The Fantastic Adventures of Grace and Daniel

Mi dispiace, blog followers! The past couple weeks have been insane. I shall try and recap them for you before I pass out from exhaustion- I had all of about 20 minutes of sleep last night, but that story is not nearly as exciting as it sounds and comes much later.

Belated picture of the Ecstacy of St. Teresa from Santa Maria della Vittoria from drawing on Wednesday.

So... Friday we awoke bright and early and went to Sicily. We had a shuttle which was nice- we got to avoid the lovely process of calling a cab. After navigating the airport we got on the shortest flight I've ever been on- literally about half an hour.

We got to Sicilia and had to take a bus to Palermo, which was shockingly less difficult than I thought it would be. We found a nice English speaking man who helped give us directions to our hostel and told us that we could easily walk right in front of the cab driver who was trying to get us to pay 3 Euro per person to take us to our hostel (he did not speak English). It was pretty much a 5 minute walk down the street. Darn taxi drivers and their taking advantage of Americans who don't speak Italiano. So we found our Hostel- Ai Quatro Canti. GHETTO. And completely unmarked from the street. Hooray. But the hostel owner Guiseppe (or something that is spelled correctly) spent like ten minutes going over a map of Palermo with us and gave us some good recommendations of places to go. Our room wasn't ready so we dropped off our bags and went out exploring. Guess what? Palermo = like 1/3 the price of Rome. It was magical. We found a really cute cafe and got sandwiches for brunch as well as a thing called an Arancina (ball of saffron rice stuffed with ham/cheese or salsiccia or fish and then deep fried) and finished it off with Sicilian cannoli. Flipping amazing that Sicilian cannoli. Anyway, then we walked around the city for a bit. We went to the Teatro Massimo, the second largest opera house in Europe and bought tickets for the opera on Saturday night Adrianna Levaconteur (or yet again, something that I didn't butcher the spelling of. Use your imaginations)

Huge church in Palermo that was about a 2 minute walk from the hostel. You can't beat the convenience of small towns, you know.

Fish netting! I liked the colors. I didn't like the smell.

Harbor on the edge of the city

Danielle, Stacey, Christina and me. Don't look at my hair. We don't talk about it.
Church.

Edge of the church. Grouping pictures together logically makes me tired.

Um. Cool building on the edge of town near the water. I have no idea its real function other than to give me something to take pictures of. I shot like a roll and a half of film this day, by the way.

So... the weird thing about Palermo is that half of it looks historic and gorgeous and the other half looks like a nuclear explosion just wiped out half the buildings. Can't figure it out.

Anyway, after wandering for a bit, we went back to the hostel:

The hostel. My bed is not pictured. I was sitting on it. It was lighter than this too. First day we were in Palermo was the coldest I have been in Italy thus far. Not good times.

Prettiest part of the hostel: the ceiling.

That night we went to dinner with two boys that we met at the hostel named Brian and Kenny (we found out their names at dinner after we had already talked to them for a few hours. No that's not weird) at this place Guiseppe recommended. Not bad, for like 11 Euro per person we all got a pasta course and a main dish and split a bottle of red wine. I had mushroom and cheese ravioli and then goulash, in case you were wondering. I know you were. After dinner since we had been up since 4 am to catch our flight, we wanted to go crash out at the hostel. Sadly, everyone else in the living room which was of course right next to our room wanted to play crazy loud card games, play the guitar and sing loudly and drunkenly. Not the best night's sleep I've ever had. They finally passed out at like 3:45. Not that I remember this. Or still hate them for it.

The next day, we ate breakfast at the hostel (fake toast with butter and jam, coffee and tea and cookies that smelled like fish- they kind of tasted like them too. Oh, the hostel smelled like fish, did I mention that? It did) and then decided to go be warm for the day so we found a bus stop and jumped on a bus to Mondello, which equals beach.

Bus graffiti which made me happy. It made me lol, if you will.

Anyway, it was the last day of Carnivale so all these small children were dressed up in costumes and walking around throwing giant handfuls of confetti on people. Thankfully we avoided most of that. We got lunch and walked along the beach eating gelato. It was really flipping good.

Mediterranean- the most GORGEOUS water I've ever seen in my life. This picture doesn't do it justice. Don't worry, the super low speed film that I shot will totally do justice. Be excited.

Christina, Lindsey, Danielle and Stacey in front of the Mediterranean. PRETTIEST WATER EVER!!!

I may have touched the Mediterranean and had a near death experience where I almost fell in. We don't talk about that either. We walked around and bartered with fake gypsies for souvineers. I dropped the parents a postcard, because I am an awesome child.
We came back from the beach and went to a magical place called Cappello- home of Sicily's famous 7 layer chocolate cake. We're pretty sure it was located in the middle of the mob's central headquarters, but it was SO worth it:

Mmmmmm.

