I have to admit that lava was pretty much the high point of the Italy trip. But there were some other pretty cool things. And then there were the random things. One day by the pool in Sicily was a little bit of both. Cool and random.

Random first.

I spent a lot of my time in Sicily sitting by the pool. Reading, working on the blog or just sitting. One day, I was engrossed in getting a post done when some action at the pool caught my attention:

Scuba lessons in the pool. I guess they have to learn somewhere and the big scary ocean isn’t the best place for a newbie to go under for the first time. But two things really caught my eye.

One - the guy on the side of the pool, gesticulating wildly. Teacher? Cheerleader? Wouldn’t it make more sense for the teacher to be in the pool with them? I guess I don’t have a lot of confidence in an scuba instructor who doesn’t have the breathing apparatus on. Does he really know how it works?

Two - The camera crew. I agree, people scuba diving in a pool is unusual. It was salt water, but come on. Is there really anything interesting on the bottom? I can see the bottom, without actually getting in the water.

I don’t know what they were doing, but one of the pool critters (of which there seemed to be more and more every day that we were there) thought they were great fun.

Trust me here, the little girl is riding on the back of one of the scuba divers. Either that or using her arm floaties to help pull him to safety. I’m betting on the latter.

Pretty soon, the scuba divers were out of the pool and on there way to the next site. Maybe an aquarium in town?

Anyway, I stayed by the pool, because where there is one random event, there tend to be a few more to follow it up. I wasn’t disappointed. Again, I noticed something out of the corner of my eye.

What is that? It kind of looks like a palm frond, but I think it is a boat. It sailed up out of no where and all of a sudden several boats from the hotel raced out to meet it. For the next 40 minutes or so, it raced back and forth in front of the hotel beach, practicing tacking I think.

It was really cool. One of the conference goers said that it looked like an old Americas’ Cup race boat. Maybe the Italy team was practicing for the upcoming race? (Disclaimer here: I don’t know jack about sailing. Is “tacking” the the right word for turning? Are there teams in the Americas’ Cup that aren’t associated with either of the Americas? I make it up as I go along.)

When they were in the middle of a turn, the crew on the boat would go mad cranking this hand crank:

You can kind of see them in a row, hand pedaling away. I think a friend called it a coffee grinder, but I don’t remember.

I took lots of pictures, because it was so very cool. This I think is the best one of the lot:

It needs a little cropping, but what picture doesn’t?

Some people would say that watching the boat out there would make them want to take up sailing, but from what I saw, it was a lot of work for the crew. I wouldn’t mind riding on the boat, but up near the front. Not at the back where they might need help turning something.

About an hour ago, I was feeling sorry for myself because I wasn’t as creative as one of my friends. Now, I’m just pretty much wishing that I wasn’t so … me.

The story:

Husband is out of town - in California drinking wine… er, at a meeting. I am really tired. I got up at 5:30 this morning to go on a tour of the Pfizer plant in Kalamazoo. I was having a nice, relaxing evening at home, catching up on the usual domestic stuff: paying bills, petting the cats, cleaning the kitchen.

I made corn on the cob tonight as part of dinner. Instead of just throwing out the water, I thought I would use it to water the flowers on the front porch. Being green and all that stuff. As I I was walking out the front door, I was thinking to myself: “Don’t lock yourself out of the house. That would be really stupid.”

Do I really need to finish this story? Can you see where this ends?

Yup, I locked myself out of the house.

This is only the second time when I didn’t have any roommates/husband to bail me out. And it’s 11PM, again. And I’m only wearing my PJ’s, again. But this time, I was wearing underwear.

Long story short - I have an amazing friend and she came and let me into the house. Laughing all the time.

The upside, I met some of my neighbors and they were really nice. I’m going to deliver some flowers to their house tomorrow.

The downside, it rained this evening and the worms were out. And I didn’t have shoes on.

Back to photos!!

Remember, once upon a time, so long ago we can barely remember, I went to Sicily. Husband had a conference and I sat by the pool. Well, those meanies at the conference decided to give everyone the afternoon off, so their brain didn’t turn to mush by the time it was all over.

