Mormon Churches and Greek Temples

Church * Paestum

7,700 Steps

We started our day with car adventure #3 - extracting the car from a parking spot where someone during the night had parked so close in front of us we were sandwiched in. We now had about 12 inches in front and 12 inches in back of our car AND we were on a San Francisco style street, about 45 degree hill, car facing downward. Eric managed to extract the car by putting a rock behind the rear tire when going in reverse. He only hit the car in front of us once (no visible damage), thank heavens for bumpers.

We attended church in Battipaglia. A branch with 4 missionaries and about 20 sisters and 5 brothers attending. It was a regional Stake Conference for all of Western Europe, so I'm guessing Stewart listened to the same meeting. Elder Christoffersen presided and speakers included Sisters Oscarson and Bishop Causse. It was a good meeting. One of the missionaries provided talk summeries to Maren and Emma after each talk. Charlie slept and Sydney read The Friend on her kindle. We met one of Catherine Frazier's former companions and enjoyed talking with her. It turns out she knows my friend Emma Russo and they did many things together when Emma was active in the church.

After church we went to Paestum, an Ancient Greek and Roman city that contains some of the best preserved Greek temples outside of Greece. In fact, some archeologists suggest that the Parthenon was patterned after one of the temples we saw. The temples date from 600 BC. When the Romans came to town a few hundred years later, they did not disturb the religious or burial sites as was their tradition. The best thing about Paestum was that it was family day and volunteers were running around dressed as Ancient Romans showing the kids things like swords, weaving, and making money. The kids even got to make their own coin. As we were leaving we saw a reenactment of Gladiators fighting in full costume. We gave Paestum a 10!

Our day ended with car adventure #4 as we spent 30 minutes looking for a parking spot in our little town fighting with all the beach traffic trying to leave town for the day. I didn't know Eric could be so adept at driving like an Italian - butting in front of other drivers, cutting off the motorcycles, hanging his hand out the window to let other cars know we were going to cut them off and move into traffic. Eventually we found a parking spot - this time with a driveway in front of us. We won't be moving our car again until we leave town!