Bubbles

Sardinia - June 10-14

I am scuba diving certified! I passed the flood the mask, remove BCD, tow your friend, surface and underwater compass navigation and out of air skills. Although I lost my waist belt in the sea grass and was unable to find it… they still entrusted me enough to let me lower the anchor of the boat. Although it’s slightly difficult to identify people in the underwater pictures due to our extravagant equipment and matching wetsuits – we could identify some fish. I saw more fish than I had during my scuba swimming pool training courses including octopus, scorpion fish, and starfish. I got lots of sun this weekend and ate much more gelato. Why does Italy turn me into a gelato-eating fiend?

Nevertheless, our accommodation was in a camping area and sleeping in a ‘bungalow’, which seemed awfully like what I would call a camper trailer, fit five comfortably with a spectacular view of the water and a beach nearby. Due to my light packing abilities and frequent sun exposure that made me ‘change colour’ (an observation of a coworker once I returned)– my quick-dry adventure towel became my ultimate fashion accessory that could quadruple as a towel, skirt, shawl, and cover to somehow avoid sun. Not bad…

One morning, we hiked Capo d’Orso near Palau – the northern coast of the island, which we were told took only ’20 minutes’ one way because we were young, but it really took a return trip of 3 hours because I think the 20 minutes, was implied by car… The rock face resembled a bear – hence orso – and this Sardinian landmark was often used by sailors to guide them to the harbor. In the evenings, stalls set up along the streets near the harbor created an elaborate marketplace selling jewelry, sunglasses, clothing, artistic wooden carvings, underwear (just in case I guess…), beads and gems, and 5 ¢ candies (this is a funny term because I don’t think they were actually 5 ¢… due to inflation and the use of euros as currency – they were priced much differently but still deliciously scrumptious…). We delighted ourselves with dried fruits and nuts: candied ginger (one of my favorites), coconut, cumquat, strawberries, blueberries, pineapple, watermelon (I don’t quite understand the purpose of having dried watermelon fruit…). We played on the rotating kiddy swing set which we were guaranteed too big, but were impressed by it’s durability and couldn’t determine it’s maximum load – oh engineers.

One evening we planned to attend what we had seen on posters as ‘a party’ in the middle of the square. True Italian style it started punctually an hour late and two accordion players emerged onto the stage decked out in tuxes and top hats. We sat and watched – definitely everyone else was 40 or 50 years our senior in the audience – and the locals danced to everything from tango to salsa to other dance genres that I did not know. Partners twirled and smiled and everyone knew the steps and it seemed like the right thing to do.