Milan

It took a while to get used to the fact that none of the restaurants in Milan open until 7. Eating dinner at 7 in Italy is the equivalent of eating dinner with the senior citizens at 4 in the U.S. But dinner starts with complimentary prosecco and ends with limoncello, so it’s not as hard to adapt as one would think.

From Milan we took a day trip to Lake Como, where we hopped on a boat tour. We got close enough to George Clooney’s house that we probably could have gotten on his wi-fi, if only we knew his password. Our tour guide also pointed out the House of Gucci and House of Versace, and then I really wished we could get on the wi-fi so I could find out what those are and be properly impressed. See below for some photos of neither of those houses.

On the tour, Leo practiced his imitation of a house.

It makes more sense when  you see what he was looking at.

We stopped at Bellagio for lunch and pretty views. This next photo is sponsored by Rocco’s Blasted Hoodie.

With an hour left on the boat ride, Leo got bored. Fortunately we had a single paper towel that Vincenzo turned into an hour-long magic show, full of twists and turns that kept Leo  laughing. “Vincenzo! There are two paper towels!” (Psst—there were three paper towels.)

The next day we visited a shopping center that made Las Vegas seem like a strip mall by comparison.

It was pretty popular.

This little church nearby was pretty popular too.

But I know how to fix that.

For our other full day in Milan we hit up the Leonardo da Vinci Science Museum. Leonardo da Vinci is to Leo as Morocco is to Rocco.

Like the FIFA museum, the LDV museum tricked us into learning about things on display by making it so fun, we didn’t realize we were reading. For example, Vincenzo thought he was actually watching TV here.

Hold up—Leo has to take a call.

There was some nice art inside.

And some naughty art outside.

Whoops, I mean knotty art. (I’ll be here all night, folks!)

And of course, there was boba.

After a couple days in Italy, Vincenzo’s hair started doing this cool thing.

To review, V’s hair in the U.S.:

V’s hair in Italy:

I guess his hair was happy to have finally found its Italian roots. (That’s right—all night!)

But seriously, am I the only one freaking out about how much his hands look like those of a grown man in this photo?

More Grindelwald Area

Continuing on with our Swiss adventure, from Grindelwald we took a day trip to  the sweet little town of Lauterbrunnen, where we hopped on a funicolare to head up the mountain and see what we could see. And here’s what we saw:

(Again with the draw feature!)

When we turned away from the view, I saw a playground and got excited, then remembered our kids are in high school and middle school and the days of sitting down and relaxing while our kids provide entertainment are over.

Two hours later…

They spent a good amount of time chaining each other up to a wooden post and ordering them to stir the soup.

I love my idiots.

Behind the playground was a deep valley with a sharp river cutting through it, a house waaaaaaay down there, and the sound of cowbells drifting up from some cows almost too far away to see. For 25 years, this has been what I see when my therapist tells me to go to my happy place. It was my favorite moment of the whole two weeks.

(This isn’t the scene I’m talking about but I felt there should be a picture here.)

The next picture really could be our Christmas card, if Vincenzo had combed his hair and if I hadn’t decided I might be done with Christmas cards:

So that was one day in Grindelwald. Another day we went to Tummelbach Falls, where there are waterfalls inside a cave so massively loud and powerful, it takes your breath away.

The walk  to and from was breathtaking in a totally different way.

On the way home we stopped in Interlaken and had gelato while watching parasailers land in the grassy square.

Vincenzo continued his quest to have boba tea in every city we visited.

Another day we took a train to the St. Beatus caves, which were the inspiration for middle earth in LOTR.

Inside the caves:

On our last night in Grindelwald, Kevin and I stayed up late drinking rum and coke on the grassy patch outside our hotel room. Somehow we landed on the conversation topic of my ex-boyfriends: the one I want to apologize to, the one I want an apology from, the one who I wish I kept in touch with. There was the guy I broke up with because he had a bad sense of direction and the one I broke up with because of Blockbuster. We laughed and laughed, and Kevin might have reached out to one or two on Linked In. I don’t know. There was a lot of rum.

