The Big OE

When I finally got to escape Naples, I took the overnight ferry to Palermo and then got a train right through the heart of Sicily. My first impressions were that Sicily was very, very dry. Not a touch of green to be seen anywhere. I had never expected so many cacti, growing all along the train tracks, let alone that people would grow them commercially (people eat the cacti fruit, they do not have a very strong taste, and have lots of very small and stone-like pips that you have to swallow). At each rural train station we stopped at, there was a little statue of the Virgin Mary and most of the stops didn’t feel like they should be there at all, with small stone farm houses scattered only every few kilometres.

Castelmola

I got off at Taormina which is a very touristy part of the coast, half way between Catania and Messina. There Lisa (high school friend from Gisborne) and her boyfriend Andrea picked me up, and took me to Castelmola, a small village on top of a very high hill over looking the coast with Calabria in the far east, and Mt. Etna to the south. It is named Castelmola, for a very simple reason, it has a Castle on top of a hill that looks like a molar tooth. Castelmola is a strange mix, it’s full of very old houses, tiny narrow cobbled streets, cats dozing in the sun, little old ladies sitting out on their front door steps watching the world go by, and then it’s quite young and contemporary at the same time. At night a lot of the tourists staying in Taormina come up to one of the several restaurants, or go to Bar Turrisi which is four storeys high and bursting full of penile paraphernalia. It’s the kind of place that there is no need for the Internet, or even telephones for that matter. People know who you are, and your life story within minutes of arriving.

Andrea’s Mother, Angela has come to Castelmola each summer for years as their summer house has been in the family for generations. They normally live in Palermo, the capital of Sicily but during summer it is virtually uninhabitable because of the heat. We did not stay with the family however and instead stayed at the house of Carlo, one of Andrea’s friends. Casa Turrisi was right on the main street of the small village, and you could hear all the noises of daily life in Castelmola. From the old man ringing his bells every bloody ten minutes (trying to sell them to tourists) to the old ladies catching up on the latest gossip. Apparently Carlo’s grandmother was none to happy about us staying in the house all together. I think she thought we were there to have raucous sex parties and take crack cocaine.

View from the Piazza towards Calabria

I immediately slotted into the daily routine of Sicilian life, a welcome relief from Rome and Naples. My days consisted of getting up at 11 am, reading for a few hours or going down to the piazza and getting gelato. Then at 2 we would go to Andrea’s family’s house and Nonna would make us a huge lunch. Nonna was 83, and didn’t speak a word of English, so a lot of the time I had absolutely no clue what she was talking about, and was at the mercy of Lisa and Andrea to translate. We’d then go back to Casa Turrisi and have a couple of hour’s siesta. Then get up and go down to one of the cafés or bars and have aperitifs then go out to dinner around 10 or 11 pm. I got to have amazing Gnocchi with Pistachio, Vino and lots of Antipasto. Can’t say I was really overwhelmed with the Pizza though, I think I prefer the bastardized American versions – naughty I know. We would then chill out, maybe sit in the Piazza and watch all the people go by, or hang out with their friends, and then go to bed in the very early hours of the morning.

The heat and humidity was all consuming. The entire time I was there, there was virtually no relief from the heat. Even having a cold shower was not refreshing, as the effort to get dressed again made you hot. You couldn’t see very far out into the distance because the humidity put a thick haze over everything. Sometimes there was a strange hot wind, which had come from Africa and brought sand from the desert with it. Although we had access to a car, it was just too much effort to go down the hill to the beach. The beaches were packed with people, all baking themselves to a crisp. Surprisingly I thought I handled the heat extremely well, it did not get to me, as much as it did to Lisa and Andrea - I think the heat wave in Germany a few weeks before I’d left, had been good training.

View from Mimmi´s country house at Dusk

I got to go out to Mimmi’s country house, he is one of their friends who works at the Pizzeria, and is an incredibly nice guy, who plays the guitar and sings extremely well. So I’d either sit under the hazelnut trees or read my book, eat figs or picked blackberries and looked out to the hills covered in the thick humid fog, as he strummed his guitar and wrote songs with Andrea. One night after some of the locals had finished work for the night, we walked down a dark path covered in cacti to an old church lit up on the side of the hill. They sang songs in Italian and just chilled out for a while, and I couldn’t escape the thought of just how far away from home I was.

