Sicily

We arrived at Messina at 7:00 AM to little splendor or excitement. A second tier Sicilian city, I wasn’t too excited to be here. I had some of the worst hash browns of my life in the main dining room for breakfast and it was 9 before I left the boat.

The plan for the day was to take a train into the town of Taormina, a posh resort town about 50 kilometers outside Messina. However, I didn’t have a map and could not find a single sign pointing us to the train station, so we ended up taking a cab there. The cost, more than 100 euro was outrageous. However, this price was for (we thought) a round trip. We were wrong. More about that later. The taxi driver, who spoke as little English as I do Sicilian, drove more recklessly than a teenage boy the first time he’s trying to impress a girl. It seems that fact throughout Italy is that traffic laws don’t really exist. As yesterday’s guide Lello said,  “traffic lights are just meant for decoration”.

Luckily, we made it to the Taormina alive and let the driver know we would be done around 2:30. He left back to Messina and we walked into the town. Like most things I’ve seen so far over here, it was a really handsome town with a ton of shops and restaurants lining the streets. I got the opportunity to take a lot of pictures, including some of the active volcano Mt Etna.

I decided that coming to Italy and not eating pizza was just stupid, so for lunch, I ordered a pizza with spinach, mozzarella and ham. It was delicious. One thing I noticed while sitting at the restaurant was the diversity of people in the town.  I heard Italian, Spanish, French, English and German it roughly the same proportions.

After walking around for a little bit more, we headed to the pickup point we agreed to with our driver. Waiting for around 15 minutes, another cab driver comes up to tell us that our guy has had car trouble and can’t make it up to Taormina, and that he’ll take us back instead. I would have felt a little awkward about this, but since he identified our original driver as “Giuseppe”, I believed him. As we got into this man’s cab, another family from the cruise ship climbed in. This was a family from Staten Island, so I got along with them well. After the 45 minute drive back, we both realized that this driver wanted to get paid a full fare from each of us. Being that this is Sicily, land of the Mafia, we agreed to his terms, as ludicrous as they were.

After leaving Sicily, we headed toward the Island of Stromboli, in hopes to see some volcanic activity. We lucked out. Pictures were difficult to capture as we were moving at 15 miles an hour about a mile off the coast and it was dark, but I got a few that convey what was happening.

Tomorrow is a “fun day at sea”. I will take tomorrow to take pictures of the ship. More than 5000 people are currently aboard, including crew. It is truly a miniature town.

As I predicted at the beginning of the cruise, 20 is proving to be an awkward age on here. Thank god I have this and the gym to take up a lot of my time.

Goodnight.

-Matt