My Big Fat Greek Anniversary

Ok. First things first, a little clarification. No, we are not still in Greece, we've been in Bulgaria for about a week and a half. No, we didn't spend our anniversary in Greece, because we were obviously here in Bulgaria (more on what we actually did on our anniversary later). But an update about our time in Greece is better late than never, and our anniversary gift to each other was a trip to Santorini while we were in Greece, hence the title of this post. Plus we really wanted to use a derivative of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. So there you go. Now that we've got that cleared up, here's an update about our time in Greece!

Coming from Italy, it was a lot easier to just fly. I recommend Aegean Airlines...our flight from Rome to Athens was 1.5 hours, and they served us a delicious in-flight meal with free wine. Our flight from Boston to Iceland a couple months ago was over 5 hours long and we didn't even get peanuts. The only downside was that Tyler had to sit in 29D, and I was in 8E. Not exactly close. Anyway, we made it to Athens and then had to find where we were staying, which turned out to be a much longer and more complicated process than we were anticipating, but we made it there safely and were able to get a good night's rest before sight-seeing the next day.

On our way up the north slope of the Acropolis, a view of the city

More of Athens

The Theater of Dionysus

Dionysus himself

About to the top of the Acropolis

The Old Temple of Athena

Front of Athena's temple

The side of the Parthenon

Parthenon!

Theater of Dionysus from above

Temple of Zeus

Ancient Agora

Love that Greek flag!

He could've been a Greek Olympian. Back side of the Propylaea.

From Athens, we headed to Pireaus to catch a ferry out to Santorini. I've wanted to see the Greek Isles (specifically Santorini) for a very long time, so this was quite the dream come true. When we got to the port, we realized our ferry was more of a miniature cruise ship, which was fine with us since the boat ride was 8 hours.

Santorini was more beautiful than I could've imagined, and it just couldn't have been a better three days. Our hotel was perfect; the owners were wonderfully sweet and accommodating, providing a delicious breakfast and a balcony in our room (an upgrade free of charge because we were celebrating our anniversary).

The entrance to the hotel rooms

Our little balcony, complete with the smallest table and chair set I've ever seen. We enjoyed lunch and dinner out here both days.

The view from our balcony

The hotel's restaurant terrace

Delicious breakfast and a great view!

Our hotel was in Oia, the town in Santorini where everyone wants to go to see the sunset. We were just across the road from a breath-taking opening through the descending village looking down into the caldera, and it seemed like every time we stepped out of the hotel to explore the village, it was more beautiful. Different times of the day made it beautiful in different ways as well. This is a place we will definitely be returning. I will try not to overload you with pictures, but it might be difficult.

Our first glimpse of Oia. It was pretty great. This was in the evening light.

There was something about the lights at night on the white-washed buildings reflecting into the blue sea that was mesmerizing.

I love that you can also see some of the other villages dotted along the island...they look like jewels!

So beautiful!

Mid-morning light was also pretty wonderful.

I really think I could live here.

Catching some sun by the pool. The hotel is behind us, and our room was one on the bottom left of the four balconies you can see.

It was such a wonderful experience. What a perfect way to celebrate our first anniversary!

We decided to follow the crowds and walk to the tip of the island to see what the fuss was all about.

It was pretty spectacular. Although the sunset here would've been beautiful, it was also visible from our balcony, so we took dinner back and enjoyed it there while we watched the sun go down.

We couldn't not have gyros while we were in Greece!

After Santorini, we had another couple days back on the mainland of Greece, but we decided to stay in Pireaus instead of going back to Athens since our ferry got back into port around midnight. We decided to take some time to relax and enjoy our view of the harbor instead of trying to cram in more sight-seeing.

This is the view from our balcony in Pireaus. Not too bad, huh? We had all our meals out here while we were there.

A really cool church near the apartment where we stayed

Another cool building...this may have been a national embassy of some sort.

The beach in Pireaus

The journey to Veliko Tarnovo from Athens was kind of long and complicated. No international trains are running to or from Greece right now, so we took a national train to Thessaloniki in the aftenoon, then a 6-hour bus from Thessaloniki to Sofia at midnight, then a 7:45 a.m. bus from Sofia to Veliko Tarnovo. Needless to say, we were pretty exhausted, but we got settled and started the seminar. Look for another update soon on what exactly we've been doing in Bulgaria! Love you all.

One Year Gone

                    
                  This was ONE YEAR AGO. Whaaaaa?



