Budding Artists and Actors (with an aside about driving in Italy)

As we mentioned in the last post, the kids have been taking art lessons and acting lessons in Florence each Saturday.  Florence is about an hour away by car.

(An aside: we have leased a car for our time in Italy.

This is our car - a brand new Citroen C4 Grand Picasso, something you won't see at all in the USA.  I think the closest comparable car in the US would be a Mazda5.

Despite the reports of crazy drivers in Italy, I've been pleasantly surprised.  The style of driving certainly is different, but once you know what to expect, it isn't crazy.  A couple of the major differences:

-- If you're making a left turn or pulling out of a side street or driveway, don't bother to wait for a break in the traffic.  Make your own break in the traffic.  Just pull far enough out than other cars can't go around you.  So they stop and let you in.  It is as easy as that.  And no one will honk or make obscene gestures at you, who has just butted in -- I guess they know that they do the same thing.  This works for pedestrians crossing the street, too.  By the way, this is standard operating procedure in Boston, too, except for the part about not honking or making obscene gestures.

-- You can also parallel park perpendicularly.  As with busy, congested cities the world over, parking in Italy is at a premium.  This is especially true because the cities here were built hundreds (or even thousands) of years ago.  If there is a space but it isn't quite big enough to parallel park your car, go ahead and pull into this space perpendicularly to the curb instead.  This works only if you're not going to be there too long.  So what if the tail of you car sticks out into traffic?  Traffic will go around you.  It is a similar situation with double parking, too.

We didn't have any pictures of regular cars perpendicular parking, but we did have one of this little, cute, electric 3-wheeler. 

Lots of scooters and Smart Car sized cars, too.  Here is the only electric car charging station we've seen.

--  On the highways and major inter-town roads, the police monitor speed electronically remotely (think red-light cameras tied to radar detectors).  I guess, though, the public wasn't ready for complete Big Brother traffic control because each of these electronic checkpoints has a big sign saying "Electronic Speed Checkpoint" and a sign about 1/4 mile before it saying ""Electronic Speed Checkpoint Coming Up."  So, naturally, drive as fast as you want, slow down as you pass the checkpoint, then speed up again.  Surprisingly, people don't drive superfast or very aggressively.

This sign tells you that speed is being monitored electronically and remotely (and that there will be a checkpoint in about 1/2 mile).

This sign marks the actual spot where speed in checked (see the silver box behind the sign).  Right before each sign you see brake lights come on in front of you as people slow down to the speed limit before speeding up again and going on their way.

So, as long as your GPS doesn't send you the wrong way down one way streets (as ours has a couple times) or through ZTL's (Zona de Trafico Limitado -- city centers that are limited to only residents or even only residents with license plates that end with certain digits), you won't have any trouble at all.

So, back to the classes.  When we got here we looked around for activities for the kids so they could have fun, learn something (other than the homeschooling, that we are continuing with great success, if I do say so myself) and have a chance to meet other kids.  Unfortunately, options were pretty limited (read: couldn't find any) in Siena so we had to look farther afield.  Hence the weekly trips to Florence (we knew we'd be going to Florence a bunch of times anyway because it is a beautiful city with so much great stuff to see).

Luckily, the classes have met our goals, in various measures, on all fronts. (Ari has written a blog to give more details, so I'll just give the parents' view. Here's a link to  Ari's blog entry including a video of the skit the kids performed.) The art classes were with a terrific teacher named Marco.  The kids made wonderful bas-relief sculptures out of cement.  Not what would be our first choice for artwork to lug across Europe and the Atlantic -- especially with airlines strictly monitoring luggage weight limits -- but it was something new, interesting and fun.  In their spare time while waiting for the plaster and cement to dry, they were able to work on some drawing.

