Daylight Saving and Roman Ruins

So, how many of you knew that K's country does Daylight Saving? We knew this, because Jon (the other dad we traveled with) had asked Filip conversationally about that earlier this week. Interesting tidbit; not all countries do.

How many of you know when the spring switch happens in K's country?? It happened a few weeks ago in MN. Apparently, Filip didn't think this was a very important piece of information to add to the conversation, because he didn't tell us that.

But we know. Now. ;) We actually found out early this morning. You see, our agency on the European side had already arranged and paid for our cab to the airport for us. Very nice. She had it set to pick us up at 5am for our 7:10am flight to Amsterdam. We're pretty low-maintenance people, so we figured if we woke up at 4:15am (9:15pm Saturday back on MN time) that we'd have plenty of time to get up, get dressed and ready, and pack.

Apparently that was way more time than we needed to plan for, because we were surprised by a wake up call at what we thought was 4am local time saying our cab was there!!! How could our cab be there? We'd been told 5am for the cab, very clearly! What's it doing an hour early? That wakes you up pretty quickly. ;) We told her to tell the driver we'd be down within 10 minutes, and I think we packed and dressed and were down in seven minutes.

The front desk staff was then nice enough to explain to us that at 3am local time the time had sprung forward to 4am, leaving us, who had set our alarm on our cell phone by counting the hours carefully forward to match local time, an hour behind.

Very exciting. But even with the 10 minute delay, we made it to our plane without a problem (smaller airport than the one at home!) AND had time before that to stop at the souvenir shop to pick up one last little thing – a birthday present for our sweet Leah who is turning SIX YEARS OLD while we are on our way home today! It ended up being a nice way to get 45 minutes of extra sleep, but not one that I recommend as a regular practice!

And, because I don't know when I'll have a chance to spend the time I'd like to to post about what we saw around K's city over the week we were there, or about our day walking the streets of the capital city on the last day of our trip, I will post just a few photos here of a small dream fulfilled by surprise on this trip. (I'm writing this on the plane, knowing that all I'll want to do today when I get home is hug my little ones and go to bed!)

As an architecture student who had an undergraduate concentration in Latin and Greek/Roman ancient history/archeology, I have always wanted to go to Rome (or some other similar city) and see the ruins of the ancient Roman civilization. Imagine my surprise when Matt commented about a little tidbit in our hotel's “around the city” book mentioning Roman ruins! So, we decided to walk over there, and they're all over in the central governmental part of town! So. Neat!! As far as we can tell, some of the excavation is relatively recent, and is covered over with wood frames, plastic, and temporary (but neat and tidy) metal roofs. Some of them are in large courtyards surrounded by huge buildings. This was something I had pretty much written off my list of things to do someday, knowing that having four (soon five!) children doesn't leave you a lot of elbow room for gallivanting around Europe chasing ancient civilizations, so to have this as an accidental benefit of traveling for K was a delightful surprise.