To tan, to fry

My favourite place to chill is at Amarea in Bordighera (www.amareaplage.it) It has a fantastic corner of the beach, with great design, good food and lovely staff and a good Wifi connection and therefore a good network opportunity since all the entrepreneurs seem to like the place too.

The owners are ambitious and with only 1,000 euro for one chair per month, it is very cheap… However the place is sold out and frequented by a rare kind of Italian of the crispy variation also known under the name ItalianTan. Since the art of appreciating the beautiful things in life is perfected by the Italians, I have been paying close attention to the visitors.
All seem to have a rather cool life that involves around sun, see and good food. The kids are being managed by the grannies and the husbands are working hard and are only allowed to join them during the weekend, providing of course that he brings his plastic Gold card.

The ladies install themselves on the lounge chair kitted out in designer bathing suits (read small) at around 10 in the morning and discuss world politics and read literature… Well, the last part is not true of course, why bother. They lay on their backs and tan for hours and hours, small breaks are permitted only to eat a salad or drink a cocktail and than back to tanning.

It seems that the Italians have discovered that if you sunbath the whole day your skin will get a colour nobody thought would be possible. They try hard and put in great efforts for hours, days even weeks and some for months. Enabling themselves to get that tan that makes you the cream de la cream of Bordighera. This colour I can only qualify as fried chicken or Imitation Afro Tan. It is basically a colour that gets tattooed on your body will only leave after the summer. It is scary to see that suncream is applied only on kids and even the grannies prefer to get first the lobster look before hitting the afro status.

I am still trying to figure out if this enables them to elevate them to a new status in society and among friends or is it just a trend. I guess that soon they will belong to a very select part of our population and that part is better to be avoided at all cost !