Wow. I cannot believe Tyler and I have been married for an entire year. It blows my mind how fast it went, but I also can't really believe how different I am now than when we tied the knot just 365 days ago. Sure, I'm really still the same person, but I've learned so much already that the unmarried me feels like forever ago. The crazy thing is, the more that I learn, the more I don't know. I'm realizing that marriage is never something you "get." There's no ultimate level to attain, like once you've reached the top you have no more to learn. You just keep changing and learning and loving as you go! In lieu of our anniversary, I decided to compile a list of things I've learned about marriage.

12 Things I've Learned in 12 Months of Marriage:
1. Marriage is so fun. Seriously, it's a slumber party with your best friend every single night. Although some nights are more slumbering than partying, it's still such a joy to begin and end each day with your favorite person in the entire world. 
2. The best way to learn a lot in a short amount of time is to travel together. You will fight, you will cry, you will laugh, and you will fall more in love.
3. Sometimes you have to compromise on bed time, especially when one person is used to staying up til 3 in the morning and the other one likes to go to bed at 10.
4. Never stop pursuing the other. When you've only been married for a year, it can still be considered the honeymoon phase, but you can't ever let dating each other become old hat. There's always fun to be had, and there's always something new to learn about the other.
5. Choose your battles. This is especially true for me, because I'm stubborn and I don't like to be wrong. But some things just aren't worth an argument or a bad mood for the rest of the day!
6. Sometimes the toughest decisions are where to eat or what movie to watch. You always want the other one to decide because you want them to get what they want. One of you has to give in or you'll never get anywhere. And if you just cannot pick a movie, it's best to create a double-elimination poker tournament bracket of movie options and pit them against each other.
7. Marriage is a magnifying glass. It can and should make the good things better, but it can also bring out the worst in you.
8. Forgive. You've made a promise for life. You're also human, which means you are going to make a lot of mistakes over the course of forever. Forgive, learn, and keep on keepin' on.
9. Ice cream makes everything better, and it can fix many problems.
10. Communicate. This obviously seems like a no-brainer, but you may be shocked at how easy it is to just keep something to yourself or bottle an emotion that needs to be expressed. You know what this leads to later? Nothing good. If he said something that upset you, the best thing to do is NOT mope around and expect him to realize what happened and come begging for forgiveness. It's best to just get it out there and talk about it.
11. Never go to bed angry. Except sometimes. When you're fighting because it's bedtime and you're tired, sometimes all you need is to sleep it off.
12. The best way to start a day is with a "snooze" worth of cuddling after the first alarm.

Here are a few other favorite tidbits from our experiences in marriage:

-Flying a kite on a windy spring day in April can really bring out the kid in you.
-Tyler will eat anything except applesauce. His dad will eat anything except cottage cheese.
-You can always say no to drugs, even in Jamaica when a guy on stilts offers you weed.
-Just because we're married, people overseas think we're a lot older than we are. Like, 30.
-I am exceptionally bad at sharing food.
-Sometimes it's ok to drive 3.5 hours to St. Louis in hopes to buy tickets to a Cardinals post-season game outside of the stadium only to not find tickets and end up watching the game at a Buffalo Wild Wings before driving back home at 2 in the morning.
-Tyler's favorite nickname for me is Dan Dan simply because he knows I hate it. His other favorite nickname for me is Little Britches.
-Cheap wine is cheap for a reason: it tastes bad.
-The quickest way to get Tyler out of bed in the morning is NOT by yanking the covers off of him.
-No one should ever waste their time with Solitaire on the computer. It only ends in frustration and despair.
-It's not necessarily a bad thing to follow a strange man into the woods at a campsite when you're in desperate need of campfire help. When that still doesn't do the trick, it is perfectly acceptable to eat your marshmallows while your hot dogs are cooking because you never know how long your fire will last.
-I know more about professional sports than I ever thought possible. And alas, I have turned into a Lakers fan.
-Scaring me is never acceptable, even in severe cases of hiccups. Even if it gets rid of them. It's just not acceptable. Ever. Tyler now knows that. 
-I think Tyler has yet to grasp the concept of "our" money, seeing as he is constantly asking how much I would give him if he did something stupid, like eat a whole tub of butter or punch a stranger ("Seriously, how much?").
-You'll never know how great of a gift a car radio is until you've driven long distances for a couple years without one.
-Tyler frequently breaks out into random song (spirituals, hymns, raps, etc. usually with his own, made-up lyrics), so much so that I'm completely immune and forget that this might sound a bit weird to someone who doesn't know us. Most of the time he's not even aware that he's doing it.
-The best cure for a headache is to turn off all the lights and pass the time by thinking of popular songs from your childhood and whispering the lyrics together.
-Tyler can make a mean creme brûlée. He claims he can't cook, but I can see past his clever disguise.

