I think that it could have been built in a day.

Rome! (this is a long one)



We were sad to say goodbye to Florence with all her magical vistas, beautiful statues and cheap accommodations, but the time came to catch a rail and head south to the Capital.

The Termini station gave us our first impression of the city - big, hot, and crowded, with plenty of McDonald's. There are TWO in the train station!

Well, one was across the street.

Our place (a pension, accent on the "on") was near the station, which was always a relief for this pack mule. We found it without incident and immediately participated the grand Roman tradition of taking a long nap during the hottest part of the day. It was glorious.

This started a pattern for our four days in Rome: Wake up, breakfast, see the sights, lunch, sleep, evening walk and dinner. And Rome has got some stuff to see, let me tell you!

On our first evening, we found Capitol Hill and the ruins of the ancient Forum.


And we visited the Pantheon for the first time - this became a nightly stop. There were restaurants lining the piazza and usually a musician or two - see the guy singing opera?


The next morning we sorted out the Metro (we're pretty much experts on any underground system now) and rode it to the Borghese Gallery, an amazing museum set in the middle of a park.

The Gallery used to be the Borghese family's party villa on the outskirts of the city. The downstairs rooms contain mostly sculpture - each room featuring a particularly famous piece in the middle and less-famous pieces around the edge. Oil paintings covered the walls of all the upstairs rooms. Paintings by masters like Michelangelo, Rafael, and Caravaggio.

Hmm. At this point I had planned to describe some of the works that I saw, but I can see that might bog things down a bit. If you're like me, and you can only recognize the names of the great Renaissance artists because of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,then we all have a ways to go before Way to Go Kevin! can focus on art appreciation. So I'll stop there for now.

After the Gallery, we hung around the surrounding park. We rented one of these puppies...

...which are surprisingly fast and complicated. Yup, we were those tourists, tottering on the edge of control, taking up the sidewalk, laughing and yelling at one another to slow down.

It was great.

On our second full day, we demolished ancient Rome (figuratively).

Palatine Hill, home of generations of Caesars and Emperors, is a mound of red-stone ruins today, but with a little imagination, you can picture the Imperial Palace. It also helps if you've seen Gladiator.



After that, we went to the Colosseum. It's a wreck! The floor is all torn up. The walls are falling down. I mean, sure, it's nearly 2,000 years old, but still.


Actually, it was very cool. Not temperature-wise.

Throughout it all, we consulted our good friend Rick Steves. Special thanks to Sarah, who brought him along.



My nose was stuck in this book the entire time.

At Trajan's Column:


At the Forum:


Enjoying the Colosseum:


And Palatine Hill:



On our last day we visited St. Peter's Basilica and the Vatican Museum.

Sistine Chapel, baby!

There was really only one thing at the overwhelming Vatican Museum that we wanted to see so we made a beeline for it and it still took about half an hour of steady walking to even arrive at the chapel door. We were herded like cattle the whole way. Apparently a lot of other people wanted a gander at that ceiling.

But it was worth it. We couldn't take pictures. We couldn't stay long. The overall effect of the chapel was, I'm sure, marred by the hundreds of tourists packed into the room like sardines. And it was still worth it.

St. Peter's Basilica and the home of the Pope were interesting, too. I've only ever seen this square when it is featured in the news because of some papal event, and then it is always smothered with worshipers.

The church itself is huge! Bigger than St. Paul's in London, which is also huge. All the furnishings and statues inside are built on a large scale in order to make the overall effect of the church seems smaller. Does that makes sense? Just ask Rick Steves - he explains it better than me.


Okay, almost done. We ate good food and saw more fun things like the Spanish Steps and the Trevi Fountain. We ate a LOT of gelato.

We also hiked halfway across Rome for this exciting picture:


Less exciting was the line we discovered when we got there.


Then it was on to Paris via the night train!

Florence.

Florence, or Firenze for those in the know, is very photogenic and I am tempted to skip the airing of my Florentine ignorance and just post some pictures. But I’m not happy if I’m not embarrassing myself, so here goes.

