12 Days of Christmas

I’m back! :) Our cruise and trip to Rome was incredible. We made memories that we’ll have forever… Being gone a total of 12 days gives me a lot to write about—in fact, I could write a whole blog post for each day! But, as I don’t have that kind of time, and eventually you’d be sick of reading everything, I’ll just try to write a paragraph for each day. It’ll still be kind of long, but I’ll try to be concise and short without losing too many details. :)
On the first day of Christmas, Jefferson threw up on my knee… All over my knee. This was while we were squeezed into the back of a taxi on the way to the airport… Listening to our driver talk about Afghanistan—that’s where he is from. Originally he was a policeman and then a professor, but since he had to leave the country, he now drives cabs in London. His story was amazing. And it made me so incredibly grateful to be an American. God has blessed our country so much.
Once we arrived in Rome we took another taxi to our apartment my mom had found via the internet… (Which turned out to be GREAT by the way!) On the way we kept seeing these “American Circus” signs. The joke was that it had arrived. ;)

On the second day of Christmas we saw the Coliseum. The architecture and engineering was remarkable. I couldn’t get over it. On our tour, we found out that after people were done using it for entertainment the Coliseum served as: a fortress for several different families, a botanical garden, a tobacco factory, and generally, the city quarry.
It was very eye opening though, seeing and standing in a place where so many human lives have been lost, and simply for the form of entertainment. And as horrible as it sounds—people still seemed to be entertained by that today. Whether in countries with crumbling governments and evil people pervading in authority, or in America, when people watch the “news”. Not that the news is completely bad, but often it’s the horror stories that are covered, because it’s the horror stories that people tend to watch the most.

On a lighter note, the third day of Christmas we saw the forum. And went to a huge museum, (I’m blanking on the name of it right now) who’s specialty seemed to be naked statues. My brothers got a kick out of those though… In one particular section, certain, em, areas were covered with a leaf. Which looked extremely comical. The question of the day was, “What did it take, to rate a leaf?” :)
I also didn’t bring the right shoes to walk on cobble stone streets. Whoops. By the end of the day I was limping… That evening I wore tennis shoes.

On the fourth day of Christmas we met up with the Shaws!! =) God was really good too, because their first train leaving from Florence got delayed, and we all ended up on the same train together. Then we all walked (in the rain) to our cruise ship—no need to take the free shuttle that was offered. =P
We had an amazing time with them though, no matter what we did. Both Rachel and Tim are getting so grown up, it’s kind of weird for them not to be little any more. Rachel is HILARIOUS. So it Kate on that note. So usually someone was laughing on account of one of those two. : )
This was also the day I earned my nickname from Rachel—cruise mommy. Yes. Mommy. The Italians running the ships teen zone had seen Rachel and I together, and when they asked how old she was (I thought they were asking the both of us) and I replied, “I’m fifteen” the cracked up (for quite a long time) and informed us through fits of giggles, “We thought you were her mother!!!” Cruise Mother indeed.

On the fifth day of Christmas we got off at Savona Italy. The daddies bought matching hats (on accident), we toured a fortress, and sipped hot chocolate in a café. And it was real hot chocolate too—sludgy, thick, creamy hot chocolate… So good! We sat there for over and hour, the girls played nertz, the parents talked, and the boys… well, they entertained themselves with toothpicks. Toothpicks of war rather. A lot can be done with empty sugar packets, a straw and toothpicks. : )
Oh, and at the end of the day, once again, I was voted a mother by the Italians…

On the sixth day of Christmas we sailed and pretty much just relaxed, it was really nice. I also learned how to play football-tennis. It’s tennis, with a lot of the same rules, except with your legs. I was one of like two girls who played, and of course was the only American, and I needed a lot of practice. But the kids were gracious. :)

On the seventh day of Christmas we went to Tunisia. This was probably my favorite place we toured. I could have spent days there… A couple hours barely did the country justice. =) We took a cruise excursion though, and they bused us out to Carpathian ruins. We were actually able to go down into them and walk around, not just look down into them. I could have spent a whole day wandering around down there… Instead of the twenty minutes we had. But it was wonderful, even though short.
Afterwards we went down into the city and went to the market and several different shops. And there, we got to do one of my favorite things ever—haggle and barter. :D I got some good deals on some silver jewelry, in fact, I got it for almost nothing. The man who I was bartering with, kind of got carried away and just wanted to sell it. I ended up paying 15 dollars for something priced at 65 Euros. Which would be 104 dollars. :) Originally I had told him 10 dollars, but he had thought I meant Euros, which would have been 18 dollars, so technically, I paid less than the original price he laughed at me for offering. :D

