So, the blog fell a bit to the wayside soon after our move to Kyrgyzstan. Between busy school schedules and wonderful friends and nine months of crippling morning sickness, blogging just didn’t happen. But I meant it to. I have draft after draft saved, and years of photos just gathering dust somewhere in the cloud and practically making me sneeze. But first a few months passed, then six, and then the sheer thought of trying to catch up with so many posts covering so much time, now TWO YEARS worth of time, was pretty daunting. So I’ve just kept pushing it back.
Looking back at posts from our years in Korea and the short time we actually wrote about living in Kyrgyzstan made me wish we had done a better job at recording the last couple of years. I miss the stories, the little things that we did or that I thought that I would have forgotten all about if they weren’t written somewhere. I miss the writing, the practice of connecting some neural pathways that slowly degraded over years of teaching elementary school and watching my vocabulary hopelessly devolve. I miss the purposeful place to put photos, somewhere to collect and display and comment on a percentage of the absurdly large number of photos that I have.
A lot has changed. In some ways, everything has changed. This blog started out as a place to record our travels, but it was never just that. Most of the time it wasn’t that at all. I’m not a very good niche writer, we don’t travel enough to sustain regular posts about travel, and even though we were living abroad, our day-to-day lives weren’t always so much about traveling around that place as living in it. So the blog became much more about our lives, about traveling, but also teaching, running or yoga-ing, caring for a doggy, and now, parenting. The name, after all, is In Some Places. We’ve been writing here about doing all those things in some places for years.
We are still doing all those things. We’re just doing them from the US. For now.
This is all to say that posts to come will be about what’s happening right now, what’s happened over the last few years, and a little bit about what will happen. Organizationally, that drives me bonkers. Shouldn’t blogging be chronological? But oh well. I’ve got to brush off the dust and start somewhere.
After wandering the Forum, we showed up to a reserved tour of the Coliseum. We reserved through 
Every afternoon we found our way to a glass of wine and some bruschetta. Cafes lined the streets with outdoor seating, near fires or heat lamps to keep warm. If you found just the right seat in the sun, or near a fire, you could stay pleasantly warm for hours just sitting back and watching people pass.
In the evening we climbed the dome at St. Peter’s Basilica, a winding, small path leading up up up. We emerged at the base of the dome and walked around the edge. Although I’m not particularly afraid of heights, the arched ceiling leading right behind me left me feeling like I was being pushed forward, and I stayed back against the wall and far away from the fence with sweaty hands. After leaving the dome another set of stairs leads all the way to the top, the ceiling slanting inward as you climb ever higher to accommodate the shape of the dome. At the top, the golden light of sunset lit up the city.
Our days in Rome were mostly filled with wandering and eating delicious food. The weather was a little chilly but perfect for feeling like Christmastime. Many times we felt like the only tourists in the city, something that I’d imagine rarely happens in Rome. I think this is why I loved it so much when so many others pick on the city.