Sicily

The last weekend of our break was spent in Sicily. I took a ferry from Naples to the city of Palermo which is located on the northern coast of Sicily. The boat ride was much better than I thought it would be. The ferry was huge and I stayed in a small "cabin" as they called them with four bed in it and a bathroom. It just so happened that 40 other American students who are studying in Rome for the semester were also taking a trip to Sicily for the weekend and three of them stayed in my room with me. So I made some new friends and we ate dinner at the cafeteria, explored the boat deck, and hung out in the bar area where there were comfy chairs, tvs, and drinks. It ended up being a really fun night and I got a good 6 hours of sleep before we got off the boat in the morning around 7am. I then took a taxi to the apartment where Kate, Amanda, and Christi had arrived the night before and we got ready to explore Palermo.


On Saturday afternoon, we took a bus all the way down to Syracuse. The ride was about 3.5 hours but the scenery was so beautiful which made the time pass quickly. We traveled east first along the northern coast so we had a great view of the sea and then we started heading south and saw all of the mountainous countryside and untouched beauty. When we got to Syracuse we took a bus to our apartment and got ready to head out and explore since I had to leave very early the next day to catch my 7:30am plane.

First stop was the ruins of the Temple of Apollo (picture) and we saw a puppet theatre and dropped by this art exhibition and got some free Italian books of poetry and then came back and looked in some stores before going to dinner. We ate at a restaurant called "Marea" which was located on a dock over the water. It had very modern furnishings and seemed fancy but the prices were reasonable and we had some great pasta dishes and desserts (picture). Then we came back to the apartment and Amanda braided my hair before we all went to bed. I had to wake up at 4:30am to catch my 5am taxi to the airport at Catania so I could fly to Milan then take the train from Milan to Bassano in order to get back to campus on Sunday. Everything ended up working out ok though and I was back to campus by 3 in the afternoon.