Luckily for Ari and Ellie, the lessons were virtually private.  There was usually only one or two other kids there at the same time, and except for one girl, they were different kids each week.  It didn't matter -- usually the kids were so engrossed in their artwork, they didn't chat much with the others.  (Another aside - We did meet a very nice Israeli family through the art class and we really hit it off.  The father is a classics professor at Stanford who has the hard job of being the visiting professor from the "home office" at Stanford's Florence campus for this term.  We made it a point to try to go out for gelato with them each time we were in Florence. And, by the way, in our unofficial tasting contest, gelato is the best ice cream in the world and Florence has the best gelato.  Ari's favorite is a Ciocolato Messicano -- Mexican Chocolate.  It is a deep chocolate with just enough red pepper mixed in to make you want some of the cold creaminess of gelato -- it is a vicious cycle.)

Here are the kids with Marco, the art teacher.

Ari working on his clay bas-relief

Ellie working on her flamingo

Here's Ellie's flamingo bas-relief made of clay

Here's Ari's completed shark made of cement and then painted

Ari did some sketching while waiting for his shark to dry.  He was sketching a statue of a lady's head....pretty good!

Here we are with our new friends at Vivoli, our hands-down winner for gelato in Florence.

Here are Ellie and Ari eating gelato with our little friends, Darya and Tamara (again).  Actually, this picture was taken at a gelateria in Siena, when they came to visit our town one day...

Here's a picture of the kids on the narrow, winding stairway up to the top of the tower in the town square...It was a lot of stairs (the sign said 400) and the view from the top was pretty incredible.

The view of the duomo from the top of the tower...

...and a view of Il Campo

The girls really hit it off...Ellie will miss them!

The acting lessons, were something completely different.  This was a group of 12-15 kids ranging from 5 to 12 years old.  As far as I know, the kids (at least our kids) had never done any real acting. But they really enjoyed doing the improv and other acting exercises.  They even learned all about the traditional Comedia d'Arte characters, wrote some scripts and character developments.  The teachers made it educational and fun and it didn't hurt that, each week, they raved about what great actors Ari and Ellie are and how fearless they are.  Any time they needed a volunteer, up our kids would jump -- it seemed Ari especially enjoyed playing female characters and Ellie enjoyed playing men.  Should we be reading something into this?

The kids really enjoyed the acting classes and are really bummed about missing the last two sessions of the  class.  But we're heading to Venice for Carnival this weekend...hopefully we'll have a chance to wear those masks while we're there!

Here's the whole acting group with masks...

and without...The ladies in the back were the teachers.  Thanks ladies!!  You really put together a great program!

Crazy comedia dell'arte -type masks

The Cinque Terre and Lucca

The Cinque Terre ("5 lands" in Italian) is a UNESCO World Heritage site along the Italian Riviera, about an hour north of Pisa and an hour or so south of Genova.  We arrived in Levanto, a small town just north of the Cinque Terre, on a rainy Sunday night, and prayed for better weather for the following day.  When we awoke the next morning, we were thrilled to see blue skies all around, sunshine, and 50+ degree temperatures...it was the perfect day to explore the Cinque Terre.

The best way to travel between the Cinque Terre towns is either by train (each is about a 4 - 8 minute ride from each other) or via the walking paths that take you along the cliffs and coastline.  (In the summer, there are ferries also.)  We had planned to take the train to the opposite end (to the town called Riomaggiore) and walk all the way back during the day (a total walk of about 5 hours).  Unfortunately, when we arrived in Riomaggiore, we found out that, because of all the rain over the past few days, there had been some mudslides in spots along the paths so some of them were closed.  We did get to walk between a few of the towns though, and the views were spectacular.  We took the train to see the others.  (An all-day family train pass was about 12 Euros).  It was definitely nice being here outside the normal, busy, tourist season.  During our 2-hour walk between Vernazza and Corniglia, we saw only about 8 - 10 other people the entire way.  In the summer, I'm sure that path is packed with hot and sweaty people.

Ellie did a little Ellie on the Scene about the Cinque Terre too:

This is the town of Manorola, the second town from the south.

Hey! I snuck into a picture!  Here's Mark and me with a view of Manorola behind us.

Walking down the main street in Vernazza.  This town had the biggest "center", although it was still very small. 

Vernazza's marina, church, and square

The kids found a "spinny thing" at a little playground and had some fun...it went really fast!

