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.