I started at 6am and was out the door of the room for checkout by 7:30. Checkout was quick and a cab already happened to be waiting at the hotel so I got an instant ride to the airport. I think I was there by about 8. Inside I thought I was supposed to check in with Delta and after waiting 25 minutes in their line I was told there was another desk for KLM and because my flight was to Amsterdam I had to check in with them. I was brought over to their desk where there was no one working for another 25 minutes and then had to wait while I was line cut by 2 families for another half an hour. I had already done the kiosk checkin and just needed to drop off my bag. When I spoke to the woman at the desk she told me they weren't sure if the flight would get out on time or if it would even get out at all. They had canceled an 8:25 flight. They wouldn't know until the plane left Amsterdam. I asked what I should do and she said just go inside and sort it out if it doesn't come.
Inside I then had to wait until 45 minutes before the flight to find out the gate. I got down to the gate instantly and then the check in to the plane took an extra 25 minutes even though the plane and crew were ready because they didn't have a bus to drive us to the remote location for boarding. This meant that when we got to Schipol I had to run across the airport, checking through passport control to basically get in line to be one of the last to board the plane. In so doing I fully expected to not have overhead room to put my backpack but fortunately it wasn't a full flight and I did indeed have the space. I was ready for an argument as I was not going to let them check my bag with 2 laptops in it.
We managed to get out of the airport on time. The flight was 7 hours or so. I watched Despicable Me again, followed by a British movie called The Damned United about the 1974 Leeds United football club. It was interesting and had a bunch of Brit actors I've seen before. Not a lot of soccer footage, it was more about the manager of the team than a pure sports film. After that I watched Avatar because I knew it was long enough to fill up the majority of the rest of the flight. By the time it was over they were announcing the half hour till landing. We managed to get into the airport about a half an hour early. From there passport and customs were easy because I guess a lot of flights from Europe have been canceled over the past couple days.
In all it was a successful trip. The Hologic Europe employees were very nice and extremely helpful. My students were all attentive and interested in learning, even the ones that had a lot more experience on the system. It was probably the easiest it could have been for the first time teaching the class in a different location. Hopefully it will turn out the same in Hong Kong in March.
As a parting gift I provide this explanation of Belgium given to me by one of my Belgian students. Beware it has a couple of swear words in it.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Belgium for Business Day 15
My last day in Belgium turned out to be really cold. Below freezing the whole day actually. I had decided the night before I wasn't into taking long train rides out of country because it would be more than I probably wanted and so had opted for Antwerp as the sight for the day. I got up early but I knew that things don't open before 10 so I took my time having breakfast and getting ready. I had to buy a round trip ticket so I left a bit before the expected 8:38 departure to Brussels-Noord. The train rides to Antwerp are basically the same as I was taking for Vilvoorde only longer so I knew which tracks to take before I was on my way.
I arrived in Antwerpen (as the Centraal Station sign says) about 9:30am. Still a bit early but the town was waking up. Basically if you walk west from the train you will enter all the prominent areas of the city. It is a jewelers' town with a diamond museum I didn't go to as well as a lot of jewelry and diamond sellers near or in the train station. The main route towards the city center and cathedral is pretty much all shops and restaurants. I made it to the cathedral in short order but didn't feel like paying 5 Euros for the visit. It was fairly large but not quite as spectacular as anything I had just seen in Rome. Granted it was frikken freezing out but I figured my best bet was to stay outside and get use to the temperature. I had layered 5 layers and I am not sure that was enough.
I walked further on and saw the city hall which appeared to be close and the gross markt which is the main square that had a few Christmas festival booths opening as it was getting past 10 now. A bit further on and I had reached the river and the waterfront. I walked along that and found the Maritime Museum which appeared to have been an old castle. You could walk around outside it but unfortunately it was closed until May. Near the museum was a bit more of the festival. Some booths were open but a lot still weren't. I walked along the river for some distance then turned back into the city and followed some of the shopping streets around and basically just wandered for a while until I decided I was hungry enough for lunch.
I stopped at an Italian restaurant named Da Giovanni which was huge. It had an upstairs and downstairs on both sides of the street where it was. I had a pizza Bolognese, which is with a meat sauce on it and a De Koenink beer. The pizza was too much to eat so I left the equivalent of one slice behind. It was messy with the meat sauce on it so I ended up eating most of it with knife and fork though I really wanted to be messy about it. I should have just gotten the margherita which is our cheese pizza. Then I could have shocked them with eating it as a finger food. They served some bread and olives as an accompaniment and they weren't even that bad. I finished with an espresso and then walked on.
I was trying to find the local toy store to help a friend find something but was not having an easy time of it. By accident I ran into Danny who is the head of the service group in the Hologic Belgium office. I chatted with him and his wife for a couple minutes and they pointed me on to the toy store, but I had no luck finding what I was looking for. By then it was about 2 o'clock and I was near the train station so I decided it was time to return to the hotel. It was still freezing out and I had to start to pack.
The train rides were painless though I just missed the best exchange train back to the hotel by a minute or so and had to wait an extra 15. At the hotel I started packing then relaxed for a bit. I had gotten there at about 3:30pm or so. After my rest I left for downtown to find dinner at about 6:15 or so. The walk was quick to the center and I wandered around for a couple minutes to find some last minute souvenirs and then decided I wanted to try a restaurant named Falstaff. Unfortunately it was full and people in Belgium do not get on a waiting list so I had to move on. I ended up at Restaurant Olympe which was a Greek place not too far away. It had a fair number of people eating but was not completely full.
I ordered a red wine and the mountain lamb which turned out to be a roasted lamb shank in a brownish sauce that I couldn't place for type. The lamb was good and fairly tender. The fries perhaps needed a new change of oil but weren't really bad. Just about when I was done eating they shut out the lights and two of the girls there did a couple traditional style Greek dances to music blared over the sound system. It was kind of fun. One of the waiters broke few dishes and then handed more out to the patrons near the fireplace and they broke theirs as well. I wasn't expecting it. The girls were probably in their teens and related to the restaurant owners I am sure. That is the way it usually works. As a point I should mention the Italian and Greek restaurants seem to be owned and run by their appropriate citizens rather than some external nationality, so that is nice. When I got the check they gave me an aperitif which I assume was a Metaxa on the house.
On the way out I did some more quick shopping then headed towards the square. It had started snowing again, if only lightly. The square had more than the typical lights on the city hall this time. There was a woman singing opera with some kids in costume dancing around her. I could barely see because I am not that tall and the crowd was fairly thick. I couldn't get my camera up and ready with an actual view before the show was over unfortunately. It was interesting. She looked oddly made up from what I could see. It sounded like she was signing in Italian. It must have been going on while I was eating. It finished within minutes of me getting there.
At that point I was done for the day I was sure and headed back to the hotel to finish the bulk of the packing and get some sleep before the transit on Sunday.
The pictures from day 15 are located here.
I arrived in Antwerpen (as the Centraal Station sign says) about 9:30am. Still a bit early but the town was waking up. Basically if you walk west from the train you will enter all the prominent areas of the city. It is a jewelers' town with a diamond museum I didn't go to as well as a lot of jewelry and diamond sellers near or in the train station. The main route towards the city center and cathedral is pretty much all shops and restaurants. I made it to the cathedral in short order but didn't feel like paying 5 Euros for the visit. It was fairly large but not quite as spectacular as anything I had just seen in Rome. Granted it was frikken freezing out but I figured my best bet was to stay outside and get use to the temperature. I had layered 5 layers and I am not sure that was enough.
I walked further on and saw the city hall which appeared to be close and the gross markt which is the main square that had a few Christmas festival booths opening as it was getting past 10 now. A bit further on and I had reached the river and the waterfront. I walked along that and found the Maritime Museum which appeared to have been an old castle. You could walk around outside it but unfortunately it was closed until May. Near the museum was a bit more of the festival. Some booths were open but a lot still weren't. I walked along the river for some distance then turned back into the city and followed some of the shopping streets around and basically just wandered for a while until I decided I was hungry enough for lunch.
I stopped at an Italian restaurant named Da Giovanni which was huge. It had an upstairs and downstairs on both sides of the street where it was. I had a pizza Bolognese, which is with a meat sauce on it and a De Koenink beer. The pizza was too much to eat so I left the equivalent of one slice behind. It was messy with the meat sauce on it so I ended up eating most of it with knife and fork though I really wanted to be messy about it. I should have just gotten the margherita which is our cheese pizza. Then I could have shocked them with eating it as a finger food. They served some bread and olives as an accompaniment and they weren't even that bad. I finished with an espresso and then walked on.
I was trying to find the local toy store to help a friend find something but was not having an easy time of it. By accident I ran into Danny who is the head of the service group in the Hologic Belgium office. I chatted with him and his wife for a couple minutes and they pointed me on to the toy store, but I had no luck finding what I was looking for. By then it was about 2 o'clock and I was near the train station so I decided it was time to return to the hotel. It was still freezing out and I had to start to pack.
The train rides were painless though I just missed the best exchange train back to the hotel by a minute or so and had to wait an extra 15. At the hotel I started packing then relaxed for a bit. I had gotten there at about 3:30pm or so. After my rest I left for downtown to find dinner at about 6:15 or so. The walk was quick to the center and I wandered around for a couple minutes to find some last minute souvenirs and then decided I wanted to try a restaurant named Falstaff. Unfortunately it was full and people in Belgium do not get on a waiting list so I had to move on. I ended up at Restaurant Olympe which was a Greek place not too far away. It had a fair number of people eating but was not completely full.
I ordered a red wine and the mountain lamb which turned out to be a roasted lamb shank in a brownish sauce that I couldn't place for type. The lamb was good and fairly tender. The fries perhaps needed a new change of oil but weren't really bad. Just about when I was done eating they shut out the lights and two of the girls there did a couple traditional style Greek dances to music blared over the sound system. It was kind of fun. One of the waiters broke few dishes and then handed more out to the patrons near the fireplace and they broke theirs as well. I wasn't expecting it. The girls were probably in their teens and related to the restaurant owners I am sure. That is the way it usually works. As a point I should mention the Italian and Greek restaurants seem to be owned and run by their appropriate citizens rather than some external nationality, so that is nice. When I got the check they gave me an aperitif which I assume was a Metaxa on the house.
On the way out I did some more quick shopping then headed towards the square. It had started snowing again, if only lightly. The square had more than the typical lights on the city hall this time. There was a woman singing opera with some kids in costume dancing around her. I could barely see because I am not that tall and the crowd was fairly thick. I couldn't get my camera up and ready with an actual view before the show was over unfortunately. It was interesting. She looked oddly made up from what I could see. It sounded like she was signing in Italian. It must have been going on while I was eating. It finished within minutes of me getting there.
At that point I was done for the day I was sure and headed back to the hotel to finish the bulk of the packing and get some sleep before the transit on Sunday.
The pictures from day 15 are located here.
Belgium for Business Day 14
Last day of class started a bit rough with it snowing out and the trains being delayed a few minutes. Still I was able to get in about 10 minutes later than normal and before my students arrived anyway. The last day involves the test and they all passed but due to the weather and traffic we started later than I would have wanted to (most of my students were late arriving with taxi problems). We did manage to finish up during lunchtime and some of them had to leave right away to pack and catch planes in the evening. At least not long after we started the test the weather cleared up, if it stayed very cold.
After the students were on their way I finished up my paperwork and cleaned up the equipment we used, making sure things were there and in their right place. Unfortunately the weather caused most of tech support out here to work from home today so there were few goodbyes when I left the office at about 3pm. I managed to catch a train back to the hotel rather easily and relaxed and kept up on email for a couple hours until it was getting closer to dinner time.
At about 5pm I started on my way to downtown to do some souvenir shopping and eat dinner. I wandered around central Brussels for an hour or so then decided to eat at La Rose Blanche right on the main square. I had a vegetable soup, cherry and beer braised duck and a Grimbergen Brun. After the meal I had a dame blanche and a coffee. The dame blanche was interesting because I had to pour the chocolate sauce on myself.
After eating I walked around for a very few minutes doing some more souvenir shopping but with it getting to reasonably below freezing by that point I opted to go back to the room not long after. At the room I watched a semi-amateur heavy-weight boxing tournament until it was time for bed. Semi-amateur because there was no headgear and there were only 3 rounds per match. I think there were 8 boxers involved. Being heavy-weights it was awkward and clumsy.
I took a couple pictures today and they are posted here.
After the students were on their way I finished up my paperwork and cleaned up the equipment we used, making sure things were there and in their right place. Unfortunately the weather caused most of tech support out here to work from home today so there were few goodbyes when I left the office at about 3pm. I managed to catch a train back to the hotel rather easily and relaxed and kept up on email for a couple hours until it was getting closer to dinner time.
At about 5pm I started on my way to downtown to do some souvenir shopping and eat dinner. I wandered around central Brussels for an hour or so then decided to eat at La Rose Blanche right on the main square. I had a vegetable soup, cherry and beer braised duck and a Grimbergen Brun. After the meal I had a dame blanche and a coffee. The dame blanche was interesting because I had to pour the chocolate sauce on myself.
After eating I walked around for a very few minutes doing some more souvenir shopping but with it getting to reasonably below freezing by that point I opted to go back to the room not long after. At the room I watched a semi-amateur heavy-weight boxing tournament until it was time for bed. Semi-amateur because there was no headgear and there were only 3 rounds per match. I think there were 8 boxers involved. Being heavy-weights it was awkward and clumsy.
I took a couple pictures today and they are posted here.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Belgium for Business Day 13
I was able to get moving and to class quite easily. There was a light rain as I walked from the train station to the office but it wasn't much and it was a bit warmer than the previous few days so I didn't feel that it was that unpleasant a walk.
The class was in break/fix day where I break things and they fix them. They managed to get to 7 breaks fixed which is really good. Most of the time I get 5. Maybe because I only had 2 systems here versus 4 at home they were able to collaborate more. In any event, I thought the day went well.
After class I was invited to the Christmas dinner for Hologic Belgium. The Chairman of the Board for our company comes out here each year and takes the office out to dinner. I got a ride from Joris. We were taken to a fondue restaurant that was not really near anything. The food was good. I didn't take any pictures for the crowd. The restaurant was not prepared for a nearly 60 person party. We maybe managed to get 1 to 2 drinks apiece so no one appeared to get drunk.
After the dinner I got a ride near to Brussels and took a cab the rest of the way in. By the time I walked in the door it was nearly midnight. I was fairly tired. All I could really do was gloss over emails and get to bed. Again I had no pictures today.
The class was in break/fix day where I break things and they fix them. They managed to get to 7 breaks fixed which is really good. Most of the time I get 5. Maybe because I only had 2 systems here versus 4 at home they were able to collaborate more. In any event, I thought the day went well.
After class I was invited to the Christmas dinner for Hologic Belgium. The Chairman of the Board for our company comes out here each year and takes the office out to dinner. I got a ride from Joris. We were taken to a fondue restaurant that was not really near anything. The food was good. I didn't take any pictures for the crowd. The restaurant was not prepared for a nearly 60 person party. We maybe managed to get 1 to 2 drinks apiece so no one appeared to get drunk.
After the dinner I got a ride near to Brussels and took a cab the rest of the way in. By the time I walked in the door it was nearly midnight. I was fairly tired. All I could really do was gloss over emails and get to bed. Again I had no pictures today.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Belgium for Business Day 12
I managed to get out the door on time with a bit of late start and walked from the train station to the office in a small amount of flurries which started just before I got off the train and ended maybe 10 minutes after I arrived at work. Ah well, at least it wasn't rain.
Work itself was the last day of lecture and the students will be tested on the systems and in the classroom over the next two days. I think things went well enough. After the class was over we went with Patrick for the class dinner at a Chinese (Chinees on the sign) buffet. The food was good but I am not a fan of buffets so much. I ate enough and had two Jupiler beers which were very much like Bud back home. Patrick was good enough to drive me back to my hotel. I guess he is close enough to home that it is not too far out of his way to drop me off.
I got back in and had a Grimbergen and then went to bed about an hour after I normally do. I have no pictures for day 12 as I didn't bring the camera to the class dinner.
Work itself was the last day of lecture and the students will be tested on the systems and in the classroom over the next two days. I think things went well enough. After the class was over we went with Patrick for the class dinner at a Chinese (Chinees on the sign) buffet. The food was good but I am not a fan of buffets so much. I ate enough and had two Jupiler beers which were very much like Bud back home. Patrick was good enough to drive me back to my hotel. I guess he is close enough to home that it is not too far out of his way to drop me off.
