Tavira, Portugal - Sun, Surf, Sand and a short trip to Spain

boats at the waterfront in Cabanas

Hauke and I took the train from Faro to Tavira, 30km east, around midday. It only cost a couple of euros, so I was expecting the same level of service as I experienced in Sicily, but apart from the trains being several decades older than the majority of others in western europe it was great, having an actual timetable and sticking to it!

Tapas on our balcony in Tavira

Tavira is a smaller town, of around 10 000. Unlike Faro, its a small, sleepy town, with no big office buildings and a smaller amount of tourism. I found it much more beautiful than Faro, with old Moorish architecture and castle ruins perched on a hill that gives an amazing view of the town. After lunch at a cafe, we headed to Viva Rio to check in, a new guesthouse on the riverbank with cheap but really nice rooms with a bathtub that I made the most of, our own balcony, and a bigger rooftop balcony with a great view - I really recommend the place!

Me and Hauke on the beach in Ilha de Tavira

The best beaches near Tavira are located on islands a little out at sea past sea pans, so after dumping our stuff we took the ferry to Ilha de Tavira, which is claimed to be one of the best beaches in the Algarve. There are some tiny houses, built in the early 1940s there, and a bunch of restuarants and bars. It was later in the afternoon when we arrived, and I did have sunscreen on, but I still managed to fall asleep and get badly burnt. After a quick mojito, we headed back to the village and spent the rest of the evening enjoying tapas and wine on the rooftop watching the sun go down. Unfortunately, my level of discomfort increased to the point where sitting was painful and after the sun went down I ended up back inside lying facedown with the airconditioning system pointed at my back begging for more applications of aftersun every ten minutes of so!

Old church in Tavira

The following morning was Hauke's birthday so I headed out early to grab food for breakfast, and after deciding to go to the next town over, Cabanas, to reach the Ilha de Cabanas, we killed some time waiting for the bus by exploring the old section of the town on the hill next to our hotel. There is a couple of beautiful old church, a freshly painted convent and many amazing houses on steep lanes or small plazas, but the most incredible is the castle ruins. There is a section of walls still standing, with a beautiful garden planted inside. From there, you can climb up, walk around the walls and have an amazing view from the towers.

Ilha de Cabanas

After a quick beer, we headed to Cabanas, a small village just 7km away. While originally a tiny fishing village, it has been recently developed for tourism, with a new broad walk along the harbour and big resort hotel buildings along the shore. We took a boat to the Ilha de Cabanas only a couple of hundred metres away. This was one of my favorite beaches in Portugal, with raised wooden bridges leading up to a restaurant perched on the top of the island, and down to the main beach on the other side. I was much more liberal with the sunscreen this day, and we had a great time - I'm jealous that I've never got to spend my own birthday lying on the beach!

Tavira by night

For dinner we headed to A Ver Tavira, an upmarket restaurant next to the castle ruins, where we could again pass the evening sitting on a balcony watching the sun set over Tavira. I attempted to surprize and embarrass Hauke by getting the wait staff to stick a candle in his desert but failed by talking too loudly! But it was a nice meal, and we finished the day off with a walk around the city by night, and a few more glasses of wine back at the hotel. Its definitely convinced me to head away for another trip on my own birthday next year!

Convent in Tavira

After talking to a couple at our guesthouse, we decided to take the train east along the coast to Vila Real de Santo Antonio, a town of about 18 000 on the river that is the border between Portugal and Spain, and cross over by ferry into the spanish town of Ayamonte. They'd assured us that both were beautiful, but I'm not sure what they saw in Vila Real - being founded in the 1700s it doesn't have the amazing architecture that Faro and Tavira possess, and has been in decline for the last 50 years. We walked down the main shopping street of stores selling mass-produced straw hats and baskets and cheap chinese plastic crap and past an uninteresting town square to the harbour without spotting anything worthy of interest, and we both grumbled when we had to wait quite a bit for the next ferry, as there really was nothing more to see to kill time.

