Ortygia

Jo arrived in Sicily a couple of days ago. Vivian is at camp in Slumber Falls learning to be a better Christian, along with her cousin Ava. Evan is hanging out with his cousins at his Aunt Nicolle's. From the pictures we are seeing, they'll both be disappointed when we return to Austin.

Jo and I spent a lovely evening wandering around Palermo eating and drinking. Next morning we drove for three hours over bridges and through tunnels across the heart of Sicily to the lovely historic town of Ortygia - a tiny island town connected to the city of Siracusa or Syracuse by a couple of bridges.

When we checked in to our hotel, our receptionist came out and inspected the rental and declared that it was too low and too wide to be accommodated in their garage - which surprised us a bit considering we are talking about a Fiat 124 Spider. She somehow got her six foot self into the car and found street parking for it. When Jo and I later walked past the only public garage in town we understood what she meant. The car would have bottomed out entering and leaving the garage and the average streets of Ortygia are slightly narrower than when I spread my arms. So we walked.

Jo and I liked the open air church. We also visited the main cathedral - an amazing structure built in the seventh century. It incorporates an even older Greek Temple of Athena from the fifth century B.C - you can see the original doric columns both inside and outside the cathedral. And archeologists have found that the greeks built on pre-Hellenic foundations. So people have been praying to different gods right here for a few thousand years. I hope it worked out for them. Outside, in the plaza, a lady in a black dress had arranged six portable LED lights around her in the evening darkness and was dancing a tango with an umbrella in her arms. Keeping Ortigia weird.

Beside the cathedral was another smaller church (one of many hundreds around the town) that is home to a Caravaggio - The Burial of St. Lucy. St Lucy is the parton saint of the city and some of her remains are at the cathedral. We walked in and I stared at the huge painting hung over the alter for as long as I could without being rude to Jo- we aren't museum compatible :-)

Besides churches, Ortygia is very serious about gelato. And they too have auto rickshaws - beautifully painted and trimmed in wood with cabriolet tops.

While St Lucy is famous, there is another even older and probably better known citizen of Ortygia - Archimedes - of the "Eureka!" fame. When I was a nerdy kid (as opposed to a nerdy adult) and learned about the principle of density it was a huge aha moment. Archimedes invented a screw pump (a variant of which which Uncle Tom uses to load grain into a silo to this day), discovered hundreds of geometric relationships, and successfully defended Siracusa from the Romans multiple times using his catapult, the Archimedes claw and heat rays. Eventually he was killed by a Roman soldier. He requested that a cylinder and a circle be placed in his tomb. Good man. Below is the Fontana di Diana in the middle of the Piazza Archemede.

Which brings us to yet another Ortygia-related celebrity (TMZ of thence would have been in a tizzy). Diana is the Roman version of Artemis - the original feminist, hunter, goddess of wild animals, a cool person all around, daughter of Leto and Zeus, and twin sister of Apollo. She born in Ortygia according to legend. As it turns out, her attendant Zoe Nightshade (according to Rick Riordian) is Vivian's alter ego. Small world.

We loved our short couple of days in Ortygia. The island town was ancient and sublime and peaceful and gentle and beautiful and we'll miss it. Tomorrow onwards to the Aeolian island.

Palermo

Palermo is a jewel - founded almost three thousand years ago by the Phoenicians and subsequently ruled by the Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and Normans, roughly in that order. It was briefly the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. Patton raced to capture it during WWII.

Today Palermo is a bustling grimy city filled with architectural wonders, graffiti, traffic, restaurants, markets, dog poop, and churches. It's somewhere between Hyderabad and Europe and I feel very much at home. There are crumbling derelict buildings next to lovingly maintained plazas, roof top restaurants, food to die for, and street markets that remind me of visits to Monda Market on Sunday mornings with my dad. And there are even rickshaws ("autos" in Hyderabadi).

