To Milan and Back

One thing I'd like the US to adopt from Germany is the vacation time. As a German employee, you receive six weeks of vacation in addition to the national holidays already allocated. And the holidays are quite nice by themselves. For Easter weekend, everyone takes off Good Friday and the Monday following Easter Sunday. So with my unexpected four-day weekend, I hopped on a train and headed to Milan, Italy to meet up with a friend.

I know Jaime through Campus Outreach and met the family she nannies for when I arrived. Spending a weekend with some Americans was a real blessing. Jobey and Kristen and their daughters, Isabella and Elisabetta, have lived in Italy for seven years now I think, but they haven't forget their Southern roots. Kristen made chicken dumplings for dinner on Sunday, a wonderful reminder of Southern cuisine.

The highlight of my time was a day-trip with Jaime to Cinque Terre, an absolutely beautiful arrangement of five towns along the Mediterranean Sea (pictures at bottom). The small towns are positioned along the rocky coastline wherever the steep cliffs allow. Jaime and I walked on the sometimes wide and flat, sometimes narrow and steep paths that connected each town and witnessed some of the natural beauty of the area--the lemon trees, vineyards, steep cliffs, and wild flowers. Although too cold to swim, the beaches were also some of the most beautiful I've ever seen.

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Quick story: as Jaime and I walked nearly two miles from Monterosso al Mare to Vernazza, we climbed from the water level to nearly the top of a mini-mountain, a brutal hike. The path winded through the terrain and at many times was simply too narrow for more than one person. So when two parties approached each other at a narrow point in the path, one party would retreat to a slightly wider area and hug the cliff as the other group passed.

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But when one pack of six or seven teenage girls approached Jaime and me, they showed no signs of stopping or even slowing down. I didn't have time to retreat so I tried to be a gentleman, and take the ledge side as they stormed through on the cliff side. There simply wasn't enough room and I took a 5 or 6 feet tumble off the ledge before a bush halted my fall. No worries though, besides some dirty shoes and itchy legs for the rest of the day, there was no damage. On other parts of the path though, I could have been in big trouble.

The other very cool part of the trip was seeing Milan. The massive cathedral in the center square was the most interesting/impressive site I visited. I could have taken and posted thousands of pictures of this magnificent structure, but I chose to include a picture of David slaying Goliath carved on the cathedral's exterior. Probably hundreds of Biblical stories are carved in marble all over the outside. From what I gathered from Jaime and my own limited knowledge of the Catholic church's history in Italy, these images served to tell the great stories of Scripture to the common people before mass literacy and access to the written text existed. So interesting to see not only the beauty but the utility of this art.

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First game is next Saturday--my next post I'm sure.

God Bless!