It's been a wonderful year. We had our first apartment, we graduated college, we've been to 17 different countries and three U.S. national parks together, camped, road-tripped, and backpacked, and we're about to embark on another year that includes two months at an orphanage in India, more national parks, more camping and road trips, moving to a new city, jobs, and more school. I'm so incredibly blessed to have this man in my life. He loves me more than I deserve, and I'm so thankful for the time we've had together. Here's to many more years to come!

A Fickle Heart

I have a confession to make: I have trust issues. I've always been that way, even with group projects in middle school--you know, where everyone is supposed to take a certain task, but you're not confident in anyone else's abilities so you end up just doing the whole thing on your own. I'm a control freak at heart, because I want things done right and the only way I can be positive about that happening is by doing it or overseeing it myself. I wouldn't say that I have trust issues necessarily in simply believing what someone else may tell me, but it's just always been difficult for me to have 100% confidence in something I don't have a hand in at every step in the process. Which of course doesn't bode well for life, because a) it is literally impossible to do everything on this earth entirely by myself, and b) when it comes to faith, I actually have very little say in things. Nonetheless, I still grasp for control, and when I can't reach it, stress and panic tend to take over.

Let me tell you a little story about how we got our visas for India. As many of you know, India was kind of a last-minute God thing. Things fell into place around two or three weeks before we were to leave for Europe. Which gave us very little time to get things in order. As we were frantically trying to move all of our stuff across the state, pack, re-pack, spend some quality time with friends and family, and get everything squared away for backpacking, Tyler studying in Bulgaria, and working in India, we were bound to forget something. Unfortunately, that something that we forgot was kind of important. Every American going to India for any amount of time, even for tourism, needs a visa before arriving to the country. For those of you who don't know, that means a special detailed visa sticker stuck to one of the pages in your passport to show upon arrival to India. We discovered this little fact approximately just one week before we were supposed to leave. Do you think this sat well with Dani "Control Freak" Jackson? Um, no. Cue stress and panic.

We were a week away from needing our passports to leave the country and were about to send them to Chicago. We jumped on the process as quickly as possible, but nothing seemed to be going our way. We found out on a Friday, meaning all we could do was get the application ready and wait to send it in Monday. Except, oh wait. That Monday happened to be Memorial Day, so we couldn't send it in until Tuesday. From there, things were a little haywire on the Post Office's end (aka they took away another day of potential processing), and I must have called the Chicago Post Office and the visa office at least 32 times (I'm seriously not exaggerating. Diane Washington, the lady who helped me at Travisa Visa Services, and I are practically best friends). By the time it finally got there on Wednesday, we still didn't know if we would have them in time to leave for Iceland the following Monday (we were even prepared to drive to Chicago to pick them up, although that didn't prove to be necessary).

Long story short, everything worked out and Travisa got us our passports with the visas in them on the Saturday before we left, but not without great expense. Sure, it cost a pretty penny to expedite everything, but that's not the expense I'm talking about. I'm talking about sacrificing a precious peace from God that comes from trusting in Him wholeheartedly. I lost sight of faith and, as a result, forfeited peace. You wanna know what worrying and stressing about getting our passports back in time got me? Absolutely nothing. Except maybe an ulcer. By panicking through the whole process, I did not speed up USPS's delivery system. I did not telekinetically push our application to the top of Travisa's pile, and I certainly did not magically make visas just appear in our passports with a poof or teleport our visas back to us from Chicago. Instead, I let stress and panic deprive me of peace, faith, and contentment.

And you know what's crazy, it's not like I learned my lesson quickly from it. The first couple weeks of travel were equally filled with stress, with feverish attempts to make everything go smoothly and according to plan. I just had to know exactly how and when we were getting somewhere, where we would be staying and how to get there, and what we would be doing once we were there. And it led to more unrest and dissatisfaction, all without really accomplishing anything purposeful. Yes, we got places according to schedule, but what was the worst that could happen if we'd missed a train? Catch the next one? Stay one more night there? What's the worst that could happen if I didn't write down and memorize perfect directions to our next hostel? Stop and ask how to get there?