I got back in and had a Grimbergen and then went to bed about an hour after I normally do. I have no pictures for day 12 as I didn't bring the camera to the class dinner.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Belgium for Business Day 11
Again with an early start I made it to the office before my students. I managed to get no delays on my way in which is rare. I am not sure if I have mentioned the penchant for the trains in Belgium to be late. I had assumed this would be more of an Italian or maybe Spanish thing or something but it is definitely something that happens a lot. If you are waiting for an incoming train there is even a big red section that shows how many minutes late it is on the LCD boards that describe what the next train at the platform is going to be. I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. It is an admission that the train is going to be late and deal with it. But I suspect a lot countries would never do such a thing at all and just keep the riders guessing. Either way today was one of the rare chances you get when the two trains you ride are both on time and your train journey is as short as it can be. It gave me a few extra minutes to prepare for class.
Class was still a bit abstracted as my typical agenda back home has a half day for someone from applications to teach something. I didn't have that luxury here and it meant I had to fill in a half a day with material I don't typically have. I had an idea and I think I got it across but it was definitely not polished and it was filled with a couple mistakes that I wouldn't have made if I taught the material more regularly. Ah well, I will have to write things up for my next class out here to use that time.
After class I just headed back to the hotel room and cooked yet again. My burger package had 2 in it and I had eaten one yesterday so today was the day to have the second. Not to be a total repeat of the day before I had an instant rice packet to go along. It was reasonable rice. I got the brown variety figuring it might have more flavor and nutritions. Probably it did have more flavor if only by a little anyway. I finished off what was left of the bottle of wine as well, which wasn't a lot. After dinner I settled in to watch a couple stand up comedy videos and then sleep for the night.
The picture of tonight's dinner (don't get it confused with last night's) can be found here.
Class was still a bit abstracted as my typical agenda back home has a half day for someone from applications to teach something. I didn't have that luxury here and it meant I had to fill in a half a day with material I don't typically have. I had an idea and I think I got it across but it was definitely not polished and it was filled with a couple mistakes that I wouldn't have made if I taught the material more regularly. Ah well, I will have to write things up for my next class out here to use that time.
After class I just headed back to the hotel room and cooked yet again. My burger package had 2 in it and I had eaten one yesterday so today was the day to have the second. Not to be a total repeat of the day before I had an instant rice packet to go along. It was reasonable rice. I got the brown variety figuring it might have more flavor and nutritions. Probably it did have more flavor if only by a little anyway. I finished off what was left of the bottle of wine as well, which wasn't a lot. After dinner I settled in to watch a couple stand up comedy videos and then sleep for the night.
The picture of tonight's dinner (don't get it confused with last night's) can be found here.
Belgium for Business Day 10
With an early start and for the first time no line at the counter for tickets I was able to purchase a 10 ride pass on the train which should help me from having to wait for people who are usually doing things that take over 10 minutes each time I want to take a ride on the train. It is nice that it was also cheaper than the full price for 10 one way rides to Vilvoorde and back.
One of the cabs was late in bringing in half my class but not by too much. We managed to get through the day with a bit of adjustment to what I normally teach due to the differences in equipment I have here. Unfortunately this day is usually a lot of information but I think they survived.
After class I just headed straight back to the hotel and cooked dinner hastily. I had a burger on toast and spread some of the arrabiata sauce on it. I had some chips on the side and a Grimbergen Dubbel. While I was cooking and eating I started some laundry in the bathtub and hung it up to dry after I was finished with the food.
The picture of my dinner is located here.
One of the cabs was late in bringing in half my class but not by too much. We managed to get through the day with a bit of adjustment to what I normally teach due to the differences in equipment I have here. Unfortunately this day is usually a lot of information but I think they survived.
After class I just headed straight back to the hotel and cooked dinner hastily. I had a burger on toast and spread some of the arrabiata sauce on it. I had some chips on the side and a Grimbergen Dubbel. While I was cooking and eating I started some laundry in the bathtub and hung it up to dry after I was finished with the food.
The picture of my dinner is located here.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Belgium for Business Day 9
My hastily drawn up plan from the night before was to take the train to the city of Brugge (Bruges, depends on which language you speak). While one of the US employees was in the office last week he said there was an ice carving exhibit that was very good in Brugge. It sounded like a good idea to me and a quick glance at Bruges as a tourist destination didn't seem like a bad idea. So I packed up my camera bag and headed to the train station for an 8:38 departure from Brussels-Luxembourg. That train was on time, however the second train, the intercity train to Brugge was about 15 minutes late arriving and turned out to be about 25 minutes late for our destination in Bruges. From hotel to Brugge took about an hour and forty-five minutes and cost 9.50 Euros for the round trip ticket.
I got there at about 10:20 and that was ok because things were just beginning to open up. The Ice & Snow Festival, as the exhibit was called, was just outside the train station and was just beginning to line up people. I had to buy a ticket at an office and then could enter the exhibit. The lines were still relatively short and the wait wasn't terribly long to get inside though not long after the lines were piling up through the multiple switchbacks they had to contain everyone. I am glad I got in that early. Inside the exhibit was -6C to keep the carvings from melting. I did not bring a winter jacket with me to Belgium and standing through the slow moving lines without being able to keep my typical brisk pace made it all the more obvious how cold it was. I kept my gloves on while I operated the camera, which I normally do not do. There were supposed to be 30 major carvings. I didn't really count but there were certainly quite a few. They ranged in quality from reasonable to really good. I know I could not do better than the worst one there but still, some were not up to the same standards as the best. I think it took about an hour and ten minutes or so to get the ticket, wait through the lines and see the entire exhibit. It cost 11 Euros to get in. The ticket included a mirror hall somewhere but I don't think it was open. In any event I was in for the ice and not the mirrors. I will say that it being about 2C when I got outside felt like summer. I should also point out that they had an ice bar at the end of the exhibit by I skipped on that.
After the exhibit I tried to find my way into town. Brugge is a canal city. The canal is carved in a spiral like circle that goes around the center. Not long into getting inside I found a restaurant called t. Walnuntje. I assume it means The Walnut but what do I know? I saw the sign said pizza but when I saw the menu I realized I wasn't going to have pizza. I had a set menu of a cheese croquet and beef stew with fries. Both were very good. The stew was not served in a bowl and the fries got soaked in the brown sauce. I accompanied that with a Brugse Zot Blonde beer which was the best yellow beer I have had here to point. The set menu also came with a vanilla pudding which was nice. The place was small but I liked it a lot. The stairs to the bathroom upstairs were a bit treacherous, especially on the way down where the steps had room for less than half my foot it felt.
After lunch it was my basic march around town with no basic rhyme or reason. I just started off towards the center and wandered around a lot to see what I could see. In all I spent another 3 hours and more just moving around the city and hitting souvenir shops and I bought a waffle in a concession booth in the center of the town. It was not really anything to write home about but I figured I should do the waffle thing at least once in Belgium. Overall I really liked Bruges. I had a couple small spats of rain that hit at various times during the trek and I got lost a bit once but really it was a matter of orientation rather than anything severe. As I said, the city is a circle and it was easy to find my way back.
I got to the train station a little after 4 and it was already starting to get dark. I was able to take a 4:35 train back to Brussels-Central. The train was pretty much full the whole way. When I got out I had intentions of getting something to eat but I really didn't feel like doing the walk down restaurant row, nor did I want fast food, so I chose to just head back towards the hotel and hope the market was open this time. Fortunately it was and a bought a couple sundries to supplement what I already had in the room. I got back and cooked pasta with arrabiata sauce and had a piece of bread and some of the wine from the night before to round it out. After dinner I watched another video and then prepared to get some sleep to be prepared for class the following day.
The pictures from day 9 are located here.
I got there at about 10:20 and that was ok because things were just beginning to open up. The Ice & Snow Festival, as the exhibit was called, was just outside the train station and was just beginning to line up people. I had to buy a ticket at an office and then could enter the exhibit. The lines were still relatively short and the wait wasn't terribly long to get inside though not long after the lines were piling up through the multiple switchbacks they had to contain everyone. I am glad I got in that early. Inside the exhibit was -6C to keep the carvings from melting. I did not bring a winter jacket with me to Belgium and standing through the slow moving lines without being able to keep my typical brisk pace made it all the more obvious how cold it was. I kept my gloves on while I operated the camera, which I normally do not do. There were supposed to be 30 major carvings. I didn't really count but there were certainly quite a few. They ranged in quality from reasonable to really good. I know I could not do better than the worst one there but still, some were not up to the same standards as the best. I think it took about an hour and ten minutes or so to get the ticket, wait through the lines and see the entire exhibit. It cost 11 Euros to get in. The ticket included a mirror hall somewhere but I don't think it was open. In any event I was in for the ice and not the mirrors. I will say that it being about 2C when I got outside felt like summer. I should also point out that they had an ice bar at the end of the exhibit by I skipped on that.
After the exhibit I tried to find my way into town. Brugge is a canal city. The canal is carved in a spiral like circle that goes around the center. Not long into getting inside I found a restaurant called t. Walnuntje. I assume it means The Walnut but what do I know? I saw the sign said pizza but when I saw the menu I realized I wasn't going to have pizza. I had a set menu of a cheese croquet and beef stew with fries. Both were very good. The stew was not served in a bowl and the fries got soaked in the brown sauce. I accompanied that with a Brugse Zot Blonde beer which was the best yellow beer I have had here to point. The set menu also came with a vanilla pudding which was nice. The place was small but I liked it a lot. The stairs to the bathroom upstairs were a bit treacherous, especially on the way down where the steps had room for less than half my foot it felt.
After lunch it was my basic march around town with no basic rhyme or reason. I just started off towards the center and wandered around a lot to see what I could see. In all I spent another 3 hours and more just moving around the city and hitting souvenir shops and I bought a waffle in a concession booth in the center of the town. It was not really anything to write home about but I figured I should do the waffle thing at least once in Belgium. Overall I really liked Bruges. I had a couple small spats of rain that hit at various times during the trek and I got lost a bit once but really it was a matter of orientation rather than anything severe. As I said, the city is a circle and it was easy to find my way back.
I got to the train station a little after 4 and it was already starting to get dark. I was able to take a 4:35 train back to Brussels-Central. The train was pretty much full the whole way. When I got out I had intentions of getting something to eat but I really didn't feel like doing the walk down restaurant row, nor did I want fast food, so I chose to just head back towards the hotel and hope the market was open this time. Fortunately it was and a bought a couple sundries to supplement what I already had in the room. I got back and cooked pasta with arrabiata sauce and had a piece of bread and some of the wine from the night before to round it out. After dinner I watched another video and then prepared to get some sleep to be prepared for class the following day.
The pictures from day 9 are located here.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Belgium for Business Day 8
Being the first of the two free weekend days I thought my best bet was to tour around Brussels and see what there is to see for the day. I woke up early but left at 8:30 (which is still early because I was fairly certain nothing would be open until 10 and I was basically right) but I wanted to scout if there was a better way to walk to the center of of the city. I tried what I thought might be the path to take but it definitely was not better than my method I had already been using. It took longer to get there and I definitely was not fond of the regions it was putting me in when it comes to safety. In all I still was in the center of town before 9:30 and while a few places were open, most everything was shut down for the day.
I walked around the center and spun around in circles a few times to make sure that there was nothing that I was really missing in the region. I found a lot more shops amongst a large tangle of streets. Brussels was not designed but formed out of horse paths much like Boston or London. That much is obvious.While it was nice to look around I think I can feel safe that most of the touristy stuff I needed to do in the center of town I have managed to do at this point. It is not a very big city after all.
After a while I decided I needed to get to the Atomium which is in the northern suburbs of the city. I thought I could take a train like I had been taking to get to Vilvoorde and back but I was wrong. I had decided I would walk up to Brussls-Noord (North Station) and I would take the train from there. This turned out to be fairly well a mistake. I instead had to take the Metro back down one stop to Rogier and from there I took the blue 6 line all the way out to Heizl where the Atomium is. The ride on the blue line was over a dozen stops to get to where I needed to go. I am sure there is a more efficient way to get there but the Metro signboards and maps made very little sense to me. I figured if I was on a train that was going where I needed to I better not try to jump off until I got there. With that I arrived a bit after noon in the region and it is a short 3-5 minute walk to the actual Atomium. It was opened in 1958 if I understood the literature correctly. It cost 11 Euros to get in as an adult. There are several globes on the structure as you will see from the picture but not all of them are open. When I got inside I opted to walk upstairs and see the exhibits because I saw the line waiting for the elevator to the upper globe. My hope was that I could walk up there on my own. Unfortunately, as I said not all the globes are open and I could not get to the top. So, of course when I got back down the line for the lift was even longer. I waited patiently through it. Anyone who had reservations for the restaurant up there kept getting to cut the line which was a touch annoying for me. The top globe is basically an observatory like you might have on the Eiffel Tower or Tokyo Tower except that it is only 93 Meters tall. The real let down was that the weather had completely not cooperated and you could only see the clouds and a few feet, much like my visit to Etna. In any event I didn't stay in the upper section too long and eventually left the Atomium and headed back towards the center of town.
In doing that I hopped off at Brussels South and instead took the other trains to Brussels Central. I was not really sure what trains I should switch to on the Metro to get there. I didn't feel like spending 45 minutes to figure out the Metro enough to do it. The ride was short to Central and I walked around a bit more, this time in hopes of getting some lunch. It was basically a fair bit past lunch time by this point and I was hungry. I again stopped at an Italian restaurant. This time I ordered a set menu of minestrone soup and lasagna. The operators were speaking to each other in Italian so it may have been a real Italian restaurant. I had a Duvel to accompany the food but for a second beer I ordered a Grimbergen because I didn't much care for the Duvel. The food was good if a touch salty.
After lunch I walked around a bit more, basically doing some half-hearted souvenir shopping until I realized my bladder was going to explode. At that point I paid 3 Euros to visit the Brussels City Museum right in the middle of the Markt. It was a nice little museum that happened to have a restroom to boot. The main issue with the museum was it was in Flemish and French only. There was little to no English anywhere. So it mostly amounted to looking at the ceramics and paintings and pottery and statues and tapestries with little reference. Still it was nice and took a bit of time to get through (it is not a huge place) and you get to see the stained glass on the upper floor as well.
After the museum I decided to just head back to the hotel because I was fairly tired. In going back to the room I discovered the market near the hotel is not open on Saturday at all. I had been hoping to buy some sundries on the way in. Without being able to do that I got back to the room and watched Norway beat Denmark in the curling world championships 5-3. It was odd to see curling on TV and to see it with basically no commercial breaks unlike when it was shown on the Olympics in the US. It takes a real long time to play. The Norwegians were still wearing very noticeable plaid pants.
When that ended it was near 7pm and I made up my mind to order room service rather than find a restaurant. The reason for that being that nothing in the area of the hotel is open on the weekend. I would have to walk back to the downtown area and then back again if I wanted to eat out. Basically because Belgium is the seat of the European Union right now, the place is jam-mobbed with people on the weekdays and they all go home on the weekend. Once the business of government has been put to rest for the week they have no reason to be here and all go home. The region where my hotel is caters to these people as does the hotel itself. It was obviously much more crowded on Sunday to Thursday nights than the weekend nights. It is fine by me because I can sleep in peace on the weekend anyway.
For room service I ordered a cheeseburger and Belgian fries. Yes, Belgian fries. If you ask a Belgian they will tell you that they should be called Belgian fries because they were invented here and not in France. All the same they look like any other fry you would get, French, Freedom, whatever and taste the same. The burger was a bit more well done than I would prefer but it was tasty. I also ordered a bottle of shiraz because I know that Australian wines have resealable caps and I wanted to have a glass or two of wine and I could store what I didn't finish for use another day. The shiraz was also the second cheapest wine on the menu so I don't feel too guilty about it. After eating I opted to watch some videos and think about preparations for Sunday.
The pictures for day 8 can be found here.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Belgium for Business Day 7
Today was another early start and to top it off none of the trains I take were delayed. If you speak to Belgians they will tell you that their trains are notoriously late. That translated to me arriving in the office at just around 8:10. Typically I have been arriving around 8:30. There was a light rain walking in this morning but it cleared up not long after class started.
The class went well enough today but I had believed we would be done an hour early based on my typical classes in the US. This did not happen and we managed to just get done by 5pm. In leaving the office after my students had gone it turned out that Nettie, who coordinates the training in Belgium currently, she is a temporary filling in for maternity leave employees, was also heading to the train. I think she might be the only person in Belgium who does not drive. We walked to the train station and I found out more about Belgium then both rode the same train to Brussels-Noord because her preferred train was seriously delayed, then I continued on to Brussels-Central and walked around the center of town a bit until I decided to get dinner.
