I've been here for three weeks, and this is my first time picking up a pen and paper. I'm fucking bored. Sitting on my balcony sick as a dog and smoking a butt. the first two weeks were fun. I mean as fun s it could be in a town with only ten thousand people.
It was great for the first three or four nights, hanging out with all my friends and getting smashed, and when i say smashed i mean completely and totally inebriated.
After the first week i was kind of getting tired of hanging around the same people, day in and day out. Watching everyone making fools out of themselves at ALAMA (a school we attended while we were there). I hate looking like a foreigner or a tourist and most my classmates were like a big tourist magnet. I escaped every time I could to experience the real Italy, not the tourist Italy.
I remember one night meeting these local skater punk rocker kids. I was wearing m Lagwagon hoody and these kids spotted me out. I ended hanging out with them a couple times. One night i was in the piazza just hanging out with my friend, drinking some wine when one of the skater kids comes up to me and invites us to a house party. I obviously said yes and finished my bottle of wine and headed into the "Nekrocar", or so they called it. We headed to a house in the sticks where they had a local band doing covers of all my favorite punk songs. It was a lot of fun, and a lot of craziness. Naked men floor punching and really really fast punk rock. We headed to a local pub after, something I noticed in Italy is they don't sell pints, they sell litres. I must have drank four to five litres of beer that night. I don't remember how I got home, I just know that i did.
For the second week we did a lot of touring. We went to Tuscany for to see how wine is made from grape to bottle. It was really amazing there because not only did this vineyard make wine but they also made olive oil! Watching this giant stone wheel just completely pulverize these olives and extract the oil was amazing.
We also went to a restaurant/prosciutto farm to see how this chef raised, slaughtered and cured his own hams for prosciutto. It was incredible, I can still smell those legs, the slat, the pepper. Later that day we had the honor of enjoying some of is cured meats in his two Michelin star restaurant "Il Cavalino Bianco".
The week passed and we all headed for our placements. I was placed in Puglia. A region on the heel of Italy, I was the only one that far south. Most of my classmates were placed in Parma.
It was Monday morning and I left Cassalmaggiore at 8:30 and arrived in Parma train station at 9:00. I shook Chef Zambottis hand and off I was to the biggest train hub in Italy..... Bologna.
The train station in Bologna is humongous! I have never been in a train station before, not even in Canada, so you can probably guess how confusing it would be for someone who has never been in a train station before, never mind a foreign one.
I must have asked four or five different people where my train would be, I must have climbed four flights of stairs. I know it doesn't sound like much, but when your carrying two suitcases weighing a little over fifty pounds each, and a back pack weighing about fifteen. It was quit a trek.
I finally get to my track. I waited exactly two minutes before my train got to my platform only to realize that I was standing a carriage number three, and I was seated on carriage number twelve!
"Oh Shit!" i thought to myself. I booked it. I was running as fast as my chubby legs could take me, pushing one of my suitcases in front of me and pulling the other one.
They sound the whistle, fifteen seconds before they close the doors, I look to my right and see I am just passing carriage eleven. Five seconds left. I reach carriage twelve, my carriage twelve. My legs are trembling, I'm so out of shape, I throw one suitcase on the train, the hissing sounds of the hydraulics let me know that they are about to close the doors. I chuck my second suitcase on and throw myself right after it, the doors just closing behind me.
It is now 9:00 and i finally reach my destination, Brindisi. I get off the train and smell the crisp sea air. I pull my suitcases off the train. I walk around to the front of the station and looked around me. The city looked old. I mean, really old. Like there was a story to be told but no one could remember it except for the cobble stone road. Houses that were once white now stained yellow with age.
I throw a cigarette in my mouth, light it up, and inhale. My first cigarette in twelve and a half hours. I could feel the smoke enter into my lungs and caress them. The nicotine rushing through my veins like a thousand Ferrari's racing on the highway. I exhale.
"When you get to Brindisi, call your chef and she will pick you up from the station." That is hat chef Zambotti had told me. He was the coordinator of the program I was in that sent us to Italy. He looked after us like we were his own.
I reach into my pocket and pull out my cell phone, and a piece of paper with my chefs name and number on it. I dial.
"Pronto," she says. I begin to speak to her in my broken Italian. I tell her who I am and that I am at the train station ready to get picked up.
There is a pause. "Uh-oh," I think to myself. As it turns out there was a mix-up at the school ALMA.
ALMA had told me to go to Brindisi on Monday, but they told my chef that I would be there on Tuesday.
I was pissed, "What am I gonna do? Where am I gonna stay?" I start to panic and light another cigarette without even realizing it. But she was calm and her voice was re-assuring that everything would be OK.
Ten minutes later her husband, Vinod. Very nice guy. He helped me throw my suitcases in his trunk and we were off. We got to the restaurant/home of the chef and her family. Vinod showed me to where I would be staying. It was a little hut that the call a trullo.
Then it hit me, like a Mack truck hitting a moose, I was alone. Although I missed everyone, the person I thought of most was Daniela. My girlfriend that I left in Toronto.
I call her up. It was so nice to hear her voice, mine was cracking like a 15 year old boy. We talked for about four minutes before I ran out of minutes on my phone. But four minutes that I got to talk to her were enough to make me sleep easy.
There really isn't much more to talk about. I slept pretty much all of Tuesday, and then from Wednesday through until Sunday i worked.
I have lost about five pounds and i hope to lose a couple more. My recipe book is actually filling up.
That's about it for now. I think I will go out for one more smoke and then watch infomercials until i pass out.
