Sheep Guarding Llama

Tuesday, our first full day on Sicily in the little hill top city of Noto. I was up at eight. Of course, there was no Internet so there was not very much to do. I set some things up and did a little posting from my phone, but that was about all that I could do. It was rather stressful because no one was responding to us and we have never had working Internet here so we did not know how bad this was likely to be. You expect that when you arrive at a new place that the Internet will be on, tested and working for you at least upon arrival. Hiccups happen, a lot, but they should be working when you get there! They have had unlimited time to make sure that that part was working.

We were very pleased when the Internet came on between ten and eleven this morning. We got everyone online and started doing some catching up. Now we can really start to get settled. And we know that we do not have to find a new house right away! That would be a major problem, of course.

Around noon I finally had a chance to set out on a hike around the city. We need supplies and I have to figure out where to get them. I had been out for a walk last night and came across nothing at all, so that was not promising.

I walked all over town, doing a lot of kilometres. I got down to Corse Vittorio, the main street in the city, and made it the entire length of the city! At least of the old town. On the way I found the big cathedral that is the main attraction in the city. And the amazing baroque city hall. And next to that was a large tourist information centre, although they were pretty much just into talking to one another and did not seem very interested in the fact that a family had just moved in for three months. They handed me a paper map and seemed to feel that their entire, large, three person office was only there to hand out a paper map. Odd. I did ask, though, and they showed me some stuff in town and where some mini-markets were.

I set off on a very long walk which got me to the edge of town just fifteen minutes after the only market on that side of town had closed and would not open again for two more hours. I took a picture of their open times, told Dominica and set off to walk back home. That really sucked.

I got quite the walk in, though, and got home and spent a few hours doing work in the new upstairs office. This is my first chance to start to actually catch up in weeks. I need the quiet, alone time of the office.

In the late afternoon, we went to the market after it had opened and did our first real grocery shopping. We got as much as we could carry, maybe a little more, and hoofed it back to the house. Now we have ingredients and can cook. And now we have bottled water so we can drink since we can’t waste the water in the house because we need that for toilets and showers and stuff. Having so little water is a major issue.

That was an exhausting walk, and I had done it twice (plus more.) I was super tired. The stairs up to my office are a flight and a half of very narrow, very stone stairs that wear you out quite quickly, too. I am getting a workout.

Dominica made pasta for dinner, what else would we have for our first homemade meal on Sicily?

We did discover that there is a market right around the corner from us, but that it is only open in the mornings, so we will check that out tomorrow if we can. There is a bakery near there as well. Hopefully that means simple, fresh, daily bread is available.

The evening was spent posting, writing and getting the house in order. Tonight we hooked up the Amazon FireTV in the living room and got Full House up and running so we started watching that as we only get to watch it when we are not in the United States and the girls love the show and have been waiting to watch it again since, we think, Romania. A long time, no matter what.

I got effectively no sleep last night.  I did not get into bed until almost two and was up by four.  At four thirty I gave up on resting at all and just took a shower to get a jump on the day and get out of everyone’s way so that we could get ready as quickly as possible once Dominica and the girls were up.  This is going to be a long, long day without a real chance to rest.

It was a bit of a scramble to get everyone out of the door by a quarter till six in the morning, but we did it – just barely.  We had to lug our luggage down the street and over to Cavour where the Uber was going to pick us up.  We were right on time and he was waiting for us.  We were on the wrong side of the street so he swung around in his Renault van and we fit in nicely.  Plenty of room for everyone and the luggage, we didn’t even need to use the third row seating to do it.

The drive to the train station, Stazione Termini, was only a few minutes and most of that because of construction.  Fourteen Euros and we were good to go.  It was before six thirty and we had more than an hour to camp out and relax before our train was scheduled to depart.  That’s what we like, better to be a little bored than in a panic.

We had time to build a luggage fort for the girls that they played in.  They thought that that was great fun.  We got coffee and snacks for now and snacks for the train.  Plenty of time for a walk around and scoping out the train station.  We got there only a few minutes earlier than ideal and not knowing how Uber was going to work in Rome, we did it perfectly.

We boarded the train right on time and off we went.  No issues this morning.  It was still dark out when we got underway and would be dark when we arrived in Sicily, too.  A long day, but no changes so we just get to sit back and relax all day.

The ride went well.  Long, but well.  Our luggage all fit into the end luggage area so we were able to keep a decent eye on it easily.  That was very good.  Our backpacks went into the overhead above us.  We had a table just for the four of us so we all faced each other as a family.

