A month on a Tuscan hill

The idea of eight weeks at summer camp was daunting even before it began.  Even though I’d done it before, I was aware that it takes a certain type of person to deal with the daily ups and downs of children; in particular, a certain willingness to leave the corners of your adult world behind.  I knew it was possible for me to re-enter this world, but I was feeling painfully aware that I’d been living in a ‘normal’ life for the past six months, during which time I’d more than once felt the absence of creativity or spontaneity.

I “got it” during week five and from that point had a lot more fun being in the childrens’ sphere, as I’d finally re-learned to play.  Though hugely creative and willing to be imaginative, kids and adolescents feel everything very deeply, in a way that is easy to forget you once did too…and the change from seeing them as mini people rather than odd aliens can only be made when you are willing to remember what it was like being knee high to a grasshopper, or gangly of limbs and angry of mind.  Or at least, to be able to acknowledge that this is how they feel.

My first four weeks of camp were held in an 18th Century villa in Tuscany, near the recreational town of Cortona, in the midst of land valued more for its Etruscan artifacts than ability to deal with the dramasa of 68 children as they navigate life, love and the English language.

Who's got a spare house in Tuscany for me?

The villa’s owner, Angelo, was an Italian in his late 50’s, suitably potted of belly as Italians over the age of 40 tend to be.  He ran the villa with his much younger Ukranian wife, Julia (not quite sure how they got together) and three Romanian staff.  Legend has it that Angelo’s first two weeks “at camp” were lovely, and he overly jovial.  However by the time I arrived with the second lot of children (and 50% more than last time), his patience had suffered several blows and he was no longer the bouncy Santa Claus of old.  Perhaps he’d realised that no monetary benefits could balance out the insanity of agreeing to house 68 kids and teens in a villa more fit for yuppie honeymooners and business gatherings.  Such an undertaking was not a recipe for perfect paintwork and unbroken cups, after all.

While the reaction to some instances was an overreaction at best, that to others was not.  Two terror children resided at camp, and all events of a slightly more insane and less forgiving nature could always at some level be accredited to them.  Antonio and Fabio were two 14 year old Romans; big, strong and proud.  Antonio had a case of ADD to complement his already impulsive manner, and Fabio was the regional director’s son…two elements that would prove their exploits to be particularly innovative, and them difficult to get a confession out of, or punish when caught.

Antonio was in my class, and was the sort of student who either looked at you blankly, or with a glint of madness in the eye (depending on how stupid or ridiculous he currently felt in class).  At 14, he was years older and levels below than most of my students, a fact that was made painfully obvious as he flopped unskillfully through the classwork, or devised more and more ingenious ways to leave the room without permission.  I was always incredibly happy to see him go at 12.15, so as to be able to spend the rest of the day watching him scathingly from afar as he ran amok, eluding all attempts to pull him in and supposedly planning his next adventure with Fabio. Some trouble of note that the boys got into included almost setting fire to their room by placing a towel-covered fan on the hot stove in their kitchenette (why two such Romani brats were granted a stove in the first place remains to be answered) and throwing mini fire crackers out of their bedroom window.  The latter offence scored Angelo a visit from the police, as a similar incident a month earlier had destroyed a field of wheat before landing two other boys in juevenile detention.  Angelo was not impressed, and the boys were barely punished.  “They’re only children,” said the heavily-biased regional director, before adding “And look how beautiful they are.”

Such behaviour from the children could be accredited to dud genes, or the excitement of being away at camp.  But I had it on good authority that Italian kids are this way because of their parents.  Now, of course, not all go about setting fire to other people’s belongings, nor feeling lax about their ability to set fire to a staple crop…but they were almost without exception, more quick to talk back than other children I’d known, and less willing to clean, help and tidy.

This was seen most readily during mealtimes.  Food at the villa was simple, good and almost entirely devoid of vegetable product (the teachers, suffering from violent constipation, had to specially request a plate of something derived from the earth at each meal).  But most importantly – and alarmingly – it was served to the children in a three course procession, during which they needed to do nothing except sit and watch the plates come and go.  “Say thank you!”  we reminded the multiple offenders, but it did no good.  Very rarely did you see them thank the wait staff, and even fewer times did they spontaneously stack their dishes to ease the staff’s workload.  It’s not difficult to imagine that this is how their lives are at home.  Food comes and goes, help is begrudgingly given when asked for.

