Holy Cannoli! Palermo Day Two

At Mondello Beach

My hotel is in a great area of Palermo... very central. If you turn left on via Roma, you are a 5-15 minute walk from a lot of the main sites and areas like Vucciria (the vibrant neighbourhood where I had lunch yesterday), the Cathedral, etc. If you turn right on Via Roma and go up a bit, you get to Via della Libertà which is a main shopping street, and there are tons of little side streets with restaurants and stuff.

Last night I went out to find a place for dinner. I'd found some places nearby recommended on tripadvisor, but they were all either a) impossible to find, or b) closed because it was Monday, so I ended up at a patio restaurant very close to my hotel. It was ok, but a bit annoying. My food took an extremely unreasonable amount of time to come... 90 minutes for pasta all'amatriciana? Come on... But I didn't mind too much since I had a big glass of wine and a good book ok my kindle. Also, it should be illegal for a waiter to take your order and then say "can I bring you some bruschetta?" and make it sound as if it's on the house, and then later charge you for it. I don't even like bruschetta that much...

Afterwards I went to a highly recommended pasticceria next to the restaurant and got some cannoli and other ricotta-filled pastries to bring back to the hotel room. I exercised a great deal of self control and managed to only eat a few of them! Then I called it an early night.

This morning, after hitting the snooze button about 8 times, I dragged my butt out of bed and went up to the rooftop terrace for breakfast. I was pleasantly surprised by the selection. Usually Italian breakfast is just cookies, pastries, and nutella. At my hotel breakfast, there was cake and nutella-filled croissants, but also scrambled eggs, bacon, cheeses, cold cuts, and several more items to choose from. I was so satisfied with breakfast that I fully skipped lunch today, saving a few dollars (well, to be fair, I did have a couple more of my ricotta pastries from last night a few minutes ago, so I guess that counts as lunch...).

After breakfast I walked about 2 or 3 short blocks to a piazza where I caught a bus to go to Mondello beach. It was about a 20 minute bus ride (which was very very scenic). The beach itself is beautiful! White sand, bright blue water, and a mountainous vista in the background. I'd read online that the beach is now "all public". This isn't entirely true... it is largely private, with a thin strip along the water that is public (and therefore crowded). I was going to dish out the cash for an umbrella on the private beach, when I realized that I would be fenced off from the water, so instead I went to the public area and squeezed my towel in between some other people. It wasn't that bad really. Even all the kids running past me didn't bother me, although I was a little leery when the cute little girl beside me decided she liked my zebra-striped towel and wanted to sit on it with me...

Determined to avoid another sunburn incident like the one in Split, I made sure to voraciously slather myself up with SPF45 (my SPF60 is somewhere in my suitcase in the Rome airport), and I reapplied at least 6 times in the 4 hours I was there. Now I'm back in the hotel, and, having evaluated the damage, am quite proud to announce that I am relatively burn-free, minus the part of my back that I couldn't reach.

Now that I've showered off all the sand, I'm planning on going out to find a nice patio for a glass of wine and so I can read my book. Then in just over an hour I'm going to meet Carolina (the Italian girl who is interning at Celle in September) at Palazzo Riso, the Contemporary Art Museum in Palermo.

Ciao!

The view from the rooftop terrace of my hotel

Mondello Beach (the girl on the right is the one who decided to share my towel)

Palermo Day One

Yesterday after I posted at that nasty internet cafe, I headed over the the station with all my stuff and grabbed a dinner of McDonalds Chocolate Sundae. Now, you may be thinking "she's crazy! She's in Italy but instead is eating indian food and McDonalds all in the same day! Blasphemy!" but let me explain... as great as Italian food is, there isn't really a whole lot of variety. You've got simple carbs, tomato sauces, cream sauces, cheese, and not a ton else.

Then I sat on the floor of the station for 5 hours because there's no seating. Finally at 9:20pm the train showed up and I got on and found my cabin. There are 4 "couchettes" (beds) per cabin. I had requested an all-female cabin, and was with 2 sicilian ladies (a mother and daughter). The 4th bed was free. I had a top bunk. Each bed had a bottle of water and a little pouch with a travel toothbrush and a packet of toothpaste for free! This train ride was such an amazing deal in general. It cost me 66 euros (about $90) in one direction. The ride was 13 hours, and I had an insanely comfortable bed to sprawl out on, plus tons of shelf space, a locking door, A/C, a light to read by, a blanket, a pillow, a bottle of water, and the toothbrush/toothpaste. To put this in perspective... a 90 minute train ride between Florence and Rome, where you get a seat and very little leg room, costs 45 euros. Plus taking the train overnight meant that I saved on a hotel! Awesome awesome awesome. 

