Christmas in Provo, without people

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Caucasus trip 2019, part 1

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Dad (Jon) and I are roughly three weeks into a month-long trip around Eastern Europe and the Caucasus region. We started in Armenia, made our way through Georgia, across the Black Sea to Ukraine, through Moldova and now to Kyiv, Ukraine. We have one more stop, Lviv, and then it’s back home to Idaho. I’ll cover our first two weeks(ish) in this post, from the start to the Black Sea ferry. This trip may sound familiar, as many of our destinations match up with a trip Dad and Phin took in August 2013. They wrote about their trip in several posts: Let sleeping dogs lie in Kiev Kiev Pechersk Lavra More Kiev churches and sights Ukrainian miscellany Tbilisi, Georgia Enlinking the Caucasus from Tbilisi to Yerevan Yerevan, Armenia sights Burning rubber in Yerevan, Armenia Garni & Geghard, Armenia Ejmiatsin, Armenia Dad and I have been interested in Eastern Europe for a long time, so this trip has been a great opportunity to see a lot of new places in the east. A lot of plac...
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Sense and Sensibility

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Sense and Sensibility is my favorite novel by Jane Austen, so I was excited to go to an outdoor theater production of it at Burnby Hall Gardens just down the road from us. I told the kids that I'd take anyone who read the book first. Nobody was very interested except for Lillian, who immediately started it. She was about a quarter of the way through it when we saw the play and she's busy finishing it now. It'll be her first time reading a Jane Austen novel. (Insert gleeful clapping here!) Left to right: servant girl (also played Fanny Dashwood and Mrs. Palmer); Margaret (Lucy Steele); Willoughby (Mr. Palmer); Marianne; Eleanor; Mrs. Dashwood (Mrs. Jennings). In this production, all of the actors played multiple parts except those who played Eleanor and Marianne. I love seeing actors take on multiple roles in a production. It's fun to see how they highlight the differences between the characters. Since the play was performed outside, many people brought picn...
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Malta devotional niches and shrines

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Malta’s long history is very interesting, including what is widely thought to be the shipwreck by the apostle Paul in AD 60 described in the New Testament Acts of the Apostles chapter 28 , the last chapter in Acts. Later there was a period where the inhabitants were killed and it was mostly unpopulated, then was resettled around AD 1049 by a Muslim community and their slaves, who rebuilt a ruined city and called it Mdina after the Arabian Madīnah / Medina. Eventually Christians reconquered the island, yet the Arabic dialect spoken by the population remained, with new Christian faith. Here is one example, a guest house called Dar is-Sliem, “house of peace” in Maltese, similar to Dar es Salaam in Arabic, the largest city in Tanzania: Nowadays Malta is a strongly Catholic country. This is evident in many ways. Visually it is obvious in the large in the many, many churches on the islands. In the small, see the very common house devotional niċċa (niches) and shrines that are al...
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