La Pictureless Puglia

I unfortunately have to begin this blog on a somewhat tragic note: I accidentally deleted all of the pictures from my trip to Puglia. I've never been a "fan," per se, of digital photography... but now I've just had it. This is the universe's way of telling me that I need to go back to film.

On a lighter note, I had an amazing time this week! For those of you who don't know, Puglia is one of most southern regions of Italy. If you think of Italy as a boot, it would be the heel.

On Saturday morning, Kat, her brother and I caught a flight into Bari which is the biggest city in Puglia - but since we had trouble finding couchsurfing there, we headed straight to the more southern city of Lecce and met up with our host Luigi. He actually goes by Gigi, which is a pretty good indicator of his personality. We had a great time hanging out with him and he was an amazing host. On our first night there, he took us to a beautiful medieval town called Otranto for dinner. It was an amazing city, surrounded by huge stone walls which made it seem like we were walking into a castle. I think there was some sort of festival going on because there were actually men dressed as knights standing at the gates to the city!

Dinner was amazing, delicious seafood which had probably been caught just that morning. Puglia is almost completely surrounded by the sea so it's known for its incredibly fresh seafood. Mmm. We also got to meet Gigi's friends, whom we ended up spending quite a bit of time with.

On our second day in Lecce, we spent the day on the beach at Porto Cesareo, where Gigi's family has a beach house. Just like the house where I stayed in Sicily, this beach house was only about a 20 minute drive from the regular house. I think it really says something about Southern Italians - they can't stand to be 20 minutes from the beach. No wonder they're all so relaxed.

Porto Cesareo is arguably the most beautiful beach in all of Italy. The water is so clear that when even at waist-level I was able to make out individual grains of white sand on the sea floor. There were also teeny little crabs scuttling around, which Gigi's girlfriend informed me are actually a specialty.

We spent the evening wandering around downtown Lecce, which is also a very beautiful city with beautiful Baroque architecture and wide cobblestone streets. We happened to run into two of Gigi's friends and they took us to the bar with the "best mojitos in Puglia". While talking over our amazing mojitos, I couldn't remember the word for octopus (polipo) which had come up in conversation for whatever reason. I tried to explain and said "you know, that animal with 8 legs that lives in the ocean." I didn't know the word for tentacles and the Italians started making fun of me. So, I jokingly made up an excuse for my error... which led to the following ridiculous conversation (all in Italian). For simplicity's sake, I'll clump my two Italian friends into one Italian entity known as "Them."

Them: Silly American, polipi don't have legs, they have tentacles!
Me: Yeah, I know (a little embarassed)... but you know why I said "legs" instead of "tentacles" don't you?
Them: No, why?
Me: (completely joking) Well, see, in America there's this disease which some people have... it causes them to have tentacles instead of legs...
*Italians grow wide-eyed*
Me: ...and since we don't want to offend anyone, it's more polite to say "legs" instead of "tentacles." I mean, we don't want to rub it in their face, do we? It's important to be politically correct.
Them: Yeah, I guess that makes sense, but... what is this disease? I've never heard of it! There are actually people with tentacles in the United States?
(The Italians didn't actually believe me - they just thought that I didn't understand what I was saying, being a stupid American and all. It never occurred to them that I might be pulling their tentacles. Ha, ha, ha...)
Me: Yeah but we don't really talk about it, that's why I said legs. By now it's just habit.
Them: Um, okay, but is this disease pretty common? What are the other symptoms? (Trying to figure out what I'm actually talking about without making it obvious that I'm talking nonsense - a face I was quite aware of)
Me: It's not too common, I mean about 1 in 20 people have it. Most of them stay at home though, or travel in packs, they don't really like to be singled out for their tentacles. That's really the only symptom but I've heard of some of them having some pretty severe social disorders. I'm sure you can imagine.
Them: Yeah, yeah we can imagine... (Still wondering what I think I'm saying) Well... does it run in families? Do your parents have it? Do you have it?
Me: Ummm... don't you think you'd see them?
Them: *nervous laughter, realizing I might actually be talking about tentacles after all* Yeah, yeah I guess we would. What about your parents?
Me: Well my dad doesn't have them - my mom does but it's actually sort different because she's a hybrid. She only has 4 tentacles and then one normal leg.
Them: WHAT?
Me: Yeah, it's not too bad but sometimes she has some balance issues.

Eventually the Italians realized that I was kidding... but for a while they were unsure. They thought that either there were octopus-people roaming the streets of San Francisco or that I had no idea what I was talking about. For some reason they trusted that I would never lie to them, which actually made me feel kind of bad about the whole thing... or at least it would have, if it hadn't been so damn funny.

We hung out a few more times over the course of the trip, but our conversations were never quite as interesting...

My favorite city that we went to in Puglia was probably Gallipoli. It's a beautiful city which is almost completely surrounded by water - there's just a narrow strip of land connecting it to the rest of Puglia. We arrived there during the afternoon when everyone was taking their nap (mid-afternoon nap is an extremely important ritual to Italians) so we just wandered around the silent town for a few hours. As we were standing in front of the town's cathedral, Kat said "hey guys, listen to that." Her brother and I stopped talking and realized that everything was completely silent - we could just barely hear the waves off in the distance but it seemed like the entire town was deserted. Silence is a very rare thing to find in the center of an Italian city. Even in the smaller villages, there's usually at least one grumpy old man shouting at pigeons or some teenager attempting a wheelie on his vespa and cheering if he succeeds or cursing if he fails... Anyway, it was nice to have a quiet moment.

We stopped for lunch at a tiny little restaurant right above the beach and shared a delicious seafood platter, sat for a while and enjoyed the view - I think at this point the sleepiness of the town caught on and after lunch, I actually fell asleep on a bench in a nearby piazza. It was funny because I woke up to a group of old ladies watching me curiously. One of them said "what is she doing, is she sleeping?" Another responded "I think she's just getting some sun" at which point I looked over at them and they realized I could hear and understand them. They weren't too phased by it and sat down at the bench next to me where they continued gossiping. (Gossiping - another important Italian ritual, especially among older individuals).

After Gallipoli we went to another interesting town called "Alberobello" which translates literally as "pretty tree." I was expecting to see a pretty tree, but was disappointed to find that the town is actually known best for its architecture, which for some reason reminded me of an Ewok village (maybe after they evolved a few centuries and moved a few galaxies, yes I'm an enormous nerd). The buildings have cone-shaped brick roofs, some of which have symbols painted on them. Here's a picture, courtesy of Google:

The town is actually a World Heritage site, which basically means that a committee decided that it's especially culturally significant. It's kind of a funny concept in Italy because just about everything is culturally significant...

We spent our last night in Bari where we couch-surfed with a great guy named Simone. He took us on a nighttime tour of the city and we grabbed a quick dinner before going to sleep. We were actually only in Bari for 10 hours so I don't have too much to say about it... I guess I'll just have to go back and get a better idea of what it's like!

Well, that's about all there is to say about Puglia. It's too bad about the pictures but hopefully I'll be able to steal some from Kat one of these days.

Next stop: in approximately 35 minutes I'll be leaving for Morocco!