The Adventures of Moving

Megan crammed into the back of our little fiat panda.
Here starts the tale of how Alan, Rachel, and Megan made their way to Catania Sicily from Florence.

We rented a little Fiat Panda and we fit all of our belongings minus one suitcase into it.  Megan came along with us for our ride to Sicily as mini vacation/helped us a lot with the move (Thanks Meg!).  We made it into a bit of an adventure.  Alan planned the trip, so it should come as no surprise that the first stop was Naples just so we could eat at Da Michele for pizza (it's famous for it's pizza and they only make margherita and marinara pizzas).  It was pretty good.  Actually it was amazing!  Service...ummm yeah not so great, but pizza was worth it.  Normally people wait a couple of hours to get into this place.  We went really early for dinner (5:30ish) so we only waited for maybe 20 minutes.
No matter how many times we've had pizza, we still get this excited about good pizza

























We didn't stay long in Naples.  The next morning Megan and I took a train to Pompeii while Alan stayed at the hotel and got the car, etc.  Once we finally figured out how to get to Pompeii (after asking about 6 different people how to get there), we finally arrived only to find out that Pompeii was on strike and wouldn't open until 11am.  Welcome to Italy! Hah.  So we did manage to get free maps that were usually one euro to the place that we couldn't get into.  We decided to wait it out, and we were both glad that we did.  It was a lot of fun, and we got to see some pretty cool things, and we did it all in less than 2 hours (well we didn't see the whole city in 2hours, but that's all the time we had and we saw a lot).

  
Meg and I at Pompei.

Alan picked us up, and we headed on down to the really cheap but super nice resort that we stayed at in Calabira.  We drove down via the Amalfi Coast and we stopped in some of the cute towns that we saw.  We managed to make it safely to our destination even though we were forced to pull over by cops with machine guns at one point during our trip.   We stayed at this beachside resort for two days.  Nobody really spoke any English there.  It was definitely an Italian holiday place.  But they would rally people together to try to find someone who spoke English (they didn't realize yet that we did know some Italian) to invite us to play volleyball, soccer, or bocce ball with them.  Megan and I both lost in the first round of bocce ball, but Alan made it to the second.  It was a really nice break and I think we all enjoyed it. I'm sure Alan would have preferred not breaking his nose while he played soccer with everyone, but he's okay now.  Actually, we don't know for sure if it's broken, but since it still hurts if you touch it, we're guessing that it is. I've attached some photos of the beach because it was just too beautiful to not share.



Monday afternoon we arrived in Catania and met with our landlady.  We got the keys to our apartment, ran to the Coop with Stephano (the evangelist at the church here who we will be working with a lot), bought some essentials, returned, threw some sheets on the beds, and collapsed for the night.  We spent the next two days cleaning.  It really wasn't that bad except they have black dust here that was all over the walls and it took a while to scrub that off.  Poor Megan came with us for vacation, but we put her to work those last few days.  She didn't seem to mind though, and we really appreciated it a lot!

We've spent the last week learning our way around town, visiting with the church members at the Bible studies, getting settled in, and meeting some of our future students (there's about 8 already!).  The church had a  welcome party Saturday evening.  We sang some songs together, talked, and ate pizza.  Stephano and Rina have been extremely helpful.  We've been over to there house almost everyday for either lunch or dinner.  They've helped us settle in and have taken us around in their car to run errands.  We are so thankful to them and to everyone else here who has made us feel so welcome already.

  
 Well, I think this is a long enough post for now!  Ciao ciao!

PS. Thank you for all the support and prayers, and Alan and I would definitely appreciate prayers in the language department - that we continue to learn it and to learn it quickly!

 

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