CLibra’s Blog

On my holiday in Sicily, I realised a few things.

1. A pair of Vans and a pair of flip flops are not enough. The streets are not the best to traverse, so some more shoes would have been better.
2. Being disconnected from the infinite flow of the net didn’t bother me. I knew I had email waiting, I knew I had things to do, but it didn’t bother me. I only started to want to rush to a computer after I’d got off the plane on the journey home.
3. Don’t order things from Amazon just before you go.
4. Travelling with a disabled person is very easy. Kudos to the support that Parlemo airport offer for the disabled – it’s meglio than I had expected, with special shortcut corridors and check in areas, a dedicated attendant, and a lift for wheelchairs, it really caters for the less able people among us.
5. Learn the dialect. I’ve always understood Sicilian dialect, but opted to use standard Italian instead. I wish that I’d spoken more like a local.
6. Cultures don’t lock each other out. In Agrigento in Sicily, there are Greek temples; it took me a moment to comprehend why there are Greek temples in Sicily, but I grasped that Sicily didn’t just drop out of the sky, it’s an amalgam of some of the world’s most influential places, and in being so, it’s entirely its own.
7. Driving is amazing. Seeing the mountains all around you, the bleakly beautiful countryside, softened by the Mediterranean sea, is really something. Navigating the roads is easy, and it’s impossible not to enjoy it with the countryside – you even ignore the bad Sicilian driving.
8. Respect. Out there, respect is key. Most of the world now confuses respect with fear – we respect people because we are afraid of what they might do if we don’t; in Sicily, there is still true respect. And d’ya know what? It really shows.
9. Time is irrelevant. People and places don’t change, Sicily retains an eerie immortality. I guess people just ignore the superficialities that we have over here, they stay themselves, per sempre.
10. I love being Sicilian. The lifestyle is so genuine, sometimes overpowering, but always itself.