So, how was Palermo I hear you ask. I'll sum it up in one word... meh. Don't get me wrong, it was all in all a nice trip and a good tango festival for the most part. It's just Palermo the city itself didn't really appeal to me. Being a person who likes a bit of peace and quiet I just found Palermo as a city to be dirty and very very noisy, unbearably so in fact. It says something when the first thing you notice about Dublin upon landing back home again is how wonderfully quiet and clean the city seems. I suppose having a miserable start to the trip didn't help my overall experience or mood either. Let me recount my adventures from the beginning. Be warned, this may turn into a very long rant post.
First our plane from Dublin to London Standsted was late (almost an hour) and then Ryanair lost my baggage in between Dublin and London. Since the plane was late it meant that we had little to no time to sort out the lost luggage as we had to go immediately to check in for our connection flight to Palermo. When I asked a girl behind one of the Ryanair desks for a customer support number so that I could ring Ryanair about the status of my lost luggage I was shushed away with the knowledge that Ryanair does not have a customer support number! Luckily for me, knowing Ryanair, I had prepared myself for the fact that the airline was going to lose my luggage somewhere along the way from Dublin to Palermo so overall I wasn't overly upset about not having my luggage. However I was a little pissed off that they were so dismissive about not having any sort of customer support number people could call for occasions like this.
On the plane from London over to Palermo I was flicking through the Ryanair magazine and as if the gods we're trying to be funny I noticed the following full page ad for Ryanair:
At that stage I just closed the magazine (after taking a quick photo of the ad for irony purposes) and went to sleep. To top off my misery, it pissed down for the first 2 days in Palermo and I was stuck with soggy clothes with no dry clean clothes to change into. In any case, they found my bag 3 days later and sent it onto the hotel I was staying in just as it stopped raining and the sun came out... friggin typical!
To top all this off, we discovered, after having to pay for our stay in full first, that the hotel we had booked ourselves into had a 12 o'clock curfew. We told them that we were tango dancers here for the tango festival and that milongas starting at the earliest at 10:30pm and having to come back before 12 each night just wouldn't work for us (plus things only really start to kick off in Palermo after 11pm). We wanted our money back and only to stay for 2 nights instead of 2 weeks. On hearing this the hotel person suddenly didn't speak english and told us that it was OK and we'll sort the little problem out in the morning. So in the morning it was a different person we spoke to and they assured us that despite the curfew for us they would make an exception and have someone at reception to let us in around 2am each evening which made it very difficult for us to use the 12 o'clock curfew excuse to check out early so we ended up letting them keep the money and staying the whole 2 weeks there. We're such push overs.
Palermo as I subsequently found out is a very very noisy city. There is constantly the sound of engines (very loud engines) flying down the road accompanied by the beeping of the car horn every few seconds for no apparent reason at all. I firmly believe that if you were to take a driving test in Palermo you'd fail the test for not beeping your horn enough times during the course of your exam. Despite there being car lanes and traffic lights there might as well not have been any. Every driver was just weaving in and out of each other and trying to squeeze into the smallest of open spaces on the road. I'd go so far as to say that over 95% of the cars i saw in Palermo either had a couple of dents on the side and/or a wing mirror missing from trying to squeeze through impossibly tight spaces between cars on the road. To make matters worse, we had to walk on the road a lot of the times as well because a lot of the cars would park right up onto the footpath leaving you no choice but to use the road to walk on. Palermo is definitely not a city to have a big fancy car in. Interestingly enough I didn't see one bike on the roads the entire time I was there.
If we weren't being kept awake from all the noise outside our windows during the evening (our fault really for choosing a hotel in the center of the city) we were being woken up really early in the morning by the lady who runs the hotel shouting at the top of her voice at all her staff. Either that or else she had been asked to give someone a wake up call in the mornings and had forgotten which room had made the request so decided it was best just to stand outside every door and shout at the top of her voice. After a few days we got used to all this and learnt to block out all the shouting in the mornings.