From observing two groups of children and teens over this one month period, it seems that Italian children grow up quicker than other nationalities, and learn how to be “adult”.  Not necessarily responsible adults, mind.  But “adult” in the sense of learning how to deal with the opposite sex, however obviously.  Perhaps it’s the influence of the Mediterranean, the sureness that the sea and sun are only a couple of hours away at any point.  Or, maybe it’s the culture of fashion awareness, of Gucci and friends permeating thorugh their lives.  Regardless, flirting must be a subject taught at school.  One such student, Daniela, had man-hunting down to an art.  And she was only 12.

Daniela and two male friends arrived in my group on the first day of camp, and were so adjoined at the hip that I had to ask if her if they were old childhood friends. “No, I meet they on bus yesterday,” I was informed.  Right. No big deal, really.  A girl can certainly have a few guy friends.  But it soon became clear that she was enjoying an intricate game of being both cat and mouse for these boys.  Daniela had woven a situation in which she was never far from either, sitting on either one’s lap, sometimes while giving another a head massage or calling out to which ever wasn’t currently with her.  Not that she was often with only one of them.  And never with another girl.  Their presence as a threesome, and their fashion choices were so amusing and obvious, that they were soon dubbed Aber, Crombie and Fitch. Fitch was also in my class, and as neither of her men were there with her, she’d enlisted the platonic help of another boy, Andrea, with whom she seemed to get on with splendidly.  Andrea, it seemed, was not interested in Fitch.  Aber and Crombie would have all the Fitch they wanted, or at least, half each.  Why they were both so unwilling to back down was something which we teachers wondered daily.  If a friend of yours so obviously likes someone that you do too, don’t you kinda sorta back off (after having discussed whose 12 and 13 year old love was purer, perhaps?)  But it was a battle to the end, and all tension escalated on pool afternoons.

Fitch felt the need to shower more than the average student before being playfully pushed into the pool, and she’d happily drag one of her admirers in with her to rinse off.  Happily, her bikini top would often come a little loose at the back, and she’d need help to have that tied up.  Or her towel would inexplicably fall off.  Or, maybe her ice cream would need a long lick to clean up all that unruly trail of vanilla heading down her arm.  Towards the end of camp, once Andrea had been roped in to the fun as well, Crombie – under questioning – admitted that “She told us yesterday that we are all just friends”.  Good thing.  She’d be a lot for even four men to handle.  And good luck to her.  At the rate she’s going, she’ll need it.

The set for our first production of Grease

Adolescent delinquents and teenage love foursomes aside, Italian camps were certainly memorable, if not almost completely lacking in vegetable matter.  Once Grease the musical had been choreographed (read, the kids had been forced to enjoy themselves while doing it), Daniela’s bikini top had been secured, sobbing homesickness was over for the moment and the outrageous seven year old had stopped asking to see the “porn” on his roomate’s mobile phones; lunch time wine drinking under the Tuscan sun was an agreeable way to spend part of a summer…especially if when you didn’t have to watch a field of wheat blaze beneath you, and two teenage boys skipping off into the sunset, fire crackers in hand.

Notes from a sticky keypad. As in, the keys stick.

19:08 (like in the army)
 
There have been two weeks spent in our fair (pentagonal shaped?) land near France.  I am finally housed, temporarily though gratefully in a little flat decorated so as to embrace everything that should have been forgotten about the seventies.  I share this mission brown heaven with a nervous Peruvian and his more arrogant but thankfully more absent friend.  Each morning, I am greeted by the former wanting to talk and talk and talk.  At this point, clad only in pjs and the sleep from my eyes, I want nothing more than to shuffle past him and splash some overly calcified tap water onto my face…but he’s just so ‘i want to learn English’ that this is nearly impossible!  Unfortunately, it’s hard to answer his questions, and he doesn’t really understand mine…so our is a mutually unbeneficial relationship.
 
