Boy, This Place is Cool!

I mean LITERALLY cool. We arrived in Ortigia, where we planned on spending 10 whole days, to find, to our chagrin, that the weather was really cold, and the first couple days were rainy.  We'd been looking forward to staying in an apartment where we could prepare our own meals, and even stopped in Syracuse to grocery shop for the week.  We found our place, Ortigia Luxury Apartments, and our first surprise was that "ground floor" really means one floor up, and carrying our suitcases up those stairs. Upon first walking in, we thought we had the perfect place; we had two bedrooms up, one big bedroom down, a large bathroom, kitchen, dining area, comfortable-looking furniture etc., even a washing machine. Beautiful high ceilings and it was very authentic old Italian looking. Shutters on the doors and things like that, tiles and stone surfaces everywhere, modern kitchen appliances, and everything clean as a whistle. Then we discovered that it's really winter here. It's 47 degrees outside this building and what they have to heat the whole downstairs is a small box heater, and not even a strong one. The bathroom has a small electric heater but it will only stay on for like 5 minutes at a time, so you can never heat up the bathroom. Taking a shower is like doing the polar bear plunge. I must have made quite a picture as I went to bed each evening with my socks on, my nightgown, and a shirt over the nightgown, all in an attempt to keep warm. Without the electric blanket under the sheets, we wouldn't have slept at all. Then there's the Wi-Fi or sometimes there is Wi-Fi which is a real problem for us, being into Ozark.

The other issue is that the community of Ortigia is basically closed for the winter. It is very difficult to find even a place to buy food. We finally found a little mini-mart (the Indian-run mini-marts are everwhere) where at least we could buy water; rather important, as it also turns out that the water in the apartment is non-potable! That is very hard to get used to or even think about like when brushing your teeth or boiling your spaghetti. So you end up carrying a lot of water back to the apartment. One morning I made the mistake of turning on the water to wet my toothbrush and I almost freaked out.

Randy asked me this morning how many days we have been here and I said 25. It really only feels like 25.  So the internet was up for a bit and I searched for flights from Catania on Ryanair to anywhere--anywhere at all--focusing on not going to places like Amsterdam. So we found two flights one on the 27th going to Seville and another on the 30th going to Seville. We didn't want to wait until the 30th, even though that flight was only $5, as we need to get out of here.

So we're going to just eat the seven days we have left here, and tomorrow morning we jump on a plane early and go to Seville. According to Google weather it is at least in the 60s in Seville and we will be in a hotel that hopefully has heat.