Our First Trip...Continued

Katherine captured the trip amazingly well. I wanted to add just a couple things and a few more pictures, because I can't help myself.

First, when we booked the trip to Sicily, there was some thought that we might be jumping out of summer, into more, hotter, summer. What actually happened is that we jumped out of torrential flooding into summer, so I was desperate, and it was even more amazing than it might have been.

A couple of observations on Sicily and Polermo, and some pictures to illustrate. It is an amazing city, and the parts of the island we saw, a beautiful island. What is amazing is the density and the age of the cities. First, the density. It is all flat or condo's or apartments, or whatever you want to call them. And they are all very close together on this tiny old streets with the piazza's opening up every once in a while. Every flat has a balcony, and in some spots, you could hand your neighbor a cup of sugar across the street, from your balcony to theirs. Crazy.

The second thing is that while Palermo is a modern city with plenty of shopping, nice hotels, and good restaurants, it is also very old, and often times poor. The result of which is that people are living in old buildings in various states of disrepair that 100 or 200 or 400 years ago were beautiful buildings. In some cases, you could see where bombings happened in World War II left parts of buildings destroyed, which hadn't been repaired. And people were living in the undamaged portion of the building. It was a little bit surreal.

Finally, I'll leave it with this. Great food and an amazing pace of life. Go out, shop and eat. Come home and have a siesta, and then go back out. A drink at 8, dinner at 10, home by 1. Not too shabby.