Mingling kids and museums

Remember the field trips to the musuems when you were a kid? Where one painting looked like another, and you couldn't wait to get to the gift shop? DH and I realized from the start that taking 2 small children to historical sites throughout Europe had the possibility of ending in disaster for everyone. DH loves the military and historical end of things. I love the art and architecture. Our kids, 2 boys who exhibit the ADHD traits naturally inherent in little boys, like activity. So what is the trick to making sure everyone is happy? Bennadryl. Just kidding. We actually found that the boys were agreeable to walking around the sites in Pisa, so long as we played "I Spy" and pointed out the things kids would be interested in.

In the Museo dell'Opera, which houses the original statues of the piazza, typically a snooze-fest for children, we had fun looking for baby Jesus, who was represented plentifully, and angels, another Italian favorite.

After our dinner, we wanted to give the kids a final chance to burn off energy, as the hotel room didn't offer much space to play. Piazzas are known for being large, open areas. We took the kids back to the Piazza Del Miracoli and had fun running races along one of the less-used pathes.

Hot and sweaty we headed back to our hotel room for showers and bed. Remember in one of my first posts where I talked about the difference between European and American hotel rooms, and I mentioned air conditioning? To Europeans, cold is a commodity. When you are served a glass of soda, you consider yourself lucky if you get 3 cubes in your glass. Air conditioning is the same. To Europeans, 80 degrees is cool. If it's below 90, they have their windows open, and a/c shut off. In our hotel room, there was a window unit in the room, but it only ran in the evening hours, and you had to call downstairs to have it turned on. Looking forward to cooling off, we called downstairs to be informed that they were having a problem with the electricity and the a/c would not be working.

To make sure that something hadn't been lost in the translation of the hotel clerk's broken Italian/English, I went downstairs to clarify. To the clerk, it should be no big deal for us to simply open the windows and let the air flow. To me logic said that if it was 90 degrees outside, the air flowing through my room would also be 90 degrees. Not acceptable. After some gentle persuasion and a little batting of my eyes, we were transfered to a sister-hotel a few blocks away. The kind, or maybe just tired of me complaing, clerk even called for a cab to help carry our now exhausted children and baggage to the new hotel.

As we walked into our new room, we were greeted with a burst of cold air, as it seems 3 star hotels put more money into their electric bills than 2 star hotels and provide their guests with not only softer mattresses but also 5 degrees of added coldness.

Ciao' for now!