2/16/10 Sicilian Pavillion

So here was the plan as of 7 days ago. We bought tickets to fly from Torino to Trapani, Sicily. From the airport, we would take a bus to the city center where we would spend the night in a hostel. The next morning we would leave for Palermo by bus (2 hours east)and spend two night in a hostel in Palermo, and then finally we would leave by bus and go to a hostel in Agrigento (3 Hours south) for two days and then take a bus back to Trapani and leave.
Trapani
Well we arrived in Trapani and we took a bus to the city center. Unfortunately, Trapani is like West Philadelphia. Let me take a minute now and build a mental picture of Trapani for you. The best way that i can describe this cradle of filth called Trapani is to present to you the image of two monkeys flinging their excrement at a brick wall covered in graffiti for about two hours. This is the only true way to describe the city. Trapani is on the coast so we thought "hey lets go out to the beach" No you can't go out to the beach because the beach is covered in trash. I walked down to the water only to see a series of bathtubs that and oildrums that had carelessly washed up on the shore like cocunuts on a desert island. Thats right, bathtubs. You think ok, i can handle rusted out bathtubs, well did i mention that this army of God forsaken porcelain maggot bowls also harbor wild dogs. Well yeah, obviously, as every good Trapani citizen knows you can't go near the bathtubs surrounded by trash and oil drums because they are protected by an array of wild dogs. I have one picture of the island and i think it does it justice. It will take me a while to put it up because its on someone elses camera. We walked along the coast for a while, commenting on the disarray of the island and picking out our favorite wild dogs until it starts sleeting. At that point i felt like my jenga tower of bad luck was one block away from falling over so i suggested that we cut our time short in Trapani and head to our next destination- Palermo.
Palermo
We get to Palermo and all of a sudden i feel immediately revitalized. The city was cleaner the people were nicer, and i had my dancing shoes on. I headed to the hostel that i had booked in advance with high hopes. When i got to the hostel with my four friends, who should answer the door but the lovable Gesepee. Gespee ushers us in and shows us our room and he gives us a map detailing every conceivable thing to do in the city. It takes him about 30 minutes to go through everything and he is unbelievably thorough. He tells us that we should go grab a snack at a cafe down the road and come back for dinner because he was making an authentic Sicilian meal.
We did as he said and we came back around 7 or so for the "dinner"
THE DINNER
The words of one of the other hostel guest resonates in my ears. "Gesepee parties like a crazed animal" I had never heard this expression, and it was a little colorful, but their is no other way to describe that dinner. He brings out his "wine" and he gets us all sicilian pizza and encourages us to drink as much of this wine/juice he had made as possible. Well none of us our drinkers, we are all conservative good natured ambitious men, but we didnt want to offend him so we drank what he poured us, which was a lot. Before i knew it he was pushing us all to go out and sing Karyokee. I didn't drink that much because thats not my bag and it doesn't coincide with the moral equation i have laid out for my life, but anyway he took us all out and had us all sing our favorite song in this bizarre district of Palermo. Well one of my friends did drink a lot and he starts getting angry and he makes a scene by punching random cars, and another one of my friends starts flipping tables over. I don't know what was in Gesepee's jungle juice, but i do know that none of us went to dinner the next night. One thing is for sure I had confused Gesepee with the lovable character from disney's Pinochio (Japetto) but i would not any longer.
So before we left Palermo we decided to go to the famous catacombs that are on the outskirts of the city. To call the catacombs disturbing would be like calling the movie Babe 2 (Pig in the city) mildly bizarre and off putting. (Both of these are horrendous understatements). Basically, the catacombs consist of about 200 bodies that are anywhere from 100 to 200 years old that have been ripped from their coffins and nailed to the wall. These catacombs made the "controversial" bodies exhibit look like the Chuck E’ Cheese birthday band. In fact, some of the bodies still had flesh on them, most of them had hair, oh yeah and did i mention their is a children’s section where feti and children under 10 are still rotting suspended to the wall. Some sadistic animal with a sense of humor had them all doing poses too. (Anything ranging from the simple “Uncle Sam” pose to the more complex ‘john travolta’ Saturday Night Fever pose. Nevertheless, I dont think i ever truly left the catacombs because i have had nightmares for the last couple of days. I’m probably going to be carrying a piece of that experience with me for the rest of my life. Anyhoo, we left Palermo and headed for Agrigento.
Agrigento
Agrigento is the picture of cleanliness. If i was in the awkward position of comparing Sicilian cities to Charlie Brown Characters, i would call Trapani (Pig pen-The filthy boy), Palermo (Snoopy), and Agrigento (Charlie Brown). The city has an open market that extends for half a mile and sells everything under the sun. There was not a piece of trash in site, no karyokee bars, and no rotting corpses hanging on the walls. Agrigento is known for its Greek Ruins. Supposedly in southern sicily their are more Greek Ruins then in Greece itself. The ruins can date back as far as 1500 BC and they are pretty spectacular. Agrigento was really a lot of fun and we were able to find a relatively inexpensive place to have a nice dinner and watch a parade that was coming through the city. Our hostel owner was really interesting. He had had multiple death threats from the Sicilian mafia because he was a part time journalist who wrote about the inter-workings of the Sicilian Mafia. He also had discovered some Greek ruins during his stay in Agrigento that had got him some press coverage