Three Months of Adventures

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this page so I’ll just pick up where I left off: the second week in December.

That week we played both flag football and basketball with the Navy base, so we weren’t short on things to do. We went to Pompeii earlier in the week and it was pretty cool. I have to admit, I expected to find more buildings and a larger part of the city preserved a little better. Rather than individual preservations the most amazing thing about Pompeii was the size and magnitude (although I was extremely impressed with the Bakery of Modesto where 160 carbonized, fully intact though slightly stale, loaves of bread were found in a stone oven). It’s hard to believe a city as big as Pompeii could actually be covered in ten feet of ashes and be dug up 2000 years later. I will admit, though, it was hard to get a sense of what Pompeii might have looked like before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius (that covered Pompeii in AD 79) because just about all of the buildings have been almost completely destroyed (even if you can see where they stood). Though most of the buildings were destroyed, the Coliseum was exceptionally remarkable. According to the books we read the Coliseum in Pompeii is the best preserved in all of Europe. The underground passageways, the stairs, the seats, and the field were all completely intact with the only difference from 79 AD being an amount of grass and moss covering some sections of the seats.

On December 12th or 13th, I can’t remember which; we got our boat hauled at a boatyard down the road. It was a ten minute motor to get there, but it was multiple hours before the yard actually pulled it out (they’re Italians, what should we have expected). To haul the boat they have you pull into a large slot with cement piers on either side. They take this big, four wheeled crane and drive it with two wheels on each of the piers and the crane part of it is over the boat. The crane drops two big rubber band type things that are slid under your boat. Then the driver, if you can call him that, pushes a button that lifts the lines that are attached to each side of the rubber band things. This gradually lifts the boat until the crane can drive off the piers back onto land. On land they used a high-powered hose to clean the bottom of the boat. At this point I left, but all they did now was put our boat down in a spot to be held for a while. During the time we were gone they repaired some things and gave the boat a new coat of paint.

After getting our boat hauled we stayed in a hotel for one non-eventful week before leaving for France. On December 19th we took off for the Alps, Paris and Lausanne. The first place we went was Courchevel, Mirabel Val Thorens – the ski areas making up the famous 3 Valle. It was amazing. We didn’t have the greatest weather so the skiing wasn’t fantastic, but the mountains themselves… Gargantuan. Colossal. I usually ski at Squaw Valley, big mountain with tons to ski, but this area was, by my estimate, fifteen times the size of squaw. Just reading it doesn’t give you much of a sense though. To me it seemed as if every other lift on the mountain had as many runs to go down as any entire ski area in the U.S. I would glance around and say to my dad, “Look at that peak covered with snow way over there. What ski area is that?” With so many famous ski areas around I expected the answer to be “Chamonix,” “Val d’Isere,” or something like that. Instead my dad would answer “That one. Oh, that’s still part of this one.” We skied for three days with some people who knew the mountain and one of them told me that it was impossible to ski every run on the mountain in a week — Even if all you did was try to ski all of the runs, and even if you had it planned out so you knew the quickest way – It’s impossible. The peaks seemed to rise forever. There wasn’t a single day that we didn’t peer downwards to see the clouds. There wasn’t a single day that we didn’t go up through a cloud, get to the top and look down to see it, and then ski back down through it with our faces unprotected. Every day we would go above clouds and look strait down sheer cliffs or beautiful mountains and see clouds below us and ask ourselves “Is it raining or snowing down there? Did I leave anything outside?” Amazing.

