Hearing us praise our loves of Italy

Alright, well, incidentally although the subject line deals with Italy, I'm going to talk about the Vatican for a bit, which is not actually a part of Italy but is instead its own separate country.  You don't get a stamp on your passport though, which is majorly lame.  But seeing as the country is completely surrounded by the city of Rome I think it still sort of counts as Italy.

We woke up at our hotel, packed everything up and rushed off to Rome to find the beginning of our tour.  Because we were rather limited on time my parents decided that they'd rather pay a little bit of extra money to get in on a tour than stand in the line to get in.  Our tour guide was really neat.  She was good at making sure that she didn't lose anyone and that we all saw a bunch of really interesting stuff.  And she was really really Catholic, which was pretty awesome.  I mean, if you're touring the Vatican you kind of want a Catholic to tell you about it.

It was pretty exciting for me that one of the very first things that we saw was this giant gold ball.

Huge golden ball in the courtyard of the pinecone.

Now, to fully understand my excitement I'm going to have to go even further back in time and post a picture from Ireland, from Trinity College.

Look familiar?

Alright, so here's the story.  While in Ireland we went to Trinity College to look at the Book of Kells.  When we had finished that all of us had reached the point where we were tired and borderline cranky.  Pretty sure it was one of those times when we were all just tired and hungry and wanted to sit down for forever.  But then we walked around the corner and saw this giant golden ball (see above).  As we had been taking an art class Catherine and I wandered over to the ball and proceeded to "analyze" the piece of  "modern art".  We made up some stuff about the ball being the world that looks so smooth on the outside, but it's starting to break apart and reveal the complexities and problems in life and as the world grows more wicked the ball breaks up more.  We laughed at ourselves and found that laughter brought the energy that we needed to continue on.  

Fast forward and I'm standing in the Vatican.  Our tour guide is trying to tell us about the Sistine Chapel and what's on the ceiling and all I can look at is this golden ball because it's the EXACT SAME.  (And I'd taken a course where we discussed in detail what is happening on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, so her nice pictures and explanations weren't strictly necessary).  So I'm hoping that she says something about it and finally she does!  Apparently the golden smooth part represents the Catholic church and as the world and people start to break away from the Catholic church because of the complexities and problems in life the world grows more wicked and less smooth, like the Catholic church.  Yup.  It was definitely pretty exciting to have my totally made up explanation be validated and confirmed.  

Anyway, we saw a whole bunch of cool art in the Vatican but I think that one of my favorite things to see was this room that was full of tapestries.

Tapestry of the nativity.

To make a long story short, these tapestries hang in the Sistine chapel on the walls on very special occasions.  (used to be all the time until they realized that art is fragile).  The paintings that these tapestries were based off of were done by Raphael and are currently in London.  And yes, I did see the cartoons in London.  I thought it was a neat story about how the popes were trying to one-up each other with art and I thought wow, well that's neat and it's too bad that they aren't in the Sistine Chapel anymore.  Nope, instead they're just hanging in the museum that you have to walk through first.  Yeah, pretty cool.  

The Sistine Chapel was absolutely amazing of course.  I have seen few things so stunning in the my entire life.  Michelangelo was a freaking genius.  We just stood and stared at the ceiling for a good half an hour.  And then you remember that Michelangelo didn't really do frescoes and then you stare some more, even more impressed and amazed.  

No pictures though.  It's like the one Catholic church ever that you're not allowed to take pictures in.  Also the only one that I've been in where there's an intensely concentrated effort to keep people quiet at all times.  I think that they do a really good job trying to remind people that a chapel is a chapel.  

Anyway, we left the Sistine Chapel and went to the Basilica next door.  It was absolutely enormous (the Statue of Liberty could sit comfortably on the floor in the domed section) and really intricate and colorful.  The most impressive part for me was these paintings that I'm pretty sure were originally done by Raphael.  The actual paintings aren't there anymore (they had to take them away so that they could be properly preserved) so instead they decided to just recreate the paintings exactly with tiles.  Yes.  TILES.  This is what they look like.

Made of tile.

So that was pretty nuts.  That was the end of the tour though, so we just went out onto St. Peter's Square afterwards.  David and I found the spot where you can stand and have all of the columns line up, so that was pretty cool, but we couldn't stay long.  

Me in front of the Basilica.  Sistine Chapel's the brownish, not very nice looking building on my left.

Anyway, we had to rush off to find the Pantheon!  We did find it, but there's so many old and awesome buildings in Rome that at first we weren't sure that we'd found the right building.  But we saw the dome with the big hole inside, and then we knew for sure that we were in the right place.  Kind of embarrassing that we weren't sure we'd found it?  Yes, but then again I also walked into the Roman Senate without realizing what I was doing.  

