The Internet Personified: And so, the weary traveller wends her way back home

Hello, hello,

Since I am now back in Delhi, and already my journey is starting to fade at the edges, here's a bouquet of memories, quick preserved in writing:

On tech: (Wrote this in Germany, so excuse the confusing tense) I began this journey with a ride in a super fast battery operated car--the Tesla--and I ended it with a vegan "meat" patty, so identical to meat in flavour and appearance that you really had to be thinking about it when you chewed to be able to tell the difference (not bad, a bit soya-y for my liking, but not bad. Not as good as the expensive, much marketed Impossible Burger, or so I've heard, but for a pack of 4 for three euros, pretty affordable.) We've left Italy, we're back in Germany, all our bags are packed, we're ready to go, in fact. In a few short hours, we'll be on an Air India flight, a Dreamliner with windows that they keep at a peculiar shade of blue at all times (you can look outside if you twirl a knob, few people do) which means you can't tell what time it is at all, no matter whether it's 2 pm or 5 am. It's like being in a spaceship. I have no doubt this is meant to make all the passengers fall asleep and be comfortable or whatever, but it's odd being cut off from light, just like it's odd that the Dreamliner toilets are so sensitive that they flush when your butt is still on them.

Technology--life's easier when you're trudging along a hot road in Bari, and you come across a water vending machine, ice cold water for 10 cents a litre, When you're doing a wine tasting in Lecce, and you have an app called Vivino that you point at all the wine bottles so you know what you're drinking and how much it would be priced at and so on and so forth. When you use Google maps to find exactly the right kind of restaurant in Monopoli, when the train station is deserted but the ticket machine still whirs, waiting for you.

On meeting new people: Sal came up to us at the beer bar he was working at, our second last night in Santa Spirito. (SS being a satellite village of the nearby big town of Bari, voted, incidentally, one of Lonely Planet's most beautiful places in the world. Bari, that is, not SS which was kinda meh compared to all our other Italian experiences, but "real" as K kept saying, not totally given over to tourists.) Sal, it turned out, had been to India two years prior, and in between waiting tables, he came back to show us photos and videos on his phone. The next day, he told us, we should totally come to the beach with him and his family, which, of course, we did, being all like, "OMG REAL ITALIAN DAY WITH REAL ITALIAN PEOPLE." Terribly exciting. [It was fun! We hung out with Sal, his pregnant wife, and their daughter.]

Side note on the beaches: I mean, after Asia's beaches, the beaches of Italy (that I saw, YMMV) should really be just "beaches." There's like one TEENY TINY strip of sand on to which everyone is packed on to. And that sand is if you're lucky. In SS, the "beaches" are rocks, and the locals have taken over the flat rocks with umbrellas and chairs and towels, for all in the world like they're lying on the white sands of Thailand, or turning over in Ashvem or something. K laughed to see my face the first time I encountered them, I was so excited before, all like, "BEACH YAY" and then to see these ROCKS, where was the beach? There's the beach? Whaaaaat? The sea however, totally made up for it. Because it was rocks, it was clear-clear-clear, and you could see very easily all the hazardous places where you could slip and stub your toe. (Okay, no, no, some of it was very nice, the fact that there were hardly any waves, it was like a large deep swimming pool, the sun was warm, the water was cool, and I could float on my back.)

On the looming economic crisis: It's definitely coming, folks. You can see it already, in the lack of jobs in Europe, in the tightening of belts. When I spoke to Sal and his family, they were a little worried about how to make ends meet--he is between jobs and she is on maternity leave till next year. At the moment, life is all sun and beaches, but soon, winter is coming, as I was able to work into a sentence with a perfectly straight face. Better sell my book before the cash crunch arrives at our shores.

On gelato: I am dairy free when I can manage it, but for gelato, I will willingly suffer a rumbly stomach and bloating. It's not like any ice cream I've had before--maybe it was actually being in Italy, and I don't even like ice cream that much, but gelato has transformed the way I think about it. [What I never did eat: lasagne, risotto, tiramisu (one bite of a badly made one at a coffee shop does not count).]

On a great deal on drinks one night in Lecce: They had this wine tasting where for 10 euros (770 rupees), you got eight tickets and then you wandered around different town squares where they had the red, white and rose sections. Some sommeliers gave you just a taste (still enough to get drunk), some refreshed your glasses, some let you try their whole range for just one ticket (the idea was that you spent one ticket per glass of wine), and you got this little cloth bag with a plastic wine glass to hang around your neck, which made you look quite dorky, but it was still super fun, and one of my favourite memories. What I can remember of it anyway.

On aperol: Which has been RUINED by the Brits and other tourists, apparently. But was still a great way to start an evening: one glass of spritz is usually accompanied by a variety of little munchies, chips and olives and these little round things (we called them tarantulas, but they had a different but similar name.) It was very civilised and also a nice way to people watch, because a lot of Italians did the same thing, just sat in the square, drinks propped up in front of them and shamelessly gazed at people. Aperol spritz in the rest of the world is super expensive because of the ingredients: Aperol (imported), prosecco/sparkling (not cheap) and for a really good spritz, you need a slice of those fancy foreign oranges, not ours with the sections, but the ones you can actually slice down the middle.

On visiting somewhere because of the name: K and I had a free day between Lecce and our booking in Santa Spirito, so we picked Monopoli, because of the name, duh, and it was such a charming town! We wound up for dinner at a place right next to an ancient church, and then, walking back, found ourselves at a live concert in the middle of another piazza.

K and Tom also went off hiking to a beach I mentioned in my last newsletter, called Crapolla, which made me laugh. (Crapolla was very beautiful and not crapola at all.)

On speaking Italian: You know I am shy, and like a lot of shy people, I am terrified of being laughed at, so I did not speak much Italian (beyond buon giorno etc) but was very taken with the concept of "allora" which is an Italian bridge word, sort of like, "so" or "then." Aziz Ansari uses it a lot in the first half of the second season of Master of None, which is great TV, all black and white and in Italian with subtitles, and I recommend it highly, despite Aziz being slightly sketch at this point. (Not fully sketchy, but a little bit less wholesome.) It's such a great word, and it makes you feel ten times more Italian if you use it. (No, seriously, try it yourself. Al-lor-a.) I did not, sadly, manage to work it into a sentence. Next time!

Things I wrote, for I have not always been idle like a grasshopper, but busy--not so much like an ant, but an ant-grasshopper hybrid, which would be a scary insect:

I turned my Work Depression into an essay for Open Magazine on how writing as a career is sometimes dissatisfying.

And in my latest Mythology for the Millennial column: on one particular Lakshmi legend and why female infanticide is less in areas that cultivate rice.

Three links you should totally read this week:

Paper straws won't stop climate change.
Laughed out loud at poet Patricia Lockwood on her cat, Miette, who sounds so much like our Olga.
Loved this on an ultramarathon through Ladakh. (Who are these people who want to do all these horrible things?)

And a few bonus reads, just in case you're feeling like more:

This guy made THOUSANDS of cat videos and not a single one went viral. He does it anyway, for love. (Much like me and this newsletter.)
Loved this New Yorker profile of Mayank Austen Soofi, aka The Delhiwallah.
And also this piece on Pompeii, the one place everyone asks about when you return.

Have a great week! Speak soon,
xx
m

Where am I? The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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