From 3 Valle we went to Paris and met my grandmother. We walked around a lot, even though the temperature was at record lows. It was kind of unfortunate because my grandmother, who loves walking around and window shopping, hates the cold – and Paris is famous for offering the best walking around and stuff. All the buildings are old and classy and the streets are fun and lively. There is one part of town consisting of only restaurants (mostly Greek) and the owners are all outside their restaurant trying to coax people to eat there. We walked by them and one person was telling us they had good chicken by balking like one. Another lady spoke 7 languages and she said that she had food from each country of those languages. Another gave my sister a postcard and another told us we could shatter our plates after dinner. We walked around the Latin Quarter (where we found an Easy Internet Café, the place I watched the World Series in Rome) and Marais District. We have a little bit of a story with the Eiffel Tower. One of the first days we got to Paris we set out an itinerary for the week. The day we went to the Eiffel Tower it was closed – due to weather. It’s the first time in a decade the Eiffel Tower has been closed because it was unsafe in over a decade. Luckily when we went back a few days later it was open. We went at dusk so things were a little hard to see, and we were in a bit of a rush so we couldn’t stay long. Unfortunately we couldn’t see all the way to the Sacre Couer (which is supposed to be a beautiful site), but we did get to see the lights of Notre Dame. We also got to see Notre Dame during an evening service, and though I’m not Christian (and don’t plan on becoming one) it was extremely moving. The chanting and singing echoed of the stone walls and there were these double walkways on the side with interwoven vault-ceilings which was my favorite part. We didn’t get to climb the spires of Notre Dame because of the weather, but instead we went to a rooftop café at a Department store that had a 360 degree view of Paris, including the gargoyles on Notre Dame. On one of the coldest days of our trip, Paris or Alps, we took a tour of the village of Montmartre. Due to a combination of boredom and frozen body parts, we decided to leave after the first half for a hot chocolate and later venture on to Sacre Couer on our own. Sacre Couer was bigger and nice than I expected. How can a small village like Montmartre have a cathedral like Sacre Couer. The interior was rich with gold and arches and curves; it reminded me of the mosques and architectural designs in India. On New Years Eve we walked down the Champs Elysee to the Napoleon’s famous Arch de Triomphe. The Champs Elysee is lined with large sidewalks and small trees all the way down, and for New Years Eve the trees were covered in lights; it was pretty spectacular. There were at least half a dozen movie theaters and three tourist offices. You could see, all the way from the beginning of the road, the Arch de Triomphe lit up. It was the type of place where you could see movie stars and other famous people without being surprised. The one bad part of it was that the Arch de Triomphe was closed for security reasons. Earlier I said that Paris was extremely cold for the time we were there; in truth it was fair temperature for the first few days. On the first day of the cold weather we went with one of our very good friends out to the Loire Valley to see a couple Chateaus. The adventure begins just outside of Paris. After dropping off another friend of ours we started out for Chambord – about an hour and a half outside of Paris. You’ll remember that during our stay in the Alps it didn’t snow once; well in Paris – and just outside of Paris – it did. We got to this Chateaux in what must have been temperature in the negatives. We looked around this huge, castle-like chateau and noticed two different things inside. First was the fire. Second was the double helix staircase. It was pretty cool. The mansion was six or seven stories high and so it could make good use of Leonardo da Vinci’s design. There was two spiral staircases starting ten feet from each other. In between them was a circle that was surrounded by stone and went all the way up to a sky light at the top. The two staircases – very wide and circling the circular stone wall – never came together even though they both went around the same thing. In addition to that, they were holes in the stone wall so you could look from one staircase to the other. It doesn’t make much sense writing it or reading it, but it was very cool. From here I’ll make the story short. We tried to go to a second chateau but didn’t get there until 7:00 when it was closed. We started to drive home but because of the snow there were a lot of accidents so traffic was bad. After a while of no moving in a traffic jam we got off at an exit and took back roads for four hours to get back to Paris. The next morning we found out that traffic had been completely stopped and people stayed in there cars overnight a very short distance from the exit we got off at. On our only other trip from Paris we went to the palace of Versailles. I won’t talk much about it given I didn’t like it that much. I will, however, say that this was so big it had a room for the royal dogs. Unfortunately we didn’t get to see much of the opera house since there was a rehearsal while we were there. We also saw the tomb of Napoleon. It was in a huge, domed building. His tomb itself wasn’t small. It was made of shiny and beautiful wood and marble and was big and grand enough to hold the coffins of 15 kings. Knowing that Napoleon was very short, I speculate that the building and his coffin were to compensate for that. The Pompidou center was, well, out of place – and that’s all I’ll say about it.

Now for the museums of Paris. We paid a quick visit to the discovery museum which was very similar to many discovery and tech museums in the U.S. with a lot of hands on stuff. We also went to the Picasso museum which housed all of the Picassos in Paris. It didn’t have his most famous stuff, but it was Picasso. The Marmiton was a museum consisting of mainly Monet’s works. It had about fifteen of his water lily pictures, many of the paintings he did of his bridge, and his Impression of a Sunrise. I gave my sister a lesson in impressionist art. The Muse d’Orsay was well worth the long wait we had to sustain. We spent many hours enjoying the Monet’s, Van Gogh’s (probably my favorite artist), Gaugin’s, Renoir’s, Seurat’s and many more. My grandmother is very knowledgeable and passionate about these impressionist artists so it was particularly fun and interesting going through these museums with her. Last of all, but definitely not least, is the Louvre Museum. This museum consists of thousands of paintings, sculptures, pieces of history and other artifacts. It is stored inside the biggest palace I have ever seen – and the scary thing is that the works of art fill the building completely. We saw works by da Vinci, Michelangelo, Boticelli; we saw Hammurabi’s code, the Venus di Milo, and the 140 carat diamond used by Napoleon and other kings and emperors. With all these things the most impressive was the building itself. The first part of this was the architecture. The rooms are all decorated with colors and gold, and the three small pyramids provide areas that appear to be outside. Also, when it was remodeled for Napoleon it was designed so that you can still see the medieval moat. The next part of this was the size. There were multiple courtyards as large as football fields and literally hundreds of single rooms bigger than my entire house. I estimate that the entire building is 1000 times the size of my house.

