Casteluzzo

Amsterdam Birthday

June 17, 2017June 17, 2017Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Having a party in the city carries with it some challenges. Most of them have to do with transportation. Neither we nor many of our friends have cars, which can make transporting eight rambunctious boys a bit of an adventure. That’s why as far as I’m concerned, the perfect summer party is what Raj chose last year: pizza in the park a few blocks from our house, with the Minecraft ghast piñata his mother cleverly made out of toilet paper.

But the kid is growing up, and wanted something a bit more exciting this year. To wit: laser tag! The closest place that offers laser tag is under a bridge in the centre of the city.… Read more

Amsterdam House Tour: The Kitchen

June 10, 2017June 10, 2017Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Sad, but true: this is the final post in the Amsterdam House Tour. I’ve run out of house to show you. The final room is perhaps the most important, seeing as how it revolves around food. So here you go: my kitchen!

Is that a fun, bright room, or what? I am a little in love with it. As you can see, turquoise is the name of the game. I still feel a bit assaulted by the brightness of it, but I’m pretty sure I like it.

For reference, here’s what it looked like when we moved in. So you can see that for better or for worse, we’ve definitely brought it into technicolor.… Read more

Avondvierdaagse: the Redemption

June 9, 2017June 9, 2017Sarah Bringhurst Familia

On Wednesday it was Tony’s turn to walk the Avondvierdaagse with the kids while I went to a writers’ meet up in the city. And of course the weather was perfect for him: sunny until after nine o’clock, as it is here when it isn’t pouring rain.

Last night I had a second chance myself. I thought about holing up in a café while the kids walked, but in the end I decided to give it another try. And I’m glad I did. This time the weather was much better; it was even a little too warm at first, which I didn’t mind at all.… Read more

The March of Death (aka Avondvierdaagse)

June 7, 2017June 7, 2017Sarah Bringhurst Familia

There are quite a few Dutch customs that would seem, frankly, crazy in the U.S. Some of them involve the impressively wide range of stuff Dutch kids are permitted, nay, encouraged to do (cycle several kilometres to school by themselves, take public transport all over the city, etc.) Others involve acts of defiance against the weather (the impossibly long ice skating race, Elfstedentocht, which happens only when the ice is thick enough on waterways between eleven northern cities, or the wildly popular leap into the frigid North Sea on New Year’s Day).

And then there are activities which can involve both kids and extreme weather.… Read more

Renewing Our Vows

June 4, 2017June 4, 2017Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Tony and I have been wanting to renew our wedding vows for a while. Partly because we’re just kind of romantics that way. Partly because we’ve been married for quite a while now, and been through a lot, and accomplished amazing things together. And partly because we were really uber Mormon when we got married, and now we’re, well, not.

When I found out last year that it’s a Dutch tradition to celebrate anniversary #12.5 (half of 25), I thought that would be perfect. We had it all planned out: we’d send the kids to the US to visit their grandparents, and meanwhile Tony and I would hike the West Highland Way in Scotland, and do a romantic vow renewal in some picturesque corner of the Scottish Highlands.… Read more

Things I Have Worried About While Applying for Italian Citizenship

May 26, 2017May 31, 2017Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Almost ten years ago we moved to Italy specifically for the purpose of claiming Italian citizenship for Tony via a process called jure sanguinis (by right of blood). In fact, that was the impetus for starting this blog in the first place: recording all the wacky and frustrating and occasionally miraculous things that happened along the way.

Several months, dozens of official stamps and seals, and many scoops of stress gelato later, Tony and the kids officially had their Italian citizenship recognised. And I was immediately eligible to apply for Italian citizenship myself as the wife of a bona fide Italian.… Read more

Amsterdam House Tour: The Bathroom

May 25, 2017Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Welcome back to the biggest tiny house in Amsterdam. Half baths, 3/4 baths, 1 1/2 baths, I never really got all the bathroom fractions straight, even through all our years of renting various houses with various configurations of bathroom facilities. However, I’m fairly sure that the bits of tile, porcelain, and chrome in our little house add up to somewhere in the vicinity of one whole bathroom.

You already met our tiny little powder room toilet in the Hallway. We are, in fact, lucky there’s a diminutive sink in there; many similar toilets in Amsterdam houses don’t have them.

And that’s it for toilets in our house.… Read more

A Party Boat, Opera, and the Plastic Soup

May 24, 2017Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Last fall Axa participated in an academic competition with kids from schools around Amsterdam to design an invention. Another team ended up winning according to the judges, but the audience prize went to Axa and her classmates from Denise.

Their winning idea was a “Party Boat”. The boat would be made of recycled plastic. On the boat would be a dance floor that collected kinetic energy from the dancers and converted it to power the boat. It would also somehow collect the energy generated when they sang into the microphone. Besides being fun, the boat was meant to raise awareness of the “plastic soup” clogging the world’s oceans and threatening the lives of marine creatures and the health of the planet.… Read more

My Transition from Mormonism, in Music

May 20, 2017May 20, 2017Sarah Bringhurst Familia

I haven’t written a lot on this blog about leaving the Mormon church. I’m not sure exactly why. I think at the beginning I had so many strong, raw feelings I preferred to discuss them privately. And after a while I guess it felt like there was less to talk about.

However, at the time that I left, it was really huge. It’s hard to overstate the significance of unraveling something that had been tightly woven into every aspect of your life since birth.

There were, of course, many reasons that Tony and I decided to leave the Mormon church, none of which I’ll go into here.… Read more

Amsterdam House Tour: The Dungeon

May 13, 2017May 13, 2017Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Many of the houses we looked at in Amsterdam had some kind of storage room available. Sometimes it was a detached room on a completely different floor in the building. Once it was an attic room, weirdly accessible through an illegally built ladder right next to the fireplace in the living room.

The house we ended up picking was much more normal (not). A nine square metre (100 square feet) storage room lay just under the living room, accessible (as you’ll remember) literally through a hole in the middle of the floor.

Thanks to my brilliantly designed wall and a matching bannister, it no longer looks like somewhere you’d hide a body and then put a rug on top of the trap door.… Read more

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