Exploring Favara

It’s a fascinating thing to walk aimlessly around an unfamiliar city. Dreamily you wander, making turns on streets randomly, stopping to listen to the happenings within the houses, reading posters, and kicking around garbage.

Today I woke up, washed up, had an espresso, and took my camera to explore Favara. With a camera strap around your neck, you see the world a different way. Everything you see is presented as a possible subject- a parked car, crumbling walls, fading posters, piles of garbage. The mundane becomes beautiful as you scan your vision consciously.

I took a right out of the apartment building, walking alongside olive groves to my left, and the industrial sprawl of the city to my right. I stopped to read some spray paint graffiti on the walls. In poorly translated English, I read “Fuck you!”,  “Anarkism 4ever”, “always forever I will loving you.” I continued on, made a right, turning up the hill. I walked on a main street past bars, cafes, and construction sites, stopping frequently to photograph. I read the obituaries posted all over the town, and took pictures of many of them. I watched a stray cat eating garbage, and two dogs chasing each other on a side street. I turned off onto a side street, wandering aimlessly in circles as Fiats, Alfa Romeos, and mini coopers raced by, weaving in and out of pedestrians, cars, scooters, and dogs.

People on their balconies watched me pass by. I said “ciao” to all of them, sometimes receiving a mumbled “ciao” back. I get the feeling that people don’t expect to see a lone teenager wandering around the streets with a camera, since this town is not on the tourist radar, overshadowed greatly by the more historical and beautiful town over, Agrigiento, with its ancient Greek ruins, statues, and modern shops.

I walked around abandoned constructions sites, looked into the crumbling remains of the failed projects. Shoes, old sweaters, abandoned wheelbarrows and ladders were strewn about everywhere.

I thought a lot while I was walking about where I was, where I wasn’t, where I will be in five months. Will this be my home? Or will my home still be across the ocean, thousands of miles away?

I explored for two hours, then returned to my house, where Gerlando and Sabrina were playing Guitar Hero, and Maria, my host mother, was asleep next to a heater, snoring faintly.