Days .... not sure

This is the very friendly cat who's adopted us- this is her kitten (I do wonder what happened to the rest of them :( ):
This is the beach at Catania, the largest town nearest us. The water isn't as clear here as it is at others:

 The day after Tori and Erin got here we visited a series of seaside towns near us. Here you can see an old church, we walked down on the shore a bit after this:

 View on the other side of the cliff above:

 Lunch, I got very tired of paninis on our trip:

 The day after that, Sunday, we visited Taormina, a small town on the coast with picturesque ruins and rocks that is apparently 'the' reason you visit Sicily, and it was only an hour and a half away with traffic:

 This is to the right of the above picture, you can see mount Etna, where we live:

 Then on Monday we took a plane to Pisa, here you can see the (round building) baptistry, then the cathedral, and, of course, the leaning tower, which they still let people climb (I was surprised):

 Yesss:

 From Pisa, same day, we took a train to Florence, here is the sunset:

 I don't have a lot of pictures of Florence actually, left that to Tori. Here you can see Brunelleschi's very famous dome on the cathedral of San Lorenzo to the left:

 Cathedral at night, the cathedral itself is pretty old, but the facade, that nice marble outside, is much newer:

 And on Wednesday we took a different train to Rome, here is the Colosseum:

 Inside it they had bits of sculpture they'd excavated and things they'd found, old nuts and glasses and bones and graffiti:

 Here you can see the arch of Constantine, celebrating his making Christianity a big deal (until he stopped being emperor) and the Colosseum on  the right:

 Now we're on Palatine Hill just beyond the arch, where the rich and aristocratic used to live, now just hulking bits of building:

 Here you can see a bit of the Roman Forum, right next to Palatine Hill. Those three arches are the right third of the old Basilica of Constantine:

 From there we walked to the Trevi fountain:

After which we visited the Pantheon:

 Walking through the city:

 The Romans looted Egypt, too, like Napoleon much later, here's one of their obelisks, we saw maybe three more in different parts of the city:

 The next day we took a guide-led bike ride on the Appian Way (after visiting the National Museum of Rome), the ancient, still-used primary road into Rome. Nice contrast in this one, I think the guide said the exact purpose of this arch was unknown, it wasn't a gate into the city:

 In ancient Rome you couldn't be buried in city limits, so there were a lot of ruins of tombs that we saw:

 Aqueduct with golf course in foreground:

 We stopped here for sheep cheese and wine and bread. Part of the building was very old (on the right, you can only see a bit) and falling apart and propped up and unlivable that was I think in the process of being preserved, there was some project going on I couldn't translate from the signs. The other, newer side, on the left, was inhabited by the family that kept the sheep and I think a farm, very neat, but I think you could tell from past photos how much the old and the new all coexist in Rome:

 The next day we went to the Vatican, I was pretty excited to see the (most) original Laocoon:

 Here you can see some of the inside of the Vatican Museum, though different areas looked vastly different:

 Tori and Erin in front of the Vatican:

 Tourista-ness:

Tori took good photos of the inside of St. Peters, which was huge huge huge, and also had multiple dead people on display, their faces didn't look real, it was creepy, creepy Catholicism .... http://ivarfjeld.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/dead-pope-kept-in-open-air-after-earthquake/ It's not respectful of me, but it was very striking, I have to say ....

Days 5-6, Sunday & Monday 1-2 July

Not many pictures, so not that much fun, sorry- we went to a beach called Fontane Bianche on Sunday that was pretty crowded, but nice, and this evening went to the square of our neighbourhood/town to watch the festival of Saint Antonio, I want to say it was, can't believe I forgot already. One weird thing about Italy is the Italians themselves, they are a pretty homogeneous group, tan skin, dark hair, dark eyes, and I'm taller than like half the men. From what I saw tonight at the festival, they seem to dress mostly like Americans, except, as mere pointed out to me, there's a weird trend for the men to flip their collars up. At the beach it was pretty different from the states, and my board shorts covered more than most of the guys' bathing suits did, and almost all of the women except some grandmothers wore bikinis (this seemed to upset Bill, but you know). The populace is consistently pretty thin, not always fit, but again homogeneous, and I guess stereotypes exist for a reason.

The festival was decidedly un-American, and I didn't see anyone who stuck out as foreign as us, which is fine; we think it's a festival purposed to blessing cars, and at 7.30ish the church bells rang and a band in the square started playing and a large wooden effigy of the saint came out of the church and hung out in front of it while a choir sang a few songs. There were two people on it but I'm not Catholic at all, and oh, I don't speak Italian, sooo I'm not sure what was going on but it was interesting. After the music, kids pulled on ropes on the front of the cart (but you could barely see the wheels, it was all in wood and decorated) and adults pushed behind and it started to go through the streets and we walked back to the house. There were some fireworks, not a lot a lot, they must have depleted them over the past four days of firing them off ....

Day 4- Saturday 30 June

We visited the city of Syracusa (Syracuse) today, a pretty old city settled by original Stone Age wanderers, then Greeks, then conquered by Romans and by Spanish people and poooossibly also by a few others, in a trip that was led by the navy base. Our first stop was a mixed Greek religious, Roman entertainment site, so here's where you get tickets and express your tourist-ness:

Here's a Roman amphitheatre, which used to be above the canopy height but the Spaniards sacked it, also apparently it used to have a pool in the middle:

 Now you can see we're in the limestone quarry, which was dug down from ground level, which you can see at the top of the photo, and that slit was a vein of really good limestone they dug out. The roof of the quarry fell in about three hundred years ago, so they turned it into a really pretty garden:

 The touristas and I taking photos in the 'cave':

And then we went into the city proper, here are mere and Bill at the ruins of a temple dedicated to Apollo:

We visited a cathedral:

 (Altar:)

 That was interesting because the walls of the modern structure used the standing columns of a temple originally built by the Greeks to Athena, and you can see the columns here on the left:

Oh and here you can see that the historic bit of the city is actually on an island, Bill fed the fish some crackers:

So yeah, good day. Nothing more to report other than the cannons that keep going off and tripping the fuse box or whatever the slang is a few more times today.