(Side note: Who in their right mind takes small children on a 13 hour train trip?)

Anyways... after I brushed my teeth and read a couple chapters, I stuck in my iPod and let Moby and Joanna Newsom put me to sleep. I woke up around 9am. We had already crossed the water (apparently the train gets loaded into a ferry one car at a time. I slept right through that). Shortly after I awoke, my cabin-mates disembarked somewhere around Messina, and I had the cabin to myself for the remaining 4 hours. It was awesome lounging back and watching the stunning Sicilian countryside go by. It's so gorgeous... incredible hills and mountains, and such great colours... burnt orange dirt and brush, dark green vegetation, silvery blue olive trees...

When we arrived in Palermo, I got a cab to my hotel. I got an incredible deal on a 4star hotel downtown Palermo, and was worried that it might be run down or something, but it's great (besides the flimsy half-ply kleenex)! I have a nice view from the 8th floor. My room is a very decent size by european standards. It's clean and not run-down and has all necessary amenities like a safe and a minifridge and a TV and a hairdryer. Apparently breakfast is served on the rooftop terrace!

After I had a much-needed shower, I set out to explore Palermo. I could tell immediately that I REALLY love this city (more on that below)! And I FINALLY found somewhere to recharge my phone credit. Then I sought out a place to eat. Unfortunately it was about 2:30pm meaning nearly everything was closed, but I found an open restaurant in the Vuccirio area and decided I'd give it a shot. It ended up being really good! The first point was scored when the bread came out... All my experiences of getting bread anywhere else I've been in Italy (Rome and north) has been that bread is stale, even in the nicest restaurants, and it's really only worth consuming if you have a lot of liquidy stuff on your plate that you want to soak up. The bread at the place I had lunch was actually fresh! And soft! With crusty edges! Then I ordered Bistecca alla Palermitana (Steak Palermo-Style). It was really delicious... thin, breaded and cooked in oil. It was very tender and flavourful. Way better than any of the times I've attempted to have Bistecca alla Fiorentina (Steak Florence-Style), which seems to just be a big, tough, flavourless T-bone. The waiter at the restaurant was extremely nice and said "you are welcome to stay here and read. We're closing up because it is time to nap, but feel free to stay and read on the patio".

I didn't stay though. I had a city to see! I did my best to go see all the main squares and sites that I'd written down. I also had the goal of finding an AMAZING gelato place. However, after walking in the sun for quite a while, and then getting lost in an unappealing residential area, my plan changed to "must find any gelato place". I had some decent gelato. FYI my new go-to flavour is yogurt. It's extremely refreshing! My other food goal for this week is to have the best cannoli of my life...

At one point in my exploration, I tried getting to the Mercato di Ballarò, which I'd heard was a very lively market. Two minutes after finding it, I realized "merda! I'm the only female walking around!". (This happened to me once before this summer... on a Sunday morning in Pistoia, when apparently it's time for all the men to go walking around with their buddies and their babies). 

It also doesn't help here that I stick out like a sore thumb in a region where everyone has skin the colour of a burnt cannoli shell. I, on the other hand, have pasty skin as white as, well, cannoli filling.

Now I'm back at the hotel. One of the first things I did was to look up a bunch of words in Italian, so that when people ask me what I think of Palermo, I'll be equipped with an adequate vocabulary of adjectives. Such as:

-vivace (vibrant)

-animato (lively)

-rumoroso (cacophonous)

-puzzolente (smelly)

Below are some pictures I took today. Enjoy! I'm off to hopefully find somewhere good for dinner and maybe some cannoli!

In the Quattro Canti

The street beside the cathedral

Inside the cathedral

Palermo cathedral

Fontana Pretoria

Cactus in the Villa Bonanno Garden

Statue in the Villa Bonanno garden

At Piazza Pretoria

Graffiti in the Vucciria District

Beside my restaurant in the Vucciria District

The street that my hotel is on

Work Work Work

Although I love my job here, I'm thrilled to be through this work week finally! I've had a tour nearly every day, all of them huge groups, and all of them in Italian. As a result, my Italian has very much improved just over the last couple days.