I chose an Italian restaurant, Restaurant Luna di Venezia, thinking I would enjoy something Italian but when I got in I decided to have a soup and roasted chicken. The soup was something like a split pea with chicken in it. It was reasonably tasty if a bit sweet. I actually added some salt to it, which I never do. I also had an order of Bruschetta as a side and ate that with the soup. The chicken was good but the dark meat was a bit dry so I didn't eat the whole of the dark meat area and passed up on the wing completely. I accompanied my food with a Grimbergen Brune again because it was the best looking beer on their menu. After the main food I had a sundae-like dessert and an espresso. Both were good.
After finishing dinner I walked back to the center and took a couple more pictures. They were projecting things on the cathedral for Christmas. After a bit of wandering I headed back to the hotel and settled for the night. The locals say it is far too dangerous to be out in Brussels too late. I am not sure how much is true and how much is based on the typical hatred of foreigners and the like. They do make it sound rather dreadful, pointing out that the country has not had a government for 7 months and that they pay foreigners a lot of money when they are here illegally in the winter. I am dealing mainly with Flemish Belgians and they seem to have a natural disdain for the other half of the country which is French. Not that it is a war-ready-hatred or anything just a malcontent for the French part of the Government I think. The country is certainly not that big but it has 3 languages aside from the expectation to speak English. I suspect they are smaller than, say, Maine overall. So to be so diverse and house the seat of the European Union government is a bit tough on them it appears.
The few pictures I took are located here. Hopefully with 2 full days to hop around the area I will come up with some nice pictures.
The class went well enough today but I had believed we would be done an hour early based on my typical classes in the US. This did not happen and we managed to just get done by 5pm. In leaving the office after my students had gone it turned out that Nettie, who coordinates the training in Belgium currently, she is a temporary filling in for maternity leave employees, was also heading to the train. I think she might be the only person in Belgium who does not drive. We walked to the train station and I found out more about Belgium then both rode the same train to Brussels-Noord because her preferred train was seriously delayed, then I continued on to Brussels-Central and walked around the center of town a bit until I decided to get dinner.
I chose an Italian restaurant, Restaurant Luna di Venezia, thinking I would enjoy something Italian but when I got in I decided to have a soup and roasted chicken. The soup was something like a split pea with chicken in it. It was reasonably tasty if a bit sweet. I actually added some salt to it, which I never do. I also had an order of Bruschetta as a side and ate that with the soup. The chicken was good but the dark meat was a bit dry so I didn't eat the whole of the dark meat area and passed up on the wing completely. I accompanied my food with a Grimbergen Brune again because it was the best looking beer on their menu. After the main food I had a sundae-like dessert and an espresso. Both were good.
After finishing dinner I walked back to the center and took a couple more pictures. They were projecting things on the cathedral for Christmas. After a bit of wandering I headed back to the hotel and settled for the night. The locals say it is far too dangerous to be out in Brussels too late. I am not sure how much is true and how much is based on the typical hatred of foreigners and the like. They do make it sound rather dreadful, pointing out that the country has not had a government for 7 months and that they pay foreigners a lot of money when they are here illegally in the winter. I am dealing mainly with Flemish Belgians and they seem to have a natural disdain for the other half of the country which is French. Not that it is a war-ready-hatred or anything just a malcontent for the French part of the Government I think. The country is certainly not that big but it has 3 languages aside from the expectation to speak English. I suspect they are smaller than, say, Maine overall. So to be so diverse and house the seat of the European Union government is a bit tough on them it appears.
The few pictures I took are located here. Hopefully with 2 full days to hop around the area I will come up with some nice pictures.
Thursday, December 09, 2010
Belgium for Business Day 6
I started out leaving the hotel a bit earlier in order get a train that departed before the ones I have been catching. Of course that meant that when I got to the line to purchase my ticket I was behind a woman who had lost something or needed something very difficult for the train services to provide which of course mean phone calls and filling out paperwork and everything that meant an interminably long wait. Fortunately I was able to get on an earlier train and made my way to the office earlier than I had the rest of the week. It basically mean that the lights would not turn on for 10 minutes after I arrived. Still, I like to be there before m students arrive.
The temperature was a touch warmer today which made waiting for the trains less difficult besides. Class today went well enough except I had 2 groups to do the same thing and one rocketed through it and the other wasn't done by the time we were supposed to head home for the evening. Keeping the faster group occupied proved difficult.
After class I rode the train into Brussels Central and headed to find a restaurant to eat at. I ended up eating at the Danish Tavern mainly because it didn't look empty. It is right by the main square near the Cathedral. I had a Grimbergen Brune along with the rack of lamb with beans and gratin potatoes. The food was reasonable except maybe the lamb was overcooked. I enjoyed it nonetheless.
After dinner I walked back to the hotel to find my cards were not letting me in and had to go to the desk to get that sorted out. I was a bit peeved but the person at the desk was quick and pleasant enough. During my walk back I did take a few pictures of Brussels at night.
The pictures are posted here.
The temperature was a touch warmer today which made waiting for the trains less difficult besides. Class today went well enough except I had 2 groups to do the same thing and one rocketed through it and the other wasn't done by the time we were supposed to head home for the evening. Keeping the faster group occupied proved difficult.
After class I rode the train into Brussels Central and headed to find a restaurant to eat at. I ended up eating at the Danish Tavern mainly because it didn't look empty. It is right by the main square near the Cathedral. I had a Grimbergen Brune along with the rack of lamb with beans and gratin potatoes. The food was reasonable except maybe the lamb was overcooked. I enjoyed it nonetheless.
After dinner I walked back to the hotel to find my cards were not letting me in and had to go to the desk to get that sorted out. I was a bit peeved but the person at the desk was quick and pleasant enough. During my walk back I did take a few pictures of Brussels at night.
The pictures are posted here.
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Belgium for Business Day 5
Today was an early rise and exit but the person selling tickets for the train at Brussels-Luxembourg was indeed there so I was able to purchase before I got on the train. The exchanges worked out as the train to Vilvoorde was delayed or I would have been waiting longer.
Class went fairly well. We talked about Solaris mainly. I think things worked better because I was finally able to get the technical issues with the smart board figured out and was able to do my presentations in a more accurate manner. This trip has been learning about what I do not have available to me here in Belgium that I generally have back home in Bedford. That said, my class is very accommodating for the issues I have had and have not complained at all. I hope they are learning as well as I think they are.
After class I hopped the trains back home to the hotel instead of heading downtown and made myself dinner from amongst the convenience foods I had purchased at the market. I will have to go again in the next day or two as I really didn't buy a lot of variety. I made a quick pasta Bolognese and had a Leffe Tripel and a couple thin slices of bread as the loaf is starting to hit the stale point. Toast tomorrow and it is pretty much done. The only picture I took today was of my food.
The picture can be found here.
Class went fairly well. We talked about Solaris mainly. I think things worked better because I was finally able to get the technical issues with the smart board figured out and was able to do my presentations in a more accurate manner. This trip has been learning about what I do not have available to me here in Belgium that I generally have back home in Bedford. That said, my class is very accommodating for the issues I have had and have not complained at all. I hope they are learning as well as I think they are.
After class I hopped the trains back home to the hotel instead of heading downtown and made myself dinner from amongst the convenience foods I had purchased at the market. I will have to go again in the next day or two as I really didn't buy a lot of variety. I made a quick pasta Bolognese and had a Leffe Tripel and a couple thin slices of bread as the loaf is starting to hit the stale point. Toast tomorrow and it is pretty much done. The only picture I took today was of my food.
The picture can be found here.
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Belgium for Business Day 4
Day 2 of the class started out at 6am as well with me being prepared and leaving a bit earlier. I had a badge to get into the office so if I was early, which I was, I would not have to sit outside in the cold, which I did not.
I got to the train station around 7:35 or so and found that the person who should be selling tickets was not around. The booth looked open but no one was there. A train was departing that I could take at 7:38 so I opted to just go and take it. When I successfully made it to Brussels-Noord I bought my ticket which counted for the distance I had traveled and on to Vilvoorde. I made it to the office before 8:30 including the walk from the train station.
I managed to take a couple pictures of the training room and lab. I have posted. Today's class went well enough with the added benefit? that we had two technical malfunctions. We did manage to repair them but it ate up a lot of our time for the day.
After class I hung around speaking to some of the locals for a bit and eventually was given a ride to the train station. From there I rode back into Brussels but went to Central instead of Luxembourg and found a restaurant to eat at. I walked through the restaurant row near the Gros Markt and agreed to eat at the first place that asked me to come in. It was called Le Mouton D'or and it appeared to be run by Arabics of some sort. That said the food was actually fairly good. I started with an onion soup. I ordered vegetable soup but they were out so agreed to have the onion. I enjoyed it and the cheese was reasonably stringy. For main course I had a rabbit in brown sauce. It looked a bit like chicken in flesh color but the bone structure was obviously not that of a bird. It tasted different than chicken as well. Perhaps a bit more gamey, but I quite liked it. I was down to the final bits before I managed to splash some of the brown sauce on myself. I thought I was going to get out unscathed at that point, but alas no. The rabbit was accompanied by some Belgian fries and I also had a Chimay beer, which was dark and very enjoyable. I have seen the bottles around town so I figured they were worth a shot. I enjoyed it.
From dinner I walked back to the hotel which took about 15 minutes and the settled in for the evening.
Since I took pictures of the office area and had multiple pictures of dinner there are more than one picture today.
The pictures are located here.
I got to the train station around 7:35 or so and found that the person who should be selling tickets was not around. The booth looked open but no one was there. A train was departing that I could take at 7:38 so I opted to just go and take it. When I successfully made it to Brussels-Noord I bought my ticket which counted for the distance I had traveled and on to Vilvoorde. I made it to the office before 8:30 including the walk from the train station.
I managed to take a couple pictures of the training room and lab. I have posted. Today's class went well enough with the added benefit? that we had two technical malfunctions. We did manage to repair them but it ate up a lot of our time for the day.
After class I hung around speaking to some of the locals for a bit and eventually was given a ride to the train station. From there I rode back into Brussels but went to Central instead of Luxembourg and found a restaurant to eat at. I walked through the restaurant row near the Gros Markt and agreed to eat at the first place that asked me to come in. It was called Le Mouton D'or and it appeared to be run by Arabics of some sort. That said the food was actually fairly good. I started with an onion soup. I ordered vegetable soup but they were out so agreed to have the onion. I enjoyed it and the cheese was reasonably stringy. For main course I had a rabbit in brown sauce. It looked a bit like chicken in flesh color but the bone structure was obviously not that of a bird. It tasted different than chicken as well. Perhaps a bit more gamey, but I quite liked it. I was down to the final bits before I managed to splash some of the brown sauce on myself. I thought I was going to get out unscathed at that point, but alas no. The rabbit was accompanied by some Belgian fries and I also had a Chimay beer, which was dark and very enjoyable. I have seen the bottles around town so I figured they were worth a shot. I enjoyed it.
From dinner I walked back to the hotel which took about 15 minutes and the settled in for the evening.
Since I took pictures of the office area and had multiple pictures of dinner there are more than one picture today.
The pictures are located here.
Patriots
Perhaps I should head out of town more often in they are going win games that easily while I am away.
Monday, December 06, 2010
Belgium for Business Day 3
Ok, so today was the beginning of the heart of the trip. I didn't sleep perfectly overnight, and part of that may have been due to the neighbor who believed that everything should be slammed and the TV should be on full volume until past midnight. After that settled down it was a bit easier to get to sleep. I set the alarm for 6am but basically took my time getting ready. I knew we would be starting later than we do in Bedford so I didn't want to show up too early that I couldn't get into the office.
I had a quick breakfast of some Greek yogurt and a very large piece of toast cut from the loaf I bought the day before. I chased that with 2 cups of coffee from a brew in the bag packaging system. After breakfast I showered and headed out the door. The train station is less than a block from the hotel I knew I basically had to get to Vilvoorde to get to the office. I got stuck behind a kid who's card wouldn't work and he didn't have enough cash to buy his ticket followed by a woman renewing a picture ID or something like that so my wait at the ticket counter seemed excessively long. I bought a ticket to get me there for 2.50 Euros. I needed to change trains at Brussel-Noord on the Brussel-MIDI line, 2 stops up. From there I needed would ride the Antwerpen line to Vilvoorde which was about 3 stops up. The train exchanges weren't too bad but I had to ask which train to take at Brussel-Noord. From the station at Vilvoorde it was a walk of about 15 minutes. Take a right out of the station and then under the second bridge take a right (you cannot continue straight there). Then follow that road to the office. It was very easy.
Apparently all the trains in Belgium are delayed all the time. I was not riding Metro trains but something like commuter lines to reach my destination. I am told the train operators strike all the time. I hope it does not affect me too much. The trains I got on were both delayed quite a few minutes not that I noticed... It turned out to be rather well timed for me.
I got in the office a bit before 9am having gotten to the train station around 8. From there I found I had 2 Hologic Belgium students as well as 2 students from France, 1 student from Italy, 1 from Israel and one from South Africa. Apparently this is a fairly easy mix of students to deal with and they seem like a good bunch.
I had to figure out some of the equipment to get through the presentations and lecturing and midmorning the internet access went down leaving me unable to check or send emails. All said for not knowing the facility too well I think the day went by reasonably well enough. Some of the hitches with the equipment changed up my methods but I got through it.
We finished up just about 4:45 and I sent the class on their way. The majority of the class is staying about 15 minutes taxi ride away from the office. They have nothing around their hotel at all they said. We also found out the hotel is more expensive than mine in Brussels. They are basically close to the airport if I understood them correctly. So they had to wait a couple minutes for a taxi and I walked back to the train station and bought my return tickets and got back to the apartment around 5:45. An hour journey with a train swap and a 10 minute delay on one train wasn't too bad in my opinion. I also figured out how to route myself to the center of town to pick up dinner on another night. For this evening I just cooked a package of soup I bought at the market and had some of the bread as well. It was simple and will be the only picture I have for today. It being work I didn't really take any pictures, not yet at least, though I did bring the camera along anyway.
The picture for day 3 can be found here (kinda seems pointless but still...).
I had a quick breakfast of some Greek yogurt and a very large piece of toast cut from the loaf I bought the day before. I chased that with 2 cups of coffee from a brew in the bag packaging system. After breakfast I showered and headed out the door. The train station is less than a block from the hotel I knew I basically had to get to Vilvoorde to get to the office. I got stuck behind a kid who's card wouldn't work and he didn't have enough cash to buy his ticket followed by a woman renewing a picture ID or something like that so my wait at the ticket counter seemed excessively long. I bought a ticket to get me there for 2.50 Euros. I needed to change trains at Brussel-Noord on the Brussel-MIDI line, 2 stops up. From there I needed would ride the Antwerpen line to Vilvoorde which was about 3 stops up. The train exchanges weren't too bad but I had to ask which train to take at Brussel-Noord. From the station at Vilvoorde it was a walk of about 15 minutes. Take a right out of the station and then under the second bridge take a right (you cannot continue straight there). Then follow that road to the office. It was very easy.
Apparently all the trains in Belgium are delayed all the time. I was not riding Metro trains but something like commuter lines to reach my destination. I am told the train operators strike all the time. I hope it does not affect me too much. The trains I got on were both delayed quite a few minutes not that I noticed... It turned out to be rather well timed for me.
I got in the office a bit before 9am having gotten to the train station around 8. From there I found I had 2 Hologic Belgium students as well as 2 students from France, 1 student from Italy, 1 from Israel and one from South Africa. Apparently this is a fairly easy mix of students to deal with and they seem like a good bunch.
I had to figure out some of the equipment to get through the presentations and lecturing and midmorning the internet access went down leaving me unable to check or send emails. All said for not knowing the facility too well I think the day went by reasonably well enough. Some of the hitches with the equipment changed up my methods but I got through it.
We finished up just about 4:45 and I sent the class on their way. The majority of the class is staying about 15 minutes taxi ride away from the office. They have nothing around their hotel at all they said. We also found out the hotel is more expensive than mine in Brussels. They are basically close to the airport if I understood them correctly. So they had to wait a couple minutes for a taxi and I walked back to the train station and bought my return tickets and got back to the apartment around 5:45. An hour journey with a train swap and a 10 minute delay on one train wasn't too bad in my opinion. I also figured out how to route myself to the center of town to pick up dinner on another night. For this evening I just cooked a package of soup I bought at the market and had some of the bread as well. It was simple and will be the only picture I have for today. It being work I didn't really take any pictures, not yet at least, though I did bring the camera along anyway.
The picture for day 3 can be found here (kinda seems pointless but still...).
Sunday, December 05, 2010
Belgium for Business Day 2
Today was definitely off sorts for me. My cell phone ran out of power and the alarm didn't go off so I woke up late. I mean really late for me. It was 9:45 when I woke up. I haven't woken up that late without being dog sick in years. Generally I am up by no later than 7am local time. This really threw me off schedule. I had hoped to be out the door early so that I could see some of what Belgium had to offer in a quick run before Patrick was to pick me up and bring me to the office. With the whole morning already gone by the time I was done showering and having a quick cup of instant coffee I really wasn't getting much chance to do that. I did manage to walk back to the center of town and poke around for just a few minutes though.