After Paris we changed our minds about going to Lausanne and instead we went back to the Alps. For this trip we went to Val D’Isere, Chamonix, and Zermatt. This second trip was fantastic. The mountains were not quite as intimidating in these places but they were just as large. Val D’Isere and Tignes, the first resort on this trip, were a lot like I pictured the alps: High, rolling, open mountains with sun and powder; chairlifts going way up and giving you long, beautiful runs. There were no hard runs at Val D’Isere, only Tignes. We went snowboarding one day and I was pretty good; I can carve turns, but I couldn’t manage to jump. Adam was really good; he was more comfortable going fast and he could jump too. The chairlifts here are awesome. Some have plexiglass covers that come down with the safety bar and footrest, some have conveyer belts that take you to the loading point, some load two chairs at once, and there are poma lifts. Pomas are surface lifts made up of metal bars with discs at the end that hang down from a line. You put the disc between your legs and it pulls you. It’s really fun to try to stop and wedge, it puts pressure on the line, and then you jump up and get tons of air. Then we went to Chamonix. Chamonix is divided up into five or six resorts; the most famous of which is mostly a glacier. We got a guide to take us on the glacier (you can’t do it without a guide because of crevasses) and it was pretty amazing. There were these big, blue ice falls and you could almost see where the ice was moving. After this we went to Zermatt. They had really good chocolate and it was my favorite mountain. One of the runs was a skiers cross course and had beginner grinding polls. We went up really high and twice we did runs that took more than an hour and a half to get down. One of the runs was probably six miles long. In addition to showing me great skiing Zermatt introduced me to Swiss chocolate. In Zermatt they don’t allow cars, only electric taxis and busses, and you could really tell the difference between the fresh, clean air and the polluted air in the town below. Then we went to Montreaux to stay for the night before taking a train from Geneva back to Rome.

After that we had a long day getting our boat in the water and getting it completely fixed, for the workers were Italian so naturally it wasn’t all done. Because it took so long to get our boat into the water we had to stay the night in that little slip between the cement piers. It was mayhem. All night we rocked and twice our bow line broke so we found our boat banging up against one of the piers.

So finally, after a couple days, we got used to life in Gaeta… and then we took off again. This time for Venice. The city was very neat. It’s built on tons of islands that aren’t very stable so the ground is wavy and uneven. There are tons of canals instead of streets so people use vaperetos (waterbuses) to get around. There are hundreds of bridges in Venice and an equal number of canals. On the last day we got to watch glass blowing. They can make detailed art with melted glass and stuff and some iron rods. One day we got to ride on a gondola. A gondola is a large canoe that people of the city use to give tours. They take you around for an hour or so and show you the sites. The famous piazza, St. Marcs square, is filled with pigeons that always land on people who feed them. My sister had ten pigeons on her at once. I mentioned the wavy ground earlier; well it was easily visible in the church. The tide in Venice is something like a meter so all the buildings are deserted because the water ruins them. The buildings are a lot of times right on the canals so the front door can get buried in water. At least once a month St. Marcs square and the rest of Venice are covered in water so you have to walk on special raised platforms; otherwise you’d sink down to your knees.

Soon after we got back from Venice my grandparents and aunt came over to visit. When they came they rented a large minivan so we could go on trips around the area. The first place we went was Montecassino, the home of one of the most famous abbeys in the world. On the way up the mountain that the monastery is perched on top of it started snowing. Fearing the steep, curvy roads would get slick we turned around and went down. Upon reaching the bottom we looked up and saw that the cloud had moved on. So, we turned around again and went back up to the abbey. Once we finally got in the gates the sky cleared completely. The part of the abbey that we saw was mostly outside and the blue sky made for some beautiful pictures. The most amazing part was the cathedral, which was laden with gold and marble, covered in colorful mosaics, covered by elegant domes and vaults, and supported by perfectly carved pillars.

Soon after Montecassino we journeyed on to the crazy world of Naples. We traveled to Naples with the goal of going into the Archeological Museum and finding some good street markets; we did a lot more than that. It took us about an hour to get to Naples and then we started our adventure. We drove in a roundabout way for half an hour, and with the Naples streets and drivers that’s not fun. You see, in Naples the drivers pay no attention to lights, stop signs, police, the width of roads, or crashing. In one place I saw a one way street with two narrow lanes; there were three lanes going one way and four going another. Motorcycles will weave in and out of traffic going the opposite way and even large cars will drive on the sidewalks. You also have to be very careful of crime in Naples, it is the home base for a large mafia. This mafia steals cars and wallets from all parts of Naples to the extent that no car rental company will sell insurance for Naples. Fortunately we were not victimized by the mafia, but unfortunately we were by the drivers of Naples. We were hit the first time by a motorcycle who tried to pass us by going on the side walk. The lady on the cycle had her ten-year-old daughter onboard and neither of them had helmets. We had to wait around for three hours while the police took care of things (the lady got hurt in the fall). Next we were hit by a car backing into a parking spot above ours and later a car hit our side on the freeway. We also had a number of close calls with pedestrians and bikes, and once a motorcycle came millimeters from hitting an open door.