Leif, Jim and I decided to take the afternoon and check out the town of Taormina. It is north of Catania, and according to the guidebooks, quite the tourist destination. But some friends at the conference had spent the week before there and suggested we check out (yet another) Greek Theater. Plus, the sights were supposed to be amazing.

We had to drive to the city. The drive wasn’t bad, if a little boring and uninteresting, scenery-wise. I think that’s because we decided to take the highway and not the more scenic local roads. Jim doesn’t like being honked at.

But on our way up, we see this:

Is that a city on that rock? Is that where we are going? Do you see a road leading up to that or are we going to walk? I’ll admit, I was a little concerned.

But Toarmina is definitely used to the tourist hordes. There were actual PARKING LOTS. With space to put your car. It was posted, with actual signs and everything. I almost felt like I was back in the states. But to get to the parking lot, we had to cross this terrifying bridge. I only have a very vague recollection of it because it freaked me out good. Thank goodness I wasn’t driving. We would have come to a screeching halt in the middle of the road. I vaguely remember that it was only two lanes wide, with no shoulder. There were guard rails, but come on now. I really don’t know how it was held up. Toothpicks probably.

But husband was driving and so we made it safe and sound. At the parking lot, there was a BUS that took us up to the main square of the city, so it was quite painless. No walking at all.

It was much more crowded than Syracusa. There were people everywhere, but it was a very pretty town. We made our way up to the Greek Theater and saw some of the most amazing views of the trip.

Well, of course, we’re not the amazing views, but the coast and Etna behind us are!

The ocean was SO stinking blue. I could have sat there for hours!

Above the city sits the castello. You can hike up there, but it takes about 30 minutes and it was pretty hot out that day. The views would have been amazing, but we made do with what we saw from the Greek Theater.

As usual, the “Greek” theater is now almost entirely Roman (rebuilt in 3 Before Canada) and of course obscured from our view by some stupid concert set. (We were 0 for 3 in the Theater seeing department.)

Remember, scientists can take the fun out of any occasion. They were talking about science.

I like this next photo:

I don’t know for sure, but I hope those columns are some of the original Greek columns that the Romans incorporated into the “new” theater. Plus, you can see the cheap stone on the inside of the walls with the more expensive brick on the outside.

Whew!! All that looking can make a person awfully thirsty. Plus it was getting late in the day, so we found a place to have a drink, right next to a beautiful church:

Can you imagine getting married there? Well, someone did! At some point, a bride passed us on the street. Plus we kept seeing all of these people dressed to the nines, promenading in the sunset. Very cool.

I left the boys to do some tasting of the local beverages while I did some shopping. I passed a shop and saw a rug that I really wanted:

I’m not sure if it goes into the “Dogs in Inappropriate Places” photo essay, but it made me laugh.

As we were leaving, I saw a GREAT sign:

If you don’t read Italian or English, or even if you do, does this really explain what is forbidden? Holding hands? Relationships? And what is the last one? No eating? Thank god they didn’t catch us at dinner then!

One thing I will miss about Italy:

Well, duh, the wine!! But beyond that, this is a bottle that we bought in Toarmina. Even though we were going to open it in about 3 hours, they wrapped in beautiful paper and tied a ribbon on it. Almost everything that you buy in the smaller shops is wrapped up in beautiful bags or paper. I will miss that pride.

We grow out of a lot of things. Milli Vanilli albums, radical make-up usage, and hair that changes color about every three months. But I wonder, is using the word “like” as an interjection or phrase linker something that people grow out of?

“It was, like, the most amazing thing!” or “And I was, like, no duh!”

Husband and I were at lunch today and we had the misfortune to sit next to a pair of college age girls complaining about their dorms. Jim timed one girl in particular; she used the word “like” 7 times in 22 seconds. And we’re not talking “I really like this sandwich.”

Once you hear a conversation like this, it is almost impossible to train your ear not to hear it. We laughed every time we heard two or three “likes” in a single sentence.

This is a conversational usage that afflicts females from the ages of 16-23 (this statistic is PFA by the way). You don’t hear professionals peppering their speech with “like”. So is this something that you grow out of, or is it something that you eventually train yourself not to do?