I always thought the Italians that visited Dublin were really loud because they were tourists and tourists usually have an innate ability, regardless of nationality, to talk as if they were shouting all the time when in a country that doesn't speak their native language and they think no one around understands them. I now believe that Italians are naturally really loud when talking so as to be heard over all the street noise and then each other. Due to the fact that they need to constantly have their voices raised it eventually becomes the norm even when abroad.
We got 3 days off during the two weeks where there was nothing on for the tango festival so I took the opportunity during one of those days to escape the hustle and bustle of Palermo city and went to visit the nearby sea-side town of Cefalu. After a week in a dusty noisy city I cannot describe how nice it was to hear nothing but the quiet calming sound of the tide on the beach and be able to breath the fresh sea air. It was a struggle to get back onto the train again to return to Palermo.
OK, it seems that so far all I've got to say about my trip has been bad things. That's not entirely true. The people I found to be generally quite friendly and helpful. For example, I got a really bad tooth ache accompanied by a headache one day. My house mate/tango partner, the thoughtful person that she is, decided to go find a pharmacy to get me some stuff to relieve the pain (she later told me that she just wanted to make sure that her only tango partner there was well enough so that she wouldn't have to miss class later... I suppose it's the thought that counts). Unfortunately it so happened to be a national holiday that day so very few places were open. However she met a very nice Sicilian guy outside one of the pharmacies she went to who subsequently offered to drive her to an open pharmacy and then waited for her and brought her back to the hotel again. Of course, me the cynical type of person that I am still think that if she wasn't (1) female (2) blond and petite and (3) somewhat attractive the helpful guy would have just told her where to go for an open pharmacy rather than going that extra mile of bringing her there and back again himself. Yes, I know, I am a very cynical person.
The other good thing I can report about Palermo is that you can generally get some very nice clothes there at very reasonable prices. Even I, a person who hates clothes shopping picked up a few things while I was there. One day I decided I could do with a new belt because the leather you can buy in Palermo is quite cheap. Instead of going into a high street store where I would be paying about 20 to 25 yo yos I decided to buy a belt from one of the many stalls in the markets. I found a stall with some nice looking belts, picked one out asked the guy how much it was. He told me it was 7 euros. I figured 7 euros is pretty good, I'll try it on. Tried it on and found it was way too big for me so I handed it back to the guy, told him it was too big and I wasn't interested and was about to walk away. Before I could blink, he went "no problem sir", took out a big pair of scissors, cut a chunk off the belt and told me "now fit, 6 euros!". All I could do was smile and point to the now lack of belt buckle on the belt. He then took another belt, took out a butter knife and preceded to unscrew the buckle from the other belt in order to use it to replace the now missing buckle from the belt that he just cut up. I figured, hell if he's gone to all this effort to try and sell me the belt I might as well buy it so I ended up taking it (of course first trying to get it for 5 euros since it was now technically speaking a Frankenstein belt).
As for the tango festival itself. In general it was very good. The classes were very good and the teachers full of energy and entertaining which is always a nice thing. The festival organisers on the other hand just seemed not to care for anything or anybody for the most part which was very disappointing. I had the feeling that they just wanted the international presence to help fund bringing over the good teachers for themselves. Also, during the first week the classes were all on at ridiculously inconvenient times, for example starting at 8 pm and ending at 12pm. This meant that we generally had no time to grab dinner before or after class because people, it would seem, eat late in Italy and it was too late when the classes had ended. This however gave the little cafe place at the venue a chance to sell some finger food at whatever prices they wanted to us. I couldn't tell you how much food cost at the venue mainly because it kept changing every day. A small bowl of fruit could cost you 2 yo yos one day and then 4 yo yos the next day.
The people attending the festival seemed like a nice bunch. We met a couple (in the sense of dancing partners) from Hamburg whom we hung around with a bit. The guy was a cigar smoking author and translator of German romance novels who used several nom de plumes since women (and I say women here as I can't imagine many guys reading romance novels) were not really enticed to buy romance novels written by a guy and especially from someone called "Wolfgang". Instead his publishers had made up several other names in which he published under accompanied with background story to the name. One of them being a 40 something Scottish mother of two called "Scarlett O'Doherty"! :o) They even went as far as finding a profile picture to accompany the background story.
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