Sunday – 8 July 2018 to Tuesday 16 July 2018
You may recall from my previous post the dilemma I had experienced with the bad driving habits of the Sicilians… Well today, a week later, being Sunday and all, my faith and nerve reserve was sufficiently replenished to attempt a drive to Cefalu, some 60km east along the coast from Aspra. It was a gloriously sunny day, the town was packed, the beach was packed; we hit that beach with a vengeance.

After searching frantically we finally found – or rather made – a spot on that precariously packed beach where we could bring our bodies to a welcome rest. The atmosphere on the beach was festive, the sand was a pure white and the sea was a most brilliant blue, as was the sky, simply amazing. We whiled away a few happy hours here but needed to explore the town, and we were certainly not disappointed.

Cefalu is a beautifully maintained town, clean as a whistle with plenty quant little shops and an array of restaurants and bars strung along the street one after the other, all vying for your precious time. We should have spent more precious time here but alas; the day was fast drawing to a close.

While the whole of Palermo seemed to have gathered in Cefalu for the day, all those gathered now needed to return to their natural habitat, just like us. There was a huge snarl-up at the tollgate where few of the many cubicles were in operation, the cubicle operators were most likely still on the beach.

We were stuck there for at least an hour, and this all while my fuel was fast running out. We thought we’d fill up on the way home but of course there were no service stations on that part of the highway, pity. We finally did make it to a service station with the car thankfully still running on fumes.

Every evening there seems to be some sort of a celebration on the promenade of Aspra – or so we thought – but we would come to realize that this was just the normal course of life here. It was Monday evening when we took a stroll down to the promenade, like everyone else, where we found a few teams playing beach volleyball with the locals cheering them on from the safety of the sidewalk. We stopped off for a while cheering no one team in particular.

There are usually quite a number of stalls set up each evening along the promenade which sells allsorts, from cell phone protectors to shoes, to action figures to haircut equipment… We weren’t in the market for anything in particular until we came across a cooler bag stall. With the 30+ weather we’ve been having this was not a nice-to-have, it was a necessity. I so needed this yesterday on Cefalu’s beach, I thought. We chose a good quality lightweight one, the perfect size, i.e. enough space for at least one bottle of wine and at least a six-pack of beers, and then some. Now we can have real picnics!

It was Tuesday afternoon when Adri took a walk down to the beach to catch a couple of rays. I, a lover of rays, politely declined the invitation but there was a more sinister reason for my awkward behaviour. You see, I already had an ice-cold Tuborg at hand, watching a World Cup soccer match, both in need of my urgent attention.

An hour or so later Adri returned bearing gifts, a bright green seashell, or so I thought. Turns out it was a piece of broken glass that had been smoothed over time by the rocks and the sea sand. I was happy to be drinking a bottle of beer rather that searching for broken Tuborg bottle shards on the beach.

We spent the evening watching Wimbledon and saw South Africa’s Kevin Anderson beat Federer, probably his most famous win to date. Later on we watched France beat Belgium in their World Cup soccer match; we were obviously thrilled with our home team’s performance. Oh and by the way, Italians simply love their soccer but nobody seemed to be following the World Cup here. And can you blame them? Italy did not qualify for this World Cup with the only other time being back in 1958. Italians were rightly disgusted and disillusioned with the game and their team.

Wednesday we ran out of water… but all was okay, there was plenty of beer in the fridge. “But even so, how was that possible?” you may ask. Well, the houses in Aspra – and I guess in most of Sicily – have water holding tanks on its roofs and three times a week these can be filled by activating a water pump. Once the holding tank is full, the pump is automatically deactivated. We filled up yesterday but Adri did a spot of washing today and that is what probably depleted our water supply. It seemed like the doom and gloom of Cape Town’s countdown to their Day Zero had caught up with us here in Aspra. Or that was the prognosis at least.

We went through the evening and Thursday morning without water. Anna, our landlady, just happened to pop in for a visit and frowned with deeply furrowed brow – looking deeply confused and concerned – when we told her about our water shortage. “But that should not be possible, the holding tank is large enough to hold two weeks’ water” she said.