We got to go through Naples, which was neat.  What a huge city.  Napoli is actually larger than Roma, just by a little.  And both are much smaller than Milano up north.  Those three dominate the country as the big power house cities.  In Napoli we got see to Mt. Vesuvious was is pretty cool.  We have seen a lot of volcanoes in the last year!

The trip south went well and was interesting.  The train route really does hug the coast once you leave Roma so we got to the sea for a large portion of the trip, which was neat.  Southern Italy was far more industrial and depressed than I would have imagined.  Hundreds of miles of beaches and we never saw a single person out enjoying some of the best sea front in the world.  Just old run down houses and condos in one little depressed town after another.  I knew that south of Napoli, Italy got pretty poor but I really did not know the extent to which the coast itself was not even developed.

The highlight of the trip was getting to the port of Messina where our train drove onto the giant ferry to cross the strait between the Italian mainland and the island of Sicily.  How cool.  We have done nearly everything with trains, but this is a new one.

On the ferry Liesl was fast asleep so I stayed on the train with her while Dominica and Luciana went up on deck.  It was a good thing that they did as there was a tiny storm and the water in the strait was really rough.  We were getting thrown all around down on the train in the bottom of the ferry. Dominica was getting a bit sick even up on top in the air.

The strait is tiny, so small that they regularly consider building a bridge to cross it, so the crossing was maybe fifteen minutes of actual time on the water.  Not bad at all.  Once docked the train just pulled us out and we were right into the Messina station where our half of the train was separated from the half that was heading to Palermo and we went down the east coast of the island towards Siracusa.

Eastern Sicily was much, much nicer than western southern Italy.  Beautiful towns and we got to see the mammoth that is Mount Etna, Europe’s most active and imposing volcano.

We were all pretty sleepy by the time that it was dark and we pulled into Siracua, the final stop of the mainland train.  It is nice riding to the end because there is plenty of time to unload the kids and the luggage of which there is so much.

Thankfully Siracusa is a terminus and we were able to walk on ground level around the end of the tracks, no need to go up and down a ridiculous amount of stairs.

We were going to book another train to take us on to Noto, but there was a taxi van waiting right outside of the station, so I went and talked to them and they said that for eighty Euros they would take us to Noto, so we did that.  A bit more expensive, but we could go there straight away.

The taxi took no more than half an hour and we were up into the hill town of Noto.  It was very dark so we really got no view of the area around.

Google Maps, as always, was useless. It could not show us a way to get to our house and kept trying to send us on roads so narrow no car could go down there and some were stairways!  We would days later figure out that Google Maps has the road names all wrong in this town and many are in the wrong places.  Our driver had no idea where to take us and had to use our GPS since he didn’t have any.  This is a good reason to use Uber, they have this stuff ironed out a bit.

The driver and I wanted to get dropped off at a spot that he found where it seemed reasonable for us to walk.  Dominica would have none of it and made him drive us all around trying to follow her GPS.  It would turn out later that the driver and I had found the spot literally closest to the house on the best ground.  We did not know that we had, but from looking at maps it appeared to be the best possible option.

So we drove around a bit and ended up parking on Cavour and blocking the street for quite some time as we unloaded onto the tiny, tiny sidewalk and then worked to drag everything that we own up a very uneven cobblestone street with traffic constantly making me move over to the wall to let them pass.  It was terrible.

Thank goodness the housekeeper for the house got our message that we were nearly there and looked for us out on the streets.  It turned out that we were never going to find the house given that the maps were totally wrong.  There was no way to ever find it.

Even with her finding us, it was an ordeal to get all of our luggage to the house itself. There was just so much and no good way to move it.  I was in some serious pain by the time that we got into our new home for the winter.

The house is really nice.  Solid old stone structure and a lot of room.  A nice big living room, good bedrooms for us and the kids.  The bathroom upstairs is ridiculously small, to the point of actually being a joke.  The girls can use it, but neither Dominica nor I can, at all.  We actually cannot physically get to the toilet in it!  It has a nice shower, though.  The downstairs bathroom is really big, which is good.

No Internet was on when we got in.  None at all.  Apparently they forgot to turn it on before we got here.  So our first night is one without any Internet.  Not such a big deal, we get 3G and sometimes LTE inside of most of the house, so we are able to let people know that we have arrived and are safe and we can let the landlord know that we have no Internet.  We are pretty tired so not looking to be up very late, anyway.  By the time that we were really into the house, it was likely nine or ten at night.  We are exhausted, especially after getting essentially zero sleep last night.

