Palermo 3/20

Palermo- start of Spring Break

 

Amanda and I have been planning spring break for a while now.  We found flights to Trapani, Sicily for 4 euro but with taxes it came out to around 20 euro.  This is still really good though.  The only catch was that my flight left the Ciampino airport at 7:15am.  This meant that I needed to leave my house by around 4:15 am to get there!  My neighbor Sally, was worried about getting to the central train station by herself so she came along with me.  There is a bus that takes you from the central station to the airport since the airports are all outside the city.  They start running at 3:30 am and usually come every half hour.  Sally ended up sleeping a little too long and we didn’t leave my house until 4:30.  I knew we had to wait for a night bus because we were leaving so early so I was a little concerned about getting to the station on time, but a night bus came right away.  We got to the station around ten till 5.  I walked over to the ticket area and asked for the next bus.  The woman said that the bus left 5 minutes ago and that the next one wasn’t until 6:30!  Well that wasn’t going to work because my flight left soon after and it took 40 minutes to get to the airport.  Sally was going to stay and wait for her friend that she was traveling with so I said my goodbyes to her and went to find a cab.  The cab ride cost me a flat rate of 30 euros!  So much for my cheap flight!  The flight itself went great.  It was a sunrise flight and it landed early!  I got into Trapani at 8:15 and only had to wait 5 min for my luggage.  Amanda and I had booked a bed and breakfast in Palermo so we needed to take a bus into the city which was about 2 hours away.  The night before we left, we realized that our flights were way apart from one another.  I got in at 8:15 and she didn’t get in until 3:30pm.  When I got to the airport and realized there was nothing to do around there, and not to mention that I was really tired from getting up so early, I decided to take the bus right away.  In Italy, if you take a bus from town to town, it is a big chartered bus.  There was one leaving at 9 so it couldn’t have worked out better.  It turns out I was the only one on the bus so the driver and I had some great conversations with my little Italian and his little English.  I arrived in Palermo around 11 at a stop that was in the middle of the city but not at the central station like I had thought.  I called the bed and breakfast and they told me to take a bus to the main station and then take the Metro to the Tomasso Natale stop.  Well it turns out I was in the middle of the city so I figured I could just find a metro stop around there and take it to Tomasso Natale.  It looked like rain but it was pretty warm out so I figured I would just walk around and find one.  I couldn’t find one around there after about 10 minutes of searching so I decided to ask someone.  I went up to a little old couple and asked in Italian where the nearest Metro stop was.  They looked at me SO confused and asked if I was speaking Italian.  I replied yes and tried to explain in a different way.  They told me something that I didn’t understand at all so naturally I thanked them and walked away.  I had forgotten that in Sicily the dialect is so strong that most Italians can’t understand the Sicilians and vice versa.  So my Italian wasn’t going to do much good.  I saw a ticket booth and decided to ask there.  I got a little further in that they told me to got to the central station and take the metro from there.  They told me which bus and pointed to the stop.  I made it to the central station and got off to start my search for the Metro stop.  I searched all along the outside of the building and saw nothing.  I went inside to but a ticket and ask for directions.  The man at the booth pointed me inside the building.  I thought, that seems odd for the subway stop to be inside the station, but I went in and searched all around.  15-20 minutes later I was convinced that there wasn’t a metro stop so I went outside to the busses and asked for directions to the metro and to Tomasso Natale.  Mind you, NO ONE speaks English in Sicily.  They are very far away from the business of Italy and other English speaking countries so they just stick to Sicilian.  I finally to one bus driver to tell me that I could get on his bus and that he would tell me where to get off.  The stereotypical personalities and behaviors of Italians definitely hold try in Sicily.  Everyone was screaming at each other and flailing their hands at the bus driver, each other, and cars outside the bus.  I stayed on the bus until the last stop and the driver told me to get off but he didn’t know which other bus took me to Tomasso Natale.  I figured it out on the signs and went from there.  I got off at the Tomasso Natale stop and called the owners of the bed and breakfast to come pick me up.  It took me 3 hours to get here from where the chartered bus dropped me off!   It turns out that Tomasso Natale was a train stop!  There is a train that goes from the central station to the Palermo airport and they call it the Metro!  It all made sense now why everyone was confused and why they were all pointing me inside to the trains.  Marizio was the father of the girl I had been speaking with and he picked me up.  It was about 5 min to the B&B, except we were going up one of the Mountains! The B&B was outside the city and the only way for me to get into the city was to repeat my path and have Marizio drive me down the hill!  I walked in and two women were sitting in a common room.  They showed me to my room and bathroom, which was down the hall.  I thought that there would be other guests there and that it would be bigger.  I set my stuff down and the two women came into my room asking what I needed.  I said that I would just get settled in and then maybe take a hot shower since it had been raining the second half of my trip.  Ten minutes later the older women comes into my room unannounced and said that she made pasta for me and that I had to come eat.  I was a little confused but knew that if I didn’t eat it was going to be disrespectful.  I ate the AMAZING pasta and then asked them if they lived near there.  