Before I was employed and housed, I walked everywhere and saved on food (and health) by surviving on pasta, tinned tomatos and the included breakfast of white bread and cake (yes) at my hostel.  Now that both issues have been rectified, I can afford the metro, and so no longer fall out of my skinny jeans with each step (though part of me found that mildly enjoyable!).  So while I have yet cooked only one decent meal during my stay here, I have been kept fed due to the fact that my work backs onto a Subway store which is under the same management.  I am averaging 2m of sandwhich per week.  A statistic that both pleases and disgusts me.
 
Employment has it’s benefits as follows:
* i get to enjoy the fact that blonde hair is a relative novelty in Spain
* i now mildly understand the rules of rugby
* the blank, non-English speaking cook gives me lessons in loosing my ‘whitest girl on earth reputation’ via handshakes and Spanish ‘wat up dawg’ style gibberish
* i can rank the world’s nationalities in terms of rudeness (surprisingly, Ireland needs to work harder)
* there is a motorbike above the bar, which causes me great amusement
* the look from people when I tell them I’m Australian and the never failing ‘why are you here?’ that follows is even more amusing
 
And negatives.
* i certainly cannot carry a platter laden with four plates atop my shoulder while effectively unfolding a serving table without causing serious alarm and possible arrest
* i have to wear an unattractive t shirt
 
All is well in this land.  Dogs run free on the metro, human castles and street-long fire fights are staged to celebrate local saints’ days, girls have shaven mullets, verbs are conjugated 18 different ways and the change in temperature (I can only imagine) has caused a 10c piece sized section of skin on my right shoulder to scab, heal and rescab with rampant abandon.
 
I hope you are chirpy and delicious.

Hi Thailand…

Our Boeing was delightfully Austin Powers themed.  The colour-coordinated mania began when we were handed our fuschia and purple boarding passes and opened into a sort of crazed hysteria when the cabin was revealed.  Each seat was either pink, yellow or dark purple and patterned in different variations of stripes, swirls or spots.  Even the passenger blankets and tray tables were bright purple.  The whole thing was delightful – and appealed to my inner six year old, and worryingly, my awareness of it’s comparison to a cheesy porn flick.

When we arrived in Bangkok Airport – newly renovated for our traveling pleasure – I quickly found out that the mass hysteria my friends and family had put me through with regards to prescription drugs was entirely unwarranted.  Before leaving, I had visited our family doctor, and had her write me letters excusing my possession of all manner of perfectly normal medication; paracetomol, antibiotics and The Pill included.  Having passed through preliminary customs, I solemnly took out my little medicine pouch and attached letters, and waited in line for a small Thai man to receive me.  He took one look at me, asked if the medication was for myself, and upon my earnest affirmative answer, waved me through.  It seemed I could easily have had crack cocaine in there “…for myself,” and confidently sauntered on by.

After taking an unmarked mini van to our hotel (which was apparently the professional transport we had booked from home) we had our first experience with both hand waving and verbally emphatic communication with non-English speakers, and using a toilet-shower.  Toilet-showers, for those accustomed to life at home, are rooms little bigger than a cubicle, with a shower head pointing at a small floor drain in one corner, a toilet bowel, sink and open-topped bin for used toilet paper in the other.  Showering without flooding the room and drowning yourself is a challenging, as is using a toilet slippery from the previous person’s attempt at not flooding the room and drowning themselves.  It is basically a wet room for rinsing and shitting.  This, coupled with our thirsty initiation into not being able to drink tap water (via discovery of complimentary water on our bedside table) was a lot to take at 1am…particularly as we had to be up again at 5:30am to catch a bus back to the airport for our flight to Phuket.  And so we slept.