My job is about 50% knowledgeable tour guide, and 50% shepherd. The second part is the hardest. At the beginning of each tour I implore the visitors to please STAY TOGETHER and WALK QUICKLY with me between art works so that it doesn't take forever. Some groups are able to do this well, but in most groups, there are some serious laggards. You'd think that the oldest people would be the laggards, but it's definitely not the case... gli anziani (the elderly) are real troopers, and its younger people who drive me insane trying to get them to please hurry up. It's definitely going to change the way I view tours in the future. It's pretty selfish when people think they deserve to spend 5 extra minutes on their own with each artwork after the group has moved on, not only because there are 40 outdoor works so 5 minutes each = an extra few hours, but also because then they get lost and don't know where the group went, and I have to run back and find them.

This job is also an interesting psychological/social experiment, like Miranda told us on our first day. You see some interesting characters and get asked some interesting questions. One girl today had the most daft questions for me that there was no way I'd know the answer to. Like, "What is the depth of this part of the pond?" and "how did the artist move that piece to there?". It's also really funny when visitors ask questions I've already answered and the other visitors yell at them... for example (in Italian) "you idiot! she already told us it's by Luigi Mainolfi! And she clearly pointed out that aspect of the work! How could you miss it?!".

Another thing I find hilarious is that there are people who seem to think that this is a haunted pumpkin patch visit rather than a private contemporary site-specific art collection visit. They seem to expect that I'm going to try to spook them with something. There's one work out in the olive field by Bukichi Inoue titled My Sky Hole that is a long outdoor passage that leads into a windy indoor underground passage that leads to stairs which lead to a glass cube above ground. I have to stay behind to close the entrance door after the group has entered the tunnel, because we always close doors here, and I've had quite a few visitors panic and say "what's going to happen now??" as if the boogieman is going to jump out. I calmly respond "we're going to walk through the art work".

I do like that this job requires to speak very loudly... it's one of my fortes (pun totally intended). Quite often on Italian tours, people don't give me a chance to find my words and so they try to finish alllllll my sentences. I just raise the volume and drown them out. It works pretty well. I also meet some very nice people and get to work on my tan.

I'm starting to feel a bit like Bianca Neve (Snow White) here... not only because I'm pasty pasty white (despite being abbronzata (tanned) my my standards) but because all the woodland creatures are drawn to me for some reason. I literally have a memorable wildlife experience once daily. One day was the hedgehog, another was the lizard in the bathroom.

Then there was the day that I was taking a tour group out to the artwork by Alan Sonfist titled Circles of Time that tells the story of tuscany through various circles, starting at the center with a circle of the 14 oldest varieties of plants of tuscany, then a ring of thyme, then a ring of laurel, then a ring of rock, a ring of wheat, and a ring of olive trees. As I was walking over, a MASSIVE green snake (definitely the same length as my armspan) slithered over the rocks and up into the laurel, where it sat at eye level by the entrance and just stared. Needless to say, we didn't go inside the laurel ring that day. It was pretty cool in an ancient adam-and-eve kind of way.

Yesterday my wildlife encounter was going through a cave and having a bat fly out right in front of me. Today it was a bombo (bumblebee) the size of my face (seriously!) that followed me around for 10 minutes. He must have been super into the art work I was describing.

Anyways. Now I'm finally done what will probably be the most work-heavy week of my time here, and my next 2 weeks are going to be awesome!! I have an english tour next week, and then June 2nd is my birthday. Since June 2nd is also a national holiday, I'm going to go out in Florence with Katie and some of my Florence friends on the night of the 1st, since less people will have to work the next day. Maybe I'll get lucky again and see Jwoww and Snookie on my birthday! Then 2 days later I'm heading to Rome for a night in a hotel because early the next morning I leave for Split, Croatia!!! I'm so so so excited. A few days after I come back from that, Katie and I are going to go down to Rome for a night for their Pride week. I imagine it's going to be quite different from Toronto's! Then the next week my parents and their friends are coming to visit. I'm even giving them a private tour of the collection. And hopefully they'll bring some of the stuff I'm running low on (...mom! I need face wash, more earplugs, and sun screen please! Basically whatever's in that bag I left at the house... thanks!). The other new excitement in my life is that I've just booked a trip to Palermo, Sicily for the first week of August. I'll be spending 13 hours on a train (but I will have a bed on the train) and then about 4 days in Palermo. I'll also try to get to Taormina while I'm there.

Now I'm going for a much needed nap. Ciao tutti!