I'm currently in Sferracavallo. It's a smaller town in Sicily on the ocean and I believe historically it was a fishing town like a lot of Sicilian towns. I've been here two days and I'm camping out. Today I'm going to get moving though, to see a lot more of Sicily and I can't wait! I'll talk more about that in a bit.
First I wanted to mention how the beach at Sferracavallo showed me something about Sicily that I didn't know... I'm not sure if the rest of Sicily or Italy is this way yet, but I'm giving Sicily the benefit of the doubt and assuming the problems are mostly due to this town's proximity to Palermo. The beach and it's surrounding landscapes are ridiculously nice. There's a tall steep mountain overlooking an old fishing town with a rocky coast and boardwalk. When you look closer though, none of it is very well kept. There are businesses out of business, the boardwalk is falling apart, there are stray cats and dogs everywhere, and there is so much trash on the beach it's ridiculous haha. I'm not sure why the people here do not clean up the town... because otherwise, it would be a great place to live. You can see what I'm talking about in the photos below.
Last night, I walked in to the town.... right to the beach and left to the restaurants....and I went left expecting to find maybe 4 restaurants and pick one of the less expensive options. To my surprise, I found about 1,500 people, 25 restaurants, music, people selling things on the side of the road that light up and balloons for kids, families everywhere, etc. Most all of the restaurants are seafood based and I love seafood! I asked for a salad with seafood. It was on the menu as Insalada Di Mare I believe. I asked.. "This is salad with seafood on it right? The waiter said yes. To clarify, I said... "Like it has lettuce, tomato, etc. with seafood?" He said yes... so I said I'll take it! Of course when it arrived, it was just a bowl full of cold squid, Octopus, clams, mussels, etc. haha. You rarely get what you're expecting when you order food in Europe, just because our food is so much different than theirs. I'll include a photo of the food here as well.
Today (Monday), I'm bicycling back towards Palermo, then taking a train to Agrigento. If it's nice I might stay the night, if not I'm heading towards Catalina for the night. After Catalina I'm heading to Messina which is at the top right corner of the island and I'm confident I can get a ferry there cheap to take me back to mainland Italy at which time I'll be heading for Rome. I made a little deal with myself... I'm going to try to head through Italy a little faster than expected because I want to spend more time in Germany, Sweeden, Denmark, Finland, Amsterdam, Austria and most definitely in England and Ireland because I've realized it's very difficult to talk to people when you don't know their language! haha.
I slept most of this afternoon so now it's 2AM and I'm ready for the day! One problem is that I can't check out until 6AM and they have my passport, so I'm about to head back in to the tent and read a book (wifi only works at the reception area). I'm starting a book called Swan Song which is supposed to be very good (Scary Post Apocalyptic Fiction I think), but it is like 1,000 pages. In the last 4 days I read The Time Machine by HG Wells and re-read half of Walden by Thoreau. I'll have to finish it soon, but I want to start something new!