When I found this sagra della granita (granita food festival) while excavating in Sicily one summer, I invited my dirt-covered dig friends who knew and trusted my weird and wonderful obsession and we made a weekend of it. Granita is the original cousin (or maybe great grandmother, to add in some history and separation) of the item known as an “Italian ice” (aka “abomination”) in the United Stated.  You may also know this as a “slushy,” which is a further abomination.  But, shockingly, both of these backwards cousins have something in common with their ancestor: no dairy.  Granita is a dairy-free semi-frozen, slushy-like treat that is typically made from fruit or nuts mixed with water and sugar, but can also be found in coffee and chocolate flavors. “Sah-gran-IT-ah!”

Bad things happen in threes.  The first time I went to Palermo I was thoroughly creeped out by its small, dark allies and dirty complexion.  The second time I went to Palermo I spend 36 hours in bed after eating a likely e-coli rich cookie in Syracuse.  The third time I went to Palermo I got mugged. 

Finally, a purple bus arrived at maybe 7:40pm (not surprisingly late), but the bus turned out to be bound for Syracuse, rather than Catania, which didn’t make sense since a bus going to Syracuse would pass through Catania and probably make a stop… but that is what we were told.  It delighted the faction of tourists who were Syracuse-bound, but angered the red-haired Italian who seemed to be the most vocal about his feelings about the bus.  He repeatedly yelled at the bus attendant, telling him to do his job and get us another bus.  We decided that when we started our new lives in Acireale, the ginger Italian would be our leader.

“If you got it, flaunt it, boy, I know you want it…”

An appropriate (or hilariously inappropriate) way to introduce how I stripped naked in front of a Czech “nurse” (heavy on the scare quotes here) before my mint infused mineral bath at a “spa” (same).  We were staying in Karlovy Vary, a quaint resort town at the western edge of Bohemia that was the closest city to our ancestral villages.  Prior to our eventful - or uneventful NYE, depending on how you look at it (below) - I had decided that we should experience the reason that made Karlovy Vary famous – its healing spas.