It was only when Adri told Anna that the water pressure was also rather feeble just before we ran out that she burst out laughing and explained. Adri had inadvertently switched off the water pressure pump when she did the washing, for which there is another activation switch. This of course also led to our supposed water shortage. In Adri’s defence, there are many switches for many things; this took some getting used to. As Marina would have said, “You live, you learn”. And so we survived our day zero that never was.

After the disaster management was concluded we settled down for a bit of a chinwag. We found out that Anna is Polish and have been in Italy for 25 years, is married to an Italian and have two kids, a boy of nine and a girl of seven, or thereabouts. They own a piece of land near Cefalu where they have olive and lemon trees and it is from these harvests that they make the wonderful juices that we found lying in wait for us in our apartment, homemade olive oil and lemoncello. Divine I assure you.

And while chatting to Anna I simply had to ask – at the risk of offending her – about the litter problem is Aspra. She gave me a pained smile, pointed at her head and said “It’s the mentality, it’s the mentality of the local people, it’s just not important to them”. One hears many stories of corrupt Mafia run municipalities where litter does become a huge problem from time to time, but she assured me that it was not the case here, “It was just the mentality of the people”. What a shame.

We had an outing planned for the day but decided to cancel, we needed to stay indoors; it was 34°C outside. There was however a further reason we had to decline our generous offer of an outing; I was expecting the delivery of my newly minted credit card from SA. The story is way more complicated than that though, but let me explain.

I had renewed my credit card while I was in SA late last year but after a few unrelated queries a month or so ago they decided to “upgrade” my credit card. Unbeknownst to me they ordered this new card and thus deactivated the almost new one I had in my wallet. I only became aware of this when I wanted to watch Netflix and I couldn’t, my subscription had lapsed as my credit card was cancelled. Ditto for Scribd, ditto for Skype, ditto for…

Being so far away it was a long and arduous trek to get this all sorted out but it was around 11:30 that the doorbell rang and I scrambled down those two flights of stairs like a rabbit on heat, being mindful of those ribs around the corners. As I opened the door the DHL van was busy pulling off but I caught up with it just as it was about to disappear around the corner.

After activating the card I re-activated all my subscriptions with the new card details; life was back to normal, life was once again good.

It was time for a celebratory beer. From my terrace looking down towards the sea I had one eye on my icy Birra Moretti…

And the other on the old man that lives down the alley where he was standing under his blue umbrella on his terrace watching the sea and its goings on. At a casual guess the old man must be very near his 90s but is still as fit as a fiddle and in perfect working order, although he does not walk like a young man of 57 anymore. As he looked up in my direction I greeted him with a hearty “buongiorno!” to which he replied in kind. During the rest of our stay we had many more “buongiorno!” interactions; there were even a few “buonaseras!” as well.

Friday, being the alpha of the weekend and all, we got a late start, had a late breakfast and spent some quality time on the beach. I suspect you will agree there’s nothing wrong with that. But, we could not linger too long on that beach; there was tennis that required our attention.

We watched SA’s Kevin Anderson play against John Isner in the semi-finals. We had planned to go out for supper after the match but it was not to be, the match just went on and on and on… Anderson finally won the fifth set 25 games to 23!! I can hear Renata commenting, “Isn’t that something!”

This was the second longest Grand Slam match of all-time, with their match lasting 6 hours and 36 minutes, the fifth set alone lasted 2 hours 55 minutes. By the way, the longest ever Grand Slam match also involved Isner. In the 2010 Wimbledon edition he beat Nicolas Mahut in 11 hours and 5 minutes, a match that spanned over three days.

Anyways, it was far too late to go out for supper and in any case we still had the Djokovic/Nadal match to watch. We rushed the 57m to our nearest pizza parlour, ordered takeaways and 15 minutes later we were back home watching tennis while gulping down scrumptious and generously loaded slices of pizza.

Saturday we spent more quality time – or is that guilty time – on the beach, cooling off in the cool water with the sun burning from above at a not so cool 32°C.

I settled down under the umbrella with my Ipad and continued reading Sidney Sheldon’s Kane and Abel, which is a book I should probably have read 30 years ago. I was able (no pun intended) to continue reading my book now that my Scribd subscription had been reactivated. And by the way, although I prefer reading non-fiction, a bit of escapism has never hurt anyone, and I actually quite enjoyed this one, and the follow-up, and the follow-up’s follow-up.