The evening felt like a page from an earlier chapter in my life, from one of those summers in Switzerland when us counselors would sneak a bottle of wine from the kitchen to a balcony and stay up irresponsibly late, talking about anything and everything. Completely happy in the moment, but also hoping something special would happen. Hoping to make a connection that lasted beyond the night, beyond the summer.

Now here I was with Kevin, staying up late, with our boys sleeping in the rooms behind us and the cliffs rising above us and the glass of rum and Coke between us. All those things I had been hoping for? They were with me right now. It wasn’t only the rum that made my head spin.

Returning to Switzerland was like finding something I’d lost so long ago that I had stopped looking for it—something I had learned to live without, but now here it was, just as vast and spectacular as I remembered.

I left Switzerland feeling completely exhausted and also completely filled up.

Grindelwald

This leg of our journey feels almost too precious to blog about. It was the Switzerland I know. A village humbled by cliffs named after giants, softened with hills of the greenest grass, dotted  with brown houses clinging on like strong-willed goats. Houses that fill you with questions you can answer only with your own imagination.

So where do I tell the boys to sit for a picture among this vast landscape?

I’m a sucker for cool-looking walls.

And stairs.

And, apparently, skylights (this plaza is the roof of a grocery store).

The forecast was again for rain. Vincenzo had come to embrace the rain lifestyle.

Our hotel was as enchanting as the landscape.

Sometimes a guy would show up and play his little horn thing and someone in the audience would say, “Riiiiii-cola!” like he was the first person to do so and everyone around would chuckle like they hadn’t seen it coming.

At Grindelwald we ate fondue…

made a friend…

tried again with binoculars…

and discovered the drawing feature on my phone.

I made this one for Vincenzo’s girlfriend.

I don’t know how or why this next picture came to be; only that, like the brown houses on the hills, it leaves you so full of questions.

I feel like I haven’t even begun to blog about the Grindelwald part of our trip, yet here I am at the bottom of today’s post. Fitting Switzerland into a blog is like trying to squeeze toothpaste back into a tube. You’re only going to get a little bit in.

Of course, now I’ve compared Switzerland to a pile of toothpaste on the counter, so I fear I’m going the wrong direction.

Zurich

We left for airport at 3AM, which wasn’t as hard as you would think because it was bright as day. Next up: Switzerland! I couldn’t stop smiling as the scenery below the plane turned into villages, each radiating out from a church, edged by farm plots and separated from other towns by rolling hills and valleys. I could practically hear the cowbells.

Switzerland has been dear to me after spending two summers teaching at a summer camp in the Italian-speaking town of Lugano, traipsing around the countryside with middle schoolers from around the world. It felt like I was coming home.

But as the flight continued, the sweet villages faded and the beige, blocky city of Zurich came into view. I could tell right away there would be no cowbells here. What were we doing, staying here two nights? I began writing a letter of complaint to our travel agent in my mind. I dictated large portions of it to Kevin.

It didn’t help that when we landed, everything was in German. My Switzerland was Italian.

But there were chocolates in our hotel room and Kevin was optimistic. No amount of saltiness would deter him. It’s like I had traveled to Europe with Pollyanna.

I did feel better when we walked a couple blocks from our hotel to dip our toes in Lake Zurich. Lakes are part of my Switzerland.

The boys weren’t skeptical about Zurich at all, not once they found out is has bubble tea.

The forecast predicted rain, rain, rain our first day, so we headed for the FIFA museum.

Rocco found the jersey of his favorite country, Morocco (read as: “More Rocco”).

The museum was packed with memorabilia and information, presented in creative enough ways that even someone whose strongest emotion toward the sport is ambivalence could get pulled into the thrall. We had fun comparing the original World Cup trophy to the current one.

