The Agriturismo and friends

So the place that I stayed at along with 16 other people as I mentioned earlier was called the Agriturismo. For all the bad things that happened, I actually ended up with the best roommates out of everyone. Cait was my roommate, Reese was in the other bedroom of our apartment sharing a room with Katherine. After staying here though, I was glad to come back to the states and be able to keep the shower on the whole time I was taking a shower. Our showers had a very shallow basin, and would easily overflow and leak out across the floor of the bathroom and into the bedroom. So, to prevent this and to save on water as that was a problem as well, we had to only turn on the water to get wet enough to soap up and turn the water off again etc. The water issue was realized during the first week we were there, when we all came back from the field dirty and sweaty, we ran out of water so only about half of us got showers. After that, everyone was super careful about taking very quick showers. Our water came from a spring source, so it refills fairly slowly. The Agriturismo was owned by Mrs. Deluca (who I actually don't have a picture of), but she's a very cute little old Italian lady. The caretaker for our place was a Moroccan native, that had moved to Sicily for work with his brother (who's now a cook in Messina). Chokie was his name. He spoke Arabic, Italian, and French. No English though, which made things interesting at times when we had no Italian speakers around. There were two students who could speak decent to good Italian, which helped a lot when they were around. Chokie really liked having us around, as did the dogs. He did learn a few things in English before we left, which of course consisted of some swear words, most of our names (including my nickname!), and a few more useful verbs (like eat). He would make us tea sometimes in the afternoons that had fresh Moroccan mint in it (as there was a plant right outside our apartment) which was fantastic, and espresso in the mornings if we were washing ceramics that day. One weekend he even made us pizza from scratch, along with pasta and a sauce he also made himself. The other person I have mentioned that also spent a lot of time with us (well, actually in our kitchen), was the Sicilian cook Santina. I don't have a picture at the moment, as someone else took the picture of me with her on their camera, but the best way to describe her was a loud Italian version of Gloria Estefan. She used our kitchen since it was the only downstairs kitchen to cook our meals at night, so if we weren't eating that night with her we would have to either eat before she came at 8pm or cook in another apartment. There was another big common room that everyone (staff and students) that was eating that evening would sit down in and be served, we also had our lectures in this room when they were scheduled. Oh yeah, she also spoke zero English. So we would have to guess most of the time what she was trying to say to us, since none of our apartment spoke Italian, or go get someone to translate. Even though she knew we didn't speak Italian, she would just say it louder the second time, as if that made a difference. ::shrug:: She also, along with many other Sicilians we ended up meeting, had no concept of personal space. If you ate everything on your plate, she would give you more, even if you said no haha. The way the meals worked was you had an appetizer, usually consisting of one or a few of the following: prosciutto, mozzarella, bread, lettuce with lemon juice, or olives. First course is some kind of pasta dish, and second course was either some type of meat or eggplant/peppers. Dessert was usually fresh fruit (cherries, apricots, peaches, strawberries, watermelon), a few times we got a special treat and got Sicilian sweets. The first time we had that, I tried one that I thought was just a pastry soaked in honey or something, and as I popped it into my mouth (with all the staff watching me do this, as they knew what it was actually soaked in), I choke as it was actually soaked in rum! They got a good laugh out of that one...
There was one weekend trip (the last one) where myself and a few others did not go, as it was going to be the most expensive one (Lipari, one of the Aeolian Islands off the coast of Sicily). It ended up costing them about €200, equivalent to about $320 US. Some of those pictures from that weekend are also in this post, more in the upcoming post. We ended up staying up to watch the sunrise one night, with the help of a variety of beverages. The weekend before this, one of the dogs had puppies! We of course, took bets on when the date would be and how many she would have. Price is right rules applied. No one won the date, but Andy won the number of puppies, which was 8. Everyone owed Andy a liter of beer.

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