Seraphiel´s blog: Calabria, Italy

On Friday the 13th nobody likes to travel. Alas, we did! By us I mean myself and my Mother. The destination was Calabria in Italy, the infamous home for mafia, beautiful italian countryside, food and sea. Our resort was Parghelia, close to Tropea city and the hotel we stayed in was on top of the cliffs, the amazing Santa Lucia https://www.hotel-santalucia.it/
We knew the pitfalls of this area, such as a necessity of taking a minibus to get to a beach or the city. We knew that our appartment will not have the most wonderful seaview, as they were all booked out. We also knew that there will be no town in walking distance or promenade to take an evening stroll on. With a hindsight, none of that really mattered. The hotel was clean, beautiful, spacious and full of goodhearted, always smiling staff.

After we set our feet into our room and settled in, we started to explore little by little. We made friends with local head waiter Marcelo, who surprisingly turned out to be of Argentinian origin. He was sweeping the pavement by the swimming pool when we first came, and when I wanted to touch the leaves of a tree, he reprimanded me and gesticulated in desparate yet funny gesture not to go near it….as if sweeping the leaves was the worst job of his life, which probably was. We all had to laugh at it afterwards, while he made friends with us, wiping sweat off his brows. The first hard working employee I´ve seen in a long time!

Our first dinner was delicous. We had ravioli in rich sugo and tuna steak with loads of grilled vegetables. The dining room looked very posh, with all those carpets, chandeliers and twenty waiters who run around in their suits and bows. We also discovered a tiny shop behind our hotel run by a small Italian guy named Antonio, whom we noticed during the dinner. We thought he must have been the owner, as he walked from table to table and chatted vigorously to each customer.

The weather here was very humid and hot, so I was happy to have air conditioning in the room and little balcony with a small view of sea in a distance and small portion of a swimming pool. We were positioned just above the hotel entrance, so we saw all the guests coming in and out, we heard the fountain gurgling, the cicadas singing, the minibus arriving and the hotel staff runing around doing their daily routine. It was all nice and peaceful though. That´s until the night started, and the bunch of Italian singers started to sing until oblivion. The door shutters nor the door itself really helped to block out the terrible sounds. So we gave up and used earplugs, shut the door and turned on the air conditioning, full blast! We were unconditionally grateful for having one of the „better located appartements“, as some people weren´t as lucky.

In the morning, there was a buffet style breakfast, where you could choose from many varieties of sweet buns, sponge cakes and croissants and also yoghurt, cereals, fresh bread, salami, proscuitto, mortadella, scrambled eggs, tomatoes, some fruits and canned plums and peaches. You could accompany this with delicious frothy cappuccino or latte, strong americano or just very sweet red orrange and pinneaple juice. We were happy above our expectations, as we are used to much more meager rations and worse food quality from other destinations in Greece. This was a luxury in comparison! During the breakfast, as a part of your new daily routine, you had to thick off your choices of meals for lunch or dinner, depending on your programme. There was usually a choice of three starters, one of which was soup, three main courses, one of which was fish and one vegetarian option, and two types of vegetable side salads. The desserts were always a surprise, but mostly just a slice of oversweetened ice cream or piece of melon, which in Italian is known as anguría.

After the first breakfast, we had a half an hour of tedious meeting with our delegate, who kept talking of the history of onion, so called ciopolla, which is famous in the region. We were in a hurry to get to the beach!!! The only interesting information she gave us was, that there was an earthquake close to morning hours. We didn´t even notice. She did, she told us, because a piece of a bread fell out on her head from a kitchen cupboard. The earthquake was at 3:40,which leaves her story rather questionable.

Later we took a minibus that was extremely overloaded, having capacity of just 20 seats. Some of them had to be taken by a spare bus. We travelled about 10 minutes along the coast and through small villages, and under the cliffs with the famous viaducts of Tropea city. Then the bus stopped by a small beach resort, Lido Calypso, where we unloaded and paid our entry fee of 7 EU for two seabeds and umbrella. At first the guy who sat by the little provisional table told me a price of 13 EU, at which I looked startled and said…“sorry, but the guy in front of me paid only 7!“, and then I saw the girl next to him gesturing something like it´s ok…just let them go….because we were from Santa Lucia, and the guests from this hotel have it for cheaper. At least that´s what I gathered. So we grabbed our seats just wherever there was a free space, which was behind a giant rock, that looked like a meteorite that was short of destryoing whole of Tropea some hundred years ago. We got a place right next to two Slovak couples with kids, who were very friendly and talkative, and gave us their unused ciabattas. Other than these, we haven´t met any Czechs throughout our stay in Calabria, which was very peculiar but very refreshing!

