Virtual Vagabonds isn’t meant to be a travelogue but let me say this about Palermo. It’s dirty, crowded, decaying. There are way, way too many cars – way too many – and even more scooters and mopeds. And they’re all driven by madmen. Many have a superstition about their horns. They believe that if they’re approaching a blind intersection and they toot a few times, this magically prevents them colliding with oncoming traffic, even if both vehicles are going about a million miles an hour along narrow cobbled streets. Or – and this is much more important to us – tooting absolves them of all responsibility for killing unsuspecting Canadian tourists on foot.
But it’s also a fascinating place, vibrant and full of fabulous things. On Monday, our first full day in the city, we went to see the number one tourist attraction, the Cappella Palatina or Palatine Chapel. It was built for Roger II, the 12th century Norman monarch who ruled over a brief golden age of multi-ethnic harmony, abundance and splendour in Sicily. Every surface in the chapel is covered with beautiful decorations, mostly fabulous gilt mosaic work depicting biblical scenes. The mosaics were done by Greek artisans. The intricately carved wood coffered ceiling was created by Arab craftsmen. Norman artists were responsible for overall design.
Once again, we rented an apartment, which we found on the Internet at a rent-by-owner site called Homelidays, the same site we used to find the apartment we took in Venice for a week in the summer.Even though I’m on vacation, having access to the Internet was important, so I searched at Homelidays for properties that offered Internet service (not that many). The one we chose did, but I made sure to specifically ask the owner, a guy who is off working in Paris and renting out his home while he’s away, if the Internet service was available. He confirmed that it was. It wasn’t.
When we arrived, the owner’s friend, a young businessman who works in the area and looks after vacation rentals for a few friends, explained that the modem (by which he meant the ADSL modem/wireless router) was broken and in being fixed. The owner’s father was going to bring it over the next day. Didn’t happen.
Instead, Maurizio, the friend/caretaker brought his own cellular modem, which he uses to connect when he goes travelling. To me this is going above and beyond the call of duty, especially since the next day, he was off to Catania on business and probably would have like to have the modem. But it was much appreaciated. The modem, which connected over a TelecomItalia HDSPA network (very fast) actually works well, slower than a land line connection, to be sure, but perfectly acceptable. It even worked for Skype.
Then on Tuesday, Maurizio’s pregnant wife, Andrea, an Argentinian language teacher whom we had met the first night we arrived, went out and bought a new modem so we would not be without Internet. She called me on my mobile while we were out sightseeing to arrange dropping it off and, when I explained that we wouldn’t be back for awhile, she agreed to let herself into the apartment and leave the modem along with instructions for connecting and setting it up. Which she did.
It took a little more effort than it should have to get it set up but that was mostly my stupidity. Now we’re live on the Net, wirelessly, both of us.
All of the backing-and-forthing on this, incidentally, was conducted in English, almost fluent in Maurizio’s case, not quite so good in his wife’s case, but infinitely better than our Italian.
The broken modem debacle is one of the few blips we’ve encountered in a decade of renting apartments and cottages over the Internet. It turned out well in the end, and showed how kind people doing this (renting to travellers via the Internet) can be. We hardly ever travel any other way. I'm sure there are jerks that rent properties to foreign travellers, somewhere, but we haven’t met any yet.
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