Dream, Plan, Travel, Repeat.

I was browsing through some old files and realized that I wrote quite a few notes from various parts of the world for my O & E section that were never posted. So, consider this an O & E “international edition.” (Notes from Italy are coming soon.)

•    In Hyderabad, India, there appears to be a trend of photographing your baby/toddler in a variety of costumes, such as a doctor, a god(dess), a policeman, or even (my favorite) Gandhi. Some people put all of the images together to create giant posters to hang in their homes. Very, very funny.

•    I passed by a kindergarten in Kenya that had painted the alphabet, and images that corresponded with each letter, on its exterior walls. What image do you think they used for the letter “G”? A giraffe? Nope. They used a gun.

•    While a friend and I lounged on a beach in Lamu, a Kenyan man told us a nice story about the baobab trees that can be found around the country. One legend says when a god gave each animal a tree or bush to plant into the ground, the hyena planted the baobab tree upside down (which is why its branches appear to be roots). When the hyena realized his mistake, he began laughing and continues to laugh to this day.

•    A friend I traveled with in Tanzania had a Swahili phrasebook that provided sentences for interactions with market vendors, waiters, taxi drivers, and so on. One of the sections was for sexual interactions. Phrases that you could murmur to your Swahili lover whilst in the throes of passion included “Easy lion!” and “It helps if you have a sense of humor about it.”

•    In Kigali, Rwanda, you can make a “cell phone call” by stopping one of the young men and women wandering the streets with full-sized desk phones that are somehow wired to the mobile network.

•    Pigeon is a popular dish in Egypt. I consider myself an adventurous eater, but I couldn’t bring myself to try pigeon, a bird that I believe is popularly known in the US as a “sewer rat with wings.” I am also amused (and a little disgusted) by the similarity between the Arabic words for “pigeon” (hamam) and “toilet” (hammam). Coincidence? Probably not.

•    Cairenes have an awesome(ly scary) way of asking for directions: rather than safely pulling over and directing their question to one of the thousand pedestrians on the street, they will drive alongside another car and, as the two vehicles weave unsteadily down the road, converse with the other driver for a minute or two.

Hi. Remember me? I’m your daughter/sister/granddaughter/niece/co-worker/friend who has been traveling around the world for the last 11 months. (Can you believe it’s been that long already?) I think it’s pretty clear that I failed miserably in upholding my New Year’s resolution to post on this blog more frequently, but I thought I’d try to get back into the swing of things today.

I’m still in Rome, where I’ve been housesitting with Matteo since late November. This is my third time in Italy, and I’ve noticed that while Rome’s amazing monuments are still exciting, I tend to focus more on day-to-day things in Italian life this time around. One of those things is Italian TV or, more specifically, a hilarious primetime variety gameshow called Ciao Darwin.

From what I gather with my slowly (but surely) evolving Italian vocabulary, each episode of Ciao Darwin is a competition between groups of polar opposites—blondes versus brunettes, old versus young, fat versus thin, smart versus stupid, the “enhanced” (via plastic-surgery) versus the “natural,” and so on. Usually, there is a question-and-answer round, a “time travel” round where contestants dress in ridiculous costumes to re-enact something like Dante’s Inferno or the American Wild West, and a sort of Fear Factor round where contestants let bugs crawl all over them or experience other disgusting or horrifying things.

But the craziest thing about Ciao Darwin to my American mind would be the fact that a good 50 percent of the show is dedicated to showing off women’s boobs and butts. (Do I have your attention now?) This flagrant display of sexuality isn’t uncommon in Italian popular culture (there are billboards near my house, for instance, that use women’s breasts to sell toothpaste and their bare bodies to sell air-conditioning units), but Ciao Darwin takes it to a whole new level with its creative approaches.

For your enjoyment, I’ve linked to a few clips of common Ciao Darwin segments that I found on YouTube and an Italian site. The first is a “dance” scene (Matteo says that the dances are famous for how awful they are…which obviously isn’t the main point, as you’ll soon see); the second is a Madre Natura scene, where a scantily-clad woman with strategically-placed leaves invokes the spirit of Mother Nature for absolutely no reason; and the third is the infamous “catwalk” scene (which I am having trouble linking to– you’ll need to click on the link on the left-hand side that says “Nord vs Sud”) where the opposing teams battle it out by showing off “day wear,” “evening wear,” “disco wear,” and “night wear”… I’ll leave you to figure out which is which. Be sure to watch for amusing facial expressions from the men in the audience as well as their use of binoculars, and to listen for an increased roar in the crowd every time a woman in a thong turns around.

Oh, Italy. There’s so much more to you than the Colosseum and gelato.

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