I was tempted to, as we were leaving, walk by their table and let them know that the word “like” came up about every 4 seconds in their conversation. Just FYI, ya know. But I didn’t really want to deal with the fall out that I know would be coming:

“That is so, like, rude!! Who do you think you are? Like, the language police?”

No time for a long post with Italy photos today. So I decided to show you some of the stuff that’s going on around the homestead.

I was really glad to get home. I missed playing in my garden. But I am rethinking the size of some of my beds. When I got home, this is representative of what my beds looked like:

And this is one of the clean ones! We must have had a hell of a winter while we were gone. There are several perennials that just didn’t come back. And not ones that I planted the year before. I accept about a 50% loss on newly planted perennials. I am learning by trial and error what the deer like to eat and what can accept shady conditions. ‘Cause my yard doesn’t get a whole lot of light.

But I lost perennials that were several years old! My dianthus is gone, several of my Siberian Iri didn’t come out this year, coral bells, cottage pinks… Gone.

On the flip side, some annuals that I haven’t planted in years have started showing up… Pansies in the front bed (none there for 18 months), snapdragons in rock beds (I haven’t had snapdragons for at least two years). I have echinacea that shows up EVERYWHERE. I have two in my front bed and they are active suckers. I dig probably 10-15 babies out of the yard every year!

But I digress.

I got everything all weeded in the back and put in some pretty flowers on the 4th of July. We had friends over and I couldn’t handle sitting out back looking at the weeds:

In addition to all of the flowers in the ground, I planted some planters and had them on the edge of the deck to add some color.

This is what I woke up to on July 6th:

Those were begonias. (See my shadow on the bottom!! Cool.)

This is what I call the buffet:

Those used to be petunias.

What really burns me about this though is that the only petunias they ate were the ones on the patio. They left the ones in the beds alone. What is it with these deer? Are they now too lazy to bend their necks and eat the ones on the ground? Is this what I’ve led these deer to?

Remember how I said that it was hot when we visited Siracusa? It was really hot, about a billion degrees. We parked about 16,428 miles from the interesting parts of the city in order to avoid the traffic. Leif and I decided that it was really too hot to walk and Jim should drive down to Ortygia, the island which makes up the old part of Siracusa. Remember, we don’t have good maps of the town, which really didn’t matter because once again Jim had to put up with two people yelling opposite directions at him from different parts of the car. I really am amazed that Jim didn’t kill one or both of us.

No one honked at us the whole way into the city! But we couldn’t figure out what the parking signs meant once we were downtown. We knew that they said something about residents and parking but couldn’t decide if the sign meant that only residents could park there or if they weren’t supposed to park there. Leif and I had a nice discussion for about 5 minutes before I wandered over to a restaurant to ask for clarification. After they told us we would go to parking jail, we found a nice pay lot with plenty of spaces to park.

Lunch was next on the agenda. We happened to park right next to a restaurant that was recommended in the Rough Guide (lots of good info, but not as funny as my boy, Rick). This sounded great to us and we marched right over. There was this gentleman in a black suit standing at the entryway and I just assumed that he was a maitre d’. My bad. He was a patron, and probably part of the mafia. I think this was the case because it took about 10 minutes for someone to bring us a menu after we sat down. I think that he had a few words with the staff…

(By the way - in most Italian restaurants, they don’t have a hostess stand or someone waiting to seat you as you walk in. You see an empty table and just grab it. It takes some getting used to at first but I kind of like it. I get to chose where I sit. Back in the states, I’m not enjoying having my table chosen for me. Call me a control freak!!)

But we finally get some food, and more importantly, wine!

Jim modeling our wine choice. Notice the name on the bottle. I wonder if the guy I offended is related…

This was my lunch. It was the local fritto misto, or mixed fried stuff. It was the best calamari that I think I have ever eaten, including the appetizer at 23 in Chapel Hill!

What meal in Italy is complete without gelato? We head down to the check out the sights, keeping an eye out for a promising gelato stop. This is what we settled on:

Of course, I had to get a picture of the professors at the Caffe del Professore! It was good, but they didn’t have lemon. What a waste.

Across from the caffe was the Temple of Apollo. The oldest parts date from the sixth or seventh century BC. That’s not “Before Coffee” or “Before Chocolate”, that’s 2700 years ago folks.