A typical little alleyway in Vernazza

A view down the coastline

A view of Vernazza from the path that goes to Corniglia

Ellie, with Corniglia in the background

We had a picnic lunch of bread, cheese, and prosciutto in a nice spot along the coast

A beautiful spot with olive trees all around along the walk from Vernazza to Corniglia. 

Ellie's pizzeria!

Monterosso's beach

The kids running along the beach on the Mediterranean coast at sundown...very nice.

The day after our fun-filled day of hiking along the Cinque Terre, we headed back to Siena with a quick stop in Lucca to break up the drive.  Most people haven't heard of Lucca, but we really liked it.   Its history goes way back - it was a Roman settlement 2000 years ago - and its most unique feature, its intact medieval wall, is a descendant of the first Roman walls that have protected this city ever since.  In fact, Lucca's walls were so effective, no one even bothered to try to invade the city during the entire Medieval period, leaving it independent, peaceful, and happy.

Today, the old city of Lucca is still completely surrounded by a huge, fortress-like wall that's been turned into a park with a 2.5 mile walking/biking path along the top (this is a REALLY thick wall!).  It's a great city to bike around and through (since it's nice and flat, unlike Siena)...so we rented bikes and rode around for a couple of hours.  Very relaxing!

Here we are riding along the top of the wall.

Seems life is busy no matter where you are...

We know, we know...we've been horrible at updating our blog lately and we apologize.  Seems we got away from all the hub-bub and hysteria of modern-life in Yardley and ran smack-dab into a busy existence in Siena!  Well, not really.  We're busy, but it's not quite the same, usual grind.

For starters, I thought I'd give you a quick update on our adventures this past weekend.  Then, we'll work on catching you up with the past few weeks.

Each Saturday for the past 3 weeks, we've had busy days in Florence. The kids have been taking an art class in the morning and a theater class in the afternoon.  During their classes the adults get to spend a little time checking out the sights (that the kids wouldn't want to see anyway).  This past weekend, after classes, we headed out to see some sights a little farther afield from Siena.  Sunday morning, we set out for the quick trip to Pisa to see the famous tower.  We were a little worried because we had heard that they'd spent a few years stabilizing the tower and had "un-tilted" it by about 6 inches in the process.  Would it still be a "leaning" tower?  We weren't disappointed...it is still remarkably and almost unbelievably tilted.  It started tilting almost as soon as construction was first begun a little before 1200 AD.  Little by little, it kept leaning over and was only reversed about 10 years ago.  Ellie and Ari had a huge grins on their faces as we walked toward the old town wall and the tower came into view...it is a really cool thing to see.

Here's a peak through the gate of the old city wall to the cathedral and tower behind...The tower is very obviously leaning...

We had to make these cliched pictures of the kids "pushing" the tower up.  Alongside us were a group of about 100 Japanese tourists all doing the same.

The last time Mark and I were in Pisa, you couldn't climb the tower...now you can and it's pretty surreal.  The stairs spiral around inside the tower and you can feel the slant as you climb around and around.  The stone steps are worn either on the inside or the outside of the step depending on where in the "lean" they are.

Ellie thought it was so cool that she did an "Ellie on the Scene" video about it.

After this quick stop in Pisa, we headed a little farther north to Viareggio, a small coastal town known for its unique, colorful and festive Carnival celebrations.  Viareggio's Carnival is very different than the one in Venice.  Each year they have a series of parades that include beautiful, enormous floats, many of which took an entire year to make, have multiple moving parts, and make some sort of political statement.  The day we were in Viareggio was very rainy and dreary, so on one hand it was great because there was no one there and we had front row seats to the floats coming down the street.  But, on the other hand, we missed out on the famous "festive atmosphere"... everyone was soggy.  We did see some people dressed in costume and masks, but it was relatively quiet.  The kids did get in the spirit and put on some masks for a while though.

Obama must have been at least 50 feet tall on this float touting his efforts at nuclear disarmament.

Anti-pollution and pro-environmental issues were big in the floats this year...this one is a statement against immense global oil usage.

