Leo in Estonia

Leo went with his class 6A and class 6B on a trip to Estonia to visit the music school and perform a concert. They took the ship over on Wednesday and came back on Sunday. Of course, Leo’s phone memory was full after one picture, but luckily there were chaperones on the trip with cameras and a parent named Josef Sjöblom tooks lots of very nice pictures of all the kids during the trip. They are all on his Flickr account. I have taken just a few of them to show here. You can click on each one to make it bigger:

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Easter 2017

Max’s 10th Birthday!

Lisbon, Portugal 2017

Måns and I are back from our trip to Lisbon, Portugal to celebrate our 17th anniversary. It’s the first time we’ve seen the sun in months!

We stayed in a hotel attached to the São Jorge Castle (11th century), with beautifully restored rooms, an amazing breakfast buffet in an inner courtyard, a free bottle of port wine in the room every day and…. peacocks! Peacocks everywhere! Beautiful to see, not so beautiful to hear. If you’ve never heard a peacock’s screech call, look up a video. It’s an effective alarm clock.

We mostly ate food – roast chicken with piri piri sauce, pasteis de nata (custard tarts), and drank Port wine, Vinho Verde, and ginjinha. We visited the huge flea market, a cathedral from the 1100’s, the castle ruins, the Belém Tower, and half of a contemporary art museum. They closed the bottom floor for a fashion event and the people coming inside were just as much artworks as the paintings and sculptures.
Pictures below, you can click on them to make them bigger:

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Christmas 2016

Italy – Autumn 2016

We took an autumn trip to Rome and drove north to stay at a house on Lake Bolsena. The house had gardens with olive trees, kiwi vines, pomegranate trees, cachi trees, pear, etc. In other words, we wouldn’t go hungry.

The house was near the village of Montefiascone – a very pretty town high on a hill with a giant domed church from the 1500s.

Also nearby was the town of Civita di Bagnoregio – a medeival town barely hanging on to the edge of a cliff. Gorgeous!

We also visited another very interesting place in the area of Bomarzo called The Park of the Monsters (Il Parco dei Mostri). These strange sculptures in the forest were created in the 1600s. It’s an amazing place!

And of course we finally got to visit Terme di Saturnia, the natural hot sulphur springs in Tuscany. The waterfalls can be traced back to the Etruscans, during the Bronze Age.

One of the old stories is that the falls and pools were created when Saturn threw down a burning lightning bolt that tore open the earth exposing the hot waters, which is where I assume the name comes from.

Anyway, they’ve formed naturally over thousands of years. It’s just out in nature and anyone can use it. The building you see in the picture is just an abandoned old mill. The temperature is a constant 37.5 all year long.

The last day of our trip was spent in Rome. Our friends Licia and Iocopo (with their daughter Emma) took us around the city and then invited us for a wonderful dinner at their house. We also got caught in a very bad storm during the afternoon and Licia and Iocopo lent us extra shoes so we wouldn’t have to wear our soaking wet ones on the plane home. Now that’s the definition of good friends – they give you the shoes off their feet! (or extra ones in their closet).

And now, just a few photos:

Texas 2016

Washington D.C.

London 2016

Back from a weekend trip to London! Måns was attending a branding awards show for work but we stayed an extra day to celebrate his birthday!  We went to see “Book of Mormon” at the Prince of Wales theater to celebrate. It was hilarious!

We also visited a few places nearby the hotel, like Harrod’s Department store (I could only afford tea) and the Victoria & Albert museum, the world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects. We spent over an hour inside and didn’t even get to see half of it.

Italy 2016

This time, we went to the northeast of Italy, in the Veneto Region, Treviso Province.

We flew into Venice and spent the day there walking around the giant mouse maze that is the city and eating lunch. Then we drove about 45 minutes north to the farmhouse we rented.

The farmhouse was out in the country between two medium-sized towns. The kids had their own clubhouse, plus there were goats and chickens. We ate half of our meals outside.

So now for the odd parts of the trip…

  1. Hausbrandt. Måns loves the logo of Hausbrandt coffee, so when I saw that we were staying close to their headquarters, I wrote to ask if we could visit and perhaps purchase some cups with the logo. Apparently, they don’t give tours, but decided to give one to us – it was really interesting! When we got there, we were informed that the owner of Hausbrandt – Martino Zanetti – wanted us to join him at his house in the hills and treat us to lunch. This was in addition to gifts of coffee, the cups Måns wanted, beer and many prints of Mr. Zanetti’s artwork.So we unexpectedly found ourselves at a beautiful villa in the hills for the afternoon. Mr. Zanetti showed us around and really wanted us to come stay with him, but we politely declined. Then he took us to a beautiful restaurant overlooking the hills and treated us to lunch with some other business clients.
  2. Ai Pioppi.  Ai Pioppi is an amusement park built in the woods by a man who runs an outdoor restaurant. Nothing is electric – it’s all run by kinetic energy. There are rollercoasters and slides that go above the trees! It’s kind of scary but exciting. Don’t worry – all rides meet “Italian Safety Standards”! Which means we made it out with Leo covered in bruises, but otherwise it was great! Check out more pictures of the place here- http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/10/ai-pioppi-kinetic-carnival/
  3. Santa Augusta restaurant. I chose it because it had good reviews on TripAdvisor. However, I don’t recall seeing the words “40 minute uphill pilgrimage” in the description. We started up the stairs and then began climbing the trail up the mountain into the forest. We met people who said, “Oh yeah, it’s just up there,” along the way. 40 minutes later, starving and thirsty, we made it to the top. The food was good, but as Leo says, “Not good enough for that climb.”