The really big shocker for us is that there is only two hours of water, per day, in the house.  That’s right, I said it, only two hours of the day is there running water and twenty two hours of the day, there is not.  The only water available during those times is what is in the hot water heater (which we’ve not seen, it might be an inline) and what is stored on the terrace in two, big Rubbermaid cisterns.  There is a total of 2,000 litres that gets stored up there, if all goes according to plan.  Enough for the basics, but just barely.  Showering, laundry… these things are going to be difficult.

Well, our new adventure in Sicily has begun.

There is no food in the house, obviously, since we just arrived so we decided to go out to eat on our first night. Dominica set to unpacking some things and I did a walk around the vicinity to see if there was anything open.  I found one thing, a trattoria, that was really close to our home that was open and looked nice.  I walked quickly home, got everyone dressed and ready and we walked the girls down there and went out for dinner.

It turns out that the place was pretty fancy, as it would turn out nearly everything in Noto is because it is mostly a tourist town, and we were the only people in the restaurant, likely all evening.  We popped in and asked, in Italian, if they were open and they assured us that they were and we ordered their antepasti buffet, which was seven amazingly different antepasto piatti mostly made of seafood.  The girls tried octopus (pulpo) but did not care for it.  There was a lot of really neat stuff.  We enjoyed it a lot.

Then we had pasta for dinner, all of us.  It was all amazing and we were very happy with dinner, although it was not cheap and we were not looking to spend any money unnecessarily.  But it was what it was, we needed food and it was the only option.  Tomorrow is going to begin the search for groceries.

After dinner we got home and were off to bed.  Dominica and my bedroom is the not the master, but is the ground floor room with the main bed, it is off of the living room.  The girls have the upstairs master suite that doubles as my office.  They have the en suite pointlessly small bathroom.

Finally, time to sleep.  Fingers crossed that someone will get us Internet access in the morning.

DuoLingo Italian Day 66

Sunday and our last day in Rome.  Today is our day of rest because we need to pack up the apartment, get all of our devices charged and get the family off to bed early so that we can get up very early tomorrow morning, get a taxi (we hope) to the train station and catch our very, very long train ride from Rome to Syracuse.  It’s funny because Rome and Syracuse are neighbouring stops on the Amtrak line in New York, but they are about eleven hours apart in Italy!

We all slept in a lot today.   All of the walking yesterday wore everyone out.  Dominica is still in a bit of pain from all of it.

For lunch today no one wanted to go out for food except for Liesl; so she and I went out on our own to find a place to eat. We did some looking around and found a nice place with outdoor seating on Cavour that seemed to have a wide menu and things that she would be interested in.  She ended up getting salmon bruschetta and penne alla salmone, both of which she loved.  She described it as a “boom” of flavour. She has decided that salmon is her favourite fish.  It was a really nice lunch.

I went out a while after getting lunch and did some filming while I had the chance.  I have had so little time to do that since getting to Rome because of our jet lag.

After most everything was packed this evening Dominica decided that she wanted to go out for our only real dinner out in Rome.  We just went to a little place across the street that turned out to be amazing.  We got a traditional cheese and pepper Roman pasta dish that was just fantastic.  Dominica also tried to get dessert and got a rum soaked sponge cake that was so heavy with rum that she could not eat it and got a little tipsy.

We tried hard to get everyone to sleep tonight around one.  Best case scenario is four and a half hours of sleep before we have to be up.  Reality is that we will be lucky to get any.  Everything is packed around ready, though.  And our Uber for the morning is scheduled.  So, in theory, we will be all set.  We want to get to the train station around six thirty, but our train is not until seven thirty.  But with kids and all of this luggage there is just so much to go wrong that we cannot have any less time than that.  If our car does not show up we “think” that I can run the luggage to the train station in that amount of time if Dominica and the kids wait at the station.  But boy would it be hard and risky.

Country Count: S&D 32 / L&L 30

DuoLingo Italian Day 65

Saturday in Rome.  Today is our big day for going to see Vatican City which is no little thing to do.  But we did a good job of getting to bed last night and we were up at eight thirty this morning!  I think that we finally beat the jet lag.

Our plan for tomorrow is to take the day “off” from really doing anything and just get rest so that we are ready for our really early and long train travel day on Monday.  It is eleven hours from Rome to Syracuse and then we have to get from Syracuse to Noto.  We are going to be so exhausted by the end of all of that.  And Dominica has to pack us up tomorrow, too.