In front of the Pantheon!

The tell-tale dome and hole in the roof.  I guess they don't get a lot of rain.

We sat down here for a few minutes before gathering up our energy to find a bus and say farewell to Rome.  In our quest to find the appropriate bus and bus stop to use we decided to grab gelato one last time.  It was delicious, although the gelato we got between the Colosseum and the Roman Forum was far superior.  We boarded the bus, rode back to where our car was parked and bid a tearful farewell to Rome.  (Okay, so nobody cried, but it was pretty sad.  It's an amazing city and we only got to spend a very very short amount of time there.)  

And as this is long enough, we're going to cut off right here.  Hopefully sometime soon I'll get the last bit of my Europe experience posted!

A merrier day did never yet greet Rome

This post is about Monday, June 20th, which was my first day in Rome!  Major day in Rome.  We got a really late start that morning and didn't get to our first stop until around noon.  We took the metro in after a very interesting breakfast (I had nutella yogurt and this really delicious orange lemon carrot juice which sounds weird but is really good, and croissants which appear to be typical food for Rome) and hopped off at the Colosseum!  Really it was sort of akin to the moment when you walk out of the Westminster Tube stop and Big Ben is just stretching to the sky above you.  We got off the metro stop and there was the Colosseum just sitting there.  You know, famous Roman architecture across the street from the metro.

We managed to skip most of the line by going to the front and paying to go on a guided tour (you can do the same if you get an audio guide) which was very interesting.  It was really really hot though.  I'd forgotten what it was like to sweat all over your body.  Yeah I know, lovely.  But the Colosseum was really neat.

Me outside the Colosseum.

And David and I inside.  The Colosseum is a very photogenic piece of architecture.

Although did you know that when women went to the Colosseum they had to sit on wooden benches at the very top, while the men sat down below on marble benches.  Yeah.  You have to wonder if any of those "delicate" women ever really did faint from the sight of blood or whatever and fell or tumbled down because the stairs were pretty steep.  Another interesting thing that I learned is that the Colosseum was built in a lake's equivalent of a riverbed.  Nero made himself a lake for his enormous palace so that he could have mock sea battles on it.  Well, he was seventeen or eighteen.  I know several teenage boys who would totally do the same thing if they were suddenly emperor.  Anyway, I thought it was kind of cool to hear that the main reason the Colosseum was shaped the way it is was because it was built in a lake bottom.  

Alright, well we left the Colosseum and walked towards the Roman Forum.  We stopped for lunch along the way to get pasta (I got tortellini) and "italian bread" that was pretty good, and then we got the most delicious gelato of our whole Italian experience.  Quite honestly, this was almost comparable to the cookie cup explosion.  

SO delicious.

Well anyway, we wandered on over to the Roman forum.  My dad kept marveling (rightly so) over the way that there were just all these Roman ruins lying around.  No cataloging, only a simple bar keeping visitors from climbing all over them, knocked over pillars just lying in the dirt, etc.  We found this one section where they were doing excavation work, so we kind of wandered around it and went inside this brick building tucked behind the work.  It was full of all of these statues of Nero and stuff, so we're wandering around thinking about how great it is to be inside out of the hot sun and what a convenient building this is when my dad comes over from where he's listening to the audio guide and informs us that we're standing in the Roman Senate on a tile floor that's been there since the time of Julius Cesar.  The steps we walked up to get into the building are the steps where Romulus was killed.  It was pretty awesome.

We were caught unawares sitting on the floor where Roman senators debated whether or not to attack Carthage.

Yeah, so I totally wandered into the Roman Senate without a clue as to the fact that it was the Roman Senate.  It's still a totally sound and complete building.  (It was turned into a church for a while, so that explains the wholeness of the building).  We went and wandered some more.  Some other notable things we saw were the remains of Saturn's temple.

You can thank my brother for the excellence of the sun in this picture.

and the Vestia, where the Vestals lived.  The Vestals were priestesses of a sort I suppose, but their main job appears to have been to keep the fire of Vestia from going out (Vestia is the goddess of the hearth sort of) and to stay chaste.  Apparently Vestia really liked virgins.  Every year all of the women in Rome would come to Vestia's fire and take some of it home with them.  You know, light a branch and carry it back to their own hearth so that the goddess's protection could extend to their homes.

This is the central courtyard for the Vestals.  

We kept wandering through the Roman stuff after that, eventually going up to the top of the hill and looking at a few more really neat buildings and getting an awesome view of Rome and finding some nice orange trees before we needed to move on.  We got back on the metro and stopped off at this random little square that's a top sight in Rome I suppose.  It was sort of this big fancy hotel/mall with a really neat fountain in the middle.  There was this really old church there too.  I guess that this church used to be part of the largest baths in the Roman empire, although most of them are gone now, so that was kind of neat.

