Backtracking... so tomorrow (well, today, since it's after 2am my time) starts Umbria Jazz 2011, which is this huge and awesome jazz festival that takes place every year in Perugia. They've been setting up the main stage for it next to the fountain all this past week, which has been an epic tease because we're leaving *the very day it starts* and won't get to partake in any of the fun. Apparently this is because the hotel prices skyrocket once the festival starts and we couldn't afford to stick around (boo Harvard). The atmosphere started to change around here in the past couple days because more and more people and musicians were arriving to get ready for Umbria Jazz, and tonight was the eve of it so things kicked off with a bang.
As soon as we got onto Corso Vannucci, there was a fairly big crowd of people watching this one group of jazz musicians playing in the street. We stopped by for a little but there was really loud noise and lots of lights coming from the center by the fountain/steps, so we headed over to check it out. Everything was all done being set up and there was this crazy huge light show, with all these colored lights and designs being projected onto the wall of the Palazzo dei Priori (the wall behind the fountain in the picture below, so you can finally get an idea of what it looks like in the center of the Piazza IV Novembre here!)
I keep typing and backspacing my descriptions of the light show and there really aren't words to describe it besides "really really mesmerizingly cool!" so I'm just gonna go with that for now and put up some pictures soon!
Anyway, the (really loud) music got kinda scary after a while, so we headed back to see what was going on down the street, and the crowd around the jazz band we'd seen earlier had grown and some people had just started dancing around them. I was with Hannah, Luciana and Rachel and Luciana, ever making friends, started dancing too and introducing herself to everyone. The energy of the place was just ELECTRIC and the musicians were SO good and so before long me, Rachel, and Hannah all joined in too, clapping and dancing along in the center of this giant group of people we'd never seen before and would never see again to the music of this random Belgian jazz group we'd never heard before and will probably never hear again, in the early hours of the morning in this beautiful city filled with people and musicians from all over the world. As I finally gave in to the random people who'd been persistently trying to pull me into their dancing train and began circling the group of onlookers with them and pulling in others to join, I was filled with such utter happiness and excitement and smiley-loving-life-ness and really reminded that the whole dancing-in-the-street-with-total-abandon-on-the-last-night-of-being-in-a-foreign-city thing is absolutely NOT something to be overlooked or shied away from as overly-ambitious-Harvard-kids like myself sometimes tend to do because it's FUN and AMAZING and PERFECT and most importantly it's *LIFE*
And I am absolutely in loveee with life, especially on FUN and AMAZING and PERFECT nights like tonight.
AND I AM ABSOLUTELY IN LOVE WITH PERUGIA WHY ARE WE LEAVING TODAYYYY?!?!?
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