I awaken to my Ipod alarm clock-thing, delivering my soothing Saturday morning wake up call. Sweet sweet Saturday.

I swat the alarm clock and re-locate my corpse a few meters to the couch. Flicking on my sweet, sweet saturday morning rage. Hair special, eh. A little time is spent considering Cyndi Lauper’s freakish latterday haircut. But wait, it’s a pretty nice day outside. I’m looking at it, out the window there. Too nice to spend looking at Cyndi Lauper’s head. So nice, maybe I should go to the beach. Cyndi Lauper never went to the beach. Birds would have attacked her freakish hair.  Bird attacks. What a phenomenon.

Anyway Kelis comes on, and starts shriekin’ all over the place, sealing the deal. “Fuck this!” I say, turning off the TV, grabbing a shower and driving down to the beach. Note: I’m going to beach for the purpose of walking, not swimming here. Yes, I like long walks on the beach. They’re soothing, okay. Way more soothing than they are dorky, and vaguely suspect.

And I gotta say I’m pretty proud of my Woodman Point beachwalk, I’ve got a primo route figured out that means I never have to backtrack, and I can cut across the cape at several points  and shorten the length of the walk if I want to. The walk starts with about 20 minutes of bushland path, then it’s soothing beach back the rest of the way.

And there I am, walking through the bush. Everything is stereotypically delightful, the day is sunny, the bush in the full throes of spring, with flowers everywhere. The air is full of calling bird noises. There is a cool, almost air conditioned breeze blowing through it all. “Excellent call.” I think to myself. “You needed a break, doing that 4-day week of work, after being on holidays for a month.” Of course I do.

Despite the niceness of the day, the place is fairly deserted. I get through the 20 minutes of bush, only bumping into 1 other person – can I just take a moment to say how excellent that is, being able to see another person coming towards you for like 5 minutes, to add mental weight to the choice to either attempt ot exchange a bland plesantry or just ignore them. Today’s victim is some power walking old lady.

And let’s be honest, I look pretty out of place, walking down the beach. The mind of the at-beach-belongers must leap to such conclusions. But I’m not going to be the surly silent type! I beleive in a nicer time where everyone drove jalopies around at slower-than walking pace and waved cheerily at each other. So in my most cheery, not-a-serial killer voice (probably without intended effect) I deliver an even handed “Morning!” in this instance, I receive a guarded “How you going?”

“God dammit”, I’m thinking. I hate that. “How you going” isn’t a mid-stride reply! In my 1920 low velocity jalopy doctrine handbook, that is a question that demands an answer! But you don’t want an answer. You are just a rigid power-walking robot, playing pre-taped responses whilst reaching for your pepper spray. “Not today, lady!” I think, and just keep walking. Anybody else out there having these tiny daily panic attacks?

Anyway I finally set foot on the beach. The wind is a little stronger here, and the waves a little more unruly than usual. I look up the beach, just two other people plodding in the opposite direction, further up the beach. Nice, unless both of them break a leg, there’s hopefully no more awkward pleasantries involved for this stretch of beach, anyway.

About a hundred meters up, I notice the sky. Not particularly sunny anymore! In fact, dark ominous clouds are rolling in from the sea. As the light darkens, the wind that was pleasantly cool before starts to feel a bit chilly. I’m cool with that, I think. Maybe it’ll thin out the crowds, make the rest of the walk nice and peaceful.  I can deal.

But soon, I am looking at the telltale veil of grey haziness coming in from the sea. Mans ancient, sunny-go-to-the-beach-ruining foe, rain.

“Crap.” I climb up the bank from the beach to the road, looking to cut across the point, taking a shortcut back to the car. I’m feeling optimistic enough not to just backtrack though, I’ll forge on. Get in one good stretch of beach, and home dry.

“Gah.” I’m actually too far down the point as of yet, there’s a nature reserve fence blocking my way across the center. I’ll have to go a bit further up before going across. Well it’s not raining yet.

“Dammit.” A few more minutes up the road, the 1st inquisitive drop flicks my forehead. “No way man, this doesn’t happen to me, I’m luckier than this.” I think as the rain starts in earnest.I don’t mean generically lucky, in a win the lotto sort of way. But like, Rain lucky. It’s a thing I had. You know, where you get those few spitting drops, but I get under cover, just seconds before the rain gets into the swing of things. Then me and god secretly high five, confirming our arrangement. (Athiests please imagine Santa in place of God, and LAUGH at our primitive belief sets.)

John “Home Dry” Chillemi. That’s they call me, probably. But hey, actually; Ol’ Home Dry has run out of rain-avoiding luck lately.

