Paris and our Very Good Friends

 July 1, 2023, Paris--Travel was quite easy to France last weekend.   The taxi to Catania, the planes to Vienna, then to Paris, and then the taxi again from Charles de Gaulle to our friends John and Eric in the 18th arrondissement were little more than tiring.  After all it is a five hour air trip.  We have been quite busy so that John has not taken up the keyboard to write.

It is always good  to see our friends and to visit the French capital, a city we love.  After the constant walking, up and down, around and about in Taormina, Siracusa, Noto and Palermo, it is good to have the Metro nearby and few hills to deal with.  Although they live near Montmartre we didn't scale it this year.

We've been to Paris many times, so we did not need to  deal with the usual tourist sites.  Instead John had read about a major show at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, part of the Louvre complex, that was a must for us.  "Hair" was both humorous and informative, going all the way from classic times to the present including how the monstrous head dresses of the 18th and 19th centuries were constructed.  A movie, with one shot here, showed how it is done.   The intricacies and the additional materials necessary were incredible, including combs, other people's hair, ribbons and other stuff we can't name.  Visiting non-Europeans even got photographed, but to make the shots proper they wore European dress.  Some shots:

The following day, Tuesday, a group of John and Eric's expatriot/binational friends came by for a cocktail dinner party that lasted the whole evening.  The conversation went from the sublime to the ridiculous and poop to nuts because John and Eric had just brought home a new dog, Taylor,, and one of the guests brought her 3-month old poodle named Martini. We had a really fine time.

On Wednesday, June 29, we headed out to Le Perreux, a suburb in the Marne Valley by train.  We have known our host and hostess, Marcel and Colette, who are in their early nineties, for about 30 years, visiting them at their summer home in Brittany, and having them visit us in Washington.  Their grandson, a film maker, who had spent a couple of weeks on our street with neighbors when he was about 15, was also present.  Wonderful courgères (accompanied with champagne), then mushroom salad, lotte (monkfish), cheeses (accompanied with a Sancerre) and pineapple-strawberry tarts with fresh whipped cream (accompanied by a Bordeaux).  A truly lovely time together.  

On Thursday we had a good quiet day, shipped gifts home, a sidewalk cafe lunch of wine and salad, whole filet of sole for dinner, cooked on its bone structure, on which Ben very successfully proved his surgical talents and a relatively early night to bed.

Friday, June 30, included one of our reasons to come to Paris, a place which we have never visited.  We took the hour long train trip to Giverny to see Monet's fabulous gardens and his water lily pond that served as inspiration for his magnificent paintings. 

 

Of course there is always an interesting character around, this one happened to be a pet chicken who was clearly well fed at the café in the nearby village.  Today we head off to meet our fellow cruisers and we will board our canal boat tomorrow. 

 

Sicily here we are!

 Taormina, Sicily, June 19, 2023--It seemed like a good place to start an exploration on an island of rich and complex history, and one we had never been to.  With a little planning and lots of discussion among friends we decided we'd use Taormina as the base, explore Syracuse and Mt. Etna and manage a day trip to Palermo, the province's capital.

June 19, Taormina, Sicily.  It's a grand place.  As you can see with Ben's back on Mt. Etna, lightly fuming away, and John's on the Mediterranean, trying not to look at the smalli-ish cruise-ship which seems to have unloaded merely one zodiac of tourists looking for T-shirts. 

But don't be faint of heart when you learn that it is 12 and a half hours of flying time alone to get here.  We stood in line at Dulles for 90 minutes, got stuck in Metro's construction on the Orange/Silver line, then some TSA guy thought he found something explosive on the outside of John's cellphone--requiring  a full body pat-down (nice soft hands), and experts looking over the phone.  We had five minutes to spare before Austrian Airlines closed plane's the doors without us.

At Catania Airport in Italy, we learned John had made a mistake on the pick-up car service so we ended up with a taxi to the hotel, the Hotel Mediterranee, with the fabulous views. but now we are settled and off to see the people at this high level center of commerce (it hosts international meetings), and partake of gelato before finding  a dinner specializing in local fish or seafood. 

June 24, Taormina, Sicily. Saturday, As is obviously visible, John has not had time to sit down and write anything this past few days.  It has been a whirlwind of activity, so much so that we are taking a day of before heading to Paris tomorrow.  We have had to forego a day's visit to Mt. Etna, but we have seen smoking in the distance every day when we get up.

The dinner we found on the 19th, Monday, was in a small trattoria down a side street where we truly enjoyed wonderful traditional Sicilian cuisine.   We sat under arbors with trained orange trees growing. One small orange, about an inch in diameter, landed into Ben's seltzer literally making a splash at dinner.

Trattoria Don Camillo does not have a wine list and provided us with the house white wine, which was better than many of the much pricier vintages we have had around the world. Our primi piattis were linguini with  bottarga and zucchini blossoms.  It was breathtakingly wonderful.  For the second course we split a dorade à la siciliano, cooked with tomato sauce with capers.

On June 20, Tuesday, we ventured around and about Taormina, which despite its resort reputation, is really quite small.   It is loaded with high-end retail, and very very ritzy hotels.  There are a number of interesting buildings like the police station with Stars of David in the walls.  One of the churches is even as old as Harvard or Rhode Island, dating to the 1630s! 

