We touched down on Sicily's East coast at the Catania Airport on a warm afternoon on the last day of March. After a very productive meeting with some friendly representatives from the International Air Transport Association, the European Aviation Safety Agency, and the Italian Federal Police (the Carabinieri), who fell just short of banning Hurricane Hannah and the rest of her family from commercial flights passing anywhere over or near EU airspace after a particularly sympathetic EASA agent felt pity when Sandi explained that much of Hurricane Hannah's embarrassingly un-German behaviour stemmed from her finding out that while we had been talking up the excitement of all of us wearing matching new shoes on holiday, when they arrived -- a set of handsome TOMS espadrilles -- Hurricane Hannah's were much too big for her and we therefore didn't pack them (which was the catalyst for much pandemonium to come) we were ultimately let off with nothing more than a warning, we made our way to the airport car rental queue.
While Sicily is very clearly a distinct society from the rest of Italy, there are of course many overlapping traits that remain. In Italy, on average, you can get a great coffee at most bars. Same thing in Sicily. In Italy, on average, anything official takes about ten times as long as it should. Same thing in Sicily. So, while we were happy to find ourselves second in line, minutes in the queue turned into hours which ultimately became days and then weeks [could be slightly exaggerated] and Sandi soon had to take Hurricane Hannah on a "cooling down" walk around the airport. As I heard distant gasps and other assorted exhortations from shocked holiday makers from far off in the airport terminal who were suffering from Hurricane Hannah's wrath, I finally made it to the front of the line where the young man asked me what number I had. "Number?" I asked politely but incredulously as though I had passed a beaten-up red "take a number please" machine on my way to the line, I obviously hadn't stopped to try to use it as it had the appearance of not having been in use since some time in the early 1930's and then hadn't fared well during the war years. Luckily, however, I went back to take a number (somehow one actually came out) after the man's assistant brought it back to life by giving the machine a thorough swat, and when he called out the next number it matched the one I had just been given. I signed seventy-three different official-looking papers, initialed about fifteen, and recited some weird latin verses with my hand on a bible, and just before sunset we were given the keys to a pretty cool, pretty giant SUV that would prove to be too wide for roughly 85% of the roads in Sicily.
Our first destination was the Agriturismo that we had booked approximately two months prior. I remember those days in early January quite well. Booking.com urgently reminded me every few minutes that Sicily is very popular during our requested dates, so we had better book something soon. Time is running out. Do not delay. Why haven't you booked yet? It seems like you don't really want to stay at a very nice place. Bad husband and father. Or at least one who doesn't.. OK! Under immense pressure that our dream farm B&B would soon be fully booked, we finally at what felt like the last possible moment made a reservation for what looked like a beautiful, relaxing quiet destination. And when we arrived and parked in the empty guest parking lot, it was! At least the first part... Our (first) Agriturismo sat close to the foot of the south-east side of Mount Etna, right in the middle of a large orange orchard. The buildings were old stone and really it was quite a nice looking place. The problem was that it wasn't all that quiet. At all. No, this particular Agriturismo (which I suppose I could have plainly seen if I'd paid closer attention to the Google Maps) sits right directly beside the one and only trans-Sicily highway. In our room with the windows and doors closed tight, if you had the air conditioner on high, Hannah's white noise machine was cranked up to 11, and you were hiding under the covers, it didn't seem THAT loud. But if you wanted to sit out in the orchard and spend the afternoon lazily picking, peeling, slicing (OK, so you can't lazily eat an orange) and finally eating fresh oranges in the mid-day sun, it was actually pretty difficult because all you could hear was the sound of Italian transport trucks flying by at 130+ km/h and I couldn't really get my heart rate down to anything below a 150. It's sad really. The place was just beautiful. They didn't lie or anything in any of the pictures, the food was delicious, the people were nice, but man was it ever loud.
