Sicily Oh Sicily

We were in Barnaby’s car on the way back to the tunnel from Brussels this Sunday when he apologised because he thought he would have to stop because his tum wasn’t feeling too good. In actual fact things settled down and he managed all the way to the tunnel through it and beyond. But those moments sparked a conversation about one of our excursions abroad and to Sicily in particular. So ingrained in my brain is this story that I feel sure I must have blogged it before but I’ve had a look through and can’t see it.

This by the way is not for the faint hearted so look away or don’t read when you’re eating.

Blowzabella have had amazing trips abroad and despite the fact we’re not getting any younger we still look forward to and enjoy our foreign excursions. When Sicily came up as an option it just had to be done.

The organisation, whoever they were, booked and paid for the flights in advance…result…but other than that and knowing we’d quoted a fee we didn’t have much other than an address of an office and that there should be someone to meet us at the airport. Well there wasn’t anyone to meet us. We waited a respectable amount of time and then the anxiety began to build partly because it was already 10pm at night. Paul tried ringing the one number he had and got nothing and no-one. It was before the days when everyone carried a mobile phone but in hind sight, even if the organisers had had them, I’m not sure they would have shared their numbers with us.

So we did the only thing we could, really, and went to the one address we had. The festival office. I think we hoped it would be on the festival site or something. We had no idea what this thing was that we’d agreed to come to. We arrived in a dark and dismal street with not much lighting and a significant dead rat laid out like a warning on the street infront of the office. Not many of us had credit cards then but Paul fortunately did and so we got the taxi to take us to a hotel and went to bed not really knowing what the next day would bring.

My memory was that it had all been a mistake and some guy came and paid for the hotel and got us transported to the festival hotel we were supposed to be in. Paul says he was never paid for the hotel so I must have remembered that differently. He probably told Paul he would repay him and then never did.

The Hotel we were transported to was much more opulent than the budget one we’d booked ourselves in. Massive and marble everywhere and quite old fashioned. it was buzzing with people of all nationalities and most of them musicians. Things were beginning to feel like a festival.

It was extremely hot and humid. Dry hot and you can cope but wet hot is just horrible. The sort of heat where when you have a shower it’s bliss, you come out, dry yourself and 2 minutes later you are wringing wet again.  The guys all had beds in one room and I, being the only woman, had a room to myself. That meant that I could at least lie on the marble floor stark naked in an attempt to cool down. I don’t think the guys were doing the same thing. At least I hope not! I’ve always had a love of marble from that day to this. So many uses!

Anyway we found out that the festival had two stages. One on one side of the island and one on the other. Instead of splitting the acts between the two and then changing that arrangement the following night they decided that all bands were going to be on both stages on sequential nights. That meant that there were 11 acts and we got 15 minutes. Yep…I’m not joking. 15 minutes and the same for the following night. So we had gone all that way to play for half a blinking’ hour. The first night went Ok and there was a crowd but it felt so bizarre and 15 minutes isn’t enough time for anyone to get going.

The second night involved a coach trip to the other side of the island through mountains  and on twisty roads in a coach. I suffer from motion sickness and was not surprised that by the time we got there I was green about the gills. What I hadn’t realised was it wasn’t just the coach journey making me feel ill. We did our set, we hung around and by the time everyone had finished all the public had gone and the cafés and bars were closed. That was bad news as at that point I started to feel very ill. Not having a toilet to rush to I moved to the side of the road to be sick in the gutter. As I retched and vomited by body decided to join in from my other end…I’m really sorry folks but I am not joking.

With everything being closed I knew I was going to have to get back on the coach, presumably stinking, and sit it out until we got back to the hotel.

Then came the announcement..’it’s time to relax everyone, we know you are all hungry and thirsty so we are going to a restaurant ‘….’oh noooooooo’ screamed my mind. I got on the coach. Managed to find a seat on my own and hope I wasn’t stinking the place out. In the restaurant I rushed to the toilets and tried to clean myself up as best I could. Not easy when the sinks are public and the toilets not. It involved a lot of waiting in a cubicle and occasionally running out to moisten some toilet tissue etc. I then had to sit for an hour and a half, feeling like death in stinking trousers, smiling and occasionally wrinkly my nose as if to say, ‘it does smell strange around here I wonder what that can be….obviously not me … ah ha ha Hmmmmn’.

But eventually the ordeal came to an end and back to the hotel we went and I rushed to the sanctuary of my room only to find……they’d turned the water off for the night. Shall I repeat that so that you can take it in fully. They’d turned the water off for the night. Not just the hot water, all tap water. So I had to put my poo encrusted body to bed unclean. I was so exhausted I fell asleep and washed my sheets out in the morning as if I’d just sweated too much in the night…at least that’s what I hoped it looked like and I knew I might need to lie down again so having them cleaned at least slightly wold help.

The next day I remember having a bit of a time to wander around Palermo. Yuck. In the bay there were turds bobbing. I kid you not and I certainly didn’t need the reminder of my ordeal and in the market place there was a massive severed head of a sword fish, presumably left by the morning market, stinking and covered in flys. I did not get a very good impression of that town.

The trip ended with a  night drive to the airport for an early morning flight. We shared that journey with a group of very jolly Yugoslavians and they sang the Yugoslavian national anthem regularly and with great enthusiasm and lots of bottle clinking. In fact they sang it so often we were all singing it by the time we got to the airport. You would never have guessed that that country was about to implode as they were definitely united on the bus.

There ends my story dear readers and I am sure you are not surprised that I have never forgotten this trip. We were never paid the fee they owed us and were told later that it had all been organised by the mafia and it was best to leave it well alone…so we did.