Hi there! I know it's been a while since I last wrote--let me say, my, I've been busy! It takes a lot of energy to see everything worth seeing in the birthplace of western civlization (as Sicilia prefers to be known). In any case, I am now in Munich staying with Tobi and Gerlinde. My flight got in yesterday morning to Munich at about 10:30am. I went over to Tobi and Rosie's and tried communicating with my six words of German for quite some time--Oma, you should probably call Tobi and ask him about his conversation. I think he was pretty entertained, especially when I started drawing pictures to explain myself. But I really did get a lot of out of the conversation, to my surprise (especially considering that I pretty much only know the names of furniture pieces). But we talked about Florian and Melanie's apartments and their furniture (ha!), as well as Soraya and her duck (first thing I did was ask after your duck, Soraya; did you know Tobi named it Sorto as in Soraya-Tobi; it was looking to be in excellent condition by the way), my Mom and her kindergarten, how old the kids are now... We had a pretty good conversation. After our chit-chat, Gerlinde came over and took me back to the house for some lovely pumpkin soup. Then Tobi and I went and picked up Tante Anni for afternoon coffee at three and Gerlinde had made an apple cake (I'm not sure what it's proper name is). Present at coffee were Tobi x2, Gerlinde, and Tantes Anni, Rosie, and Hilde. Then there was lots more chatting, and later I walked over to Tante Hilde's (sp?). Then Gerlinde made wienerschnitzel for dinner with potato salad and green salad (I cannot remember being more excited to see fresh vegetables after being in Sicily for so long without them), and Florian came over for dinner, and then Melanie came over after, and I showed them pictures of Soraya, Louisiana, and prom. I need more family pictures--I have mostly pictures of my friends on the computer. And then Florian's girlfriend, Kirsten, came over too, and I tried to help her with her English vocabulary (she had a test on it today). It was immigration reform-themed vocabulary, which I found very entertaining--with such vocabulary as "The American Dream," "to be deported," "to vote for Bush," and so on. I think there were some words in there that the average American doesn't know. But I think she's learning Business English--so that makes sense.
All right, so I was hoping to provide everyone with a full account of my Sicilian travels, but I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to write before getting burnt out. We spent almost every waking hour touring ruins, cathedrals, palaces, castles, theaters, etc. etc. etc. There was so much to see! I think I've seen almost everything worth seeing or of great historical significance in Sicily now. So I made a few notes the first five days or so, but then I just couldn't remember everything we saw--even the day after it happened. I probably should have written everyday, but alas, I had no time. And every time we got back on the bus we were so exhausted we feel asleep--every time, without fail. You could turn around five minutes into the ride and everyone would be passed out even if it were 8:00am--and no one ever went clubbing, etiher. Okay. So here goes my epic attempt at recalling my trip to Sicily:
Monday, October 15:
I started the day by rolling my enormous blue suitcase up the hill along with Erinn. (Coming down the hill when we got back to Lugano on Wednesday, I was very impressed with us, I must say.) In any case, the two of us were too cheap to get a taxi. That morning the Austria/Germany trip was leaving too, so we saw all of them gathered. Then we hopped on the nicest bus I had ever seen, which took us to the Milan Linate airport. At the Italian border a customs official got onboard and checked out all of our passports--he spent a little extra time on Bahar's Persian passport... That happened a lot during the trip. In any case, then we flew with Alitalia from Milan to Catania, where we took a tourbus to Taormina. There was an enormous group of American boys on the flight. From the sound of it, their parents were with the Army and were stationed in Germany, and they were playing in a soccer game with kids from another base. I was impressed by efficient and on-time Alitalia was--even though it was a tiny flight. I haven't been on an on-time flight in the States in a long darn time. In any case, as were got off the airplane, it promptly began to rain, to our great distress. Later that night, Professor Cappiello showed us how to take the Funi into town and how to navigate the main street, then set us loose for dinner. Marcel, Samantha, and I ended up losing the rest of our group, and continued to search for them in the rain until we became too hungry to continue. We went to a nice little pizzeria, and I had "Diavolo" pizza, which had spicy peppers, spicy salami, mozzarella, and pomodoro. Then later we found a few more people, but Sam and I went back down to the hotel rather early.