*** A SEMI-RELATED STORY APPEARS

Hey remember this used to be a travel blog? Well here’s another story from back in Sicily. Getting home from Sicily involves catching a train, from Capo D’Orlando to Rome. The night we were set to leave was stormy early on, but it cleared up nicely by the time we went to wait for the train. Now Capo D’Orlando’s train station has 2 platforms: One main one with all the ameneties you’d expect. Chairs, lights, rooves, and a second, rarely used platform, that is a merciless strip of concrete, with a single light pole under the open sky.

But that’s okay. Platform two has got it’s own thing going on. And I don’t care cos my train is coming in on platform one. 40 minutes late, but platform one nonetheless. Skip forward to 10 minutes before the train arrives, and the announcer chimes in to say our train will actually be coming in on platform two. Hey, that’s fine right platform two? We don’t really talk much, what with me hanging around with the platform one crowd, but we’re cool right?

And yes, we are. For about one minute. Then the rain starts back up. And it gets heavy. Storm heavy. And it’s stand out here and catch the train, or run back under cover and miss the train. So we stand there. Once the announcer sees that we and our baggage are thoroughly soaked, he says “No wait, it’s actually coming in on platform one again now. The good one with a roof.” We drag our luggage back to the other platform, and board the train a minute later. We dry off as best we can and get changed.

Ironically I’m wearing exactly the same clothes at the train station as I am at the beach, a week later getting soaked again. Including my favorite, apparently rain-attracting shirt.

*** ENOUGH OF THIS OTHER STORY HEY BACK TO THE FIRST ONE

So here we are again, stuck in the rain on the beach. I follow the road up, looking for the point near a little boat ramp that I can cut across to the last beach. I’m reasonably soaked by this point, and at least 30 minutes or so from the car. I find a firebreak demolished around the edge of a fence, giving me a shortcut into the boat yard.

In the edge of the boat yard, I cower  under a bunch of trees for a little while, steeling myself to go back into the rain. Nearby there’s a camper van, I eye off for a minute. “Maybe they’re friendly Hippies. With friendly umbrellas. Nobody bad has ever inhabited a white van!” I stare at it a bit longer, but there is no sign of movement, for good or ill, so I go marching down that last stretch of beach.

I walk and peer down to the far end of the beach towards a jetty, the finish line. Normally full of people fishing on the weekend; it’s barren except for two figures. Fishermen, I guess, standing rigid like pillars of justice, unphased by the rain. “Yeah” I thought. “Me and you, fishermen. We know what it’s all about. we’re real men.” We knew Brandy may indeed have been a fine girl, bur our life, our love and our lady was the sea.

We take a moment to mourn the diminishing fineness of girls named after hard liquor, and we get back down to consumating our un-erotic oceanic wedlock. I don’t even know what I’m saying here.

Walk walk walk, rain rain rain. And then I am halfway down the beach. I look back up at those fishermen. So it turns out they were just two exceptionally long poles on the pier. Damn rain mirages. Apparently. Near the jetty however I see there is an actual  family swimming despite the rain, but they came to the beach specifically to get wet. I can’t poesy them up to the status of working class heroes so I can relate myself to them. The fisher-poles however, had nobler ideals.

And finally I am near the end of the beach. The rain has actually calmed a bit, a bunch of actual, non-wooden fishermen are tentatively returning to the jetty. As I casually walk past a flock of gulls, relieved to be on the home stretch. One flaps over me, but is caught by the wind, hovering above my head, cawing. It is when another two join in that I realize they are swooping me. Yep. The parting shot after being rained on for 40 minutes, is being attacked by birds.

I brokenly whisper “Why” to my vengeful Santa-God, and break into a short defeated, drenched fat man run up the beach, out of bird-range, trying to remember if I had absent mindedly murdered an albatross or badmouthed posiedon earlier on in the week. Surprisingly the fishermen don’t seem to see my little jog of shame, or that nature apparently hates me. This is a small kindness, perhaps.

I head up the path to the car. In the car wringing out my socks I notice in my hurry to pick up my coat on the way out of home, I’ve grabbed a shirt at the same time; Of course, it’s the same shirt I changed into on the train. Nice. I change shirts quickly in the car, and drive home in wet pants. Great day.

Yep! It’s been good, but I’m packing this showboat and makin’ like a tree, in a horrible mixed metaphor that will echo through the generations. So how about some bullet points of things I learnt in Italy! Sometimes also pictures. I went to the beach, or something. Also that door photo i’ve been promising all along.