Main square in Ayamonte

Ayamonte however, was a different story. This town is a similar size, but is much older and still has a beautiful medieval old town with the narrow alleyways that I love! The town square, and many other areas, are filled with palm trees and seats covered in brightly coloured and intricately designed ceramic tiles. We walked around for a while, checking out some old churches and monuments, and stopped in the city zoo to eat a picnic lunch accompanied by the spanish Shandy beer that I had missed so much! Being able to talk Spanish again for a day was great, it was kind of infuriating listening to Portuguese, as it sounded so similar but I could only understand snatches of what was being said. The whole town was dead during siesta time, so we walked up the hill in the scorching heat to yet another church, and were rewarded by an amazing view over the little town, and across the river to Vila Real and Portugal.

Me in Ayamonte

You can notice the difference between the whitewashed walls of the more moorish-influenced southern Portugal, with the bright colours of southern Spain, although the colours of both countries seemed to stand out a lot more against the amazing blue sky and sunlight of the South compared to back in western Europe, and I took a lot of photos of little architectural details - having not had amazing experiences in Spain before, it was great to visit such a beautiful place and have such a nice day. Finally, after one last beer it was time to take the ferry back to Portugal, grab our things from the hotel in Tavira, and head back to Faro for another two nights.

More photos of Tavira are here, and of Ayamonte here.

I've signed up for Live Below the Line, and will live off €1.40 a day for five days to change the way people think about poverty and raise money for charity. Read more here, and Support me here.

May in Amsterdam

Ollie, Pepi and me playing in the paddling pool

This blog seems to be dying a silent death! I just got a bit too busy living life to spend any time writing about it, you'll understand why when I catch up on posts! But I am determined to get up to date, if only in brief as a record for myself, and now some I'm having some really cool new experiences. So here goes!

I don't have too much to say about May in Amsterdam, after Hauke was here for Queens Day I got quite sick, eventually being diagnosed with bronchitis, so I spent a lot of time at home trying (and failing) to shake the cough. I did manage a trip to Warsaw in Poland over the second weekend of the month, but I will write about that in another post.

Rollerderby in Amsterdam

I watched Rollerderby for the first time. I'd often thought about playing it myself, as I'm quite aggressive on sportsfields and used to take great pleasure from shoving my elbow into an opponients side while the referree wasn't looking, but I never really new much about the game. Turns out, the point is to go round and round in circles, with one person from each time trying to get to the front and go around the fastest, while the rest of the opposing team tries to block you from doing so. It actually wasn't very exciting viewing after the first couple of rounds.

Ollie on a really hot day

The weather got really really hot for a while, and I spent a lot of time hanging out in the sun with Ollie, splashing around in the paddling pool with both kids, and sitting on Anissa's terrace in the evenings with a few drinks. The nice weather really lifted my mood and made me happier to be in Amsterdam over summer...

...until one morning Jacquie told me that my visa application had been rejected and I had 28 days to leave the country! There was no indication that there would be any problem, so it was more that a bit of a surprize. Their basis for rejection was that Rogier and Jacquie could not prove that they could financially afford an au pair, as their only income source was earned in Luxembourg. Seems a bit silly to me, given the whole borderless Europe thing, but I've heard a lot about the Dutch visa office, and it seems a total mess, turning down a lot of visas for random reasons after they refuse to process visas via their embassies and make you fly all the way here to submit the application.

"Who me? Of course I wasn't playing with it.."

After I got over the initial shock, with the help of a lot of red wine and some amazing friends and family, I actually came around to the idea, and decided that while I would miss Ollie and Pep like crazy, I wasn't really keen to spend much more time working for their parents and was glad to leave Amsterdam. While I had a lot of "wow, look at the clogs/tulips/windmills/cheese, its so cool to be in the Netherlands" moments, I never really felt at home there.

too cute!

