Our honeymoon begins with a long flight Wednesday morning from San Diego, thru Chicago, thru Rome, and finally ending in Catania, Sicily after 22 hours. The time difference is 9 hours and it was morning in Sicily and we haven't slept more than a few uncomfortable winks on the plane. I remember being delirious while falling asleep in the car ride from Catania's airport to Syracusa, 50 minutes away. When we arrived we found that noone spoke english, more than a few broken phrases and lots of pointing. We were at a hotel on the beach across from Ortygia, a cool little island town connected to the mainland by a few bridges. After sleeping until 9PM we had to get some dinner before every place closed (there was no room service to order off of). We were just completely wandering around down a somewhat vacant semi scary street in the middle of Syracusa looking for food. We found some food, drank some house wine and headed back to the hotel to prepare for the next day.

Day 1 - Ortygia

Here is the view from our room, thats the island of Ortygia, just to the right of the pic are some short bridges that connect it to the mainland (the island of Sicily that is).

The hotel was a little wierd, the toilet is shaped differently, and the flusher is on the wall. Then next to it is a bidet, except this bidet doesn't shoot water up, apparently you are suppose to fill the whole bowl with water and then wiggle your butt around in it or something, I never bothered trying as the great invention of toilet paper was in abundance.

If you look, the bidet and the sink are the exact same, except one is like a sink for munchkins.

Sink

Bidet

The completely too small uncomfortable round European Toilet

Now on to the important stuff. We traveled into Ortygia to do some sight seeing and perhaps a little shopping.

We checked out some ruins. The term "ruins" became a joke between Shana and I, because it was really just old fallen down buildings, which is kind of funny to keep around isn't it. Anytime we saw something that was falling apart (which was frequent) we would just point and go "ruin."

These are exactly what the streets of Ortygia look like, cars drive down them and people walk down the middle of them, its really cool, but not very functionally optimal (of course the streets were around since before they had cars so it made more sense then).

Here is a castle we visited, pretty cool, it was apparently a really good place to defend, they had cannon rooms setup on all the sides of it.

We saw a ton of other things including a church, and a bunch of Piazzo's (plazas where people like to walk around with both hands behind their back and talk to each other), then we headed back to get some beach time in before dinner.

At dinner we found a really nice place, they spoke a little English, and then after dinner they took us to this crazy basement room that hand natural fountains in it. The room above the basement had a glass floor, and was filled with Italian families, when we went down there it really felt like the "tourists" weren't suppose to be visiting this hidden place, it was pretty cool.

After dinner we hit up a few bars and drunkenly stumbled the 1.5km back to our hotel.

Day 2 - Greek Theatre

On the second day we woke up pretty early, still having trouble adjusting to the time change and our lack of sleep, and planned to head out to the far side of town where a bunch of "ruins" lay around. We never really found an English speaking guide so we pretty much just looked at a bunch of falling down things and made our own conclusions as to why they were so cool.

This is what Shana and I never got, the star attraction is the 2000 year old Greek Theater ruins that still last, and they are covering them up with new age stuff to turn this back into a Theater, seems kinda sill to me, they could build a theater anywhere, why cover up the ruins that everyone is coming to check out.

We think these were caves where they held prisoners, but we don't really know.

This is called Dionysus's ear, we know they stored prisoner's here, and apparently when the prisoners whipsered to each other, the people outside could hear the conversations perfectly.

This is the gladiator arena, where people would apparently fight to the death. They had crazy animals involved in this as well, including lions and crocodiles.

This is a hilarious store sign that I had to show you :-P

And that pretty much raps up Syracusa, next we head to Taormina where we stay in a fabulous 5 star hotel.