Next we stopped off at the Trevi fountain.  You walk down all of these tiny, twisted streets that are crowded with stalls and people and the occasional car in the areas that weren't pedestrian only and suddenly there's this enormous fountain absolutely swarmed with people.

Yeah, I was making faces.  

We tossed coins into the fountain (over our shoulders) because it's said that if you toss a coin in the Trevi fountain then you're ensured to return to Rome, which is something that I DEFINITELY want to do.

Yeah, so then we wandered over to the Spanish Stairs which didn't strike me as particularly Spanish, but they were pretty neat so we climbed up to the top and had this really cool view of the sun meeting the tops of the buildings around as it set.  There was this big obelisk up there too and the Medici home.  Yeah, they have one in Rome too I guess.

On the Spanish Steps!

Then we kept wandering down the road (all this stuff was in the same general area and NONE of it was convenient to the Metro) to Popolo Square.  We actually ended up above it first where there was this really gorgeous park, but we went down to it eventually.  This is home to the biggest obelisk that we'd seen so far and was the original northern entrance to Rome, which is really the one that counts I think.  Also apparently the sight of public executions for a long time.

The gate into Rome.

Alright, almost done I SWEAR.  We then walked out through the gates to the metro stop only to discover that the Metro closes at 9:00 every night while they're doing work on it.  Anyone want to guess what time it was when we made that discovery?  9:15.  Heck yes.  Luckily there was a bus stop near by, so we figured out the bus system (which is WAY easier than the London bus system just to let you all know) and hopped on the bus we needed.  There was this really really gorgeous Italian man on the bus which made for a nice ride.  He reassured my parents that they were on the right route by showing them where we were on the map when he got off.

Yeah, so we eventually got back to our hotel and sat out on our little balcony area (yeah it was like this private balcony, SO cool.) and ate rolls and apricots.  It was an absolutely beautiful day.  Long and lovely, even if I then had to go sit in the lobby for an hour or so to do my schoolwork.

Whew!  That's the end of a horrendously long post.  I promise that's the longest post I'll ever write.  Luckily most of the benefit is just for me.

A young gentlewoman here in Florence

Alright, onto Sunday the nineteenth.  And yes, I realize that was two weeks ago, but I'm a bit slow I'm afraid.  My days were packed while I was gone, and in America my whole schedule's messed up.

Okay, but Florence!  Or Firenze, as the Italians call it.  We started off by going to church, which was in a rented set of rooms in the middle of a street full of apartments.  Hard to find parking.  But going to church in Italian made me realize how long it's been since I've been to church in English.  Not since before going to France.  The meeting was interesting to say the least.  Especially because there were these two absolutely adorable little kids (this fat baby boy with curls for the first half of the meeting and this little girl with short hair and a light pink dress) that kept climbing up on the stand during the meeting.  Like over and over again.  They'd climb up, the bishopric would stop listening to the speaker and watch the kids instead, ready to jump up and grab them if they fell, and then about five minutes later their respective mothers would sigh, march up to the stand, and retrieve them.  I listened to the meeting too though, I promise.  They were translating on behalf of some other Americans, so we actually heard most of the talks in English.

We only went to sacrament meeting, so on our way to the part of Florence we were going to explore we stopped in at a bakery and bought some more bread.  One kind was absolutely delicious and the other kind was the most flour covered and bland thing I've ever eaten.  Mom was fascinated by the fact that you could just walk into the bakery and buy part of a loaf of bread.  Just tell them that you want half a loaf and they chop it off for you.  Much more effective to only buy the part that you want to eat.

Yeah, so then we went (okay ran) down to the Uffizi museum.  As we went past we saw this really huge church (doma) that I guess I'll talk about first.

Well, you can see me and you can see that there IS a building in the background.  

This church is ginormous, seriously.  And it's just sitting in the middle of town, surrounded by all of these small streets.  I guess that's how they do it in Italy.  We didn't go in (there was a big line) but we walked around most of the building.  They've got a bell tower thing on the side (which made SO much more sense after seeing the Leaning Tower of Pisa) and it's all colorful.  It's all green and red and white, and SO pretty.  I'm pretty sure that it's like limestone.  Except the sad part was that it was filthy!  Really, they need to get a crew in there with sponges to clean the place up.  If they cleaned it up I think it could become (1) a major tourist attraction and (2) the most fabulous church building anywhere.

There.  Now you can see the colors.