From Viareggio, we headed up to the Cinque Terre, 5 tiny, towns set along the Italian coast, each perched on a cliff or in an inlet and each picturesque and quaint...next blog entry will be about our visit there (or maybe the one after)...

Teachers (again)

Cue the music, it's flashback time!  (The music I mean is the Wayne's World dooda-lee-dooda-loo sounds while we wave our hands -- I tried to find a clip of this on You Tube but wasn't successful.  I have tips on other ways to waste time, too, in case you're interested).  A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post about great teachers.  At the time you may have been wondering why the post was titled "Teachers" when I only wrote about 1 teacher (Andrea from the cooking school in Rome).  Well, I was planning on writing about Philip, Chantal and Mark -- other great teachers we'd had.  Now, I'm finally getting around to it.

Filip and Chantal are Belgian expats living in a small village in southeastern Crete.  Dara found them on the internet and they were the main reason for our jumping from mainland Greece over to Crete.  Their observatory/workshop, named Sasteria, seemed like the perfect mix of education and off-the-beaten-trackness for our travel cum homeschool adventure.  Chantal gives art lessons by day and Filip gives astronomy lessons by night (well, sometimes by day, too, as we were to find out).  We quickly discovered how right Dara's intuition about this was.

After arriving on the island of Crete, we spent a day exploring the ancient ruins of Knossos (home of the Minotaur - and pretty cool).  

This is one of the more famous fresco reproductions on display at Knossos.  We found Knossos, the almost 4000 year old palace of the ancient King Minos, really interesting due in large part to our good tour guide who brought to life the various layers of excavations that have been found, the magnificent wings and rooms of the palace, and various artifacts uncovered from the site.  Knossos is the mythical site of the labyrinth, where the Minotaur was kept, and eventually killed by the hero Theseus.  Evidence of pre-Greek languages have been found on inscriptions of different ages (as yet, undecipherable in some cases).  Sir Arthur Evans, who was in charge of excavations starting in around 1900 AD, reconstructed large parts of the site based on his "best guesses" as to how it may have looked...and, although controversial, it does help you picture just how extravagant and grand the palace might have been in its time as the capital of the Minoan culture. 

This throne room includes some reproduced and some original frescoes, along with the alabaster throne against the wall, the benches, and  the basin, all thought to date back to around 1000 BC. 

This is an original, found in one piece at the site, probably originally used to store liquid or grain.

Then, we headed off in search of Sasteria.  Chantal had told us that when we arrive in the small, tourist beach town of Makrygialos, look for the turn off that is marked with their little yellow sign.  Oh, and by the way, we may want to buy some bread or something for breakfast because there is no store in their little village.  Well, we found the turn off but when we went into a store to get some supplies, the guy there was sure we should take a different road -- much shorter.  So we followed his advice and, as visions of Monteverde, the mountain-top, cloud forest town in Costa Rica, filled our memories, we wound our way up a very curvy, very narrow (but paved, at least) road to the small village of Agios Stefanos.  Ellie, for one, did not like this drive.  (It turns out the other road is a little longer and much wider but still pretty curvy.)

Agios Stefanos turned out to be a tiny village of about 100 people tucked up on the side of the mountain range that is Crete.  It is composed, more or less, of one main road along its downhill side with narrow lanes zig-zagging up the hill.  Houses are stacked one above the next at all sorts of odd angles and gravity defying juxtapositions.  It would be the idyllic Greek island village if all the buildings were bright white with blue roofs.  It was pretty clear, however, that the village is in transition.

The houses of the village ranged from run-down (to put it charitably) to completely refurbished.  It turns out that gentrification doesn't just happen in big cities.  This village had been in decline as its inhabitants set out for greener pastures.  Over the past few years, however, there has been a turn around as expats have bought and fixed up some of the houses.  There is no doubt that the success of Sasteria, has played a big part in this.  As part of her services, Chantal arranges for her guests to rent one of these fixed up houses.  Ours was a quaint two bedroom vacation house owned by a family from Norway.  It was cozy with a great view out to the sea and just a short walk up the hill from Filip and Chantal.

