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.