Well, as I said we ran over to the Uffizi Gallery, which is a museum in the Medici's old home.  Yeah, cool isn't it?  Because for those who don't know, the Medicis were like THE art family.  Back in the days when art was done because of commissions from churches or wealthy families, the Medicis were that wealthy family.  So the museum was choke full or all of this art that they'd commissioned, plus some stuff that they didn't.  It was  a pretty awesome museum, but I think I liked best the fact that it was in their old home.  The last Medici donated the building and a lot of the artwork.

After we finished at the Uffizi we wandered down to the other museum that we wanted to see and stood in line for probably an hour and a half to get in.  The main thing in this museum (I've even forgotten what it's called) is the David by Michelangelo.  Bascially it used to be out in the main square, but they decided that they needed to move it indoors (preservation and all that important rot) so they built a museum to house the statue.  They then realized that they need something else in the museum BESIDES the one statue, so they put in a bunch of other statue work, including a bunch of the unfinished sculptures also by Michelangelo which was really neat.  People talk about being able to see a statue in the stone before it's carved, and you could totally tell that Michelangelo had that ability.

When we saw the actual statue it was late enough in the day that the sun was streaming through the window above the statue lending the marble a sort of ethereal glow.  It was really neat.  I wish we had been allowed to take pictures.

On a different, amusing sort of note, there was this sign posted on the wall of the museum outside where we were standing in line which read, "Writing on the walls or stones of a public historic monument and in any other way defacing or damaging IS A CRIME punishable by law with imprisonment.  WARNING!  This area is under video surveillance." About a foot below the sign, this is what the wall looked like.

Lots of this was recent graffiti.

It made me laugh anyway.  I find general group disregard for notices of importance to be entertaining.  So obvious that the sign wasn't doing anything.

We grabbed gelato on our way back to the car (it was pretty good, but the Genoa gelato was better) and then drove towards Rome.  Here's another funny sign that we saw on our way.

The two arrows at the bottom are the original sign, showing the road splitting.

We drove through some absolutely gorgeous countryside on our way.  Italy has a very different sort of flavor to it than Switzerland.

Random castle on a hill out the window.

Well, that was pretty much all for Florence.  We stopped on our way to Rome at one of the AutoGrill places that they have at all of their rest stops and I got some pretty excellent pasta.  Gelato and pasta pretty much defined the whole Italy food experience.

Haha, where? In Genoa?

Alright, so this is the first day in Italy!  I had four days in Italy total, and each one is most definitely getting a separate post because of how much we crammed into each of them.

Okay, so this is about Saturday the eighteenth.  We woke up in Torino, which some of you might recognize as the location of the Olympics.  For breakfast I had hazelnut yogurt (that's an interesting experience) and this orange carrot lemon juice that's actually really delicious.  I was trying to branch out a bit.  But the other thing that's in Torino (besides the Olympics which were actually way up on the Alps, some distance from the city) is the Shrine of Turin.  For those people who aren't up to date on Catholism (like me) the shrine of Turin is supposed to contain the shroud (sheet) in which Christ was wrapped in the tomb after he died and before he was resurrected.  But they only show the shroud like once a century or something, so when you go now you go and look at the pictures of the shroud that they've got.  That was in a pretty cool church, and then there was this castle looking thing in the square and whatever the family of power in the area's old mansion house as well.

This is me in front of the family's house.

Yeah, so Torino was pretty cool, but we didn't stay long.  We hit the road and headed out to Genoa.  We stopped on the way at an AutoGrill and got pasta!  These AutoGrills became our favorite, because you stop at a gas station and they've got pasta and fruit for relatively cheap prices.  Freaking delicious.

Anyway, we pulled into Genoa and went to the Maritime museum there.  Christopher Columbus is from Genoa (or Genova I suppose) and it's a major port there, which explains the presence of the Maritime Museum.  It was actually a really good museum.  I felt that it was a lot more informative than the one at Greenwich and that I learned a bunch about how ships worked at that time.  There was also this really neat display on the top floor all about immigrating from Italy to America through Ellis Island.  As I went to Ellis Island just a couple of summers ago, it was really interesting seeing what the Italians had to say about the process from the other side and compare the two.

After the Maritime Museum we walked over to the Aquarium.  The Aquarium was fairly cool, but definitely not the neatest thing that I've ever done.  The penguins were awesome though, and we could see them a lot better than the ones at the zoo.  Plus, I got to kiss a fish.

It's called a parrot fish.  And yes, there is definitely glass in the way.

The Aquarium was definitely a tourist attraction.  My mom says that it's supposed to be the third highest tourist attraction in Italy (after the Colosseum and the Roman Forum) but in all honesty I don't think it warrants that ranking.  But it was kind of neat to see signs written in five different languages.

