Intermediate Days

The days in between my trip to Venice and Florence were filled mostly with work and some walking around Cascina, but nothing in specific. I went to Pisa one more day and that was on Thursday the 25th. But before I left to have dinner with mostly the AEI (Albert Einstein Institute in Germany) people, I had a little walk around the town of Cascina and found a nice stall selling fruit. I bought cherries for 2 Euros (about 250 gms) and they were ok, nothing spectacular but not too bad either. We had dinner at a local pizzeria in the middle of Pisa and I had a pepperoni pizza. Before you get alarmed that I have turned non-vegetarian suddenly, pepperoni is the term for pepper in Italian. By now my Italian skills were getting better and I could communicate with the waiter without much effort. The night before I had dinner at the hotel, it was some sort of Pasta which was very salty but ok. So I had vowed to myself that I will almost all days eat out, since the hotel was expensive and not so tasty either.

All these days I was planning as to what to do next. So I talked to all the resident Italians like Marialessandra and Laura, who offered me suggestions as to where to go and where to stay. After much deliberation, I decided to go to Venice on friday, spend a day and a half there, get back to Florence on Saturday night and spend a day there before returning to Pisa. So after dinner on thursday I walked down to the train station and bought tickets from Pisa to Cascina and from Cascina to Venice. The walk back was very interesting, since I walked along the major artery of the Pisan heart and it was very lively even at 10.30 pm. There were people mulling around , lots of youth cuddling with each other and enjoying some Italian Gelato, which is the best ice-cream I have ever had in my life. The one thing that struck me was the fact that the only person with my skin colour walking around as an equal to these people was me. All of the other Indians and Africans were selling things on small stalls or on the streets. It was very disheartening, as we Indians tend to do this kind of work all over the world. We work under the Arabs in the Middle East, while they live lives of complete luxury. We run American motels and small shops and are often scared for our jobs and our family to not mess around with the local population. Is it too much to ask that people from my nation start taking up their place in the world as equals and not as petty workers and salesmen? But then this brings me to the fictional character Londo Molari, a Centauri who longs for his race's "good old days" in the tv series Babylon 5. His obsession and patriotism brings him to do terrible things to other people and races and he almost loses everything in the pursuit to better his people. So, while such feelings of ambition and pity are well-founded, they might not be what is needed the most. On a side issue, most of the Indians there seemed to be speaking Bengali. They looked at me strangely and why not, after all most Indians there didnt have enough money to roam around proudly. This is not to say that the Italians were racist or that there was something actively working against coloured people there, but its just stating the facts.

Anyways after I got back to my hotel, I packed and waited for my real vacation (aleit 2 days long) to start.