La Fronte

Holy cow, I'm so sorry! It has been so incredibly long since I've updated, and so much has happened! I think I'm going to just bullet point again because there is SO much to write and I know most of you have better things to do than read my blog for an hour :-) So here it goes:


On Sunday, the 21, I left for Trapani, Sicily with Rachel at 3:55 in the afternoon. The entire plane was filled with Italian people, who only spoke Italian. Not joking, we were the only people on the plane that needed the English instructions on how to evacuate the plane in case of emergency. I now know that you are supposed to be chewing when you put on an oxygen mask, no high heels are allowed on the blow up slide, and all you men and women wearing skirts, please remain calm enough to remember to hold your skirts down while jumping out of the plane.

I sat next to a woman who thought I could understand Italian. I shall call her Carlotta. Carlotta kept asking if the aisle seat was "occupado". I kept responding "no" and so therefore, I spoke Italian. When she sat down she started chatting away, asking what I can only assume were questions because she kept pausing and looking at me expectantly. Rachel sat back and was entertained while I was struggling to figure out how much French and Italian were really alike, and if I spoke to her in French, would she understand it? Carlotta eventually figured out that I was NOT Italian, and asked where I was from in the most broken/incomprehensible English I've ever been able to understand. I said "America" she said, "Belgium?" "America" "Belgium?" "THE USA" "oh. New York?" I point to Rachel and say "She is". So ends my conversation with Carlotta until we take off.

We flew over Paris so I woke Rachel up and told her where we were, and she was promptly very confused as to why we were in Paris instead of Italy. We could see the Eiffel Tower and the Champs Elysees and the Arc de Triumph and we observed how cool it was that it was sunny in Paris. We hoped that Italy was the same.

Rach went back asleep and Carlotta, seeing that I was eating peanuts, offered me one of her hazelnut chocolate cookies. When have I ever turned down a cookie? Never you say? You're right, I still have never turned one down. She gave me one, talked to me in Italian again (no matter how many times you repeat it in slow Italian, I STILL won't understand you... You can even get louder and repeat what you said and that still won't help me...). I thanked her in the only Italian I know (grazie) and offered her peanuts. She quickly turned her nose upwards and exclaimed something in Italian that must have been "ew gross" because she scrunched her face up and wrinkled her nose. She then proceeded to eat the entire package of cookies. I found this to be much how I ate for the rest my time in Italy. If it's in front of you, EAT.

The flight attendant, who shall be called Alfredo, was a regular Jerry Seinfeld. In Italian. He would get on the microphone and give a bland English translation of what he was about to translate into Italian, then proceed to crack up the entire plane (including the guy directly behind Rachel who looked as much like the Godfather as anyone I've ever seen) with jokes that only they could understand. Rachel said that she always envied the people who could talk and know that the people around them had no idea what was being said. I feel different. I hate feeling like the one that's completely left out from a conversation, the only reason being a language barrier.

When we landed it was dark, but it was also raining. As we got off the plane, Alfredo assured us that this would change because "it never rains in Sicily". The famous last words.

Silent cab ride to our B&B in the middle of "posh" Trapani (by the way, that's pronounced TRA-pa-ni) and 30 Euro later, we are standing in the middle of a white room with three beds, a HUGE chest, a desk and a window. And two chairs with no table. The breakfast room is plastic patio furniture that has been moved inside because of the rain, there are movies, but the cabinet is locked, and the bathroom is past the breakfast room, so if you want a shower in the morning and it's past 8:30 you have to walk through the breakfast room with people eating in it to get there. In a towel. There was a towel warmer though. Which was cool. And a bidet (pronounced bh-day).

After a good laugh and a little bit of disappointment, we woke up the next morning in time to eat breakfast (which I now call the Italian Breakfast, consisting of pastries, focaccia bread, egg bread, tea, coffee and marmalade) , drink all the tea and meet the two other people staying with us. We didn't catch their names that morning, but we did catch that they were from Lubig, Germany, that they had two sons, they thought we were movie stars (which we promptly said "Of Course") that the woman had taken a Greyhound bus tour of the US (almost exclusively to California, Nebraska and New York...) and the man's mother lives in Yakima, WA. Small world...?

We stole the remaining pastries to eat for lunch while we were out then set off to explore the town. The day was at that instant, sunny. But I had an umbrella just in case. It took us 15 minutes to find the beach and we were almost blown away. Literally. The wind was so incredibly strong that it was hard to do anything except stand there and try to take pictures. It was beautiful though. It took us about another hour to figure out that we were walking in the main shopping district and that this was also old town and it was also where the tourists go. For that entire hour we were on the same road going up and down. At one point we looked up and realized that we needed shelter stat because there was a black cloud about two inches from us. We ducked into a ceramics store. Low and behold, Sicily is known for their ceramics! Hey hey! We waited the storm out, walked outside, then quickly ducked into another store (also ceramics) to avoid yet another storm. After three or four storms, we decided to just keep walking, finding cover when needed.