Wait, so where's the way out?  Oh right, not in England.

Although a comment on the whole English thing.  You know how you can pick what language you want based on the flag of the country?  Well, when you're in Europe it's definitely the flag for the United Kingdom that means English.  Of course, I find myself pointing to it without a conscious thought.

Anyway, we left the museum and decided to go wander through some of the really cool streets in Genoa that were close to the port.  Old city you know.  It was pretty nifty, but the best part is that we got lost!  So fantastic, even if my mom was freaking out a little bit.  We ended up walking in the completely wrong direction and eventually Lorraine got directions from a man that spoke only Italian and French and seemed quite taken with her.  We got gelato on the way (daily occurrence whilst in Italy) from this really awesome shop in the middle of all the mess we were wandering through that the girl who worked there had just made, so so delicious, which kind of stood in for dinner, and ended up walking along/on top of the old wall that surrounded the city, which was pretty neat.  You could really see how the city's built in layers, because, as David pointed out, there's always a church or shops or another apartment building underneath the buildings you're walking past.

We got out of Genoa finally and hopped back in the car and drove down to Pisa.  There's nothing in Pisa but the leaning tower, which is actually a bell tower for this enormous church.  We hopped out and took pictures (yes I got the typical leaning against the tower, it's not on my camera).

That's the tower in the background.  Our camera was having trouble focusing in the dark.

It just so happens though that while we were there the church/cathedral was just about to start mass.  So there were these hordes of people going into the other side of the church, all carrying their candles to go in for evening mass.  It was really neat, and definitely not something that you'd see in normal tourist hours.

After that we hopped back in the car, drove for a couple more hours or something like that and checked into our hotel in Florence.

O, how ripe in show . . . those . . . cherries, tempting grow!

Alright, so this post is all about Friday the 17th of June.  This day is mostly centered in Switzerland, but by the end of the day we were in Italy.

So we woke up at 5:30 in the morning to get ready and leave our hotel.  We were all packed and ready to go by 7:00, but we didn't have any food for breakfast.  We wandered around for a bit trying desperately to find something open, and finally found an open bakery.  I got this delicious apricot custard pastry.  The apricots tasted a bit like cobbler, which was really amazing.

Anyway, we headed off to see more beautiful Swiss countryside.  We stopped at two little tiny towns that my mom's mother's side of the family is from.  In the one town I have ancestors from the 1500s and the other from the 1700s before they emigrated to America.  The one was called Eptingen and the other Haefelflingen.  Yeah, sounds a bit like Hufflepuff.  The first one was just this cute little town nestled in this valley that had a small little chapel and a handful of houses.  The other one was a tiny bit bigger and surrounded by all of these cherry trees.  We bought some from a random stand on the side of the road (no person at the stand, you just leave the money and take the deliciousness) and they are without a doubt the most delicious cherries that I have ever had.

AMAZING cherries.  Seriously, if this was all there was to eat for the rest of eternity I would still be content.

Funny story about Eptingen though. So we want to look for the cemetery, on the off-chance that we can see some really old gravestones of our ancestor's friend's descendants because stones from 500 years ago definitely aren't there.  So Dad asks this man who doesn't speak English but proceeded to explain and speak in English to Dad where the cemetery is.  Dad comes back to the car and says that it's just down and to the left of the cow.  So we're thinking, okay, there's a statue or something that we somehow missed, and we start looking for it.  But apparently Dad was talking about an actual cow.  THE cow.  Only one in the town I guess.  It had a cute little cowbell around its neck (although the brown sheep in the next town over did too).  A side note: there seems to have been some decree that all graveyards needed to be started over in 1989, because that's the oldest tombstones that we could find.  Their cemeteries are immaculate by the way.  Neat rows, and clean headstones, and clean little flower plots on each grave.  Swiss.  

Of course I took a picture.  Who do you think I am?

Well, we got back on the main road and continued on through the Swiss countryside until we reached Bern.  It's the capital of Switzerland, but I guess that nothing of much importance happens there, because Zurich and Geneva have way bigger airports.  We went to visit the temple there.  It was the first temple in all of Europe, which I actually didn't realize until we got there.  The temple was closed because it just so happens to be the two weeks that the temple is being cleaned, but we walked around the grounds.  Lorraine and I also made friends with a nice lady from England who now lives just a couple of towns over and was watching her grandkids and let us into the bathroom in the church next to the temple.  

The temple!  I think all of the pictures that have me in them are on my parent's camera.  I need to figure out how to get a hold of those pictures.  

Well, then we headed off to Geneva to pick up David (my older brother) from the airport.  I think that he ended up hanging out at the airport for about three hours waiting for us.  (And we'd gotten up at 5:30 that morning remember!)  I guess he found a nice Portuguese man to talk to for an hour though, so that's alright.  