Things!

• Here, you deal and play cards in reverse, counter clockwise. They also drive on the wrong side of the road. Perhaps it’s related? Cannot verify if toilet flush is inverted, do not remember how it flushed back home.
• In public bathrooms, you’ll usually see sinks with little foot pedals to run the water faucet, instead of taps. The first time I encountered this involved a frantic 90 minute search for the taps, also waggling my hand furiously around the faucet, attempting to trigger a non-existent infra-red beam. I’m pretty crafty like that.
  

• And of course, the elephant in the room. Specifically the bathroom. This thing! No, I don’t know how it works. I could sort of maybe guess? I considered somehow trying to google it, to make this more fact filled, but I sort of don’t really want to do. These are in bathrooms in houses here sometimes! Yep. Don’t really know what to tell you.
  

• I’ve mentioned Padre Pio, Italy’s totally favourite No. 1 Saint. You’ll find pictures of him everywhere. He is a particular hit for religious calendars and the like. What makes Padre Pio extra great, is his preference for fingerless gloves. And not the hobo woolen variety that I use, like you’d expect. But the biker “I punch dudes all day, and don’t want chapped knuckles cos I moonlight as a hand model” kind. Super great. Picture included for reference!

• So apparently Sicilians eat horse. Found this out the hard way, accidentally ate a slice o’ horsemeat before someone filled me in on what it was. No I didn’t like it. And no, I did not care it is a specific brand of horse bred for eatin’. Horse is not a flavour sensation, as you’d imagine.

• Booze is all over the place here. Every store supermarket and local deli sells it, and it’s reasonably cheap to boot, for example 1 euro local beers in Rome. It’s a culture that drinks often but in moderation.

• Occasionally here, especially when bad weather is expected, the military reads out the weather report. And then they wonder why they lost all those wars.

• Messina, the main port of Sicily, which is the meeting point with the mainland, has been destroyed 2 times in recent history. In 1908, It was hit by an 11 on the ricter scale earthquake, then 8 minutes later, by a tidal wave. Later, during WW2, it was largely bombed to the ground by the Americans. To this day Messina has really strict building laws, with an enforced maximum height of something like 4 stories per building, all and all of them designed to be anti-apocalypse tough. Messina ain’t gonna be snuck up on again, apparently.
• If you’re bored at some point, read up on Italy’s current Prime Minister, Silvio Belesconi. He is pretty corrupt, and his scandals are the wackiest. Wikipedia has split the Trials he has been involved in into a separate article, there are so many. Quality leadership, people.

And now some more trip things.

More needlessly classy panels and the like. Everywhere should be like this! Makes mundane things seem vaguely steampunk. My first impression of this classy hotel/resteraunt thing.

This thing here! Yeah.

How classy? This many stickers classy, to be exact. So classy infact I didn’t really take any photos inside, thus ending this thrilling coverage. The food was pretty good btw.

Then there was this cool olive grove hill, on the way back from the resteraunt. With a cool little water tunnel beneath the winding road up there. So I climbed up to get some photos of it.

And got a whole pile of photos to boot. Pretty chuffed with how these turned out. the 8 days of rain innnarow we endured has really brought all the green of this place bursting to life.

And then some shots of that tunnel thing too. Cool.

But it is probably not smart to go climbing a muddy hill in your classy resteraunt clothes. Hurr!

A nice shot of the views outside another resteraunt (That is apparently all I do), Baia Verde Ristorante, which translates to  Green Bay Resteraunt. Lots of businesses here are something-verde, much like everything in Perth is Swan’s something. No idea why they settled on verde. As can be seen in the above photo, the bay is clearly blue, you Sicilian rubes.

Some sweet old house we saw up in the hills. It’s a ramshackle delight.

Oh yeah, that beach I went to. The beach here is full of rocks! Also some sand, but mostly rocks.

Houses by the beach, if poorly maintained get pretty ravaged by the salt, damp and wind. Another house I was too daft to photograph, had at some point had scaffolding erected around it. They then must have left it too long, because rust fused it all together and is now locked around the house. Nice.

In amongst all the rocks n’ things, You’ll occasionally find chunks of terracotta or green glass, that have been scraped smooth by other rocks. I am perhaps the only person pleased/fascinated by this.

Further up the beach, these classy curved retainer walls stop the ocean crushing the road up above, thwarting the sea’s constant thirst for destruction.

Also they dumped some twisted metal-filled here. I guess they had a good reason for that also, at some point.