The town of Siracusa is mostly done in the Baroque style because of an earthquake that leveled the city in 1693.

I don’t know what “Baroque” means, but I liked it. The buildings were so ornate and scrollwork was everywhere. The little street above was very typical of the streets that we saw in Siracusa. It made me laugh that all of the buildings on this tiny street had balconies. A cat could visit the different building without ever touching the ground!

It wouldn’t be a visit to an Italian town without seeing the local Duomo.

It was another masterpiece of the Baroque style. But I don’t really understand why the church is called “the Duomo”. I didn’t see a dome anywhere on that building.

The inside of the church was very unique. The church was built on the site of a temple to Athena that was started in 530 “Before Chianti”. Instead of razing the old temple, the builders incorporated the architecture and columns of the pagan temple into the church.

I really loved the atmosphere of this church. You could look around and see the contradiction of the Catholic Church and the old pagan temple. It kept the dimensions of the old temple and didn’t try to be too big. It was very cosy for such a grand structure.

In the loggia of the Duomo, there were a couple of sculptures. One in particular caught my eye:

Is that a flame coming out of his head? I have no clue who it is, but his head is on fire.

After touring the Duomo, it was getting time to head out. We, being Jim and I, were getting tired. It was hot and all I wanted to do was take a swim. I think that Leif could have kept walking around, but we outnumbered him. Plus Jim thought that we were running out of time on our parking meter and didn’t want to get a ticket. Sounds like a good excuse to me!

We walked back to the car along the coast. The city designers had built a promenade below the old city walls. It was tree lined and very cosy. There were a few kiddie ride set up and several food vendors. Thankfully, one of them had lemon gelato so I got my fix!

The tree lined promenade. We walked in the shade. It was still pretty hot.

Jim by an ENORMOUS tree. He’s holding up to the heat pretty well!

We got back to the car and still had plenty of time on the meter, so all was well. Our only hurdle was to get out of the city without:

• getting lost
• getting killed
• getting a ticket
• getting in an accident

Remember, we don’t have very good maps and the Swede in the passenger’s seat isn’t that good at reading maps. We felt confident as we started out, but didn’t take into account one way streets. It was the usual scene; Leif and I yelling directions, Jim getting mad because nothing we were saying made sense and he didn’t want to violate the four rules above.

We got funneled into some street that we weren’t sure that we wanted to be on but we came across a disaster of a traffic circle that we recognized from driving and we were good. Jim had to cut someone off to get on the right road, and so we got honked at but no one got:

• lost (just minorly diverted. I quickly found where we were on the map.)
• killed
• a ticket
• in an accident

So driving in Siracusa was a success, no thanks to Leif or I.

Let’s take a trip back in time to a few weeks and pretend that I’m still in Italy. It wasn’t that long ago, and with the help of the guide book, I still remember what all of the things are!

Before we saw lava (and really, what can hold up to lava?), we saw some other stuff in Sicily. Jim wanted to drive down to Siracusa, on the southeast tip of the island. Siracusa has quite a history! Because of it’s location, it was a stop on the trading routes throughout the Mediterranean and was quite wealthy. Now a days, it is a much quieter town and I think it is probably more known for the Mafia than anything else. I think I had a little run in with one of the local Mafia at lunch. I thought he was a waiter! But that’s a different story…

Siracusa is about 1.5 hours south of Catania, where our hotel was. We went with Leif, our friend from Sweden who was also down for the conference. It was a pretty easy drive until we got into Siracusa. We didn’t have great maps of the towns and it was an interesting time for Jim. Poor guy, he had a Swede who can’t read maps giving him directions in the front seat and me yelling corrections in the back seat.

Our plan was to go to the Neopolis in the Archeological Park first, and then walk south about 1.5-2 km through the city of Siracusa to the edge of the city that overlooks the Mediterranean. This way we could park outside the city center and not die.

The Neopolis was the city’s collection of altars, temples, theaters and other non-house type places. Our first stop was the old Roman Amphitheater.

