Palermo
“Here in Sicily, with it’s dreadful poverty, real life is never far from anyone’s mind. The mafia has been the only successful business in Sicily for centuries (running the business of protecting citizens from itself, and it still keeps its hand down everybody’s pants). Palermo – a city Goethe once claimed possessed an impossible to describe beauty may now be the only city in western Europe where you can still find yourself picking your steps through World War II rubble, just to give a sense of development here. The town has been systematically uglified beyond description by the hideous and unsafe apartment blocks the mafia constructed in the 1980s as money laundering operations. I asked one Sicilian if those buildings were made from cheap concrete and he said “o no, this is very expensive concrete. It each batch, there are a few bodies of people who were killed by the mafia and that costs money. But it does make the concrete stronger to be reinforced with all those bones and teeth.” In such an environment, is it maybe a little shallow to be thinking only about your next wonderful meal?” – Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
We arrived in Sicily hot, sweaty, and inhaling the putrid smell of rotting garbage. The bags lined the streets begging the trash collectors to remove them from the sizzling midday Mediterranean sun. We negotiated our way across pebbled pavements, past crumbling cement high raises and decrepit stone buildings dissipating into dust and rubble with every breath of wind. The Sailitalia office disappeared into a wall of one of these crumbling old buildings, with a stone veranda in front the miranda that attempts to blur the lines between the poverty of Palermo and the extravagant yachts moored on her shores. Did I mention that the city prison is just a stones throw from the marina as well?
While my mum attended the skippers meeting with Sailitalia, Lovedy and I walked up to the nearest supermarket. This supermarket was much more of a corner shop, with a deli counter, shrink-wrapped produce, and aisles of pasta, bread, and biscuits. One of my favorite things to do in a new place is buy food, see what the locals eat, and attempt to negotiate what cheese I want. I find myself staring at strange orange and hot pink fruit, shrink wrapped by the dozen, wondering what on earth they are, while Lovedy stares at the multitude of cheeses on display. “How do you think I ask for 200 g?” she asks me. I have absolutely no idea, which is how we end up with multiple different types of cheese in varying quantities and a strip of raw bacon. Just to taste. Raw? I don’t think that is quite how we eat our bacon in America.
Finally, we find head to the check out, with five baskets laden with food, toilet paper, and water, thankful that the young man at Sailitalia told us we could get help carrying our groceries back to the boat.
Our help? A twenty-something year old guy form Ghana, with decent English and introduced himself by asking if we could run. Well, yes, I supposed we can run. And run, well chase, we did, down the middle of a busy Palermo road, with oncoming traffic, a runaway trolly, honking cars, and an immigrant who dodged the cars like magic. But, our groceries did make it.
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