Tour of the Apartment

I probably should have cleaned the house first, but here it is anyway....

Sirmione

Lake Garda is the largest lake in Italy. It's an hour away from our house. I was DYING to be near water again, so I planned a little trip to Sirmione, which is this touristy little peninsula into Lake Garda.

First, we stopped off at this war memorial.

It's inside of this church called Capella dei conti Treccani, which means Chapel of the Counts Treccani. A church of Counts!! So the collection of skulls (and bones, which are not featured in the photo) are those of Italian soldiers who died in the second battle for the independence at San Martino della Bataglia (the town). "The outnumbered soldiers from Piedmont had defeated Austrians in glorious battle," which essentially won the war for the Italians... helping establish an independent country. Well, hell...... I'm REALLY bad at history, so I am piecing this stuff together from different websites using babelfish-type translation.




See the head injury???









Then we headed off to Sirmione proper. Non-local car traffic is not allowed. So we walked in through the castle wall...

The houses are, in the typical old Italian city style, close together. The alleyways were a great place to walk around and imagine living in such places. The apartments had interesting doors, and it seemed each place had their own unique plaque and name:

We took a nice walk around the edge of the town, on the water. It was too bad that Mateo and I were so tired or else we would have explored a little more.
We saw this woman... now, tell me folks... does that look like a bathing suit to you? It seemed painfully clear to us that it was lace thong underwear. And, well, I shudder.

The town has random art pieces up everywhere...

I miss being near the beach..........

Promotion

Matthew was promoted to Sergeant today in a ceremony on post. He has been waiting for this promotion for awhile now, so this was a really exciting day for us.

There were a lot of people there (more than I expected!! I'm glad I brushed my hair). I, of course, did my part to spice the solemn ceremony by being the one to "promote" Mateo (otherwise it would have been his squad leader in uniform...only one other person was promoted by their wife). I ripped off the old rank and tossed it in the air behind my shoulder. Then I secured the new rank on his uniform and everyone made hoooah noises and chuckled.

The first sergeant and the company commander both said a few words about Matthew. Then Matt had the chance to speak.
He (Mateo) was really nervous to have to speak in front of people, but he came off as really eloquent, poised: thanking family, fellow soldiers, and giving the advice to others to work on their promotion now, etc.

What does the promotion mean? Well, he's now a non commissioned officer in rank, so he can strut around on post a little more. There's the pay raise, which is excellent. And, then there's that little "with increased rank comes increased responsibility" part that the commander repeated three times this morning.