Sicilian Adventures

Day 1: His side of the story

Scene1: Italian cab drivers
The day began early with an adventure trip to the airport! We were to take the flight from Rome to Trapani.
Airport was hardly 2 km. away from the Hotel we stayed in ( thanks to all the planning we did with the initial hotel booking) but the cab driver was an Italian Version Of our dear Prem chopra - smooth talker with equally cunning intentions -- charged us 30 Euros for the ride and all that with a big smile on his face. What a way to start our day!

Scene 2: Airport
This is always the tricky part... 15kgs allowed to check in and only 1 cabin baggage per person is what Ryan air says and that was quite a challenging ask. On a lighter note we had second thoughts to check-in Rashmi instead of the big suitcase. But all went well and we reached Sicily with no further hiccups.

Scene 3: Trapani and the Statue of Garibaldi
This time from Airport we had our learning not to take the cab so we waited for the Shuttle service to Trapani. The hotel owner had given us directions from the statue of Garibaldi in Trapani. So we asked the bus driver to stop near the statue and he assured to indicate the stop when we pass by.
The drive from the airport to Trapani was interesting and extremely long (close to 45minutes).
The landscape was more like an African village (not that I have been to one but I read something like that in a book :-)). It was more like a spaghetti western movie in Sepia mode. Some of the towns we passed by, reminded me of Chitradurga (a district in Karnataka).
After 45 minutes of drive we reminded the driver about Mr. Garibaldi and he promptly dropped us near a park which had a statue and explained something in Italian which we did not really understand.
We searched all around for the statue and did not find one. With all our linguistic and expression of Italian skills we found out that we actually got down in a wrong place. After about a couple of Km's of walk with the entire luggage we got to the Garibaldi statue and then the B&B was not too difficult to find from there.



The owner of our B&B (Alessandra) was a very warm person welcomed us with some sweets and local sweet wine. After some small talks we found out that she was in India as a tourist some years back and was very impressed by India (also I realized that she had visited more places in India than me so I decided not to discuss that part too much )..

Scene4: Food hunt
Trapani is probably as lazy as me. The city wakes up probably after sunset... had a real tough time finding place to have our lunch. But food probably is one of the best parts of Trapani. Rashmi could not stop eating their local dish (Pesto trapanese) everywhere we went.

The rest of the day went smooth with lesser surprises.... except for the part where we forgot our address and had to communicate with the locals only to realize that we weren’t aware of any street names except for our Mr. Garibaldi's statue (but we were really overwhelmed by the support we got from the locals to trace our way back)..

Her side of the story will have some more of the practical details about Trapani and so on :-)))