Oh man finally, these doors, right. Reinforced as fuck. So on the normal latchy side you’ve got the 5-bar main lock, and two bars of equal thickness, above and below this. Another bar comes out the top of the door, also. With most locks here, you can turn them multiple times, to make them lock more? The front door here can be spun about 6 times, each time making the bars come out about another half inch.

And on the back of the door, another 4 bars that lock into the other side. The idea here is that you’re in an apartment several floors up, the only point of entry, aside from climbing up the side of the building, is the front door. Note also I’m yet to see a non-deadlock here, so even if thieves did come up the side of the building, they’d be unable to open the door unless they found a key. Apparently the way these doors are usually got past is by smashing the wall around them, and yanking the whole doorframe out. Oh also, these doors use sort of big classy key, that makes them extra hard to pick. So they’ve pretty much got all the angles covered.

And there we go!  I thought I was running out of internet time, and smashed out this post in the last half an hour I thought I had, and published it without edits. But it turns out I have another 5 hours! Who knew. So anyway this is probably my last post from Italy, i’m jumping on a train to Rome tonight, and hopping on a plane tomorrow. I might put up some other tidbits when I am at home, such as the creepy robotic-gollum voice of the fruit merchant who trucks around our neighbourhood, and a few extra photos I have been too lazy to work in. Well anyway thanks again! Cya’lls when I get back in Perth I guess!

Firstly the traffic. They have a saying that In Palermo, red lights are for cops. When the lights turn red there, people just keep going, until a gap in the traffic, or some larger vehicle capable of crushing the majority of forward-flowing vehicles charges into the fray and cuts them off. They have the lights, and they work, but apparently people see them more as ceremonial than authoritarian. The thing that makes that even better is that there are no lanes. So the forward flowing traffic is a sea of tiny Italian hatchbacks, and a never ending swarm of mopeds and motorcycles, weaving opportunistically through tiny gaps between the cars.

I had the luck of being perched above all this madness in a gigantic bus, but even I found it reasonably terrifying. Particular favourites involve an ambitious mopedder trying to squeeze by our bus, and getting wedged between the curb and the side of the bus, before wiggling himself free. Also people too lazy or despair-filled to find parking, who park their car in the road, flick on hazard lights and walk way. The sidewalks are edged with bollards, to stop people parking and driving on them.

I wish I had more photographic evidence of this, and indeed a lot of things in Palermo. However most of them took place whilst I was on a speeding bus, frozen in horror at what I was witnessing.

Next is the trash. At the time I was there, Palermo’s trash problem was not really at fever pitch, but I did not see a bin or dumpster that was not overflowing, normally with a small mountain of surrounding trash gradually engulfing it. This is a problem in Palermo, and to lesser and greater degrees all over Italy. I’ve heard this is due to the fact that the Mafia has some sort of iron grip on the waste disposal industry, keeping supply a whole pile lower than demand.

Things get particularly hairy during garbo strikes; The streets fill up with trash, which then happens to keep mysteriously setting on fire, leaving the fire agencies racing around putting out gigantic trash-fires. There are even cases where people actually fight off the Firefighters, to keep the fire burning and get rid of these trashmountains.

Palermo has also historically had a really high crime rate; though this has tapered off somewhat in recent years. The security reaction can be seen in the modern apartment regions, each building’s front court yard being surrounded by a high, fairly martial fence, and gate. This is made all the more impressive when coupled with the relative security of an Italian apartment door, which I’ll hopefully finally get around to showing in the next post. There is a whole district of such buildings, which as a side note, were apparently built as a cash-grab by a corrupt mayor, who built cheaply, and demolished a whole bunch of historic buildings to make space for the process.

Note: This shit would be a whole pile better with photos, but the bus factor again screws me over. I’m hesitant to yoink photos from other places to illustrate all this, but they wouldn’t be hard to find if you want to look. I also wanna point out this stuff seems sorta grim, but most of my time was spent exploring the sparkly inner region of Palermo, and I felt that I had to extrapolate on some of the very real shit that also compromises this place. I have decided, as a sort of makeshift travel journalist, that I have scruples, or something.

… and these reasons and more are why I vote Palermo city-most-in-need-of-an-irl-Batman-or-if-technology-significantly-advances-maybe-a-Robocop. Note to our would be Italian batman, the Italian word for bat is like Pipistrello I think which sounds wussy as hell. Stick with the English word bat, at least. Lawsuits be damned. You become the night, Senor Bat!