Tuesday, October 16:
This was a very busy day, but really it was just the beginning. We first went to Siracusa, where we met our first tour guide, Suzanna, who was a little bit kooky, but nice. We saw Greek theater, and Roman amphitheater, as well as a number of other ruinds. The Greek theater was very cool--and just behind it, right in the middle at the top, there was an enormous fountain of fresh spring water. We also visited a number of churches that have unfortunately blended into one... We visited a small island just next to Siracusa, as well, which I cannot remember the name of. But we saw a Greek temple that had been turned into a church of Santa Lucia, and you could still see the Doric columns, which is quite rare. After Siracusa, we left and had lunch at the AutoGrill. I had rustichella, it was sort of like a pita bread panini. Then we went onto Catania, where we had a guide named Giuseppe. Catania seemed to be pervaded by a sense of death, doom, and destruction. So many disasters have taken down the city so many times, it seems incredible that it still exists. Everything has had to be rebuilt eight times. All of the buildings were made of black lava stone too, which was very striking but also made the city seem that much darker and foreboding. It probably didn't help that it was a cloudy kind of day, threatening to rain (once we got to Catania at least; we had had some sun in Siracusa). After our tour of Catania we went back to Taormina for dinner as a group.
Wednesday, October 17:
This was an early one. We went up to see Mount Etna. We didn't get to see any lava, but we stopped at Crati Silvestri, which was plenty cool on its own. Everything was black, and it was all huge. Mount Etna is made up of like 35 craters or soemthing huge like that. And the fog even cleared a bit so that we could see around us too--usually the fog sets in pretty early and you don't have a very good view. After Mount Etna we visited the beach at Naxos and had lunch there. It was a very pretty beach and there was a big cruise ship in the harbor. After Naxos, we drive to the highest part of the Taormina area, Castelmola (sp?), which had a spectacular view. Once we got back to Taormina, in the later afternoon (but not evening yet) we had the rest of the day free. I went into town by myself, but eventually met up with Ryan, then Bahar, Gabi, Devon, and Marcel. We shopped around until about 8:00pm, when we scouted out a place for dinner. We found a quaint little place where the chef spoke some Spanish, and he sort of fell in love with Devon and made her a Sicilian specialty of some sort of seafood marinara pasta--that was good. We spent a long, long time there. Then we went and had gelato, and then went to an Irish Pub for coffee, where the waiter was Moroccan. We ended up going to bed around 1:30am, I'd say. It was fun and I sort of found people to hang out with over the trip.
Thursday, October 18:
The day before we went to Palermo, we got to get up a little bit later. We met at 10:30am to go up to town (Taormina) in order to meet some students a private language school. That was good, but it was also difficult because both sides were very shy--most of the language students were taking French too, so for those of us English/Spanish speakers, it got a little awkward. But they had lots of pastries for us to try. Then we had a couple of hours free until our walking tour or Taormina; we met again at 2:30pm in front of the church. We saw the botanical gardens and the Greek-Roman theater, which had a great view of the water. Then we were free until 7:30pm, when we met for pizza. During that in-between time, I got some monstrous mosquito bites that turned into welts. And that was pretty much our night.
Friday, October 19:
We moved to a hotel just outside of Palermo, in a town called Mondello. Palermo is the largest city in Sicily with about one million inhabitants, including illegal immigrants (mostly from North Africa, as the distance is only 120-150 miles across the water). You can actually take a train to Tunisia from Sicily. I was very surprised to find out you can take a train to Sicily too, for that matter; you get on the train and then eventually the train gets loaded up onto a big ferry boat, and the train is floated across to the rest of its tracks. Amazing, huh? In any case, we were all a little disappointed by the hotel in Palermo because we were a bit spoiled by the one in Taormina, but it wasn't so bad. We left Taormina at 8:30am and arrived in Palermo at about 4:00pm, during which time we made two bathroom stops and toured a very well-preserved Roman villa, with some spectacular mosaics covering all its floors. It had some very entertaining rooms--like the Bikini Room, which had all mosaics of women from different countries in bikinis. So they're not such a modern invention.
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