We had a really nice dinner there on the first night, and then a 4+ hour Easter "lunch" the next day which involved unlimited wine and what seemed like never-ending courses of pretty delicious Sicilian food. But since I'm old now, becoming more curmudgeonly by the day, and steadily turning into a combination of the worst traits of each of my forebears, I just couldn't stand the noise. I felt a bit embarrassed telling them that we wanted to leave (and even blamed Hurricane Hannah to help save face) but I couldn't relax with all the noise. Luckily, Booking.com had been lying their faces off and when I called up another place that we had considered the guy said "yes, we have room" and when we got there and stayed with them for about a week, we were the only ones there for our entire visit. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's get back on track now to Monday morning when we ate another delicious Sicilian breakfast (a special Easter edition) and then checked-out and headed towards our new abode...
The new and improved Agriturismo was about a 30 minute drive south down the coast. This one also specialized in growing fruit on trees, but instead of oranges (actually it had a few blood orange trees and man those were delicious) it specialized in... LEMONS! First: obviously we were pretty worried that this place would be just as loud as the last one or some other thing would bother us and we'd just keep leaving places never finding that unattainable mythical perfection that is just over the horizon and realize that we've become those awful people who can never be happy anywhere and just as I was looking up the coordinates of the Al-Bustin Hotel as our potential next destination and considering changing my name to G.G, ... it was great! Quiet, close to the sea and a nice small town with a great bar for morning cappuccinos, and even a place to have a BBQ. We dropped off our things and headed towards Catania proper to meet up with a friend whom I hadn't seen in years.
In the heady days of 2003 I was a student activist on the campus of the University of Leeds fighting for the rights of the down-trodden and doing all in my power to bring down the capitalist oligarchy and disrupt its evil roots of power in all their forms. We traveled to London and shouted to the warmongers that you will not drop those bombs in our name! Rosalinda was a fellow socialist freedom fighter and we bonded over our hatred of what seemed back then like a bad US president (hahahaha oh the days of the early 2000's). Rosa was strong-willed and had the heart and mind of a person whose people had been colonized and bandied about amongst essentially all of the different conquerors that are known to history for the last 3000 years. Which makes sense because she's Sicilian. We met up with Rosalinda on the rough-and-tumble backstreets of Catania where she graciously offered to help keep us alive that little big longer by chauffeuring us around for the rest of the day. We started at a local eatery where we consumed 6 or 7 kilos of pasta each with a light Sicilian red wine to help down the pasta. Then it was time for dessert. After strolling through the Duomo Square -- home to the well-known 18th-century Elephant Fountain -- and (something for our Schmitter readers) spending a few moments awing at the grand Norman Cathedral dedicated to the patron saint and protector of the city, St. Agatha (!!!), we were led to a dessert bar where we were to try some Sicilian post-main-meal specialties. We ate frutta martorana, Pignolata of Messina, buccellato, cannoli, granita, cassata siciliana, and probably five or six other desserts that I either don't remember the names of or which I literally have no recollection of eating because my brain had turned off the memory-creating portion in an all-out rally-the-troops effort to produce enough insulin to keep me alive after consuming more sugar in a single sitting than I ever had before. Despite the near-death-experience, however, the sugar rush and tastiness was well worth the very brief trip to the emergency room.
The next day we packed up for a hiking excursion to Mount Etna. This day saw Hurricane Hannah at her most-deserving-of-the-name-Hurricane-Hannah. Mount Etna is the tallest active volcano in Europe and one of the most active volcanoes in the world. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (since 2013) and a Hurricane Hannah Greatest Hits site since 2018. What do I say about this? It was awful. It was really quite a terrible experience and possibly constituted the worst few hours of our entire vacation (with possible exception from Sandi's perspective of those hours when she was non-stop vomiting from her food poisoning attack -- discussed infra). Of course part of Hurricane Hannah's hurricaneness probably came from the fact that she didn't get a nap and we didn't have much food with us up there on the volcano but that doesn't really take away any of the sting.
