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Wanderung 10

Boating around the Boot & Gallivanting through Gaul.

October 2005

Sunday October 16, Taormina and Messina, Sicily

The Astor glided through the narrows between Italy (the "boot" in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea) and Sicily (the island being kicked by the boot) at the first blush of dawn. We arrived in the port of Messina just after sunrise and boarded a bus for a tour of the area.

Our first stop was Taormina, a small resort town up on a rocky peninsula south of Messina in the neighborhood of Mount Aetna. We enjoyed hiking through the old, narrow streets in main shopping district and looking at different items for sale in the boutiques. The stone gates on the edge of the shopping district looked quite ancient, and our guide said that the town had been first settled by the Greeks during their period of expansion and colonization, and then later taken over by the Romans as they consolidated their power in central Italy.


 

Out on the peninsula we had wonderful views up and down the coastline. To the south along a beautiful arc of white beach was a chain of seaside towns starting with Naxos. To the north lay other small coastal villages that our guide said had been fishing villages until being settled (overrun?) by tourists. Off in the distance loomed the beautiful but dangerous Mount Aetna with its perfect, Fuji-like volcanic cone.

Our main goal in Taormina was to visit a very old Greek theater situated in a natural bowl at the edge of the peninsula. There we sat on seats that ancient Greeks and Romans had used while listening to our guide chat about the differences between Greek and Roman cultures. The Greeks, he maintained, always situated their theaters in natural bowls or hollows in the land, whereas the Romans often built up their theaters from level ground. This one was a natural hollow and definitely of Greek origin although the Romans had transformed it for their use after taking over the area. Still, some of the original arches and columns were there and what was still intact was quite graceful and pretty. Also, just being in a 2,500 year old theater made me feel at least relatively young, which was a good feeling. In America everything is too new for me to have that feeling and in fact the rapid development of our area of Virginia often makes me feel completely out of date (as in, "Where's the K-Mart that used to be on that corner?", and things like that.).


 

Our tour guide on this trip was cheerful and had quite a sense of humor. I was astonished to find that some of the jokes he told would probably survive the two-step translation from Italian to German and from German to English. One such joke went something like this:

A long-time worker on a Fiat assembly line came to talk to his boss.
"Boss", he said, "I'm going to have to quit."
"Why would you quit?", his boss replied. "We were happy with your work and we thought you were happy with us."
"Well yes," replied the worker, "but I've decided to go to work in the Ford assembly plant instead."
"But why would you want to work for Ford rather than Fiat?" replied his puzzled boss.
"Well because here on the assembly line it's always 'faster, faster, faster'," replied the worker, "But on the Ford assembly line it's always 'Fiesta, Fiesta, Fiesta!"

Another joke he told played on cultural stereotypes, but those stereotypes sometimes have a nugget of truth in them. In any case I thought this one was quite funny:

A man died and went to be judged by Saint Peter at the Gate.
"I'm sorry," said Saint Peter, "but you must go to Hell."
"Oh please, Saint Peter," pleaded the man, can't I go to heaven?"
"No," replied Saint Peter sadly, "I really can't do that but I tell you what I can do. I can give you the choice of an American Hell, a German Hell, or an Italian Hell."
"What's the difference?" asked the man.
"Well," replied Saint Peter, "The American Hell is fully computerized and automated to insure that all your punishments are exactly what they should be. In the German Hell all the punishments are always right on time and the discipline is very strict. In the Italian Hell the devils are often out on strike and the fires only burn intermittently, but the choice is strictly up to you!"

We returned to Messina just before noon so that we could watch the display as the church bells struck the hour. The bell tower has a fantastic array of moving figures that each do their thing when the clock strikes noon. One thing that did crack me up was that the church clock was 5 minutes slow! I have checked the clocks mounted everywhere on the Astor against our travel clock that is set by official German time signals, and I can verify that all those clocks were right on the minute, as were all the clocks I have ever seen in Germany (see Wanderungs 2 and 5). Somehow it was hilarious that this huge, fantastically complicated Italian clock that served as a tourist landmark for people from all over the world was not even set to the right time.


 

After a quick lunch back at the ship we wandered around Messina for the afternoon. We marched up to the church atop a nearby hill and then zigzagged down through some side streets to see some of the city, which was not all that impressive. On a Sunday afternoon, at least, Messina was somnolent if not completely quiescent. We also saw far more litter than we had seen on Malta and places where paving stones were missing and so forth. That was in contrast to the neat and clean environs of Taormina, which might be due to Taormina currently being more of a resort community. Still, we had a nice walk and felt ready for supper when we arrived back at the ship.


 


 

At supper I implemented a new strategy I had formed for coping with the evening meals aboard the Astor. On previous cruises I had just had an appetizer if I really liked the sound of it but otherwise stuck to a main course and desert. On the Astor, however, the main courses had rather small portions, something like what I think of as "California Cuisine", and if I just ate the main course I woke up as hungry as a bear the next morning. To forestall that, I decided to order as many of the appetizers as I possibly could in addition to the main course. The appetizers were, of course, smaller than the main courses, but I reasoned that if I ate enough of them the whole shebang would add up to a decent meal. This strategy had the additional advantage of exposing me to a wide variety of novel foods that I might have otherwise eschewed. The ship's chef was excellent and all the appetizers were artistically presented dishes, beautifully crafted and exquisitely flavored, so in the end my new strategy worked out very well indeed. If you ever find yourself on the Astor or its sister ship the Astoria, you might want to take advantage of the wide variety of appetizers offered with each meal either for epicuric or simple caloric reasons.

The one thing that was impossible on the Astor, however, was to have just a normal glass of water, tea, or coffee while we were eating the meal. The only water offered was rather pricey bottled water, and as an American I just expect water to be provided for free with a meal, so I usually declined that. Although the waiter was quite willing, nay eager, to sell us wine to drink with dinner, he couldn't comprehend the idea of having coffee or tea to drink with the meal. So I just got used to eating a meal while getting progressively thirstier and thirstier until after the desert course when I could finally start to soak up a pot of tea or decaffeinated coffee. My sister Lois had the same problem in England at a rather upscale resort, so the problem has something to do with the American penchant for drinking water with a meal which is not apparently shared by most of Europe. In any case, I did get enough to eat and drink on the Astor; I just had to figure out how to do it. Curiously enough, when we dined upstairs in the Ubersee Club, a self-service dining area, a carafe of water was always available near the fruit juices so I could pour myself a glass of water to drink with my meal. The water in our cabin was also potable and I seriously considered filling a canteen and taking long swigs from it during dinner. You can imagine how that would have looked on the 'black tie' formal dinner nights! In any case, we had a great dinner, after which we relaxed in our cabin doing our usual evening tasks until it was time for bed.

Copyright2006 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt
Prolog
Map
October 2005
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9 10 11 12 13 14 15
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Epilog

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