Day 32

Buongiorno,

Our host at the B&B is a lovely man. Very quiet and humble, but very generous. He made us a huge breakfast of delights from the bakery, many featuring sweetened ricotta cheese (fresh croissants fill with sweetened ricotta, extremely dangerous!)

Today was a bit of a housekeeping day as we get ready for the next stage of our adventure. Laundry. Mostly Koro’s socks and undies, apparently.

Grandma has been washing her undies in the bathroom hand basin and hanging them in our bathroom overnight. In some places we have stayed Grandma has had the bathroom looking like a Chinese laundry.

Then Koro needed a haircut. We found a hair salon owned by a man named Alessandro. Alessandro himself cut and styled Koro’s hair. Alessandro knew a lot about cutting hair.

It was a beautiful salon, unlike what we expect to see in New Zealand. We couldn’t find it at first, then we saw a sign in a doorway leading to a set of stairs. The salon was on the first floor of an old apartment building that had been renovated.

It felt like we had arrived at the front door of someone’s apartment,

and we were kind of wondering if this was someone who cut hair in their kitchen, like Mrs Moore did when Koro was a boy.

But when you press the door bell, and get buzzed in, the door opens to this big, bright, modern hair salon. As Grandma keeps saying, it is a surprise what you can find inside some of these old buildings. They look old and ordinary on the outside, even slightly run down, but inside they are beautiful, modern spaces.

The afternoon was spent at the Valley of the Temples Archeological Museum. This is where all the stuff that has been dug up in the Archeological Park gets cleaned up, catalogued and put on display.

There were an awful lot of old terra cotta pots. The first five or six are quite interesting; amazing quality of workmanship and details from the artists of 2,500 years ago. Once you get to the seventh terra cotta pot, they all start to look the same, and the next 1,000,000 terra cotta pots just become a blur.

The highlight of the museum was a stone statue from the Temple of Olympian Zeus. These giant stone statues were used to hold up the

temple roof, along with the Doric columns. The statues and the columns alternated.

We had seen several of these stone statues lying, assembled, on the ground yesterday. But to see one raised vertically, as it would have stood when it was built, was really neat. Each statue was 8 metres tall. You can see how it towers over Grandma in the pictures.

Next to the statue was a scale model of what the Temple of Olympian Zeus would have looked like when it was completed. Can you see the stone statues, and how small they look compared to the completed temple? Grandma came up to about the knee of the stone

statue, so If you compare that to the model you get a sense of the enormous size of this temple.

The weather turned this afternoon, and a storm was brewing. We had a quick look at the cathedral, but it is undergoing renovations; the foundations are eroding and the building is in danger of one day collapsing, so work is being done to fix the foundations.

We were only in the cathedral a short time, and as we came out onto the street it felt like a small tornado was running up the street, the wind so strong. As we walked the wind suddenly stopped, then came from the other direction, blowing all kinds of rubbish down the street. The sky was also very dark.

Then a huge thunderstorm started, and there was lots of thunder and lightening. Spectacular.

Dinner was in a quiet little pizza restaurant while the rain came down.

A bit of a quiet day, but we enjoyed not rushing, and we enjoyed the little village of Agrigento.

Love to you all from Grandma and Koro and Buzzy Bee. XXX OOO.