Room with a View

For long time readers of this blog, this picture should look vaguely familiar. This is Porta San Gervasio, aka our home. Well, technically we don't live in the tower, but we are attached to it. If you look carefully at the top floor of the yellow building attached to the right tower of the gate and find the left most window that is facing perpendicular to the photo (I'll give you a moment to interpret that)....that's our apartment. Or more specifically, that's the window of our kitchen.

When we moved in we thought it was cool that we had a place attached to this amazing historic structure. As it turned out, the street that runs along in front of the gate is a rather important street and tends to be a place where lots of things happen.

Here's a view out that window on a normal day. You can see a tower off to right of this shot. If you have really good eyes, you can see Arya and my buddy Jeff walking along the street mid-picture. Also notice in the bottom left of this shot you can see a little area right where the river goes under street. There's a fountain there where we filled up our water bottles several times a week (the tap water is fine, but the fountain water is better!)

During the year, we would often be surprised by hearing noise out that window. Here a few of the things we saw out the window this year.

A marching band (you can see the fountain now on the right)!

Floods of cosplayers during the Comics and Games festival. This picture doesn't even begin to do justice the number and types of characters we saw.

A wedding celebration! That family was there for about 10 minutes. They did a dance in the street, sang some songs, and took pictures.

A motorcycle club. More came later but I forgot to get another picture.

The Lucca marathon! This race and the half-marathon later in the year ran by both sides of the apartment.

Nighttime church celebration. I wasn't able to figure out for sure what the procession was, but it appeared to be a whole congregation with candles singing and chanting as they walked.

And those are just the things we caught in pictures. All year long we have been treated to sights and sounds in our little corner of town.

• A street piano player who came probably 50% of the weekends we were around and played the same 6 songs over and over...and over........and over. 
• Holiday projections on the wall of the tower for the Christmas season. 
• Countless lost tourists who reached this part of town and realized they weren't where they thought they were and pulled out their maps (many of whom I would offer to help when I was at the fountain earning me the nickname "The Ambassador" from my loving family). 
• Lots of antics of local school kids who would hangout near the fountain waiting for buses or friends or parents.

Let's just say we have had plenty to watch. More importantly than entertaining us however, I think getting to witness all these gave us a bit more of a connection to this town. We got to witness the real people who live their lives here. In our own voyeuristic way, we got to be honorary Lucchese. 

The End of Homeschooling and Time in Lucca

“How did it get so late so soon?” 

- Dr. Seuss

We’re nearing the end of our time here in Lucca. It’s the penultimate day of homeschooling, our last full week in Lucca, then off for our last adventure in Norway. After that we pack up and head back to American soil. Back to In-N-Out Burger and Starbucks as the girls would say.

For the last two weeks it has been hot here, and sleep has been somewhat fleeting. Not unbearably hot, but it has also been mosquito ridden because we live next to a canal. Our A/C barely works and we have no screens on our windows. The girls have moved from their twin beds upstairs to sharing the pull out couch downstairs. We don’t go to the park in the afternoons because it’s too hot. So, we’ve taken the opportunity to get out after dinner. We ride our bikes on the wall at nine in the evening. The breeze feels nice. I get up early enough to make my morning run before the heat sets in. We have pizza at our favorite spots, listen to the Lucca Jazz Festival in the Amphiteatro, and the kids play their piano songs ad nauseam on the keyboard.

Yes, it’s bittersweet. We love Lucca, but we’re also missing our family and friends. At the end of every school year I feel a sense of loss. Another year of my children’s life that has passed and another year closer to them leaving my nest. This year is special. I’m not feeling so much loss because we really didn’t lose any moments together, and what we gained is so much more.

Don’t get me wrong, homeschooling was not a cake walk, we definitely had our ups and downs. The struggles of separating parent from teacher being the most difficult. But, as I’ve come to realize recently, I was as much of a student this year as Ashley and Arya. Things that I have forgotten or never learned in the first place became fresh. 

For starters, fifth grade social studies - the American Revolution and the creating of our government’s documents. Ash and I bonded through the memorization of our states and capitals, presidents, and the preamble of our constitution. From there I was able to compare our form of government to what we were seeing internationally. And dates. An intangible concept to me before, started to make sense. I’m beginning, after 37 years to see the big picture. From Stonehenge to WWII, we touched history. How our world was built and is growing through technology. And geography. A class I took in high school summer school, now relates to me. Many of the things that I regurgitated for a grade in my K-12 years, I finally actually really care about and understand. For me that’s huge. But more than that, I hope it’s significant to my kids. 

Maybe their experiences will add meaning to the words they read in a textbook. Maybe it won’t. Maybe they’ll forget everything because they were only eight and ten. But, even if they do forget the dates and the places, it’s okay. I’m pretty confident that they won’t forget our time spent together. And that’s why I have joy in another year passing. We recently read a book with the girls called “Momo” by Michael Ende (the author of the Neverending Story). While, not my favorite book ever, the central theme was how our time can easily be stolen away from us. In this family, we are learning communication, we are learning how to compromise and prioritize, and we are learning and relearning how to love one another well. No time stolen here.

Outstanding Amsterdam

After the crazy train adventure that day, we got into Amsterdam safe and sound. The way to our apartment was absolutely gorgeous. There were lots and lots of pretty rivers with all sorts of boats on them. For example, house boats, garbage boats, tour boats, and little row boats too.