I'm going to make some horrible general-
isations here, and say that the Dutch are quite cold people who are hard to befriend and have very different concepts of manners and childraising than I am accustomed too. Unlike some of the other au pairs, I wouldn't say they're rude, because I think its just a different way of doing things, but definitely the lack of pleases and thank yous started to bug me, as did their way of letting their children run wild and do whatever they want unpunished when young, figuring at some point when they grow up they will work out the proper way to behave

Our boat trip, pulling up at the windmill brewery bar

A good example was when I was having lunch with Anissa and a very flashy woman dining with a friend ignored her preschooler while he disturbed the rest of us, and then turned around to order another diner to shut the door, without adding a please or thank you anywhere. I know it seems minor, and the kind of thing you see in most countries, but it seems so much more prevalient in Amsterdam, if not the whole of the Netherlands. Overall, its not a culture I could see myself integrating into. Also, I don't think Amsterdam is my favourite dutch city. The blatant sex, drugs and drunken debauchery gets annoying after a while, as do the hordes of tourists that constantly get in the way. It isn't a big city, but feels quite spread out with different bars, resturants and parks all over the show rather than in a orderly centre, so that it becomes a hassle to do things. I much prefer Haarlem or the Hague.

Me and Anissa at the windmill brewery

And finally, having to move turned into a good opportunity to see a little of somewhere else for a couple of months, before I head to Gottingen in Germany to work in September. Initially, my mind was spinning with all of the possibilies, and I looked at spending the summer in the south of France, or Turkey or Greece. After finding the Netherlands hard to settle down in, my heart really wanted me to go back to Luxembourg, where I felt at home, knew my way around and had friends. I spent hours every day for weeks looking at profiles of families and places to go - hence the lack of blog posts! But, in the end I listened to my head over my heart (and my desire for sun and surf) and agreed to go to Munich for a couple of months, as it would allow me to improve my German. More on that later...

Me perched on the stern

Moving also meant I had to cram four months worth of plans into just one month! Just after I found out I would have to move, Anissa surprized me with a day out on a boat cruising around the canals. This is something I'd always wanted to do, not just go on the tourist trip in the big barge, but be on a little motorboat with a bunch of friends, drinking and partying as the dutch do on the weekends. A friend of hers had gone in with his coworkers on a boat for a year, so he took a bunch of us out for the day. We had perfect weather, and after a stop to get petrol (service stations in Amsterdam have back entrances, steps down the the canal water level so that boats can pull up and get gas, cool ay?) we picked everyone up and spent the whole day cruising around.

Faces of horror as we ventured out into the rough open sea

Memorable moments were me offering to take driving over while someone had a ciggie, and subsequently crashing into a moored boat, heading out into the open sea and then reaslising we were a bit too small for it, then running out of petrol and having to refuel in the middle of the harbour with the waves crashing over the sides and the big boats steering around us, pulling up at the windmill brewery bar to stop for drinks, and the many interesting locations we stopped to pee, including Willem just sitting on the stern and peeing overboard. Willem also ended the day on a funny note by falling into the canal while trying to moor us.

Willem overboard in the canal

I also visited a beach with Jana, at IJBurg, some man-made islands just on the edge of Amsterdam. Its not a beach I would recommend, like the rest of the city its horribly windy, has a view of the suburbs and industrial area rather than open sea, and was a bit icky. I was feeling really sick that day and didn't enjoy it as much as I normally would have, and also managed to get sunburnt. I think my skin has been dutchified, as last summer I spent a whole week lying in the sun in Sicily with no sunscreen on and didn't get burnt at all, this year I had a low-SPF on but still got burnt by the dutch sun, surely one of the weakest in Europe! Not cool!

