Posted by emily on Wednesday, May 17, 2017 in 2017 Blog post.

On Monday May 15th, we had a free day. So what did we decide to do in Italy? ENDLESS SUSHI! However, the challenge of the day was actually getting there. Endless sushi was located in Palermo which is about an hour drive away from Cefalù. The only issue was that we don’t have cars here like we do in America. Also, Uber is always what I use whenever I need to get somewhere and don’t have access to a personal car. As you can probably guess, Uber is nonexistent here in Cefalù, so we had to turn to public transportation. Being from San Diego, I never have a need to use public transportation, but I do know that there is a public transportation system similar to the one set up in Italy, in America. We looked up the train schedule and showed up at the station 10 minutes before the 10:42 train that we were trying to get on. I thought the time 10:42 was very strange, but my friends here from New York said that that’s typical of trains even in America. When we told the man at the station that we wanted to ride the train at 10:42 he looked at us like we were crazy. He told us there were only buses running until 12:30 when the trains were starting. So we bought bus tickets and our adventure began.

PHOTO: The 6 of us on the bus

The bus was very similar to a charter bus that we use in America. In fact, I use charter buses almost identical to the one we were on all the time when traveling with my sorority back in Nashville. The only difference is that this bus in Italy was considered public transportation and the charter buses at home are generally rented through a company and not public. From what I have seen at home, the public bus system uses bigger “accordion” buses that would not be considered charter buses.

When we got into Palermo, we immediately realized we weren’t in Cefalù anymore. The city seemed dirtier, the crowd seemed more dangerous, there was grafiti everywhere, and the pace of life was going much faster. It reminded us of Mexico city. For a second we debated getting off the bus because we were a pretty scared and uncomfortable since out of the 6 of us I was the only one that knows a little bit of beginners Italian, but not enough to fully get by. None of us expected Palermo to be like this.

PHOTO: A group members face after stepping of the bus

We had simple directions to start with: Take Via Roma to Via Principi and the sushi place was there on Via Principi. The problem was, we didn’t know how to get to Via Roma from where we got dropped off from the bus. As we got off the bus, I asked the bus driver for directions of how to get to Via Roma. All he said was continue walking straight. So that’s exactly what we did…until we hit a dead end. At that point we asked a random man walking by where Via Roma was. He wasn’t sure so he asked another man, who then collaborated with another man to get to an answer. Through lots of hand signals we interpreted the directions as: left, straight, left, round about, left, straight, left. So, we went left out of the bus station, straight through an intersection, but then the round about was to the right. We paused for a second because this didn’t align with what the man (really 3 men) had told us. We decided to ask a woman passing by and she told us take a right, go through the round about, and take the street on the righthand side. Completely opposite directions, yet still willing to help. Finally, we made it to Via Roma! We knew we had to walk about a mile on that road before we got to Via Principi. We walked for about 20 minutes down that road and then started getting worried that either we had passed Via Principi or maybe we were going the wrong direction in general. So we asked yet another lady walking down the street if she knew where it was. She didn’t, but she asked all her friends that she was with and they told us to keep going. We eventually found the sushi place safe and sound!

PHOTO: Found the sushi!

PHOTO: Restaurant

This whole experience especially navigating through the city made me realize that we were very fast to judge a book by it’s cover. Just because the buildings looked a bit older and the city looked dirtier than we are used to we felt scared. All the people we talked to were all so nice and ready to help some American tourists find their sushi. It makes me question whether or not this characteristic trait of being quick to judge is only possessed by Americans or even just American girls. I have always been taught to avoid dangerous situations rather than get into sticky situations and then know how to get out. I have never considered that my approach may cause me to miss out on things just because I am judging a place or person based off of their appearance. If I was back in America I would have just gotten back on the bus to find a different sushi place instead of braving what turned out to be a harmless situation. I would have definitely missed out on the experience of navigating through an unknown city and getting good endless sushi. Maybe instead of practicing avoidance just based on appearance, young women should be taught to be confident and able to get out of dangerous situations if the time ever came to that.