JOHNBLAWG

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.

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!

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