they wonder why they lost all those wars.

• Messina, the main port of Sicily, which is the meeting point with the mainland, has been destroyed 2 times in recent history. In 1908, It was hit by an 11 on the ricter scale earthquake, then 8 minutes later, by a tidal wave. Later, during WW2, it was largely bombed to the ground by the Americans. To this day Messina has really strict building laws, with an enforced maximum height of something like 4 stories per building, all and all of them designed to be anti-apocalypse tough. Messina ain’t gonna be snuck up on again, apparently.
• If you’re bored at some point, read up on Italy’s current Prime Minister, Silvio Belesconi. He is pretty corrupt, and his scandals are the wackiest. Wikipedia has split the Trials he has been involved in into a separate article, there are so many. Quality leadership, people.

And now some more trip things.

More needlessly classy panels and the like. Everywhere should be like this! Makes mundane things seem vaguely steampunk. My first impression of this classy hotel/resteraunt thing.

This thing here! Yeah.

How classy? This many stickers classy, to be exact. So classy infact I didn’t really take any photos inside, thus ending this thrilling coverage. The food was pretty good btw.

Then there was this cool olive grove hill, on the way back from the resteraunt. With a cool little water tunnel beneath the winding road up there. So I climbed up to get some photos of it.

And got a whole pile of photos to boot. Pretty chuffed with how these turned out. the 8 days of rain innnarow we endured has really brought all the green of this place bursting to life.

And then some shots of that tunnel thing too. Cool.

But it is probably not smart to go climbing a muddy hill in your classy resteraunt clothes. Hurr!

A nice shot of the views outside another resteraunt (That is apparently all I do), Baia Verde Ristorante, which translates to  Green Bay Resteraunt. Lots of businesses here are something-verde, much like everything in Perth is Swan’s something. No idea why they settled on verde. As can be seen in the above photo, the bay is clearly blue, you Sicilian rubes.

Some sweet old house we saw up in the hills. It’s a ramshackle delight.

Oh yeah, that beach I went to. The beach here is full of rocks! Also some sand, but mostly rocks.

Houses by the beach, if poorly maintained get pretty ravaged by the salt, damp and wind. Another house I was too daft to photograph, had at some point had scaffolding erected around it. They then must have left it too long, because rust fused it all together and is now locked around the house. Nice.

In amongst all the rocks n’ things, You’ll occasionally find chunks of terracotta or green glass, that have been scraped smooth by other rocks. I am perhaps the only person pleased/fascinated by this.

Further up the beach, these classy curved retainer walls stop the ocean crushing the road up above, thwarting the sea’s constant thirst for destruction.

Also they dumped some twisted metal-filled here. I guess they had a good reason for that also, at some point.

Oh man finally, these doors, right. Reinforced as fuck. So on the normal latchy side you’ve got the 5-bar main lock, and two bars of equal thickness, above and below this. Another bar comes out the top of the door, also. With most locks here, you can turn them multiple times, to make them lock more? The front door here can be spun about 6 times, each time making the bars come out about another half inch.

And on the back of the door, another 4 bars that lock into the other side. The idea here is that you’re in an apartment several floors up, the only point of entry, aside from climbing up the side of the building, is the front door. Note also I’m yet to see a non-deadlock here, so even if thieves did come up the side of the building, they’d be unable to open the door unless they found a key. Apparently the way these doors are usually got past is by smashing the wall around them, and yanking the whole doorframe out. Oh also, these doors use sort of big classy key, that makes them extra hard to pick. So they’ve pretty much got all the angles covered.

And there we go!  I thought I was running out of internet time, and smashed out this post in the last half an hour I thought I had, and published it without edits. But it turns out I have another 5 hours! Who knew. So anyway this is probably my last post from Italy, i’m jumping on a train to Rome tonight, and hopping on a plane tomorrow. I might put up some other tidbits when I am at home, such as the creepy robotic-gollum voice of the fruit merchant who trucks around our neighbourhood, and a few extra photos I have been too lazy to work in. Well anyway thanks again! Cya’lls when I get back in Perth I guess!