Ortygia

First the bad news (for me, at least). My laptop died. It's somewhere in the continental United States, hopefully being attended to by Best Buy geniuses. I don't know what's wrong, how long it will be gone, or how much it will cost to fix it. Other than that, it's fine.

Thankfully we still have the old desktop, so I've rescued some photos, moved them here, and will start blogging again. You may all rejoice.

OK, back to Sicily. On Tuesday we took a day trip to Syracuse, an ancient town with more history than, well, most places. In Syracuse, there are two main areas to visit, the ancient town with lots of historical rubble, and Ortygia, the touristy island, with a little bit of historical rubble.

We didn't know if we could visit both, so we went to Ortygia first. This picture shows how beautiful Sicily can be, when framed properly.



A great part of the charm of Ortygia are its narrow streets. Many of them are so narrow that cars don't drive on them. And that is saying something.



One of the fun parts of our trip was trying to find the tourist information office. We had a map of Ortygia which had an "I" marked on it. There was even a street name. We found the street, walked to where the office should be, and couldn't find it. Michelle noted a door that had "tourism" on it, but we saw that it was a travel agency. They did point us in the right direction though.

Apparently we had walked right by the office. Here it is.



What we failed to see was this sign, which apparently is sufficient to tell all the tourists that there is a tourist information office inside the courtyard.



In most countries, they mark the tourist offices so they can be easily found. In Sicily, they want to make sure that you really want to get tourist information.