Day 14: Eternal blessings in the Eternal City

One of the most important places for Mormons is our temple. For normal weekly church services (like taking the sacrament [others may recognize it as communion]) we go to a church or "meetinghouse." But for other, less routine ordinances, we go to temples. Whereas meetinghouses are reachable for most members of the church, temples are much rarer; there are thousands of meetinghouses worldwide, but only 173 temples in operation or announced/under construction.

I've lived in three U.S. States, and I've never been further than 30 or so minutes from a temple. That is a luxury that I've often taken for granted. In contrast, many Mormons so far from a temple that they may only dream of visiting one once or twice in their life. This was the case with many of the members I met in southern Italy in 2002. My brother, Travis, served his mission there, and my family toured his mission afterwards to see the area and people with whom he worked. It was heartening to meet so many people who had made substantial changes to embrace new-found truths and those who continued to be faithful despite difficulties. For them, the nearest temple to visit--where they could get spiritually charged--was in Switzerland... not exactly an easy afternoon drive. When the Mormon church announced in 2010 that a temple would be built in Rome, many members were shocked that we could build such an important edifice in the motherland of the Catholic church. For me, my thoughts went to the people who, for so long, desired to have a House of the Lord nearby.




Whitney and I got to visit the construction site for the Rome temple today! It has taken a while for the permits to go through, but the bulk of the building is done. The bus ride lasted about an hour to get to the city limits, but to see a building rising overlooking the Eternal City that will hold services of eternal significance made us gleeful. Unfortunately, visitors aren't allowed to tour the site (we asked. we pleaded. we were refused.), but that didn't stop us from scaling a wall and fence to get a panoramic selfie.




Later in the day, we visited the Sistine Chapel. That was also a very fulfilling experience. We craned our necks at the ceiling while we listened to an audio guide explain the painting sections and history of the Michelangelo's masterpiece. The painting covers, well, the history of the world: from God separating light from dark all the way up to the final judgment. Furthermore, Michelangelo had to make adjustments along the way while painting the ceiling, and then his outlook (and that of the European people) had changed 23 years later when he painted the wall above the alter. It was a good illustration of stages, both in the line of events that the painting tells and in the the process by which the painting was completed.

So often, we fail ourselves in the present because we're only looking to the future. I see this in people who think that by achieving the "next stage" in life, they will suddenly be transformed into someone else. The thing is, that transformation happens when we steadily prepare ourselves now for what the future holds. Of course, I can't fault the Italian Mormons for yearning for the blessings of a nearby temple. But my guess is that the temple will benefit those most who are individually changing themselves through daily preparation, rather than those who passively expect that the temple will change them without any work on their parts.

Yes, let's look to the future; the future is bright! But the future arrives by sequentially stacking up a lot of presents. If we don't make the most out of our presents, then our futures may be pretty empty.

Day 13: A Panoply of Pantheon pAntics

Today Whitney and I boarded a 5am vaporetto for a 6am express train from Venice to Rome. It was like a totally different world to not have to navigate around tourists on land or gondolas on water. Also, it's hard to beat the soft, colorful glow of a sunrise for photos. 

We prepared well for our 3.5 hr ride. 

After arriving at the Tiburtina train station, we looked up google directions to our hotel. We had a nice surprise when we came out of the metro stop, and BAM, the Coliseum stood there like a friendly guard dog. 

As an aside, it's been REALLY nice to have a cell phone with a data package here. It's a very different experience from 15 years ago... for better and for worse. It's been interesting to see how the trinket hawkers have changed their goods to relate to the change in technology: selfie sticks and mobile battery chargers for cell phones. 

Our hotel let us check in early (it's amazing how relaxing that feels after not receiving the luxury post other recent morning arrivals), and off to the Forum and Coliseum we went!

The weather was pretty warm (I changed into short sleeves, shorts, and sandles!), and soon we felt like we had the beginnings of heat exhaustion. I checked my phone... 72 degrees. We were in the sun, ok?? But I think NW Europe conditioned us to cooler climates. 

Whitney and I love dinosaurs, and we take any chance we can get to channel our dino spirits. 

Then we walked up to the Pantheon. Along the way, we frequently heard cheers and moans from restaurants and bars. No, it wasn't gladiator battles, but a soccer game. 

The Pantheon was beautiful in its symmetry and geometrical design. Probably most impressive is its dome, that still looks new after many hundreds of years. If you revolved the base of the dome around itself, you'd outline a large sphere, the bottom of which would grace the Pantheon floor. 

We decided to honor such an amazing feat in design and construction by taking silly pictures with it! Back in my Odyssey of the Mind days (now called Destination Imagination), we would exercise our creative juices by re-defining objects as something else (like saying that tweezers are antennae, a beak, angry eyebrows, stilts for mice, etc). Whitney obligingly played along. 

Here are our entries:

A halo

A gold coin

A lollipop

A volleyball

A bubble

A blingy ring 

Day 12: Boat racing in Venezia

The weather today couldn't have been more perfect: low 70s and partly cloudy. This was a welcome change for us, and I'm sure the boat racers felt the same. "What?" you ask, "Boat racers?" Yes, that was news to us as well. We'd planned our day around taking the vaporetti around town today (vaporetti are boat buses that service the Grand Canal through Venice and local islands), but were surprised to find that service would be suspended until the afternoon for a boat race.

