Sicily (part 1 of 2)

ok, it took me a while to get this posted, but here it is! (second part coming soon)
sicily pics are HERE
(they are in order when you view them as a set only, and you can view as a slideshow, although you would miss the comments)

Sat. Feb. 17:
Our flight left at 7AM, and we barely made it! You see, we don’t have a car, so we had to take a bus and a train to get to the airport. Fortunately, the public transport system is extremely reliable, but even then, the earliest we could get to the airport was 6AM, and that was before check-in and security, and unless we wanted to sleep there, that was the way to go. We transferred in Milan, where we found a huge statue of Hagrid (Harry Potter character) made entirely out of Legos! (I took a picture). We landed in Catania, and then took a 40 minute bus ride to Taormina (but we had to wait for the bus for more than 1 hour). In an attempt to empty my fridge of all things perishable (we learned a very important lesson once when we left a cucumber in the fridge for a couple of weeks), I had made us sandwiches (bread, ham and cheese, the perishable trio). Abril teased us and said we were going to look silly carrying around sandwiches on the airplane. Well, when we ate our tasty lunch in Catania while waiting for the bus I thought “Not so silly now, huh?”.
After walking from the bus station through a series of death traps, we finally reached our hotel (most of the road had NO sidewalk, and was steep, and there were buses and cars speeding by!). We had booked a hotel online, but a couple of days before our trip, we were “upgraded” to a sister hotel (apparently, someone messed up our reservation). The new hotel was supposed to be nicer and was almost twice the price!! (and we did not have to pay the difference). I did not find it all that “fancy” for a 4-star rating, but it was ok. We checked in, and were back out again within a few minutes. We had only a few hours of sunlight left, and we wanted to walk around. We first went to some gardens right next door to our hotel, and then went to Corso Humberto, basically Taormina’s mainstreet. There, we ate gelato (the first of many!), and had some pizza sold by the slice, which turned out to be microwave pizza!! But it was still good, and we were tired and hungry, so we did not care. We ate our microwave pizza on a park bench and then headed back to the hotel. It was only like 7:30 pm, but we were so tired (we woke up at 4am) that we went straight to bed!!

Sun. Feb. 18:
The next day we headed to Taormina’s main attraction: the Greek Theater. It was a bit chilly, but the sun was out, so it was beautiful. The views from the theater were amazing! We thought about going to the beach, but the cable-car was closed, so instead we went up to the Castello, a small caslte on the top of a hill (more like a mountain!). The book said there were 500+ steps to get there, but it felt like way more. I started counting, but gave up around 70 (not much incentive). It was a nice warm day, and we enjoyed it a lot. The actual Castle was closed, (we knew this beforehand thanks to the Hieftjes), but it was worth the 500+ steps! We walked around town some more, ate some pizza for lunch, this time it was not microwaved!, We also had some more gelato (that stuff was good!). While Gera was at the welcome reception for the conference, I went for a walk with with Kara (another lab-wife, hehe). We got to see the Carnival parade floats. The very small parade was struggling to get by those tiny little streets packed with people, but it was fun and festive! There was a float with a “Mexican theme” where the dancers were wearing zarapes and had painted mustaches, funny! After that, the welcome reception was over and we were done for the day.

Mon. Feb. 19:
Monday was rainy and cold. Gera had his talk this day, so I was by myself most of the time. I walked around a bit in the morning, then went back to the hotel. I went back out to meet Gera for lunch. We went to a restaurant recommended by frommers, and had some ok food. He went back to the conference and I went back to the hotel. Later that night, we went to a very nice restaurant with the Hieftjes and the rest of the Hieftje group. We had a very nice dinner and a great time! (Thank you!) And to keep on with tradition, we also had some great local wine.

Tues. Feb. 20:
On Tuesday I went to a scheduled excursion to Syracuse and Gera stayed at the conference (muaha, ha... evil laugh). On this trip, we went first to a Greek Theater and other ruins (greek theaters seem to be all over in sicily!). Then we had a huge lunch (they just kept on bringing out more and more dishes! and for desert: cannoli). And finally we went to Ortyga (an island) and visited the Piazza Duomo, where according to the tour guide, Dolce OR Gabanna (fashion designers) has a house! (Haha, the things I remember)). Oh, and there’s also a very, very old church and some very nice buildings around it. This was an all-day trip, and by the time I got back to the hotel it was almost time to go out again to the Young Scientist’s Ball (a big dinner and dancing party, with a “mascarade” theme because it was fat Tuesday). I had bought and painted some masks the day before, so we were set! Some people had more elaborate costumes, like a guy dressed as what we thought was Disco Stu (the Simpson’s character), but later found out was supposed to be Elvis! (when did Elvis get an afro?)

Wed. 21:
Wednesday Gera went to the conference (again) and I went for yet another walk around town (I tell you, those conferences get on the way of our vacationing!! Haha). We met for lunch (pizza) and then we went to meet up with the tour people for trip to Mount Etna. We were lucky enough to get the same guide as the Syracuse trip, because apparently one other guy was very boring. “Our” guy had a sense of humor and talked about everything and anything and kept saying “Mamma mia!” and “I don’t like it!” (when referring to newer churches or buildings). The volcano’s last eruption was on 2002 ( i think) and you could see where the lava had run down because there was no snow there (since the ground was still a bit warm). The view from up there was amazing, it was snowing too!. Although it was a very short trip (it took us longer to get there than the time were actually there) it was a great experience and I brought some lava rocks with me!. Later that night we went out for dinner, and ran into Bill and Kara (lab-wife mentioned before) also former members of the Hieftje klan. We had dinner together and they told us about their boring tour guide.