Let's see... we had some nice dinners, some great pizza, we drank Camparis with about-as-fresh-as-you-can-get lemons since just as we needed one for the drink we would step outside and pull it off the tree, we ate ice cream, we walked along the sea, we ate brioche and ice cream for breakfast as Sicilians really do, and a bunch of other cool stuff. But let's get to that food-borne illness part now!
Amongst many other things, Sicily is well-known for having a fine seafood cuisine. The area around Catania in particular is known for a grilled swordfish which we tasted a little of earlier in the week but we wanted a full-blown Sicilian seafood experience. We looked up some places that were nearby (side note: never trust Booking.com -- ever. I've already alluded to the fact that things were not "almost full" at all and even though it was Easter time, we were far from "high season". In fact, most of the restaurants were still closed for the winter break which was a little disappointing but there you have it) and found a place right on the water fairly close by that had some good ratings. The place was pretty empty (cf. side note just above) but we had planned to go all out and gosh darnit we'd come this far so we ordered the "catch of the day". Whatever those fishermen brought back on the boat during today's outing, we were going to down. First, however, we were offered a pretty substantial appetizer. And by pretty substantial I mean almost every type of seafood you can think of: octopus (cold octopus salad which amazingly Hurricane Hannah loved), shrimp, mussels, clams, and ... oysters! I decided not to eat my oyster. Why, you ask?
Since nothing has really happened until it's been blogged about, you might not actually know about one of my many brushes with food-borne-illness and/or death that coincided with trips and air travel. Perhaps you're familiar with my trip to China (minimally catalogued on this particular blog) where I began suffering from the onset of FBI just as we were making our way to the massive Shanghai airport. But what about our nearly decade-ago trip to Canada's shining West coast capital and the bacteria that we brought with us back East? This happened, of course, before the advent of GWMD blogging and so there's no way that anyone could know about it (right?). It was March 2011 (Ok, I just checked that date and I guess that's only like seven years ago) and Sandi and I were newly-weds eager to discover the vast country that claimed us as its intrepid children. To set the mood and to understand how staggeringly long ago that truly was (even if it wasn't quite a decade), let's examine a visual representation to begin with.
Depending on your powers of observation, you will notice a couple of important things that have changed over the years that are clearly reflected in the above images. First, I had a lot more hair nearly ten years ago, and second, I would add a lot more whisky to my morning coffee nowadays. I also have a much cooler winter jacket now.
But back to the matter at hand. We had visited some quote-cool-unquote oyster bar in some hip neighbourhood in Vancouver and eaten a bunch of oysters (naturally). The menu warned us that it was their legal duty to inform all customers that it's possible that eating uncooked food introduces an increased chance of developing symptoms and/or sickness due to FBI-causing bacteria. We scoffed at such a warning that was clearly aimed at those less experienced in exotic food consumption than we and spent the afternoon and early evening helping to do our part in causing the latest oceanic dead zone in our quickly dying planet. Sure enough, 48 hours later on our way back East we both started feeling a little queasy. I remember thinking "weird... I didn't think that I suffered from air sickness..." but then everything came together as I sprinted out of the airplane to the nearest airport bathroom to vomit (btw, have I written about this before? It really feels like déjà vu is happening... hmm...). Anyways, long story short: I got terrible food poisoning and haven't eaten an oyster since.
Back to Sicily now. I felt a bit stupid and maybe even kinda wimpy but the trade-off didn't seem worth it. Even if there was only a 0.001% chance of developing a bad reaction from consuming said oyster, in the end they just taste like salty water with some squishy something or other in there. I'd rather have a lolly pop. Sandi ate one though, and ultimately paid the price. Forty-eight hours later -- like clockwork -- she was in and out of the bathroom praying to the porcelain gods. I'll probably never eat an oyster ever again.