On this trip we decided to rent bikes because there are more bikes in Amsterdam than cars! We rented our bikes at MacBike. I did not really like these bikes because they were hard to lock up and the seat was too hard for my taste. There are just about as many bike lanes as there are streets for cars!

One of my favorite places we visited was the kids science museum called NEMO.

It had mostly interactive experiments which I loved! One of my favorites was a little water area where you make a dam with metal bricks and bean bags to get the water to go a certain way.

Another was a ball place where you look at a computer and it tells you a type of ball to find, like a big yellow ball or a heavy blue ball. Then you put the ball in a tube and the computer tells you if you are right.

There is one more thing I want to tell you about. Up stairs there was a lab where you did experiments.

My favorite experiment was seeing what color red cabbage would turn if you added apple. The answer is pink because an apple has acid in it. 

Over all I loved the NEMO museum!

My other favorite place was a really big park, not like a playground park but a park. Probably one of the biggest I have been to all year. In that park there was a play park it was very cool. It was two playgrounds connected by a bridge that went in the tree tops. While we were there, we got hot dogs for dinner.

One of the stops Arya was most excited for was Anne Frank’s house. (Dad note: Arya read a biography, not the autobiography, but one more for kids her age, earlier this year and has been looking forward to getting to see the actual place where Anne had to hide. That might help why an 8 year-old was "excited" to visit a rather somber, yet interesting location)

To get in there was a long line. It took us one and a half hours! When we finally got to the front, we went inside and discovered that the space they lived in was a little bigger than I expected and the stairs are really steep. 

One of our shorter stops was a old windmill. I enjoyed seeing the windmill even though we were only there for 2 minutes.

A random thing we found on this trip is an orange juice squeezer. It has a big bucket of oranges on top, then the oranges fall into the squeezer, then the juice is separated from the pulp and the seeds, and out the juice comes into your cup!

We also got a pass to go to the Van Gogh museum but we had a certain time that we had to go in. So we passed our time by seeing outside art. We saw a bunch of bunny statues and an iAmsterdam sign that Arya and I climbed on.

In the museum we saw a bunch of art, for example the sunflower painting.

Arya and I had kids’ guides to help us that were like painting scavenger hunts where it would show a bit of the painting and you had to find it. Then when you found it, it asked you questions about it to be sure you found the right one, like “What’s on the windmill in this painting?” Then you would get to play games on the device relating to each painting. It was one of my favorite kids’ guides.

I really enjoyed going to Amsterdam and I hope I get to go again some time in my life.

Brussels and the EU

From France we hopped a TGV train to Brussels, Belgium, the center of the European Union. Although we were only there for one full day, we managed to pack in a lot! Dave has gotten really good at navigating city transit systems, and we made full use of the underground on this day. 

Starting at the Atomium, an exhibit from the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, we were able to get a great view of the city and a bird’s eye view of our next stop: Mini Europe. Inside the Atomium you are able to take escalators and stairs up the arms from one sphere to the next, viewing eight different exhibits which probably haven’t changed much since 1958! A lot of “retro” art and furnishings along with iconography from that era.

Mini Europe is made up of miniature models of the 28 countries in the European Union. This was fantastic timing in our one year trip as it served as a look back over all we have seen and learned in the last 9 months. Included in our visit was a booklet with information about each country including the capital, population, the year each country joined the EU, and many interesting facts about each place. Did you know that in Denmark’s income taxes range from 51% to 68%? Or that there are more saunas than cars in Finland? Can you imagine that Belgians eat more chips (french fries) than anyone else? That’s hard to imagine since I know that Americans consume a lot! We had a lot of fun recreating photos in locations we had already visited this year! Can you recognize some of these locations from previous blogs?

Next we headed to Brussels famous Arcade du Cinquantenaire. I have loved seeing the patriotism displayed in the countries we’ve visited with flags being prominently displayed. This arch displaying the Belgian flag reminded me of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris with the French flag, which then reminded me of the beautiful American flag we saw hanging in Boston when we started this trip back in September. All touching displays.

We strolled the park surrounding the 110 year old arch and the kids played on a nearby playground while Dave and I enjoyed a little sun on the lawn. We were excited to find a medieval festival being set up adjacent to the park and came back later in the day to take part. Dave and the girls tried some archery. They were naturals. The kids also played other games targeted at them like a mini catapult, and a rock throw with the intent of crushing a hard boiled egg. We also enjoyed some delicious food (beignets aux pomme, roasted pig, bread, apples, and brie) and got to hear a bagpipe band!

From the arch we made our way to the Parliament Building and the European Commission. We saw the EU flag as well as a statue representing the euro coin. 

The rest of our evening was spent buying chocolate! We went in to all the different chocolate stores, sampled, and bought a bit here and there… which lasted us until our next stop, Amsterdam! It was a good thing we had the sugar fix stored away because our easy travel day ended up not being so easy. Because of construction in the Netherlands, a two hour train journey turned into a seven hour trip with 5 canceled trains and many unnecessary transfers. But, the best part of our day was making new friends! A guy from London, named Yu, and a study abroad student from Atlanta named Paul. We were all headed to Amsterdam and it became quite comedic after a while at how hard it was to go 100 miles! It was fun listening to the girls tell stories about our travels this year and it also gave us a little glimpse of what they were remembering and counting as meaningful to them. A month to go in our European travels - see you all soon!