This place had crazy marzipan designs- including fish. Big thing in Sicily apparently.

After this we went back to the hostel and got ready to go to the Opera. We brought a Finnish girl with us that we met at the hostel. It was good times. We went to eat at a pizza place right by the opera house first and then went to our seats in the nosebleed section. No, really. Usually there are student discounts, but because it was opening night of this opera, there was nothing. So we got distainful looks when we showed the people our tickets and they had to tell us where to sit. There was seriously like no one else in our section. We had to lean over the railing to see the stage. But, we got to walk up the red carpet into the theater which was pretty exciting.

Opera house. Our chairs were not this nice. They were wooden. And painful.

More Opera housing.

Pillar at Opera house

Ceiling of Opera house

Curtain. This was seriously like... our best view

Stacey, Christina and Finnish girl (still don't know her name)

Danielle and me. You can look at my hair here, but not my smile. It's a trade off, people.

Anyway, the opera was really fun. Although 4 hours long. We had considered going out with the people at the hostel before we got out of the opera at 12:30. On the way back to the hostel we got lovely catcalls from the Palermo boys. In Rome they honk horns because of the driving, in Palermo, they honk horns because they think you're cute. Remember this.

Sunday we ate breakfast at the hostel again and then walked around a bit and found a flea market where I made an amazing find! I bought a medium format camera in GORGEOUS condition!!!!!! It looks like it's never been used and it's Russian, so maybe it never will be used, but I own one! Yay! Then we got back on the bus to go to the airport. We thought that our flight left at like 4:05, but it turned out that it didn't leave until 4:55, so we had a lot of airport time. Danielle got her contact lens solution confiscated, but other than that, it was a fairly uneventful trip. We were able to catch the train and metro back to the apartment, so that was nice and money saving.

Monday was Politics and make up drawing day from missing class to go to Palermo. We went to Piazza del Popolo and I drew some AMAZING fish. That's right. Amazing. And I got a flower from a fake gypsy. He told me that I was pretty and then talked to Danielle and me for like 10 minutes about how he liked America. He had a picture of Bill Clinton in his wallet and told us that he liked George Bush, The Father, not The W. Whatev. Free flower. Paulina liked my fish too, she told me that even as I get more academic about my drawing that I should try really hard to never lose my expressive style. Woot!

Tuesday we went to the forums of Augustus and Caesar, which was actually really cool. We got special permission to go down into the forum, so we got to touch ancient columns and see human bones.

Exciting, I know.

That night Alex got home! He had been stuck in Berlin trying to get to Sweden for the weekend. He never made it to Sweden and had to buy extra clothing in Berlin, but had fun. We like having him home though.

Wednesday was also uneventful. Sorry, I know you expected grand things. I decided to make lasagna for dinner though and for some reason, we decided to dye Terrance's hair. I don't know why. He wanted to have brown hair. Now he does. He thinks it's way too dark though and continually calls it jet black. It is not.

Thursday we went to several different churches for R&B, including San Pietro in Vincoli. Tomb of Julius II, it was cool. But a very long class. After that, we went to Italian and then decided to dye Danielle's hair. It's a trend now. I don't know how these things start.

Yes, that is me in the background

I don't know why there isn't a picture of it finished, but it looks good.

Friday we went to drawing at Piazza Bernini and drew the fountain like 17 times.

After that, we went to a museum and drew the outside of it. Well, everyone else drew the outside, I drew like... a window. Kris= drawing special ed.
Weird staircase somewhere in the museum

Wall at the museum. No, I have no idea what the museum was called.

This is what I got to draw while everyone else drew the building.

More museum stuff. Ooh, perspective.

Creepy cabin-looking thing at the museum.

Danielle and I went home and passed out soon after drawing. Why, you ask? Portugal! Oh, I went to Lisbon last weekend. We woke up at 3am to get to our flight at 6. Never doing that again. But Portugal.... It was AMAZING. I'm moving there. We got off the plane and grabbed breakfast- Portugese Fanta and an amazing pastry for me. And then we took a bus to the city center, took a metro to the bus station and took a bus to Faro. Which is 4 hours away. And we booked our return trip for 3 hours after we arrived. Basically, Saturday was my day of transporting myself. But it was amazing.

Danielle and me in Faro. See the brown hair?
Scary tiger shrimp dinner. After we walked around for a while, we grabbed dinner on the balcony of a restaurant that I'm sure is a tourist trap when the weather is nice. As it was, they thought we were insane to be sitting on the balcony. It was really flipping cold. But we had bread with scary Faro cheese (we were not going to try the fish pate, although that too, was an option) and carrots with garlic and olive oil and then the shrimp cooked in olive oil, garlic and sea salt and French fries. Something about seafood requires them, I think. The shrimp were freaky and they looked like they could come to life at any moment and crawl off of our plates. They didn't! And they tasted good...

