Palermo, Sicily

After two relatively uneventful days at sea, we arrived today in Palermo, the capital city of Sicily.

Our excursion this morning was to Cefalu, a small but popular coastal town east of Palermo. The plan looked something like this: one hour’s drive to Cafalu, ninety free minutes to enjoy the location however we wished, then one hour back to the port – hopefully in time for lunch.

On our arrival in Cefalu, the guide walked us to a small square in front of the town’s cathedral, pointed to where the public loos were and told us to meet back up in that spot, at 12 noon.

As the cathedral was right there, that’s where we headed, and since it had two towers, we bought two ‘blue’ tickets, giving us access to the tower and mosaic, although we were warned that one section of the tower walk – where we would normally be able to walk alongside the roof – was currently closed. For that, the teller gave us a small reduction. She also told us that a sermon would be starting shortly, which would last about 20 minutes, and that we wouldn’t be able to see the mosaic until after sermon had finished. We calculated that should be enough time to climb the tower, and be back down in time to see the mosaic.

Our motto is; see a tower, climb it, and it didn’t disappoint. It was a shame we weren’t allowed on the roof section because that looked quite interesting, but hey… we got the views, and looked forward to seeing what the mosaic was all about when we were back down at ground level, with hopefully enough time to spare to explore the rest of the town.

Except the sermon was still on.

Don’t get me wrong; the cathedral is a place of worship, and sermons are their stock-in-trade, but the fella giving the sermon did seem to drone on and on. We were reassured it should be coming to an end soon, but decided to wander out of the cathedral and go in search of the WC (and then come back). Well, that was a fiasco! We found it, but it was €1 euro to go in. Which would be fine except the machine that took the coins kept spitting them out. A small queue had developed, with folks at the front of the queue taking to bashing the payment machine quite aggressively, to try and permit entry. Every once in a while it would let someone through; Tracey made it, but I decided I could probably wait, and couldn’t be bothered with the hassle.

When we finally returned to the cathedral, the sermon was still in progress. The twenty minutes had stretched to over three quarters of an hour – possibly longer – and we were anxiously looking at the time, knowing that we had to be back at the meeting point in about 10 minutes. Finally, with minutes to spare, the sermon ended, the security personal in charge of crowd control opened the cordon, and we got to see mosaic situated behind the altar (which is why we weren’t allowed access while the man in white was sermonising).

Honestly; it really wasn’t worth the wait.

We hurried back to the meeting point and rejoined the group to walk back to the coach. Both of us felt that it had been a bit of a waste of a morning (apart from the tower), and we hadn’t really had much of a chance to explore Cefalu, which seems like a really interesting place.

An hour later, we arrived back at the port, and my first job, on getting back on to the ship was to go to the loo.

After lunch we decided to walk back into Palermo in search of something interesting… anything, really, just to make up for our underwhelming Cefalu experience. After a couple of wrong turns (we seem to be in the habit of taking the longest route to anywhere just lately), we found ourselves in a pedestrianised area in front of a large theatre.

It was busy, and this was clearly the Palermo that folks flocked to see. Satisfied, we wandered around a bit, taking photos, before heading back to the ship.