Looking back on Italy

I haven't had much internet time on this trip. I'm in Budapest now but haven't done anything yet, so let's see how much I can remember about Italy.

Also almost everywhere we went in Italy was very dirty. New York is admittedly not the cleanest of places, but there is evidence of people cleaning streets and the trash seems to be largely cigarette butts and the occasional other detritus. The problem in Italy seemed far more pervasive. It is a stark contrast to Budapest, where I have been for not even 24 hours, but in our short walk around the city last night in search of vegetarian food I was stunned by how clean it is. There is not so much a cigarette butt on a sidewalk. I suspect this has to do with the fact that as in other cities I have visited that are this clean, there are garbage cans and ashtrays on every corner. I know Bloomberg is against smoking, but it is ridiculous that we cannot manage to have an ashtray built onto the side of a trashcan in New York City. In Hong Kong they charge a sizable fee for throwing a cigarette on the ground, and they provide places for you to put them so people do. I'm convinced this would make a dramatic difference to the face of the city and I wonder how it could be made to happen. I can't imagine it would cost very much comparatively.

My sister and I drove through many places on this journey in Italy. Palermo was a bit scary. Not the sort of place you'd feel safe walking around alone at night. Everything seemed very worn, not just ancient, except of course for the designer clothing every other block between run down and abandoned industrial buildings. For some reason Italians seem to flock to extremely shiny and tight clothing. I'm not the best person to analyze psychology of fashion since I wear t-shirts and jeans all the time, but a dress with attached mirrored tiles all over it? Sequined shoes? Throughout Sicily, people kind of stared at us, and not in the Chinese way it seemed to me where they are just saying, wow, what the hell are you? I understand, I'm really white, I have freckles and red hair. But in Sicily it was very hard to generate a smile. I am told that this is cultural and that it involves a sort-of closed attitude to outsiders, but once you become part of the city it becomes easier to develop friendships and relationships. This is somewhat unusual for places I've visited where if you smile at someone, they smile back. In most of Italy, this wasn't really the case. There were exceptions of course, and we did meet some very nice people. Couchsurfing of course helped. In Siracusa we met one girl who is not Sicilian but lives in Sicily and had granita with her and her friend. Granita I was pleased to discover, is a Sicilian type of sorbet that is happily dairy-free and widely available. Good knowledge to have for the traveling vegan who is having trouble locating soy gelato, which is surprisingly available. Another culinary surprise was that asking for pizza without cheese was not as weird as I thought it would be. In fact, in one restaurant in Calabria, they had only slices, and several varieties premade without cheese. We don't even have that in New York. I was impressed, and starving, and pleased.

On driving in Italy, the people are pretty crazy. Sarah has become fond of saying that my driving has become very Italian. After all, when in Rome...and I actually am in Rome. So, I was told that there is only one rule for driving in Italy which is you are responsible to watch out for things in front of you. If you hit something in front of you, it is your fault. So, no need to worry about signaling, that's a given. You can also feel free to pull out into an intersection as far as you like, or just make the turn without stopping, that's also no problem. Right, left, across multiple lanes of traffic, no worries. Go as fast as you like, there's no cops anyway except on the highway and they go faster than anyone else anyway. These rules apply equally when driving in big cities like Palermo or Rome, or in medieval towns with stone streets the width of the car plus one inch on the side of each mirror. The cars are by the way substantially smaller on average. I saw no SUVs in Italy. Not one. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that gas was about 1.5 euros per liter. So, to translate to American, 1 gallon is 3.785 liters, and 3.785 liters would be 5.6 euros, which would be $8.80 per gallon of gasolio. I'm glad I don't drive on a regular basis. That horrific fact being revealed, our car was some kind of compactish Mercedes A series which got seemingly good mileage on diesel and we didn't have to fill up too much despite figuring out at the end that we drove about 2000 kilometros.

