Life Under the Leaning Tower Part 3

Comparing the clubs in Pisa and finding beauty in the mundane.

15th October - 10th November

What a month. At first, I found it hard to write anything about my life as I was constantly exhausted and frustrated, not wanting to document such negative sentiments. But as I slowly made it through several of the more complicated situations, I began once again to find the comedic value, the hopefully relatable content which I can now share with my peers. Personally, I would love to read a book about someone in their twenties experiencing some of the same things that I am, to have a realistic depiction of the stupid struggles instead of some fake, filtered ideal on social media to strive for. I've also realised that many things aren't going to get easier, at least not for a while, and I don’t wish to deny the value in a challenging lifestyle by neglecting to write openly about it, the way I did with all my positive experiences last year in North America.

That being said, my baptism by fire doesn't seem to be coming to an end.

Our house was broken into, thieves smashed a window pane and climbed into my housemate’s bedroom. After my bout of Covid, I contracted severe wisdom tooth pain, which at its worst had me bedridden for a day and taking painkillers for two weeks. For a week I woke to find small red bites on my body and face, fearing a bed bug infestation. I do not have bedbugs, however I still occasionally wake to find strange bites on my hands and cheeks, and have found a spider on my pillow! A man I was dating virtually disappeared, a new group of friends turned out to be transphobic. The handle on my window is broken, my fly screen is broken, the heating is not working. I bought three umbrellas in four days, one was left at a club and the other promptly broke as I was on the way to class, leaving me drenched upon arrival. The zipper on my beloved Patagonia backpack broke, I accidentally stained the shower mat and the back of the couch pink with my hair dye, I lost my favourite vintage jacket. I have no idea how, but I ruined all of my white shirts one day doing laundry. The first few weeks of class were messy, they kept putting us in classrooms that were far too small, students being forced to sit on the floor and stand against the back wall, sometimes spilling into the corridor. I craved some kind of regularity or organisation, but my professors would show up without the right materials, struggle to send us important information or digital copies of textbooks that they expected us to read, classes were cancelled and rooms were changed at the last minute with little or no warning. I studied very hard for a test only to witness on the day that every student in the room save for three of us was blatantly cheating. And with five minutes remaining, when almost every student had finished and vacated the room, the professor told us that class was cancelled for the following day, expecting us to 'pass on the word' to our other classmates instead of communicating it to us via email. I ran around in circles trying to get some assistance (or at least coherent information) from the university, ending up with a fine for not paying a fee which they had never told me I was expected to pay. I realised that my landlord is charging me more for rent than was specified in the contract, and had to point out that since I didn't live here in August he shouldn't be asking me to pay the bills for that month…

These are just the little things. There have been some more serious issues, but they relate to more private areas of my life or to people who could potentially read this blog, so I'll leave you with that short summary to paint a picture of the mild chaos I feel surrounded by!

Of course, there are moments of clarity amidst the chaos. I recall speaking to a friend on the phone one night and stopping suddenly on the sidewalk, shocked to see a grand old wooden door open to a golden, glowing church interior. I walk down that street virtually every day, yet I had never seen inside the church, and resolved to come back later to properly appreciate its serene beauty. Similarly, returning home from my late class every Thursday and Friday night, I always walk right beneath the leaning tower of Pisa, and it still takes my breath away a little each time, illuminated bone white against the black sky, silent and empty of tourists.

But the best thing about how overwhelmed and overstimulated I am is that I am not feeling the opposite. I am not depressed. I am not numb. I feel very, intensely alive, in a way that perhaps I never have before. And with the lows being so low, I’m able to appreciate the highs much more. At the end of an insane week, my housemate Elena and I finally coordinated ourselves to cook dinner together for the first time, and I could have cried at how good our food tasted, I was so grateful for the simple pleasures of a hot, healthy meal and her company.

I had forgotten just how time consuming school can be, already beginning to feel a little trapped in an endless cycle of attending lectures and catching up on homework. However, I didn't anticipate that I'd be able to study as much as I have been insofar, for hours every single day in libraries and cafes, in my bedroom and kitchen, from morning to afternoon to late at night. I find the content in all my classes to be relatively challenging, so I'm consistently putting in extra effort to try and understand things that my European classmates may have already begun learning in high school due to the difference in curriculums. A considerable number of my classmates have also already attended university, and a few are on Erasmus exchange, so at times I feel rather inexperienced.

When I'm not studying, I'm drinking too much and staying out too late with friends, as any good university student does. My social life here is far more dynamic and spontaneous than it ever was in Sydney, and at the moment of writing this sentence I have spent the last eight nights in a row out with various friends.

