Italy Part 1 - Tuscany

The official Tuscan greeter.  

We traveled to Italy for Grant's Easter break.  Since we were venturing to one of the most Catholic nations in the world during one of the most important religious holidays, we opted to spend Easter weekend in the Tuscan countryside.  For the next three days we drove around Tuscany - enjoying the beautiful hills, visiting old hilltop towns and fortresses, eating pasta and, unfortunately, getting wet in the rain.

The view in the back of our hotel

An olive oil press at our hotel

We started the trip by landing in Florence, where we skipped seeing Michelangelo's David, the Duomo and the millions of tourists.  Rather we drove to the small town of San Gimignano.  Besides having a name that is difficult to pronounce, San Gimignano is a small hill town with seven medieval towers.  At one time the town had over 70 of these towers which were used for defense and to boast of wealth.

Several of the seven remaining towers

View of the Tuscan landscape

The amount of history is incredible -- every building is old and they all have frescoes

They're leaning on a handrail not a bar

Typical medieval town street

We liked the windows on this building

Interior courtyard with and old well

We also visited Siena, a much larger city but still very well-preserved.  The Duomo, built in the 13 and 14th centuries, is said to be one of the best in Italy.  Beneath the Duomo is a crypt, that was forgotten and hidden for over 700 years until it was re-discovered in the early 2000's. Siena also has a huge town square, or piazza, but it was cold and windy so our visit was short.

The Duomo, or cathedral

One of the altars decorated for Easter

The black and white striping is somewhat unique.

The front entrance is extremely ornate 

There were no signs explaining what this music was, but it looked very old and very interesting. 

Close up of the facade. 

The oldest stained glass in Italy, finished in 1288.  

The tile floors took 40 artists over 200 years to complete.  

Twice a year there is a horserace around the Piazza del Campo.  The race was first held in 1310 and it is described as "raw and arbitrary".  Horses are chosen at random 3 days before the race.  There is not enough room for the 10 horses so falls and collisions are inevitable.  Jockeys ride bareback and are mercenaries from surrounding towns.  

Another view of the Piazza del Campo

In Radda we toured the Badia a Colitbuono, or Abbey of the Good Harvest.  Monks have made wine there since the 1100's and did so until Napoleon shut it down in 1810.  The Abbey has been in the same family since the mid 1800's and they sell wine, olive oil and honey that they make.  We discovered that it's very cheap to ship wine within Europe so we bought a case.  

Badia a Colitbuono

The grounds included a cedar tree with trunk with a circumference of 7 meters making it one of Tuscan's "monumental" trees.  

We were too early for most of the flowers

The Abbey had an antique grain cleaner based on a design by Leonardo da Vinci.  

The Abbey's wine cellar had wine from the 30's on, all sorted by year.  These bottles were from the year of my birth and look to be in about the same condition as I am.  

The current owners converted the crypt to a wine aging room to take advantage of the constant cool temperature.  There are over 100 of these barrels.

This wall "safe" was where the monks stored their salt.

Frescoes inside the Abbey meeting room.  

An interesting fresco at the abbey...a monk holding a skull  

An old building in Volpala, a town of about 100 people at the top of a hill.  There were hundreds of little towns just like this one.

Happy Birthday, Queen Beatrix....a little late

Monday was Queen's Day in The Netherlands, a national holiday with schools and offices closed.  It is a celebration of the Queen's birthday, but it's a little more complicated than that.

As you might expect, Queen's Day actually began as Princess's Day in 1885 to celebrate the birthday of Princess Wilhelmina on August 31.  It started as a holiday to promote national unity and the Princess was chosen as the celebrant since her father the king was fairly unpopular.  When she ascended to the throne several years later the holiday was renamed Queen's Day.  

In 1948 when Juliana took the throne the holiday was moved to her birthday, April 30.  But in 1980 when  the present Queen, Beatrix, ascended to the throne she elected to retain the holiday on her mother's birthday.  The official reason was to honor her mother.  The unofficial reason was that Beatrix was born in January and a holiday in Holland in January that doesn't involve ice skating would be a waste of a day off.  

More questions will arise when Queen Beatrix's son, Willem-Alexander becomes king.  He was born on April 27 so the date probably won't change.  But will it be called King's Day?   The Royal Family celebrates by visiting two towns each year to join in the local festivities.  Veenendaal was one of the towns they visited this year -- you'll recall that is Joan's ancestral home.  Too bad Don and Joan didn't visit us this year; they could have seen the Queen.  

Queen's Day continues to be a day of national unity.  As a show of pride, everyone wears orange, lots of orange.  Readers may be surprised to know that I had to choose between 3 different orange shirts that I own.  And none of them were t-shirts.  Queen's Day is also known as vrijmarkt dag, or free market day.  You are allowed to sell second hand items anywhere without a permit.  This is especially encouraged among children.  As a result kids line the downtown streets, throwing down a blanket to display their wares for sale.  It is one huge garage sale all day. This is also accompanied by lots of food stands, drinks and live music.  So it's a garage sale and party combined into one.  No wonder it's so popular.

This is the end of the garage sale in Wassenaar.  Hard to believe that Lori and I didn't arrive sooner.  

This swan's nest is along the bike path into town.  As you may know, swans mate for life and the male shares in duties of incubating the egg.  

Swans are extremely protective of their nest.  It didn't take this one long to come after us when we were taking pictures.  According to Wikipedia, a swan attack several years ago caused a man to drown.  

After a short stop at the town garage sale we biked around some nearby flower fields.  

If you look closely you can see some yellow tulips among the pink ones.  Kind of like volunteer corn in the soybeans.  