The mother said “Of course, this is our house and we rent out this ONE room to people”  So it was a bed and breakfast that consisted of ONE room.  The father, daughter and mother spoke NO English so I was getting a lot of practice in.  The room was very small and had only one double bed for Amanda and I to share.  I had a lot of time until Amanda got there and I wanted to go into town to explore but I knew Marizio had to drive me down and I didn’t want to make him after he had just picked me up.  The mother (Elena) and daughter (Manuela) motioned me to come sit in between them on the couch even though there was an open couch.  We watched some Italian TV and I told them a little about myself.  After about an hour of TV, I decided to shower and as I was getting out I heard children.  Manuela, had two daughters of her own, and her husband (Fabrizio) brought them over.  I was a little intimidated because I felt like an unknown guest and not a customer.  I really wanted to got into town but because I wasn’t going to, I took a nap.  Amanda had called me many times on the way in and I explained to her how to get to Tomasso Natale.  Unfortunately for her, she speaks NO Italian so it was difficult for her as well but it only took her 1 hour because I had already made all the mistakes.  We picked her up from Tomasso and got her settled in.  We sat with the family for a little while and then they dropped us off at the bottom of the hill at a pizzeria for dinner.  We had great pizza and  thought that we would go into the city for a drink, but knew that they had to come pick us up still and we didn’t want to be out too late for them so we just went back.  I’m not sure if I have ever gone to bed as early as 10pm in Italy yet.  We got up early the next morning and Elena had gotten many pastries and coffee for breakfast.  They were going into the city themselves that morning so they took us most of the way in by car.  It was pouring rain when we got into the city.  We walked around and saw many sights but Amanda was already sick, and my 12 euro flats weren’t holding up in the rain.  We saw many things like the Teatro Massimo, which is the largest theatre in Italy.  We did a tour and they were performing the next night so we were able to listen to them practice.  We saw their cathedral which was very cool because it had Arab influences unlike most cathedrals I have seen in Italy.  Also we went to a could of their markets which were very very big.  Mind you, this whole time it was down pouring and cold.  There weren’t many people outside at all because Palermo usually has really good weather.  My friend Elena from the US had been in a city just outside Palermo with her family because her brother was doing some performances as a singer in Sicily and because that is were her family is from.  She didn’t have a phone so I had been communicating through email.  Amanda and I went to a café to get internet and try and meet up with her.  She was coming into Palermo for the day to do some shopping and then her brother was performing at a club that night.  She told us the name of the club so that we could meet up later.  Amanda and I tried looking up the club online and could not find anything.  I asked a couple young girls at one of the stores and they had told me that the club was outside the city but it was only about 15-20 min by cab.  I was excited  that we were going to be able to meet up! Around 6pm Amanda and I were very cold and wet so we decided to go back to the B&B.  Amanda took a nap while Elena, Marizio and I tried searching for the address of the club.  We could not find it anywhere, and the operator didn’t think the club existed.  Elena thought that since we didn’t know where it was that we shouldn’t go because the south was different than the north and it is more dangerous.  I woke Amanda up so that we could go to dinner and maybe ask around some more about the club.  As we were getting ready for dinner, Elena came in and said that her daughter had found the club but it was outside the city in the opposite direction and that it would take an hour to get there.  We decided that it would be too far and just went to dinner.  I knew Sicily was known for their seafood so I asked Marizio to drop us at a good seafood place.  He pointed to two or three in one area and said something along the lines of “you don’t order, let them do it for you” I had heard of this before because the waiters will normally bring you the specialty of the restaurant.  Amanda said “This one looks cute” and we walked in.  We sat down and the server brought us each two classes for wine.  I thought oh great, we will choose our dinner and then choose red or white wine.  The next thing he brought was a bottle of water and a bottle of white wine that was open.  We were a little confused, and got even more confused when they started bringing dishes to the table.  We thought “ what have we gotten ourselves into, and more importantly, how much is this going to cost?”  Our waiter came over and saw that we were confused and that we spoke English so he explained to us in English that we get a bottle of wine, water, 8 seafood appetizers, 3 seafood pastas, lobster, and whitefish for our dinner.  He said that this is how they serve everyone here.  We were both really scared because it sounded extremely expensive. Finally he told us that it was 25 euro a person.  Whew, even though we weren’t planning on spending that much, it was much less than we thought it would be and we got SOOO much fresh seafood.  The night wasn’t a total bummer!  We went to bed around 11 because we had figured out that we needed to take the “metro” from Tomasso to the central station at 7:52 am so that we could catch a 9 am bus to Messina, Sicily, our next destination.  Of course, it was sunny and blue skies when we got up.  We got to the station with 10 min to spare and the controller came out to ask us where we wanted to go.  We said to the central station and he said the next one was at 9:10am.  I asked why not at the time that it says on the board and he said because.  Apparently, the trains can just come whenever they want on Sundays.  We made our way to the bus stop and took the long route to the central station.  We made it on time, thank goodness, to the chartered bus stop and we are now on our way to Messina.  We hope the rain doesn’t follow us.