Because it was so hot, random fires would break out all over the place and it was alarming to me how blasé everyone reacted to them. Most of the time they were just left to burn themselves out, unless they got extremely close to houses, then maybe the fire engines would come. I think every day I was there, I could see a fire somewhere in the distance, some days I was so close to them I could hear the cracking of the dry wood. The fires were so common, that they weren’t even included in most daily conversations.

Piazza

The best part of staying in Castelmola, is that I wasn’t considered a tourist. Because I was with Lisa and Andrea, I was welcomed everywhere I went and treated like royalty. I basically didn’t have to pay for anything, and people were so friendly it was just fantastic. Although don’t get me wrong I still did a few very touristy things. One night we walked through Taormina and I got a caricature drawn of me. It was quite well done, and unfortunately I left it at the train station on the way home. I also got serenaded by three old men at a restaurant singing Italian love songs, and playing on the Accordion, Guitar and Tambourine.

I found that throughout Italy I would be stared at all of the time, and mostly by people who looked like locals. I am not sure if it was their curiosity or if it was just my paranoia but it really became uncomfortable. Most of the time, it was when I was waiting in queues, or on public transport but the bizarre thing was that they made no effort what so ever to hide the fact that they were staring. Often when you catch someone looking at you, they automatically avert their eyes, but here they just kept looking, and looking. It got so bad that I snapped in the line for the café on the Overnight ferry. I just started screaming ‘WHAT????’ at this teenage guy, he got really startled and wouldn’t make eye contact for the rest of the night.

View from Casa Turrisi towards Catania

Reluctantly I left Sicily and headed back up to Rome. I luckily found an Australian woman and we were headed in the same direction. It is funny when you are travelling on your own, and you make ‘day friends’ you become best of friends just for a day and then when its time to leave, nothing is lost – I never even found out her name. When I got to Rome just on Midnight, it was too late to find accommodation, and my transfer to the airport was at 4.30 am so on my last night in Italy I slept in a train station. Yup, I along with about thirty others slept on platform 1 at Termini station. I found a spot slotted between a Muslim who got up at some point to pray, and on my left an older woman (I’d say in her late 50’s) who was glad to be by another woman. All the homeless people get kicked out for the night, and so all the people there were travellers. It was a very surreal environment, people from all walks of life, and all nationalities, had found themselves in the same predicament. I had imagined staying up all night and perhaps writing this very blog in a 24 hour internet café, but it was not to be. Although I probably only got half an hours sleep max, others found no difficulty in sleeping amongst strangers. Even though on reflection, I was in an incredibly vulnerable situation, it did not feel unsafe – definitely dirty, and odd but not unsafe. I couldn’t get over, how normal everyone acted that as a large group of strangers, there was an unwritten rule to not speak to one another, not to move around too much and to respect each others space. So the only noises were those of the night staff. Something I hadn’t counted on was that we were in fact locked in. And at 4.20am all of the night staff and security people had magically disappeared. I was put in a very tricky dilemma, I needed to get out in order to catch my transfer to the airport, but large gates blocked my exit. I didn’t want to throw my backpack over the gate, in case I couldn’t make it over and then we would both be stranded. So I started to scramble over, pack and all, before I was promptly stopped by a security guard who had magically materialised from somewhere – no doubt after a laughing fit from staring at the security monitors. I think my only saving grace was that I was trying to get out, and not in, so he lowered the gates, just in time to see my bus driving off. Thankfully, it had stopped at a red light not to far away and I was able to catch up to it. I got to the airport and boarded the plane, without further incident. Perhaps wearing the St Christopher’s pendant Tube gave me before I left NZ, was not such a bad idea. When I landed in Germany I felt like I was home, and the moment I got in the door I fell asleep for 18 hours straight.

One of the strange things I found about my trip was that when people asked me a question, I would often answer automatically in German, and now that I am back, I answer in Italian - go figure. I think your brain gets screwed up because you know you’re in a foreign country so it just scrambles around trying to find any foreign word.

