End of the Summer

One of the best adventures of the summer was Camp Footprints.  I feel like I learned more in that time than I did in the entire rest of the summer.  It is amazing what unconditional love and spending time interacting on a real level with other people can do.

After camp, I spent the last week of summer in Kauai.  It was a blast and we had a couple of notable adventures, including driving 5 miles on a "4 wheel drive only" road to get to a beach that only locals frequent and a day-long zodiac ride to the Napali coast.

In addition to enjoying the sun, I finished the website that I've been working on all summer.  It is the business site for Dr. Pamela Kushner's doctors office.  Here is a link: http://firstchoicefamilydoctor.com/

Well, off to work towards an MS/BS in chemistry by the end of next school year.

July update: what I've been up to

Well, it's been a while since I've updated this blog, but I've had what I think amounts to a good excuse for that.  I've been viewing nature, for example, in Sitka, Alaska, at the St. Lazaria puffin colony, I took this picture:

When I wasn't out looking at nature, I was spending time with family and making new friends on what turned out to be a wonderful cruise on the Amsterdam.  The cruise in total lasted two weeks and I have quite a few adventures to show for that time in our country's northernmost state.  Here's what I was up to:

• Ketchikan, Alaska: 6 mile roundtrip hike up Deer Mountain
• This hike was a bit challenging, seeing as it involved going up and coming down a mountain, and we weren't able to make it up to the summit due to rain and the fact that wet icy snow and tennis shoes don't mix well, but it was still a lot of fun.

• Sitka, AK: 5 miles of walking through the city and Sitka state historic park.  I also went on a boat ride to St. Lazaria island where I took the puffin picture above.
• One of the best boat trips I've ever taken and really a chance to see nature at it's best.  It's a shame that I had to come so far to see it but it was worth every mile.

• Itinerary to be continued, as I now have to go to bed in preparation for a foray into some of the best nature that Long Beach has to offer, the LA river bike path.

 In other news, "Camp Footprints", a volunteer camp that really made an impact on my life so far, is coming up in a couple of weeks and I am going to be a team leader.  With prep for camp and designing a website for my mom's office, I definitely have my work cut out for me for the rest of the summer, but these tasks also promise to be a lot of fun and a great learning experiences.

The Benefits of Jetlag

Being home has been great so far.  I've gotten to spend time with Sam, with my cat Rocky, and catch up with some friends. All helped out at least in part by Jetlag.  I never would have believed it would be so useful, but the ability to wake up at 6:30 in spite of not setting an alarm and irrespective of whether or not I got enough sleep the night before has come in handy.

Here's just a quick summary of the perks:
1. Wednesday: 12 mile bike ride with my Mom and 1.2 mile ocean swim, all before noon.  Also, I got to try out my new bathing suit, a Jammer bought in Palermo, Italy.
2. Thursday: School with Sam.
3. Friday: 46 mile bike ride with friends.

All in all, not to shabby for a week that I thought I'd be having to sleep through a lot of.  However, at this point it might not hurt to get some extra sleep.

Also, here is a quote that I have always tried to live by but that I had not heard until recently:

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow.  Learn as if you were to live forever."
-Mahatma Ghandi

Return Trip

All good things must come to an end and this one is no different. Tomorrow morning bright and early it's back to the United States of America. It's been a wonderful trip, but there really is no place like the good young US of A.

On to Venice

I just left Split Croatia, where I spent my first Saturday night in Europe ashore. Quite an experience and one which allowed me to see the country in a truly different light (pun intended). In front of and inside what was once the Roman emperor Diocletian's palace are now bars and residences that have been built up since the middle ages. It's amazing how something that is "new" in this town is 500-1000 years old and built over the "old" 1700 year old ruins.

Also, over the last couple of days, I've been getting in regular workouts in the ships very small pool. The funny thing is, compared to any other swimmer on the ship, I mine as well be an Olympian. I actually got cheered on by one very nice woman who later jokingly asked me for my autograph.

Between workouts and sight seeing, the ship also has some very interesting lecturers. One, who is a classics professor at Oxford, brought up the interesting point of national mythologies and how they are formed. It is amazing how what is highlighted in a tourist brochure today might be a result of hundreds or even thousands of years of choosing only the most interesting parts of a country's history. However, at the same time, some parts of national mythologies, although they might go far back in history, were only added recently. For example, many of the Italian towns with medieval names reverted back to what they were called under Roman times due to Mussolini's obsession with making himself seem like a Roman emperor.

Tomorrow, it's off to Venice to see what this historic and beautiful city has to offer.

Change and Time

The last couple of days, I've seen more than a few ruins of Greek temples, and I can't help thinking that it is amazing that there are perhaps more well-preserved Greek temples in Italy than there are in Greece.  The entire area was part of Magna Grecia in the 6th to 2nd centuries B.C.  Another interesting point is that some of the temples are bigger than those built in Greece.  The Doric style of Greek architecture involved building temples on a human scale.  However, in an attempt to show off to mother Greece, some of the colonies threw this aside and built gargantuan structures.  The collapsed temple of Zeus, that I saw today, was nearly 400 feet long and 140 feet high when standing.

Some of the most interesting sites that I visited were a temple and theater at Segesta and the world-renouned "Valley of the Temples" in Agrigento.  Visiting all of these ancient ruins has really gotten me thinking about how time can bring some serious change, whether good or bad.  The interesting part about this is that even an area that has remained relatively static over the years can have a completely changed function.  In Segesta, what was once a theater and fortress city (built by the Elinins in the 5th century B.C.) became a castle in the middle ages for its ability to command the surrounding land.  Today, it is merely an abandoned hilltop with ruins that provides a place to enjoy the nature and watch the scenery.

The city of Erice is another example.  What was once a fortress city is now a town with 300 permanent residents and 30 catholic churches.  Another spectacular change: one of the largest sources of the town's visitors is a nuclear physics institute housed in what was once a monastery with its larger meetings in a nearby church.  Seeing this change in the function of these buildings, I can't help thinking that to some people, science is a sort of religion and perhaps professors are the monks of today.

With this talk of nuclear physics, I'll end by translating a quote by Albert Einstein I saw in Italian on a t-shirt, "There are two things that are infinite: the universe and human stupidity.  I'm not quite sure about the first."

Shopping in Palermo: More dangerous than it sounds

Sunday was a beautiful day in Palermo, Italy on the island of Sicily.  The sky was bright blue, and I was feeling relaxed and shopping with my Grandma.  As we were walking down what seemed to be a pedestrian street, I heard the honking of the horn of a Vespa and looked back to watch as, seemingly in slow motion, an ~18 year old vespa driver and his distraught girlfriend/passenger careened out of control and knocked over the cycle, in the process knocking into my grandma and sending her crashing to the floor.

That's the basic story of how my grandma got her arm pretty badly cut up and began bleeding out onto the street, but it is only half of the story of the day.  The other half is Sicilian hospitality.  In spite of the fact that my grandma did not and does not speak a word of Italian, she managed to get some sort of help from practically every person we passed: an ice pack from the street vendor, a paper towel from a clothes seller, the use of a restroom from a restaurant owner, and finally the wound was cleaned and dressed by the restaurant owners aunt.  All, thanks to the fact that she was not seriously hurt, making for a somewhat traumatizing and unique experience.

The day ended with my grandma getting treated by the ship doctor and beginning to feel a bit better.  I'll end with what she said on the way back,

"Well Max, you got an adventure today."