Since the sky was clear, we decided to jump right into our lessons on the evening of our arrival.  It was obvious right from the start that Chantal and Filip both had the necessary qualities of excellent teachers -- they certainly knew what they were talking about, they were enthusiastic and they were great at making their enthusiasm contagious.  The first night, we were mesmerized as we bounced back and forth between Filip's two excellent telescopes looking at Jupiter and Uranus (we were lucky!), the moon and deep-sky.  As we were able to observe nebulae, twin stars, star-clusters, red giants, a galaxy, and more, Filip's explanations of the life-cycle of stars (including how that affects their colors) and other astronomy lessons were brought to life.

The next morning was our art lesson with Chantal.  For the first lesson, we all decided to participate.  With the deft guidance of Chantal, we were soon all sketching different still-lifes in their garden.  As she taught us techniques to make sure we keep the subjects in perspective and properly proportioned, Chantal was able to switch each of us to the medium that made sense for our abilities.  Ellie's eye for color got her into pastels while my abstractness (that's what I'll call it, anyway) got me into charcoal.  After some warm up drawings, we were unleashed into the village.  While Chantal floated amongst us, her insightful, constructive comments and quick instructions help her hone our rough artistic skills.

Chantal and Filip were not only great teachers, they were great hosts, too.  They were warm and welcoming, always inviting us to sit and chat with a drink and a snack after each lesson.  Because of them, we got great lessons in astronomy and art and a real feel for village life in rural Crete.

On the way to Sasteria, we stopped for lunch in Agios Nikolaus, which is a hopping hotspot in the summer but was absolutely dead when we happened by in early January.  The most action we saw was at this fishing boat, where the cats were waiting to "help" this man get rid of any extra bait or fish he might have had (also notice the heron on the neighboring boat). 

We found a nice little lunch spot in Agios Nikolaos, right on the water which is a pretty, quiet little inlet.

This was the picturesque little porch at our apartment in Agios Stefanos, up the hill from Sasteria...

...and this was the view down to the ocean.

We jumped right in, learning from Chantal about picking a subject to draw, "measuring" it with your pencil, and sketching the general shapes and shadows. 

In the next few pictures, here's my attempt at a tour of  "the doors of Agios Stefanos"...I hope I captured the quaint, traditional character of the town in my pictures.

Filip doesn't only teach astronomy.  He also led us on a peaceful and informative hike down the gorge to the town of Makrygialos below.  Even though it's winter, we saw wild spices and flowers, lots of olive trees (some being harvested as we walked by), waterfalls, goats, fruit trees, and more...it was beautiful and Filip's enthusiasm definitely extends to a love for his adopted homeland...we had a great time.

The nature walk went down, down, down along the river all the way from the village in the mountains to the beachside town.  Fortunately for us, Chantal came and picked us up so it was downhill all the way.

We ended up staying in this little village for 3 days and had a great time.  Ellie took 2 more art lessons and Ari one more.  One of these was a painting class from Chantal too...

...amazing works of art!!

A traditional Renaissance man, Filip is also learning (teaching himself actually) to play the traditional Greek instrument, the Bouzouki.  He played a few tunes for us before we headed out for an evening of "cafenion-hopping". 

Even though the village had no store, it did have 4 cafenions (small neighborhood restaurant/bar).  We hopped from one cafenion to another.  When you order a drink, you get a mezze -- a tapas-like little appetizer -- too, for free.  We moved from one cafenion to the next to get enough food for dinner, and to get more of a variety...but that meant we had to get a drink at each place...oy vey, we're not as young as we used to be!  Good thing just the kids were doing art the next morning!!

Unfortunately, it was a bit overcast the next morning, but the guys still got in an interesting lesson on sun observations and documenting sun spots and solar flares.  Filip does these everyday and sends his observations in to headquarters at the Royal Society in Belgium.  They compile the data from thousands of astronomers around the globe in an effort to catalog the effects of the sun's activity on earth.

Ellie really enjoyed her art lessons with Chantal...she would have stayed a lot if she could have!  Thanks for everything Chantal and Filip!!