As many of you might have guessed, showing up anywhere before two am is a no-no. This worked out well for Solare and I since by the time we closed down her restaurant, cleaned up, ate ourselves, made several cocktails in the blender, named the various concoctions after our ex boyfriends, and reminisced, it was usually one thirty am anyway. We’d hop in her little red car, swing by her house, throw on some scandalous clothes and heels and be back in the car in less than ten minutes.

Everything is pretty far apart here in Puglia and public transportation is practically non-existent. So there’s a lot of listening to house music compilation CDs and dancing in the car. For Saturday night, we were going to the most exclusive and famous club in the Puglia area called BluBay. Friends of ours from the night before at Kudetat claimed to have a table there and promised to get us in for free. Entry to BluBay is pricey, thirty euros and up as it’s location is spectacular – on a hill with ocean views.

The drive there was fast and easy. We followed signs for the seaside town of Castro and even saw directional street signs for the club itself. Just as Solare was pointing out the sprawling complex to me in the horizon, we came to a jolting halt. We had hit a long line of unmoving cars; some pretty serious traffic considering it was two thirty am. My eyes glanced up the where the club was perched on the hillside, and followed a line of cars all the way down to where we sat. I turned to Solare in shock:

“Everyone here is going to BluBay?”

She nodded. We were in bumper-to-bumper traffic of partygoers still five kilometers from the club’s parking lot. And these were the people arriving at two thirty am! God knows how many were already inside, and clearly not leaving. The side of the street in the opposite direction remained dead empty. I’ve never seen such a thing in my life.

So while it took us fifteen minutes to make the thirty kilometer journey from Cutrofiano to Castro, it took us forty minutes to get from the area below BluBay to it’s parking lot. This possibly infuriating situation was in fact made pleasant since everyone rolled down their car windows to begin chatting and checking each other out. A delightful man from a nearby party convertible was running around between unmoving cars with a large plastic water bottle of Havana and coke. He poured shots into plastic glasses like it was his job and handed them to everyone in the stopped traffic through their car windows. Solare and I had three shots, and made friends with the very cute driver in the car parallel to us called Fabio (considering no one was leaving the club, us party-arrivals took over the other side of the street creating a two-lane entry line. Welcome to Italy.) Fabio and his friend had driven all the way from Bari, almost a two-hour drive to go dancing. They were extremely good-natured considering they were in a hellish traffic jam after a helluva long journey.

After pow wowing with Fabio and friend for twenty minutes, Solare was forced to cut in front of them. After many dangerous and illegal maneuvers we parked about a kilometer from the club on a rocky road near what looked like a chicken coop. We hiked up to BluBay after the parking attendant instructed us to ‘have fun for him too’ and blatantly checked out our asses. We were officially in a winding line outside the club at around three am. Luckily, our friends came through on their promise and came to meet us at the door with free passes, which we then had to exchange for plastic bracelets (hate those). After sealing these around our wrists, we finally gained entrance to the megaplex fun land for adults.

I’ve been in larger Italian discotechs, but these are usually places in the middle of nowhere. BluBay was large but impeccably beautiful with winding stairs, terraces for lovers who wanted to escape the dance floor, manicured lawns, breathtaking views of the cliffs and ocean below, two DJs (an area for hardcore house and an area for slightly more commercial music) and several large, glittering, outdoor swimming pools with romantic bridges crossing over the water from one area of the club to another.

After I took twenty photos from various balconies and angles, we hit the dance floor in a thankfully elevated and less crowded private area. Initially, I was lost. I couldn’t remember the last time I was in a large Italian club like this and not working. During my time in Milan, I worked as a promotional model in the VIP sections of clubs to improve the locales overall image and share the champagne with people who spent absurd amounts of money on tables. Read more here. LINK. Without my agency supervisors, fellow models or any of my New York going-out crew of friends at my side, I had no idea what to do with myself. It took a vodka Redbull to loosen me up before I finally started to relax and enjoyed looking down at the massive crowd below that could easily fill a football stadium. After several more drinks, I contemplated bodysurfing.

My rare, stress free, peaceful going-out state of having
a) no cell phone
b) no people I was required to chat with
c) no friends I had to fight with the door man to get in
was sadly disrupted when I felt not one, but two stabbing pains in my foot. I screamed, which no one noticed since the music was loud enough to deafen infants. A lit cigarette butt had hit and rebound on the bare skin of my foot. The flaming embers had miraculously bounced to strike me TWO times. The man next to me held my elbow for support as I bent over to touch where my skin was raw. Solare quickly had ice from a stolen nearby drink on the burn and the man next me, Marco, presented the culprit: an unfortunate pale, skinny fellow muttering what seemed like an apology. I chose not to acknowledge him, just shot him my perfected devil stare and said nothing.

