Blog #6

This weekend we went on an amazing trip to the center and west side of Sardinia. We started off on Friday at the Enthographic Museum in Nuoro. Paula, our guide, took us around the museum and explained the different exhibits to us. The first exhibit was about the traditional clothing and jewelry of the Sardinians. Some of the clothing was very colorful, and Paula told us that the women wore big buttons on their sleeves and shook them because they believed that the noise would scare demons away.We also saw some costumes that people wear for festivals, including carnival. Paula explained to us that during carnival, the world "turns upside-down" (for example, a king could become a slave and a slave could become a king). In the Sardinian carnival, the people would become animals; in the museum they had two men who were oxes.

After the museum, we visited the sarcophagus of Grazia Deledda, who was the first Italian woman to receive a Nobel Prize for literature in 1926. Her sarcophagus is inside a cute, small church that also has different "pictures" depicting 15 different times in Jesus' life. However, these "pictures" are actually edible. I do not remember what they are made of, but I was once again amazed at the skill that Sardinians have to make such intricate objects out of food. After visiting the church, we drove up a large mountain and had lunch with the Sheppards. All of the Sheppards were extremely friendly and showed us how they cook their pork before we sat down in a wooded area on some benches to eat. We had a few courses for lunch: bread, cheese, and sausage slices to start, then lamb and potatoes, then pork (which was the best pork I've ever eaten), then a very flavorful orange, and then an almond cookie. It was very informal and fun, especially since we ate everything with our hands off of a board made of wood on our laps. After we ate, we listened to four of the Sheppards sing three Sheppards songs. It was very strange at first because three of them sang from the back of their throats, and they almost sounded like very loud sheep! However, they were singing different pitches because they each had their own part and were in harmony, so I enjoyed it.

After lunch with the Sheppards we drove to Orgosolo, which is famous for it's bandits and murals. Fortunately, the bandits have not been active for a while, but artists still come to the city to paint murals on the walls. We were given about an hour to walk around the city and look at all of the murals. They are all very different in terms of style and color, and I think its great that this is part of the culture of this city and that the people here are fine with artists painting on their walls! I also didn't realize how many murals there are, and after I walked around a bit it seemed that I could see at least one from anywhere I was in the city. A lot of them had messges in Italian next to them, though there were two that I saw about the United States; the first one was about 9/11 and the second one had the statue of liberty in it. After an hour, we all went back to the bus and looked out over the rooftops. We noticed that a lot of the houses had solar power and cyclindrical containers on their rooftops (Annalisa explained to us that they are water heaters).

The next day we traveled by boat to the Bue Marino caves, which so far has been my favorite part of this dialogue. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures inside the cave due to copyright, though part of me thinks that I was actually able to observe the caves better because I wasn't worried about taking pictures of everything with my phone. The part of the cave that we went in was 9 km long, and we were able to walk through the first 900 meters. The only people who can travel through the rest of the cave are specialists who are trying to find a link between this cave and another set of caves. There was a walkway that we stayed on so that we didn't disturb the cave, since there is a river in the cave and it is still active with stalagmites and stalactites. There are four halls, and our tour guide said that the first hall had the most stalagmites and stalactities. The walls of the cave were bright white, except for strip of red about 20 feet up that our tour guide said used to be the height of the water in the cave. We ducked through a small opening and entered the second hall, which is called mirror hall because the water is very still and it reflects off of the sides of the walls. I noticed that since the water was so clear and still, if I looked straight down I could see the bottom and I couldn't even tell that there was water there at all. The walls in this part of the cave were also bright white, but they had more red rock coming out of smaller caves on the side. The third hall is called the Organ Pipes hall because there is a massive clump of columns (a column is when a stalagmite and a stalactite meet) that look like organ pipes. There was one part along the walkway in this hall where we could see some liquid dripping from a stalactite at the top of the cave into the water, creating some ripples in the water. The only other movement in the water is caused by the seawater from the Mediterranean Sea meeting the freshwater underground river. The underground river is what created these caves, but over time it shrank and the seawater entered the cave. In the winter the water level rises 4 or 5 meters and covers the walkway so the public is only allowed to visit from April through October. The last hall is called the seal cave, because there is a beach where the monk seals used to give birth to their puppies. There are no more monk seals in Italy because fisherman killed all of them, and they are only found in a few other places in the world. When we we turned around to walk to the entrance, I was in the back of the group and I noticed how quiet it was without people talking; even quieter than being out in the snow in the winter. Our tour guide told us that there are no fish in the water because it is too cold, and there are no bats, but there is one rare blind gecko that lives farther up in the cave. She also told us that the temperature in the cave stays the same in the summer, fall, winter, and spring at about 16 to 17 degrees Celsius, which is think is really interesting. The rock must preserve the air inside the cave, or cool it when it's very hot outside. It seemed so different inside the cave from outside, and I felt like I had stepped onto either another planet or a sci-fi movie set. I was completly fascinated by everything I saw, and it was really an amazing experience.