On the eighth day of Christmas we went to Malta. And there, I bought a beautiful painting from a local artist. Something I’ll have forever. Well, at least forever on earth anyway. : ) Malta was so beautiful, and all the buildings so old. Yet most of them were very well kept up—so that was very neat to see.
When we got back on board we still have most of the afternoon ahead of ourselves, so Kate, Rachel and I decided to play nertz. Enter the Italians. We had barely started our game when two Italian boys walked up, wanting to know if we could teach them (right after we had sat down, a whole group of kids walked into the room talking). Haha, we did indeed teach them, it was hilarious, but it worked. After a game or two they wanted to learn to play “Go feesh”. Apparently they had heard of this American game, but had never been able to play it for themselves. Believe it or not, it was easier to teach the Italians Nertz, than it was to teach them Go Fish. Certainly something I never expected.
Before we knew it though we had the attention of the whole room and, oh probably 10 or so boys playing cards with us. The Italian girls stayed on the other side of the room and stared at us for quite some time, but after much waving and smiling on our part, decided to at least walk over and say hi. :) It was a lot of fun trying to communicate with them, quite a few of the boys knew SOME English, and we used a whole lot of hand motions, and any Italian words we knew. Later two kids joined us who knew more and were able to translate a whole lot.

On the ninth day of Christmas we went to Olympia Greece. It was beyond beautiful. The area surrounding the ruins was such an eye feast… I can’t even begin to describe it.
Also, on this day, I realized I had no clue what day of the week it was. That had never happened before! It wasn’t until I was able to look at the ships itinerary for the day that I realized it was Thursday… I’d forgotten by the next day though. It was such an odd feeling.
As this was Christmas Eve, we all dressed up (it was a gala night) and went to dinner, read the Christmas story, and then later went to Mass. I’d never been to mass before… Especially a Mass that had things being said in sixth different languages. It was kind of neat though, because the priest spoke a lot of Latin, and we were able to pick out phrases and words we knew from what we’d learned in school. :)

On the tenth day of Christmas we actually celebrated Christmas. It was cold and wet that day, but we ended up having a great time. Not near as many people were out and about on account of the weather and the holiday, so we pretty much had Corfu to ourselves. A couple shops were open though, and I was able to purchase two Christmas ornaments to add to my collection. (I’m collecting Christmas ornaments from around the world). One of them was carved out of Olive wood, so that was exciting. :)
God was also really good, because we decided to get something small for Yuri, one of the teen leaders. Earlier in the week the girls and I were able to talk to him about Jesus for forty-five minutes or so… I think it was a good conversation, you never know what God is going to do. And because of that we thought we needed to get him something. Mrs. Shaw had the great idea of getting him a card, but as we were looking all the cards were in Greek. A language neither us nor Yuri spoke. Back to my God being good statement though, we were able to find a card in English, that had a message which echoed what we had been talking to him about. So we wrote a nice note thanking him, and put chocolate in the card. When we gave it to him, his response was very positive. For which we were grateful. :)

On the eleventh day of Christmas we sailed back towards Italy… This was probably one of my favorite days though, because the main thing we did was play games with our Italian friends. Over the course of the week we had taught them nertz, go fish, speed and spoons. All of which were generally a pretty good hit. It was fun to watch how much we could communicate with people who didn’t really speak our language.
After our group had grown huge, and we had gotten kicked off the floor where we’d been playing spoons, we searched for a table to accommodate us all. And in the process decided to play a board game. A couple of the guys left, and game back with Risk. Which I had never played before, and certainly hadn’t read the directions in Italian… lol. We only played for so long, but it was a lot of fun.
Actually, the reason we didn’t play for all that long, is because it took a really long time to set up (and explain), and by the time we started playing, my parents said Rachel and I had to go run.
We ran. The Italian boys ran with us. Lol. Twenty minutes of running has never gone so quickly. The guy who ran the most was our friend Luca, and he was in flip flops! Afterwards Rachel and I agreed to go to the pool with them, which is where we taught them Marco Polo. Haha. It was quite funny actually, just because it’d be like them trying to teach us to play George Washington or something…

On the twelfth day of Christmas we traveled back.
Honestly, it was hard leaving. Right now, I’m in moving mode, which means that I’m ready to settle down and make friends in a new place. And we did settle down and make friends… We just had to leave them after nine amazing days. :\ Some of those kids were just acquaintances, but others, I think I could be really good friends with for a long time. So that was hard.
I’m back in London though, after taking a ship, train, plane, tube and walking to get there. : )

And that conclude my twelve days of Christmas. If you read it all, thanks! Sorry it was so long… So much to say… I could have written ten times as much as I did. =P
I hope you have all had a very Merry Christmas!

In Christ,
Caroline Ann