At 4:30am, we received a call from reception.  Our bus was an hour early.  Time to leave.  Again shuffled into an unmarked vehicle – this time a small car, the whole thing would have been stupidly suss had it not been for the logo-ed tee shirts – we took to the roads to discover many things:  traffic lights in Thailand are governed by a countdown timer system (telling drivers how long they have to wait for the green light), taxis come in all flavours of the Starburst rainbow, and dogs sit nonchalantly on the road and do not move for anyone, not even a lime green taxi.  The driver’s companion began giving us a lesson in Thai, the basic premise of which was to elongate your vowels to a huge extent (“Sawasdee-kaaaaaaaaaaa”) and then laughing at us as we tried!

We spent our morning in an airport gate which looked like a steel ribcage, which became more friendly as the sun rose behind it.  Gradually, people began arriving around us:  couples sleeping their last few minutes entwined in airport seats, one family with small children, some older couples, and a group of 20 something guys (“Douches!” said Anita) exclaiming delightedly over an article entitled 2007 Sex Diaries via the FHM bible.  7:30am is too early for that.

We were in Phuket by lunchtime, and in our room by 1.  We were beginning to become accustomed to people expecting us everywhere (“Miss Walton?”) and to the knowledge that we were too chicken to ride a motorbike taxi, though it looked cheaper and far more thrilling than the unmarked cars we were now catching on a regular basis.  Having arrived in our new rooms, had the shower (in a shower box, you know, like you have at home!) we’d craved for 36 hours, we unpacked our things on our beds and discovered the sheer amount of clothing we had brought.  And how much we’d matched our individual wardrobes without even meaning to.  And – how different our things were.  I had brought all earth tones, and Anita had stocked up on candy pinks and sea greens.  Perhaps excited by the opportunities for clothes swapping and makeovers awaiting us, she then unwrapped her toiletries bag to reveal a shining pair of scissors, “We can use these scissors if we want to cut our hair too!”

After spending a good half hour trying to rig a clothes line (feeling responsible, I had brought string) and washing clothes with shampoo in the sink, we headed out to Patong Beach.

A week later, we’ve completely left the island parts and are now well and truely on the mainland, heading up to hotter and hotter country.  Last week we moved from Samui to Phagnan – the land of the Full Moon parties – where we stayed for four days in a prison cell.  I made the mistake of launching myself at my bed when I first saw it (as it was a double, and I was excited!) and pretty much ended up with a cracked arse and compressed spine because the mattress was a rock.  The room was desolate and cold and 20 metres from a Pink Lady Bar from where we could hear tinkling female Thai laughter and manly grunts all night long.  Our shack was so…words fail me…that if a crazed murderer had barged through our door in the wee hours brandishing something heinous, I would have just thought “…Yeah, we’ve been expecting you,” and gone back to sleep.

But we loved Phagnan.  We weren’t there for a full moon, but caught a Half Moon party which was really fun.  And funny!  Just a great big bush doof with ye olde fluro decorations, black lights and blissed out podium dancers.  Just days before the party, we’d braved our fear of taxi motorbikes one night when the taxi buses wouldn’t take us home for more than 600B…and after we’d stormed off in a bitchy huff, this random crazy-eyed Thai boy chased after us on his little bike and told us he’d take us both.  We were such girls, making him show us his taxi licence (as he really could have looked more sober) and why his skills on a bike should stretch to dinking two girls.  In the end, we stopped squealing with fright – and yes, excitement – and loved the ride over the mountain.  It’s a bloody trecherous road, full of blind corners and huge hills that rise and fall out of nowhere and convienently sit right on a cliff.  The cars have to beep twice when they’re going over a hill, as zippy little bikes coming from the other side are fond of overtaking and have no idea who’s coming the other way.  Or if it’s going to be a semi trailer that greets them.

We also went through Angthong, a series of 40 odd rocky gorgeous mountains and islands with little inlets and caves.  It’s the kind of stuff that apparently inspired The Beach(Oh Leo, you were cute once) and it’s absolutely stunning.  We were on a day trip which other than us was made up of a tribe of Bulgarians:  tanned, anorexically thin, G-string clad girls and their fat, hairy men.  It’s certainly a sight to see a bobbing G-stringed arse climbing up a steep mountain a metre from your face.

Yesterday we braved a 17 hour boat/bus trip to get to Bangkok where we stayed for a day and a night before starting our tour this morning.  The tour group’s really good – everyone’s under 26 and fun so it should be a really good time.  Our leader’s name is Dream.  Yep.  I know.