Ask me a month ago, and the only thing I could have told you about Florence is that Lucy wanted to go there in While You were Sleeping.

And I knew it was in Italy.

Reading up a little on the train, I learned that Michelangelo’s David was there, and upon arriving I realized that, overall, Florence is a pretty arty place. The home of
Renaissance art, you might say. And even today, if you can see past all the tourists and the pay toilets, the theme of the city is beauty. Beautiful buildings, music, statues. For centuries, marble figures have been standing on pedestals, posing for students and their sketchbooks. Street musicians are out every night, playing in the piazzas. Sidewalk artists recreate famous paintings with chalk and concrete day after day.

It’s touristy, yes. But I almost feel like that’s fitting. The appreciation of the people around me affected my appreciation, and the impact of this city has reached far beyond her walls. This is where important things started – where men learned how to achieve perspective paintings and how to capture emotion in stone.

And I think that the amount of work and effort and imagination required to try and replicate this world in oils or marble is a testament to the power and imagination of the One who created everything in the first place.

The Piazza della Signoria was my favorite place in Florence. The statues have been there for hundreds of years, turning the square into a famous open-air gallery. This is the original site of Michelangelo's David, but he was moved into a nearby gallery and replaced with a copy in the eighteen hundreds (don't quote me on that date).

Getting our art on.

In the middle is Megan, a friend of a friend who graciously opened her flat up to us for three days AND showed us around town! She's great. You should be friends with her.

Our sweet digs, Florence edition.

An open-air puppet show!

Degrading famous works of art!

Street musicians!

Teaching the next generation the ropes. Very sweet scene.

I took this picture to prove that I was really there, but, on reflection, it looks a little superimposed.

Canal Retentive.

“That is impossible. There is no night train to Venice.”

Laurilee and I stare blankly at the woman behind the ticket counter for so long that she begins to worry that her English wasn’t correct.

“What I mean is,” she says, “That train does not exist.”

“Huh,” I say, “But it’s on the timetable.”

“It does not exist.”

The woman in Marseilles was sweet and helpful, and although she couldn’t magically conjure up a non-existent night-train to Venice, she could get us as far as Nice today and then on to Venice the following afternoon.

Better than nothing, we said, and started looking for accommodations in Nice.

This was the most unexpected hiccup (hiccough? I never know.) during our entire trip, and as problems go, it wasn’t earth-shattering. We had to book a semi-expensive, semi-dodgy hotel near the train station in Nice and we lost half a day of Venice, but other than that it was a piece of cake.

And then, Venice!

It’s all true! No roads! Just canals!

I can’t remember the first time I had ever heard of the concept, but I remember as a little girl trying to imagine what it would be like to use a boat instead of a car. I loved the idea of Venice, full of water-roads and winding walkways.

It was exciting to step out of the train station and be immediately greeted by a busy stretch of the Grand Canal, with tourists loading onto buses and mail-boats zipping past with bags of letters and stacks of parcels.

Venice has some really wonderful sights, including the Guggenheim Museum, Saint Mark’s Basilica and the Accademia art gallery. But we didn’t go to any of them during our shortened stay.

But that was fine. I was mostly just there for the canals.


The day train.



Venice!


See?


Some gondoliers. Too rich for our blood!


The place we stayed brought breakfast to our room. They're sweet.

Word is, the rain in this country stays mainly in the plain

SPAIN!

Although we had to walk up three flights of stairs and share the bathroom with the rest of the floor, I think that our hostel in Barcelona was my favorite. Our room was large – with a bunk bed and a double and a twin. High ceilings, tile floor. We had a small conservatory with giant windows and a table with chairs where we could sit and look into the back windows of the entire block.

Our sweet digs.

The view.

We're so crazy!

I wanted to purchase one of the canaries that the vendors were selling on Las Ramblas, the city’s main pedestrian drag. To my mind sprung a picture of a little yellow bird swinging in his wire cage in our conservatory. We could try and take him on the train, I reasoned, as a fragile and complicated mascot. Or we could have staged some sort of do-gooder freeing ceremony where we flung the bird into the air and watched him fly to liberty, his feathers blending with the setting sun.

