After getting settled into the hotel and calming down for a bit I opted to take a walk to see if there was anything interesting nearby. Not knowing the area very well and being unable to find a map in the hotel lobby I had to keep it simple I was sure. With that in mind I opted to get to the main street, Via Tukory which the hotel is off of and then take a right and walk until I came to something interesting. Unfortunately, nothing really interesting came before the street layout got confusing and I figured I would end up lost. I could see the mountains nearby to the right and decided that the road looked like a straight shot to them. The funny thing about mountains is that they always appear closer than they really are. I certainly walked quite a distance to get as close to them as I dared. There was something like a highway between them and me and I wasn’t sure it would be safe to cross.
I really didn’t take a ton of pictures because I really didn’t see a lot that was of interest. The thing I can point out is that the city of Cusco in Peru was much cleaner and seemed much less impoverished than Palermo. I am not sure which city is indeed more poor but I think if you looked at the pictures from both you would probably think Palermo.
I need also to point out the road system here. It makes the streets of Boston seem like a simple, logically thought out road plan. I can tell that there are a lot of one way streets and that a road can turn one way in a moment’s notice and that it may turn one way in the opposite direction to which you are going. All of this makes losing the GPS so huge that I basically am still stunned as to how I am going to do anything. Aside from the knowledge that when I drive out of town I am going to have to leave very early in the morning to reduce the suicidal traffic I really need to know where I am going. I am going to make it a goal to see if I can find a way to purchase a new GPS on day 5 but I suspect based on what I have seen so far that it is going to be a nearly impossible task. I just don’t see anyplace that sells modern technology. The hotel does not have even a tiny flat screen TV like the one in Rome did and I suspect that HD is just a fantasy around here.
While walking I found a sandwich shop and had a tall Moretti beer and a ham and cheese Panini. It was good and filling but certainly not 4 star material. Still when I got back to the hotel I just managed to beat some more very heavy sounding rain. I watched a little bit of TV then though I would go downstairs to eat dinner in the hotel restaurant only to find out that it opens at 8pm. It was still well before 7, closer to 6, so I decided I was done for the day, watched some more TV then crashed for the evening expecting a later start than other days to make sure the sun came up and to figure out what I was going to do in Palermo. I suspect there must be one or two nice things to see here but it will take some work to figure out. I have to be careful not to use too much data on the iPhone or the bill will be outrageous. If it was a fully functional GPS I would not care, but it is very poor at the feature even if I was able to use it to get to the hotel. In that sense it would be a waste to overuse it.
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