Tangent: While I’m talking about copyright infringement, apparently the lawsuits haven’t, or maybe can’t get here. You see it all over the shit. Some sort of sports store, with the cast of high school musical inexplicably plastered on their billboard opposite our house, a Popeye Cafe, a Tinkerbell /Peter pan themed toy store. Shit is moderately bananas.

Also before I wrap up, here is about the only decent shot I got of the more seedy regions of Palermo, I’m not all talk and no photos. Just about 90% all talk.

And now that’s out of the way, onto the classier side of Palermo. The inner district of the town is full of grand old buildings, mainly theatres, churches and government buildings. All of these are riddled with really classy carving and architecture.

A few shots outside Palermo’s main church. This church was apparently once a base for the inquisition, and it’s courtyard was used to burn heretics and the like. Lovely.

All entrances of the courtyard are bracketed by a pair of these classy statues.

A few shots of the inside of the church. Low light played havoc here, and with the million other churches I visit in todays post, with my ability to take too many decent photos. A shot here of one of the basins, and the painted roof.

Gratuitous, statue nudity, how bout it. This fountain, called what sort of translates as the shameless fountain, or something thereabouts, given the amount o’ statue-junk on display.

And of a rendering of everyones favourite folk-tale of no-hand shoving some sort of violin into the neck of a three-headed dog. He is one of the few statues wearing some sort of semblance of pants. Perhaps safety equipment for his dog-welding experiment.Yep.

Two of the stray dogs you seem to see around these towns and monuments occasionally. They live off scraps from the various passing tourists and the like. They seem to do okay in the summer, but I worry about how they winter.

And here, at church II, our tour guide is fined 1000 euros for talking facts n’ dates inside the church, whilst not being a Palermo officially sanctioned tour guide thing. Jerks!

A shot of the inside of the church. This place is apparently Greco-Romanian Orthodox rather than Catholic. This is about all I know about it, as what Italian talk of our tour guide I could understand was cut off by by those dastardly Italian tour-cops.

I finally get a decent shot of the roof-fresco in here! It is upside down! I am a moron. Whee!

A shot from one of the city gates, featuring Palermo-ian nobles… uh… MC poncy-wrist, and his wife, spiral boobs.

A few shots of the apartment blocks in Palermo, showing their age.

Though not all the buildings are so poorly maintained.

And now a series of lamps, each classier than the last seen in Palermo. This became a photography challenge for me throughout the day. The winner being a rather dim photo of one seen inside the Palermo theatre with the cherubs sculpted into the base and everything. Unnecessarily nice!

One of the Twin lion statues outside the Palermo theatre.

… and here’s the other one. Note lovingly rendered lion balls. I thought sculptors would skim over that sort of thing. Not in Palermo.

A Palermo street. You tell those nazis what for, graffiti artist.

A bus, with onboard retarder! Finally. I swear I saw another one of these, moving too fast for me to adequately photograph, which claimed to have the far more specific child retarder. I have no idea what that is really even supposed to mean, unintended implications aside.

And finally a few shots from Moriale, a very fancy church on the outskirts of Palermo.

The entire roof and walls of this church are a massive mosaic, depicting stories of both the Old and New Testament of the bible.

Including of course everyone’s favourite story, Jesus lazer-eyes the fuck outta some naked dude.

The church also houses the tombs of two kings. Unfortunately only one of the photos turned out. Kings coffins are apparently way huger than regular coffins. Maybe Sicily had really giant kings.  I hope so.

Sicilian sculptors struggle again with the issue of scale and perspective.

A few shots of the views of the towns and suburbs around Palermo, from the site of Moriale.

Well this post contained an unforeseen level of me bangin’ on. Congrats if you actually got all the way through it, to reach this semi-apology. Thanks for listening. The next one promises to be significantly shorter, I think.

Hello! I’ve been wracked with some sort of never-going-away jerkflu, which is officially my excuse for not posting something sooner. However I’ve been limping doggedly past things I have deemed photographable, and I am passing these photos to you, the customer.

I’ve got a bit of a backlog of photos to go through now, so If I’m not a lazy chump, there should be one or two more posts in quick succession. Let’s hope!

More of Sicily’s marble-excess, the stairwell of our building, which is quite classy. It seems like it’s normally the case for appartments to have full-marble stairwells, which then flip to tiles as soon as you enter the person’s apartment.

Photographic evidence, mainly for Sarah, that Twisties are called Fonzies here. In a world gone topsy turvy.

Anyone who’s been to Bali has probably seen these things, but they are also all over Italy. They’re basically a little truck body over what is a reasonably wussy motorcycle engine. You most most often see them here fully laden (normally with stereotype-reinforcing wine) leading a procession of cars stuck behind them, as they slowly put down the road. Awesome.