Dominica and I got up and got ready to go.  Luciana got up more or less with us.  Liesl was the last one to get up.  It took us until ten thirty to have everyone ready to go.  We bought tickets for the Vatican online which costs an extra four Euros per ticket but makes you able to bypass the potentially many hour long line that happens at Vatican City itself, so well worth it.  Tickets for Dominica and I were sixteen Euros each and Liesl was eight Euros and Luciana was free.  Fifty two Euros for a day in Vatican City.  Dominica wanted me to book an earlier time to get in but I pushed us back to one thirty, we were very thankful later that I did this.

We started the day by walking from the apartment past the Colosseum to our local bus stop for the City Sightseeing Tours which we had purchased for 72 hours and which meant that we had access to ride until 12:30 today. It was just after eleven when we got onto the bus.  We knew that this was a one way ride, but that was what mattered.  We had loads of time at the end of the day to figure out how to get home, but we were in a time crunch to get to Vatican City this morning.  Luckily I had walked to it the other night so I knew where things were and how to get to and from, more or less.

The bus dropped us off at stop seven (we started at stop three at the Colosseum) which is near the San Angelo walking bridge over the Tiber (this is my fifth bridge that I have walked over the river now).  We walked over and walked up the main way to Vatican City and Saint Peter’s Basilica.  What an impressive building that is.

We had no coffee by this point and it was maybe twelve thirty, technically we had an hour to go before our reservations, and Dominica was getting desperate.  We looked around for coffee options but there were not very many.  The street leading to Vatican City is full of hawkers, homeless, things like the Hard Rock Cafe gift shop but nothing useful or nice.  There was a side street that we were able to go down to get to a really nice McDonald’s, one of the new ones that is fully automated and has lots of higher end food options.  We decided to duck in there for some quick McCafe as they are the only restaurant that you can find in Italy that understands the idea of take away coffee.  Want coffee on the go?  McDonald’s is it.

The girls ended up wanting food so we got croissants and coffee and ate at McDonald’s quickly before heading out.  This is one of the first totally automated ordering McD’s that I have found.  I’ve seen it before, but normally it is hybrid.  This worked really well.  And so fast.  Insanely fast.  Food is ready as soon as you get to the counter.  They should have eliminated the cashiers decades ago.

McDonald’s in Europe tend to be pretty high end.  They are super clean, expensive, managed incredibly well and the customer service is excellent.  Not that they are bad in the US, they are often very good, but they go another step beyond in Europe most of the time.  And the coffee was very good this time, unlike what we got in Romania at the Bucharesti train station six months ago.

We got into Vatican City and found out rather quickly that we were really far from the ticket office and the museum.  There is nothing labeled anywhere on any map and everything makes it appear that you just go into Vatican City via the main road; there are no signs or guides on anything sending you somewhere else. Well, that’s not where you go.  We were very, very far away from the museum entrance and we needed to hike a long way around the outside of Vatican City to get to the entrance in the wall that takes you into the Vatican Museums.  Crazy.

So instead of being an hour early, we were now racing to get to the museum before our tickets expired.  We made it, but by five minutes.  In all, it took us five minutes short of four hours to get from our apartment to the entrance to the museum at Vatican City.  It’s only like three miles away, if that!  Once we were really, really close there were a few poorly placed signs, but almost nothing.  We were never totally sure that we were or were not going the right way.  Even the entrance itself is not properly marked.  For those wondering, the museum entrance is on the outside of Vatican City’s walls, on the north east corner of the country.

So at one thirty we were in and underway to see the museum.  All of the extra walking hit us hard, we were exhausted and soar before even starting on the museum, which is epically large on its own.  It’s a good thing that we had our Piggyback Rider Explorer or we could not have even gotten to the museum let alone done it all afternoon.

The museum itself was excellent, although with the kids we had to do it in a very cursory way.  The ancient civilizations exhibit was really cool with the best old stone tablet display that I have ever seen.  Luciana really loved looking at ancient Egyptian amulets and after seeing them with me had to take her sister over to see them and tell her all about them.

Liesl loved all of the paintings, especially the ceiling frescos.  She could not stop craning her neck to see all of the artwork that was part of the museum itself!  Liesl could have probably spent all day there, Luciana was not so impressed with the art.  It’s a little tough when the two have such widely different versions of what interests them in a museum.

Unlike the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, the Vatican Museums did not have any obvious activities to keep kids engaged which was a big disappointment, the girls loved doing that in Athens and also at the Edward Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway.  The Vatican Museums are really designed to keep people moving, though, as they are overwhelmed with people and there isn’t possibly time for people to really see things.  It kind of defeats the purpose, though.  You pretty much need to know what you are there to see, go right to it and do your best to get to see it.  There is so much to see and so many people and only a tiny fraction of what they have there is even available for the public to see at all.