Saturday -- our last full day -- was BBQ day. Rosalinda obviously wasn't traumatized enough by her initial encounter with Hurricane Hannah and so made her way out to the countryside with an SUV full of Sicilian BBQ ingredients. Sandi was still a little under the weather (i.e. she stayed in bed for most of the BBQ) but Hurricane Hannah and I started the day with a trip to our favourite cappuccino bar and to the local grocery store to buy some charcoals and other essentials. Because taking Hurricane Hannah anywhere is -- to put it politely -- a wee bit of an ordeal, we arrived back to the lemon grove far later than we had initially planned and Rosa-Sicilia (actually no one has ever called her that but whatever) was already there waiting for us at the gate. But no hard feelings and all that and we headed down the excruciatingly narrow driveway to the agriturismo-proper and started setting up the BBQ. The first thing -- of course -- is to de-cork the Mount Etna wine and light the fire. You then lean back with your glass of wine and relax while you let the coals wa... and, Hurricane Hannah just fell off the bench that she was climbing on that I had told her ninety-six thousand times to stop climbing on cause she could fall off and there's literally blood everywhere. Hurricane Hannah's mouth and surrounding area are a crimson bloody mess. I am, as you might imagine, not as relaxed as I imagined I might be a few short moments ago and I ask her to spit so we can assess the damage. About a litre (conservative estimate) of blood comes out but thankfully it turns out that she just cut her lip open and there's nothing too serious (that will wait until a few days after we return home and she breaks half of her front tooth off in the backyard, but that's another story). After a fortnight of crying and wet cloth application things calm down a bit and we finally get to the cooking.
Rosalinda is a kind and generous Sicilian. Emphasis on the generous as she brought enough steak, polpetta, and sausage to feed a small Aragonese army. With Sandi sidelined by a bad oyster, this monumental feast/task was left to just three of us: Rosa, me, and Hurricane Hannah. I swear she cooked 10 steaks if it was one, and the polpetta -- cooked between lemon tree leaves -- were not only delicious but almost endless. The sausage was the product of some kind of generations-old secret Sicilian recipe, the only problem with said recipe being that apparently you can only create it for a "serves 50" set-up. Luckily I'm such a terrible host that all we supplied was a bottle of Campari and a zucchini and so instead of having enough food for 1000 we only had enough for about 999. Nevertheless, we were up for the challenge! On certain days (cf. Mount Etna hiking day) Hurricane Hannah decides that nothing is good enough for her particular palette (even things that she's devoured before), whereas on other days, when the wind is just right, and the stars have aligned, she just goes to town... this was one of those days. Let me just say that it's a small miracle that Hurricane Hannah is still alive because she consumed more meat on that fateful BBQ day than many mere mortals consume in an entire lifetime. She ate steaks (plural) and polpette (I guess that's the plural?) and sausagess (double-plural -- get it?) and even some of my measly grilled zucchini (no Campari though). In the end we finished it all and even the Sicilian BBQ Queen of the Island herself was impressed. "Bellissima!" Hurricane Hannah exclaimed at the tastiness and plentifulness of the food.
After a long afternoon and early evening, Rosa left us to our own devices and we began to prepare for our 8 AM flight the following morning. We had some hiccups along the way and Hurricane Hannah was going through a difficult period in her life, but Sicily truly was a magical place that I can't wait to return to. We experienced a lot but only -- to truly bring in a well-used but well-fitting cliché -- scratched the surface (ugh.. barf..) of the mystical experience of this blah blah blah really nice place.
tl;dr*: Sicily has a lot of history, it's different from mainland Italy, Hurricane Hannah was difficult, Sandi got sick, Rosalinda cooked us a lot of food, Hurricane Hannah ate most of it.
* tl;dr (for those who aren't of the Internet generation) means "too long; didn't read" and is a summary often used in forums for long responses for people who don't feel like reading such a long response.
** PSA (Public Service Announcement):
I had written another version of this blogpost (lost to the aether forever) before my computer crashed and I hadn't saved it (well, I had, but about 2 hours before) and so I lost almost this whole story completely. So what you read above is not the original but a poor imitation of something somewhat akin to the original. So sad... Oh ya, and so the PSA part of this message is: SESO (Save Early, Save Often). Ciao!