I ate lunch at a McDonald's mostly out of the speed and they wouldn't serve beer factors. I tried to order a Royal Crispy Bacon Cheeseburger but they were instead having a NYC promotion where I got a NYC Crispy Cheeseburger which seemed minus the bacon and plus some fried onion ring bits. It was ok but nothing stellar as fast food burgers go. It did taste better than the burger I had in Rome. I swapped out the soda with a coffee to make sure I had the proper levels of caffeine since I woke up so late.
After eating lunch I did wander the region for a few minutes more and found the Manekin Pis. This is a statue of a pissing boy that the locals dress up in different ways depending on the season or mood. Today he was dressed up as St. Nick. The classic European variety that is. After finding him I opted to circle back into the known regions and head back to the hotel. On the way I stopped at a market and bought some groceries for the next few days. The market is just around the corner from the hotel and had more than the place I shopped the night before. It is still nothing like a good old fashioned US supermarket but at least I was able to get some essentials.
After packing up my food I hung out on the computer for a short time before Patrick showed up and he drove me to the office where I was able to see the layout and he showed me how to walk there from the train station. I intend to try the train first and if that isn't working out so well I will switch to cab. I am sure it is a ton cheaper to take the train. The office is very nice and impressively clean and new looking. My classroom there seems nicer than the one I have at home. I got the full tour of the office and could see my equipment was working when last it was used which is nice. I rather need to have it working for the class to be successful. In any event after the brief tour we headed back and Patrick dropped me off at the hotel.
It was about 3:15 by then so I opted to walk back town and see some of the sights before having dinner then heading back to the room. I wandered around a lot and mainly ended up recapping what I had already seen. I tried to get myself lost a couple times but it appears to be difficult to do in the Gros Markt region. I didn't take a lot of pictures today due to a constant rain that really limited me wanting to use the camera. Nonetheless I walked around for a while to kill time until it was reasonably late to have dinner. Around 5pm I decided on a Restaurant called L'Alzequin which is right in the restaurant row near the Gros Markt. If you've been there it makes sense. There seems to be a two street region that is nothing but restaurants. I had a set menu which included a vegetable soup and mussels with fries (which is a typical Belgian treat). The soup was very good and the Portuguese man sitting next to me decided to change his starter to the soup from whatever he had ordered based on the smell. The waiter gave him a small argument but he got the soup in the end. The mussels were also very good. They were fresh in a broth with some vegetables. My only complaint would be that a few of them were a bit gritty. Not horribly so, but they probably could have soaked a bit before cooking. That said they were perfectly cooked and very tasty. I liked the mussels we had in Denmark with Jesper just a touch more. The dinner was finished with a small waffle with chocolate sauce and I accompanied with a Leffe Brune as well. I was trying to order a blonde but got a brune. No problem for me but I wanted to try the blonde. At dinner I met a Malaysian woman and the Portuguese man and we each talked for a little bit. They were nice and the dinner was pleasant.
After dinner I made the quick walk back to the hotel to relax for the rest of the evening.
The pictures for day 2 can be found here.
I ate lunch at a McDonald's mostly out of the speed and they wouldn't serve beer factors. I tried to order a Royal Crispy Bacon Cheeseburger but they were instead having a NYC promotion where I got a NYC Crispy Cheeseburger which seemed minus the bacon and plus some fried onion ring bits. It was ok but nothing stellar as fast food burgers go. It did taste better than the burger I had in Rome. I swapped out the soda with a coffee to make sure I had the proper levels of caffeine since I woke up so late.
After eating lunch I did wander the region for a few minutes more and found the Manekin Pis. This is a statue of a pissing boy that the locals dress up in different ways depending on the season or mood. Today he was dressed up as St. Nick. The classic European variety that is. After finding him I opted to circle back into the known regions and head back to the hotel. On the way I stopped at a market and bought some groceries for the next few days. The market is just around the corner from the hotel and had more than the place I shopped the night before. It is still nothing like a good old fashioned US supermarket but at least I was able to get some essentials.
After packing up my food I hung out on the computer for a short time before Patrick showed up and he drove me to the office where I was able to see the layout and he showed me how to walk there from the train station. I intend to try the train first and if that isn't working out so well I will switch to cab. I am sure it is a ton cheaper to take the train. The office is very nice and impressively clean and new looking. My classroom there seems nicer than the one I have at home. I got the full tour of the office and could see my equipment was working when last it was used which is nice. I rather need to have it working for the class to be successful. In any event after the brief tour we headed back and Patrick dropped me off at the hotel.
It was about 3:15 by then so I opted to walk back town and see some of the sights before having dinner then heading back to the room. I wandered around a lot and mainly ended up recapping what I had already seen. I tried to get myself lost a couple times but it appears to be difficult to do in the Gros Markt region. I didn't take a lot of pictures today due to a constant rain that really limited me wanting to use the camera. Nonetheless I walked around for a while to kill time until it was reasonably late to have dinner. Around 5pm I decided on a Restaurant called L'Alzequin which is right in the restaurant row near the Gros Markt. If you've been there it makes sense. There seems to be a two street region that is nothing but restaurants. I had a set menu which included a vegetable soup and mussels with fries (which is a typical Belgian treat). The soup was very good and the Portuguese man sitting next to me decided to change his starter to the soup from whatever he had ordered based on the smell. The waiter gave him a small argument but he got the soup in the end. The mussels were also very good. They were fresh in a broth with some vegetables. My only complaint would be that a few of them were a bit gritty. Not horribly so, but they probably could have soaked a bit before cooking. That said they were perfectly cooked and very tasty. I liked the mussels we had in Denmark with Jesper just a touch more. The dinner was finished with a small waffle with chocolate sauce and I accompanied with a Leffe Brune as well. I was trying to order a blonde but got a brune. No problem for me but I wanted to try the blonde. At dinner I met a Malaysian woman and the Portuguese man and we each talked for a little bit. They were nice and the dinner was pleasant.
After dinner I made the quick walk back to the hotel to relax for the rest of the evening.
The pictures for day 2 can be found here.
Saturday, December 04, 2010
Belgium for Business Day 1
As I've mentioned, the trip to Belgium is a business trip to teach a Selenia service class to international service engineers. I did however arrive on a Saturday and the class does not start until Monday. There are a few reasons to come in early the best being that I can get accustomed to the time change before the class starts. The other is that I get to see the facility on Sunday before I actually get there to teach.
I flew Delta/KLM partner flights to Amsterdam then on to Brussels. The flight to Amsterdam departed at 7:05pm. In truth it pulled the gate away at that time but it didn't move for another 20 minutes. They said we were going to have no tail wind and we would be late arriving for certain. I am betting the sitting around for 20 minutes doing nothing didn't help that. I ended up on an aisle seat next to an Indian man who was pleasant and spoke English very well. We talked for a bit until the entertainment system came on then I watched Despicable Me followed by part of a Japanese film about a girl trying to be a concert pianist while here boyfriend was a conductor. It was very strange Japanese but being tired I did crash through some of it. I woke up and saw the end then shut the system off and slept some more. My neighbor was a loud snorer and also he was talking in his sleep in Indian a bit of the flight. I am not sure what he was saying but I don't think he was dreaming about his wife or girlfriend at least. That might have been awkward. The flight was basically uneventful and the food, which I had pasta, wasn't all that bad but we did indeed arrive 45 minutes late. That basically put me to landing while my next plane was supposed to be boarding already. When we landed in Amsterdam it was cold and snowing lightly. The snow I had heard about amounted to maybe an inch to an inch and a half on the ground from what I could see.
I ran across the airport (you always have to in Schipol) and rescreened security to find that my next flight was delayed 25 minutes so they hadn't started boarding yet. A bit relieved I was also a touch annoyed. Especially when I found out that it was delayed because they didn't have a flight crew ready for it. We ended up probably leaving about 40 minutes late and had to go through de-icing. All through the lost time the weather started to pick up and get worse and worse until by the time we were taking off the conditions were basically white out. I was fairly amazed at how quickly it turned that way. I was seated next to a Belgian man who told me a little bit about Brussels. The actual flight in air time was less than a half an hour. Almost pointless. It certainly would have been if it was not a connecting flight. In any event, the weather was a bit easier in Belgium when we landed though the plane which was a Fokker 70 was bouncing around all over on the way down. I had to wait some time to get my luggage and took a cab to the hotel. There I cleaned up quickly from the long journey. It is always good to wash the airports off yourself.
After a few minutes I got out and walked around the town a bit. The city is clean and the map makes it look sort of sprawling though I don't really think it is that big. The weather was picking up a bit by this time and as I walked around I noticed that a lot of the businesses around here were closed. It being a Saturday afternoon it didn't make a lot of sense but I have to suspect the weather. There were not many cars on the road either. I wandered until I was a fair bit down the hill where I finally found an open and busy Brasserie. I was quite hungry so I stopped in and had a beer, a brune Tongerlo (which of course is a small Belgian brewery, probably originally an abbey). It was interesting if maybe it had slight perfumy taste to it. I liked it. I coupled that with a cheeseburger which I ate like an American. After eating I walked around a bit more then when I realized the beer ran through me very quickly I decided to head back to the hotel because I was very tired as well and it was still fairly cold out as well. Amazingly I found my way back without having to consult the map or GPS feature of the phone. On the way back I stopped at a shop to buy a quick bit of snack food and a couple more beers for the night or two ahead.
I decided to take it easy for a while then later on I made the easy prepare pasta that I bought. Well, I actually made half of it and ate that along with a Leffe Brune as accompaniment. From there it was almost bedtime.
The pictures from day 1 can be found here.
I flew Delta/KLM partner flights to Amsterdam then on to Brussels. The flight to Amsterdam departed at 7:05pm. In truth it pulled the gate away at that time but it didn't move for another 20 minutes. They said we were going to have no tail wind and we would be late arriving for certain. I am betting the sitting around for 20 minutes doing nothing didn't help that. I ended up on an aisle seat next to an Indian man who was pleasant and spoke English very well. We talked for a bit until the entertainment system came on then I watched Despicable Me followed by part of a Japanese film about a girl trying to be a concert pianist while here boyfriend was a conductor. It was very strange Japanese but being tired I did crash through some of it. I woke up and saw the end then shut the system off and slept some more. My neighbor was a loud snorer and also he was talking in his sleep in Indian a bit of the flight. I am not sure what he was saying but I don't think he was dreaming about his wife or girlfriend at least. That might have been awkward. The flight was basically uneventful and the food, which I had pasta, wasn't all that bad but we did indeed arrive 45 minutes late. That basically put me to landing while my next plane was supposed to be boarding already. When we landed in Amsterdam it was cold and snowing lightly. The snow I had heard about amounted to maybe an inch to an inch and a half on the ground from what I could see.
I ran across the airport (you always have to in Schipol) and rescreened security to find that my next flight was delayed 25 minutes so they hadn't started boarding yet. A bit relieved I was also a touch annoyed. Especially when I found out that it was delayed because they didn't have a flight crew ready for it. We ended up probably leaving about 40 minutes late and had to go through de-icing. All through the lost time the weather started to pick up and get worse and worse until by the time we were taking off the conditions were basically white out. I was fairly amazed at how quickly it turned that way. I was seated next to a Belgian man who told me a little bit about Brussels. The actual flight in air time was less than a half an hour. Almost pointless. It certainly would have been if it was not a connecting flight. In any event, the weather was a bit easier in Belgium when we landed though the plane which was a Fokker 70 was bouncing around all over on the way down. I had to wait some time to get my luggage and took a cab to the hotel. There I cleaned up quickly from the long journey. It is always good to wash the airports off yourself.
After a few minutes I got out and walked around the town a bit. The city is clean and the map makes it look sort of sprawling though I don't really think it is that big. The weather was picking up a bit by this time and as I walked around I noticed that a lot of the businesses around here were closed. It being a Saturday afternoon it didn't make a lot of sense but I have to suspect the weather. There were not many cars on the road either. I wandered until I was a fair bit down the hill where I finally found an open and busy Brasserie. I was quite hungry so I stopped in and had a beer, a brune Tongerlo (which of course is a small Belgian brewery, probably originally an abbey). It was interesting if maybe it had slight perfumy taste to it. I liked it. I coupled that with a cheeseburger which I ate like an American. After eating I walked around a bit more then when I realized the beer ran through me very quickly I decided to head back to the hotel because I was very tired as well and it was still fairly cold out as well. Amazingly I found my way back without having to consult the map or GPS feature of the phone. On the way back I stopped at a shop to buy a quick bit of snack food and a couple more beers for the night or two ahead.
I decided to take it easy for a while then later on I made the easy prepare pasta that I bought. Well, I actually made half of it and ate that along with a Leffe Brune as accompaniment. From there it was almost bedtime.
The pictures from day 1 can be found here.
Friday, December 03, 2010
Departing Tonight for Belgium
Knowing that I was flying to Europe in December I expected to have bad weather of course. I just figured it would be here in the Boston area. Instead the bad weather has been all over Europe for the past few days and many airports are closed and tons of flights are delayed or canceled. I am flying KLM to Amsterdam then on to Brussels. As it currently looks I should be able to make it through but I am not going to hold my breath on getting there without delays. I would like it of course but I just can't think it'll work my way. In any event a lot of Europe has been getting snow and we really haven't yet seen any here. I am sure the major storms in the Boston area will be in time for my return here.
I am glad in some respects I scheduled the flight this early. If there are delays I will probably not have to rush too terribly to do what I have to do there. I am teaching a 2 week long course in our Hologic Europe facility. I will have the weekend in between free and I will have some of Saturday and some of Sunday this weekend also to check out Brussels. I will be visiting the office on Sunday so I can see the lay of the land before I have to teach there and also make sure everything is in order. I do not remotely equate this trip to a vacation. It will be work with a couple spare days. Hopefully all goes well.
I won't be blogging the full blow by blow but I suspect I will mention where I ate and such when the day is over.
I am glad in some respects I scheduled the flight this early. If there are delays I will probably not have to rush too terribly to do what I have to do there. I am teaching a 2 week long course in our Hologic Europe facility. I will have the weekend in between free and I will have some of Saturday and some of Sunday this weekend also to check out Brussels. I will be visiting the office on Sunday so I can see the lay of the land before I have to teach there and also make sure everything is in order. I do not remotely equate this trip to a vacation. It will be work with a couple spare days. Hopefully all goes well.
I won't be blogging the full blow by blow but I suspect I will mention where I ate and such when the day is over.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Belgium
My next trip will be to Belgium for work in December. I am not going to be doing a blow by blow blogging for the work days but will definitely have a weekend there to look about so will be writing about that at the least.
Italy Pictures
Now that all of the pictures from Italy have been posted I would like to apologize for how long it took to get them up. I had a busy week and it was just a bit too much to get them loaded up earlier.
Monday, November 08, 2010
Italy Day 16
Day 16 was of course the transit day back home. I got up early to clean up and finish packing then had breakfast at the hotel. I really liked the brand of yogurt they had. After eating I checked out of the hotel and made the brief walk to the train station. The Leonardo Express was completely full for the 8:22 departure. I had bought the ticket the night before but I probably didn't need to as they never checked it. The train was too full probably. In any event I did see the route this ride as the sun was fully up by this point. There is a lot of graffiti along the way.
I got to the airport and checked in but the baggage check conveyors were broken so had to wait for a guy with a cart to come pick up the bags of those of us waiting. This meant the security line got longer but I guess I was plenty early so it was of little consequence. After getting in I checked the shops and bought a snack then waited patiently for the flight.
The flight to Rome was 2 hours long and I had a window seat on the A320 with no one directly next to me. I did doze off a bit as the only entertainment was the airplane GPS.
Arriving on Heathrow I had to rescreen security then wasted the time before my flight boarded which was around 2 hours or so. We had a general boarding which involved riding a bus to a remote space and climbing stairs onto the plane yet again (time 3). This plane was a 777. I apparently got assigned a middle seat but lucked out because the guy on the aisle didn't like the tall guy behind him so moved to the only other seat on the plane. This gave me am aisle seat with no one next to me. The in flght entertainment was individual seat but you had to choose between set channels. I had hoped to watch Despicable Me bit of course that was the broken channel. Instead I watched Agora which was odd as a first film. I think it was anti-Christian which I liked. The meal was ok but they called the pudding creme brûlée which was wrong. There was a significant pause to the entertainment system then I watched Toy Story 3 which was ok but not as good as the first two. The sound was a bit crackly which may not have helped. After finishing that movie it wasn't long before they started another set so I started watching Jonah Hex which seemed bad but I couldn't finish it as the flight didn't have enough time left.
