3rd Weekend trip: Part 3

(June 15th) After getting our free breakfast at the hotel bar (cappuccino and a chocolate creme filled croissant...yeah I was being the fat kid that morning), we headed back towards the east coast of the island with a few stops on our way back. Oh, on the way there, we stopped at a gas station to fill up (gas is ~$10 US a gallon by the way), and I saw a whole bunch of children surrounding this red vending machine. So, being curious as to what was in this vending machine besides candy, we went over to look. It was a vending machine for Adult videos! Hence, the collection of fascinated children surrounding it. We made another stop at a Medieval castle on the coast, which happened to be closed for renovations at the time, so we only got a far away glance. The beach there was beautiful, but also a private beach, so we also had to enjoy this from a distance. Our next stop was Piazza Armerina. We didn't actually spend time in the town, but visited the Roman Villa of Casale, another UNESCO world heritage site. This site has one of the most important and best preserved Roman monuments in the world, most famous for mosaic floors that can be found in almost all the rooms. The building itself was built around the 2nd century AD, and enlarged in the 3rd century. No one really knows who actually lived here, there are a lot of good guesses though (such as the Emperor Maximianus). Unfortunately, around half the mosaics/rooms were being renovated at the time we went to visit. Bummer : (
The ones we did see though, were amazing. The mosaics themselves cover a floor area of about 3,500 meters squared!! Also necessary to buy a guide book for this site, as the entry fee doesn't cover a map or anything. I had bought one earlier that covered both this site and Morgantina, but as I can't walk and read aloud at the same time, I was not the designated tour guide haha (Kirsten, another friend of mine, was). Funny (but also, not so funny) story: Chris another student joining our little group around the Villa site, had bought a jew harp (aka mouth harp) earlier with Eddie (another student). The way the viewing of many of the mosaics works here is you are on a raised steel walkway over the mosaics and rooms, looking down on them. So, Chris was playing with his jew harp and some how managed to drop it while we were on top of one of the mosaics, and of course it dropped right smack into the middle of one of them. Yeah...nothing we could do about that one.

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