Original:

Current:

There were some sizable differences between the two.

We studied a replica of a World Cup stadium and learned that the word “bar” is universal.

We cheered for an invisible team on bleacher chairs from World Cup games of the past.

The museum cheered me up. The Mouthies know how to do museums. Museums also feel like home to us.

But it still didn’t feel like my Switzerland. So after dinner, Pollyanna found an arboretum nearby and we ditched the boys for a walk. It was nice until we accidentally got mixed up in a swarm of young people just off work, crowding the sidewalk and dressed fancy, each with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. It called to mind a nature documentary where a mob of male fish spray their juice all over the eggs and hope that some sticks. The looks they gave us when we squeezed through in our jean shorts and flip flops!

I was back to cranky. There were no pheromone clouds of judgy young professionals in the Switzerland of my past. Plus, tomorrow’s forecast was more rain.

Pollyanna remained optimistic.

The next day we walked the opposite direction from the lake and—wait a minute, what is that in the distance? Is it really…could it be? Is that…charm?!

It was! It was charm! Helter-skelter cobblestone streets that didn’t follow any rules! Colorful buildings jigsawed together! Couples drinking capuccinos al fresco!

(Picture shamelessly stolen from zeurich.com.)

I squeezed Kevin’s hand. “This! This is my Switzerland!” It all came back to me: being young and single in Europe, brimming with potential, feeling both small and big for going away so far and for so long.  The joy in hearing church bells ring out the hour. The challenge of figuring out how to ask for dressing on the side in Italian. The love for the world and everyone in it.

And then the rain that had been lurking in the forecast happened. I mean, it HAPPENED. One minute the streets were filled with leisurely window shoppers and the next sent us running for the awnings, laughing and watching as a biblical amount of rain poured down around us.

It was just like the storms when I taught in Switzerland, sometimes so fast and furious that we had to keep the kids in class longer because the streets turned to rivers. Zurich’s rainstorm was a gift. It was a tease. It was Switzerland saying, “Ha! I was here all the time!”

I am 25 years older now than on my first trip. I don’t get giddy like I did in my early 20s.  But there was a glow in my chest, a spark of giddiness that was coaxed into a flame. It hadn’t disappeared. It was waiting for me under a yellow awning amidst a rainstorm on a cobblestone street in Zurich, which is now part of my Switzerland.

Iceland Part 2

Day Two0 at Iceland began with a lovely continental breakfast where I unwittingly put Skyr in my tea thinking it was cream. My kids were very supportive, as you can imagine. So much for trying not to be the loud, obnoxious Americans in Europe.

After breakfast, we headed for the Blue Lagoon, which is a giant hot spring known for its silica content and rejuvenating mud masks.

Fun fact: the Blue Lagoon is formed from run-off water from a nearby geothermal plant. Nothing to worry about; I’m sure it’s perfectly safe. Leo’s tongue was always this color, right?

I kid, I kid. His tongue was blue because he drank a whole cup of krap from the drink bar.

(If you squint, you can see the name KRAP on the machines.)oo

Anyway, part of the fun involved floating over to the mask bar to get handfuls of the loveliest goo to rub on our faces. We got three masks each, the first of which was black lava and which I won’t picture here for sensitivity reasons.

Here we are in our silica masks.

And like that, our Christmas card photo is done!

For our final mask, we could choose between the algae one that made us look younger or the mineral one for hydration. They actually wouldn’t let Leo get the algae mask because he would have turned back into a baby.

So did it all work in the end? Did we look younger? Let’s study the before and after pictures below.

Probably you’re thinking there’s not much difference. But if you’re nodding, thinking yes, there is a difference and you really can reverse time, you should know that the before picture is on the right; the after is on the left.

I think I’ll just stick with my usual rejuvenating mask, a little thing I call “Sunglasses.”

When we finally had enough soaking in the lagoon, we headed back to the hotel where Leo continued his studies of hygge.