Here's me checking out the price of birds.


But, as it turns out, the birds were 40 euros, not even counting the cage, so it was not to be.

All for the best, I suppose. Our freeing ceremony, although good intentioned, would probably have left the bird unable to fend for himself after years of captivity, fighting pigeons five times his size for crumbs of paella and trash. Eventually, we would find him with a five o’clock shadow on his little feathered cheeks and fingerless gloves on his orange feet, whistling a tuneless song, a tiny little hat at his feet to catch contributions.

I don’t want that on my conscience.

So we left the birds at the pet shop and enjoyed our time in Spain anyway. We bought breakfast from the same little coffee shop (The Times) every morning, carrying it back to our hostel to enjoy in the conservatory. Our days were spent rambling on Las Ramblas, learning the Metro, visiting La Sagrada Familia Cathedral, and finding the beach.

Barcelona is in the Catalonian province, and I was worried that everything would be in their own special, secret language of Catalan. But our stammered and fuddled high school Spanish was enough to get us around.

Laurilee and Jannell have a conversation on Las Ramblas.


Sarah and I buy some bread for dinner at the market.


Paella. Probably the most accurate-looking food known to man. There's no mistaking what you're getting yourself into with a plate of paella.


The interior of that eternal work-in-progress, La Sagrada Familia.


On to Italy via the south of France! Note the discrepancy in backpack proportions.

...to visit the Queen.

One of the highlights of being here in England has been the opportunity of living so close to London. I've been able to visit the "Big British Apple" many times, always with a new mix of friends and family.

Although catching the 4 am bus from Bath to Victoria Station in London wasn't my most favorite scheduling in the world, I was able to meet up with my three traveling compadres just a few minutes after they arrived in the city, for our first stop in our four-country tour.

All I could think on the five-hour drive was "please let their backpacks be as big as mine!"

They weren't.

When my three dear friends rounded the corner, strapped into their cute little pill bug packs, I realized that maybe I should have left the tennis shoes at home. And the regular-sized shampoo. And the two sweatshirts. And the jacket. Everything that seemed so essential at two in the morning (just a few short hours ago) was now slung over my shoulders. Ah well.

Seeing my Alaska friends at the Victoria Station threw me into a world-colliding-disorientation that is becoming more and more familiar. Laurilee, Sarah, and Jannell, after all, round out my total American visitor list to an even 10.

London can be a pricey place to sleep, but thanks to Hotwire we were able to find some very reasonable accomodations in the beautiful London haunt, the Holiday Inn Express. We were happy to camp out there for a few days, see some sights, and get adjusted to time zones and group dynamics.

Some things that we did:

Visited the Borough Market (I think that outdoor markets might be my new favorite. Does that make me a yuppie?)

Sound of Music! Maria was a little over the top (your place in my heart is safe, Julie Andrews) but the music was, as always, fabulous. Those Von Trapp kiddos have some pipes!

Hunted and discovered a good old, dark paneled, English pub.

After a few days in London, we braved the Gatwick Airport and entered the orange-hued world of EasyJet to fly to Spain.

Wait Jess, you may ask. Haven't you already been to Spain?

Well, yes. I did just go last month. But this is different Spain. This is Barcelona! Home of all the Barcelonians!

aaaaand we're back!

Beginning on July 17th and ending on August 2nd, Jessi and her three intrepid friends, Laurilee, Sarah and Jannell, set off to see the world.

Well, part of the world.

Armed only with enormous backpacks, pre-moistened face wipes, and doggedly cheery dispositions we chugged through Western Europe in a flurry of camera flashes and mispronunciation.

Now my tiny flat is littered with ticket stubs and loose change and sleeping pallets and the empty shells of backpacks.

I don't want to say much more until we get through some of the pictures. Maybe a country per day? That sound like a healthy pace?