Try and count the ways in which this napkin seems racist! Stop somewhere near 11! Italy.

More collecting water from some spring! This is the one that’s closest to our house, I think! Not as classy looking but equally fresh.

And near that fountain there was some hill! So walked up it! Fascinating shit, right.

So hunting season is open here, apparently. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, the hills are alive with the crack of double-barreled shotguns going off all over the place. There isn’t even very much to shoot at here, like some tiny pheasants, or maybe a rabbit if you’re lucky? But they’re still out there, blasting away at trees and rocks and things.

Maybe hunting the deadliest prey of all: cars? Probably.

More shots of that crazy hill! Crazy, I know.

This is a castle, which sits somewhere between that hill and our house. It’s been restored by the local council here. When my dad was a kid, it was apparently abandoned and in really shitty repair. It’s actually pretty ancient, though it doesn’t look it post restoration. Apparently the original builders owned all the land to the coast, in this area. The current owner is some dude who hangs out the little top window and talks shit to his neighbour across the road. So regal.

Adjacent to the castle, you can see the castles little well, and an oldschool clothes-washing basin thing.

A building next to the castle, originally used for making wine, has clearly not received the restoration treatment. Probably the most overgrown abandoned building i’ve seen here, which is saying something cos there is an abandoned building about every 3 feet here.

A couple of shots of inside the building. Judging by the thickness of the trunks of the trees growing in this thing, It’s been abandoned for quite a while. Note that last shot is actually me photographing the inside of the building from the outside. Best building 09′

These lil’ lizards are all over the place here, when you’re walking near any sort of bush, you’ll hear one scrabbling away every few meters or so. They are pretty great.

That is about it for now! Maybe even later today, or at some point, 2 more posts in the pipeline: One of my visit to Parlemo and it’s equal mix of seediness and exquisite architecture, and another gripping tale of me walking up a hill! Will I survive? Don’t let the fact that I am writing about in the past tense lull you!

Hello,

Since I last posted I’ve gone and done some more touristy things, visiting Taormina and the Golle Dell’Alcantara, as well as more general driving around stuff, and thus, here are some photos and explanations of the interest piquing or dumb things I see. Hooray!

This stuff doesn’t look that visually spectacular, but is pretty tasty. The stuff in the plastic stuff is Granita Limona, which is like a sweet sorbet made out o’ real lemons, and the bread is Brioce, a vaguely sweet bread that you rip up and dip into your granita, which creates a delicious, flavour sensation. Also available in Fragola, or Strawberry.

I previously pointed out that Sicily is basically a gigantic mountain. What I didn’t explain is that it is a mountain entirely made out of marble. And as such, this stuff is all over in house building. It’s said that in Sicily you’re poor if you’ve got marble floors, and rich if you have wood, which is reasonably rare in sicily, or at least growing on such steep ground it’s pretty difficult to harvest. What you see here are bits of marble, which have been chucked in the sea for some reason (an example of how valuable marble is here) and has been rounded off by the waves slightly. And now they hold down the tablecloth so it doesn’t blow away. Marble! Sicily has too much of it.

One of my Aunt’s cats. My Aunts cats do not like me! Or anyone but my Aunt.

The next few photos are from a villa near our house, which upon the death of it’s original owners, was gifted to the state and became a public park/function area of sorts. (This is a bit of a theme of this post. State owned villas. What a theme.)

A little shot of the entrance of the house. The tree cover makes it hard to get a reasonable shot of how grand the house is.

This is a lil cemetery for all the dogs of the of the houses original generations of owners. I know looking at a graveyard is always gonna be fairly depressing, but these guys clearly loved their dogs, so it’s quite lovely in a way.

There are these lovely vine covered walkways around the property. Where the original owners used to take their dogs for an evening walk. You see they were very dog-centric. Of which I approve heartily.

Hey look, a cork tree. You just hack bits off em. And use em as corks, who knew the process was so simple.

Finally, photographic evidence of a weird fact of Sicily: The place is fuckin’ covered in Eucalypts. In digging for why this is so, I’ve come up with a few answers. In a couple of places in Europe, Eucalypts have been used In low, marshy areas,  to combat mosquito-spread malaria, by draining away surface water. I’ve tentatively heard that it was Mussolini who introduced them for this purpose. However they’re also planted on steep, never-gonna-be-marshy hillsides near roads all around here. My guess is, due to their got shallow, spreading root systems which suck up moisture, they’re using them to prevent Sicily’s favourite past time: having major roads blocked by sudden rockslides. Though this is only speculation, maybe they just love Eucalypts!? Who knows.