Day 3- Friday 29 June

Today's plans of visiting a beach were somewhat thwarted by further issues with getting the house running, namely the fact that handypeople are about 50% likely to show up when they say they will, and half the time they do show up they come at a different time than planned (I guess it's just their way). Notable things about today: A cute kitten followed Bill and I around when we were watering the plants this evening (there are a good number of stray cats and dogs around, but more I'm told are in the bigger urban areas like Catania) and I took a walk to a lava field up the road a ways, voila, here you can see it looks like it's raining on Mount Etna, the local active volcano, it's had a lot of clouds around it lately which is unusual, but there aren't clouds anywhere else, as you can see in following pictures:

 We live on a hill, part of the incline to the volcano, here you can see Nicolosi and beyond it other neighbourhoods/towns (still not sure which one we live in (or if there's even a difference)) (it hasn't really been clear yet, but if it were you'd be able to make out the thinnest strip of sea in the distance):

How cute are these little gate-door-things? This is on our street just up the hill:

I'm not sure how long it's been there, but I think our neighbourhood (forgive the British spelling, my computer has never gotten over visiting France) is comparatively new because prior to technology being able to divert lava away from civilization, I think the area we live in was periodically destroyed. I'll confirm tomorrow, though ....

Day 2- Thursday 28 June

Today was base day; there are two naval (not army, apparently it's insulting to call a navy base an army base) bases on Sicily, seven miles apart. One seems to be where most people work and has the exciting things like the hospital and aeroplanes and drones on it, and the other is more domestic and has housing and the Navy Exchange (it looked like Dillard's to me) and is where we did laundry (coincidentally our neighbourhood/town lost water for half the day) and got groceries and a bit of internet. It was a weird place, they use American money so mere carries dollars and euros all the time, and there were a lot of families and fit people in different uniforms and the architecture was American-ish, here's the road to one of the bases (two-way traffic with no lanes marked, standard):

 A bit of the airport on base, you can juuuuuust make out a bit of one of the unmanned planes by the right building:

 Some of the second base, apparently people get upset if you take photos so that's all, not wickedly exciting:

Also there was a cat in the house when we were closing it up, that was fun.

Day 1- Wednesday 27 June

Not much to report today, I spent most of it in a minor headachy fugue and asked about every hour what time it was. We’d intended to do a few other things on the base, but the plumbers were out the house most of the day, so I mostly just alternated between reading and passing out. This, however, left me plenty of time to make observations for my first ever Weird Things About Italy, which addresses the house: Aside from the toilet water being blue, the house lacks a certain American eye to detail that marks it as foreign: The wallpaper is different in almost every room and coordinated independently of the flooring and room function. You can’t always reach the toilet paper from the toilet. Some of the light switches, noticeably the hall one and outside ones, have more than one function when really everyone would be fine with just one function. My bedroom seems to lock from the outside. Doubtless there's more but that's what I have so far ....

pre-days, Monday and Tuesday 25-26 June

Hello again faithful reader(s), I write to you from the lovely neighborhood of Nicolosi in Sicily, Italy, in a somewhat significantly sleep-deprived state, time zones always confuse me but I think I’ve got it straightened out to I travelled to the future, maybe …. It was a reasonably smooth journey, the only things worth noting being the following: 1. The absolute lack of border control at Italy (they definitely would have let me in with razors). 2. The toddler who sat next-next to me on the nine plus hour flight and who did not sleep at all (however, her mother next to me did and thus missed witnessing her child eat part of one of those vomit bags). 3. How gorgeous Sicily looked when I was taking a bus to Catania (I did a complicated plane-train-bus-then-mother thing). Flying in to the airport, which was right on the water, we had tall mountain-cliff-hill-volcano-things, really rocky, on one side, and postcard Mediterranean blue on the other (T&E, you get a different airport, though (trust me, be glad)). I took some photos while I was on the train and bus of what I travelled through, here you can see the cliff-hill-things:

 And a farm on the plains, much more yellow in real life and pretty, no other word:

And here are some photos driving to the house, this is a bit of Catania, I assume we'll visit later and I'll photograph it more knowledgeably then:

 Driving craziness:

 Entering Nicolosi, you see they're putting up lights, our landlady told us they have a festival and are going to bless the cars on Monday, I think:

And here, for the benefit of the female folk, some photos of the house, which they only moved into three days ago, so I guess I could’ve waited until it was more picturesque but it was like therapy for me, I was so tired and confused, here's the pizza oven in I think what was the original kitchen, the house was built on in several stages (or at least two), we don't know how old it is:

 There's a nice inner courtyard we haven't used at all because ....

 There's such a nice porch:

 Kitchen area:

And I thought this was neat, a cistern for watering the plants without using expensive city water:

 Bill in the trunk of the cute car they got, even the white car, which would be considered small in the US, is noticeably large here for a personal car, and very American:

 Here you can see a bidet:

And the front of the house, which happens to have two front doors (you can just make out the second to the right of the stone siding):

Poor mom waited an hour and a half for me at the bus place (we had some trouble communicating and I’m not stupid, but I could only make the payphone send text messages) but I’m here, she doesn’t seem traumatized, we went to a pizza place two houses away for dinner, Delta didn’t lose my luggage, it’ll be a great vacation.