I heart Bangkok.  It’s amazing.  Thrilling.  You escape death every few seconds as tuk tuks and mad 12 year olds on motorbikes drive (or rather, fly at the speed of light) past you.  I have never seen so much food and had no idea what it actually is.  The shopping is dirt cheap – finally!!!  And the place is teeming with ridiculously attractive tourists, often with ridiculously attractive accents.

Roadside medicine

Living in Barcelona means many things.  Being amazed everytime you look at the Sagrada Familia.  Sitting in plazas nursing a coffee and laughing at the tourists who continually fall down what to you is a very obvious  stone step.  Being chastised for beginning a night out at the ungodly early hour of 1am.  Watching old men ride bikes while smoking cigars.  Speaking Spanish.  Mildly understanding Catalan.  Living near mountain and sea.

Ultimately, however, it means becoming accustomed to being harassed in the street by night.  Or day.  Or twilight.  It means walking along with you bag under your jacket and your bank card stuffed down your bra (the theory being that you would surely notice if someone stole it from there!).  It means listening to the *ppsssssssttt* sound that emits from the mouths nearby leering street urchins (a sound which apparently is translates as ’Hi obviously naive foreigner, why don’t you come and talk to us a bit?’, but really, just sounds like someone rudely calling their dog to them).

Last night, on the way to meet a friend, I experienced one such – mild – encounter.  A car, slowing down beside me, and the driver emiting the now well-known chalkboard-scraping *pppsssstttt*.  I ignored him.  A further *ppsssssstttt* combined with an ‘Oye!’ made me turn to see what was up with this dude.  The Colombian, as I believe him to have been, wanted directions to Plaza del Sol; a plaza which any idiot, no matter how drunk, or how new to Barcelona, would know wasn’t in El Raval.  He seemed unimpressed that I couldn’t direct him through this suburb very well, as the streets are mostly one-way’ and dismissed my directions from the main road completely.  He wanted, it seemed, to talk about my eyes.

‘And so…go along that road and ask someone there for…’

‘Yeah, yeah.  Do you know what?  Your eyes are full of negative energy.’

I look at him incredulously.  I was in the middle of negotiating direction-giving in Spanish, which is something that I should never be trusted to do in English.

‘Oh yes?’

‘Yeah, the white part isn’t clear.  It’s not clean.  It’s full of negative energy, it’s really bad.’

‘Well, that’s just excellent for me then isn’t it?’

It was clear that he didn’t get sarcasm.  He looked at me blankly.  A little maliciously.

‘I was in Brazil, they taught me how to recognise and clear negative energy.  And yours is terrible’

It was my time to look at him blankly.  Even a little maliciously.  Of ourse I didn’t look like a bowl of icecream.  I was talking to a weirdo alone at 11pm, hands gripping my bag lest he grab it and speed off.

‘I’ll do it for you.’

‘Ahhh.  No thanks.’

‘Why not?  Nothing weird.  You did me a favour, and I could return it…’

I was already walking away….

This isn’t much, but did make me question the motives of road side medicine men in general.  In Thailand several years ago, I was travelling with a friend when we came across a small, tanned, leathery fellow in Koh Phangnan.  This island, famed for the monthly Moon Festival, is a veritable mixed bag of odd sorts, and so the site of this guy wasn’t anything particularly special.  However, his brand of introduction was.

He was, it seemed, a medicine man.  The details elude me somewhat (I had participated in a vodka bucket or two before meeting him, and years have passed since), but the essence was that he was able to remove bad spirits and energy from people.  A lengthy sort of self-promotion followed, through which we learned that he had a room (I guess we could call it a practice) conveniently nearby.  Ahhh.  No thanks.  We were far from home, counting our little bahts and not willing to spend then on the questionable skills of a leathery medicine man sitting on a rock in downtown Koh Phagnan.