More Tulips

Not much news here.  It is still cold, but today the sun came out so I took a few photo's of our tulips.  

Spring is coming.... slowly

It's spring time in Holland but sometimes it's hard to tell.  Our temperatures continue to get down to the mid 30's each night with highs in the 50's during the day.  Last year at this time Don and Joan visited us and we sat outside on the patio in our shirt sleeves to enjoy the 80 degree days.  Not this year.

Despite the cool weather my tulips are up.  I planted 400 new bulbs last fall.  You'd think that would give acres and acres of solid color, but it actually results in fairly small patches.  The colors are beautiful; I just wish I had more.  It makes you appreciate the Kuekenhof with their millions of bulbs.  That's how you get acres of color.

About a third of my landscaping from last year got killed off by the freeze.  

Finally, after almost three months our street has re-opened and we can drive to our home.  It is great to drive all the way to the house instead of walking for two blocks.  I celebrated and went to the grocery store to restock on all the things I didn't want to carry that far.  With cat litter, cleaning supplies, diet cokes, paper towels plus food I ended up spending almost $300!

It is tough to see, but the street is constructed with bricks.  They put down a rock/gravel subsurface,, put sand on top of that, go over it with vibrators to compact the sand. When's that's done, 2-3 men lay the bricks by hand in a herringbone pattern.  It's a lot of bricks.  The also refurbished the sidewalk with new pavers.   

Graber has his spring hair cut.  

Someone's soccer ball (not ours) as ended up in the canal across from our home.  I can't decide whether to call the Canadian Ambassador and ask him to fish it out or to get out our rowboat and get it ourselves.  

Seychelles

Skating and playing on the ice in Holland was fun.  But for February break we were ready for some sun so we headed to the Seychelles.  If you're like I was and not exactly sure where that is, get out your atlas of Africa, go 900 miles east of Somalia and you'll find 150 islands that lie 4 degrees south of the equator.  That is the Republic of Seychelles.  We stayed on the largest island, Mahe.  Many of the islands, such as Mahe, are granite.  Other, smaller islands are coral based.

A couple of items in that first paragraph may have caught your attention  First, Somalia.  Yes, there have been some Somali pirate kidnappings of boats in The Seychelles.  But for the most part, the pirates have learned that the big money is in freighters and tankers, not small dive or excursion boats.  Second, 4 degrees south of the equator means the Indian Ocean was a balmy 82 degrees.  Great for diving and playing in the water.  

We flew to the Seychelles via Dubai, which is establishing itself as a key hub in Middle East travel.  The airport is huge and busy.  We arrived at midnight and you'd have thought it was O'Hare on Friday afternoon at 5:00 pm.  The new Terminal 3 opened in 2008 and is the second largest building in the world in terms of floor space -- almost 300 acres of it under roof!  As you can imagine, lots of that floorspace was dedicated to shopping.  We were thrilled to find a Cinnabon Store.    

What a great midnight snack

Our resort in the Seychelles was located on an isolated bay, with rooms built in the surrounding hills.  We arrived to glass-like seas with warm, sunny skies.  Unfortunately, that lasted about a day.  From that point on about half the days were windy and cloudy.  The other half brought sunshine.   The weather didn't significantly impact our diving.  We did two dives a day, every day.  Sometimes the seas were rough so we had to stay close to shore.  It also resulted in one day of very limited visibility under the water.  Not quite as murky as the Mississippi River or old quarry pits, but you had to pay attention so you didn't get separated from the leader.  

View of the resort from our room

Grant studied and did the required dives to get his advanced scuba diving certification during the week.  One of the requirements was to do some underwater photography, so we've got a few sample pictures.  He learned how tough it was to hold still in the water to be able to get a good shot.  

Photo by Grant.  A small crab tucked away in a coral structure.  

The diving student

Photo by Grant.  The sea cucumbers in the Seychelles were very interesting.    They almost look dangerous.  Luckily, they just lay on the floor and mostly get moved around by the current.   We used to have to eat these things in China.  

Photo by Grant.  A nudibranch -- small, colorful mollusks that are difficult to find.  

Photo NOT by Grant.  We saw a four foot long Gray Reef Shark the first day.  They don't bother divers, but your heart rate goes up a little when you see one swimming nearby.  We saw sharks (mostly smaller) on almost every dive.  

The seas on a sunny day

The resort's beach.  

On the way home, we went through Dubai Airport at 4:00 am.  It was just as busy as before.  And we stopped at Cinnabon like before.  It was difficult to arrive back to Holland's cool temperatures and permanently cloudy skies.  But there were signs of spring in the air.  My tulips are coming up.   And the local ice cream store re-opened after its normal winter break.

The tulips on the warm side of the house are well along.  

Luciano's --one of the best ice cream shops in Holland.

Flavors include Snickers, Caramel, Speculoos and many more.  

ICE UPDATE:  It was great fun to skate and curl on the Dutch ice, but there was a downside to the winter fun.  According to a local consumer safety group, there were 13,000 injuries to people ice skating in Holland this winter, of which 80% were broken bones.  The over 40 crowd accounted for half of the injuries.  People over 65 accounted for 10%.  I'm impressed that 1300 people aged 65 and older were skating.  

And while I was reading about the skating injuries, I also found this interesting bit of information.  Around 250 couples are expected to tie the knot on Wednesday, Leap Year day, according to the national statistics office CBS.  This is twice as many as on an ordinary Wednesday in February, which is not a popular month for weddings. Just 5% of weddings take place in February, says the agency.  The exception was February 2 2002 (02-02-02) which was chosen by prince Willem-Alexander and princess Máxima. 515 couples followed their example and also married on that day.  What would we do without helpful statistics like that.