Firenze

So I'm in Florence right now.

Guess who's here?

David.

More from Rome!

La Sagrada Familia

Started in 1882, with a planned completion date sometime in the next twenty years, the Temple of the Sacred Family, or La Sagrada Familia is the ultimate example of budget and time overruns.



I mean, really. I know that it is very huge and very elaborate what with the stained glass and the marble arches and the stonework covering the outside, but over one hundred years and still under construction???

Lazy.

We were able to go and see the work on this cathedral and go up one of those impressive looking towers (four of the towers are completed, there will eventually be thirteen - one for each apostle and a big one in the middle for Christ. I have walked through a lot of old Catholic churches in my time, but this was the first time I´ve been able to see one in the process of being built. Priests and nuns were replaced by men in hard hats and ticket takers.

I´ll be interested to see La Sagrada Familia when it is completed. It is going to be an awesome and beautiful building. But I wonder if it will succeed in pointing people toward Christ or toward man´s architectual prowess.

PS: These aren´t my photos. Will share some when I get home.

The Girlz

Currently in Barcelona, with three of the coolest girls in the world. So far, we have:

Slept in

Visited the Borough Market in London

Made the first stop on our "Jason Bourne" tour for Laurilee - Waterloo Station

Talked, talked, talked

Ridden trains, planes and buses

Spoken Spanish and been laughed at

Taken a bunch of pictures


I would love to write more, but I´m on a ticking internet cafe clock!

See you in Venice!

Ireland!

Tyler and Laura stopped by on their way home from South Africa for about five days.

We flew to Ireland and boy are our arms tired!



From Dublin we took a bus tour into the country.


The ceiling on the bus was super low. This is Tyler saying, "Jess, I'm not a freak show!"


Cool Celtic cross at an old monastery.


And here I thought an Irish weaver was some kind of bird.


No trip to Dublin is complete without a trip to the Guinness Storehouse. Everything you ever wanted to know about Guinness. And a lot more.


Then it was back to Bath for a short night of sleep before heading to London the next morning. They look pretty chipper for 4:20 am.


Bit o' London sightseeing...


...and then a musical! We Will Rock You is, hands down, the best musical featuring the songs of the legendary band Queen that I've ever seen. It was a very cheesy and very fun show. Bohemian Rhapsody will never be lame.

Wimbledon? Wimbledid.

So Wimbledon is this tennis competition that happens every year in London. All the best players are there and the courts are grass.

Yeah, that's right. See how much I know? I'm pretty much a tennis expert, now.

But it wasn't long ago when the bulk of my knowledge about the sport came from playing Super Nintendo Tennis. When John McEnroe could have been a celebrity chef or a mandolin player. When a Grand Slam was nothing more than an egg-heavy breakfast dish served at Denny’s.

But now I've been to Wimbledon, so I know lots of stuff.



First of all, I know that it takes a loooong time to get into Wimbledon.

In order to buy day-of tickets to the tournament, you must wait, for several hours, in what is affectionately and accurately called “The Queue.” Thousands of people stand, sit, or stretch out in The Queue as it winds its serpentine way around a huge field. As we took our place in line, we were handed a queue card, designating our position and eliminating the ever-present temptation to cut, and (I kid you not) a pamphlet on "queuing etiquette." Aren't the British just so cute?

Newspaper vendors walked up and down between the folds of the line hawking their wares. There were plenty of coffee stands and toilets. Next to us, in a patch of open grass, a football (soccer) game started up. It was nice. You can't fight the queue, man. You gotta embrace it.

Here we are in the queue: Me, Jonny and Tomoki.



And here's Mina...and a giant tennis ball. Awesome. These pictures are actually all Mina's because I was a dork and forgot to put my memory chip in my camera.



Fast forward three hours, and we're through the gates, ready to watch some tennis.

Secondly: The real show is on the sidelines.

I don’t mean the fans. In fact, I think that tennis ranks second only to golf for most boring fans ever.