Fast forward a week.  Anita and I had met the group we’d be travelling to the Golden Triangle with, and are enjoying our obiligatory pre-journey bonding party night on Bangkok’s Khaosan Road…when who do we run into, but Mr Medicine.  While our new friends wait nearby, we ask him a few questions of the small-talk variety ‘How’d you get here so fast?’ ‘Why are you here?’ ’Where’d you get that tasty looking fried banana dessert you’re holding?’.  Soon however, he steers the conversation towards his profession, and almost before we’d had a moment to digest what he’s saying, let alone reply, he’d offered us a free mini-on-the-spot-bad-spirit-removal-test, lept over, clamped his mouth over mine and proceeded to suck an entire lungful of air out of my pulmonaries.  A 3-second eternity later, with the leathery man removed, I was left to recompensate my breathlessness (literally), by quickly breathing in a mouthful of sooty Thai air.  The next two minutes alerted us to the fact that the rest of his treatments occured in private, and would involve not only clothing removal, but the placement of withered hands in areas where the sun doesn’t shine .  A German lady had thoroughly enjoyed his treatment, we were assured.

We declined.

We never saw him again, though if he did managed to suck anything evil out of my lungs, I’d like a word or two with it…

Weather patterns and SMSs

It´s been a week since I arrived back in Barcelona, and I can finally almost claim competence in the art of rugging one’s self up against the cold.  Though I don’t do it as well as the almost spherical pidgeons (so fluffed up are they) that I walk past each day, I can now leave my front door without immediately gasping and hopping straight back over the threshold, ice-block hands sheltering in my satchel.  I arrived back to a naked city (in the sense of course of leafless trees rather than clothesless people!) whose criss-crossed streets seemed suddenly wider, pinker, emptier, after having been stripped of the canopies provided by their avenues of straight trees.

After the culture-slamming shock of exchanging 35 degree humidity and broad Australian accents for 8 degrees and a reminder that I would have to work on my Spanish, I retreated indoors for a day or two to recover from jetlag and psych myself up for the job hunt that promised to chase my curriculum-laden self through the streets for the next few weeks.  This served my need for rest well, and many an odd dream played through my mind…but upon awakening, my status as an informed citizen of the city proved somewhat questionable.  Having emerged bleary-eyed from my hibernation, I was rather embarassed to discover the extent of my ignorance regarding the wretched weather Barcelona – or really, Spain – had been suffering…and will here admit that yes, I was actually informed of the howling gale outside my window not by my own eyes, no, but by an sms sent to me by my father in Australia.  I was sleeping deeply you see, and sleeping deeply is something that I do very, very well.  Very well.  In normal circumstances; let alone flying and waiting and eating and scratching and stretching on delayed flights for 45 hours straight.  I returned said sms with another, whose relaxed air (‘yes, of course, the weather’s fine, no i’m not hurt, why should I be?’) breathed a sort of  confused, yet nonchalant unflappability which continued until I turned on the news that night to learn that four children outside the city had died when the small stadium in which they were playing baseball in fell on them under the pressing magnitude of 200km/hr winds.

This is a city in which it’s easy to forget ones self …never more so than when you have just arrived back in it.  It’s an anthill, a rabbit warren in those images’ realest sense.  A seething mass of humanity surviving, sometimes only just, in a series of vastly different, yet strangely identical neighbourhoods.  Tiny streets divide crumbling buildings upon which precariously pegged fluroescent washing hangs on for dear life.  Old ladies walk in twos, the same fur coats and slash of red lipstick that once attracted their long dead husbands still adorning their faces and bodies as they did 50 years ago.  The language is screamed, shot out of mouths like metallic, verbal bullets.  Bottles of beer sit finished upon terrace tables at 8am, not from the night before, but from the morning just entered.  I’ve returned, but it seems that my physical self, or my…something…is still following me; perhaps still sitting, waiting and wondering on the 6 hour delayed flight that brought the rest of me here.  I hope that it – whatever it is that is yet to arrive - is making itself at home on that plane: ordering itself another (this time unecessary) bottle of sparkling, going nuts with its teeny-tiny personal television and laughing quietly at the compartmentalised dinner it’s being served…because when it arrives here…I’m going to need it shiny, polished, glittery golden and ready to go.