siguiendosalamanca: Una settimana in Sicilia...

Italy, yeah, I’ve been there. I was there for a whole week. What did I see? Messina. Where’s Messina? On Sicily. Must be pretty? It’s a port city, and after my trip to Portugal we all know how well I like those….

When I found out my boyfriend was going to go study in Italy I started making plans to go see him. Sicily: island, beach, site of some ancient Greek and Roman ruins. So while he’s in class, I get to go have fun. Well, I still had fun, but it didn’t turn out like I expected. To put it one way, the infrastructure in Sicily kind of sucks. Maybe that’s just my opinion after coming from Spain where there are central bus stations with ticket booths for many lines instead of walking all around a very general area looking for the store of the company you want. But in Sicily the ticket booths are kind of scattered around, as well as where the bus picks you up and drops you off. I will say however, that it is nice that there are multiple places where you can be picked up or dropped off within a city for a ticket of the same price.

I spent the first few days of my trip worried about money, because as it turns out, I was not able to stay with my boyfriend in his dorm; but in a hotel instead for which I had to pay. The last few days of the trip I was still distressing from culture shock and the emotional rollercoaster I was on between leaving Salamanca and arriving to Messina; so I decided not to do any traveling on my own. I went with my boyfriend and his friends to Reggio di Calabria, on mainland Italy, and he and I attempted to go to Taormina, but that whole infrastructure thing….the times for buses suck in Italy too. There was a bus there, but no bus back even though the town we wanted to go to was only an hour away and it was still plenty early in the day to make the trip and back. Oh well….

It was a nice relaxing vacation. I puttered around on the internet trying to find grad schools, did some French homework, went for walks around Messina on my own, and hung out with Jair. I even got to go to some classes with him : ) I probably would have ventured around Messina a little more than I did had the weather cooperated. I was hoping to get my tan on, people say it’s warm and I wanted a beach; but here’s the deal on Sicily, warmth doesn’t mean sun, just because there’s a beach doesn’t mean it’s either pretty or clean, and supposedly the water is still really cold. I didn’t try it out for myself; the not pretty, not clean beach was kind of in the way. But overall, it was a good time, and worth the trip. My advice, going to Sicily want to see Messina and go to a beach, find a different beach.

Yes, Sicily is pretty, what I saw of it at least; I did most of my sightseeing of places other than Messina on a bus when I wasn’t sleeping, so honestly, I didn’t see much. But it was pretty. To give you an idea, when you’re not in a city seeing some architecturally beautiful buildings, you see either the Mediterranean Sea or mountains; and it is gorgeous.

Here are some pictures....the weather did not cooperate....