Sicily: getting there

[ewx]

We travelled all the way from Cambridge to Palermo by train - to London, then to Paris on the Eurostar, from Gare du Nord to Bercy by Metro and RER and then onto a Trenitalia sleeper to Rome. The cabin was pretty cramped; in principle it can fit three people but they’d have to know each other pretty well! The picture may give some idea - the sink is just off the right hand side of the picture and that’s about it.

We had (pricey) dinner on the train, in the company of some chatty Australians.

In Rome the following day we confined ourselves to lunch (where we were misidentified as Russians) and some fairly passive site-seeing; it was too hot for much else. We saw silly things:

No smell of colitas was in evidence:

We saw ancient things; the Colosseum and the Arch of Constantine:

Brides and grooms turned up every 20-30 minutes to be photographed in front of these monuments. This set a theme for the holiday as a whole, the Italians seem to like getting married.

N: “Some Pope’s been doodling on the Colosseum!”

The next train was all the way from Rome to Palermo. We were in a couchette this time, which although lacking its own sink was rather more spacious - it’s designed to seat six rather than three and we had it to ourself. If you are good at geography you will recall that Palermo is on the island of Sicily and getting there from Rome requires crossing the water at some point; in this case, by putting the train onto the boat and taking it off again at the other side. I was fast asleep when this happened.

On arrival we managed to negotiate Palermo’s bus system to the Hotel Vecchio Borgo, a tall thin building some distance from the station but convenient for the Piazza Politeama, a good place to catch a bus. The views from this hotel are mainly Palermo but there’s a bit of geography too.

North-ish towards the sea:

Looking inland a bit:

Down Via Quintino Sella, the road by which we most often left the hotel:

There was a good sunset, but there was a better one later on, so I’ll come back to that.

Speaking Italian: I spent some time before the holiday attempting to learn some basic Italian. Familiarity with French and to a small extent with Latin helped with a lot of vocabulary and a bit of the morphology, and the very regular Italian orthography made mapping between symbols and sounds straightforward. Still, I only had the most basic tourist Italian by the time we got there. In practice it seems to have been more or less enough; the locals were friendly and helpful and made a lot of effort to get their point across, even wehen they were just random people helping us navigate the local public transport (something we needed help with more than once) rather than restauranteurs interested in selling us food.

The only time we encountered anything that might have been Sicilian was some pizza names in Catania, which on asking we were told were the names of Sicilian games.

I did tend to find that, when quoted a price for something, I’d freeze for a moment while I mentally translated it - for just long enough, almost every time, for the shopkeeper or waiter to interpret my silence as incomprehension and repeat it in English. (In France, by contrast, I was quick enough to produce the right amount without prompting.)

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Links to the rest of this account:

• Getting there
• Palermo
• Agrigento
• Catania
• Pompeii
• Just the photos

Comments

[em788.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[ceb.livejournal.com]

Love the stop sign :-)

[naath.livejournal.com]

I was awake when they put the train onna boat; it goes "clank clank clank crash bang" for about an hour...

More fun during the day :-p

[damerell.livejournal.com]

That looks very like the Deutsche Bahn sleeper, which also would be extremely cosy with three. It was pretty cosy with two if one of them has a broken ankle and two crutches.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

As a matter of interest, why did you go to the effort and cost of shlepping all the way to Rome by train, rather than flying? (I know why I did, but that might not be the same as your reasons.)

N: “Some Pope’s been doodling on the Colosseum!”

The Christian iconography at the Colosseum really narked me. Contrary to popular myth, there is no evidence Christians suffered a martyr's fate at the Colosseum; however, it is a matter of recorded fact that the amphitheatre was built using the proceeds of the wholesale looting of Judaea and the selling of large numbers of its people into slavery following the putting down of the First Judaean Revolt against the Romans, so really there ought to be Jewish commemorative symbols there, not Christian.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

N hates flying and want to go on a train on a boat l-)