Faro beach

These are the signs they keep in the airport and all around Portugal in general. Not no smoking, no smokers. Anyone else amused?

Faro beach. Start booking your tickets to come visit me there. Because I'm moving. Like now.

Faroan fishermen. They thought we were crazy too.

Still Faro.

More of the scary Faro dinner.

We left Faro at 8:30 and got back to Lisbon at about midnight. Why not stay in Faro, you ask? Good question. Because we already booked a room at the Poets' Hostel in Lisbon at the recommendation of a friend from high school who backpacked around last summer and recommended it very highly. So we had to find our hostel at like midnight thirty and we discovered that the cool thing to do in Lisbon is to like stand around on the streets and just talk. That's it. But anyway, found the hostel. SO MUCH BETTER THAN PALERMO!

Window in the Whitman room.
Beds that were not mine.

Ditto above caption.

Lisbon sidewalks! Gorgeous, right? The correct answer is yes.

Right around here is where we met Richard. Richard came up to me and asked me for money and I said no and he asked if my friend had money and I told him no. But he waited to ask her anyway. And so Danielle gives him a cigarette and tries to light it for him and he gets mad and says that women never light men's cigarettes. She was just trying to hide the fact that we labelled everything in our apartment with Italian vocabulary last week so her lighter says il accendino on it. Anyway, Richard says he's going to take us around all day and that he can take us out for a really great breakfast, but we're paying. And we tell him we came here from Italy so he's crazy impressed by our English. He tells us he only speaks English to the people he likes. We're so priviledged. And so we try to lose Richard in a crowd, but he's persisitant. And then Danielle sees a metro stop and goes "oh look, Kris! Our metro, we found it!" and Richard follows us into the metro until I tell him that we have to go to the airport and then he tries to get a minimum of 5 Euro from Danielle. Sigh. We said no, jumped on the metro, went in an unnecessary loop and got out by the Hard Rock Cafe. It sounded like a good time for lunch and a t-shirt.

After that, we walked around and tried to shop, but all the stores are closed in Portugal on Sunday. We stumbled on a little flea market (apparently those are popular on Sundays) and found some amazing souvineers. So amazing, in fact, that we had to go get more cash. And while I'm using the ATM, some guy comes up to Danielle and tries to sell her Hash. And then when I turn around he tries to sell me hash. And I yell "no!" and we walk down the alley. And then while I'm saying "I can't believe that guy just came up and tried to sell us marijuana" this guy says "you want marijuana?" and pulls this GIANT bag out of his pocket. And I yell "No!" again and Danielle and I flee down the alley. Sigh. Anyway, bought things and then it started raining so we went to our bus stop to wait for our bus. Which took almost an hour so it's a good thing we went when we did. Catastrophe if we had missed it. We went to the airport and got on our flight. Came home and took the train to Termini, the main metro/bus station. The metros were closed so we had to take a night bus. Don't do that! Take a cab! We're standing by the stop waiting for the bus and this guy comes up with his hand outstretched in the classic "give me money" pose so before he can even say anything, I'm like "No." And he stares at me in confusion for like 30 seconds and then leans in and says "You have such pretty eyes, so why are you such a nasty bitch?" Why, God, why? Anyway, he left and I didn't have to beat him off with my umbrella, so whatev. Caught a night bus and then waited like 40 minutes for the connecting one. Seriously, cab. But, I am home and alive from Portugal. Which is exciting. I suppose. I really did like it there.

Monday I had the day off because Politics was rescheduled (it's now tomorrow which is a bit of a bummer) so I went to an R&B review session to prepare for the midterm which was today (hence the 20 minutes of sleep). Tuesday we went to Palazzo Massimo and the museum there.

Statue from Museum
Discus throwing statue from Museum

Aphrodite

Baths of Diocletian. This is where we went for drawing yesterday. Well, there was a museum involved too. Paulina specifically found me a piece of marble with fish on it to draw because I so rocked the fish last week. Anyway, after this, I came home and made awesome fried rice- first kind of Chinese food in 2 months. And then Alex and I began studying. And proceeded to do so for the next 13 hours. No, really. I am so flipping exhausted. I came back to my apartment at 6:15, showered and set the alarm for 7. And then woke up, took a 2 1/2 hour exam and then thankfully, because it was raining we stayed in the classroom for most of the rest of the class. And now I'm going to sleep. I promise it won't be two weeks again before the next post!