The  past week, the weather has been very stormy and cold.  There has been  very high wind, flashing lightning And rumbling rolls of thunder in the sky.  We hav’nt been able to walk around much because of the  weather, so all we have been doing is  sitting around the house and enjoying the weather and doing our schoolwork. The first day it started raining, most of my family wanted it to clear up and be sunny again, but To me it felt like a little piece of home that we brought with us ;)

October 25th, 2012 Yesterday we took a bus back down to Naples and explored an old catholic church and an art museum. The journey there and back were the most exciting however. We were walking on the sidewalk when we saw, on the outer edge of the wide sidewalk, a pretty rooster pecking at a tomato. Now that's a first! I didn't even know they knew what a live chicken was here in the city! Nearby, there was a very small petstore with massive amounts of pet cages, food, excesories, etc tightly jammed near the doorway and inside the store. There wasn't much of a variety of pets in the store, but they did have a few here and there. In the front of the store, there were little tiny yellow and black turtles swimming around in a tank. They were so cute! I think it would be awesome to own at least 1 or 2 of these at least while we are living here, and if we cant take them back home, we can just set them free in the big pond behind the museum Ceramica Di Martina where lots of other turtles live! Anyways, further back into the pet store, there were little fluffy kittens and mice and rats and..... wait for it...... CHIPMUNKS! Yes, chipmunks! how awesome is that? Most of them were sleeping in their cage, but one of them would climb up a wall of the cage, do a backflip, and land on the other wall. It was so cool!

  the other wall. It was so cool! After we got to the church, we went inside to see the super tall, fancy decorated ceilings and lots of beautiful paintings. At the very back of the church, there was an alter on a huge stage with a covering of white and a vase of roses in front of it. Down the middle of the building, there were the seats, and on each both sides of those, were many large pillars holding the building up. There were little side rooms with pictures of Mary and Jesus and Nativity scenes with gold frames and decorations around them. Here and there there were candles fake and real that you could light up to signify that you were praying for someone. Donation boxes were by the alters and candles all over the place.

After having visited the church, we were on our way to the art museum! The museum started with a room with all sides, ceiling, floor and walls painted (actually the floor was tiled in colorfull decorations). The walls depicted creepy spider people in wierd positions and some other un-recognisable, colorfull shapes. My least favorite type of art.... :p It was really innapropiate too.... :P. anyways, the next room in the museum was the same. Upstairs, however, it was completely different. It was more of a modern-style type of art. The first room, was a giant anchor sitting infront of some bars. The next room made a wierd ecoey, humming noise when you entered. all around the walls were mirrors with light reflecting off of them. On the bars that held the mirrors out, were metal skulls without the mandable. The next room, had a piece of foggy glass on the wall with a jelly dude's face smushed up against it from the other side... It's kind of hard to explain but it's a good thing we took pictures! The next room had a huge black board with some form of math written all over it. This was Race's favorite. Then, we came into a room with a big black rectangle in the floor that turned out to be a hole in the floor, how crazy!

  After we had finished visiting that museum, we walked around in the allyways to see what we could see. There were hundreds of stores lined up everywhere, and some were just homeless people trying to see what they could sell. In many of the allyways, there were people creating these amazing houses and scenes with tree bark, moss, cloth, anything they could find and glueing them together to make a great, big scene. Some of them even had little lights built in and little waterfalls and streams running real water! They were the coolest thing... thank God for cameras!

                                October 23, 2012      Today we went exploring the roads of Posillipo (where our house is currently) and found a large park not too far from our house. We had already been to the park before with our tour guide (he was our house searcher as well) but we wanted explore the rest of the park too. there was a nice, sunny area where the pavement came to a cliff (of course it had walls and fences) with an amazing view of the water below and an island not far off. The sight reminded of an old game that my brother and I used to play called Sid Meyer's Pirates. what the game was about was finding crew at nearby havens and taking down ships in the sea and gathering loot from them, you could also go look for and take down the well-known pirates and find their buried treasure. Anyways, so at the park, my favorite part was chasing all the lizards that were sunning on the warm walls near the cliff. They are really fast and super hard to catch! But finally, I caught a pretty good sized lizard and took a picture (top). After that I felt pretty accomplished and tried to catch some more, I grabbed at a big lizard that was fleeing over the edge of the wall but it ejected its tail before I could grab the rest of him, so I was stuck with a little tip of a tail flopping around and squirming. I saw my mom walking over and quickly stuck the tail into a little crack in the wall so part of it could still be seen flopping around. When my mom finally came over, I told her that a lizard was trying to fit into the hole in the wall, mom was amused until I pulled out the tail and set it on the wall. She was really freaked out!

                                          The other day we went to a museum at a park in Naples. I can't quite remember what it was called, but the museum really wasn't all that amazing. It had some old china and chinese art and stuff, and some pots and glasses, but it didnt have much to read about or anything really cool enough to write about. But the park was another story. It wasn't so much antique stuff and old ruins, it had lots of trees and lots of nature all around. There were so many trails to explore there, but unfortunatly, almost all of them were closed off iwith orange tape. Infront of the museum was a huge open field to have a picnic or just sit around, behind the museum, there was a big fountain with little yellow and black turtles and bright orange fish. There must have been about 30 turtles in there, big and small, and lots of the visiters were feeding them their sandwitches or bread or something. It was entertaining to watch the fish and turtles grab at the food floating in the water, the turtles like to bite the big pieces and tear the rest off with their front legs :).

