Sicily, Italy - day one

Lunch in Palermo

I arrived at Palermo airport at 9am on Thursday, and managed to find the bus going into Palermo without too much difficulty. Driving in from the airport you could see piles and piles of garbage littering the side of the highway, like all of the houses in the area were just dumping it there, and stray plastic bags blowing in the wind. In the city itself there a big dumpsters but they are absolutely overflowing with rubbish that hasn't been collected, and stray dogs get into it all and tip them over. I don't think I've ever been in a city that's so dirty, even compared to developing countries in Central America.

Palermo

I also noticed the hills. Unlike most of Europe that I've travelled through, Sicily is not flat! Its very hilly, and I love being near the sea again, after living in a harbour city for four years it doesn't feel right to me to be inland. The landscape is very yellow and brown, it looks like the drier parts of Costa Rica and was really different after Germany.

shop in Palermo

I also quickly noticed the difference between German and Italian transport systems. In Germany, trains and buses run to a schedule found on one website, and you can usually download maps of the stations that show you where the various buses from. They apologise when a train is a couple of minutes late, and only the day before I got mad about waiting 57 minutes for a bus after missing one...

apartments in Siracusa

Italy is a completely different story. Schedules and websites don't really exist. Francesca had told me how to say 'I need to take the bus to ____" in Italian, and it was armed only with this that I eventually found my way to the bus stop for Siracusa. I asked some guys sitting outside a bar about it, which provoked a stand-up-in-each-others-faces argument between themselves that I quickly backed away from, but eventually I found it, only to learn that there was a strike on (Francesca had given me that work in Italian too!) and there was no bus until 2pm.

Palermo waterfront

So I spent four hours wandering around the city. There is a big waterfront, kinda like in Wellington, except strewn with grafitti and rubbish and a few sunbathers in very tiny swimsuits. Without a map, and lugging my bag around in the 35 degree heat I didn't walk too far, just around the waterfront, through part of the old section of town with cool alleyways and sidestreets, and through the produce market.

myself and Francesca

I spent a lot of time looking for a cafe that didn't look like either an expensive tourist trap or a dive that the locals wouldn't appreciate a local entering, but the one I went into in the end was quite nice, the guy was really friendly and asked where I was from. Italian isn't that hard for me to understand, as it's quite similar to Spanish, but having never experienced the language before I didn't even know how to order a coffee! I kept talking a mix of spanish and english and hoping for the best, but my head is such a mess of different languages now and a lot of german kept popping out!

Siracusa waterfront

After an expresso that I swear was the same size as the dregs I would leave behind in a normal coffee and a tasty ham, tomato and mozzarella roll, I headed back to the train station, the 4am start, long walk and the heat catching up on me. There, I brought an english newspaper from the day before and sat reading until the bus came. It was late, and a lot of buses were all departing at the same time and from the same place, so the street because madness with buses honking at each other and stopping in the middle of the road, holding up all of the traffic and the other buses while everyone boarded. Some english tourists kept laughing and shaking their heads and wondering if anyone could possibly invent a worse system!

Playing canoe polo in the sea between old and new Siracusa

I got to Siracusa just before 6pm. Francesca lives here with her parents, she was an AFS student in Wellington for six months in 2009. She met me at the bus stop and we walked back to her place, she lives on the island of Ortigia, the old city centre, linked to the newer part of Siracusa by bridges. As we walked past, some canoe polo teams were playing in the channel, with goals rigged up on the two bridges - one ball that missed the goal bounced off a car crossing the bridge! Its pretty cool, much cleaner than Palermo with beautiful old architecture. Their apartment is in the old servants quarters of a noble house built in the 1700s. It has a terrace up the top overlooking Siracusa, so we sat out there and I ate cheese and vegetables and bread, and then we walked around Ortigia for awhile.

View through one of the doorways in Siracusa

We visited the main square and looked at the church, town hall and various plazas, but what I like best is the waterfront, its much nicer than the one in Palermo, with a big walkway and a lot of superyachts berthed along it. I also love the huge doorways that open onto a whole other scene, like another street or a plaza full of restaurant tables, and the buildings that were once very elaborate but have now fallen into decay. The sun was just starting to come down, my favorite time of day, and all of the old men were sitting out by their doorsteps chatting. It was completely different from Palermo, and my opinion of Italy soared! Just around the corner was a former bakery, burnt out by the mafia after refusing to pay protection money though, its kind of weird to actually see that sort of thing.

Dinner on the terrace with the canadian neighbours

We had dinner on the terrace again, with Francesca's mum, and her canadian neighbor and friend. They were really nice and it was good to chat away after spending so much time by myself in Harste! We had two types of pasta, bread and cheese, and a whole lot of vegetables, things like eggplant and grilled capsicum, which I loved, and wine and home-made sangria full of fruit. Francesca's parents run a bar/bakery/ice cream shop, so we had an assortment of different desserts to try out, things like chocolate-dipped balls of icecream, and layered icecream cakes.

Sunset in Siracusa

We finished off the day by wandering around Ortigia again to see what it looked like by night with two of Francesca's friends, and then I collapsed into bed absolutely shattered around midnight after a day that started out stressfully and ended really pleasantly!

Photos of Sicily are here.

I got the disposable camera I took to Festival La Semo developed, photos from that are here.