Human-powered boats of all kinds were involved from singles kayaks to dragon boat racing. It really was quite the site to see: modern fiberglass and spandex skimming the water in front of a medieval palaces. But then, this would be the place for such harmonious juxtaposition; Venice made its name through blending disparate cultures, as can be seen in the Roman arches, Greek columns, Byzantine golden mosaics, and Turkish domes of St. Mark's Basilica.

Also, we were happy to see little fish flitting about near a pier in the canal. Like we learned from Jurassic Park, life finds a way!

We visited St. Mark's Basilica, that houses Mark's remains, and enjoyed walking through the church. Especially striking were the aforementioned golden mosaics that wallpaper the building. The manufacturers of the gold-containing glass cubes used in the mosaics purposefully made the surfaces uneven so that the walls would glow from reflecting light. It's really a beautiful, energizing sight to see: the building almost hums with sustained luminescence similar to the embers in a fire.

Then it was time for gelato.

Finally the vaporetti resumed service, and we took the sea buses out to the island of Murano to check out a glass museum. Venice has contributed much to the development of glass over centuries, so it was interesting to see a comprehensive history of the technological developments in one place. Also, I had to hold back the urge to go on a rampage through the place, because wouldn't it be SO COOL to hear so much glass shatter? (Remember in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when they smash hundreds of prophecy orbs? Yeah, that'd be pretty fun.)

Later in the evening, the city put on a nice sunset

And we said "buona sera" to the Bride of the Sea.

Day 11: Venitian Water below, around, and above

This morning Whitney and I took an earrrrrly morning flight from Lyon to Venice. When I was first planning this trip, I found that I could avoid a hefty (~$800 after taxes) one-way international car rental fee if I picked up in Paris and dropped off in Lyon (France) rather than Rome. It also made sense time-wise so that we wouldn't have to spend hours in the car from Switzerland to Venice and Rome.

So we booked a night at an airport hotel and Lyon (a shortish drive from the Swiss Alps), with a morning flight from to Venice. A 6 AM flight. I figured that it was a regional airport, so we could get there just an hour before. As it turns out, construction at the airport meant that we had to arrive 2 hr ahead of time, which meant waking at 3:30 AM, and considering I was up until 1:30 AM figuring out the packing situation, I had the fun opportunity today of practicing a positive attitude about staying awake and alert. And not tearing my hair out (gotta preserve what I have!) at the hordes of bumbling tourists. I know, I know- what a sob story. 

Venice greeted us with a wet, blustery day. Almost as if to say, "Welcome to Venice, you filthy animals." I'm not sure why Venice would say it that way, but it sounds good in my head.

Despite the rain, the environs were still unique and charming, with many opportunities to pause and take it all in.

We walked across Venice from the bus station to our hotel, and at first I was a little surprised to see bags of trash lining the street. But then we found that garbage men were still making their rounds. They would call out "Rifiuti!" or something else that I can only meant, "Trash!" and wheel around these carts (that were fun to dodge in tiny alleyways) collecting the bags.

My family has been to Venice before, and I totally didn't remember having to cross so many canals via bridges to get anywhere. But I suppose that, as Venice is an archipelago of 118 islands, one would have to cross a bridge to walk further than a few blocks. The canal water is also much cleaner (for the most part) than I remember.





The roads can be especially narrow and winding, like a maze set in the valleys between tall buildings. I think that much of Venice was built before the 1600s, before they needed to make room for a Ford Expeditions and Hummers to travel the streets, so it only makes sense that the planners would minimize road size to foot traffic to maximize real estate. Still, the teensy, dark alleys took a little getting used to (especially after discussing Jack the Ripper in London).

Due to the rain, we decided that today would be a fantastic museum day. Everyone else had the same idea, which increased the waiting lines for many attractions. Luckily, we had an ace up our sleeves: the museum pass. We bought this combo pass and were able to bypass scores of queued tourists to see the Correr Museum (featuring historical art of Venice), the Doge's Palace (opulent building for the seat of government), and a costume/perfume museum.

The symbol for Venice is the Lion (St. Mark is the patron saint), so I got to see lots of big cats in art. It was wonderful.

View of St. Mark's Basilica and the campanile from the Doge's Palace.

The Doge's Palace had been decorated to impress visiting dignitaries, and I thought that some of their architectural methods were pretty clever. Exhibit A: the ceiling of a stairwell. This stairwell is the entrance into the palace, and the panels in the ceiling look perfectly balance and rectangular from this perspective (looking up in awe as one enters).

However, once you're in the stairwell, you realize that they're not squares, but rhomboids!

If a person were found guilty of a criminal, they would be lead from the palace via a bridge to a connecting prison. As this afforded the new convict the probably final view of Venice, writers in the Romantic Era dubbed this the Bridge of Sighs.

"Ah, Venice."