Me on the beach at IJBurg

So May was not my best month this year, it really drained me emotionally and saw me get really sick physically. Finding out I would be moving again was hard, facing the fourth time I'd have to pack up and start all over again in a little over a year made me realise that this whole nomadic lifestyle is getting old, and I am beginning to crave a solid base, a house I can feel at home in and some close connections with people. It also proved my theory that trying to plan anything while on an OE is a waste of time - six months ago I would have told you I would spend the summer in Luxembourg, a couple of months ago I would have told you I would spend the summer in Amsterdam, and now here I am off to southern Germany! My new mantra is life live by a Plan B - Plan B is what you think you could do, if everything works out right, no doors close to you and no new doors open to you. Plan A is what you actually do when everything turns to shit or you get a better offer! So lets hope my new plan works out better than my previous ones!

More photos are here.

The Netherlands - work in a different location!

I should have written about this weeks ago, sorry I've been a bit slack with the blog, I've been really busy but I will try to catch up this week, they will just be short accounts of what I've been doing though.

Noordwijk aan Zee

Back towards the end of August we loaded up both cars and headed off to Noordwijk, on the coast in the Netherlands. Travelling with these two kids was a lot different to travelling with Arin and Alice from Antwerp to London - Arin and Alice slept most of the way or just sat quietly looking out of the window.

Rogier and the kids in the Bungalow Park

Ollie and Pepi were a whole different ball game, and I was exhausted after the five-hour-because-we-spent-an-hour-stuck-in-traffic trip, and feeling kinda sick from turning around to retrieve dropped toys and pass food and break up fights. We stayed in a little house in a 'bungalow park', five minutes drive from the town of Noordwijkerhout, and ten minutes drive from Noordwijk aan Zee, another town on the beach. Jacqueline and Rogier's friends, Paulette and Remco, their kids Dante and Ava, and their au pair Kerli stayed in the bungalow next door. From the day we arrived, Pepi was different with me, it was like he finally accepted that I was there to stay and I could be fun too, and things between us improved drastically!

The restaurant in Noordwijk aan Zee

From day one, Kerli was counting down until we went home again, and I only laughed and said that being on holiday couldn't be that bad. The first couple of days were really sunny, so we spent them at the beach in Noordwijk aan Zee. This version of 'going to the beach' was a bit different to the NZ version, in that we really went to a restaurant next to the beach with a big outdoor lounge area where waiters brought wine for the adults and a playground for the kids.

Pepi and Ollie in the restaurant

Apart from a brief trip or two down to the water each day for the kids to paddle or kick a ball around, and my walks up and down the boulevard when Ollie needed a nap, we stayed there the whole time. I guess the advantage of being there was that the kids were normally pretty contained, like they stayed in the playground and played with the other kids and Kerli and I could watch them easily, whereas when we went down to the beach the could head in any direction and things got more tricky! But it did get a little boring after the first day or so, and it was really tiring, being constantly on the go and standing most of the day and chasing kids around a lot. It also meant that we spent a lot of time resolving issues between our kids and others, and that several friends of the adults who came to catch up brought their kids and didn't watch them properly, and Kerli and I ended up keeping an eye on them too.

on my walk around Noordwijk

I went for a run the day that we arrived, and then a couple of walks in the following days, but after that I couldn't go anything but sleep whenever I had the chance! I like the scenery in the Netherlands in that there is a lot of water around the place (although unlike NZ, its never fenced off and I can't help but wonder what the rates of children drowning are here) and its really really flat, so it just feels totally different to NZ. I love all of the canals, I would really like to spend some time kayaking up them, and close to where we stayed there were houses with their own boats tied up on the water boarding the garden. One morning I walked to the beach close to the bungalow, it was really cool to be there so early in the morning when there was hardly anyone around.

Amsterdam

On Tuesday I headed off the Amsterdam, about 45 minutes away by bus and train. The weather was terrible, all grey and rainy, but I found my way to the Flying Pig hostel. This place was cool, with free breakfast and a bar, and a smoking room where people sat around smoking pot and jammin on drums all night. I went for a walk looking for food, in the centre of Amsterdam where there are narrow pedestrian streets full of shops peddling sex and pot. I wasn't really a huge fan of this area, it was packed with english tourists and just seemed kind of sad. I ended up eating a weird version of Pad Thai in Chinatown, and then took a boat tour around the canals.