The start of the descent was very bumpy and a few people sounded fairly nervous but it smoothed out after a couple minutes. I guess there was some serious winds in the jet stream to contend with. Then we got a bit bumpy as we were in the final moments of landing but all in all it was a fairly easy flight. After getting off the airplane the passport control line was short. With its humble beginnings on the cart in Rome my bag did actually make it across to Boston. It was within the first 20 bags off the carousel, and customs was a breeze, the one funny part being the passport guy's stamp on the customs form was hideously wet and it wasn't dry by the time I went to the customs guy. I saved him from smudging himself so he pushed me right through I think. My brother was there to pick me up and the ride home was easy. All in all as travel days go it could have been a lot worse though I will never like having to ride a bus to a plane somewhere on the tarmac. At least I didn't have a huge bag to stuff in the overheads to carry up the stairs to the plane. That definitely caused difficulty for a few people.
Italy was a lot of fun. The drama with the car and the GPS aside I had a blast. Seriously though, don't stay in Palermo if you go to Sicily.
I got to the airport and checked in but the baggage check conveyors were broken so had to wait for a guy with a cart to come pick up the bags of those of us waiting. This meant the security line got longer but I guess I was plenty early so it was of little consequence. After getting in I checked the shops and bought a snack then waited patiently for the flight.
The flight to Rome was 2 hours long and I had a window seat on the A320 with no one directly next to me. I did doze off a bit as the only entertainment was the airplane GPS.
Arriving on Heathrow I had to rescreen security then wasted the time before my flight boarded which was around 2 hours or so. We had a general boarding which involved riding a bus to a remote space and climbing stairs onto the plane yet again (time 3). This plane was a 777. I apparently got assigned a middle seat but lucked out because the guy on the aisle didn't like the tall guy behind him so moved to the only other seat on the plane. This gave me am aisle seat with no one next to me. The in flght entertainment was individual seat but you had to choose between set channels. I had hoped to watch Despicable Me bit of course that was the broken channel. Instead I watched Agora which was odd as a first film. I think it was anti-Christian which I liked. The meal was ok but they called the pudding creme brûlée which was wrong. There was a significant pause to the entertainment system then I watched Toy Story 3 which was ok but not as good as the first two. The sound was a bit crackly which may not have helped. After finishing that movie it wasn't long before they started another set so I started watching Jonah Hex which seemed bad but I couldn't finish it as the flight didn't have enough time left.
The start of the descent was very bumpy and a few people sounded fairly nervous but it smoothed out after a couple minutes. I guess there was some serious winds in the jet stream to contend with. Then we got a bit bumpy as we were in the final moments of landing but all in all it was a fairly easy flight. After getting off the airplane the passport control line was short. With its humble beginnings on the cart in Rome my bag did actually make it across to Boston. It was within the first 20 bags off the carousel, and customs was a breeze, the one funny part being the passport guy's stamp on the customs form was hideously wet and it wasn't dry by the time I went to the customs guy. I saved him from smudging himself so he pushed me right through I think. My brother was there to pick me up and the ride home was easy. All in all as travel days go it could have been a lot worse though I will never like having to ride a bus to a plane somewhere on the tarmac. At least I didn't have a huge bag to stuff in the overheads to carry up the stairs to the plane. That definitely caused difficulty for a few people.
Italy was a lot of fun. The drama with the car and the GPS aside I had a blast. Seriously though, don't stay in Palermo if you go to Sicily.
Saturday, November 06, 2010
Italy Day 15
The one thing I hadn’t succeeded in doing in my visit to Rome that I had sort of set my mind to was to walk the Appian Way. I had tried it on the first Sunday when the weather was nice but missed the mark in finding it. I do not feel too bad about that as it was a good distance away, not actually on the map I got from the hotel and I was following signs that said Appia but apparently meant Appia Nuova rather than Appia Antica. So that was a failure. The second day I found my way to the head of the road but unfortunately I had already been walking for many hours and though I got in a small distance I was not able to finish it with any gusto so I returned to Rome standard.
Today I was not really sure what to do with myself but when I woke up I was nagged by the idea that I should again try to walk the Appian Way or I would regret it. So after my breakfast I set out immediately. This time I was armed with the knowledge of where everything was a fairly efficient route to get to the park. It is technically a park. In fact I was there by 8:20am. What I had sort of realized but was sort of deluding myself on was how long the park is. I think it measures 11 miles from top to bottom.
In the early going I really needed to visit a bagno and there happened to be a couple sites to visit so I hit both of those. They were both castles in their time dating back to the 2nd century BC or so. Owned by important people and all that. They are ruins now but still the size of the first is very impressive and the latter was still neat. The second had a cat that followed me around a bit and figured she should get some cat dander on me as well. There was a box where she sleeps inside the castle.
If I were J.R.R. Tolkien I would have to give you a step by step detail of 11 miles of course. I think walking over 22 miles not including my in Rome time has sort of worn me out to the idea of actually writing things in too much detail. Suffice it to say the longer it felt like it was getting the greater the pace I took on in an attempt to finish it quicker and get back to Rome to buy some souvenirs. I checked the clock when I reached what I presume was the end of the trail and it was 11:20. Granted on the early going I was walking slower and no matter what I was stopping to take pictures on the way out so the timing is a bit deceiving. The roads on the trail are all very uneven cobbles of different make-ups that cause for some tiring footing at times. I am sure that didn’t help me in either direction. There were a couple points where work was being done on the cobbles and I was forced to walk on the shoulders which were also torn up in those areas. After a very long time the road turned into a trail. In the very latter stages it appeared that the locals dumped their trash there and occasionally someone came and picked it up but didn’t clean every last bit. I found that a bit disappointing.
In any event the trail is basically an ancient highway to Rome from the southeast. Along the way there are all sorts of buildings and parts of buildings that had been unearthed. Some of them were fenced off, some were not. Some looked very fantastic and others were just bits of stone wall. I took pictures of mostly everything that needed to be represented along the way, mainly skipping things that looked too similar to things I had already seen and taken pictures of.
I can say that the weather held out a bit too perfectly as it was sunny and hot the whole time. Most of the people along the trail seemed to distrust someone walking so fast that wasn’t in a running suit but what do I care really? When I reached what I presumed was the end I turned around, put the camera away and just did a speed run back to the top of the way. I checked when I was officially back on Roman streets and it was 1:30pm. I can’t say if I really went the full 11 miles each way but if the pictomap at the point I turned around was accurate to what I think I saw then yes, I did. I will need to check with more detail on picture I took of one of the maps that was in the early going of the road. Like most of Rome they are not generous with You Are Here maps so I really had no idea what sort of progress I was making on my way out the whole time. On the way back I at least had the benefit of knowing what I had already seen. There are tons of bicycles on the road but overall cars are kept from being on there except people how have farms or houses along the way it appears so the traffic was many foot and bicycle. There is the early stretch which is quite scary with the close walls and cars racing through in both sections but after the two catacombs I didn’t actually get to visit (and didn’t bother with this time) it wasn’t long before traffic was detoured away from the course. It did make for a pleasant summer feeling walk. I would have preferred to get going even earlier if I had any idea how long it was going to be.
The thought did cross my mind to try to take a bus on the far end but it didn’t appear there would be anything of the sort available so I just turned around and headed right on back. By the time I returned to Rome my feet were fairly sore and my legs tired and since I had only bought a bottle of water and a wafer cookie package on the way back I was very hungry as well. As soon as I got into the vicinity of the Coliseum I searched for a restaurant and ended up at one named the Coliseum which I am not sure was the best choice overall. I got a beer, a bottle of water and fettuccini with pesto. The pesto wasn’t really all that filled with basil and they had included small tomatoes in the mix but it tasted like pesto overall. They basically scammed me on price by about 2 Euros but I would have tipped them that if they hadn’t so I didn’t leave the tip I had been doing at other places. The food was OK overall but more than anything I think I needed to rest my legs for a bit. The beer was nice too if the more watery Nastro Azzuro? brand of beer around here.
Once done eating it was about 2:20pm and it was my mission to buy some souvenirs in the form of t-shirts and the like. All the shops are owned by Asian people of some sort. I think one shop had an Italian woman at the desk. Most of the stuff is basically the same from shop to shop and not one place sells teddy bears of any sort. I would think it would be a natural to have a Roman Centurion or Julius Cesar bear to sell, but no, only cheap crummy looking puppets of Pinocchio which there was no way I would buy. I managed to buy a few things in a windy course that took me up and down the Vias Cavour and Nationale. By then I was spent for much more walking and even if there were more shops down further I couldn’t put the energy together to get any further away from the hotel than I got. I do hope the airport has a thing or two worth buying in the international terminal. I didn’t really seem much in the terminal I used when I flew to Sicily but also I had no time at all. I am also hoping that I can actually get in the plane on a gate rather than a bus to stairs outdoors. We’ll see.
After the shopping I returned to the room to rest because it was about 4:45pm. Still too early to get dinner in most places around here and I needed the time off my feet anyway. I started out by writing the best majority of this before just relaxing a bit until it was time to eat.
For dinner I had intended to go back to La Mensa di Bacco again because of all the restaurants around here I liked them the most. Unfortunately I had not noticed that they are closed on Saturday so when I got outside to look for them they were all chained up. I was a bit disappointed about that but I chose a secondary place I had eyed most of the week but not gone to yet which was called 27 Tudini Gabriele & Tomoko. I would assume that they cater to Japanese people based on the Japanese tour that went in and the fact that they had a Japanese menu. They were a bit expensive but had a couple distinguishing features, the main one being a fairly extensive artisanal beer list all from Italy. From that I chose a beer that was an Italian version of an American pale ale. I shudder to think how much it cost but it was actually pretty good as in I would drink it again if for a more reasonable price. For dinner I skipped primi and went straight to having the roast chicken, which turned out to be two legs and some red and green peppers with a very nice yellowy-orange sauce. I cannot say what the sauce flavor was supposed to be but it was enjoyable. I accompanied that with some roasted potatoes that had maybe a touch too much rosemary on them. Overall it was easy to get rid of the excess rosemary though and they were cooked correctly and quite tasty especially when rubbed through the sauce from the chicken. After eating I was deciding if I wanted dessert for a couple minutes but instead opted to get a grappa as I had not had one yet in Italy (mainly because it was hard to identify them in restaurants). It was a clear grappa that was a touch rough but really not bad. It was definitely not the best grappa I have ever had though. After I was done with that it took the waiter forever to get my bill but it appeared that he was really overwhelmed with tables and I wouldn’t have held it against him too much if I hadn’t needed to use the facilities fairly badly. Since it was a few moments from the hotel I paid and rushed back to do so.
I came back to the room and finished up this while watching some Europa League Soccer. I never did mention the thing that irks me about European sports. The real issue I have is that every single jersey design is basically an advertisement for some sort of product rather than the team. Some, like the hockey team ones were a mess of ads rather than any sort of team name or logo. In many respects their jerseys are the equivalent of NASCAR paint jobs. It doesn’t matter what sport you are talking about. This becomes an issue when, say, your favorite team takes on sponsorship from a product or company you dislike I would think. How can you support your team by wearing their gear if you hate the logos plastered all over it? At least that would bother me. It would be like if the Patriots got rid of their team logos and replaced them with Vonage logos or something. Yeck. Anyway, the next thing to mention is about European league football. That is soccer. I am sure that they have resources the world over to get the best players out there to play professionally. The problem is there are so many teams in so many countries on so many different levels of the sport that it is honestly very watered down talent in I am sure more than 75% of the games you can watch. I am sure that what they are airing here in Italy is not remotely the premier teams with the premier players. I have seen British Premier League soccer and know there must be versions as good in many other countries including in Italy but they must play so infrequently you are more likely to get bad football than good. It makes it all the less interesting for a person who is not really truly a fan of the sport. I am American after all. It doesn’t make sense to not stop time when play stops and then arbitrarily add on an amount of extra time based on guesswork. It is also tough to watch guys get barely touched and flop around for 5 minutes like they were shot by a gun. It gets much worse when teams don’t even really have the ability to accurately pass and there is no speed whatsoever to the game. I think, world sport or not, the world could use a lot less professional soccer teams and maybe we might find it more enjoyable. I might anyway. But enough of sports.
Day 16 is my return to home. I am set to get up early. I already purchased my ticket for the Da Vinci Express. I am basically packed already. As vacations go this one has seemed like 2 full weeks. I am not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. I did like Rome a lot after all though. My legs and feet are tired…
It may take me until next week to get all the pictures posted. I hope folks can be patient.
Today I was not really sure what to do with myself but when I woke up I was nagged by the idea that I should again try to walk the Appian Way or I would regret it. So after my breakfast I set out immediately. This time I was armed with the knowledge of where everything was a fairly efficient route to get to the park. It is technically a park. In fact I was there by 8:20am. What I had sort of realized but was sort of deluding myself on was how long the park is. I think it measures 11 miles from top to bottom.
In the early going I really needed to visit a bagno and there happened to be a couple sites to visit so I hit both of those. They were both castles in their time dating back to the 2nd century BC or so. Owned by important people and all that. They are ruins now but still the size of the first is very impressive and the latter was still neat. The second had a cat that followed me around a bit and figured she should get some cat dander on me as well. There was a box where she sleeps inside the castle.
If I were J.R.R. Tolkien I would have to give you a step by step detail of 11 miles of course. I think walking over 22 miles not including my in Rome time has sort of worn me out to the idea of actually writing things in too much detail. Suffice it to say the longer it felt like it was getting the greater the pace I took on in an attempt to finish it quicker and get back to Rome to buy some souvenirs. I checked the clock when I reached what I presume was the end of the trail and it was 11:20. Granted on the early going I was walking slower and no matter what I was stopping to take pictures on the way out so the timing is a bit deceiving. The roads on the trail are all very uneven cobbles of different make-ups that cause for some tiring footing at times. I am sure that didn’t help me in either direction. There were a couple points where work was being done on the cobbles and I was forced to walk on the shoulders which were also torn up in those areas. After a very long time the road turned into a trail. In the very latter stages it appeared that the locals dumped their trash there and occasionally someone came and picked it up but didn’t clean every last bit. I found that a bit disappointing.
In any event the trail is basically an ancient highway to Rome from the southeast. Along the way there are all sorts of buildings and parts of buildings that had been unearthed. Some of them were fenced off, some were not. Some looked very fantastic and others were just bits of stone wall. I took pictures of mostly everything that needed to be represented along the way, mainly skipping things that looked too similar to things I had already seen and taken pictures of.
I can say that the weather held out a bit too perfectly as it was sunny and hot the whole time. Most of the people along the trail seemed to distrust someone walking so fast that wasn’t in a running suit but what do I care really? When I reached what I presumed was the end I turned around, put the camera away and just did a speed run back to the top of the way. I checked when I was officially back on Roman streets and it was 1:30pm. I can’t say if I really went the full 11 miles each way but if the pictomap at the point I turned around was accurate to what I think I saw then yes, I did. I will need to check with more detail on picture I took of one of the maps that was in the early going of the road. Like most of Rome they are not generous with You Are Here maps so I really had no idea what sort of progress I was making on my way out the whole time. On the way back I at least had the benefit of knowing what I had already seen. There are tons of bicycles on the road but overall cars are kept from being on there except people how have farms or houses along the way it appears so the traffic was many foot and bicycle. There is the early stretch which is quite scary with the close walls and cars racing through in both sections but after the two catacombs I didn’t actually get to visit (and didn’t bother with this time) it wasn’t long before traffic was detoured away from the course. It did make for a pleasant summer feeling walk. I would have preferred to get going even earlier if I had any idea how long it was going to be.
The thought did cross my mind to try to take a bus on the far end but it didn’t appear there would be anything of the sort available so I just turned around and headed right on back. By the time I returned to Rome my feet were fairly sore and my legs tired and since I had only bought a bottle of water and a wafer cookie package on the way back I was very hungry as well. As soon as I got into the vicinity of the Coliseum I searched for a restaurant and ended up at one named the Coliseum which I am not sure was the best choice overall. I got a beer, a bottle of water and fettuccini with pesto. The pesto wasn’t really all that filled with basil and they had included small tomatoes in the mix but it tasted like pesto overall. They basically scammed me on price by about 2 Euros but I would have tipped them that if they hadn’t so I didn’t leave the tip I had been doing at other places. The food was OK overall but more than anything I think I needed to rest my legs for a bit. The beer was nice too if the more watery Nastro Azzuro? brand of beer around here.