I say aloud, "I wonder what that building is?" We walk past, then Rachel turns around and says "let's see." It turns out to be gated inside (... go figure) and the guy at the gate, who will be called Tony, called me over. After a few gestures and a few failed attempts to understand him, I get across that we're American students. His face lights up and he opens the gate for us and gestures for us to go inside. Magic words, apparently. Tony then practically runs over to us and starts talking in wild Italian, presumably telling us where we are, though neither Rachel or I can understand a single word he says. We explain again that we are AMERICAN STUDENTS (we're really good at saying this in Italian by now) and this look of recognition flashes across his face as the notion hits him that he knows no English and we know no Italian. So he calls this other guy over who speaks French. Maybe we're not as good as we thought we were. Then Tony calls ANOTHER guy over who speaks nothing but Italian. Way to go. Finally, after many men, a guy claims to know English and says to us in our broken language "Good morning, you are Americans? My name is Joe." All three men (the French guy was still there) proceed to tell me that my eyes were beautiful, Tony demanded that Rach take her sunglasses off so they could see her eyes too. "BELLA!" I guess blue and gold eyes are rare here in Trapani... Tony is asked to go back to work at the front gate (we've figured out at this point that this is some sort of governmental building, and Tony just left the gate unattended to talk to some foreign girls... This would get you fired in America) and Joe asks us to follow him and we get in this elevator meant for one, Joe is huge and Rachel and I are small, so we are practically having the floor buttons imprinted on our backs while Joe is standing in front of the door, smiling, trying to talk to us in English, when the only English words he actually knows are "good morning, you are Americans? My name is Joe." It was now that we decided that this was probably not the smartest idea, getting in a small elevator, going somewhere inside a gated building with a man the size of a medieval door. All the same, we were there, we were together, and we were trying hard not to laugh. Tony later joins us as we are being let into what we learn is the Sicilian Parliament. This building is the Sicilian Parliament and the president/mayor/representative of the isle of Sicily works here. No wonder it's gated.

Once explaining that we wanted to leave, they put us (ALL FOUR OF US) in that tiny elevator and brought us to the front gates where they told us to wait there. So we did, and they were STILL trying to find someone who spoke English well enough to translate. While they were unable to find anyone, we succeeded in one try by asking a polizia a question. He and another man told us to go salsa dancing, that our Italian book was crap and how no tourists ever came to Trapani, which is why no one spoke English.

As we leave, we believe we're in the clear because Tony and Joe never came back for us. How wrong we were. They were waiting, OUTSIDE the gates AROUND THE CORNER, wanting us to go to lunch with them and let them show us the town. In Tony's car. In Rachel's words, the first thing I learned was to never get in a car with strangers and the first thing I learned from the Soprano's is to not get in a car with strange Italian men. Needless to say, we hastily looked up the word for leaving in our little book then practically ran in the opposite direction. They stood behind us and laughed. Comforting.

Hunger pains hit at about 2pm.

Discovered MTV at the same time.

Chose TV. Sad, I know, but it happens.

Crashed an Italian Wedding where everyone was dressed up "nice" in their animal print and leotards and suits with tennis shoes.

Discovered how strange it was to see everyone with the same types of features; dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin, strong bone structure. When you're used to seeing even diversity in hair color, it's very strange to realize that the only blonds in this church were bottle blonds and the only people who had a different natural color were about 75 and gray.

Returned to Novecento (the B&B) and relaxed/dried off, Rachel napped and I wrote in my journal. Headed down to the corner American Pizzeria for some authentic Italian food and discovered that Italians watch dubbed American movies and charge you for using their silverware. The food was really good though!

The next day we discovered that there was a town called Erice. ERICE. How could I not go there? If I block out the E, I'm going to a town that is named after me! (sorta) Anyway, we steal the leftover pastries again and head out (in the rain) to the cable car that takes us to the top of this "mountain" where the medieval city is perched. As we are going upwards and taking pictures of the city below us, we turn to find ourselves being enveloped in a cloud. Wonderful.

The city is beautiful though, even in the cloud. I think the cloud added to it even more because it made the area around you just disappear. It seemed almost magical in the way that it shrouded the buildings and the people.

We walked through the walled city and went into even more ceramic stores to avoid rain, then watched as the cloud lifted and we were granted possibly the most beautiful view I've ever seen. The city literally sits on a hill that overlooks the island of Sicily. The vineyards, the villas, the beaches, everything. STUNNING. Then there were the castles on the cliff.

We returned for the sunset and took pictures of the castles lit up and of the cities at night.

We made an Italian dinner with Ignazio and Peter and Helga (who were our resident Germans... I can't go ANYWHERE without having at least one resident German, and I'm learning to love that...) We call the dinner Pasta Ignazio. It was the best dinner EVER. Homemade sauce, fresh tomatoes, basil, homemade olive oil, hand picked and cured olives, locally made wine, and pasta that was made less than twenty four hours before we ate it. INCREDIBLE. Helga and Peter were slightly drunk and asked if I was Chinese. ?!?!

Pisa was next. Our flight left at an obscene time of the morning and got into Pisa at 9am. And, can you guess what the weather was? RAIN. We got on a bus, pretending to know where we were going and where we were supposed to get off. Rachel was the brilliant person who got us off at the right stop, I would have stayed on it forever I think...

Bought an outrageously expensive ticket to the Leaning Tower, had a rushed lunch, then checked all our bags because we couldn't take them up for fear it would make the tower lean more (?!). Climbing up the inside of a circular, tilted tower makes the equilibrium in you go a little wacky. Especially because you had to look down to not step in the puddles that formed on the crooked stairs from the rain. The view from the top was pretty spectacular though.

Then we got on a plane and returned home to Dublin. Rachel fell asleep in a weird position and stayed that way the entire flight so I entertained myself by reading and laughing at the child sitting across the aisle from me who thought he was a siren. Apparently that was not as funny to Rachel who was trying to sleep...

London is next, but hold your horses. This took me a good two hours to remember and write...