It was the 14^th of July and Bastille Day back at home, a day widely celebrated throughout France. We were not there to join in the celebrations as we did in Marseille last year, but Philippe did send us a few pictures to quell our longing! We did clink a glass or two on the motherland even though we did find ourselves in Italy.

Saturday evening it was back to watching World Cup soccer, it was Belgium against England. The English have been too arrogant to my liking during this tournament and I was happy to see them lose 2/0, thus ending their campaign in fourth place. Steve, a blue blooded Englishman, sent me a text with a similar view as mine saying “the English team played like a bunch of girl guides”. My response was “Impossible, girl guides have good direction”. He agreed.

We’ve been exercising regularly; mostly yoga, walking or a spot of running… it was 10:30 when we decided to do a spot. With the sun beating down already at around a 30°C somebody sane should have told us “not a good idea”. No sane person was around just then.

The reason for this folly had nothing to do with physical fitness but rather mental madness. You see, I had just started playing around with my Samsung S8’s Health App and just had to try it out, like now. Adri had been mumbling in the background for a while now that she wanted to get one of those exercise watches, which is what initially prompted me to check out the Health app as a possible substitute.

And I was suitably impressed. Whenever I stopped it automatically detected that I had moved into corpse mode with a message “Exercise paused” and moving them bones again prompted an “Exercise resumed”. After every kilometre it informed me how slow I was going including another few titbits of useful information. Once completed it gave a rather extensive synopsis of the entire exercise cycle, i.e. map of the route taken, time taken, average time per km and so on…  even the temperature. Rather cool… and also rather useful, there was no need for an exercise watch.

It was mid-afternoon and finally time for the World cup final, played out between France and Croatia. Adri settled me down in front of the TV with snackies and beers, with the emphasis on both the s’s. And what a game it was, with my team finally winning by 4 goals to 2. I guess it was written in the stars that France would win, it being Bastille Day and all yesterday, the celebrations had started early.

A few days ago a holidaying Italian family had moved into the apartment downstairs across the lane from us. Since then we kept hearing a rather high-pitched coucou… coucou… rising up from there. At first we thought it might be their pet bird and later we considered it might be the lady imitating the bird to try and get it to say coucou, there was a human tinge to it. Yet later we thought the people might be French as coucou means hello, but there could not be so many people to greet in that apartment… too small.  But this sound kept repeating itself on and on and on… ad nauseam. It was a mystery to us…

It was Monday afternoon and I was sitting outside on the balcony, beer in hand, wearing my thousand yard stare over the ocean below, when I heard that mysterious coucou sound again, more clearly now… and again… and again… And then I finally saw the source of this mystery, or rather misery. Now I don’t like reading sad stories, I don’t like writing sad stories, but please allow me this one…

The family was readying themselves to go for a drive and that’s when I heard that coucou sound, loud and clear this time; it was the daughter aged around 20, that seems to have this innate urge to repeat that phrase over and over and over again, high-pitched. When she was not coucou’ing she was talking in a drawling voice, on and on.

I soon enough realized that this poor girl, with all due respect, was a bit coocoo, or rather she had a slight intellectual disability. She also seemed to have a slight leg deformity and thus required some assistance from her dad to walk, who also had to help her into the front seat of their car, with much difficulty. Through all her strife this girl still had a lovely sunny disposition. The mom and dad seem to have the utmost patience with her, but I’m sure their patience must surely sometimes run rather thin. While watching them I felt an awful sting of sorrow wash uncontrollably over me, I felt depressed; I felt sick to the stomach with sadness. We have so much and still we complain, we take so many things for granted… we should not…

And to make matters worse, they seemed to be of meagre means judging by the car that they drive. It’s a very old, but in excellent condition, Volkswagen Golf, two door, one of the first models I assume that came out pre-power steering, judging by the way the man brawled with that steering wheel. The number plate is owner manufactured; a piece of black plate with the white numbers neatly painted on by hand. When the car finally started up after a few tries it belched more than a few puffs of black smoke from its exhaust, still belching as it disappeared around the corner.

They may be of meagre means but they certainly make sure they save up enough money to bring their daughter for a lovely seaside vacation each year, which you could see she enjoyed immensely. The family seemed content, happy and at ease with their situation. It was later in the day that they returned and walked down to the beach where we would meet them by chance a few days later… What a lovely family.

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