Once done eating it was about 2:20pm and it was my mission to buy some souvenirs in the form of t-shirts and the like. All the shops are owned by Asian people of some sort. I think one shop had an Italian woman at the desk. Most of the stuff is basically the same from shop to shop and not one place sells teddy bears of any sort. I would think it would be a natural to have a Roman Centurion or Julius Cesar bear to sell, but no, only cheap crummy looking puppets of Pinocchio which there was no way I would buy. I managed to buy a few things in a windy course that took me up and down the Vias Cavour and Nationale. By then I was spent for much more walking and even if there were more shops down further I couldn’t put the energy together to get any further away from the hotel than I got. I do hope the airport has a thing or two worth buying in the international terminal. I didn’t really seem much in the terminal I used when I flew to Sicily but also I had no time at all. I am also hoping that I can actually get in the plane on a gate rather than a bus to stairs outdoors. We’ll see.
After the shopping I returned to the room to rest because it was about 4:45pm. Still too early to get dinner in most places around here and I needed the time off my feet anyway. I started out by writing the best majority of this before just relaxing a bit until it was time to eat.
For dinner I had intended to go back to La Mensa di Bacco again because of all the restaurants around here I liked them the most. Unfortunately I had not noticed that they are closed on Saturday so when I got outside to look for them they were all chained up. I was a bit disappointed about that but I chose a secondary place I had eyed most of the week but not gone to yet which was called 27 Tudini Gabriele & Tomoko. I would assume that they cater to Japanese people based on the Japanese tour that went in and the fact that they had a Japanese menu. They were a bit expensive but had a couple distinguishing features, the main one being a fairly extensive artisanal beer list all from Italy. From that I chose a beer that was an Italian version of an American pale ale. I shudder to think how much it cost but it was actually pretty good as in I would drink it again if for a more reasonable price. For dinner I skipped primi and went straight to having the roast chicken, which turned out to be two legs and some red and green peppers with a very nice yellowy-orange sauce. I cannot say what the sauce flavor was supposed to be but it was enjoyable. I accompanied that with some roasted potatoes that had maybe a touch too much rosemary on them. Overall it was easy to get rid of the excess rosemary though and they were cooked correctly and quite tasty especially when rubbed through the sauce from the chicken. After eating I was deciding if I wanted dessert for a couple minutes but instead opted to get a grappa as I had not had one yet in Italy (mainly because it was hard to identify them in restaurants). It was a clear grappa that was a touch rough but really not bad. It was definitely not the best grappa I have ever had though. After I was done with that it took the waiter forever to get my bill but it appeared that he was really overwhelmed with tables and I wouldn’t have held it against him too much if I hadn’t needed to use the facilities fairly badly. Since it was a few moments from the hotel I paid and rushed back to do so.
I came back to the room and finished up this while watching some Europa League Soccer. I never did mention the thing that irks me about European sports. The real issue I have is that every single jersey design is basically an advertisement for some sort of product rather than the team. Some, like the hockey team ones were a mess of ads rather than any sort of team name or logo. In many respects their jerseys are the equivalent of NASCAR paint jobs. It doesn’t matter what sport you are talking about. This becomes an issue when, say, your favorite team takes on sponsorship from a product or company you dislike I would think. How can you support your team by wearing their gear if you hate the logos plastered all over it? At least that would bother me. It would be like if the Patriots got rid of their team logos and replaced them with Vonage logos or something. Yeck. Anyway, the next thing to mention is about European league football. That is soccer. I am sure that they have resources the world over to get the best players out there to play professionally. The problem is there are so many teams in so many countries on so many different levels of the sport that it is honestly very watered down talent in I am sure more than 75% of the games you can watch. I am sure that what they are airing here in Italy is not remotely the premier teams with the premier players. I have seen British Premier League soccer and know there must be versions as good in many other countries including in Italy but they must play so infrequently you are more likely to get bad football than good. It makes it all the less interesting for a person who is not really truly a fan of the sport. I am American after all. It doesn’t make sense to not stop time when play stops and then arbitrarily add on an amount of extra time based on guesswork. It is also tough to watch guys get barely touched and flop around for 5 minutes like they were shot by a gun. It gets much worse when teams don’t even really have the ability to accurately pass and there is no speed whatsoever to the game. I think, world sport or not, the world could use a lot less professional soccer teams and maybe we might find it more enjoyable. I might anyway. But enough of sports.
Day 16 is my return to home. I am set to get up early. I already purchased my ticket for the Da Vinci Express. I am basically packed already. As vacations go this one has seemed like 2 full weeks. I am not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. I did like Rome a lot after all though. My legs and feet are tired…
It may take me until next week to get all the pictures posted. I hope folks can be patient.
Friday, November 05, 2010
Italy Day 14
I woke up early for some reason and I killed a few minutes flipping through the couple hundred mostly non-functional TV stations (it must be satellite) until I found an Italian hockey game being re-aired. It was a dark arena and the players made most Boston area college teams look like 10 year pros but it was still something to watch. I suspect it was situated somewhere in the Alps region with the adverts on the ice and boards.
After killing enough time to get ready and start off with my breakfast at the hotel I walked down to a Da Vinci museum that was displaying a series of his larger inventions from drawings as made in the appropriate material. That is to say there were models of the various machines he invented. Obviously some of them worked and some didn’t, especially the flying machines but it was still an interesting idea to see them I thought. I arrived an hour before they were going to open so managed to get another coffee at a cafeteria and then wandered for a while until they let me in. I was the first person in and they hadn’t even finished turning on all the lights as I started through it. I did like the museum but it took maybe about 45 minutes to see and read everything there. I took a bunch of pictures. When I was leaving a family was coming in and the woman at the desk told them not to take pictures. No one told me that and there were no signs saying not to so I don’t feel like I cheated too much. Overall it was a bit too expensive at 9 Euros but I am happy I did it anyway.
After the Da Vinci museum I intended to go to the Villa Medici. It is a now French owned villa that was owned by the Medici (a strong financial family from Florence) and built up by one of the arch-bishops as well if I understood it correctly. Napoleon bought the villa and since it has been a home for French dignitaries as well as many artists who speak French. They take turns staying and working on various projects. The artists are all established artists it seems and they spend a lot of time either reproducing ancient art or who knows what else. Of course I also arrived about an hour early for the English language tour which started at noon so I walked into the park grounds that are considered part of the Villa Borghese which is a museum that you need to make reservations for. I knew this from Kate the woman I met the day before who said she had reserved her tickets for it. I didn’t reach the villa in this trip through because I was mainly trying not to be late for the ticket I had bought for noon. So I wandered a bit and bought a package of cookies to eat because I wouldn’t be done with the tour until after 1pm.
I got back to the Villa Medici with about 15 extra minutes and patiently waited out the time until the tour started. All the people on the English tour were Americans, two from Michigan and two from Philly. I talked a bit of sports with the guy from Philly which was nice. He agrees that Philly fans are horrible and said he wouldn’t bring his kid to an Eagles game until he was 15. I explained my experiences with Philly fans via the Winter Classic. He said it is usually worse there. In any event, our guide was Italian and her name began with an L I believe unfortunately she said it quickly and quietly so I didn’t really get it. She was nice and spoke English fairly well but it sounded as if she was concentrating on saying certain words so her accent was a bit exaggerated at times. All the same she knew a lot about Rome and the villa so it was a good tour.
The tour is of the gardens in the villa. The actual villa is privately owned and is off limits to tourists. I was surprised that the main gardens didn’t have any flowers. According to the guide that is typical of Italian gardens of the sort. They instead do geometric shapes of rocks and sand. It is basically what we saw but I figured with the climate it would be easy for them to grow flowers. Also it is a French owed estate and the French definitely did flowers. All the same the grounds were fairly large. The better side of the villa is inside the gates so I was glad I got to see that. The tour takes you through the gardens and shows you some artwork that the various artists that have stayed there have made including a series of 8 statues that had been recreated from statues found in ruins in Rome. Also you get to see a room that used to be a tower along an ancient Roman wall that had been frescoed and was in the state of being restored as they found a thin veneer of marble underneath some wallpaper that had been put in the room. It was interesting and the frescoes were fairly well maintained even with the humidity and light that appeared easily able to get in.
After that we visited a room with a bunch of plaster reproductions of statues and one marble statue of King Louis XVIII though it is believed it was started as a statue of Napoleon then recommissioned when Napoleon was sent into exile. Lastly we got to visit the grand room which had 8 really well restored tapestries from King Louis the XIV. They were very colorful. She said they were restored recently. The whole tour took about an hour and 15 minutes and she told us a lot of information I could not remotely repeat in this blog but it was interesting and very fun. I did manage to get a picture of the guide though I made her blush of course. After the tour I chatted with the guy from Philly for a few more minutes before moving on to get back into the park of the Villa Borghese, it being right around the corner.
In there I had lunch in the form of a Pizza Napoli which unfortunately meant with anchovies (I didn’t know that and there were no descriptions on the menu. It was top of list and I assumed it would be simple. I guess it was but the anchovies definitely were not my favorite though I ate all but the equivalent of one slice of it.). I rounded that out with a beer and then after leaving that place found a mobile snack shop and bought a chocolate gelato which I ate while walking through the park.
The park is very large and I wandered around for a few minutes while heading towards the Villa Borghese to see the outside of the building anyway, knowing I couldn’t get in. Oddly, Kate and he friend were there very early waiting for their 3pm reservations. I chatted with them for a few minutes. Apparently the place is very strict on what you can bring in and no pictures and you have to go in at the set time and you have 2 hours to do the site and get out. It is not a tour per se, you go in on your own but they apparently let people in in groups and there is generally a large line to both stow bags in the baggage check then to get into the museum. It sounded like a terrible hassle really. I chatted with them for a few minutes while they were killing time then when they were going to line up at about 2:45 to get inside I said goodbye and continued my walk around the park. I definitely did not attack the park in the most efficient manner. It has a zoo but the zoo costs 12.50 Euros and I was not into paying that much at all so I skipped it. I was curious to find the Piazza Thorvaldson because of the name and I had a very unpleasant time doing so. The map of Rome I have does not cover this park and the maps in the park were far too infrequent to be useful. I made a couple wrong turns in guesses and that sent me back to where I started the park before I regrouped and set back to finding the place. As I said my stubbornness paid off but with little reward as I cannot really say why it was named such. I can say there are a lot of statues of non-Italians in the park. Many different people who “liberated” different countries in whatever context that means. I also so the museum of modern art which I of course will not visit because modern art is more lost on me than older art is.
By this point it was rolling around to 4pm and I figured I should head back to the hotel. I was in a new area of town for myself and I made a couple guesses based on my Rome map and was correct so much so that it took me about half an hour to get back to the hotel. I had been expecting much longer. There were a couple steep hill climbs in this part of the town but all in all I was able to get in and relax and write a fair portion of this before heading out for dinner.
For dinner I rounded the corner to Ristorante Il Condor. It was pretty much basic I guess. I had a beer and a lasagna for dinner and followed with a café Americano and a tiramisu. The food was good and the service reasonable. The prices were pretty much the same as anywhere else I’ve been. They didn’t try to sell any extras to ring up the bill higher and they include service and all that in their prices which is nice. I didn’t really have a lot of soul to decide what to eat so I basically ordered what the Swedish guy next to me ordered honestly. I am not sure why, just maybe getting a bit tired of Italian food. In any event the tiramisu was ok but not the best dessert I have ever had. The coffee was good, not too chalky though obviously made with the espresso press like all coffee is around here. I think if I skipped the coffee and the dessert I could have come in at 11 Euro or so. As it is I paid 18.50. I should say the servings were large because they were, so there is that. I realize as I am putting up Euro values that you really need to multiply everything by 1.5 to figure out a US dollar guestimate but I try not to think about exchanges during trips or it gets to be too much. Being on vacation the last thing you should be doing is worrying about your budget. You can do that after you get back and sort everything out.
I haven’t decided yet what to do with day 15. I have managed to see most of Rome itself a couple times over and the thing I wanted to do which was visit the Villa Este and Hadrian’s Villa are closed for the winter since Halloween so I missed that. I may just have to tromp around town one more time.
After killing enough time to get ready and start off with my breakfast at the hotel I walked down to a Da Vinci museum that was displaying a series of his larger inventions from drawings as made in the appropriate material. That is to say there were models of the various machines he invented. Obviously some of them worked and some didn’t, especially the flying machines but it was still an interesting idea to see them I thought. I arrived an hour before they were going to open so managed to get another coffee at a cafeteria and then wandered for a while until they let me in. I was the first person in and they hadn’t even finished turning on all the lights as I started through it. I did like the museum but it took maybe about 45 minutes to see and read everything there. I took a bunch of pictures. When I was leaving a family was coming in and the woman at the desk told them not to take pictures. No one told me that and there were no signs saying not to so I don’t feel like I cheated too much. Overall it was a bit too expensive at 9 Euros but I am happy I did it anyway.
After the Da Vinci museum I intended to go to the Villa Medici. It is a now French owned villa that was owned by the Medici (a strong financial family from Florence) and built up by one of the arch-bishops as well if I understood it correctly. Napoleon bought the villa and since it has been a home for French dignitaries as well as many artists who speak French. They take turns staying and working on various projects. The artists are all established artists it seems and they spend a lot of time either reproducing ancient art or who knows what else. Of course I also arrived about an hour early for the English language tour which started at noon so I walked into the park grounds that are considered part of the Villa Borghese which is a museum that you need to make reservations for. I knew this from Kate the woman I met the day before who said she had reserved her tickets for it. I didn’t reach the villa in this trip through because I was mainly trying not to be late for the ticket I had bought for noon. So I wandered a bit and bought a package of cookies to eat because I wouldn’t be done with the tour until after 1pm.
I got back to the Villa Medici with about 15 extra minutes and patiently waited out the time until the tour started. All the people on the English tour were Americans, two from Michigan and two from Philly. I talked a bit of sports with the guy from Philly which was nice. He agrees that Philly fans are horrible and said he wouldn’t bring his kid to an Eagles game until he was 15. I explained my experiences with Philly fans via the Winter Classic. He said it is usually worse there. In any event, our guide was Italian and her name began with an L I believe unfortunately she said it quickly and quietly so I didn’t really get it. She was nice and spoke English fairly well but it sounded as if she was concentrating on saying certain words so her accent was a bit exaggerated at times. All the same she knew a lot about Rome and the villa so it was a good tour.
The tour is of the gardens in the villa. The actual villa is privately owned and is off limits to tourists. I was surprised that the main gardens didn’t have any flowers. According to the guide that is typical of Italian gardens of the sort. They instead do geometric shapes of rocks and sand. It is basically what we saw but I figured with the climate it would be easy for them to grow flowers. Also it is a French owed estate and the French definitely did flowers. All the same the grounds were fairly large. The better side of the villa is inside the gates so I was glad I got to see that. The tour takes you through the gardens and shows you some artwork that the various artists that have stayed there have made including a series of 8 statues that had been recreated from statues found in ruins in Rome. Also you get to see a room that used to be a tower along an ancient Roman wall that had been frescoed and was in the state of being restored as they found a thin veneer of marble underneath some wallpaper that had been put in the room. It was interesting and the frescoes were fairly well maintained even with the humidity and light that appeared easily able to get in.
After that we visited a room with a bunch of plaster reproductions of statues and one marble statue of King Louis XVIII though it is believed it was started as a statue of Napoleon then recommissioned when Napoleon was sent into exile. Lastly we got to visit the grand room which had 8 really well restored tapestries from King Louis the XIV. They were very colorful. She said they were restored recently. The whole tour took about an hour and 15 minutes and she told us a lot of information I could not remotely repeat in this blog but it was interesting and very fun. I did manage to get a picture of the guide though I made her blush of course. After the tour I chatted with the guy from Philly for a few more minutes before moving on to get back into the park of the Villa Borghese, it being right around the corner.
In there I had lunch in the form of a Pizza Napoli which unfortunately meant with anchovies (I didn’t know that and there were no descriptions on the menu. It was top of list and I assumed it would be simple. I guess it was but the anchovies definitely were not my favorite though I ate all but the equivalent of one slice of it.). I rounded that out with a beer and then after leaving that place found a mobile snack shop and bought a chocolate gelato which I ate while walking through the park.
The park is very large and I wandered around for a few minutes while heading towards the Villa Borghese to see the outside of the building anyway, knowing I couldn’t get in. Oddly, Kate and he friend were there very early waiting for their 3pm reservations. I chatted with them for a few minutes. Apparently the place is very strict on what you can bring in and no pictures and you have to go in at the set time and you have 2 hours to do the site and get out. It is not a tour per se, you go in on your own but they apparently let people in in groups and there is generally a large line to both stow bags in the baggage check then to get into the museum. It sounded like a terrible hassle really. I chatted with them for a few minutes while they were killing time then when they were going to line up at about 2:45 to get inside I said goodbye and continued my walk around the park. I definitely did not attack the park in the most efficient manner. It has a zoo but the zoo costs 12.50 Euros and I was not into paying that much at all so I skipped it. I was curious to find the Piazza Thorvaldson because of the name and I had a very unpleasant time doing so. The map of Rome I have does not cover this park and the maps in the park were far too infrequent to be useful. I made a couple wrong turns in guesses and that sent me back to where I started the park before I regrouped and set back to finding the place. As I said my stubbornness paid off but with little reward as I cannot really say why it was named such. I can say there are a lot of statues of non-Italians in the park. Many different people who “liberated” different countries in whatever context that means. I also so the museum of modern art which I of course will not visit because modern art is more lost on me than older art is.
