Marco Polo

I'm getting ready to learn more about him.  For our youth class, Vanguard Youth, I mentor the history and geography lens each month.  I love learning more about different cultures and time periods, it's so fun to see how it cycles through.  In my preparations for it, I discovered this little treasure on the internet.  In the footsteps of Marco Polo .  It's a documentary that two men from Queens, New York started back in 1993. The one man decided that he would sell his stuff so he could travel.  (Made me think about a certain friend of mine who sold most of her belongings and moved to Hungary with her family. They are certainly having an adventure.) It's about 1 1/2 hours long, but the photography is stunning, and their adventures are rather incredible.  Basically, they decided to take Marco Polo's book and follow the route he describes to see if he actually went to all the places he says he did.  There have always been people who haven't believed that he actually did what he said he did, and saw what he said he saw.  Of course, that was a while ago, I think that it's widely accepted that he did indeed do all that is spoken of in his book.  Anyway, The two guys in it are okay, they had a great adventure, but there are parts that they show that they aren't as, how should I say it, cultured as they could be, there are a couple of instances that you get the bleep over a swear word, I really wish people would just learn to speak without doing that, but..anyway, there's also a part where they are in a hotel room (that's a rather loose term for where they were staying, it's a dump!) where they don't have their shirts on.  I have to include that for any of my friends that it might matter too.  :)  Also, I missed a part of it, so not sure what happened during that, (sick baby!) but Ginga' assures me that it was just fine.  :)  One of the things I love about it, is that not only do they show many of the areas and things that Polo saw, but they show how much diversity there is in the world, but also how much people are the same.  I think it reflects very well what our history and geography class is all about.  After watching it, I'm even more excited to learn about Marco Polo and the time in which he lived!