What I mean is that it truly takes a village to run a tennis match. In the match we watched, there were five line judges, six ball boys/ball girls (ball people?) and a small army of teens in green polo shirts on rain patrol.

The ball boys and girls were fun to watch because I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone scurry that much in real life. They ran everywhere they went – even very short distances. And when they weren’t running or crouching at the net, they were standing “at-ease” at each end of the court, with tennis balls in their hands to give to the players. It was a little silly looking, but I gotta admit, a very smooth system.

Here they are in their natural habitat:


I learned some other stuff about tennis, but I think that I’ve covered the bulk of the important info.

Wimbledon’s over now – the men’s finals were on Sunday in one of the best championship matches ever. Federer, the reigning champ who has won Wimbledon for the past five years, was trying to be the first person to ever win six championships. But he was beat out in a match that lasted nearly five hours by a Spanish guy named Nadal. I watched the highlights because I’m such a tennis fan. On the women’s side, I think that Venus Williams won again in a championship match against her sister, Serena.

Feel free to forward me any of your tennis-related questions.

Kevin Recommends #2

(This is the place where we get to recommend things that we like. Once again, in the spirit of credit where due, the idea was 100% ripped off from McSweeney's.)

Spelling out alphabet letters_Actually just one: Aitch.

Poetry readings_Turns out, these are going on all the time. And poets are really friendly in a desperate-to-be-understood sort of way.

Billy Elliot, the Musical_The movie is better, in our opinion. But the dancing kid in this musical is phenomenal.

Spain_The only place where you get to practice your high school Spanish AND flush your toilet paper!

The Gadsby Project by Red Mountain Church_Rearrangements of old hymns by a church out of Birmingham, Alabama. We like every song, but especially the Johnny Cash-like ballad – Christ, Or Else I Die. Plus, harmonica!

Getting some friends with cars_It just makes life so much easier.

Not getting crapped on by pigeons_We recently gave this a try and can state unequivocally that getting crapped on by pigeons is lame.

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh_We’ve been hearing a lot about this book and the related movie, and finally picked it up at our local library. Read most of it with a tight throat because it is gross and sad. In the comfort of your own home, try reading it out loud – Scottish brogue, baby!

Happy Birthday, Ty!

Awww. They grow up so fast.

Hey Jude!

I'm always a little behind the YouTube curve, so I'm sure you've all already seen this video.

But it's great.



I'm kind of on a watching-babies-on-YouTube kick right now, so there may be more of these in our future.

The Papa

This is my dad.

Here he is fixing the hole in my ceiling.

Here he is schlepping my stuff to London.


Things that are great about my father:

1. He loves the Lord and has raised us kids to know and love our heavenly Father above all.

2. If there is an open container of sour cream in the refrigerator, I can pretty much guarantee that he has sprinkled some Tabasco in there. Maybe even some french onion dip mix.

3. He wired a universal remote for the family television set. And when I say "wired," I mean he put our DVD remote and our TV remote back-to-back and wrapped a piece of wire around them. Ghetto? Maybe. Effective? Yes.

4. He has always loved me unconditionally. I know this because he says (often), "Do you know I love you, daughter?"

5. He LOVES to pick people up from the airport. Or drop them off at the airport. Or rescue them from a stalled car at the side of the road.

6. He usually just smiles, but sometimes you can get him to laugh really hard. That's always fun.

7. He's always up for a drive.

8. He's smart and creative.

9. He's usually game for an episode of Star Trek or a late-night movie. And he's always been an easy touch when it came to an ice cream at McDonald's or a basket of fries at the Breeze Inn.

10. He is characterized by his kindness, hospitality, and graciousness.

He is especially gracious with his eldest daughter when she fails to call or write him on Father's Day and tries to make up with a long and sweet (though belated) post.


Happy Father's Day, Dad. I love you.

See you soon!

Grathiath for your Patience

So, the posts are going to be a little patchier than usual as I'm in Southern Spain (or, as they say it down here, "Thouthern Thpain").

Many interesting and culturally inaccurate observations to come!

Stay tuned!