Messina

Messina was the first stop on the cruise (remember I warned you that I wasn't going to go in order).
Until that point our traveling SOP consisted of looking up 3 restaurants, jotting down their address and then hitting the streets and trying to find them.
Sounds lame but it worked.
But then we did the cruise which meant we started from a ship.  And then we became tempted by these things called land excursions.  And then we listened to fellow-cruisers talk about their experiences and we began to doubt ourselves and our abilities to be tourists without guides and buses and people speaking English.
In short, we were thrown off our game.
Or maybe it's just that Messina is not all that interesting.
I shouldn't say that.  Probably it was us.  Yes, I'm sure it was us.
Unlike other ports we visited, the city is directly across the street from where the boat is docked.  As in, you walk across the gangplank and are unceremoniously dumped into Messina.  Auto, bus and train traffic, vendors hawking their wares and even a nice little cafe within a stone's throw of your cabin window.  Sounds simple, right?
The easier it was, the more confused we became.  I have no explanation for this.  At least none that is in any way flattering for Mihai or I.
We exited the ship in the middle of heaving mass of people which promptly made me so nervous and agitated that I said "whichever way the throng is moving, we must go the other direction."  (Fear of closed spaces, fear of crowds, fear of snails, I have a nice little list of phobias to my credit).
In any case, after 20 meters we stopped for a coffee break.  Must be some kind of record for us.  But at least we got a photo of Mircea looking sophisticatedly world-weary with his cappuccino.

From the barista Mihai obtained the names and whereabouts of 2 local restaurants.  So we should have been set, right?  Right.  But no.  No, somehow it all went wrong and we walked around for hours not only unable to eat anywhere (one of the restaurants was closed and the other we could just never manage to find) but also not seeing anything really that interesting. We were trying to see something of note, we were trying to be impressed.  Really. It was our first port, of course we were trying to have that moment when we were stopped in our tracks, looked at each other and said with big smiles "Wow!"
But what we saw was a lot of this:

Yeah.

I know that one of the reasons I write this blog is to provide a moment of escapism for my friends and family back home but I also am a big proponent of keeping it real.  If I tried to tell you it's all-glamour-all-the-time I would not only be embarrassingly pretentious but lying as well.
In any case, you would not be fooled because I already confessed about the head lice a few months ago.

Here's the fact: the best views we got of Messina were from the boat.

But I'm still standing by my statement that it's not Messina, it was us.  We were just...off somehow.  We should have followed the crowds.  Surely they were onto something, right?
However, all was not lost: we at last found a restaurant where there were no menus in English and none of the staff spoke English and so we ordered blind.  That in itself was cool (even if I got 10 times the amount of protein I would normally eat in a week.)
I had what I believe is the best wine I've ever tasted and it was 3, yes three Euro a glass. Numbers don't need translation.  3.
And then later we found a cafe and had a splendid espresso and cappuccino which cost (drum roll) 0.80 and 1.20 Euro respectively.
Huh?
Why can't we do this in the States?
So bravo for your excellent quality and outstanding pricing on wine and espressos, Messina.  Bravo.
Oh, and your awesome views from afar.