We wanted to eat like a local for lunch, so we stopped into a bit of a greasy spoon, where was had to elbow our way up to the counter and attempt ordering in Italian.

Most of what we got was fried snacky things, like Arancini (something I've pined after since our trip in 2002), fried Mozarella sticks, fried mashed potato balls, etc. It's a good thing I've been conditioning by living in the South.

After our fry fest, Whitney said, "So... how do you feel about eating gelato in the rain?" Um, that was a no-brainer! We shared a cone with a caramel scoop and a pistachio scoop.

One of the major industries in Venice's history has been glass. It used to be much more difficult to blow and shape glass, which meant that the rich and famous liked to flaunt it. I suppose this this method of conspicuous consumption was effective in earlier centuries, but now this colored chandeliers just look to me... I dunno.... kinda tacky, like you'd find it in a dusty garage sale. Maybe I have poor taste. Probably.

We finally got to check in to our hotel (like I said, our flight got us in niiiiice and early), and when we opened the door to our one-star hotel room, its long and narrow dimensions jumped out at us.

Then I heard some street noise... nay, CANAL noise beyond the window, and opened it to discover a balcony overlooking the canal!

We found out that 70% of the hotel's rooms are long and narrow to fit in as many canal views as possible. Makes sense.

At 5 PM, the sounds of bells from the nearby church filled the air for 20 minutes. There are seven churches with about 200 meters, so it was a bit of a symphony.

We took a passeggiata, or evening walk to St. Mark's Square and enjoyed sampling music from various cafe quintets. La vita e bella!

Day 10: Of cars, cold, cows, and chimes

We traveled south from the Schlucter's house in Sattel to the Lauterbrunnen valley, which is located in the Alps. The valley is about a kilometer in width and is framed by vertical limestone cliffs on either side. Streams from the melting glaciers lead over the edge of the cliffs, creating multiple waterfalls along the precipices. Tolkein reportedly hiked the area in 1911, and was so taken by the beauty that it provided the inspiration for his description of Rivendell, which is where a group of elves live (Whitney specifically requested that tidbit to be included; she and her family go ga-ga for Lord of the Rings).

The highway from Sattel to Lauterbrunnen traced lakes, mountains, and valleys, and actually featured quite a few looong tunnels. We should've kept count how long we were in some of these tunnels that slice through the mountains, but one we went through one that was at least three minutes long of driving time.

The twisting mountain roads were tortuous and provided for some interesting mapped routes:

The valley is shaped like a V or U from above, and we parked at the mouth, with plans to hike up the valley to the apex and take the cable car to Gimmelwald, a tiny town perched on the ledge of one of the cliffs. Whitney was pretty thirst, but conveniently Staubbach Falls provided some much needed refreshment.

The 3 mile hike up the valley was peaceful and beautiful, with many streams (freshly formed from falls) and allowed us some time to make friends with some bovines. Unfortunately, they were pretty standoffish.

A network of gondolas and cable cars exist through the Alps, and this terminus at Stechelberg makes a few stops before arriving at the Schilthorn peak. However, considering the weather would only allow for visibility of a few feet, we decided that the price of ~$120 for a round-trip ticket to the peak was a little steep. We settled for a ~$15 round-trip ticket to Gimmelwald.

A view from the gondola.

Our car was filled with people representing multiple nations, and it was fun to hear the babble of different tongues, most of which I imagine was remarking on the beautiful vistas (and occasionally expressing concern over the swaying of the gondola).

While the walk up the Lauterbrunnen Valley was fairly damp and cool (roughly 54 degrees F), Gimmelwald was slightly colder... to the tune of 39 degrees F. Of course, Gimmelwald is ~1900 feet higher (elevation 4472 ft), so we should've expected that. Whitney had a sweatshirt and jacket on, but her pedal pushers and fabric shoes meant that we could probably only spend an hour wading through the melting snow.

It looks like we weren't the only ones surprised by the snow; snow blanketed flower beds and fields of wildflowers.

At one point, we heard a great crashing noise from the cliff on the other side of the valley. When we looked, we saw a gush of water burst from the snow pack for 30 seconds or so and cascade down the cliff before the impromptu waterfall ceased. We think that a small glacial stream had built up behind an ice dam on the edge before forcing through the snow and over the cliff. It was a pretty unique experience to see the brief life of a stream-fed waterfall, and Whitney and I just paused and looked at each other before shrugging and moving on. (Though it did remind me of this Far Side comic)

We saw a happy cat in Gimmelwald (and not so happy mouse in its mouth). I'm glad that I'm able to document so many multinational cats.

The view from this vegetable garden would make weeding a much less arduous chore!

Finally, the cold caught up to us and Whitney started showing signs of cyanosis, so we headed back to the cable car station to return to the valley floor.

Once there, we strolled the three miles (emphatically trying to return feeling to toes!) back to Lauterbrunnen.

We made a friend!!! Check out his baby cowbell! Squish!

As if to bid us "adieu," the church bell chimed for us when we reached the car, and as we drove away, the clouds thinned enough for the sun to shine through and create a warm glow over the mountains.