Medieval Sighisoara and the House where Vlad the Impaler was Born #Im4Ro

medieval Sighisoara, House where Vlas the Impaler was born

What turns a house into a home? Is it the light that peeks inside through its windows? The scents rising from the kitchen? Or is it the people, the mingle of generations, of shared laughter and tears?
While we visited the house where Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Tepes, was born, I asked myself: what was the light like inside? What street noises reached every morning to little Vlad’s room and woke him up? What childhood memories he kept locked in his heart that reminded him of his mother and home – while imprisoned by the Turks? Or when he was fighting them, surrounded by the sights and the stench of war?

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Looking at Skulls in the Catacombs of Paris

Looking at Skulls in Paris Catacombes

I guess I am one of the very few for which looking at skulls in the Catacombs of Paris means a great holiday – yet I do know that my daughter and my favorite author, Kathy Reichs, fall in the same category. Bones are the very last of our earthly traces and a proof of the existence of life itself. Bones symbolize that life is indestructible and they symbolize resurrection too (in Jewish tradition). Yet bones constantly remind us of our own mortality and of our feeble presence in this world.

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