Anyway, we survived. We drove through days of beautiful scenery in Sicily. The middle tended to be agricultural. We would drive through rolling hills of farms and terraces and invariably every few hundred kilometers a town would appear way atop a mountain looking like a medieval fortress. We got the car onto a ferry between Sicily and the mainland. We drove up the east coast of Italy all the way to Amalfi which for the record is beautiful, but so is the entire coast and most of it without the people scrambling for views. We stopped in Caserta, a town north of Napoli, and visited family members of Sarah's most influential piano teacher. They were extremely welcoming. We sat in their kitchen watching them cook an insane meal for us. We then got a tour of the Royal Palace in Caserta, which is one of the most opulent places I've ever visited. We also wandered through Casertavecchia, the ancient medieval town of Caserta which was as atmospheric as any of those small towns we visited and among my favorite places I think.

We finished our Italian voyage in Roma. Having been there a few times already, my only real goal other than letting my sister relax and getting vegetarian food was to see the Colosseum, which for some reason I have missed out on up until now. More notably, we had dinner with two wonderful friends of Sarah's at a traditional restaurant and had a very nice conversation on our last evening, a perfect cap to our adventure in Italy before boarding our plane the following day to Budapest from where I currently write this.

I haven't wandered yet in this town, but our initial impression is positive. It's certainly a very clean city and very pretty to walk by night. Oh yes, and Hungarian may be impossible, but I'll reserve judgment for another 24 hours and until I have a chance to look at a phrasebook.

Europe, Sicily

I suppose the story of the rest of my Philippines trip will have to wait. I am in Siracusa, Sicily now. This trip is going well, though I have had hardly any computer time so I can't even really write the whole story now. The basic idea is a few days in London, fly to Palermo, a few days there, then rent a car and drive around Sicily and all the way up to Rome via scenic backroads which have in one case now led us into a field of crops. I don't mean they led us into a road surrounded by crops. I mean our car, in the middle of a pile of dirt around which things have been planted. That particular misadventure was an attempt to find the Vulcanetti di Macalube, a strange volcanic landscape in the vicinity of Agrigento. I am with my sister throughout and we've been having a pretty interesting time of it. We drove through maybe a dozen small towns and medieval villages. I navigated our rental car carefully through very small streets with ancient streets, nearly tearing the mirrors off but no actual damage so far. Between the towns the scenic roads wind up and down mountains and through farms. Grapes, oranges, almonds, and other unknown crops grow up and down the occasionally terraced fields around us. Crumbling and abandoned buildings are everywhere, some maybe 200 years old, some 2000. We have been to ruins of temples and theaters and churches built on top of mosques built on top of greek temples. I have eaten lots and lots of pasta but my Italian is now as good as it has ever been. One night we made friends with the owners of a hotel in Erice, a city on top of a mountain in northwestern Sicily. The owner and chef made us possibly the best Italian meal I've ever had, and then again the next day for lunch. In the evening, we sat in a courtyard with all of them drinking wine, smoking cigarettes, and laughing. It was a memorable evening.

So yes, Italy for a while. I will write more about these details when time permits. There is so much more. London was brief, mostly visiting with friends and enjoying London more than in the past thanks to staying with a friend in what I'd describe as a suburb called Leytonstone, which feels more like a town that has only recently been joined to London. Also a bit of a wander around Soho, a neighborhood I really should've known better, has given me a more favorable impression of the city. I'll be back there at the end of this journey for a few days before I fly home and will explore more. A lot of our first visit was resting and overcoming jetlag. So after Italy, I'll be going to Budapest to meet up with my parents and grandmother for a foray into the Ukraine to visit my grandmother's hometown, but I'll leave that story for when it happens, starting around the 30th of July. In the meantime, we're going to go drive circles around Mt Etna, an active volcano not far from here, and then head further up the east coast of Sicily and soon onto mainland Italy. At some point I'll have to learn enough Italian to figure out how we get our rental car onto a ferry. For the immediate future we'll explore Siracusa a bit and try to hook up with a Couchsurfer contact who lives on a farm just outside the city. I will remind myself when I next have a few moments to jot down impressions of Palermo and overall of the culture and people we've met and seen. It has been quite different than I expected in some ways, and exactly as expected in others.