A Whirlwind

It started with the flight. Cat drove me an hour to Newark, where I picked up an hour long shuttle ride to JFK. Three hours later, I was in a spacious Coach seat aboard a Delta flight where I spent the next 9 hours of my life. On that flight, I met up with one of our group, Yali ("Jollee") who was just a few rows back. After several failed attempts at sleep, I watched two movies, studied music, and made several trips up and down the aisle to stretch. After landing in Rome, Yali and I wandered around the concourse, as we had three hours before our connecting flight to Rome. Getting through Customs was very easy. I'm not sure it's going to be that easy coming back. After window shopping at stores like Dolce & Gabbana, Hermes, and other posh stores you wouldn't expect to find in an airport, we boarded a small flight to Cagliari, Iglesias. I was asked to move to the back of the plane to help balance the weight for flight.
We were picked up by the family that has run the music festival here for the past ten years. Gianluca, company administrator/accompaniast, and his mother, Lilliana. Lilliana was already documenting with her video camera as we made our way to them through the empty baggage claim area. Lilliana does not know much English. Gianluca's english is very good. Between the three of us we were able to communicate just fine. Gianluca drove us, in what was a relatively spacious car for Europe, to his family's house. This is Yali, and Gianluca's mother, Lilliana.
At first glance, it seemed a humble place, but once inside you see the love and care the family had put into the house. They had rennovated the entire place. Three floors, with a Terazza on the roof, where Lilliana has her garden.During the rennovation, they removed certain areas of the wall finish to expose the underlying old brick. This brick looks more like Adobe than what we think of as brick. There is rock, straw, mudpack. It's very interesting, but it has a wonderful effect. It is a warm place, comfortable, and welcoming.
So here we waited another several hours for Sophie (the groups mezzo-soprano) to arrive. Yali and I were both a bit hungry, and extremely tired, as it had been over 24 since we had slept. lilliana picked up on this and said she would make a "snack". okay, the snack was so much more. she had prepared several things, from simple sliced bread with Beautiful olive oil and vinegar, to preparing fresh green peas, she made a breaded, pounded pork which was wonderful. She also made a giant fritatta with green peas (one of her specialties). She offered us her home-pickled calliflower and dried tomatoes. They packed some serious punch, but were amazing. There was also a dried sausage called.....um, "saltuzza", I think. I'll check on that. She boiled a pasta only made in Sardegna, it was kind of like gnocchi, only smaller, and she made a light tomato sauce with it. Everything she made was from Sardegna, and it was all wonderful. And she does it all in a kitchen which can hardly fit one person. It makes the kitchen at Mom and Dad's look like the Claim Jumper Kitchen.
So we ate, we talked, had an italian lesson, all while fighting the urge to pass out from exhaustion. Eventually, Sophie was brought from the airport, and friends of the family came to meet the singers.
In the pic above, from the left, Sophie our mezzo, in the very back Lilliana is head back to the kitchen, to her right is Don Carlo, her husband, then Karen Saillant (the director of International opera theatre, the one who hired me), Emily Wong (one of our accompaniasts, and a wonderful pianist), and Gianni (a potter, a singer, a comedian, and more on him later).
Once we had the three singers that would be arriving on day one, we were driven an hour to our flat in Iglesias. It did not take me too long to put my things away and crash. What a day (or days). As I was falling asleep, I took a quick look at my phone..... 33 hours without sleep. I would sleep for the next 14.