a non italiana in italia: So, Sicily...

Ahaha... Sicily is just as contradictory as I thought it would be. Don't get me wrong, I had A LOT of fun, but it's hard to only think well of an island that basically coined mafioso and tried to steal my passport. Oh, that's right. The 4-star, incredibly gorgeous hotel in Agrigento (Hotel Ulisse, so don't stay there!) tried to steal my passport. It was a whole ordeal that lasted over an hour. Basically, for everyone who hasn't been to Europe (or Italy, specifically), hotels like to keep your passport for traveler information. I'm not really sure as to the reason, because in Italy the police can stop you to check your identification, so this doesn't seem like the best idea, but whatever. They usually keep it in the cubby hole allotted for your room key.

We had to hand in our passports the night we arrived at the hotel. The directors of our program went around and collected them from everyone and I handed mine to my friend who was closer to one of them and WATCHED HER hand it to him. He then put his stack of passports (mine was in the MIDDLE) on the desk for the clerk to check in. That night, they called his room because he had forgotten to hand in his passport, so they just needed his info. At that point, no mention was made that the clerk had only received 20 passports (instead of 22). The next morning, everyone got their passports before going out to the bus. Mine was NO WHERE TO BE FOUND!!! The clerk kept asking if I had it. Yeah, right, like Miss OCD doesn't know where that sucker is at all times. Ironically, or I guess interestingly, my passport is the only old passport amongst everyone at CIEE: it has a very flexible cover, no microchip and is much easier to fake.

The clerk NEVER alerted anyone to the fact that my passport was missing and got angrier and angrier about us asking him to check behind the desk, etc. The nicest and BEST bus driver in the whole world (seriously, this guy navigated scenic, windy roads up cliffsides like it was nothing) crawled around under the registration desk to look for it. Basically, Riccardo and Richard--two of the directors--were arguing with the clerk and some other flunky who showed up as well.

After an hour, when the passport was still MIA, I had to go out and dig through my bag to make sure it wasn't there (best line ever was my friend telling them it wasn't in there because "she has OCD. Her passport wouldn't be anywhere she didn't know about." Yeah... it wasn't there of course.

Riccardo and Rich went back inside without any students (who knows what went down then...) and the owner of the hotel had to come down as well. Richard said very loudly that we now had to go to the questura (police station) to report the theft (which meant really un-fun things for me in Agrigento) and then they went back to the bus. Low and behold!! Just as we were about to pull out of the parking lot the flunky runs out to the bus with my passport in hand (the whole bus started cheering). Wow. Apparently it was "under the registration sign on the desk" (which it wasn't because Richard looked under there and it would have been lopsided if it was under there).

Moral of the story: Never. Give. Anyone. Your. Passport. In. Sicily.

Needless to say, I was very happy to have it back.

But the rest of Sicily was a lot of fun. If you want to see all the pics, I'm slowly going to be loading the good ones on facebook over the next week(-ish)... (give me a break, there are about 800 of them).

Highlights:

Palermo