Ok, kiddies, now I know I didn’t update the last two weeks cause I had exams to prepare for.  Then, to make up for the stress of midterms, I took time off and went to Sicily and Naples;  which means people missed out on their normal dose of Jesus.  Somehow Glenn took time from being the goddamn batman long enough to notice this injustice and was all like, “Where’s my fucking column?”  Well, not quite, but I been reading a lot of Warren Ellis before bed lately (transmet + gin = odd dreams).  So in order to appease the mighty NerdFit overlords I bring you the first of two (maybe three if I get lazy and don’t want to make a real article later on) articles about my trek.

So get this, we get one week off during the semester, which means a 10 day holiday. Some people in our school have been planning what they were going to do and who they were going to do it with since they got off the fucking plane in Rome. We’re listening to inspector GQ talk to us about gypsies and these people are ordering plane tickets. Anyone who knows me can guess my response…Fuck that noise. I am a procrastinator extreme so much so that I didn’t decide where I was going till last week, I booked no rooms, and only bought my ticket down the day before I left. But I decided the three places I must at least stop at are the villages that my family emigrated from. So I pack my bags, pick up my tickets and start my 18 hour trek the southern most village, Calatafimi.

After a relatively shitty train ride I arrive in Calatafimi, the countryside of the old country, rustic, quaint, and the middle of bum fuck nowhere. Don’t get me wrong it was all very scenic and spent like two hours just taking pictures, but that’s all I could do. I leave the “station” and find myself smack-dab in the middle of, what I can only equate to, an interstate. So I choose to follow the roads for a ways and find there is a small road that cuts through some of the farm land, suitcase in tow, I decide to see where this path lead and what kind of pictures I can take to share with my folks and grandparents. Cause of course half the reason to even seek these places out is to provide myself with material to show off at Christmas time.

As I said I took pictures for like two hours along this one road, and at first it was great, the road was paved and the previously crappy weather had cleared (oh foreshadowing). Well the paved road eventually gave way to gravel, “sure fine whatever” I think, aloud, to myself… Anyway that’s fine too at first, then some puddles begin to appear, “well it did rain for like 10 hours straight last night, make sense” again to myself, don’t judge me. Well apparently I’m a frightfully and stubbornly slow child, cause I still kept going even after the gravel changed to dirt and the puddles to an omnipresent mud. By this point both my shoes and the wheels of my suitcase have a decent layer of mud caked on at which point the skies open up and I decide to give up and return to the “station”.

I put this in quotes for a reason, the “station” has only two tracks (one from Palermo one towards), no employees working there, oh and the machine that normally dispenses tickets was completely powered down…I had no way of buying a return ticket, stranded in this farm community where the only forms of life I had come across was a pair of horses. So after a few minutes panic over what to do about the ticket I spent twice as long in rage over the discovery they didn’t have a restroom, I had to piss like a racehorse. Eventually I got the bright idea to try and get a ticket online, yay mobile internet, but the site kept yanking me around despite have had worked for me just the night before.

Eventually I get my father on the line and the two of us are both trying to pull some tickets out of the site. Each of us went through a handful of new accounts and all of our collective cards, but the site refused to work with us. We each got about an hour into it and decided that it was a hopeless cause so I had to just try to getting on and hoping no one asked to see my ticket.

Eventually I got back and it turns out that no one did ask to see my ticket. However for the three hours it took to get back to Palermo I was jumpy as a mofo, every village we stopped every time one of the doors opened, pretty much anything put in a personal state of panic. So in summation, I love my family, I love my heritage, and I love Italy. That said, fuck that place, I’m glad my great grandmother left I think that maybe the should have a few generations earlier. Its pretty but damn. Well that’s all for now, surely my experiences in the other two villages could not have as bad… surely.

CIAO TUTTI.