Messina

3/4 July 

I think I realise now why my head hurts. Each day, without fail, I pull back the little curtain into my little bathroom and each day, without fail, I bang my head on the low cross beam just inside the door. Have I mentioned that the roof is low?

Another early start to get homework done for teacher after another late night out last night.  After yesterday's (Thursday's) lesson in which, among other thing, we learned some common Italian colloquial phrases - largely based on racial stereotypes it has to be said (to ’do a North American Indian' is to slope off without paying for example) - I rushed back and did a quick turn round in the house and then was off to the school for a trip to Messina, the port town 20 miles down the road and the main route into Sicily 

from the mainland.  I thought about five people from the school would be going (and apart from Joel and me the rest of the students are women) but as it turned out it was just Joel and I. On the one hand I'm glad to have seen another part of the island but on the other, Messina is a port town that has been flattened by earthquakes in the 1700s and early 1900s and so there is little of the original there.  We saw an old Christian church come mosque come church again (this island has been overrun by many people over the years; part of it was even English at one stage although we pulled out in the 1700s - and it seems the reason why is a mystery).  We saw the duomo, or cathedral, which has been rebuilt but is quite impressive,

 

and we saw one of the only original buildings that is still standing.  In general though, we just tried to imagine what the place might have been like before it was flattened.  The day was rounded off with a swim in a part of the town to the north that, if it were not for all the cars parked in the narrow streets, would have been the typical dusty, paint peeling, but nevertheless character laden, Mediterranean seaside village. 

I agreed to meet Joel for a pizza in the town after we got back and then we met up with the girls we had had a drink with last night.  But I think the combination of late nights and the loud music in the open air bar (so different from last night) took its toll and I decided to leave just after midnight and toddled off home to sneak in like a dirty stop out yet again.......