Amsterdam

This was quite cool. The canals go back as far as the 14th century, but most were built during the Golden Age of the 17th century, with the biggest ones fanning out in semi circles around the centre of the city, and smallers ones linking everything. I love how all of the canals have names! I also love the houseboats lining the canals, around 2500 in the city in total. We passed a lot of the main museums and tourist sites, and I really wish I'd had enough time to see more of the city. Amsterdam has 51 museums, conventional ones like the Anne Frank House, and the Von Gogh and Diamond museums, but also weird ones like the Tulip museum, the Fluorescent Art museum, the museum of Bags and Purses, the Torture Museum, and the Death Museum - I thought I was over visiting museums, but I reckon I could spend a week or so wandering around the huge variety in this city!

Amsterdam

I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering through the city and doing some shopping, and ended up back at the hostel in the early evening, where I made a snap decision to join a pub crawl as I really wanted to go out but didn't have anyone to go with. I probably enjoyed the pub crawl I did in Berlin better, as there were less people on it and everyone made friends, whereas in Amsterdam the group was so big we had to split into two lots and it was still hard to keep track of everyone. I spent most of the night hanging out with a Swiss architecture student and a group of Uruguayans, and had enough fun for me to feel quite miserable when I had to get up and leave the hostel the next morning. The hostel's free breakfast was a life-saver, and I spent the rest of the day doing my best to recover before I went back to Noordwijk. I did have a good time in Amsterdam, and I would like to go back, but I'm still not certain that I really like the city - the sex and pot is a little too in-your-face and tacky for me, and the place is so crowded with tourists that its annoying.

Dante, Pepi and Ollie in a 'pirate ship' inside on a rainy day

Back in Noordwijk, we had a week and a half's rain, and for me anyway it turned into a bit of a holiday from hell. Kerli and I were stuck in the bungalow park the whole time, trying to entertain four kids in grey or wet weather. Luckily the park had a playground and a couple of goats to feed in one corner, but we were both going pretty crazy. Rainy days were the worst, as there wasn't much room inside and nothing was baby proofed, so I spent a lot of time trying to get Ollie to stop touching the TV or turning the microwave on!

Ollie feeding the goats

I did a lot of babysitting as Rogier and Jacqueline went out catching up with friends. Normally babysitting isn't a problem, as Pepi sleeps pretty well and Ollie wakes occasionally but goes back to sleep pretty quickly too. In Noordwijk it was much trickier though, Ollie's cot was making him wake a lot more and because the place was smaller, Pepi would hear him crying and wake too, leaving me with two crying children wanting their parents and only one pair of hands! In the end I just chucked them both in their parents bed.

The Hague

On Monday I went to the Hague, again about 45 minutes away by bus and train. The Hague has always interested me, because it has the offices of about 150 International Organisations there, including some major UN ones, and its also the location of the Dutch Parliament, even though constitutionally Amsterdam is the capital city. But, as I was really tired and hadn't had much time to plan anything, the extent of my tourist activities was taking a photo of the Parliament while waiting for friends to meet me there. Instead, I spent the whole afternoon walking around the shops. I quite like the Hague, it is small, but it seems quite chilled out, and full of people from around the world working in areas that I am interested in.

Sarah, Hideki, me and Lillian

Later I met some friends for dinner, Lillian from Norway (who I caught up with back in Belgium) and fiancees Sarah from Canada and Hideki from Japan, all of whom I know from the Ship for World Youth. We were joined by another Japanese guy who participated on the Ship in a different year, and some friends of Sarah, and we went for a drink and then had dinner together.

Ollie rocking his brother's shorts and underwear!