The guidebook (Not Rick Steves’. Apparently he doesn’t think that Sicily is part of Italy and so doesn’t include it in his book.) says that at 140m long, it is one of the largest of its kind. Really? It didn’t look all that big to me. I guess the movie Gladiator has tainted my ideas of history.

Jim and Leif were thinking about staging their own combats. People would come from miles around to watch two scientists duke it out over who has the shortest laser pulse! Think of the glory!! You know, scientists can suck the fun out of any occasion.

I was amazed that some of the arches in the Amphitheater were still standing. I mean, our engineers can’t build a road that doesn’t crack in 6 months. These guys built arches that are still standing 2000 years later. Maybe we could learn something from them?

The main attraction of the Archeological Museum is the Greek Theater, which I didn’t take any pictures of. I take pictures of slugs and people I don’t know, but I can’t seem to get a photo of a large outdoor theater. Go figure.

I did take a pretty picture of the view from the top of the theater though:

The sea was so blue!

The top of the theater is lined with caves. There is an artificial grotto:

In one cave, there was a cool stone throne:

I tried to get someone to sit in it, but it was covered in moss and slimy stuff.

There was also a “Cave of the Scientists”:

As I said, it was really hot. We spent a lot of time in the caves, just cooling off.

A lot of rock was quarried from this area to build Siracusa. Rock takes up a lot of space and most of the time they don’t get filled in when the rock is exhausted. The left over pits are called the “Pits of Paradise”.

I’m pretty sure the landscaping is a new thing because the pits were used as places to hold prisoners of war. But it wasn’t always a prison. At some point, a cave with some unique acoustical properties was gouged from the side of the pit walls.

It is 20m tall and extends about 65m back. It is man made, too. I didn’t believe it at first, but you can see the gouge marks in the walls. I tried to get pictures, but the didn’t turn out too well. There are also peg marks in the wall that look like anchors for stairs. This begs the question: how do you think they dug out the cave? From the bottom to top, or top down?

There is also a great big ruin in the Archeological Park:

The sign said that it was the “Ara di Ierone II”. Great descriptive name huh? It wasn’t until I was reading the guidebook on the way back to the hotel that I found out that this was an ALTAR. Not a temple, but an altar. It was dedicated to Zeus and some historian records that 450 bulls were slaughtered there at a time. Wow.

Time for some more baby pictures!!

There are so many excuses…. er, reasons, that I haven’t posted the Sicily pictures.

1. My lap is full when I sit down. I can’t sit down for longer than 10 seconds without a cat crawlingon me. Not that I’m complaining or anything. But the cats won’t move when I put the computer on them either. It makes it difficult.
2. The weeds are taking over. I look out the window and can’t handle the weeds everywhere. I’ve spent about 3 hours outside this weekend and only got three beds cleaned out. Two of them are small! I have two more to do and they are both ginormous.
3. Hanging out with friends and family has a higher priority right now. Sorry about that! I know that a lot of you are friends and family too and this is a surrogate for hanging out. I promise to post pictures tomorrow. (I have a sunburn from weeding on the fourth and can’t be outside if I want to keep my outer layer of skin.)
4. I have to write a grant!! I’m trying to scare up some funding for my students next year. I need to focus on that and get it done!!

We are settling right in to living in the US though. It was pretty seamless, which is a little scary. I kind of wish that it would have been harder to get used to home life again. But I am enjoying watching TV and going to the movies.

We saw Wall-E tonight with friends. I love Pixar. It was good, but no Monsters, Inc.!

Well, not when this post actually gets to the internet, but as I am writing it. Yup, made it safely to the airport in Florence at some ungodly hour, successfully navigated the Frankfurt airport and made it on to the plane. Only a couple more hurdles left - customs, a too long layover, and the flight to Lansing. Hopefully Lisa will be there to pick me up!

I should be working on the Sicily posts, and might do it after this post is done but I wanted to do my “Wrap-up” post while it is still fresh in my head.

WARNING: I might get a little maudlin and mushy. I think I just scared the guy sitting next to me when I started thinking about what I was going to miss and started tearing up. He must think my book is really sad!

I think that I can really sum up what I am going to miss about Italy in one word: choices.

Choices? How can this be? Isn’t America the land of choice? As you drive down the street, you are bombarded with choices, places to go, places to eat, things to buy! Let me explain what I mean.

