The Earth hour and about Italy

Hello again.

So the Earth hour was last Saturday. I'd like to talk about that for a bit.
So as you know, the Earth hour is a thing organised by WWF where everyone in the world (doesn't) turns off all their lights for an hour, from 20:30 to 21:30. Local time, that is. So that one timezone at a time goes dark. Or at least darker. It's always on a Saturday in the end of March. The last one, I guess. The point for people is to show their commitment to the planet by going dark for an hour.
According to Wikipedia (because I somehow couldn't find much on their own page) the whole thing started in 2007 as a lights-off event in Sydney, and then kinda spiralled on from there, so that now it's a world-wide thing every year. The idea originally came already in 2004, but it took a while to convince the mayor and stuff.
In October 2007 also San Francisco did a lights out thing inspired by the Sydney's happening in March. In 2008 there were already 35 countries participating. There were also some monuments participating, like the Sydney Opera House and the Empire State Building, and a bunch of other ones from Canada to Malaysia. Also for example Google's homepage went "dark" on the day of Earth Hour, meaning black instead of white.
In 2009 there were 96 countries on 6 continents participating, along with a bunch of tv and radio stations. In 2010 it was 126, and it's gotten bigger every year.
This year over 170 countries and territories had confirmed their participation by Friday. This means more than 1200 landmarks and close to 40 UNESCO world heritage sites set for the switch off. I don't know how many of them actually did and who else did, because I cant find this year's stuff yet (on Sunday, I'm too tired to do anything else right now, so I figured I'll write now, and do something useful on Tuesday instead of spending time on this).
There's also a good amount of criticism towards Earth Hour, mostly about how it doesn't actually make any kind of difference, because it's just an hour, and because then people feel good about not having had the lights on for an hour and don't actually change their behaviour, because, you know, they've done their part by switching the lights off for an hour. Or not. Also people are saying the Earth hour makes using electricity seem evil, even though it's one of the biggest reason for, well, modern everything from refrigerators (meaning unspoiled food) to proper hospital facilities (meaning modern, very good health care, meaning not dying). So we shouldn't see using electricity as a bad thing. And I guess those people are right, but still. People could easily survive using less electricity, even if a lot of it is required for making the world a little safer for every one.
Anyway. I think it's a pretty cool thing.

Ok, then about the other thing on the title.

You remember when I was doing the application for next summer's Explorer belt, but didn't get to go.
On Saturday morning I got a phone call from the leader of the EB asking what I'm doing next summer. Someone had cancelled and they were offering me their place. So now I'm going to go to Italy for a month next summer.
So....
That's not only going to make writing a bit of a story twice a week practically impossible, it's going to make writing anything at all on the blog here very difficult. Because for the first ten days (as far as I've understood, they haven't actually told be anything about it yet) I will be without any electrical devices, and even after that I don't know if I'll have access to the internet.
But maybe we could figure something out, like someone else would write the bits when I'm gone, or we'll jsut stop writing for a month, or something. I don't know. If we want to do that, that is.
I'm still a little (a lot) confused about this, because it kind of came completely out of the blue and yeah.
I have no idea what is going on.

I'm just gonna stop here.
I'll hear from you on Friday.

~matu