10/21/18: Palermo day 2

We're both a little sick, with me waiting to see if my runny nose will get any worse and Muslimah saddled with a cough. Harder to go to sleep at night, so we give ourselves more time in the mornings. 

We kicked off with trying to find a place to get onto the hop-on-hop-off bus. Eventually, we found a spot and got a bus that was running late. The circuit of the city was pretty scenic, when I wasn't marveling at how close the driver was cutting it in every encounter with cars, motos, bikes, and pedestrians. The canned audio guide was a little uneven but still informative. If we had had more time, we could have hopped off at a few stops and seen things up close. 

After a loop, we got off and snaked back to the start of the food tour to get some more frittola and sfincione. The frittolero recognized me, probably since I was the Asian guy wearing the same bright shirt as yesterday.

Then we walked back over to the archaeological museum, which was supposed to be an impressive collection of Greek and Egyptian artifacts. Or so I hastily read some weeks ago. The Greek stuff was indeed impressive, mostly artifacts from a Greek city founded in Sicily in 600s BC. There was really only one significant Egyptian artifact, though the Palermo stone on its own was pretty amazing. 

https://github.com/cotalabs/scala/blob/MLL_Proto/reduct/src/main/resources/db/migration/R__01_rwe.patient.sql#L150

We didn't stay long, as we wanted to do a different hop-on loop around the Eastern part of the city. Unfortunately, I went to go get a Coke and use the bathroom and missed the bus. So we settled for an afternoon snack on a rooftop restaurant by our AirBnB. Some good views of the city:

We rushed to the hotel to pick up our bags and then blazed it on foot to the train station for the first pickup point for the airport shuttle. Muslimah's concern about not getting decent (or any) seats was well founded -- after 3 stops, the bus was full up. 

I started looking into Naples restaurants on the shuttle wifi, and boy do these articles make Naples seem like heaven on Earth for pizza. We'll see. 

One short flight later, we landed in Naples. Took the shuttle into the train station and then walked to our current AirBnB, a modern affair in a cavernous hulk of a building, with the flimsiest elevator I've seen.

Update: first pizza place in Naples was disappointing. It was good, just not blowing my mind.

Neapolitan specialty -- fried pizza. Like a very thin calzone but fried instead of baked. Very cheesy.

Some unwieldily cheesy pizza with tomates, basil, and prosciutto. Just very heavy.

A very wet and cheesy margherita.

I think there's plenty of time to do better. Also the security guard for the back open area said they take card, but they didn't by the time we wanted to pay. I got one hell of a scooter ride from one of the waiters to bring me to the ATM. I'm pretty sure he was trying to mess with me by going really fast. But it wasn't enough to rattle me.