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.