More on Sicily!

Hi everyone!

I don’t get it but because it’s a blog you have to start reading from the bottom and make your way up :-S. Noticed this a while ago just never thought to remind you guys :-P.

Right… now where was I with my last post… I’m not going to go by everyday in Sicily… mainly because I’ve forgotten a lot and I’ll only type up the interesting stuff :-P.

Sicilian’s (not all of them, but most) are very stubborn, they keep wearing their ginormous winter jackets and scarves, no matter what temperature the day is all the way up until June! Then they’re free to wear what they like :-P… of course I didn’t know this on my very first day of being in Sicily. I woke up and it was gorgeous outside, so as any sane person would do, after getting ready I put on LIGHT clothes.

Then again me coming straight from cold Ireland, it may actually have been cold for the locals and I just wasn’t used to it because I was so used to freezing temperatures… literally if Gizmo wanted to go outside in Ireland, I’d open the door just slightly let him out, struggle against the wind to close the door again, then run to a window and watch him… I was always afraid he’d get blown away :-P… we lived on a hill in the middle of the country side so… it COULD have been possible :-P!

Once we’d had breakfast we went for a walk around the area we were in. After 5 minutes of looking around I got stopped by an elderly man, who started rambling on in Sicilian, making vigorous arm movements towards me and then the sky, then him… me and the sky a final time… quite confusing… then he tapped my bare arms and said in Italian this time “cold?”, I laughed and said “No, I’m from Ireland”. He kissed me on the cheek and wandered off… it was very strange but then again, I didn’t know the Sicilian culture…

On the first day we had to get a phone SIM card, so we went into a small electrical shop… it is the most obvious thing to do :-P. Anyway we really couldn’t get our message across but strangely enough a guy walked into the shop at this exact time, the shop keeper greeted him and then said something in Italian… he immediately started speaking perfect English… what are the odds! It turns out he’d moved to Sicily 11 years ago from Scotland, and was now teaching at the university near by. Anyhow we got his number and the SIM card :-) and left. This left my spirits slightly higher, but they were later crushed again when I found out that an English speaker who’s not a tourist in Sicily is very odd :-P... AHHH!

Palermo is an absolutely gorgeous city… it just has a lot of stray dogs which you know what that leads (HA! Leads!!! Do you get it? :-P. I’m SO funny!!! … if you could hear me now, you’d know this is said in a sarcastic way… so just read it like that :-P) to on the ground :-P. Yeah! Some Sicilians don’t seem to love their animals as much as the French do. Over Easter there, some of them go on holiday and just set their dogs free to look after themselves, when they come back if their dog’s still there they’ll take it back… most aren’t though… on the motorway we say tonnes of little, fluffy, dead…dogs… it was absolutely heart breaking!

Our house that we found (I’ll get to this later), the garden of it, used to be the home of the guard dog of the house, before we moved in. Now the owners were supposed to take him away… they did. They just threw the poor thing into the boot, slammed it shut, drove down the lane and we thought that was the last we were going to hear of him. A few days later my sister and I took a walk down the lane only to find the poor thing tied to a tree on a short chain by the grape vines. We ran down to him and found that he had no water and today was absolutely blistering heat! We quickly walked back up to the house, got a few bottles of water brought them down to him and later that night we even brought him the left over from dinner.

The owners of the house, we noticed, came back and gave him some of those dog pebbles, but we still fed him sometimes… in the end my parents and I were even taking him for walks, we weren’t allowed to give him a name though because then we’d become too attached… he was part pointer it was really funny to watch him chase a lizard, then run around the rock digging at where he thought it had gone even though it had long run away through the grass.

But not all Sicilians are like this with their animals, one day, actually when we were leaving Palermo to go to Mazara del vallo, which is to the south west of Sicily (I’ll also get to that later).We were waiting for a train and we saw an elderly man with a puppy that would literally fit in your hand! He would push the puppy gently away with his foot then keep on walking, but the puppy kept coming back and jumping all over him… okay all over his ankle… it couldn’t really reach much higher :-P. Anyway he sat down on a bench doubled over with his arms flapping about playing with it. At the end he walked around the fountain and the puppy got distracted and was looking down at something through the gutter. The owner saw, then ran and “hid” behind a pole watching the puppy like a little boy.

Soon the puppy realised that it’s owner had gone missing and began running around, looking frantically for him, eventually it spotted his owner, ran over then went crazy! It was the last highlight of my time in Palermo.

Yes the statues in Palermo city were absolutely gorgeous! In Palermo we met some of my father’s family. The first time we met them we went to lunch… they can eat A LOT of fish… actually Sicilians can just eat A LOT :-P. They invited us to their house a few Sundays and wow, we could hardly move!!! They also took us around quite a few times (I promise I’ll get back to all of these things in more posts to come!). A few places was Mondello beach… I have to say I hadn’t ever seen so many people out and about, playing football, walking, or just sitting around… and it was almost dark!... and very cold … even for me :-P!

Another one was the cave were Saint Rosalia was found. It was very pretty, built into the mountain and had a big, open area where the rain water came in and was captured into little pipes along the walls which ended at the Holy water area. Pretty scary being inside though because of the way the rocks just jut out in random places so you don’t quite know how safe it is :-P!

I’m sure I’ll go into more detail about these places and put up a few images soon. Going to leave it at that, don’t want to make you all TOO bored :-P. Hope to hear from you all soon!

- Bianca