Bakin' in the Sun

After Sunday's roasting in the sun, I did my best to stay out of the sun Monday. In the morning we had a guest lecture by Stefano Milia regarding control and remediation of contaminated sites. This topic wasn't quite what I was expecting it to be. A lot of this control of contaminated sites consisted of placing some sort of barrier in the ground to contain a spill or to purify it as it pass through the ground water. There were a lot of different solutions to pollution that were presented, but what struck me was how the greatest priority was on reducing costs. In many situations it is more economic not to clean up a spill but merely to contain it to a location or away from human activities. I was personally expecting these clean up efforts to be taken with utmost concern for the environment. I didn't imagine them being handled in quite this way. There still certainly is a great advantage to these re-mediating efforts, but I don't think this is the angle I personally want to come at the environment with.

After this lecture, we all headed out to lunch and back to the dorm for the day because or second guest lecture for the afternoon was postponed to later this week. We all did our best in staying out of the sun and spent most of our afternoon time working on our project. Later on after the sun had fallen lower in the sky, I went for a walk around the area to get some groceries and buy some souvenirs. When I got back, a bunch of us went out to grab dinner at the usual Coccodi café, and we shot the usual shit.

Tuesday, we got up bright and early to go to Poetto Beach. We were all planning to go sailing because many people in the group had never been before. I was a little worried when we first got there because the water was still as a pond. It wasn't until we got out a little ways and the sun rose a little higher that the wind picked up. Then, it slowly but surely got windier and windier until we were moving at a pretty decent pace. It was really interesting because 6 of us were out on a J24 with an Italian who couldn't speak almost any English. He say something trying to communicate and we'd all look at him with blank faces. After awhile we all started using a lot more hand gestures to communicate and we actually ended up doing okay. It helped the Erika and I both sailed so in given situations we'd already have some sort of idea what to do, so whenever he made motions in different directions and with different tones of voice we could gather what he wanted us to do. The whole trip was actually really cool, and it turned out to be a great time! We got a different view of Cagliari and the surrounding terrain which was an interesting new perspective and now we can all say we've sailed in the Mediterranean.

View of Cagliari from the boat.

After boating we grabbed some lunch at a close by stand and headed out to the beach. We'd already spent 4 hours out in the sun so I was baking. I really didn't want to use sun screen so I layered up with my t-shirt and hat. I would have been okay, but I didn't realize how long we were spending at the beach. I was expecting maybe an hour or 2 max at the beach and than we'd take the bus home, but no, we ended up spending a few more hours at the beach... roasting my body like a turkey dinner. It was a nice day on the beach and the water was beautiful, but by the time I left there, even though I covered up with my shirt, my sweatshirt, and my hat, I got burned kinda bad. First thing I did when we got back to the dorm was take a shower and throw aloe on that shit. Following that, I finished my reflection on the Sardinian culture and a bunch of us went down to Incognito Pizza, the first dinner place we went to Cagliari. We all got pizzas and lamented over our sun-dried bodies.

Wednesday, we went to another landfill, Villaservice Plant. This one was much more like what we were expecting a landfill to be. This was a municipal solid waste landfill so there was lots of trash, swarming seagulls, and ripe smells. This plant was actually pretty cool though, it had a section for anaerobic digestion, compost, bio gas, wind turbines, solar panels, and the landfill itself. The tour guide we had for this visit was also really cool. He was the main chemist for the plant and he only had been speaking English for one week prior to our arrival! For all that his English was impressively good, including a good accent, and the ability to make jokes. He was very well put together, fun-loving, entertaining, and intelligent individual. Despite the smell, this turned out to be one of our best technical visits.

The crew at the landfill visit and our guide in the yellow hard hat.

Wind turbines.

White sphere is a bio gas containment zone.

After the visit, we took the bus to a location in Villacidro and ate lunch. There was some good hiking here, and small stream of water coming down the mountain so we hiked up to see where it all was coming from. We came out to a few different with small pools of water. It was an interesting challenge trying to get up this mountain and past this water to continue our hike. Eventually, it appeared there was no way further forward, so I took off my shoes and jumped in the adjacent pool of water. It was a a beautiful refreshing temperature as it was 38 degrees Celsius outside (100+ Fahrenheit). I was the only one to go swimming and I had a wet butt all the way back on the bus, but it was totally worth it.

I managed to stay out of the sun most of the time on this trip, so my burns didn't get any worse thankfully, but nonetheless, I took tap when we got back because the heat still takes the energy right out of you. Now I'm heading off to dinner, so ciao!