Mt Etna

I enjoyed my trip to Italy. Although I didn’t particularly like Rome or Naples, I still want to go back to Italy and travel the rest of it. I strongly recommend taking a guidebook, and buying it in your home country, at least to give you some idea of how to get around there and what to see. Unfortunately I didn’t have that luxury as it’s not that easy to find English guidebooks for Italy in Germany. And when in Italy it’s not that easy to find good guidebooks for the whole country, they only sell books for each region or town. Keep your wits about you, and try to look as less like a tourist as much as possible. Try to learn as much of the language as you can, because a lot of the time no one around will speak any English. Always make it known your not American, a lot of the time people didn’t give me the time of day, until I said I was a New Zealander, then they warm up instantly. Unlike home, people wont help you at all if you can’t speak a little of the language. Don’t look like a victim, when in Naples, I made sure at all times I had a ‘Don’t mess with me look’ and I was luckily left alone for a lot of the time.

Italy is not always beautiful; it is quite poor in a lot of areas and is actually incredibly ugly in some parts. It can be congested, polluted, dirty, smelly, scary and noisy and some of the people are simply not very nice. But on the other hand, you can be overwhelmed with its beauty, embrace its simplicity, marvel at its ingenuity and feel incredible hospitability all in the same breath.

Ok where to start? I have finally made it to Italy and although I have not been here even five days, I have to say I'm pretty disappointed. It’s polluted, swelteringly hot, unorganised, crowded, smelly and it is the most unsafe I have ever felt in my life. It’s not all bad though, and it’s my own fault for coming here in the middle of the high season! I landed in Rome, and immediately got on the bus to hell. Remind me NEVER to drive in Italy; it would freak me out for life. Lanes mean nothing, stop signs mean nothing, and pedestrian crossings definitely mean nothing. You just have to start walking in to the middle of the traffic and hope to survive.

My first hostel in Rome was really dodgy, and didn’t even have a sign. First I had to walk with my huge backpack, past homeless people sleeping in shop doorways and then couldn't find the blimmen building. It just had a tiny piece of paper on the buzzer, and you had to go in the dodgiest elevator to the 5th floor. As I got there pretty late, I just crashed straight away. The next day I meet some Americans at breakfast, (if you could even call it that; juice and a small bun) and they took me under their wings. So I went with them to the Pantheon, Coliseum, Roman Forum and out to dinner in a nice Piazza across the other side of the river.

Jill and Mike, the Americans in front of the Pantheon

Jill and Mike, were lovely and didn’t make me feel like a third wheel at all. I got to see a lot more of the city than I probably would have if I was just by my self. I was a little worried that they thought they were stuck with me, but they assured me that it was nice to have some different company as they had been travelling together for the last two months. So if you're reading this you two... thank you very much for all of your kindness and I wish you all the very best for the upcoming nuptials!!

My hostel in Naples was more of a hotel and was fantastic. Although it was in a dodgy area, I ended up having the whole room to myself on my first night which was sooo good to actually get some sleep. As I hardly got any sleep in Rome. I visited Pompeii, a historic Roman city being excavated and Sorrento an unabashedly tourist town on the side of some cliffs. Sorrento was really nice, it was good to get out of the doom and gloom of Naples. A bit expensive - but nice views and pleasant atmosphere.

I have come to loathe Naples with a passion. While in the trains people walk through the carriages playing the accordion, and thrusting their children at you (some only look 18 months old) who are clutching plastic cups for you to give them money. When I was in McDs (the only place I could find actually open on the National holiday) a girl came right up to me and was begging for my food. I felt positively awful, I didn't know whether to ignore her or be a 'stupid tourist'. Then some man started shouting at me in Italian through the window, I think he was angry that I was even in the building, let alone also eating. On my second night in Naples I meet an Australian and a Venezuelan. We were all solo female travellers and so we went out to dinner. The Australian could talk Portuguese, and so she could somehow communicate with the girl from Venezuela who spoke Spanish and a little Italian, and basic English. At the restaurant we drew a bit of attention from the locals and so they joined in and the process of translation was hilarious. In order for the waiter to communicate to me, he first had to talk to the Venezuelan, then she talked to the Australian then the Australian told me what the question was, and to answer it was the reverse. The locals then got in to a very loud argument about which wine we should have, as they had conflicting opinions over which was the best.

Next day I headed to the port, and got my tickets to get out of Naples ASAP. Short and brief blog I know, but just wait till you hit the epic blog for Sicily.