Happy New Year! / The End

Happy New Year everyone! I'm back in Durham, so no more Sicilian adventures for now. Thanks for following along. See you in person soon!

A little longer than expected

Snowstorms have gotten the airlines all screwed up. Somehow I've ended up in Dallas. Things like this shouldn't happen. 8am flight to Raleigh tomorrow. Should be painless. No weather down here. Downright balmy in NC if I believe the weather report. This is probably the most amateurishly run, unprofessional hotel I've ever stayed in. But after I found my room hadn't been cleaned from the night before, I asked for another one, and somehow ended up in the luxury suite. Kitchenette that I'm not going to use, king size bed, that I'll only use a tiny bit of, and a hot tub/shower that I might just have to go ahead and use. Even if I have now officially been awake for 24 hours.

Napoli

I made it to Napoli. I'm pretty impressed with the hostel I've landed in. No real plans, really. We'll see what happens!

Düsseldorf

I´m here. I´m in a hostel. They have free internet. Their keyboard is a little fucked up. It´s late, so even though I´m not particularly tired I think I´m going to go to bed.

Per Caso

Here's why I like Catania. It's Sunday night. I'm getting antsy for lack of exercise. I need a walk. I go out and head downtown. The streets are packed, and I mean packed full of people. Ok it's Christmas shopping season. But it's kind of cool that things are so lively. With everything open improbably until 8 on a Sunday night, all the Christmas lights, the people in cafes and bars and crowding the streets, it feels like a big party. I don't feel like doing anything complicated for dinner so I just get an arancino. Then I go wandering about a bit more and by chance run into a couple of guys I met the other night at Indigena and then at the Blonde Redhead concert. I join them and we have a beer. They play in a band here that's going to be touring the US in March. They're playing SXSW. I've never been to Austin. You should come out for SXSW then, they say. Idle chatter, probably. That's a lot of money. And time. And I will have just had a three month vacation. But, you never know. We wander down towards the Teatro Bellini which is covered with Christmas lights and is blaring opera at incredible volume into the square, which sounds like it would be obnoxious, but it's actually quite nice. It turns out none of the three guys I'm with have ever been inside the place. I've been inside once, to see Tosca with Christa and Mary, but Rosa (the professor's wife) was terribly disappointed afterwards when I told her we had gone to our seats, watched the show, and then left without exploring the building--we supposedly missed some cool stuff. They're giving small guided tours of the place, so we go inside. This is exciting. I'm with locals who have now also become tourists. There's a fairly impressive salon that I hadn't seen before. Very fancy. That was about it. Another beer in another place. We chat about a lot of stuff, but one thing I hear about is the Benedectine monastery and the crazy unfinished church there in Piazza Dante, which already is one of the most impressive building complexes I've seen in Catania from the outside. (No picture--Laura was the only visitor I managed to make it over there with, sorry.) Apparently there is a whole series of tunnels underground that exploit the existing roman city that modern Catania was built on top of, that go all sorts of places, and there's lots of strange stories. He offers to show me around sometime and so we make a tentative appointment for Wednesday lunch time. Then home. It's nice to be out and about with the locals. I don't know very many people here, so it's pretty cool that I can run into them by chance and we can go out and have a good time. That's all. Good night.

Calcio

Man am I incazzato. I was all geared up to watch the Catania vs Lazio match in the series A championship. I found out what channel it would be on, Mediaset 1, and turned it on well before the game and left it on while I did other things. At some point I realized the game should have been on already and I started poking around. As near as I can tell the game is actually on a Mediaset premium channel that requires a subscription. The only coverage of the game I can find is a local channel that has a graphic with the logos of both teams and then a terrible sounding audio feed with someone in the stadium. Occasionally, and I shit you not, they cut to a TV studio where there's a guy watching the game on a TV that we can't see and who talks to the guy out in the stadium. Ridiculous! I can't watch the game but I can watch a guy who's watching the game! How am I supposed to root for the local sports team? I presume the rights to broadcast the game are owned by Mediaset, which is owned by Berlusconi, who is a stronzo, so there you go. Grrrr. Fanculo.

Anyway, Catania was not favored to win and they didn't. No big surprises. It's cold out and raining. Bahh.

Photos Updated

Photos are all up to date on my site. I'd write more but the sun just came out and I feel like going outside. More later.