A Glimpse of Cagliari

“Once my father gave me a necklace with a ship’s steering Wheel. It was one trinklet, he must have got it in a Chinese shop. It was some cheap pendant, but twenty five years later, I discovered it was a metaphor, so I felt compelled to write a song about it.”

I don’t even know what I’m doing in this underground club of independent artist, but I’m here, listening to all in Italian and trying to understand how this guy just sang a song about poo that ended up with a message about human feelings.

Such are the sights of Cagliari. My friend Claudia was telling me the story of this guy who stands at the exit of the docs when the tourist season is at its best. He just stays there and asks for money for him and his pets, a bunch of kittens now laying on his feet on a box, kittens that are cuddling with about three times their number of white mice, all of them sleeping in perfect harmony. Claudia tells me the trick: the animals are drugged enough to be sleepy, still the guys pulls the trick on many tourists who believed he was a kind soul that solved the enmity of two species with love.

Such are the stories of Cagliary. Here, I can speak to a security guard to get entrance to an exportation dock, and he allows it by just trusting me. Here I lost my phone and got it back from the bar staff a few days after. Here I go to class with two classmates from Pakistan who later go their parents’ shop to help out in the family business. I’m in a city in which my bubble speaks English all day, but when they go to sleep the rest of the world keeps on going in a romance language.

Such is the magic the foreigner gets in Cagliari. However, what we get is the rumor of it. This beautiful city, far from being a stage of elaborated and simple everyday plays as I first thought of it, has a beautiful spirit that comes from its everything. I’ve fallen not only in an old city one third castle-one third fortress-one third chaos. I’m tangled now in a beautiful lifestyle that weaves itself around food,  drink, chatter, and wonderful social conventions that demand to be followed.

I’m tempted to go outside and eat it all at once. I have discovered, though, that unless I care to implement a few changes in my life, that spirit will hardly bruise me.

To mention:

-Learning Italian has become a must. The language carries far more culture that what one would think. Italians are very comfortable in their Italian self – and I can see why. More specifically, Sardinians enjoy their Sardinian flesh and have a hard time leaving it. To successfully integrate with them one should then shed its own skin and identity and mimic others. One has to adapt its sense of humor and the topics of conversation – as well as the scale of priority certain stages of life have, to the socio-cultural context. Sure there are some curious souls that speak English or Spanish to you there and there, but they are to be taken as extremely curious individuals, never as people who are seeking for an identity in foreign values. Being Sardinian requires no further search to be anyone else in life, so it seems.

- Fitness is important. I’m already making note of working out and closing my mouth because the body difference of people around here it’s not even funny anymore. I feel is extremely unfair they have these free complete dinners in bars and all this gastronomy and yet they seem to have developed a genetic immunity for fat around the waist line. That, sadly, does not apply to foreign me.  They are naturally blessed with health, and God has to be a bastard with favorite people on Earth.

-I should refrain from just having an 8 hour shift, plus 2 hours classes and still think I’m presentable for a club. Not grooming properly only puts me 3 hours and a salary of cosmetic and hair products behind the average Italian. My current stipend money does not really allow me to catch up, so an effort seems to be only in place.

-I should never underestimate the generosity of the people over here. To give over here is natural. They make it seem like is nothing. I find myself constantly overwhelmed and in debt with these giving people that exercise a hosting spirit that I once knew in the old Costa Rica. I’m sure this welcoming spirit still exists in essence in remote corners of the country, saved for a few explorers if compared to our tourists; well, over here it remains immaculate.

I would be a liar if I said I haven't almost felt blue sometimes this week, but I’ve easily got distracted by the constant highs the discovery of new places and experiences give me. I’ve been in an overall high that I’ve found hard to get across. It’s easier to look at Abi, the Indonesian guy who came with us, who seems to be in a constant and more notorious high, even in his more notorious lows. Stil, this city whispers to me. This city is my current lover.  I just realized today that my only fear for the future is finding out that I’ve signed up for a limbo: Quitting to many experiences I could have lived in Costa Rica just to discover after ten months that nearly one loop around the sun is not enough to enjoy the scent of this surreal and wonderfully conflictive island in the heart of the Mediterranean.

The story goes on.