What makes this an even sadder situation is that stress and worry eat away at more than just your peace; they affect every part of your life, including your attitude, your joy, your mood, everything, meaning it makes it that much harder to get along with your husband or actually enjoy the cool things you're seeing everyday. So why worry or stress if it does all of those bad things but absolutely nothing good? Because I have a fickle heart. I know deep down what is good for me: Jesus. Period, point blank, it's that simple; He's all I need. But I forget that far too often. I am swayed by my sinful desire for control, and Satan convinces me that worrying or stressing over something is the best way to get that control. I flip-flop back and forth between my soul's desire to trust the Lord and my nature's desire to do it all on my own.

A little while back, we were on a train for several hours, and out of nowhere I started singing "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" to myself. I couldn't get the words, "Oh, what peace we often forfeit, oh what needless pain we bear," out of my head, and I took a second to thank God for putting that on my heart. How true it is! I couldn't agree more from my own personal experiences that we often forfeit peace, bring pointless pain upon ourselves, because we try to do it all. We are blessed to have a faithful friend that will share in and even take away our worry and suffering, but we oftentimes don't let Him! Another lyric from that hymn says that it's a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer. We have the freedom, the liberty, the privilege to put it all on the Lord: all our sorrows, all our griefs, all our sins, all our stress, all our trials and temptations. So why not take advantage of that? God desires for His children to be free from tiresome burdens and asks for us to lay it all on Him. After all, it's not like we can accomplish anything by worrying anyway.

Here are the lyrics to "What a Friend We Have in Jesus." I hope that, as you reflect on them, you can think about what area of your spiritual walk suffers because of a fickle heart. I pray that you will give your stress to the Lord and let Him fill you with His peace.

What a friend we have in Jesus,
All our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry
Everything to God in prayer!
Oh, what peace we often forfeit,
Oh, what needless pain we bear,
All because we do not carry
Everything to God in prayer!

Have we trials and temptations?
Is there trouble anywhere?
We should never be discouraged—
Take it to the Lord in prayer.
Can we find a friend so faithful,
Who will all our sorrows share?
Jesus knows our every weakness;
Take it to the Lord in prayer.

Are we weak and heavy-laden,
Cumbered with a load of care?
Precious Savior, still our refuge—
Take it to the Lord in prayer.
Do thy friends despise, forsake thee?
Take it to the Lord in prayer!
In His arms He’ll take and shield thee,
Thou wilt find a solace there.

Be More With Less

Ok guys, I’m going to try and do all of our two weeks in Italy in one blog, so bear with me. I’ve got lots to cover, but I think it’ll be easier just to put it all together. And of course, that means LOTS of pictures. Here we go!

Our first stop in Italy was Venice. The original plan was to just sleep in the train station when we got there since we were pulling in after midnight. However, a couple things changed our plans. First, the Italian train system is less than ideal. We’ve been traveling by trains for a while now, spanning many different countries. We’ve gotten to the point where we don’t have to think about it anymore when we have an upcoming train departure. We’re pros. Italy quickly knocked us back to amateur status, though. We found that we just couldn’t rely on the trains like we could in other countries. They were usually 10-45 minutes late and the ticket-checkers on the train didn’t have the time to answer your questions unless you asked them in Italian. So this made our arrival in Venice extremely stressful, trying to figure out what train we needed to get on to get to our destination. Second, once we finally got there we found the train station to be pretty sketchy. As tired and stressed as we were we decided to just splurge and book a hotel room for the night. An air-conditioned private room that even included breakfast– what a luxury! The next day we stuffed ourselves with that free breakfast (you’ll never know how great free food is until you live on a backpacker’s budget for 7 weeks) and headed out to explore Venice.

Venice is a city best explored by wandering. Maps do you no good, and most street names are non-existent. The city is a grid of canal channels, squares, little alleys, and narrow streets, and you never really know where one of them will take you. We ended up trying to follow signs to St. Mark’s Basilica, which is actually in a huge plaza with statues, fountains, government buildings, and access to the sea. St. Mark’s was beautiful, if only from the outside…we forgot about the “no shorts and no tank tops” rule for the churches in Italy, and since it was 90 degrees outside, of course that’s what we were wearing. And we didn’t feel like paying 3 euros for 3 pieces of tissue paper to cover ourselves, so we passed on going inside. We enjoyed lunch in the shade near a canal and decided we’d seen most of what Venice had to offer, so we made our way back to the train station to catch a train to Florence.

