Comfortable shoes and eyes wide open - let's do the flaneuse

How the hell did it happen - instead of chosing some off the road, Nepalese 9-month-long encounter, I ended up in the most banal place any European could end up in: Italy. I hate the culture, the mentality, the laziness, the siesta breaks, the amount of fancy historical places, the fact that everyone loves to spend their holidays there, that it is so obviously beautiful, to the edge of decency. But ok, let's try, maybe out of my previous strange experiences - I lived in Berlin and Reykjavik, these cities taught me how to seek for and find alternatives - I am able to squeeze Palermo like a lemon and find something superspecial about it.

And so here I am. Midnight, 1 of April just started - great moment to move into a place, especially a place as abstract as Palermo, which turned out to have this strong meditteranean charm combined with off-road dirtiness and strangeness. It was unbareably hot, it was terribly late, I didn't know anyone, and the central square in front of the Central Station looked seriously strange. In the bushes around everything was possible. Under the arcades all sorts of stuff could have been hidded. In fact I never thought of mafia, more of disturbing anything, you know. And that first walk to my first bed in Palermo has shown that this will be some extraordinary experience: chaotic, extremely sensual - pushing it to the borders of what's rather surreal and impossible, resulting in all this architectural collapse, all this urban disaster. I briefly developed a really strong love-hate relationship with this city, which kept me coming back regularly after leaving it "for good". It's hard to imagine all the heritage, all the incredible palazzos that nobody knows of anymore (it happened, I was looking one extremely eccentric place with an odd history and I asked people around it if they knew where it was, but nobody did, and I found it, completely ruined and magnetic), all the ruins of XII century places that serve as dumps right in the city center. And just right next to eat people eat caponatta without regrets, have their wines, roll their arancinos, sip their incredibly dark espresso (with sugar) and have a supersweet marsala in the most devastated and the most appealing square I have ever seen - Vucciria, walking on the blood of octopuses that have been slaughtered there in the morning. Palermo turned out to be the decadence embodied, pure XIX century nihilist experience, the doom of an unbelievable phatasmagoria.