By this point, the second week, both Kerli and I were felling really sick, I think from a combination of being tired and run down, and of being outside during bad weather. I had had those two and a half days off and the chance to sleep a bit more than her, like during Olli's naps, so I wasn't in as bad a shape as she was, and finally she had to spend some time in bed. This made things really interesting for me, as there were then four kids left around, and while Jacqueline and Rogier kept helping me out, the other adults didn't as much, and I really struggled with Dante's behaviour. By the end of the week both Kerli and I were counting down the days left to go, but the weather got sunny again and both families decided to stick around for another couple of days - Kerli was really not happy, and while I was eager to stop working so crazily and recover, and I did have plans for the weekend, it didn't worry me so much as having only been in Lux for a couple of weeks, I didn't have that much to miss back.

The beach at Noordwijk in the early morning

This decision to stay longer was a good example of the drawbacks of being an au pair though, for an entire year you're really dependent on other people to make decisions about what they want to go, and you just have to follow along regardless of whether you already had your own plans. Its not like a normal job where your boss has to ask really nicely to get you to do extra work and offer compensation for it.

There is a saying that when mothers go on holiday, they aren't really going on holiday but just working in a different location - the same goes for an au pair, except you end up working a hell of a lot more than you would normally do back home. So, while I'm glad I got a brief glimpse of Amsterdam and the Hague, and spent a couple of days in the sun, I was also really glad when we got back home!

Sicily, Italy - days two and three

cheese at the market

See Day One here.


I woke up on Friday feeling a lot better, and one of Francesca's friends came over for breakfast. We had granita (like ice-cream without the sugar) with brioche (a kind of sweet, light bread) for breakfast, a typical Italian thing. Bit different to marmite on toast! We walked down to the market to get fresh fruit, you could see huge swordfish cut in half lying on the tables, waiting for people to order fillets of it cut straight off the fish. Some of the fruit and vegetables are a bit different, like a kind of round eggplant and peaches that look squashed, and the cheese here commonly comes in a funny shape. It has a softer taste than French or Swiss cheese, I quite like it.

swordfish at the market

We met Daniella and Val, the two Canadians as we came back to the house, and decided to go to the beach with them. We were trying to find a beach in a nature reserve that they had visited before, but ended up somewhere else but just as nice. Not as clean as NZ, but not as dirty as Palermo either, they gave us a big rubbish bag going in but what really bugs me is people smoking and chucking their butts on the ground. I guess I haven't been to the beach anywhere else in Europe yet, but compared to NZers Italians wear swimsuits that are a little on the skimpy side. Valerie is an olympic-medal winning synchronized swimmer, so she's really interesting to talk to.

It was great to lie in the sun and swim in water that was pretty warm. The whole week in Sicily the temperature was around 35 degrees, and it's really humid, it feels like being back in central america again. We ate a lot of the fruit we had brought for lunch, and headed back to Siracusa around 6pm.

It was just Francesca and I for dinner, so we ate pasta and the cheese and vegetables thing again on the terrace, with humoungous slices of watermelon. I really like the whole terrace thing, the sun goes down late and it stays warm so its just perfect to sit out there. Then we picked up Francesca's friend Antonio, who just returned from an AFS year in China. We went to the bar/cafe her parents run, in the nearby town of Avola, and I had an ice-cream with nutella flavour, 'little nuts' flavour (we weren't sure of the translation) and the most epic, white chocolate-almond-caramel flavor. Only the addition of speculoos could have made it better, I reckon it was the best ice cream I've ever had!

Antonio eating Brioche with icecream, and me

We picked her mum up there and then headed off to Noto a town a little further away from Siracusa that is famous for really elaborate balconies and baroque style architecture. Francesca is a fantastic tour guide, she knows everything about the different towns in Sicily and all about the different buildings and types of architecture, so I learnt a lot!