And here is the Sicilian Loch dog! This dog had sweet mismatched-colored eyes, but when I tried to photograph him, he fled under the nearby shrub. Next time, Siciliano Cane Della Loch.

And now more touristy photos from my trip. Here’s a few shots of Gole Dell’Alcantara, which is a little ravine in the river Alcantara formed by a lava flow from Etna, Sicily’s eterna-pissed, city crushing volcano, flowing across the river. The water caused the lava to cool quickly and crystallise, so where the water cuts a ravine, you get these geometric formations on the walls. Also, the water comes out of the ravine super cold, and dorky tourists like myself stand in it and giggle. Here are some shotsssssss.

Swoosh! The River Alcantara.

Another scenic photo ruined by the liberal application of hazard tape, also my blurry photography. Note the formations in the rock. Truly geologists everywhere having a ragin’ boner about it, maybe? Probably.

Spotted in the Gole Dell’Alcantara gift shop. Statues of saints, crudely covered in glitter are the shonkiest merchandise of Sicilian gift shoppery. Pictured is Padre Pio, the Elvis of Italian sainthood. Top tip: Try not to look disappointed if you get something like this as a gift. It would only hurt us both. Instead of just you.

And finally, to Taomina. Taomina is Sicily’s most triumphant hey-look-an-inhospitable-cliff-top-gonna-build-a-city-thar. It’s fullo buildings that pre-date Christ, and specialises in being equal parts delightful and snooty.

In more recent history, around 1900 or so, this  was one of Europes classiest holiday spots, attracting the likes of Oscar Wilde, Nitzche and Russian Tzar Nicholas II n’ family. Before that, it was re-captured back and forth between the Greeks and Romans, and a whole pile of things happened, probably.  I guess if you are ultra-piqued you can follow this up with Wikipedia.

Today it’s a bit of a tourist trap, but a lot of it’s upper-classiness remains. Commence some photossss.

Taomina’s streets. Classy as heck.

It is full of delightful little laneways..

…and Italy’s narrowest street. Pretty narrow, right.

Some shots of the Greek amphitheatre which is the main ruin of Taomina. You can see from this shot, the original stone and concrete building created by the Greeks, has been spitefully Bricked over by the Brick preferring’ romans, when they recaptured it.

A shot of the theatre, with Taomina in the background. The wooden stage you can see owes to the fact they’re still doing performances and concerts there today.

Another sight of Taomina is another donated to the state Villa, originally the property of an English lady what married some Sicilian dude. The place takes up 3 hectares of Taormina’s most prime land, and is now apparently priceless, given that land in Taomina now goes for about 22,000 Euros per square meter. But now it’s a lovely park we can walk around, for exactly no money.

More evidence of Sicily’s love of poor building placement.

The Paladini, or Paladins, the holy Knights of France, as interpreted by Italian storytelling. Nowadays they fuel a rampant puppet manufacturing industry. They’re pretty neat. These are some big ones!

And finally, some pimped out Carts. These are one of Sicily’s main bags, and actually a national symbol. Pimpin’ out carts, and riding them around at festivals, looking smug. These carts are usually incredibly ornate, in carving, painting and usually both. I will probably see more of such carts in my trip! Stay tuned, for more ornate cart action.

And that’s that for today! It seems that I’m having about 10 more pictures in each post than the previous, So by the end of my trip, I’m sure you’ll be attempting to open the page, then punching your monitor off the table in frustration. We can only hope.

Wheee,

Went up into the hills today, and ate tasty local food. As well as visited some of the thousands of relatives the Chillemi family has been secretly stockpiling in the Sicilian slopes.

Anyway I grabbed a bunch more photos, and here they are. I am pretty much declaring this a photo blog right now. Cos pictures are worth a thousand words. And when this blog becomes syndicated, I will demand to be paid by the word. Go.

An example of the quaint, winding roads you see all around Sicily. These meander around valleys and the like, usually hugging  the side of they very steep, hilly landscape.

Another shot from further up in the hills, where winter snow is thicker. The black-and-yellow poles indicate  where the road is when it’s covered, and also the height of the snow.

Our mighty steed, a green Fiat Punto.

Best balcony view ever. One of the relies houses.

And here is the Sicilian wave rock! It is literally called that also, but in italy-words. I can’t remember the word for wave at the moment, but the word for rock is the clearly-plagurised-much-like-the-rock-itself rocca. Our West Australian wave rock clearly resembles a wave a lot more, but this wave rock wins points for having fossilised barnacles and the like embedded in it, made more impressive by the fact it’s now it’s hundreds of metres above sea level on the side of a mountain.

