Place: City center of Trieste, Italy. Time: Around 4:00 past Friday midnight.
It’s another one of those long, sleepless nights in which you have no place to sleep in Europe.. but this time it’s in... *drumrolls* La Bella Italia!
The land of opera, art, orgasmic food, coffee and wine.. but also the birthland of the Mafia, that enjoys one of the highest criminal rates in the European Union, making it -obviously- not the most handsome of places for a street sleep..
Sooo, after checking out all hostels and coming up with nothing at all, me and 4 other “friends” decided to go for a walk down the center of this charming Italian city for some 4 am sightseeing. Obviously it was so beautiful, and obviously also, we were totally drained from the 8 hours long commute from Munich to the Croatian borders, in which we were denied access to the country as one of us didn’t bring his passport with him. Sweet.
We ended up sitting by a fountain facing the sea right in the center of the city, where we went out of the fuel in our auxiliary tanks, making us nearly hypnotized. Neighboring us, were a group of hardcore homeless Italian hippies, who obviously had been smoking good stuff that made them high at that point of time.
As for me, I was quickly drifting off to sleep, to the extent that clarinet and guitar with the neighbouring street hippies weren’t of interest to me. Eyebrows met, cheek rested against the palm of my hand, nearly fell asleep.
I hear from afar the chords of Paul Desmond’s legendary tune, Take Five, from soft strums of a distant guitar. Initially, I think to myself that my dreams were sweet enough to compensate the shit I was in, but I was -to my joy- mistaken. As the chords continued and, a clarinet stepped in to play the melody. I had to relate that to what I had seen 5 minutes before falling asleep. Suddenly my eyebrows went wide open, and I felt as fresh as ever.
What are the odds that I hear one of my favorite jazz standards (and one of the hardest as well), in one of the less jazzy countries in Europe, from a group of street hippies at 4 am?
Those are the moments that make the adventure feel rewarding.
Those those moments that we live for.
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