Cruisin' IV- Palermo, Sicily, Italy

Our original itinerary had us going to Tunisia, a country in northwest Africa. I was REALLY looking forward to this, but political tensions forced the cruise line to re-route us to the port city of Palermo in Sicily, the football of Italy.

I think political unrest would have been more awesome than Sicily.

It was cold and rainy the day we docked. We had a late, leisurely breakfast then as we were getting off the ship one of the guys we were travelling with found us. His family decided to stay in since the weather was bad, but we braved it and hopped off the ship.

Rick Steves had already told me there is nothing to see in Sicily so I didn't have high hopes. I wanted to buy a bottle of wine and a bottle of olive oil, and we quickly found those things in small markets/grocery stores. Sicily is an interesting place compared to Germany. Germans are neat, tidy, and orderly for the most part and are sticklers for rules and laws.

Sicilians are not.

They would just park wherever their car stopped. We saw a car that was turning on to a street smash in to another car and just keep driving. All the cars looked like they had had that happen to them.

There were piles of trash in the streets. But there were these sunny orange trees everywhere. I wanted very badly to pick one and eat it. I refrained.

It was pretty awesome to soak up the Sicilian culture though. Fresh fruit stands were everywhere. I stopped and bought over 2 lbs of coffee for less than 20 Euros. I got a paper cone full of delicious olives for next to nothing from a vendor I could not communicate with.

We stopped for lunch at a pizzeria. You can't go to Sicily and not eat pizza, right? It was delicious and the wine was cheap.

Maggie loved the toppings and is never ever still.

Our pizza had a hot dog on top.

After this, we were pretty much done with Sicily. After talking to the rest of the families, no one else was impressed either.

Pretty cool to walk down a street and hop on your ship at the end of it!

We got back on the ship and relaxed until dinner. We happened to be standing on the back deck of the boat when we undocked from Palermo, and the sun was setting and casting pinks, purples, and oranges over the houses and shops built in to the mountain face. It was truly stunning to look at.

I loved the seated dinners because we got to catch up with the rest of the families and just sit back and let the wait staff take care of us. We were the last table before the door which meant we were served last but this was fine with us. Most of the time when you're on a cruise ship you are seated with people from other countries and families, but since our group was so big we took up two entire tables. Some nights we did 2 families per table and some nights we did a kids' table and an adults' table. 

This particular night I let Matt go enjoy the show while I bathed and bedded Maggie. I very much enjoyed the quiet time to get some reading and writing in!

*A word about language- when we first got to Germany a year ago I had a tough time with language because I took Spanish in high school and retained a good bit of it. So whenever we were out, I knew English wasn't expected of me, but the first word that would pop in to my head would always be Spanish. I've gotten MUCH better and I can carry on short conversations in German now, but as a result I've forgotten almost all my Spanish. When in Italy, though, I always think I know more Italian than I do because it is so similar to Spanish. Sometimes.

So the whole time we were on the cruise I found all sorts of crazy words flying out of my mouth. My most common was "Scusi, bitte!" That would be "Excuse me" in Italian and "Please" in German. Some other hits, were, "Grazie! Tchuss!" and "Bonjour!" Where the hell did I get French from?