Comatose, Day 2, 15Aug2006

Tuesday was a national holiday, the Ferragosto, so I decided not to set my alarm, sleep in, and then do some solid studying since I’d been told most things would be closed. I went to bed on Monday night/Tuesday morning around 1AM, and to my dismay I woke up some 18 hours later on Tuesday evening. At first I was really confused because I thought the sun was rising when it was actually setting. But Rosa confirmed it. She’d spent the day exploring the city whereas I was dead to the world.

So I ate 2 omelets for breakfast-dinner I bought the day before and we went to find the Lanza metro station where the scuola organized some sort of dancing spectacle of the taranta. We didn’t find any other students at the metro station, but by some coincidence ran into someone wandering the streets outside that told us she saw a flyer elsewhere in the city saying the spetaccolo was at a villa away from the station. She left, but Rosa and I decided to walk the “3 blocks” for the next hour or so until we found the villa. On the way, we passed an impressive cemetery with an imposing façade. It would’ve been worth a picture if I was carrying my camera. Maybe I’ll return one day to get a foto for the readers back home.

The neurotic tarantella dances were especially amusing as more and more of the people sitting near the stage got up and danced with the performers, but after an hour or so they began to look the same and we decided it was getting time to go. It started raining so we took a cab to the park near the metro station and got out because traffic here was at a standstill and I think our cab driver might have been “coceando”, or under the influence of some other substance. We paused under a tree to watch some fireworks in the park in observance of the Ferragosto before catching the metro back to our neighborhood.