By this point it was rolling around to 4pm and I figured I should head back to the hotel. I was in a new area of town for myself and I made a couple guesses based on my Rome map and was correct so much so that it took me about half an hour to get back to the hotel. I had been expecting much longer. There were a couple steep hill climbs in this part of the town but all in all I was able to get in and relax and write a fair portion of this before heading out for dinner.
For dinner I rounded the corner to Ristorante Il Condor. It was pretty much basic I guess. I had a beer and a lasagna for dinner and followed with a café Americano and a tiramisu. The food was good and the service reasonable. The prices were pretty much the same as anywhere else I’ve been. They didn’t try to sell any extras to ring up the bill higher and they include service and all that in their prices which is nice. I didn’t really have a lot of soul to decide what to eat so I basically ordered what the Swedish guy next to me ordered honestly. I am not sure why, just maybe getting a bit tired of Italian food. In any event the tiramisu was ok but not the best dessert I have ever had. The coffee was good, not too chalky though obviously made with the espresso press like all coffee is around here. I think if I skipped the coffee and the dessert I could have come in at 11 Euro or so. As it is I paid 18.50. I should say the servings were large because they were, so there is that. I realize as I am putting up Euro values that you really need to multiply everything by 1.5 to figure out a US dollar guestimate but I try not to think about exchanges during trips or it gets to be too much. Being on vacation the last thing you should be doing is worrying about your budget. You can do that after you get back and sort everything out.
I haven’t decided yet what to do with day 15. I have managed to see most of Rome itself a couple times over and the thing I wanted to do which was visit the Villa Este and Hadrian’s Villa are closed for the winter since Halloween so I missed that. I may just have to tromp around town one more time.
Thursday, November 04, 2010
Italy Day 13
Today I opted to go for something I had researched way back when I first started planning this trip. Outside of Rome there was a city named Ostia, it is quite close to the coastline. It appears that it is somewhere in the 2400 year old range or so but it fell into disuse in the 5th or 6th century AD. The site of the ruins is called Ostia Antica.
To get to Ostia Antica you really need to take a metro train from Rome. The best place for me was to walk to the Piramide station (right near the Pyramid of Sestia) and to get on there for the ride to Ostia Antica which is about half an hour. I could have taken the metro the whole way I assume but I like the walking and all that so rather than get in a dark crowded stuffy underground I would prefer to walk the 45 minutes or so to the train I needed to take. Vacations are supposed to be about relaxing and walking is a way I relax so it makes sense for me anyway.
I woke up at 7 and had breakfast at the hotel at 7:30 and was on my way to the train station. Armed with a lot more knowledge of how to get around the city it was probably less than 45 minutes to get to Piramide station. First I used a self cleaning bathroom which looked like the self cleaning part wasn’t working so well, and that for .50 Euro. Inside I bought a day pass metro ticket and then found myself confused as to which train to take. It says this way to Lido line but then the Lido line just says the name of the stop Porta St. Paolo. So I had to ask if it was the train I needed to take. It took a few minutes to get through this process but I boarded a train that departed at 8:45 or so. The train ride was about a half an hour. This train was not very clean and very shabby looking and didn’t have any announcements or anything so I just had to keep track of the stops myself which I guess wasn’t too difficult.
Arriving in Ostia you get out of the station and do a flyover walkway over the autostrada towards the site. On the way you see a castle wall and then as you get there you turn into Ostia Antica. The site costs 6.50 Euro to get in if I recall. I think it was highly worth it. The city of Ostia is all ancient Roman ruins without the various transformation that Christianity brought on in Italy. There is one Christian basilica ruin but that was from 400 AD or so. I realize that most all of it has fallen down and many of the buildings would be much taller than they are now but it is still amazing to think how people actually used to live there well over 2000 years ago.
The site is gigantic. I need to point that out. Getting there at about 9:15 or so I was inside the actual grounds until about 2pm, including only a few minutes for a pizza and beer lunch. It is the remains of a complete city that used to live on the banks of the Tiber. The problem is in the 15th century the river flooded and the course of the river changed so the site is no longer on the river but that might actually be for the best. There is still a fair amount of excavation and restoration going on but even then there is an unbelievable number of buildings to see and may different varieties whether they be warehouses, housing, hot baths, temples, stores or whatever. I would have to assume there are some liberties taken with some of the placements of statues and the like but overall it looks like they mainly have tried to dig up what they have found. Another cool thing is that there are a very large number of areas that are free reign to walk about. I mean there are more places you can go than can’t. It was neat to get inside some of the buildings and even into some more underground stuff. I am not sure if they are dug completely down to the original ground level. I suspect some buildings may have had cellars based on stairways and the like. In the common living areas it is obvious that the living quarters were overall very small. I am sure the wealthy had more to live in but still if the book I bought is accurate most of the buildings were made of non-flammable materials in an effort to reduce fires. They also had a fair amount of water collection and deposit to help deal with fires. It is believed due to their regulations they had a lot fewer fires than the city of Rome did in similar time.
Something that is found all over Ostia is mosaic floors. Whether in the mercantile area or in the baths or whatnot there are tons of black and white mosaics. I am sure most of what has been found is restored and according to their information boards they have had to recover from problems caused by poor restoration techniques in the 20th century. In many cases they had to go back to original photos in order to more accurately reproduce the corrupted versions that were created during initial restoration. Still there are tons of them all over the place and many of them are quite nice. It was not really predictable where you might find one so it meant a lot of zig-zagging through various parts of the ruins to see every nook and cranny to make sure you don’t miss anything. I think it was worth it though. It was a lot of walking and even a fair bit of climbing steps and the like but I enjoyed every minute of it. It helped that the weather was all sun with a maybe 75F day an no real wind, though I think a touch of wind may have helped for cooling this off a bit at times.
They have a small museum with some relics that were taken out of the ruins and have been cleaned and put on display. There is also a gift shop (book store in Italy) and a cafeteria where I bought my pizza and beer and an ice cream bar. The pizza was not so great and the beer was a Scottish 9% version called Tennants Extra Strong I think. It was decent. The ice cream bar was a Togo classic which had very thick chocolate on the outside and vanilla ice cream inside. I liked it. There is also a section that displays some of the various marbles that were excavated and where they were from and what they were used for. It was interesting to see so many versions. I really know little about geology. This sorted of helped to point that out. Rock is rock, right?
When I was finally on my way out I was interested in seeing about the castle on the edge of town. It is in your face as soon as you get off the train basically so I hoped it was something I could visit. Walking around the wall to the square I found there was a small church and the entrance. It was closed but not locked and some people in cleaning uniforms were heading in at the same time. It turns out that the place would open for a tour at 3pm and it was just a bit past 2. While finding this out I met a woman from Canada named Kate who had just arrived in Rome today and was also curious to see the castle. Since we had near an hour to kill we decided to see if we could find a coffee and to chat. Her husband is a pilot (second woman married to a pilot I have met) for Air Canada. She was going to be going on a major Mediterranean cruise in the next couple days it sounded. We chatted about travel and killed the hour fairly easily. She has been to a lot of the place I have been to except many years before I went to them. We compared notes on how they were then to now. It was very interesting.
After finishing our coffees we headed back to the castle and were allowed to come in for the tour which amounted to a woman walking us to various rooms and waiting for us to be done looking. There were about 4 Italians and 2 Spanish people aside from us. The guide did not speak English at all. According to the Spanish people she was not really giving any history or the like, just taking people in to the rooms. I had already read on the signs outside the castle it was initially built in the 9th century and then redone in the 15th century and of course was almost entirely Christian based. There was some theory it might have been built on older ruins but it is speculation. In any event the castle was very nice and they were restoring some ceiling frescos. It has an outer wall and an inner keep with a tower. We got to the top room of the tower but it is enclosed. They have some artifacts in cases in the various rooms. I think the tour took maybe half an hour or so. I wasn’t fully watching the time. The unfortunate thing was that they didn’t allow pictures inside. I would have liked to take a few. Still for free it was definitely worth it.
When we had finished the tour both Kate and I were heading into Rome, her to a stop before mine so we rode the metro back together. It was much nicer train that announced next stops and the like but there were no seats available so we had to stand. In any event we talked until her stop then wished each other safe and enjoyable travels. When I got off the train I had to walk back to the hotel about 45 minutes or so and the I took a few minutes to start writing this because it was before dinner time being just a few minutes before 5pm. Most of the time it is easier to write while it is still fresh in my head and I haven’t clouded myself with too much beer or wine. All in all it was a very fine day. One of the best days I have had in Italy. Granted I had the whole drama of having the GPS stolen that really set me off for a while, the driving the car was a bit of an issue too, and I really didn’t like the cleanliness or visit value of Palermo but overall it has really been an enjoyable trip. That might be lost somewhat in the mix of my issues with my arrival in Sicily along with a couple of days of sort of crummy weather, but it has not really been a bad time at all. Those were blips that I eventually dealt with and moved on. Still today was pleasant and something very much in line with what I enjoy seeing and doing. And it is always great to meet nice people to chat with here and there. That obviously has happened more in Rome than in Sicily and I am grateful for it.
After the brief stop I walked the block really quickly to decide where to eat and ended up at the Trattoria Elektra which was right downstairs from my hotel. I had spaghetti aglia a olio a peperoncini for a primi and grilled sea bass for the secondi (not able to give the Italian name sorry). The pasta was decent but I make this at home on occasion and I believe mine is better. The sea bass was a whole fish presentation. I managed to get the vast majority of the meat but I had to fight through a few bones in the process. I accompanied this with a very gigantic beer (I didn’t think large meant keg sized) and followed everything up with a vanilla ice cream and coffee sauce dessert. This was by far my most expensive meal in Italy and though the food was good I won’t go back there. The service was reasonable but the prices are a touch high for my tastes. I realize I ate a lot of food but all the same I don’t think the bill amounted to what I did eat in the long run. If you accept the whole fish was the same cost as the fish I had at other restaurants then it really seems disproportionate. I suppose I could have made it cheaper by trying a tourist menu but I wanted what I ordered rather than what was on the tourist menu. As I said, the food was reasonably good but not for the prices.
From the end of dinner it was up to the room to watch some odd European sports channels then call it a night.
To get to Ostia Antica you really need to take a metro train from Rome. The best place for me was to walk to the Piramide station (right near the Pyramid of Sestia) and to get on there for the ride to Ostia Antica which is about half an hour. I could have taken the metro the whole way I assume but I like the walking and all that so rather than get in a dark crowded stuffy underground I would prefer to walk the 45 minutes or so to the train I needed to take. Vacations are supposed to be about relaxing and walking is a way I relax so it makes sense for me anyway.
I woke up at 7 and had breakfast at the hotel at 7:30 and was on my way to the train station. Armed with a lot more knowledge of how to get around the city it was probably less than 45 minutes to get to Piramide station. First I used a self cleaning bathroom which looked like the self cleaning part wasn’t working so well, and that for .50 Euro. Inside I bought a day pass metro ticket and then found myself confused as to which train to take. It says this way to Lido line but then the Lido line just says the name of the stop Porta St. Paolo. So I had to ask if it was the train I needed to take. It took a few minutes to get through this process but I boarded a train that departed at 8:45 or so. The train ride was about a half an hour. This train was not very clean and very shabby looking and didn’t have any announcements or anything so I just had to keep track of the stops myself which I guess wasn’t too difficult.
Arriving in Ostia you get out of the station and do a flyover walkway over the autostrada towards the site. On the way you see a castle wall and then as you get there you turn into Ostia Antica. The site costs 6.50 Euro to get in if I recall. I think it was highly worth it. The city of Ostia is all ancient Roman ruins without the various transformation that Christianity brought on in Italy. There is one Christian basilica ruin but that was from 400 AD or so. I realize that most all of it has fallen down and many of the buildings would be much taller than they are now but it is still amazing to think how people actually used to live there well over 2000 years ago.
The site is gigantic. I need to point that out. Getting there at about 9:15 or so I was inside the actual grounds until about 2pm, including only a few minutes for a pizza and beer lunch. It is the remains of a complete city that used to live on the banks of the Tiber. The problem is in the 15th century the river flooded and the course of the river changed so the site is no longer on the river but that might actually be for the best. There is still a fair amount of excavation and restoration going on but even then there is an unbelievable number of buildings to see and may different varieties whether they be warehouses, housing, hot baths, temples, stores or whatever. I would have to assume there are some liberties taken with some of the placements of statues and the like but overall it looks like they mainly have tried to dig up what they have found. Another cool thing is that there are a very large number of areas that are free reign to walk about. I mean there are more places you can go than can’t. It was neat to get inside some of the buildings and even into some more underground stuff. I am not sure if they are dug completely down to the original ground level. I suspect some buildings may have had cellars based on stairways and the like. In the common living areas it is obvious that the living quarters were overall very small. I am sure the wealthy had more to live in but still if the book I bought is accurate most of the buildings were made of non-flammable materials in an effort to reduce fires. They also had a fair amount of water collection and deposit to help deal with fires. It is believed due to their regulations they had a lot fewer fires than the city of Rome did in similar time.
Something that is found all over Ostia is mosaic floors. Whether in the mercantile area or in the baths or whatnot there are tons of black and white mosaics. I am sure most of what has been found is restored and according to their information boards they have had to recover from problems caused by poor restoration techniques in the 20th century. In many cases they had to go back to original photos in order to more accurately reproduce the corrupted versions that were created during initial restoration. Still there are tons of them all over the place and many of them are quite nice. It was not really predictable where you might find one so it meant a lot of zig-zagging through various parts of the ruins to see every nook and cranny to make sure you don’t miss anything. I think it was worth it though. It was a lot of walking and even a fair bit of climbing steps and the like but I enjoyed every minute of it. It helped that the weather was all sun with a maybe 75F day an no real wind, though I think a touch of wind may have helped for cooling this off a bit at times.
They have a small museum with some relics that were taken out of the ruins and have been cleaned and put on display. There is also a gift shop (book store in Italy) and a cafeteria where I bought my pizza and beer and an ice cream bar. The pizza was not so great and the beer was a Scottish 9% version called Tennants Extra Strong I think. It was decent. The ice cream bar was a Togo classic which had very thick chocolate on the outside and vanilla ice cream inside. I liked it. There is also a section that displays some of the various marbles that were excavated and where they were from and what they were used for. It was interesting to see so many versions. I really know little about geology. This sorted of helped to point that out. Rock is rock, right?
When I was finally on my way out I was interested in seeing about the castle on the edge of town. It is in your face as soon as you get off the train basically so I hoped it was something I could visit. Walking around the wall to the square I found there was a small church and the entrance. It was closed but not locked and some people in cleaning uniforms were heading in at the same time. It turns out that the place would open for a tour at 3pm and it was just a bit past 2. While finding this out I met a woman from Canada named Kate who had just arrived in Rome today and was also curious to see the castle. Since we had near an hour to kill we decided to see if we could find a coffee and to chat. Her husband is a pilot (second woman married to a pilot I have met) for Air Canada. She was going to be going on a major Mediterranean cruise in the next couple days it sounded. We chatted about travel and killed the hour fairly easily. She has been to a lot of the place I have been to except many years before I went to them. We compared notes on how they were then to now. It was very interesting.
After finishing our coffees we headed back to the castle and were allowed to come in for the tour which amounted to a woman walking us to various rooms and waiting for us to be done looking. There were about 4 Italians and 2 Spanish people aside from us. The guide did not speak English at all. According to the Spanish people she was not really giving any history or the like, just taking people in to the rooms. I had already read on the signs outside the castle it was initially built in the 9th century and then redone in the 15th century and of course was almost entirely Christian based. There was some theory it might have been built on older ruins but it is speculation. In any event the castle was very nice and they were restoring some ceiling frescos. It has an outer wall and an inner keep with a tower. We got to the top room of the tower but it is enclosed. They have some artifacts in cases in the various rooms. I think the tour took maybe half an hour or so. I wasn’t fully watching the time. The unfortunate thing was that they didn’t allow pictures inside. I would have liked to take a few. Still for free it was definitely worth it.