We found a nice place to park (after driving in circles for a while "getting our bearings" my dad called it) and went to wander the old part of town, because really that's the best part of any town.  We found this church from the time of the Reformation (okay, it was from earlier but they tore off all of the fancy stuff and redid it during the Reformation) and wandered around that for a while.  We climbed to the top of both towers, which was really cool and gave us an awesome view of the lake next to Geneva.

At the top of the South Tower!  There were quite a few stairs.

Then disaster struck!  I dropped my camera, while the lens was open, and it broke.  Probably one of the saddest moments of my life.  My camera has been my constant companion these last two months, and the prospect of not being able to take pictures of Italy was horrifying.  Thankfully, David has a camera (even uses the same battery and type of memory card) and so I actually just stuck my memory card into his camera and have been taking pictures using that, because he doesn't seem to mind so long as he gets pictures of the landscape and scenery and points of interest.  

Yeah, but then we ran over to Calvin's chapel where he preached in Geneva which was pretty neat and also pretty plain, and then it started to rain on us.  I swear, we get perfect weather in London for weeks and weeks and then the two days that I'm in Switzerland it's got to rain and be foggy the entire time.  But we basically ignored the rain, and wandered over to the Reformation Wall.  In addition to all of the normal religion reformers, it had bits of the Mayflower Compact and Oliver Cromwell, which was really cool.  

Then we wandered around for a bit trying to find a cheap dinner in an open place (5:00 everything closes down remember) and finally bought these really delicious panninis from a street vendor.  They were warm and delicious.  We clambered back into the car and took an insane amount of time to drive by the UN.  It was pretty neat seeing all the flags out front and especially seeing the insane amount of land they randomly have in a city that's tight on space, but we kind of got stuck in a traffic jam, which was not so wonderful.  

Once we got out of the slow traffic we headed towards MontBlanc, the tallest of the Alps, and also the tallest mountain in Europe.  We couldn't really see it very well (fog and clouds and rain again) but we took a tunnel right through the middle of the mountain.  When we came out on the other side we were in Italy!  

I don't think that I've seen so many castles in the space of just a few scant hours.  There were always signs pointing out the next castle off the freeway.  Although it's a toll road, so I guess it's not a freeway.  But anyway, Italy was really pretty, in a different way than Switzerland.  Seems to fit the country's personality.  We saw a lot of grapes growing on the hills.  They just build walls into the hill to create flat areas where they can plant grapes.  Something about the heat rising and helping the fruit ripen makes them want to plant on the hills at exceedingly steep angles.  

Well, we basically just drove to our hotel in Torino.  We had to switch rooms once we got there because our room was all smoky, but welcome to Europe, yeah?

Here is a water, look ye

Alright, so for all of you who are a bit behind the times and out of the loop, I'm no longer in London.  My study abroad program has ended.  Of course my blogging hasn't, because there's no way that I'm going to stop blogging now that I've found such an exciting and interesting writing activity that also conveniently doubles as a journal.

So without any further ado, onto Switzerland!  Lorraine and I left the beautiful city of London and, with the assistance of the Tube and the DLR, flew over to Zurich.  We hung out at the airport for about an hour before my parents came and picked us up in their snazy huge rental car that still manages to look European, and we drove towards Zug.  Oh, but in the airport, while we were hanging out we checked out the local shops and found ENORMOUS jars of nutella, like they have at Creperies, and huge stacks of chocolate.  There were no smaller candy bars anywhere in sight.  It was bulk or nothing.  Although actually, they did have a week pack of nutella jars.  Small little jars, one for every day of the week, all in a big pack.  Just the sort of thing that every family should have in their pantry.  

Anyway, we drove through the beautiful country of Switzerland and back to Zug (Pronounced zOOg, not zUG).  We got in fairly late, and had lots of fun looking at the strangest parking garage that I've ever been in.  You park your car on top of this metal ramp, and then when somebody else needs to park somewhere, the metal ramps will slide around, with your car on top of it, to make space for the other people's car.  It's pretty nuts.  But then we went down for dinner at this pizza place that is right on the edge of the lake, and I mean RIGHT on the edge of the lake.  It was really beautiful sitting right there as the sun faded from the sky and night set in.  Our waiter had something like four languages that he offered to speak to us in, including English, before settling on Spanish when he realized that we could understand that as well.  He's from the Dominican Republic, so it was exciting for him to speak his native tongue I suppose in a country full of German, French, Italian, and English speakers.  

