Story Time: spring break in Europe

Story time:

Spring break 2011- Sicily, Rome, and Athens  - as they say in Greece “VIVA”

It would be way too ambitious of me to try to explain all three parts of my trip in one post plus the last couple paragraphs would probably never be seen. So ill spend three separate days trying to explain the past week of my life. 

Part 1: 4 days in Sicily   

We arrive in Palermo (the biggest city in Sicily) on Saturday night, walk through some ‘groups of friends’ to get to our hostel, enter in the most run down and destroyed building I have truly ever stayed in, and get shown to our room by this incredibly outgoing 40-year-old Sicilian man with a fake tan named Josepa. We put down our stuff and decide to go exploring. (bear with me it gets really good).. So Josepa recommends this restaurant owned by his friend Franko who will give us all we can drink and a three-course meal for 10 euro each.  We walk in and ask for Franko; as soon as they learn we are friends of Josepa we are instant celebrities. After eating grilled eggplant, these strange vegetable casseroles, fried zucchini, other strange foods I have never seen, and individual large pizzas, I can rightly claim to be truly and beautifully stuffed. But throughout the meal they also bring us wine, shots, champagne, and their Sicilian specialty dinner drink. Lets just say it was a fun night.  

The next day we do our site seeing. We walk around the fish and vegetable markets with the classic tent roofs and barter on the streets. Then we head into the antique markets that consist of mainly people’s old shoes and broken pieces of jewelry, which ironically goes on forever as if everyone in the entire city has this endless supply of useless stuff. Finally we make it out alive and head for the Catacombs.  Ok so the Sicilian Catacombs are famous for their preserved dead people. Literally there are just people hanging on the walls who have been there for hundreds of years, looking exactly the same.  Most were decaying by this point but some still had skin and hair.  I had nightmares. Just saying. There was even one girl who was added in the 1900s who looks like she is simply sleeping because her body is fully in tact.  Creeepppyyyy.

But alas our time in Palermo was short because we had planned to spend most of the trip in Taormina, a small resort town on the Sicilian coast a couple hours north. Mallory had booked a hotel on the water and claimed it was cheaper than a hostel in the city (we come to find our it was cheaper because she had booked the hotel for two while comparing prices of hostels for the right amount of three) but fortunately the people in the hotel had compassion on the three, dumb, American tourists and let us sleep three in a double room.

Taormina was gorgeous. What else can I say?  Rolling green hills on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, ancient Greek theaters overlooking all of Sicily with a view of the largest most active volcano in the world in the background, and of course blue water that rivals Paradise itself; pure bliss. Also did I mention that it was supposed to rain, but being from Southern California I naturally took credit for brining with me the perfectly blue, cloudless, sunny, flawless skies that we enjoyed during our three day stay. There are only two events that I really need to write down during our stay here and the rest I will leave up to your imagination J

The first night we decide to go classy.  We buy some wine, cheese, and Italian olives; steal some bread from the hotel; take a boat ride along the coast that we flittered our way down to about 7 Euro each, and came back and sat on the rocks eating and drinking with the waves splashing at our feet. Yes we are cheesy but I enjoyed ever second of it, especially after realizing I am now an olive fanatic (but only the unrivaled Italian or Greek olives).  The second night went a little differently. We spent the whole day sight seeing and walking around the town and were therefore thoroughly pooped. We didn’t make it back out of the hotel until late and by that time everything was closed. So as we are walking along we run into a café as two men are walking out, apparently about to lock up.  One of them starts talking to us and asks if we want to have some drinks with his friend and him. We shrug and say we have nothing better to do and he says he will come back in ten minutes to pick us up. (trust me we weighed the situation and decided he was harmless). But apparently a lot was lost in translation because we thought we were going out but he literally picked us up and took us around the corner back to the café where we had met and reopened the shop just for us. He and his friend open a bottle of wine and we sit and drink and chat with these two Sicilian men all night. It was great! 

The next day we wake up early and sit on the beach and read. Then around midday we take the bus back to Palermo since our flight left the next morning for Rome.

And Rome is a whooollleee different story. Ill get there later. I’m going to give both you and I a break and will continue later.

(O PS. Im currently writing this in a park by my apartment overlooking downtown Prague with gorgeous blue skies and green trees with blossoming flowers.. HELLLOO SPRING!)