Sicilian Sunshine and Mafia Men

January 31, 2010

Today marked our first official day in Sicily. We left cold dreary cloudy Florence in afternoon and landed in bright sunny Sicily about two hours later (after most likely the bumpiest flight I have ever experienced- I do not think anyone thought we were going to make it to Sicily, but at least we were going to die happy.) Seeing sun, and having it stay in the sky for more that 10 minutes was so refreshing that within 10 minuets of being in Sicily I knew it was going to be a fabulous trip. I think everyone’s mood improved about 99.9% once getting off the plane and walking into the sunlight and realizing we would not have to open a school book, Word, or a dictionary for at least a week. We met up with our driver for the week, Gianni, who we would soon find out is completely crazy, and left the Catania airport to drive three-ish hours to Palermo, passing beautiful country sides of mountain (see picture), green hills, and orange tree groves,  where we would e staying for the next three nights. 

After checking into our hotel, Lenora, Olivia, Sera and I headed out to find some dinner. Being Sunday, and Italy naturally everything was closed. We stopped to ask a two (seemingly) policemen where there would be a place open to eat and after some deliberation, one of the men who we had thought was a policeman but we then noticed only one of them was in uniform, decided to walk us down the street to his favorite restaurant. Thinking this was only slightly shady, we walked down the block convinced that he was part of the Mafia. Once arriving at the restaurant, which was in fact only down the block, the man (who we found out was named Jonh – his spelling) ate at the table next to us interjecting things into our conversation in a weird mix of English and Italian, we were further convinced of his Mafia connection. But at least we have a friend inside now, and will be protected we figured. After a very strange dinner we stoled around Palermo for a little while ( picture above is the theatre across from our hotel) , and after a while we headed back to the hotel and passed out after a long day, to rest up for our next exciting day. 

ps - if you want to see more of my pictures you can go to my photobucket page at
http://s36.photobucket.com/home/breanal/allalbums
the password is florenceitaly