A shot of the little copse of oaks around wave rock. Yeah I said it. Copse.

A few more shots of one of the hilltop towns and houses dotted all around the countryside.

One of the many fresh water springs that are all over Sicily. We actually came down to this spring to stock up on drinking water, as Sicily’s ground water is full of  DDT and the restless ghosts of dead roman soldiers. It is lovely to drink directly from the spring, it tastes pure, and perfectly chilled.

Another example of how horrible wall becomes classy wall with the application of plaster. The only problem being many houses sit for decades, plasterless, before their owners feel doshed up enough to tart it up.

Cows! This is an awful photo, but if you squint hard you can see some of them are wearing bells, in what is the most delightful european cliche. Not really apparent from the photo is the noise of all the cow bells going off, like the worlds worst Blue Oyster Cult rhythm section cover band.

Bread! Really big bread. That’s impressive right. As a side note, apparently Sicilian bread is amongst the best in Italy, and much in the fashion we manually import Krispy Kreme to Western Australia, North Italians apparently stock up on the way home. This information provided to me by, native Sicilians, the unbiased source on the relative state of Sicilian bread.

Prickly pears. You can find these all over Italy, and see them from time to time in WA. I know they don’t look that pointy, but they’re full of tiny invisi-spikes which much like silent-but-violent farts, are initially undetectable, but later devastating. The fruit is pretty tasty though, so it all works out. Unlike my metaphor.

The main street of the highest town in Sicily, whose name I now forget. Also forgotten, how high it is. Bringing you the FACTS. This is where we got that giant bread.

Hey look, it’s a Dog! And it’s got puppies! Only in italy.

And now for Italians most needlessly classy outdoor fittings.

This is a little latch for holding a window open, what’s lookin’ like some classy Shakespearian dude.

Then you flip it over, and and it’s some classy broad. Probably Shakespear’s wife. Note: I couldun’t flip em over cos they were actually fused in place with rust.

Ol’ horsetap, winner of Miss Italian Outdoor Horse Tap 08′

Well that’s enough for now! I think I’m perhaps posting a few too many photos, I’m too in the moment to tell what’s interesting and what isn’t. Gimme some feed back I guess, if you have an opinion.

Thanks for looking guys, I’m missing you chumps a lot, if you are a person I know. If not augh augh augh stop stalking me.

So after 50 hours on various planes, trains and one ferry, I’m here in Capo D’Orlando, Sicily. It’s a costal town, near to Messina, the main port to the mainland of Italy, in a house up in the foothills. (Well pretty much all of Sicily is foothills, the whole land mass is basically a steep as fuck mountainside that ends abruptly in the ocean.)

Anyway, I truly don’t have that much exciting to talk about, so here are some photos with wacky and informative captionsssssssss.

A few shots of the view from the balcony of the house, looking out over the sea. Capo D’Orlando is sort of around the corner of the hill.

You see this sort of thing all over Italy: When families build, they’ll sometimes do the concrete slab-work for one or more extra houses, and leave them till they need more room, e.g Kids moving out, etc. Then when they have the money/need, they’ll fill the frame with bricks and presto-new-house-o. This massive degree of separation between parents and children probably explains in Italian dudes being huge momma’s boys.

The house behind ours, built around the same era as the one my dad was born in. (The house I’m in is a modern building on the site of my dad’s original house.) At the time of habitation, the houses roof was probably not furiously collapsed.

Mmmm, sweet quaint semi-abandoned buildings. These are Italy’s main export.

Another shot of the views. If you squint at the background, you can see one of Sicily’s older towns, which were usually built at the top of the island hills for defence. Another house being built in stages in the foreground.

From the country that brought you the aqueduct and the Colosseum, comes the ‘puttin’ some bricks inna hole tilla hole aint there no more.’ You see dodgy brick work like this all over, Italians trust the fact that they will eventually cover every surface of everything with plaster to cover their secret crappy-at-bricks shame.

The typical Italian street. Not pictured: Two tiny Italian vehicles hurtling into what looks like a gristly collision, but is merely a terrifying near-miss.

A tray of Sicilian Dolce (sweets). I can assure you everything on this tray is delicious.

Internationally stupid looking, thanks to self-shot photography. It’s now!

Well that’s about all I got to show you, hope it wasn’t cripplingly borrrringggggggg. Maybe I’ll post more later, or maybe not. The suspense will literally murder you.

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