It was hard to make ourselves leave the warmth of the room for dinner that night, but it was worth it to turn the corner and see this:

To sum up, Iceland was gray, rainy, windy and cold. But it was also blue, green, purple, and toasty. You can’t be cozy without the cold, and cozy is one of my favorite things to be.

Iceland, thanks for all the hygge!

Iceland Part 1

Wow. It feels like I just got off a waterslide that was two weeks long. A waterslide that began in a country so cold it sent us running for the hot springs and ended at one so hot it sent us running for the sea. I’m not sure whether to shiver or sigh anymore.

We left for Iceland at noon our time and arrived in Reykjavik at 7AM their time, and with nine hours until hotel check-in time we had no choice but to keep going.

Looking out the plane as we landed, my first thought was, “Purple!” My second was, “Flat.” These adjectives were soon joined by “cold” as my hands turned corpsey white on the walk to our our rental car on  a bitterly cold summer day.

The purple (which I sadly did not get a picture of) was from miles and miles of lupine, which was planted in the 70s on what was then called the “lunar landscape” of Iceland. If botanical dramas are your thing, you can read about the lupine controversy here.

Anyway, my mild swearing stopped when we stumbled upon breakfast at a cozy place that was as warm inside as it was cold outside.  I stuffed myself silly on avocado toast topped with two fried eggs, served with a pot of tea and a bowl of chia pudding. It was the breakfast of my dreams, which made up for the fact that I had not slept long enough to have dreams for quite some time.

We spent the rest of the day driving the Golden Circle. First stop: Thingvellir National Park, where the Althing used to meet, close to the Thingvallavatn. So many Things! If you’re having a hard time with the pronunciation, this is how to say Thingvallavatn: ​[ˈθiŋkˌvatlaˌvahtn̥]. Also, it is spelled Þingvallavatn. Needless to say, by the end of the drive I had used up all my five gigabytes of roaming looking up pronunciation of Icelandic words, and my Internet usage was throttled to 3G for the remainder of the trip.

Anyway, the Thingvallavatn is where two tectonic plates meet, or more likely are trying not to meet, as they are moving apart. It’s crazy to put your hand on a giant, solid piece of rock and to think how it is moving even now—even as we use our other hand to look up what sound an θ makes!

The Thingvallavatn is in Thingvellir National Park, where Iceland’s first Parliament (the Althing) met annually beginning back in the 30s. The nine thirties. Since the Althing-goers built temporary structures out of rock, and since this was 1,090 years ago, there’s not much to see. But since it’s Iceland, it was lovely anyway.

Back on the road, the boys took a moment to process all the Things they had seen.

Our next stop was the geyser that gave all other geysers their name. (The geyser is the steaming bit on the right, not to be confused with the geezer in the red coat.)

The guy in the red coat is now glancing at my computer and pointing out that this is not Geysir. As the sign clearly shows, this is Litli Geysir. So whoops.

Anyway, back when it was first discovered, people found they could make Geysir erupt by throwing rocks into it, and they threw so many rocks that now it doesn’t erupt anymore. Isn’t that so very human? Fortunately, Strokker Geysir lies behind it, and fortunately, there aren’t any rocks left.

If you turn your attention to the hot spring below, you’ll see that Icelanders like to make use of geothermal heat.

If you can’t tell, that’s not a real house, just a stone one built on top of a hot spring to make it look like there’s smoke coming from the chimney.

I wanted to continue to the third stop on the Golden Circle, the waterfall, but the weather was such that we weren’t sure we’d be able pick it out from all the rain at that point. Plus, Leo had gone rabid, so instead we called it an early night at the hotel. “Night”doesn’t feel like the right word, as the sun set at 2AM and rose at 2:30AM, but another thing Icelanders like to make use of are blackout shades, so we got some good sleep anyway.

There you have it! Day one and/or day 2, depending on how you’re counting.