Our first glimpse of the Grand Canal

Classic gondoliers...it's much less romantic when it's a billion degrees and 2 in the afternoon.

I was impressed by the largeness of this pizza.

St. Mark's

Even the outside of the church was decorated with murals

We decided because it was so beautiful on the outside, we didn't need to see the inside to enjoy it

Our lovely lunch spot

Florence is a beautiful city. We stayed at a campground of sorts, “tents to rent,” up by Piazza Michelangelo. It had the most incredible view of the city, and there was a market and reasonably-priced restaurant on site. As for our accommodation, we were in a small, 3-person canvas tent (luckily we didn’t have to share with someone else) that was perfect for sleeping, but it was an oven during the day. Thankfully, Florence had a lot to offer that kept us busy the two days we were there. We got a real taste of Italian culture simply by roaming the streets of the city. The river itself is beautiful, but there were a number of historic churches, cathedrals, palaces, and museums to explore, not to mention all the little shops, cafes, and bakeries.

The tents where we stayed

Small, but cozy

The pizzeria

The view from the restaurant's terrace

View from Piazza Michelangelo

I cannot for the life of me remember the name of this church. But it was cool.

Across the river

The Medici Chapel

Our next main destination after Florence was the Cinque Terre, but we made a pit-stop in Pisa on the way there from Florence (who can go to Italy, pass right through Pisa, and not go see the leaning tower?). It was very similar to our Bratislava outing: a couple of hours, no reason to pay for luggage storage, so why not carry the bags with us? It didn’t prove to be too difficult since the tower was only about a mile and a half from the train station, but it was incredibly hot. The tower was very picturesque; it almost didn’t look real as we were approaching it. But we had lunch in the shade and headed back to the train station to get on to the Cinque Terre.

Our first glimpse of the tower

Trying to push it over...I think I needed a little more leverage. P.S. When you're strapped into two backpacks, it really seals in all the heat. And sweat.

Our view of the tower from our lunch spot

Sandwiches are just better in Italy. I don't know what it is. They just are.

It was really leaning!

This is the Cathedral of Pisa, but it kind of gets overshadowed by it's famous neighbor. Actually, the leaning tower is part of the cathedral complex.

Literally translated as “Five Lands,” the Cinque Terre is a national park on the Italian Riviera that consists of five colorful villages dotted along the coast and interconnected via hiking trails. This was another place on my bucket list, so I was incredibly happy to be able to include this in our trip. Tyler seemed to be happy that we were there too, although it was mainly just because I was happy. Once again, how lucky am I to have such a wonderful husband? I know he kind of gave a shout-out to me in an earlier blog, so I think it’s my turn to embarrass him with compliments. He has been such a rock for me on this trip, and I know I would be lost without him. I may be more of the planner for getting us from A to B, but traveling is incredibly stressful. It’s exhausting, and when you’re with someone else, the only alone time you have is when the other person is in the bathroom. Combine stress, exhaustion, and 24 hours a day of constant contact, and you are bound to have tension. I will be honest with you all, there have been some pretty tense moments: either between us or in personal struggles for one or the other. Tyler has been the voice of reason in times of stress, he’s been comfort in times of anger or sadness, and he’s above all been wisdom in all situations, especially when I’m battling something spiritually. Plus, we’re still trying find the balance between selfish enjoyment of this trip and looking for God’s purpose in it all and ways we can continue to serve Him, so Tyler’s been a good leader there as well. Just wanted to brag on him for a minute ;)

Anyway, we had three nights in the Cinque Terre, and we actually stayed a few towns north of Monterosso (the northern-most village of the five) in another camping village like we stayed at in Florence. With a tiny tent that got up to 120 degrees in the day, there was a lot of incentive to be out exploring in the heat of the day. Since we had several days there, we felt like we had the liberty to take our time exploring each of the villages and the hiking trails in between. It was incredibly hot, which can make hiking around ten times more tiring, but a swim in the crystal clear deep blue water was pretty refreshing. 

Our little tent

Not a lot of room, but it was cozy!

Riomaggiore:

Village #1: Riomaggiore

The harbor

The beach

The water was much colder than you'd expect.

Lots of shops and apartments

From the coastal trail

Too bad construction was being done on that front building on the left...it kind of ruins the picture.

 Manarola:

Village #2: Manarola

So. Stinking. Beautiful.

More colorful houses

Once again, pretty cold water, but it was so crystal clear and refreshing!