Oh yeah, everyone speaks English here.  Some people pretend that they don't speak English (when you ask they say that they don't) but then you'll start trying to ask questions and they'll respond and give you directions in English.  Although there are some exceptions.  Most of the store clerks seem to just speak German.  Probably French too.  

This is a track that you put your shopping cart/bag on while you use the escalator to get up to the next level in the grocery store (called coop, or CoOp).  Kind of nuts, but really very smart. 

On Thursday we woke up and went to the grocery store.  We'll take a moment and talk about Swiss food now, which I know everyone will be totally intrigued by.  Too bad, this is my blog and I write about what I need to record for myself.  

The Swiss are really big on dairy.  When we got on the shuttle at the airport that took us over to border control after leaving the plane they have this music playing in the background, and then random cows mooing. Yeah, Lorraine and I looked at each other to see if we'd both heard the same thing.  So we obviously have been eating Swiss cheese, and then we got some yogurt.  But they have an enormous cheese section in the store and more yogurt than I've ever seen.  They also have this really interesting looking bread that's got dark and light sections in it.  We bought some of that and it's absolutely delicious.  They have a lot of really good French bread too that we got.  Lots of sausage in Zug, because it's definitely in the German part of Switzerland.  And strudel!  I ate a spinach strudel for lunch yesterday.  

Strudel is delicious!

And then, of course, there is chocolate everywhere!  Mostly Lindt (I got some of that yesterday to take home) but also a lot of Tolberlone.  They have great bricks and displays of it everywhere.  It's absolutely insane.  But the other thing that we have learned is Swiss is cherries.  Those'll come up later though.  

So the morning we spent in Zug.  We wandered around the old city section, or at least what remains of it.  The old city was built in the 1200's, but part of it actually fell into the lake in the 14 or 1500's.  Yup.  Big storm came up and there goes the city.  Anyway, cute village.  My mom called it Pinocchio's village, which is actually true in terms of what it looks like.  We went up the clock tower that used to be part of the wall for the first bit of the old city (you get the key from the police station) and met this nice Swiss lady on the way that was giving a tour to some students from various parts of the world, so she helped tell us about the town and the tower.  Then we went over to the city hall and looked around there and met another really nice lady, although this one didn't speak English, who gave us this nice book in German that's all about the hall and has some great pictures.  

Anyway, then we headed out of town to Lucern, or Luzern, depending on what language we're talking in.  This is where Switzerland was founded back in 1289.  Switzerland actually would be rather interesting to study politically because it's sort of a confederation of states and right now it's actually ruled by seven main rulers.  In order to pass any law all seven have to agree and vote for the law.  And yet it's the most immaculate and clean country I've been in.  No trash anywhere, and everything just feels so ordered and nice, even when the streets are winding and random.  

The thing about Luzern though is the really beautiful clear water.  Seriously, the river, Reuss, looked like it was almost pool water, it was that clear and beautiful, but it's just the local river.  We walked across all of these bridges (one is the oldest of its type in Europe, wooden covered bridge you know) and just couldn't stop looking at the water.  We did duck into a Jesuit church for a bit though, which was really neat with its white and pink wooden paneling and red marble.  

Yes, that really is the river.  Can you believe it?

After we tore ourselves away from the river we continued driving, this time towards Interlaken.  We drove past the most beautiful lakes that I have ever seen.  The water was like turquoise and clear and looked almost tropical.  It was probably one of the most beautiful sights of my lifetime.  We drove down next to one of the lakes just as a storm was rolling in, so the water was choppy and beautiful, framed by the mountains that were beginning to be shrouded in mist.  There were some fairly cute German speaking boys hanging around too.  But we hopped back in the car just as it started pouring rain.  We drove through town and up to Lauterbrunnen, which is among the top five most beautiful spots in Switzerland.  I've never seen so many waterfalls in one place before.  We couldn't really see the Alps because of the clouds, which was a bummer, but we hopped out of the car and took a walk along this little Swiss trail past waterfalls and beautiful countryside in the rain.

You know, just chilling in the Swiss countryside.

Well, we chilled there for quite a bit before slowly and leisurely making our way back to Zug.  We did almost take a tram up to the top of the waterfalls, but we took one look at the degree of fog/clouds that were covering the mountains we knew were about and decided that the weather combined with the fading daylight were both good reasons to head back to our hotel.  I swear, we have the most beautiful weather whilst in England and then we go to the Alps and can't see them because of the rain.  It's still so totally beautiful though, so I don't even care.  

Parting is such sweet sorrow

Alright, so we're now writing about Tuesday, my last day in London.  At least with all of my friends and the Center, which at this point is what I'm concerned with.

