In Greece

We arrived in Greece after a two hour flight from Italy. The alphabet and language had changed completely. The alphabet is the most confusing because as you can see from the picture above, you can't even try to sound out the words. Circles with lines through them, triangles, end even math symbols like pi. I have just finished reading Julius Casaer and recalled Casca's line "it is Greek to me." I can really see where he was coming from!

If you didn't know, the book in the picture is "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," but I don't think I will be reading this version anytime soon.

Κυνηγός (That's Greek for Hunter!)

Paestum

We have been having a great time in Paestum (PASTE-oom). Paestum is a resort town in southern Italy with incredible Greek ruins - and the tourist haven't shown up yet, but the weather is awesome. We found a great little resort, Oleandri Resort, which is a across from the Sea, has pool, and breakfast is included. It was a great rest from the hard-core sightseeing in Rome, so we are hopefully reenergized for our next leg which will be a bit tougher. We are off to Pompeii for a day and then catch a train which gets us to the Rome airport at 11:30 PM for our 6:40 AM flight to Greece. We had originally planned to travel to Bari on Italy's west coast and then take a Ferry, but the logisitics proved too challenging and we found a inexpensive flight on EasyJet, so we are doing this Amazing Race style.

Shath

As you can see, we've invented a new word called "shath". The definition of this word is: A bath and shower all in one. You would turn on the faucet, close the drain and lay down in the bathtub.

You have to lay down because the shower head is at waist height. When the bath has about 2" of water in it, you put the shower head into the water, turn the shower head on and the faucet off, then like a shower, but you hold the showerhead over you and wash your hair. You then place the showerhead back in the water and clean your body, praying you don't lose the soap bar in the mucky water! When the shath is done, turn off the showerhead like a shower and drain the bathtub as if you were in the bath, but you weren't you were taking a shath.

Again, photos aren't working tonight, so will hopefully add photo later.

Hunter (very clean)

Naples

Naples was not what I expected, until yesterday I didn't that one third of Naples was unemployed. When we steped into the Naples terminal it was the cleanest one we had ever been in and there were five cleaning vehicles being driven around. Outside was extremely different piles of trash lined the streets, it was nasty. There were shoes, fabric, cans, bottles, and simply garbage. The pizza place da michele was different than its city. It was organized and fairly clean

with the best pizza in the World!

Trying to send picture of Hunter and I eating on a street corner, but images are not working tonight, so You'll j

just have to invision it.

Life in Roma

We have been extremely busy seeing the sites and spending time doing as the Romans do. When in Rome...

We continue to be blessed by short lines and great travel tips. We have seen many important sites - Trevi Fountain (better at night), the Colosseam, the Pantheon, St. Peters. Yesterday we saw the Pope's address and even attended mass at St. Peter's - an amazing experience.

The Boys were excited to see Raphael's "School of Athens" in person and learn more about the work. The Sistine Chapel was amazing but the crowd was crazy. I couldn't imagine being here in the summer.

Our apartment has been noisy and there has been some adjustment to the bathroom situation - Hunter promises to include more on this later.

After finding plentiful WiFi in Milan, Venice, Bologna and Firenze, the public WiFi has disappeared and our apartment has no Internet. The whole team is looking forward to getting better connected at the next stop.

Galileo museum

Today we saw art, sculpures, culture all priceless but most interesting, the Galileo museum. They had contraptions that would calcutate your location would shoot a cannonball at 12:00, would show when planets will be visible,telescopes as big as a cannon and all sorts of things. but the most interesting, Galileo's thumb fore finger and middle all from the right hand.There was even a tooth! How did they get these you might ask? After dying under house arrest Galileo's followers came to his body and got what they could then encased them in jars.

WOW

Wow our last day in Venice was not the best, while we were packing up our bags in our apartment to leave for the train my mom said,"Its drizzling out there." but when we got outside it wasn't drizzling, it was raining hard, luckly I have a bag cover. Still after a long walk wich was more of a run we were at the train station drenched when we were at Bolognia the only thing not dry were our shoes thank you fast dry clothes!