The last trip I took with our visitors was a trip down the Amalfi Coast. We went from our harbor above Naples on a famous and breathtaking drive down the coast. We stopped briefly in Positano for lunch and a look at an amazing hotel there; we bought ceramics in a town called Rapollo; and stayed overnight in Amalfi. The next day we drove through Sorrento and took a freeway back up to Gaeta.

Two days later I left on a plane for California!!!!! I met my class in California for a day before taking off with them for Washington D.C. It was great. Right when I got back I went to school where I was greeted by all my friends. From there I went to the Hillsdale mall with a couple of them and later went to a Stanford Basketball game. The next day I visited a couple High schools I might go to, before heading to school for the remainder of the day. After school I stayed with all my friends to participate in their basketball practice before going with them to pizza.

The next morning our entire grade left at 5:30 AM for the airport. When we landed in Washington we had a 4 hour bus ride to Williamsburg. There was record snow in the area and after the first day in Williamsburg, which wasn’t that great, the hotel started leaking and one of the room’s ceilings caved in. The next day we saw the Jamestown museum but didn’t get to see any of the glassblowing or colonial stuff. Then we went to Monticello which was very impressive. Among the gadgets Thomas Jefferson equipped the house with are perfect exterior symmetry, many dumb waiters such as a swivel door with shelves for food to be passed through, something that brings wine up from cellar, and a cart to put food on. He created a door that swings open automatically (mechanic not electric) and a mechanism that copy’s letters; two pens are attached to something that makes the second pen do exactly as the first. Then, in D.C. we saw the capitol, which had some interesting rooms in terms of architecture. We saw the white house which was very unimpressive to me. We drove up to Mount Vernon which was colorful, big, but paled in comparison to Monticello. We also went to the Arlington cemetery where we saw the tomb of the unknown soldier, watched the changing of the guard, and stopped at the Kenned grave. Unfortunately we didn’t get to stop at the most important grave of all: Abner Doubleday. We saw the Lincoln, Jefferson, Vietnam, and Roosevelt memorials. We also had a few outings at night such as a dinner cruise, a play, and colonial dinners.

Unfortunately when I got back from Washington I was sick for a week, and a few days later one of the boats in the marina left. It was the boat I was most dependent on for playing. They were Norwegian and had a very athletic 10 year old and a 15 year old who spoke very good English. With them I/we went to the beach to play soccer, set off explosives, and play wiffle ball. We’d play tag or team handball with them almost everyday. Now that they’re gone I have a lot less to do. I still have the Dutch boat, but there’s no one my age; and basketball is no longer going at the Navy base. I still have the new friend I made at the base, but that’s only one person and we don’t see him that much. I’m starting to do more with my brother, like boxing and playing baseball and other stuff like that. My parents want me to continue to interact with Italians so they signed me up for tennis. It’s pretty fun, but there’s an American kid there who’s nice so (he speaks Italian) he translates for me and we play together.

In addition to the one friend I have made there’s also another family with kids younger than me that is being amazingly helpful and welcoming. When we first got to the base we saw and observed that families in the military are welcoming. They have to move every two years, so they know what it’s like to be new. They make it incredibly easy to join in, but it seems like they don’t let themselves make great friends in order to protect themselves from having to part with great buddies.

Two days ago was March 4th, the Italian holiday of Carnivale. For Carnivale everybody dresses up for the day with masks and goes wild. There was a parade and everybody bought a bunch of silly string and shaving cream. We sprayed each other and the all the cars that passed got completely covered by the people on the streets. A couple of motorcycles got sprayed and some cars had a window open. Everyone sprayed inside the window and I completely covered one kids head with silly string.

I talked earlier about being able to reflect while I was on the Washington trip. One of the main things I realized was that I was really lucky to have the flexibility we have this year. For instance, in school my friends all have to do a whole slew of homework whether they understand something or not. For me; if I understand something then I don’t do a lot of practice (I don’t have any homework, only school time practice) and if I don’t I practice till I get it. We also have the ability this year to shift our schedule according to the weather and other factors. I have learned a great deal from the places I have visited, whereas in school I may learn the same things but they would be nowhere near as fun. For instance I went to Florence and visited the art museums and the Medici Chapels; but when you learn the same things I learned about the Medici’s in regular school you don’t get to see all the things you’re learning about.

Well, the last six months have gone by quickly so I expect the next six to do the same. But in the meantime I’m having a great time and am learning a lot; I’m starting to see why this is such an experience of a lifetime.

— Danny —