So I was planning on going to hang out in Hyde Park in the morning to walk about and maybe read my scriptures on the grass, but somehow my phone managed to not go off.  Or maybe it did and I didn't hear it because I was so deeply asleep.  My body woke me up at the usual 8:00 instead, which was a bummer, but whatever.  I had breakfast, showered, and got ready to go.  I was planning on going with Amy, who wanted to do some shopping before going to the British Museum.  But then we're standing there ready to go and Corey casually mentions that he's going to the zoo.  Sydnie and I jumped at the idea and said forget the shopping that we didn't really want to do anyway, and we headed off to the zoo.  Took a nice walk through Regent's Park on the way, so I did get my park walk in after all.

Me at the reptile house.  Of Harry Potter fame.  The very same.  

We spent about four hours at the zoo, and it was one of the best things ever.  We just walked around and looked at all of the animals and watched a lioness stalk and pounce at a duck, otters jumping inside of logs and playing, walked through a tunnel filled with butterflies that tried their best to bowl you over as they fluttered about looking for nectar, and watched penguins stand at attention as a procession passed between them.  It was just a lot of fun.  Probably one of the just plain old funnest things that I've done in Europe.  It wasn't ultra historical or intellectual, so we could just enjoy ourselves and be young people.

Anyway, when we were done with the zoo we were absolutely starving, because it was 2:30 or so and we hadn't had lunch.  So we went over to Camden Market, as it was the nearest food source at hand, and bought lunch and sat down for a while.  Then we went to go look for fruit of some sort, and who should we find walking past the fruit stall we're at but Amy!  She was looking for a bag, so we stopped and chatted for a minute.  But then I realized that it was getting nigh onto three thirty and that I really needed to go to the British Museum.  So I parted company with all of my dear sweet friends (who are usually very sarcastic and not sweet at all, which is one of the reasons that I love them so much) and went off to the British Museum, which is probably the least British place that I've been this whole time.

It's a big blueish-green man with a strange looking goatee.  I'm guessing that's significant.

Props to whoever gets that movie quote first (although I'm not sure what you need a prop for).  Yeah, but for those of you who don't know, the British Museum is full of really cool historical stuff from other countries.  Chunks and broken statues of the Parthenon, random mummies from Egypt, a really cool room full of pictures from an Assyrian lion hunt from sometime around 400 BC, you know.  That sort of stuff.  I saw the Rosetta Stone, which was kind of cool.  It was the only thing, just about, in the whole museum in a case.  Okay, not true, the mummies were in glass cases too.  Everything else they kind of trust that you aren't going to touch.  I spent some time just wandering through the rooms, because I frankly didn't have the energy to get super excited about whatever aspect of history I'd be learning through the plaques next to the objects.  That's what happens when you go to millions of museums in just a couple of weeks.

Anyway, the museum closed and I went on back to the Center, stopping at one of those stupid touristy shops on the way to get some souvenirs.  They're stupid, but we're all getting them.  After dinner we kicked around the Center for a while before going to Paul Rhodes to get brownies, which were good but definitely not the most amazing thing I've ever had.  Anyway, eventually Sarah and I mustered up the energy to go for one more nice stroll.

Beautiful lights!  That's London bridge behind my shoulder.

It was seriously one of the most beautiful things that I've done.  Walking along the river, just enjoying London and reminiscing about everything that we had done was so incredible.  We walked past St. Paul's, and the Globe, and London Bridge, and the Tower Bridge, and the Tower of London, and all of these things that I love so much.  The first week that I was here in London I did essentially the same walk, and it was beautiful then.  It was so much more beautiful last night, and it was a very cathartic sort of thing to do.  Nostalgic one of the girls at the center called it.  And the best part was that we were still discovering corners and nooks and crannies that we didn't know about before.

Anyway, we caught the very last train home on the Tube (we were worried there for a minute that we weren't going to make it, but London's just too beautiful to tear myself away from).  Because it was so late (past midnight) there wasn't anyone else in the Tube car with us, so we took pictures.  Yes, so I've got pictures of my on the Tube!  It was totally fun.

Reading the newspaper, because that's what everyone does on the Tube.

It was the perfect end to my London experience.  It's terribly sad to leave the Center and all of the beautifully wonderful people that lived here with me.  It's sort of like leaving Girl's Camp for the last time right before I moved to Utah.  You're never going to get this same group dynamic again, and never back in London.

However, what I've learned most from London is that Emily's statement of "but you HAVE to.  We're in LONDON." can apply to lots of different things.  Why not say that we're on Earth, so we have to?  Seems sad to stop living and loving just because I'm leaving London.  Which is why, ladies and gentlemen, this blog is going to be revamped whenever I reach America again ('Merica Sydnie) under the new title of Living and Loving Life.  Because really, isn't that what it's all about?