Week 1 Reading寒假作业.pdf

Please read the following article about traveling, and write a summary of the passage with no more than 300 words. On Greece’s Mani Peninsula, a family reunion filled with Zorba-like life lessons All we wanted, really, was a pleasant place for a 10-day family gathering: my wife and me, her brother and his wife, and my 93-year-old mother-in-law — five people connected by blood, marriage and shared history, but usually separated by 10 time zones. What we got was much more than a reunion. Because my in-laws didn’t want to travel far from their home in Israel, we decided to gather in Greece. I pored over Web sites and found an appropriate house on the Peloponnese’s Mani Peninsula, where none of us had ever been. According to the Web page, the house was in a non-touristy village, several miles uphill from the coast, so we’d need a car to go to the beach or a restaurant, or to find an ATM. Did we really want to do that? My wife, Betty, had other concerns: Given Greece’s economic woes, what would it be like in a small village? Would basic services be disrupted? After some comforting input from the owners, we rented the house. We rendezvoused with my in-laws at the Athens airport, then drove our stick- shift rental car across the Peloponnese to Kalamata (where, yes, we ate excellent olives). From there we took a winding two-lane road south, with the Messenian Gulf to the right, the Taygetus Mountains to the left. It’s a breathtaking intro to the Mani, a hardscrabble peninsula that juts downward toward the Mediterranean like a tough, scraggly witch’s finger. An hour later, at Stoupa, a beach town awash in northern Europeans, we called Deborah, an Irishwoman who manages the rental house. Blond, wiry Deborah arrived on a three-wheeled putt-putt vehicle. She said that she’d lived in the Mani for years and had brought up her children there. Besides man