actually, mary did have some trouble with her ears... they didn't pop when we landed in rome, and she was in quite a bit of pain. i asked the flight attendant to get her some warm towels and put them in cups for her. my mom always did this when she couldn't get her ears to pop:
mary seemed to get some relief. lord knows, i got a good chuckle.
we didn't sleep much on board, so by the time we got to the apartment in catania i had only gotten 2 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period. we landed at 10am, and had been told that the best way to beat jet lag was to force ourselves to stay awake until a normal local bedtime.
thus, we've spent most of the afternoon, exhausted, tromping around town and seeing some sights. here's the memorial to the great operatic composer, vincenzo bellini:
shortly after i took this photo, though, things started to look a little fuzzy and i got a light-headed, so we bought some food at the market and came home and pumped some calories into our weak bodies. which helped for a little while, then we started feeling ourselves nod off again... at only 3pm.
so we found more errands to run (how much time did that trip to the grocery take? half and hour, maybe?) but are now simply counting the minutes until we can justifiably go to bed. it's almost 7pm. i'm hoping to make it to at least 8pm. 9pm would be great, but by that point i'll have had 2 hours of sleep in a 32 hour period, and i might have officially lost my mind by then.