By the time Jo arrived I had been to Palermo twice in the last ten days. I took her for lunch to a restaurant and the owner greeted us like long lost friends. To make things a bit weirder, his kitchen help was Bangladeshi - who chatted with me in Bengali. Can't wait to show this city to Vivian and Evan - I feel like I almost know how to make my way around.

Stromboli

Stromboli is one of Italy's (and Europe's) few active volcanoes. We sailed into the harbor on the north side of the island one afternoon and by 5:30pm we were dressed in hiking boots and armed with a guide and helmets to begin our 3000 foot climb to the summit so we could peer into the active crater. We could hear Stromboli thundering above us every few minutes.

As we climbed we had fantastic views of the island and the sea. In the photo where I'm looking back down, our boat is one of the white specs at the extreme right of the picture.

Once we got to the steeper switchbacks we ran into other groups who had slowed down higher up. There were probably a hundred people climbing that night. We sat around the crater and enjoyed Strobmoli's frequent and "mildly explosive" eruptions. The term "Strombolian eruption" is used to describe continuous but mild eruptions like this. Stromboli has been doing it every few minutes for a couple of thousand years, though every now and then there's a bigger one that results in the more garden type of volcanic destruction. After watching the volcano throw glowing rocks a few hundred feet up in the air from a half a dozen vents for about an hour (the last eruption was considerably more powerful and scared the crap out of us), we shuffled down an ash field and reached the bottom just before midnight. 

A couple of websites that track volcanic activity worldwide had some nice photos from the evening we were there, with a note that volcanic activity in Stromboli is increasing (though it is still within the normal range : ). The guy who took this photo could have been sitting next to me and photographing without a zoom - it's what I saw happening a few hundred feet from the end of my boots.

Several times during the evening we wondered what prompts somewhat sane people to clamber up a steep hill to peer into an erupting volcano. No good answers here. But it was easily the highlight of my sailing trip in the Aeolian islands. From Stromboli we sailed to the island of Vulcano where we hiked up yet another volcano - though this one only leaks steamy gases. Then we walked back down to the beach and waded into a pool of hot bubbling sulfurous mud where the ladies from our boats started a trend by replacing their bikini tops with dollops of steaming mud.

Strange fact - I have visited both Snæfellsjökull in Iceland and Stromboli here - the fictional entry and exit points in Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Sailing

I've never sailed in the Med before so it was a blast to skipper a 51 foot beauty around Tyrrhenian Sea and the Aeolian islands for a week. My crew of seven were good or willing sailors from whom I learned a lot and they were also a heap of fun, though our sister boat out drank us easily by an order of magnitude.

We visited the islands of Lipari, Panarea, Basiluzzo, Stromboli, Salina, Filicudi, and Vulcano. I ate some seriously good Aeolian food and a lot of raw swordfish and tuna, drank more than my fill of local wine, and swam in the amazingly blue waters of the Mediterranean sea. 

At the end of the day I learned that there are places that I'd never heard of till last week that will knock my socks off.

Next time I'm in these parts I hope it's in a cat and with Jo, Vivian and Evan.

The Rest of May

May came in like Texas spring - cool with gentle showers and flowers and a burst of green. Vivian and Evan had tons of shit going on and I don't think I remember half of what they did. But I do have a stream of photos I'm going to post here - with a little story for each. And that will have to do for my poor neglected blog.

Vidian (as Z calls her) and Z hung out together at times when Ava and Evan were at school. They seem to really like each other. Sometimes I wonder if Vivian and Evan would have bonded in this way if Jelly Bean had been a girl as Vivian had hoped and predicted instead of a boy.

Speaking of that boy - here they are, on the sets of Pinocho - the Spanish language production of Pinocchio by the middle school kids at Magellan. I think Vivian is pretending she is controlling Evan by his puppet strings. Or she's about to hammer his head.

Evan had a great year in second grade. I will miss his last day of school (and his last week...) but he won't notice. He likes his classmates and his teachers and seemed to have learned a thing or two. Here are his version of Starry Night and a cubist self portrait. Last summer at exactly this time he read his first chapter book - Harry Potter - which he started reading on the plane trip from Austin to Sweden. In the last twelve months he has read thousands of pages of various books. He doesn't like being read to. And he seems to retain vast swaths of absolutely useless information (like Rick Riordan's version of Greek mythology).