“He’s really sorry,” Marco said. I was still too pissed off to speak. “Really sorry,” he repeated. His friend, the irresponsible cigarette wielder, nodded in the background. At this point I was drunk and had skipped over anger to feel already outraged. How many cigarette burns must I endure when enjoying a night out on the town? Should I go out dancing in a latex suit and a scuba mask? At this point, by age thirty I’ll have small, round, permanent burns on half my body. I might as well consider myself permanently deformed now. All this unnecessary suffering because drunk smokers aren’t responsible with their cigarettes. Don’t even get me started on the fact that they’re killing themselves and giving me lung cancer via second hand smoke in the process. Right now, I’m focusing on the fact that I don’t want to be branded like a cow with cigarette dots every time I leave my house to have a good time.

Since this burn came after a long series of burns originating in New York, and since I was in a foreign city that wasn’t Milan (i.e. with no one I knew besides Solare and a group of people I would most likely never see again) I felt completely comfortable making a scene. First, I gave Mr. Unfortunate Looking a long speech about how he should extinguish his cigarettes under his foot instead of hurling them into the air to land on innocent passerby’s exposed skin. Since Mr. Unfortunate claimed to be Greek and spoke minimal Italian, Marco was left in the awkward position of acting as translator / negotiator as I rattled on about the perils of Marlboro Reds.

“Do you smoke?” I asked Marco. He didn’t. “See.” I exclaimed incredulously to Mr. Unfortunate. “Why can’t you be like him? Your friend doesn’t smoke.”

Mr. Unfortunate apologized unconvincingly again, at which point I was hit with an incredible drunken, house-music inspired, philosophical thought: Mr. Unfortunate’s apology didn’t help FIX anything. I was still burned, and he would probably toss lit cigarettes into crowds for the rest of his life. My swirling drunken mind formulated a genius plan.

“Light another cigarette,” I instructed Mr. Unfortunate. Keep in mind our communication between the loud music and transitioning between Greek, Italian and English was rather marred. And I still didn’t believe this sucker was even Greek.

“Light another cigarette,” I insisted. I imagine my eyes must have been wide and frighteningly glossy.

“Why?” Marco inquired.

“We’re going to light another cigarette, and I’m going to stub it out on HIS foot,” I said grinning at the pure brilliance of my plan. Both men looked like frightened animals in headlights.

“Don’t worry,” I absurdly continued. “I’ll only burn him for a second or two,” I added as if we were talking casually about drink preferences.

The men stared at me as if I had a heroin needle hanging of my arm. I got defensive and raised my voice.

“He’s not sorry!” I passionately announced to Marco. God, it felt so good to make a scene. “And even if he was. His apology isn’t HELPFUL!” I wailed like an infant. “Maybe if I do to him what he did to me THEN he’ll be sorry because he’ll have a soldering pain in HIS foot.” I then raised my eyebrows in expectation, as this course of action made perfect sense to me. Mr. Unfortunate looked like he wanted to cry and quickly disappeared into the crowd below like the shallow coward I’m sure he inevitably is in real life. Solare quickly interfered, distracting me with another drink while pulling me away from Marco and mouthing apologies to Unfortunate’s few friends.

The DJ then played a house song I’m especially fond of and like a quickly distracted child I resumed dancing and smiling. Unfortunately, two pesky men on the main dance floor below kept waving, tapping my leg, and vying for my attention. I focused on jumping up and down to my songs unusual beat (I probably looked like an female ape in high heels). After fifteen minutes, a strobe light blazed a flash of reality on the men annoying me down below and I recognized them as Solare’s good-looking male cousins who we’d hung out with the entire day on the beach. Ooops. I quickly helped them up into the privet area.

“We’ve been trying to get your attention for the past twenty minutes,” Cousin 1 said to me, attempting to mask his annoyance with humor.

“Yeah, I thought you were some aggressive Italian losers, sorry!” I replied as if this was a legitimate excuse for leaving them below in the mosh pit for almost half an hour.

The rest of the night’s a bit of a blur. We stayed till long after sunrise. First the sky turned white, then dawn broke with everyone still dancing, pausing only to ogle the view and pink sky over the ocean.

Naturally, we had to go have breakfast with the cousins in a small seaside town. We returned to Solare’s house at around eight thirty am the next morning, after stopping in Cutrofiano to get brioches for her family, who were up and preparing to go to work when we, utterly disheveled, pulled into the driveway. I was so tired I passed out immediately without taking my make-up off or brushing my teeth (number one sign I was too drunk for my own good). No matter what, I always remember to prep myself appropriately for bed, even if I do so stumbling. When I don’t it’s frightening.

LESSON: There’s a reason people go out to the same places in New York again and again; because when you know the clubbing establishment and all the people in it, you have to at least TRY to be a responsible, mature, adult. Me alone in Southern Italy = me not even trying to adhere to polite nightclub society. And if the Pugliese I tried to burn attempts to find me well HA – I’m already in Florence.