Mesa Verde

It took three days to cross from the East Coast to Utah. On the first I crossed the length of Virginia and Tennessee, winding through the Appalachian hills and stopping off in Knoxville before driving through a midnight thunderstorm to reach Memphis. I started off the next morning on a bridge over the Mississippi, then crossed from Arkansas to Oklahoma to the top end of Texas. I spend the second night just across the New Mexico border. 

By the afternoon of the third day I was looking at post cards at a gas station in Cortez, Colorado. Instead of the usual postcard array of a mountain sunset, sombrero-ed cactus or a photoshopped horse on a beach, the rack was filled with ancient stone villages perched dramatically along cliffs. They all said "Mesa Verde." The lady at the cash register told me it was just a few miles up the road. Instead of getting to Utah in the early evening, I pulled in around 1AM. 

The only way to get up close to the old Anasazi villages of Mesa Verde is by guided tour (expensive), so I had to settle for cliff-top views from the roadside (free). But seeing 800-year old ruins, even from afar--in the United States!--was worth the detour. The rocky canyons of Mesa Verde were home to Puebloan people since 600 AD, and later built into something of an American Petra. The Anasazi pieced together their homes in the shade of overhanging cliffs, and spent their days making pots, digging fire pits and hunting extinct animals. Little else is known about them, as they disappeared from Mesa Verde around 700 years ago, leaving their little canyon villages a secret to the world until the late 1800s. 

I headed back along Ruins Road to the highway just before sunset, thinking about the Mel Gibson movie potential of the Anasazi at Mesa Verde and whether it would be strange to return to Utah. 

Syracuse

My first five days in the US passed far too quickly with my brother's family in Syracuse, NY. On my last afternoon, I took his daughter Kasia down to a little lake surrounded cliffs and a fall-colored forest for a few photos. After spending some time with Kasia, I've decided having a daughter of my own someday would only be disappointing. 

On the other hand, I'm hopeful to do some more portrait/event work over the next couple weeks in the US. Please email if you have a lead. 

Arrivederci

My last days in Italy passed by just where I'd spent the first, along one of my favorite stretches of the Ligurian coast. Along with Elisa and friends, I spent a day in Zoagli before ending up back in quiet Moneglia for a night, where she taught me the right way to cook carbonara. On my final night we walked the corniche of Genova as I digested my last and most extravagant aperitivo.

 It would be a long trek across the Atlantic. I hadn't seen the US since February of '09. The trip spanned a three-hour train to Milan, a late-night bus to the airport, a night on the benches of Milan Malpensa, a flight to Spain, a full day roaming the sunny streets of Malaga, a flight to London, a night on the benches of Heathrow's Terminal 5, an eight-hour flight to JFK, a NYC subway ride to Penn Station, and finally, a 6-hour Amtrak ride north along the Hudson. I met my brother at the Syracuse Station. 

Tione di Trento

I've finished my third and last teaching stint in Italy. This one was in Trentino-Alto Adige, just a few hours over the mountains from Tirano. Tione di Trento was yet another idyllic mountain village, old even in medieval times and hemmed in by forested slopes. My hosts were the Schergnas, a welcoming family of four: two daughters, the youngest aged 11, Claudia. We immediately got along like siblings. In the later afternoons she helped teach me Italian. Most evenings were spent in long and enjoyable conversation with Silvio and Nicoletta, digesting fantastic meals on a spacious third-story patio overlooking the town. The long days of camp were spent in Bondo, less than ten minutes up the road.
By the end of the first day of "English School" I'd already been group tackled by half a dozen 6 year-olds, had my shoes thrown over a fence, thrown two kids' shoes over the same fence, incited another four-square revolution during recess and picked out my favorite and least favorite kids. I took a liking to a couple of my most adorable and attentive girls, Sara and Linda, as well as my resident devil child, the most demonic I'd encountered all summer, Ezio. I may have just taken pity for the fact that he would be spending his adult life in jail. 
We spent class time drawing hideous beasts on the board (always to a chorus of "que schifo!"), practicing the waka waka for Lo Spettacolo and playing cruel elimination games. Whenever in doubt there was dodgeball in the palestra. I spent a good number of hours squashed onto the gym mats underneath piles of freshly eliminated children. Keight, a friend/fellow tutor, often brought her class down to join us, shooting sometime suspicious, other times accusatory looks my way, depending on how close I got to the kids. I did get very close. 
In time off work, the Schergnas showed me around. Claudia gave me the Tione walking tour. Silvio took us up to Madonna di Campiglio, under the shadow of the Brenta Range of the Dolomites, and on a drive along Genova Valley, a steep glacial funnel featuring over forty waterfalls. We searched in vain for mushrooms and fled back to Tione when the rain clouds arrived. On the weekend, we hit Riva del Garda for a massive festival that brought tens of thousands and plenty of fireworks. I also joined Silvio for a relaxing night on Trento, the province's hip and extremely old capital. Midway through camp, old friends from Tirano drove down so we could spend the day together around Levico. I caught up with Gennaro, Carmen, Noemi and Giulia on the shores of the little lake. 
Early on the final day of camp, I forced my kids to spend art time drawing their beloved maestro. The results weren't as pretty as I'd hoped, but funny enough. A little later, at lunch, things started getting a bit out of hand. Our spettacolo had aired the night before, and even among my little ones there was a sense of unbridled excitement and celebration at the end of camp. Handing out a dozen 2-liter coke bottles at lunch to a pack of 6- and 7-year olds, I didn't do much to tone it down. Kids ran wild on all floors of the building, throwing small objects out the windows, screaming up and down the stairs, stampeding a trail of crushed chips across the hall. One of the bidellas snapped, unleashing a high pitched torrent of complaints into the camp supervisor's uncomprehending face. But for the last day of a summer camp, I thought all was as it should be. My favorite bit: recovering a near empty coke bottle, tied at the neck to a jumprope and balancing on the third floor windowsill where it had been launched. Amazing. I wish I had seen it happen. Maybe the crazy bidella had a point. 
The next morning, Nicoletta cashed 32 euros of my loose change (Claudia helped count it), and Silvio, Claudia and Anna accompanied me to my train from Trento. Ahead of me was another wonderful day aboard trenitalia, heading west.