The main road coming into Noto is cool, because once they built it they lowered it and all of the original doors going into buildings like the church don't work anymore, they had to add another level below and it looks really funny. We walked all around the town, there were a lot of people out and about, whole families, even though it was almost midnight, and then returned home and went to bed.

Old and now defunct church door in Noto

For breakfast on Saturday morning I had a chocolate filled croissant, they actually inject the chocolate in with a giant syringe, its awesome. We spent the morning at 'the rocks'. The waterfront at Siracusa don't have a sand beach, so they have built some scaffolding around some rocks that allow for easy access from the shore and down to the sea, with a big platform. I really liked this, because I love the sea but hate the sand! We could lie on the platform to sunbathe, and get straight into the deep sea to swim without getting sand everywhere or having to wade out really far.

'The rocks' in Siracusa

In the afternoon we headed to Taormina on the train. The trains in Sicily are a few decades behind those in central europe, but I always love sitting there and watching the countryside pass by. I wish I could take photos of everything that passes, it was an amazing trip. It took us a couple of hours to reach the train station in Taormina, and then we had to catch a bus up the hill to the town.

Taomina greek theatre

Taormina is perched on a hillside with amazing views of the sea, little villages scattered around the bays, and an ancient  theatre. The architecture around here was amazing, all of these lovely villas built onto the slopes. We went to the greek theatre first, its special because it was exhibits features of both the greek and roman periods. It's in pretty good condition, they still host performances in there, and on a clear day you can sit there looking at the stage and see the sea, the mountains and Mt Etna volcano in the background.

View from Taormina

Then we walked through Taormina. I think this was my favorite place in Sicily, its really beautiful. There are a couple of plazas outside churches that have phenomenal views of the sea, we passed a couple of weddings taking place. Unfortunately my camera died at this point, and I didn't bring the charger to Italy (normally the battery lasts weeks, not sure what happened there!) so I don't have any photos from this point onwards, the last I managed to take was me standing in the narrowest street, which really was only wide enough for me to fit inside it, and then I only took a few using Francesca's camera the next couple of days.

The narrowest street in Taormina

We brought arancini from a cafe. These are kind of balls of rice and a filling like eggplant, ragout or pistachio, covered in bread crumbs and deep-fried, invented for a nobleman or king or something to take when he went hunting. They are amazing, my favorite out of all the sicilian food I tried. Waiting for them made us late, so we had to run the whole way back through the town, pushing our way through all of the tourists and wedding parties, back to the bus.

We got back to Siracusa around 10pm, and a lot of Francesca's aunts, uncles and grandmother were waiting for us to have a huge family dinner on the terrace. We had pizza and more arancini, and more of the amazing desserts, with german beer and italian wine. It was nice to meet everyone, but hard because most don't speak english, although Francesca's dad jokes away with me a lot.

Taormina

Later that night we headed out with Daniella, Valerie and another friend who had just arrived that day, Mel. Finding a club to go to was quite tricky, we went to one that is built on platforms over the waters edge, it was really amazing but really empty, so we left and drove to another out of town, but all of the old people milling around to terrible 70s music convinced us that it must be a wedding or other function, so we drove past one more that was totally empty before heading to Fontane Bianche, which is maybe 30 minutes outside of Siracusa.

clubbing

To me, it seems really weird that three of the four clubs we went to were so far outside of the city, but  Fontane Bianche is so far out because its part of the resort where beachgoers are during the day. This place had people in it, dancing under a kind of pergola. We stayed there for a couple of hours. The DJ was terrible, I actually looked a couple of times to make sure there really was someone there instead of just iTunes with overlap playing, he kept skipping between diverse music genres and couldn't transition the songs properly. There was also a couple of weird things going on, like a girl dressed like a playboy bunny dancing on a little stage when we first arrived, then a man playing a sax along to the dance music, and finally a really old drunk man who cleared the floor to pull out some really weird dance moves. We also got bugged a lot by guys, Italians are really bold and persistent! We were home around 4.30am

Photos of Italy are here.