I finally went out dancing in Pisa. First to Borderline, where we finished a few cheap bottles of wine, got in without paying, and danced for hours to classic English-language pop hits in the tiny crowded club. It was the hottest venue I have ever been in, and even being a runner I have never sweat more in my life, it was streaming like a waterfall down my face and splashing off my chest. The day afterwards, sipping Powerade in my lecture, I silently saluted another girl I'd spotted in the club as she nursed a similar looking sports drink. However, despite feeling very unattractive and sweaty that night, I was still subject to some good old Italian charm, as a man approached me and initiated the following exchange:
Him: Sei Italiana? (Are you Italian?)
Me: No.
Him: Parli inglese? (Do you speak English?)
Me: Si.
Him: Vuoi baciarmi? (Do you want to kiss me?)
Me: (laughing) No!
Him: Va bene. (Okay.)
The sad thing is that I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly he had taken my 'no' for an answer and walked away, given the experiences I mentioned in my last blog post.

A couple of nights later we went to Caracol for a psytrance night with strong black lights and trippy glowing visuals painted across the walls. It was the first and infosar only night I have gone out in Pisa without being approached by several men, and I'd chalk it up to the fact that the crowd was very small, a little strange, and assumedly all doing drugs. No matter how hard I tried to enjoy it, trance music really isn’t my thing, but we had fun dancing all the same.

The following Friday we went to Deposito, a warehouse-style club more on the periphery of Pisa, to an event that was pitched as being similar to Berghain in Berlin, with dark underground techno music and a strict no phones policy. After buying memberships we entered to find an interesting kind of music playing, it felt richly atmospheric, with sound effects taken from nature, and I infinitely preferred the variety and texture to the trance music of the following week. We danced happily for hours, the only thing tainting the experience was a man who tried to push mine and Dani's heads together when we were talking, and subsequently continued to follow and approach me throughout the night. The fetishizing man aside, I enjoyed the new experience, especially the walk home with Dani and Jonathan, where we stopped to lovingly pet a fat gray cat. At one point on a particularly picturesque street, Dani simply said 'this is our coming of age'. I couldn't imagine being anywhere other than there in that moment, wandering the quiet early morning streets of Pisa with my two new close friends, grateful for everything I had done to get me that far.

The following night we dressed up for Halloween before heading out to drink in the piazza, and the autumnal festivities continued later with a lovely cozy night of candle painting and homemade cinnamon buns. And finally, on the 31st I dressed as Wednesday Addams, went out for dinner with my friends and grabbed a drink in the piazza before returning home to watch a funny Japanese cult horror film with Jonathan whilst the rest of the group went on to party in Florence.

It began to rain like mad, flooding streets and sidewalks and sending uprooted trees rushing down the muddied Arno river. Thankfully in Pisa the damage from the storm wasn’t as bad as nearby areas in Tuscany where hospitals were flooded, cars washed away and multiple landslides occurred. Though the relentlessly cold and wet weather was likely why I got very sick once again, as it was impossible not to get drenched once the wind picked up, and returning to a house without functioning heating or a clothes dryer didn’t make things much easier.

Jonathan and I went to an interesting exhibit on avant-garde artists at Palazzo Blu, the city’s most prominent art gallery, situated on the river with a striking blue facade. I studied for the first time in the Antichistica library with Dani, stunned by the fact that we were able to sit in the church of Santa Euphrasia, trying to stay silent lest our voices echo around the high domed ceilings and marble altars.

The three of us went to Deposito again, and I finally found a techno genre that I can dance to, and I mean really dance to, limbs flailing unashamedly like the loners in mosh pits I used to watch with a combination of envy and second hand embarrassment. The day after I whiled away my hangover by researching drum and bass and jungle music for hours, reading about the genres, listening to playlists and trying to identify exactly what it was I had liked so much about certain songs the previous night.

After realising I hadn’t been on a walk for a couple of weeks I dragged myself away from studying into a rare spot of sunshine and wandered along the city’s old medieval walls. In that rare moment of relative mental peace, I was suddenly able to zoom out from my daily to-do list and remember that I had in fact moved to Italy, that I was somewhat successfully living in a foreign country. I’d like to try and expand my perspective in this way more often, as it filled me with a sudden sense of pride and gratitude, and I spent the rest of the day with a heightened awareness and appreciation for the peculiarities of my new home. Pisa is such a curious little city to me, I find it to be simultaneously very picturesque and very ugly, changing dramatically from one street to the next. Though perhaps this intense contrast is a reflection of my internal reality, the way that I am currently perceiving life as both brutal and beautiful, inseparably so.

As always, thank you for reading!