The whole time I was in Italy, I didn’t eat fast food (as defined by the good ol’ US of A) once. I only ate food in a chain maybe five times. And that is only if you count the cafeteria at the Coop as a chain restaurant. I bought my espresso from the local bar. I would guess that most of the places that we frequented were owned by a single person or family. You could walk down the street and see 10 different restaurants, each with a different menu and different ambience. While husband and I did eat at a new restaurant every night, we sampled a few and made a choice to frequent some that were the most comfortable to us. When we went to a new city, we couldn’t fall back on a known quantity. We had to go and find something new.

Ah vino! I had wine with my lunch on the plane (this is a habit that I am going to miss!!). I asked for a red and the attendant said that they had a cabernet or a blend available. Silly me, I asked “What’s the blend?” She looked at me like a sprouted a third eyeball from my head. “Cabernet, syrah…”. Ah. I think about the places that Jim and frequented for wine: Le Volpi e l’Uva, Enoteca Ponte Vecchio, Osteria del Bricco. A lot times, wines would be offered where Jim had never even heard of the grape! Our cellar back home looks so one dimensional now.

I am going to missed the freedom and the choices that we available when working in the lab. The facilities weren’t any better than what I have in the states, but I had the time to make those choices. I didn’t have the immediacy of classes and other responsibilities weighing on my head. I had the choice to go into the lab and work on things that were exciting to me, without having to justify my time.

(Here’s the mushy part. Skip this paragraph if you have a weak stomach.) I’m also really going to miss spending QT with husband. The apartment was small and only had one couch. We had to sit together when watching movies or House on DVD. I’m going to miss the fact that we had few distractions and got to spend a lot of time traveling together and just talking. We survived four months of enforced contact, and you know? I liked it a lot.

But beyond that, I AM going to miss Florence in general. I will miss walking everywhere. I will miss my bus ride past the Duomo. I’ll miss walks up to Piazza Michelangelo and laughing at the all of the tourists.

All good things must come to an end, and there are many things that I missed about home. Absence (even of a couple of hours), make the heart grow fonder.

OK, enough with the serious stuff. We were flying over some water (what body of water is between the mainland of Europe and Greenland? Don’t have the internet on the plane!!), and I was looking out the window and saw some floaty things in the water. Boats? Ships? Floating cities? We were almost 7 miles in the air and I could see them! One, I even saw the wake as it was moving. How freaking fast and big must that thing have been for me to see it all the way up in the plane?

PS - Made it to Detroit OK, all of the luggage showed up and made it through customs too!

Wow - four and a half months gone already! I go back and read some of my earlier posts, and I never thought the day would get here, but as usual, time marches on.

Most everything is packed and I’m not going to have to leave that much behind - my old goggles, a few textbooks that I have copies of back in MI, a few articles of clothing that I never really liked anyway and a few shirts that I wore out while here.

There are a few things left undone:

• I still have almost all of the Sicily pictures that I need to post.
• I wanted to do a wrap up post - what I liked, what I’m going to miss, etc. Maybe later today. It’s murderously hot in Florence today and there won’t be much walking around in the afternoon.
• I didn’t buy any leather gloves, but I did get a purse!

I’m stressing out, thinking about traveling home without Jim. Because of how we bought our tickets, he isn’t coming home until Wednesday. He is a good traveler and I usually just follow him around in the airport.

I’m stressing out, wondering if they’ll let me check all of the luggage. They should, NWA lets business class check three pieces. But I check in with Lufthansa, so I’m all kinds of worried about that. A word of advice if you are traveling to Europe: pull out the clothes you want to bring, then put away at least a third. If you are traveling around, you can wear a shirt twice and no one will know, especially if you are visiting multiple cities. Plus, you want room to bring home lots of goodies!

I get home Tuesday evening, then am off to visit family on Thursday. Sigh. There’s a shower for my step sister over the weekend and it will be good to see the fam, but I wish it were a little later in the summer! Too many things got scheduled for the weekend that I get back and I’m having to miss a lot.

As usual, writing is doing me some good. I’m starting to calm down and think I might be able to breathe normally soon.

See you soon!