‘Tis the season when Spotify (my streaming music service of choice) offers “Your Top Songs 2016” as a playlist. They know exactly what I’ve been listening to all year. It was not surprising to see Coldplay’s Adventure of a Lifetime top the list. We’ve adopted that as our family theme song for the year, and I have been known to play it (often) as we start some particular leg of the journey. Scanning the list, I noticed how international our family music has become, with the European “song of the summer” Sofia in our top five. Yes, the song is in Spanish (not Italian). But, it became something of an anthem on the kids’ school bus and a dance-party starter for us at home. I dare you to play the song and stay perfectly still. Please report back.
The kids have their last 2016 day of school today. In less than four months, they have made an entire new set of friends, learned to play violin, AND can speak Italian with perfect accents. Their growth has been incredible and humbling to watch. Also, their Italian homework is getting really hard.
Tomorrow we are taking the train to go skiing in the Alps for the day. There is a ski resort called Sauze D’ Oulx (impossible to pronounce) that was once a destination for Torinese aristocrats. Now it’s a favorite of the Brits abroad as well as one of the closest ski towns to Torino. We’re so excited to take a train for an hour to go skiing. Crazy.
After a Christmas at home in Torino, we are traveling north–way north. First we’ll go to Amsterdam for three days, and then on to Norway. From Oslo we will take boats and trains to get us all the way up to Tromsø, a town above the arctic circle, to chase the aurora borealis (northern lights). The sun will never rise there, so we’ll spend days in alternating twilight and darkness. That should make for ideal conditions for us to try to get a glimpse of the fantastical northern lights.
Last year at this time we had just made the decision to move to Italy. This whole experience is a bit surreal (by the way, that is Merriam Webster’s word of 2016) and is defined as “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream”. That is what this whole time feels like. And we still have seven more months to go! It really has been the adventure of a lifetime.