Saturday July 6, 1986

In my journal, I have the entry as follows. It is a very personaly entry and I have no idea what everyone else was doing -- probably playing Thumper at Ponte Vecchio.

Here is what I wrote: "today after breakfast I took a long walk with Annie (France). We went up into the mountains. It rained on us all day. The area looked very poor but was very beautiful. I will remember these walks well. Annie is from a mountainous area in France and so knew a lot of things. She found a source for us to drink from. It was just a trickle of water along a rocky wall. There was a bit of a dip in the stones, as if this was used as a drinking area or well. She said that it was safe. We went along a path which led under a house. The stables with very smelly animals were on the ground level and the house was on top the stables.
The house was on both sides of the road. There was an archway through the house so that you could continue up the path. The road was very rough and full of large stones. I wonder how they get around? It must be only by foot.

Later that day, it was still raining so we played card games with Richard (Turkey), Alain (France) and Annie. Richard taught us a Turkish card game where you had to yell when you put your card down. It was very funny. We played war and then 21. I tried to say 21 in French and they all laughed at my pitiful accent. We played ping-pong for a while and the storm got worse. We kept having black-outs. It did not bother us. We just stayed where we were and played again when the lights came back on. We just sat around laughed and talked about what life was like back home. It was a wonderful night. "

Now that I have lived in Austria for a while, I know that having the stable under the house was a very common practice. But then it was really something new for me. I was very lucky to have found Annie as a friend. She like to hike and she knew her was around the mountains.