Over Spring Break, my family and I are going to France. We are going to fly to Toronto in Canada from LAX, the first Tuesday of the break. From there we will go to Quebec, and then to Paris. While we're in Paris, we will see the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, the Catacombs, Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur and many other sights. We are even going to take a drive out to Normandy, and also take the train to some other sights in the countryside.

We will fly back at the end of Spring Break. Also, the first Saturday of Spring Break, I am meeting with the rest of the Science Bowl team to prepare for the national competition. We are going to work from 8 am to 4 pm, and I'm looking forward to it. 

If I had a choice, I would like to meet Da Vinci. My reasons are that he is much more of a Renaissance man than Michelangelo. While Michelangelo is extraordinarily talented, and there are few people that can reproduce his works, Da Vinci was a scientist of many fields, not the least of which were anatomy, astronomy, physics, architecture, and cartography. He also was an extremely skilled painter and created the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. Da Vinci was also an ingenious inventor, and drew designs for a tank, car, parachute, helicopter, telescope, and many other things.

Da Vinci also had mountains of notebooks, all written in mirror script. He no doubt had many other hidden notebooks with even more ideas that could revolutionize some fields of study, even today. Da Vinci is considered the true genius of the Renaissance by many experts, and I agree with them.

My favorite subject from the Middle Ages is the feudalism system. In the feudalism system, there were many promises and debts that governed relations between everyone. The church was on the top of the feudalism hierarchy, after that came the king, then nobles, then vassals, then artisans, and then peasants and serfs, at the bottom. This in itself does not make feudalism particularly more interesting than other events in the Middle Ages, but the fact that a similar government was prominent in feudal Japan. 

Samurai took the place of knights, or vassals, and daimyos took the place of land owning lords. There was also a lower class of rice farmers that existed in the serfs place, although they weren't quite as bound to their land. This similarity between two separated cultures is what made feudalism the most interesting topic of the Middle Ages; to me, of course.