When we had finished the tour both Kate and I were heading into Rome, her to a stop before mine so we rode the metro back together. It was much nicer train that announced next stops and the like but there were no seats available so we had to stand. In any event we talked until her stop then wished each other safe and enjoyable travels. When I got off the train I had to walk back to the hotel about 45 minutes or so and the I took a few minutes to start writing this because it was before dinner time being just a few minutes before 5pm. Most of the time it is easier to write while it is still fresh in my head and I haven’t clouded myself with too much beer or wine. All in all it was a very fine day. One of the best days I have had in Italy. Granted I had the whole drama of having the GPS stolen that really set me off for a while, the driving the car was a bit of an issue too, and I really didn’t like the cleanliness or visit value of Palermo but overall it has really been an enjoyable trip. That might be lost somewhat in the mix of my issues with my arrival in Sicily along with a couple of days of sort of crummy weather, but it has not really been a bad time at all. Those were blips that I eventually dealt with and moved on. Still today was pleasant and something very much in line with what I enjoy seeing and doing. And it is always great to meet nice people to chat with here and there. That obviously has happened more in Rome than in Sicily and I am grateful for it.
After the brief stop I walked the block really quickly to decide where to eat and ended up at the Trattoria Elektra which was right downstairs from my hotel. I had spaghetti aglia a olio a peperoncini for a primi and grilled sea bass for the secondi (not able to give the Italian name sorry). The pasta was decent but I make this at home on occasion and I believe mine is better. The sea bass was a whole fish presentation. I managed to get the vast majority of the meat but I had to fight through a few bones in the process. I accompanied this with a very gigantic beer (I didn’t think large meant keg sized) and followed everything up with a vanilla ice cream and coffee sauce dessert. This was by far my most expensive meal in Italy and though the food was good I won’t go back there. The service was reasonable but the prices are a touch high for my tastes. I realize I ate a lot of food but all the same I don’t think the bill amounted to what I did eat in the long run. If you accept the whole fish was the same cost as the fish I had at other restaurants then it really seems disproportionate. I suppose I could have made it cheaper by trying a tourist menu but I wanted what I ordered rather than what was on the tourist menu. As I said, the food was reasonably good but not for the prices.
From the end of dinner it was up to the room to watch some odd European sports channels then call it a night.
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
Italy Day 12
Today I again started with a quick breakfast in the hotel and then on to the Castel St. Angelo. Of course I started out early and I didn’t stop as much to take pictures along the way so I ended up getting there at 8:30 and the place doesn’t open until 9am. So I opted to walk further up the river to the Piazza del Popoli. I think it took me about 20 minutes each way to get there. It is basically a square with an Egyptian obelisk and some fountains and the like. After the quick visit there I turned right around and visited the Castel. It is in truth a giant monument that had been used as a prison, residence of a pope and a few other things over time. I think the original foundation is Roman or maybe earlier and then it was modified and added to and rebuilt and the like until it is what it is today. It has an outer wall and you can get to the top terrace as well so there is a fair amount to do even though it is not really that big of a place. I stayed there for just a bit under two hours before moving on. The entry was 8 Euros but overall I think it was worth it. I am sure I took a fair number of pictures.
After leaving the Castel I moved on to see if I could visit the Mausoleum of Augustus but it is blatantly obvious that the location has been closed for quite some time and they do not appear to be renovating it currently. I do hope they intend to at some point. It has a high fence around it which made it tough to get any pictures of anything and it was all really overgrown inside with weeds and other plants that showed it hasn’t been open for the duration. This is the second of this type of monument I have run into that does not appear to be open. In any event I walked around it then onto the Via del Corso where I walked back up the Piazza del Popoli and then back downwards again where my goal was the Fountain of Trevi. It is obvious that the Via del Corso is one of the shopping streets in Rome. I basically rushed through it.
The Fountain was fully overrun with people. As with other places of interest there were at least a half a dozen walking tours eating up all the space and making it generally overcrowded. I took a few pictures. It really is a beautiful fountain but it would be much nicer without hundreds of people crawling all over it and intentionally getting in the way of your photos and the like. Since it was close to lunch time and I was near a McDonald’s I decided to not go Italian for lunch. I figured the crummy burger would give me some protein I have been skipping throughout most of my lunches in Italy and I could compare it off to the US version. I had a McBacon something. It was basically a bacon double cheeseburger with something like Russian dressing on it. It was ok. Very similar to the US. I think the fries are better in the US. The packaging claimed the burger was 100% Italian beef. In any event it was something to kill a bit of time and to fill my stomach and overall I was not disgusted with it.
After lunch I moved on and found the Pantheon. This was under some renovation on the outside so one half is all scaffolding which is of course disappointing. The outside obviously looks very Roman and old. It is free to get in. You can buy an audio guide but I rarely do that. It is a very large dome and it is very crowded again with walking tours and other people and at times is tough to move around in. The inside has been of course Christianized, what else would the Italians do. It is a bit disappointing because I would prefer the Roman stuff stay non-Christian but I guess that is a bit too much to ask for. It is in incredible condition on the inside and is very beautiful I will give it that. Really very nice for a free visit. I was overall happy with the monument though I would like to have seen what it looked like on the outside just a bit better without the scaffolding. You can’t have everything of course.
Next along the course was the Piazza Navona. It is a square with another obelisk built into a fountain and two other fountains on it. There are a ton of people selling cheesy artwork all over the square and the place was overrun with statue mimes as well which is a bit annoying. Still it was less crowded than the Fountain or the Pantheon was. I bought a coffee gelato here that was much better than the crema gelato I had the day before outside the basilica. I spent a few minutes wandering the square eating it then I moved back on my way.
I basically knew where I was and I opted to just do a couple side street dives to see if I could turn up anything interesting but really it just kept bringing me back to places I was familiar with. I ended up coming up to the side of the Monumento a Vittorio Emanuele II which is the very large white building with 2 chariot statues on either side of it. It is a very large building. What I found is that you can get up on the top through this side entrance. They have a small cafeteria and you can walk around the majority of the lower roof and take pictures of the Roman skyline. They also have a paid attraction which gets you up to the top of the building basically where the two statues are. The lift ride costs 7 Euro and I paid it to get up there. I should point out the weather was absolutely beautiful at about 76F or so and with minimal clouds. The rain feared from the day before never came to pass then and the rest of the week is supposed to be clear and warm (to me). The morning started off in the low 50sF but I didn’t bother with the sweatshirt as it would only be extra weight for me. You can tell the true northern non-European tourists around here because they don’t have coats. The rest are all bundled up like it is mid-winter at the north pole in this 75F+ weather. Ah well. The top of the monument might be the highest place you can get in Rome except the dome of the basilica. Of course that was mobbed and this was a lot less crowded so I liked it a lot. It probably helped that I hadn’t climbed thousands of stairs in sweltering heat before getting to the top. In any event it gives a great view of the Roman landscape and you can see pretty much to the mountains when the weather is this clear. I was very happy that I paid the 7 Euros even if it probably is a bit of a rip off considering how far from the edges the safety railings are set. It does make it a bit tough to get some of the better pictures I would have liked to get but all in all I managed with what I was looking for.
After returning to ground level and leaving the monument I decided to head in to the hotel to rest for a few minutes. It was still only about 3pm but I had to do some research and I wasn’t sure if places I wanted to go would be places to just look at or to go inside. I figured I could use the pit stop and get a few minutes of rest and to look at email and the like. The Hotel Milo does indeed have a wireless internet connection but I have to be sitting on my toilet to reach it which is sort of awkward. Anyway I stayed for less than an hour and armed myself with a few places to look towards for tomorrow. I walked down to the Quirinale which is the home of the Italian president after being a papal residence in the past. It is not very far from the hotel but involved directions I had not yet walked so I figured it would kill some time to find my way there then to work my way back because it was still very early for dinner. Of course the weather was still perfect so that wasn’t a problem at all. I was hoping that by the time I returned to the area of the hotel it would be getting dark and then I could find some food.
The building of the Quirinale is very large and I was unable to actually circumnavigate it because the roads don’t seem to follow around it correctly. Nonetheless I tried and found myself turned into some odd locations for a bit. I had a basic idea of where I was so I was not too concerned with being lost. Aside from that while Rome is a moderately large city I have managed to figure out the main streets well enough that I can find my way back to the hotel with relative ease. It helps that certain landmarks are taller than any of the buildings out there. I would assume that the city has building ordinances keeping any structures from getting too tall that weren’t some form of monument already. It makes for a nicer looking city after all. It also helps to make certain monuments more visible from different points of the city. Using that I walked my way back to around the Palantine (which was not a really efficient direction but I was still trying to kill time.
When I got back to the region of the hotel it was just a bit past 5pm. Early by Italian standards when it comes to dinner but I was ready to eat. Still I did a bit of a loop around to see what I wanted to eat though I think I had already made up my mind earlier in the day that I was going to have Chinese food for dinner, probably about the time I chose to have McDonald’s for lunch. Today became my food vacation from my vacation in that sense I guess. The restaurant was just starting collect guests though the largest table was Chinese. I bet they got better food than I got. In any event, I ordered a beer and chicken with green peppers, which was listed as spicy, along with a bowl of white rice. The food was not the best Chinese food I have ever had but it was not the worst either. The spicy chicken had a bit of spice to it. More than any of the all’arrabiatas I have had here so far so that was sort of nice. It did have some odd jelly-like black mushrooms that had little flavor and a very chewy texture. I ate those first to get them out of the way. There was also red and green bell peppers and peanuts in it. I ate the whole thing so either I was very hungry or I liked it. Not totally sure but I guess I probably liked it more than anything.
After dinner I walked back towards the hotel and found a market where I bought a beer and a bottle of water for the room. I had to use my house key to open the beer bottle because I don’t have an opener with me but I have gotten reasonably good at that trick. The key I have is perfect for pulling out the lips on the cap so it will bend and loosen. The beer was a special Moretti called Baffo D’oro and while at first it smelled like it was going to be skunked actually tasted decent. I had that while I wrote this before getting to my wireless point to post it.
After leaving the Castel I moved on to see if I could visit the Mausoleum of Augustus but it is blatantly obvious that the location has been closed for quite some time and they do not appear to be renovating it currently. I do hope they intend to at some point. It has a high fence around it which made it tough to get any pictures of anything and it was all really overgrown inside with weeds and other plants that showed it hasn’t been open for the duration. This is the second of this type of monument I have run into that does not appear to be open. In any event I walked around it then onto the Via del Corso where I walked back up the Piazza del Popoli and then back downwards again where my goal was the Fountain of Trevi. It is obvious that the Via del Corso is one of the shopping streets in Rome. I basically rushed through it.
The Fountain was fully overrun with people. As with other places of interest there were at least a half a dozen walking tours eating up all the space and making it generally overcrowded. I took a few pictures. It really is a beautiful fountain but it would be much nicer without hundreds of people crawling all over it and intentionally getting in the way of your photos and the like. Since it was close to lunch time and I was near a McDonald’s I decided to not go Italian for lunch. I figured the crummy burger would give me some protein I have been skipping throughout most of my lunches in Italy and I could compare it off to the US version. I had a McBacon something. It was basically a bacon double cheeseburger with something like Russian dressing on it. It was ok. Very similar to the US. I think the fries are better in the US. The packaging claimed the burger was 100% Italian beef. In any event it was something to kill a bit of time and to fill my stomach and overall I was not disgusted with it.
After lunch I moved on and found the Pantheon. This was under some renovation on the outside so one half is all scaffolding which is of course disappointing. The outside obviously looks very Roman and old. It is free to get in. You can buy an audio guide but I rarely do that. It is a very large dome and it is very crowded again with walking tours and other people and at times is tough to move around in. The inside has been of course Christianized, what else would the Italians do. It is a bit disappointing because I would prefer the Roman stuff stay non-Christian but I guess that is a bit too much to ask for. It is in incredible condition on the inside and is very beautiful I will give it that. Really very nice for a free visit. I was overall happy with the monument though I would like to have seen what it looked like on the outside just a bit better without the scaffolding. You can’t have everything of course.
Next along the course was the Piazza Navona. It is a square with another obelisk built into a fountain and two other fountains on it. There are a ton of people selling cheesy artwork all over the square and the place was overrun with statue mimes as well which is a bit annoying. Still it was less crowded than the Fountain or the Pantheon was. I bought a coffee gelato here that was much better than the crema gelato I had the day before outside the basilica. I spent a few minutes wandering the square eating it then I moved back on my way.
I basically knew where I was and I opted to just do a couple side street dives to see if I could turn up anything interesting but really it just kept bringing me back to places I was familiar with. I ended up coming up to the side of the Monumento a Vittorio Emanuele II which is the very large white building with 2 chariot statues on either side of it. It is a very large building. What I found is that you can get up on the top through this side entrance. They have a small cafeteria and you can walk around the majority of the lower roof and take pictures of the Roman skyline. They also have a paid attraction which gets you up to the top of the building basically where the two statues are. The lift ride costs 7 Euro and I paid it to get up there. I should point out the weather was absolutely beautiful at about 76F or so and with minimal clouds. The rain feared from the day before never came to pass then and the rest of the week is supposed to be clear and warm (to me). The morning started off in the low 50sF but I didn’t bother with the sweatshirt as it would only be extra weight for me. You can tell the true northern non-European tourists around here because they don’t have coats. The rest are all bundled up like it is mid-winter at the north pole in this 75F+ weather. Ah well. The top of the monument might be the highest place you can get in Rome except the dome of the basilica. Of course that was mobbed and this was a lot less crowded so I liked it a lot. It probably helped that I hadn’t climbed thousands of stairs in sweltering heat before getting to the top. In any event it gives a great view of the Roman landscape and you can see pretty much to the mountains when the weather is this clear. I was very happy that I paid the 7 Euros even if it probably is a bit of a rip off considering how far from the edges the safety railings are set. It does make it a bit tough to get some of the better pictures I would have liked to get but all in all I managed with what I was looking for.
After returning to ground level and leaving the monument I decided to head in to the hotel to rest for a few minutes. It was still only about 3pm but I had to do some research and I wasn’t sure if places I wanted to go would be places to just look at or to go inside. I figured I could use the pit stop and get a few minutes of rest and to look at email and the like. The Hotel Milo does indeed have a wireless internet connection but I have to be sitting on my toilet to reach it which is sort of awkward. Anyway I stayed for less than an hour and armed myself with a few places to look towards for tomorrow. I walked down to the Quirinale which is the home of the Italian president after being a papal residence in the past. It is not very far from the hotel but involved directions I had not yet walked so I figured it would kill some time to find my way there then to work my way back because it was still very early for dinner. Of course the weather was still perfect so that wasn’t a problem at all. I was hoping that by the time I returned to the area of the hotel it would be getting dark and then I could find some food.
The building of the Quirinale is very large and I was unable to actually circumnavigate it because the roads don’t seem to follow around it correctly. Nonetheless I tried and found myself turned into some odd locations for a bit. I had a basic idea of where I was so I was not too concerned with being lost. Aside from that while Rome is a moderately large city I have managed to figure out the main streets well enough that I can find my way back to the hotel with relative ease. It helps that certain landmarks are taller than any of the buildings out there. I would assume that the city has building ordinances keeping any structures from getting too tall that weren’t some form of monument already. It makes for a nicer looking city after all. It also helps to make certain monuments more visible from different points of the city. Using that I walked my way back to around the Palantine (which was not a really efficient direction but I was still trying to kill time.
When I got back to the region of the hotel it was just a bit past 5pm. Early by Italian standards when it comes to dinner but I was ready to eat. Still I did a bit of a loop around to see what I wanted to eat though I think I had already made up my mind earlier in the day that I was going to have Chinese food for dinner, probably about the time I chose to have McDonald’s for lunch. Today became my food vacation from my vacation in that sense I guess. The restaurant was just starting collect guests though the largest table was Chinese. I bet they got better food than I got. In any event, I ordered a beer and chicken with green peppers, which was listed as spicy, along with a bowl of white rice. The food was not the best Chinese food I have ever had but it was not the worst either. The spicy chicken had a bit of spice to it. More than any of the all’arrabiatas I have had here so far so that was sort of nice. It did have some odd jelly-like black mushrooms that had little flavor and a very chewy texture. I ate those first to get them out of the way. There was also red and green bell peppers and peanuts in it. I ate the whole thing so either I was very hungry or I liked it. Not totally sure but I guess I probably liked it more than anything.
After dinner I walked back towards the hotel and found a market where I bought a beer and a bottle of water for the room. I had to use my house key to open the beer bottle because I don’t have an opener with me but I have gotten reasonably good at that trick. The key I have is perfect for pulling out the lips on the cap so it will bend and loosen. The beer was a special Moretti called Baffo D’oro and while at first it smelled like it was going to be skunked actually tasted decent. I had that while I wrote this before getting to my wireless point to post it.
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