16 hours in Catania, Italy

Ciao all! 

Well our stop after Athens was Catania, Italy. We only spent one night there on our way to our workaway in Northern Sicily. 

One of the major sites I have been using to plan this trip is rome2rio.com while it is awesome sometimes it can be a little off. We flew out of Athens in the morning and had a 9 hour layover in Rome (which we took full advantage of) but this did mean that we made it to Catania very late, so when we got there and realized that the bus that we take from the airport to the stop near the hostel had changed numbers it was a little confusing after such a long day. Luckily I know much more italic than Greek and was able to communicate where it was we were trying to get to and we figured it out with relative ease. I spoke in Spanish not Italian to figure it all out but Sicilian Italian is the closest that you can get to Spanish so it worked out well and made for a much easier transition than I expected. 

Catania is such a beautiful place, every corner you take there is history on it. We actually accidentally wound up in a cemetery there but it was beautiful. All the headstones are so extravagant and beautiful it was interesting to see the difference between that and places in the U.S. We got up early enough to go the the fish market and wounded around. I love simply watching the differences in they way people treat food in various places, it's one of those wow Americans are tight asses about there food, kind of experiences. One thing that is a little less pleasant is once they close the fish market they dump the water on the streets and so all you smell is fish through out most of Catania, not in like a "I smell the sea" way but like a bad fish way. 

I wish we would have gotten there before 1 AM because the night life there was so lively, but since we only stayed one night and got in very late that one night we unfortunately missed out on that. Catania was a beautiful place to simply wonder around, we had cappuccino in the square and watched kids eating gelato on the elephant statue in the center of the square, saw the pope being broadcasted to the square on the big screen, and listened to the church bells ring all around the city. It was pretty magnificent but very brief, less than 24 hours after our arrival we were on a train headed north to Messina for our next adventure.