We had a good time and Dominica got to see the things that she really wanted to see.  At one point I sat with the girls while Dominica went to figure out where her one painting that was her “must see” was located and the guards would not let her come back to us!  What a pain.  They even stopped her using her phone, but not until after she had managed to tell me where to meet her. So we had to skip a bunch and go see her at the Sistine Chapel.

After doing the chapel, which is pretty much a mob of people crammed elbow to elbow in one room, we were ready to wrap it up.  The kids were tired and we knew that we had a long, long way to go yet to get home.

It probably took another hour to get out of the museum.  We had to wind our way to the exit, go through gift shops (where both girls bought tiny replicas of ancient scarab beetle carvings) and then go to the post office so that the girls could write a postcard to their great grandfather Tocco and send it off from the Vatican City post office (with real Vatican City stamps and post office mark on it!)

Once out of the museum we started our very long hike back to the apartment.  We were nearly back to the Tiber when everyone was too tired and hungry so we stopped at a nice little trattoria for pasta.  They did a pasta with tomato sauce for Dominica and me; and they did pasta with cheese for the girls.  The girls devoured it and wanted more!  That never happens.  We are always throwing their food away or eating it ourselves.  We had great wine, great espresso and since everyone was still hungry we added on some bruschetta as well.  Liesl had a bit of that, too.

After dinner (or lunch, it was really our only meal for the day) we walked on back to the apartment which took more than another hour.  By the time that we were back, just before nine, we had walked twelve kilometers with at least half of that with me having one of the girls riding on my back on our Piggyback Rider Explorer back pack.  Mostly Luciana rides (forty pounds) but sometimes Liesl takes a turn on it to give her feet a break (fifty pounds.)

An hour after we got back, Dominica sent me out running errands.  Getting cash, going to the market and picking up pizza.  That took me forty five minutes and gave me another one and a third kilometers of walking!  Liesl requested that I get her milk and cookies, so I had to find an open store.

We got everyone into bed around midnight.  Luciana was asleep for hours by that point.  Dominica was exhausted and kept saying that she needed to sleep but, as always, it takes hours of her saying that before she will actually go to bed. Liesl and I were wide awake with loads of energy, but we got Liesl into bed at midnight and I was winding down.

I considered going out on my own as this is our last chance to actually go out while in Rome but I really did not feel like going out on my own and decided to just stay in and take it easy.

DuoLingo Italian Day 64

We woke up to an odd banging sound in the apartment and we wondered if there had been an earthquake again.  So I jumped on Twitter and, sure enough, there had just been a very small earthquake near Rome and minutes later there were matching small ones on Crete, Turkey, the Aegean and Sicily.  Very active here right now.  None of these were big enough for anyone to really care and I am amazed that we were woken up by the little one here, we think that it was just enough to cause a door in the apartment to react to it making a lot of noise.  But that it woke us up (and even got me out of bed) and we guessed it was an earthquake and it was the exact moment that there actually was an earthquake, we are sure that that was it.

We had wanted to go to see Vatican City today, but it was so late by the time that everyone was waking up that it was unrealistic for us to even try to make it.  So we took our time getting going since we are all so tired.  I was up at least an hour before Dominica who was at least half an hour before Liesl.  I got showered and everything and did some writing while waiting for everyone so I was not too anxious to get moving as I was getting things done anyway.

We ended up taking the City Sightseeing bus to go to the Spanish Steps and the Piazza di Spagna where there is a cool fountain.  This was a long bus ride and a bit of a hike.  We got a little video footage, but not much as it was dark pretty quickly.

The Spanish Steps are, impressive but just a huge set of steps.  Not much to really see.  The idea is really more to hang out there for a long time.  Really, not many things in Rome make sense when you have little kids, which is probably why we’ve seen absolutely no kids anywhere here; in addition, of course, to the fact that Italians have stopped having kids and it is now an aging nation with few children.  Our Italian children are very needed here.

We walked the steps and then looped around to walk back to our bus stop.  We got the last bus back to the Colosseum so that we could return home.  It was almost seven when we got back.

We had a quiet evening at the house.  We turned off the lights and everyone was nearly asleep all evening.  Dominica actually napped for a while.  Luciana fell asleep early.  Liesl and I were the last ones up, Liesl going to bed around eleven.

At midnight Dominica made me go out to find pizza as she was hungry.  So I walked out and got her zucchini pizza for her and anchovy pizza for me.  That did not take too long.  I did that, we ate and then it was time for bed.