Student Bloggers
Carnevale & Catania
Date
March 2, 2014
This week started the celebration of Carnevale. It is a festival and party leading up to Lent. Here in Siracusa there is not a specific tradition the city does, like some places have orange fights and others have parades with elaborate floats, but here they mainly just dress up in costumes like Halloween in the US. I have seen pirates, princesses, Link from Zelda, and the other day I saw the cutest Alice in Wonderland with a box-house around her. For our school we made a special dessert for carnevale called “chiacchiere.” To make it we have to put the dough through a press, as if it were pasta. Then we cut it, twisted it, fried it, sprinkled it with powdered sugar, and finally we ate it! They were so good! Then we all danced and sang karaoke in celebration.
Earlier this week we went to see Catania, the city of lava because all the buildings are made of lava rock from Mount Etna. It was such a spectacular and different city to be in. We visited a couple cathedrals, an ancient amphitheater and a castle. Then we explored a little on our own where we saw the largest outside market I have ever been to. They sold everything from clothes, to food, to pets. We saw birds and bunnies in cages; I wanted a fluffy bunny so badly. Then, as typical Americans we ate lunch at McDonald’s. I do not even like McDonald’s back home, but this was too good. I have missed hamburgers a lot.
After our city adventure we ended the day by seeing an orange farm. The farm used to be owned by the Mafia but was taken back by the public after a lot of trials, hard work, and persistence. It was surprising how much water they needed in order to keep just one tree alive there. I forget the exact number but it was in the thousands of liters for just two weeks! Which goes to show just how important water is for agriculture and life. The owner let us take home oranges that we picked and they were by far the best oranges I have ever had. They were sweet and ripe blood oranges. I ate three just while being on the farm. From all my time in Ortigia I miss seeing the country, this week was really nice because it allowed me to see greenery and trees again.