The architecture depending on who ruled when varies from Greek to Roman to Arab Muslim, to Norman to Spanish to French to modern.  And the variations is in physiognomy are equally as varied.  Sicily is as varied as the United States with its continued interaction with Africa, the East and the North  It sits on the African tectonic plate, not the European one.  This causes earthquakes.

We took the gondala down the cliffs to the beach, walked around a bit.  It's very pretty, with lots of chaises longues, not our style, so we took a ride back up.  Quite fun.   

Dinner Tuesday night was at the Granduca.  The starters were absolutely magnificent.  We both had  carpaccio or swordfish served with red pickled onions, avocado, and mangosteen (!!! John loves mjangosteens).  The second course was a total let-down.  John had rolled sardines around bread-crumb stuffing.  The sardines could hardly be tasted.  Ben's involuntini of swordfish, (stuffed rolled swordfish), another let down.  The wine did not meet expectations--an Etna Bianco.

Wednesday, June 21, was a day-long tour down the region's eastern seaboard to Syracuse and Noto, two very different places.   A good part of the Siracusa tour included the archeological site, which is enormous.  The altar is about as big as an Olympic swimming pool, all carverd from one piece of lava stone.  The collapsed garden, which was full of plants brought by colonists about 300 BCE, provided the Siracusi with many varieties of plants and vegetables not available in Europe at the time,  Siracusa had a population approaching a million and is said, at the time, to be the third in the world after Alexandria and Mexico City.  

John remarked that there was so much walking that he had walked back and forth the distance from our house in DC to Eastern Market Station at least five times! 

The medieval part of the city is on an island reached by bridges, and very crowded.   We enjoyed walking around and sitting over sorbetti limone and almold gelato in the cathedral square.  The piazza's atmosphere and architecture enhanced the desserts.

Everybody back on the bus for the short run to Noto, one of two totally baroque cities in Europe and a Unesco site.  Ruined by an earthquake in the late 17th century, it was totally rebuilt in baroque style.  The main street is a forest of curlicues, among which baby angels play.  A good place to discuss American politics with Dutch travelers!

Back in Taormina we were so tired we ate sandwiches the hotel had put up for us that morning because we were leaving so early, drank lemon sodas, and off to bed for yesterday's trip to Palermo.  Due to distance it became a two day affair.  The train was almost like watching a show entitled "This is your life, Sicily".

Sicily has a train network that often is single track.   This means that breakdowns, or huge freight trains can delay passenger trains.  A couple of times we sat for five or ten minutes awaiting a passing freight train. Another time we were delayed 30 minutes because of a wreck on the line. When we saw the wrecked train, John thought that the the front car of a train dating from the 1960s, and clearly used for commuter service.  Our trains though were very up to date, huge windows, unreclinable seats, no pulldown tables from Messina to Palermo, totally electrified.  Spartan compared to Amtrak, but the longest time spent on trains is not more than four hours if they are running to schedules.  Space for bikes and scooters included. 

Wednesday, June 22-Thursday, June 23, Palermo.  We felt we had to go Palermo.  Considering that Sicily is about the same size of Vermont, with 5-million residents.  Its biggest cities are Palermo (660,000), Catania (290,000) and Messina (240,000), compared to Burlington (42,000). Palermo has passed through many cultures and it shows.  Even since 1860, when Italy's different kingdoms were united, Sicily lost its own king (a Bourbon), for the Northern Italian House of Savoy (Victor Emmanuel),which was replaced by the Italian Republic after World War II.  Sicily is supposed to be poorer than the rest of Italy, but that really doesn't show.

When we got to Palermo over two hours late, we had to find a hotel, but couldn't find the I-information service.  We even knocked on the police precinct door, where a good sergeant directed us, but we found a place by asking at a couple of hotels..  One found a BnB owned by the same firm so we ended up with fine accomodation in the historic district,

We attempted to have dinner at a friend's recommended go-to, but it was fully booked so we stopped at local trattoria, Lucchese a tavula è cunzata, where we had an excellent meal, with a Grasse wine.  The meal was two shared appetizers, then we shared octopus with mashed potatoes.  We really binged on octopus.

The following morning, June 23, we assessed our time and realized we had about three hours to visit Palermo--though we had seen a lot by foot at night the previous evening.  We decided to take in the Palatina, associated with the Royal Palace.  it was strongly recommended by an economics professor we talked to on the train, and he was right!

The Palatina is a marvel.  A few pictures will tell it all.  Mosaics, paintings, marble, gold.  Centuries of work.  Of course, one must remove one's hat.  

The train trip home to Taormina was uneventful.  Just a couple of delays for freight trains.

Dinner last night a Adduma, in the center of Taormina was excellent.  John had a pressed mix of raw shrimp that was incredible, while Ben had superb tuna tartar.  John's second course was a rump steak and Ben's was a lovely branzino.  We had conturno of grilled eggplant, zucchini, cabbage abd sweet red pepper as well as a salad.  The rump steak was excellent.  We enjoyed a Filippo Grasse with the meal.