Corniglia:

Village #3: Corniglia

Corniglia is  probably the most elevated of the five villages...it was quite a steep hike to get up to it.

I've never seen such deep blue clear water like this.

A view of Manarola from the train station in Corniglia

 Vernazza:

Village #4: Vernazza

The harbor

So picturesque!

A view of Corniglia from the coastal trail from Vernazza

 Monterosso:

Village #5: Monterosso

Much more of a resort town because it's right on the water, so it was a little too crowded for our taste, but there's a bakery here that hands down makes the best focaccia I've ever tasted.

After the Cinque Terre, we headed south to Rome. We found a room to rent through airbnb.com, and it worked out well because we had a kitchen to use and a room with a big bed, couch, balcony, and a couple tables all to ourselves. Combine this little gem with the fact that a) we were pretty exhausted by this point, and b) we had six whole days in Rome, and we found ourselves getting a little lazy. We even took a couple whole days off. But Rome was a cool city with some of the oldest history we’ve seen so far on this trip, and it was pretty fascinating to explore it all. Plus, what’s not to love when you get to hang out with the one and only Kyle Swetlishnoff? For those of you who don’t know him, Kyle is a junior at Truman whom we know through CCF, and he’s studying abroad in Rome this summer. It was encouraging and refreshing to catch up with Kyle, as it gave Tyler and me both a taste of home and a hint of the fellowship and Christian community we’ve been away from for so long. 

Our room in the apartment

It was so good to be able to cook again!

At the Trevi Fountain

As hot as it was, it was tough not to just jump in and swim around

At the Piazza Venezia

Vittorio Emanuele II Monument

Some Roman ruins. They are literally all over the city!

Part of the Roman Forum

This thing is huge. Like, huge.

Inside the Colosseum

Gladiator returning home. What a champ!

Roman Forum

The Pantheon

What are the odds of accidentally running into someone you know? This little run-in was before we'd even tried to make plans to get together with Kyle. We were wandering around after we'd been sight-seeing all day and just happened to see him. So cool!

I made pesto chicken pasta for dinner one night. Best compliment I've heard in a while? "I just don't understand why you would ever pay to eat at an Olive Garden when you can make something like this at home." -Tyler

At the Vatican

Front wall of the Sistine Chapel

Funny story...you're not really supposed to take pictures in the Sistine Chapel, so I guess this is technically illegal. I was super sneaky, but the Italian guards were a little bit ridiculous. They would "shh!" every few seconds and then yell (or at least talk very loudly) to keep quiet and not take any pictures. One caught me taking a picture and yelled to stop (what happened to the quiet rule?), so Tyler shushed him. It was pretty funny. The guard was not happy.

The back of St. Peter's Basilica

St. Peter's Square

Lunch in Villa Doria Pamphili with this cool cat.

The villa in the park where we had lunch.

Arch of the Four Winds, at the entrance to the park

Another beautiful fountain we happened upon on our way back from lunch with Kyle

As I was trying to decide on a title for this post, I thought about several different Italian phrases, and the one that came to mind was "il dolce far niente," the sweetness of doing nothing. Some of you may recognize it from the book/movie Eat, Pray, Love, but it's actually a deeply rooted part of the Italian way of life. It is an attitude. It is a mindset. It is the opportunity to live freely and enjoy the simple things life has to offer. While I wouldn't necessarily call our time in Italy sweet with doing nothing, I would say that I kind of wanted it to be. I don't regret the sight-seeing we did (come on, we had two weeks of our lives to spend in Italy), and I also think we took much-needed rest and time off. But on days where we did do nothing, I felt guilty somehow, like I should be doing something. I crave the attitude behind "il dolce far niente." There is something so beautiful about the simple life, the life free from stress about appointments, errands, and demands to be met, that I can't help but want to strive to be more with less. To live life more fully, to give more freely, to chase after dreams more determinedly, to love more deeply, to follow God more faithfully, all with less "stuff," less worry, less stress, less fear. I challenge you to see what "stuff" you can cut out of your life to make room for more "life." Disconnect from the hustle and bustle of the American dream, if only for an afternoon. Take time to cook a gourmet meal, and leave the dinner dishes for a while (who says you have to clean up the minute you're finished eating?). Sit still and let God's presence fill the spaces in and around you. Turn off the TV, and find a way to fully enjoy the people around you. May you find true sweetness in your day today!

Look out for an update from Greece next! Love you all, thanks again for reading and thinking of us!