figs and fables.

Monday, I ate my first fresh fig.

It was a delight, and made me think of that one children's story where the old woman comes in and offers the dentist three figs in exchange for a pulled tooth, and each of the figs will make his dreams become reality. He doesn't believe her and eats one (though I remember he cut it apart, perhaps they weren't figs?) and his dreams that night came real, which comes as quite a shock to him. On and on, and eventually he attempts to train his mind to dream what he wants, all the while his dog (who he treats quite cruelly) plots, steals and eats the last fig and eventually, for it is the dog's dreams that then come true, the cruel dentist and the dog exchange worlds.

My fig experience was nothing of that sort.

I did, however, also experience my first earthquake, a mere hours after eating my first fresh fig. It was quite strange to feel the earth tremor around me, not unlike how thunder tremors in the clouds.

europeans are nuts. for nutella.

Everyone in Italy takes a siesta.

Which means, for three or four hours in the middle of the day, any action is rendered into nothing. The city literally dies. From the windows echo murmurs of conversation, clinking of silver on plates: the shops lower the grates over the doorways, shopkeepers quietly sweep, or sit, or have disappeared, the streets are deserted.

Yesterday, I wandered Sesto twice: once, during siesta; dead.

The second time, during an unexpected nutella party: booths were set up around town, enormous tubs of nutella with diligent workers scooping it generously onto slices of bread, children playing in the streets, parents on bikes, teens clustered in pairs around the doorways, small groups of girls occasionally melding with the small clusters of boys perched on the staircases, waiting for the girls to walk by. Life! In Sesto!

It felt remarkably like the block parties neighborhoods occasionally throw at home, except... it was the whole city of Sesto, filling the streets, gathering to eat... nutella.