                                                        October 16, 2012. Today my brother, mom and I went to visit a science museum near our house in Posillipo. We wanted to take a bus ride down the narrow road with no sidewalk, but when the bus came down to the bus stop where we were, it just kept on going and didn't stop. So we had to walk the skinny road down the hill to the museum called Citta Della Scienza (I think I spelled it right....). This year the theme of the museum was astronomy (the theme changes every year), so when you walk in, you feel like you are in a spaceship most of the time. They even had rooms that had red-dirt floors that looked like the grounds of mars. The museum had lots of hands-on experiments and exhibits including my favorites, three giant big tubes of liquid, each had a different viscosity (each were a different thickness basically). There were big handlebars on each, when you pushed the handlebar down and pulled it back up, it would create bubbles in the tubes that naturally floated up to the top, but each tube's bubbles travelled at a different speed. For example, the red tube (each tube was a different color) was the thickest, and the bubbles travelled very very slowly. In the blue tube (the thinnest viscosity) the bubbles traveled much faster, but not as fast as regular h2o. My 2nd favorite exhibit was the rocket ship. This was a little plastic rocket ship in a plastic tube above water. When you press the go-button, there were two bubbling, silver cylinders at the bottom of the tube underwater. What those cylinders would do was split the molecules into hydrogen and oxygen (like splitting h2o into h2 and O) and use it to blast the rocket ship up to the ceiling. Last but not least of my favorite exhibits was the huge tube of blue dyed water. When you pressed the 'go' button, the water at the top would start to spin, and soon it created a giant whirlpool. The rest of the museum was very interesting too, my mom got to do the thing where you hold on to a bar that generates static electricity and makes your hair stand up-that was really funny :). Another thing that I remembered best from the museum was these screens everywhere that showed these evil-looking cartoon jack-in-the-boxes that had really wide eyes and a really big mouth. These things were idle most of the time, but whenever you stepped infront of them, they would come alive and talk to you and ask you questions in a really high-pitched, robotic voice. It was soooo freaky!! I'm pretty sure there was a real person looking through a camera and talking to you, because it asked intelligent questions and replied to you like a normal person (despite the creepy voice). Despite the scariness of this thing, i found it entertaining. :D

                October 15th 2012;  Recently, my family and I moved into a temporary home in Posillipo, not too far from Naples. The house is a one-story, quite large house with two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The kitchen, living room and dining room are all the same room and are nice and open. The giant door in this room also adds to the open feeling in the house. It is a large glass sliding door about the size of a garage door that leads to the small backyard. My family and I have been enjoying our time in this house and would much rather stay here than stay in a hotel for the rest of the trip. It's just nice to have a place of your own that you don't have to share with anybody (not that we shared rooms in the hotel). Being me, I already started making decorations for Christmas. :D Using what I have, I make origami Christmas trees, paper snowflakes and paper chains, but as soon as I tried putting them up, my brother told me he would tear them down as soon as I did so I decided to secretly put them up downstairs in the laundry room ;). (I still don't consider this house to be 2 stories since the laundry room is so small and the rest of the downstairs is a parking garage) Sorry I didn't get to post a very good picture of the giant door, that last one is the best that my mom took. That there is a picture of the opening from the backyard to the dining room.

                                          A few days ago, Me and my family took a weekend-long trip to Belgium to watch a dirt-bike race called Motocross of Nations, well, at least my brother and my dad did. Mean while, my mom and I walked around and explored the town. It was really not all that warm there, in fact it was cold enough that my cheeks turned red, travelling from Naples to Eindhoven (Eindhoven airport) was like transferring to a completely different world. The air was crisp, there was hardly any people, it was peaceful, and had lots of trees and farmland. Whereas Naples is very crowded, hot, smoky and hazy in the city, crammed, noisy and very in-your-face. The hotel in Belgium was very grand and fancy, we got two rooms, one for my brother and I to share, and one for my Mom and Dad. both rooms were fairly large with a balcony  (all we could see is a dog park......). the bathrooms were huge with two sinks, large mirrors and a remote control shower, that's right, remote control. Pretty darn amazing. Anyways, we got up in the morning and went down to have breakfast, they served cereal, omelets, toast, eggs, bacon, ham, and cheese. And then there was the fantastic milk! The must milk there own cows or something because it isn't processed in anyway, this delicious milk is full on, fresh, pasture-fed whole milk.     
                                  As my Mom and I strolled around town, we spotted a restaurant that had a big sign that said: "Chocolat" (that's actually how the Belgians spell it) so we decided to go in and check it out. After we ate, we were a little disappointed that the waffle and pancake we ate wasn't actually chocolate, but Mom had some amazing hot cocoa. It was light brown liquid in a cute little tea-cup that you stir with a plastic spoon with chocolate melted at the bottom you can mix it in. We enjoyed our lunch very much, especially the waffles. they were fluffy, but not light, they were loaded with sugar and butter with fruit on the side of the plate.
                                   After we finished looking around in the mall that the restaurant was in, we walked down the street and found a store that sold Belgium chocolates, so we decided to go inside and look. The store had lots of samples all over so we could try the different ones, we ended up buying some of them (although they were kind of expensive). We didn't get to taste the best kinds of Belgium chocolates, but we were contented.