Athenaeum Palermo

apres un peu plus de 3 heures a sillionner la sicile, nous somme arriver a palerme. une ville qui ressemble plus a naples qu'a syracuse.. C'est dimannche, tout est fermer, nous avons eu du mal a trouver de quoi se faire a souper, mais nous somme finalement tomber sur une petite boucherie ou nous ...

WE depart Sicily with wonderful memories of sunny skies, blue Mediterranean seas, green hillsides covered with grape vines and olive trees, old cities, castles and greek temples, and of course good food.
We will see more sights in Rome, and then travel down the coast to Sorrento and Amalfi. I will post more about the things we are doing and seeing as we continue our trip.

... in Palermo. But I made friends with a couple of German girls (Simone and Lizsa) and a Brazilian guy (Bruno) and we did day trips around the city. Palermo is a weird place. The buildings are all falling apart and there is rubbish everywhere. It's full of crazy drivers who don't let anyone cross the street. Crossings and lights mean nothing. You just have to walk in front of moving traffic and make them stop for you. Lots of people in the streets look poor but all the shops look very ...

... were taken by the spectacular views of buildings littering the sides of the steep slopes above, and each twist & turn of the road revealed even more pretty views, either below or continuing above......all the sharp turns and accompanying rocky confines of the road were covered by various forms of greenery, making for a truly lovely spot.


Here, as at Etna, we were left to our own devices by Marco, who informed us we had 2.5 hrs to discover Taormina on foot....we ...

After another good breakfast, and enjoyed a chat with an Aussie couple from Perth at the restaurant (we really made the most of conversing with other English-speaking people for the first time in a week...amazing how cut-off you can feel at times when in unfamiliar surroundings where everyone speaks another language!)


We walked down the street a short distance to catch one of the many & varied city bus lines to get to Palermo's famous resort beach of Mondello ...

After a nice breakfast at the hotel (included in the overnight tariff), we were picked up by our guide for the day, Salvatore (once again, we turned out to be the only people taking this particular tour today, so we ended up being personally escorted all day!)


Travelled 70km to ancient Segesta, marvelling at the hilltop township ruins, famous Segesta temple, beautiful Segesta theatre taking in magnificent views over towards the coastline, across large surrounding ...

arrived around 8pm at airport & sped (120kph) to hotel by recent model Mercedes! checked in & walked down street to Trattoria for late tea of authentic pizza (delicious!)



Next Morning, we were picked up by our personal giude for the morning, Valentina. Well educated, spoke excellent English plus great knowledge of history & architectural styles made for a fascinating morning around the old city.



Valentina drove ...

... a look, a big deal! Not! cuz we get into a doubtful neighborhood with a lot of strange people who looked at us thinking WTF are they doing here... after a few moments of fear we remember that as a funny situation, even so, we really enjoyed Palermo.

... the limited time we had, we walked down to the valley. We went into Zeus's temple area first because it closed at sundown. This was the least intact of the 4 temples we saw, but it was still really neat. There were piles of ancient stones strewn with grass and shrubbery. You could make out the foundations of the smaller buildings surrounding the temple. Moving along we came to someone else's temple. which had its entire front face still standing. There were 6 towering ...

The ferry ride was a trip. Really. In order to get used to the insane rocking (waves were a good 6 ft high or so, nevermind what we left in our wake) of the giant boat, I kept trying to find windows to look out of. Which led me to buy soup in the restaurant. Which I thoguht was the best place to sit alone, look out a window, and not be bothered by all the creepy guys going - hey look, single girl! Which turned out that I was wrong. Because in fact, a creepy ...