Cruising – Messina & Taormina, Sicily

Our first full day on board began with a lovely breakfast in the dining room. The fruit, cereal, rolls, and meats (including salmon) buffet is excellent and worked well for both of us. Since our excursion today wasn’t until 1:30 we headed back to our room to relax and post yesterday’s blog. I thought I had a brainstorm about using the ePC and iCloud to upload photos from Rome, however after waiting 20 minutes (!) for the iCloud dashboard to download I discovered the ePC doesn’t have the right version of Microsoft, so back to the drawing board. My next solution, after determining the ship’s computer towers are under lock and key, is to use the iPad for photos, carrying it instead of a camera. If you se photos in this post, you’ll know I was successful. If you don’t, then I’ll just post all photos when I return. (next purchase needs to be an Apple laptop I’m thinking…). If any readers have a photo solution to suggest for moving them from camera to post with an iPad, Nikon, ePC and a Nook on hand, please send them my way!

We headed to the buffet for lunch and were very pleasantly surprised to find a wealth of both “traditional” (hamburgers, salads, sandwich fixings, pasta, pizza) and interesting selections like curried rice, aloo gobi, raita, Thai Chicken pizza among other items. Following lunch, we met in the theater for our afternoon tour to Taormina, a picturesque town in the hills above Messina.

There were narrow streets of shops of all kinds and tons of people exploring them. Since the town is built up in the hills, there are winding side streets with flights of steps going either up to more shops and restaurants or down to the same. Flowers on balconies overlooking the narrow streets added to the town’s quaintness.

A main stop in our walking tour of the town was the Greek and Roman Theatre. It was started by the Greeks using large blocks of rock then added onto by the Romans with their typical brick building style. The stage was built with its back to the sea, so the sea winds could assist with acoustic by blowing the actor’s word toward the audience. Mt. Etna, a live volcano, is across the bay and is framed by a partially destroyed wall at the rear of the stage. Performances take place at the theatre nightly today from June to early September.

After the theatre we all had time to wander on our own, so we headed to the Roman wall that remains. Back on the main street we stopped outside a store that sells marzipan items and took a photo of the window display — the items look like onions, fish, and fruits but are really marzipan — just amazing! Denny stopped for a mango fruit sorbet on a stick at one of the many gelato shoots along the street.

After returning to the ship, we headed to dinner then retrieved our passports, as it seems we need them for tomorrow’s excursion to Malta.