The sea was very tranquil first few days, which is good if you like to swim. I prefer the big waves, and I was meant to have more of them relatively soon. We learnt to combine our seabathing with swimming pool, where there was no one and we could enjoy our lemon beer in the shade of the hotel sunbeds. On a third day we had seafood menu, prawns and mussels, pasta and red scorpion fish, and a seabass fillet, but too much is too much. Having a fish everyday is tempting at first, but after few days you get slightly sick when seeing a fish. So from that day on, we kept ordering pork escalopes with pepper sauce, with lemon sauce, with mushroom sauce…..well….go figure. I was sick of meat after three more days and went back to fish!

The only trouble with Italian entertainment was that they didn´t organise any professional bands in the evening. It was all local production, and by that, I mean guests and animators singing at the karaoke until the midnight hours, when all people would probably prefer to sleep. Sometimes it was bordering on insanity. They sounded like bunch of drunk broken-hearted guys, who sing false italian songs that never saw a hit chart. I think my version of Eros Ramazzotti would be the winner of the night, had I the courage to join!

The clouds have been gathering above Calabria for last few days, so we were expecting some storms. We discovered that it´s quite normal to see a barman working next day as a swimming pool sweeper, or a receptionist working next day as a waiter. Therefore, it was always a nice surprise to find various people at different places. It was like that game: find Wally,if you know what I mean.

One wonderful day we went to Tropea city at night where we were dropped off by the old Calabrian church, and we wandered through the little cobbled streets with beautiful neat shops and typical Italian restaurants. The town was full of tourists and the usual buzz. There were red onions hanging from every corner, a thing called Nduja, salamis and olives and people with ice creams. We made the same tour the next day, when the weather got very windy and stormy, so we could see the city in the daylight. We met a Polish guy with Ara parrot in the old square and because I am such a goofy person who likes these things, I wanted to take a photo with it, so all I got was one very bad picture and one half eaten hand, because the parrot didn´t really like humans and preffered to bite them until they all screamed in convulsions and probably died! Of course the Polish charged me 2 EU for one minute of misery and wanted the same from my Mum, who didn´t even want to have a stupid parrot devouring her arm. We then saw a whole seaview from above, which was a small compensation for our previous suffering. We had some ice cream, which as my Mother explained, was made with pure milk. True to her word, the ice cream had the same endurance as an iceberg thrown into hot lava! It tasted delicious, but you had to lick it like a thirsty dog, unless you preffered to drink it. We had time to buy some sundried tomatoes and bergamot pasta. We were waiting for our bus that never arrived, so we changed a plan and went to the beach by foot. The best things happen when you least expect them, so they say. The big storm arrived by then and there were only few people scattered about and the giant waves were glorious to watch. So we enjoyed the marvellous, powerful mother nature for a while.

The last few days we were desparately looking for a lemon and Nduja, the local traditional meat pate, which we got to taste due to Gateano, one of the eight brothers who owned Santa Lucia, as Marcelo later told us. We met Gaetano earlier on, but this time, when we tried to order Ice coffee, my Mum stroke a conversation in Italian and they chatted for another hour, by which time, Gaetano started enjoying himself too much and gave us a taste of Calabrian Amaretto, a slice of his snack, which was bread with Nduja, and plastic cup of chilled local wine. What a great and friendly attention!!! In the end he brought us cups of iced coffee to our sunbeds and when I presented him our paycard, he simply waved it off. So this is a way to a heart of Calabrian. They are all nice and sweet people under their tough, sun parched skin and they have more kindness in their cold blue eyes, then you would think. When I told Gaetano about how nice was Marcelo to us, Gaetano laughed and said....Marcelo is good guy. But he is Argentinian bastard and cornuto, which basically equals to asshole. It was so funny, when Gateano forced my Mum to repeat these words to Marcelo, after what he came to his shift and Marcelo shook her hand and simply answered:"nice to meet you, I´m Argentinian".

I finally got what my heart craved for. The giant waves, that I used as a jumping pillows. They were so huge, that they exceeded me by metre and half at times. One of them hit me hard from back, splashing all over my head, another one sent me to my knees with an extraordinary power. It literally spat me out like a chewing gum and I was just a little crabby creature, trying to crawl out on my all four. I was horrified that another one will come and finish me off. My Mum stood by on the shore and laughed like insane But it was all a great fun and I would do it again for sure!

The last day we said goodbye to our beloved Marcelo, who was waiting for us at the bar, and we slowly proceeded to pack our suitcases. This was a very beautiful place to be in and I would say, one of the few that I really fell in love with due to its people and the natural beauty. And Nduja is soo good, you will want to eat it everyday. Spicy and extraordinary like Calabria, the home to great Italians, who never lost their spirit, no matter how poor they have gotten.