Vivian spends a lot of time with her nose in a book too. But she still loves to be read to and it's a nightly ritual for the two of us. And she loves climbing and has a real rock climbing camp this summer. By real I mean she will climb real rocks - like Enchanted Rock. She's pumped.

Here's a picture of us with the Shah clan and friends. This was later the same evening as the Pinocho play, outside China Cafe. I'm still in shoes from a meeting for Archer's Challenge that morning. This year's Challenge is shaping up pretty well.

It has become pretty hard to get Evan and Vivian out walking on Saturday mornings. Most times we wander down to Pacha and eat a huge breakfast (chocolate pancakes and bacon and acai berry shakes for the kids). But when we do go for a walk they love it. Here they are at St. Edward's park. We followed Bull Creek up stream and they swam and tried to catch fish - unsuccessfully - with Evan's shirt.

We went to Nicolle's for her birthday and to celebrate the completion of their deck. And we went to Grandma's for Mother's Day. Evan and Vivian got some prime cousin time and donuts for breakfast and a walk on the damn dam or the damn dam trail and Grandma's iPad to play on and cartoons and murder mystery shows to watch on television. I am starting to realize that if I pick Sadie up and choke and pet her at the same time she is less likely to scream/bark/yelp with excitement. I'll never admit that I'm beginning to like that damn dog.

Vivian has gotten very fashion conscious but in a nice-ish way, if that is possible. She isn't after designer brands. She creates her own stuff - literally - like this t-shirt that she laboriously cut up. She also combines her wardrobe in interesting ways and runs impromptu fashion shows. 

In this shot Vivian is wearing a hipster outfit and Evan's tie for a bicycling trip to the public library. Vivian is also taking a lot of photos. She has the use of an iPhone at home and now takes pictures of everything. Like this head shot of her and Evan sitting on top of me one weekend morning. And she can make up a stop motion video in a jiffy.

One weekend in May, Jo's cousin Stephanie visited from California and she and Jo went to an NKOTB (ha! I said it) concert, also featuring Boyz to Men (I think I spelled that right) and Paula Abdul. They filled breast milk bags with vodka and snuck them inside their bras. The rest of the weekend was no less eventful - here Stephanie is kissing a stuffed moose at Poodle Dog lounge at closing time. We did a bike tour of a few fine drinking establishments in central Austin that night along with Chris and Nina and ended the night with breakfast at 24 Diner. The kids spent the night at Grandma's and remained blissfully ignorant of their parents' and aunt's shenanigans.

Evan finished scouting and taekwondo for the year. He enjoyed both and his instructors, Greg and Master Palacios respectively, did not kill him. Though one time he came back home without his belt and Master Palacios explained that she was withholding it because he wouldn't listen. Apparently in class he had continued to kick the dummy even after she told him to stop and then she stepped in between him and the dummy and he kicked her. Luckily she didn't kick back. This woman can tap you on the back of your head with her foot while standing in front of you and pretending to kick you in your face. So Evan was pretty lucky. Anyway, now he's a wolf scout and a green belt.

Vivian played in her first team sport and loved it. Between volleyball and hanging out with friends she had a great time. The team that started the season as the Turquoise Turtles ended in third place as the Furies - as confident as their Greek justice and vengeance seeking counterparts. Last weekend we hosted the parents and kids back for a end of season party and pitched a game in the back yard. I think the mothers were taken aback by how much skill the kids had developed during the short season. 

On the Saturday of Memorial Day, Jo and I did a modified partner version of Murph at the gym (1 mile run, 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 air squats, 1 mile run) and survived. Then we went sailing and had fun splashing around in the cove to beat the heat. Sailing is on my mind - on the last day of May I took off to sail in Italy. Here's the view out of the window just before I finish this post and land.