36,000 feet above the Atlantic

Well, not when this post actually gets to the internet, but as I am writing it. Yup, made it safely to the airport in Florence at some ungodly hour, successfully navigated the Frankfurt airport and made it on to the plane. Only a couple more hurdles left - customs, a too long layover, and the flight to Lansing. Hopefully Lisa will be there to pick me up!

I should be working on the Sicily posts, and might do it after this post is done but I wanted to do my “Wrap-up” post while it is still fresh in my head.

WARNING: I might get a little maudlin and mushy. I think I just scared the guy sitting next to me when I started thinking about what I was going to miss and started tearing up. He must think my book is really sad!

I think that I can really sum up what I am going to miss about Italy in one word: choices.

Choices? How can this be? Isn’t America the land of choice? As you drive down the street, you are bombarded with choices, places to go, places to eat, things to buy! Let me explain what I mean.

The whole time I was in Italy, I didn’t eat fast food (as defined by the good ol’ US of A) once. I only ate food in a chain maybe five times. And that is only if you count the cafeteria at the Coop as a chain restaurant. I bought my espresso from the local bar. I would guess that most of the places that we frequented were owned by a single person or family. You could walk down the street and see 10 different restaurants, each with a different menu and different ambience. While husband and I did eat at a new restaurant every night, we sampled a few and made a choice to frequent some that were the most comfortable to us. When we went to a new city, we couldn’t fall back on a known quantity. We had to go and find something new.

Ah vino! I had wine with my lunch on the plane (this is a habit that I am going to miss!!). I asked for a red and the attendant said that they had a cabernet or a blend available. Silly me, I asked “What’s the blend?” She looked at me like a sprouted a third eyeball from my head. “Cabernet, syrah…”. Ah. I think about the places that Jim and frequented for wine: Le Volpi e l’Uva, Enoteca Ponte Vecchio, Osteria del Bricco. A lot times, wines would be offered where Jim had never even heard of the grape! Our cellar back home looks so one dimensional now.

I am going to missed the freedom and the choices that we available when working in the lab. The facilities weren’t any better than what I have in the states, but I had the time to make those choices. I didn’t have the immediacy of classes and other responsibilities weighing on my head. I had the choice to go into the lab and work on things that were exciting to me, without having to justify my time.

(Here’s the mushy part. Skip this paragraph if you have a weak stomach.) I’m also really going to miss spending QT with husband. The apartment was small and only had one couch. We had to sit together when watching movies or House on DVD. I’m going to miss the fact that we had few distractions and got to spend a lot of time traveling together and just talking. We survived four months of enforced contact, and you know? I liked it a lot.

But beyond that, I AM going to miss Florence in general. I will miss walking everywhere. I will miss my bus ride past the Duomo. I’ll miss walks up to Piazza Michelangelo and laughing at the all of the tourists.

All good things must come to an end, and there are many things that I missed about home. Absence (even of a couple of hours), make the heart grow fonder.

OK, enough with the serious stuff. We were flying over some water (what body of water is between the mainland of Europe and Greenland? Don’t have the internet on the plane!!), and I was looking out the window and saw some floaty things in the water. Boats? Ships? Floating cities? We were almost 7 miles in the air and I could see them! One, I even saw the wake as it was moving. How freaking fast and big must that thing have been for me to see it all the way up in the plane?

PS - Made it to Detroit OK, all of the luggage showed up and made it through customs too!

In 16 hours, I have to wake up again!

Wow - four and a half months gone already! I go back and read some of my earlier posts, and I never thought the day would get here, but as usual, time marches on.

Most everything is packed and I’m not going to have to leave that much behind - my old goggles, a few textbooks that I have copies of back in MI, a few articles of clothing that I never really liked anyway and a few shirts that I wore out while here.

There are a few things left undone:

• I still have almost all of the Sicily pictures that I need to post.
• I wanted to do a wrap up post - what I liked, what I’m going to miss, etc. Maybe later today. It’s murderously hot in Florence today and there won’t be much walking around in the afternoon.
• I didn’t buy any leather gloves, but I did get a purse!

I’m stressing out, thinking about traveling home without Jim. Because of how we bought our tickets, he isn’t coming home until Wednesday. He is a good traveler and I usually just follow him around in the airport.

I’m stressing out, wondering if they’ll let me check all of the luggage. They should, NWA lets business class check three pieces. But I check in with Lufthansa, so I’m all kinds of worried about that. A word of advice if you are traveling to Europe: pull out the clothes you want to bring, then put away at least a third. If you are traveling around, you can wear a shirt twice and no one will know, especially if you are visiting multiple cities. Plus, you want room to bring home lots of goodies!

I get home Tuesday evening, then am off to visit family on Thursday. Sigh. There’s a shower for my step sister over the weekend and it will be good to see the fam, but I wish it were a little later in the summer! Too many things got scheduled for the weekend that I get back and I’m having to miss a lot.

As usual, writing is doing me some good. I’m starting to calm down and think I might be able to breathe normally soon.

See you soon!

I saw a volcano erupt last night, what did you do?

I think last night was one of the coolest experiences of my life. How often do you get to see a volcano spew lava? Just to reassure everyone, it wasn’t a huge eruption. In fact, it didn’t even make the news, here or any place else.

To set the stage: Thursday, one of the conference attendees said that Etna started to erupt the previous night and that if you went down the road a little bit, you could see some of the lava flow. Well, of course that night we had to tromp down the street (Leif let the cars know we were there with his cell phone) and see it for ourselves.

It was pretty cool.

(On the side of disclosure, I have enhanced these photos with Photoshop so you could see more of the details. The Olympus isn’t that great at letting you adjust the details of exposure. I didn’t change the colors that much, just lightened the pictures and increased the contrast so you can see the details of the mountainside.)

You could see the glow in the steams or gases that the lava was giving off. Distance? Oh, I’d say 10+ kilometers (about six miles for all you metric-phobes). We ogled for a bit, then went and had some wine at a local restaurant. That was an experience too! It was on the seaside and full of locals. A band came in and sang Oh Sole Mio, That’s Amore and some other songs we didn’t recognize. All of the fish was fresh caught locally. Very cool, and very fun!

As we were walking back to the hotel, we saw another good lava flow and stopped for some more pictures.

You can see the lava flowing down the side of the hill here!

Friday afternoon was free of talks so Jim, Leif and I went to Taormina, a small touristy town about 40 minutes north. (Pictures to come later. It had spectacular views.) Leif asked at the desk for directions to get a better view of the lava so we could stop on our way back. The receptionist gave us some pretty vague directions, but we were confident that we could find our way.

It was windy up the side of the mountain on pretty narrow roads. There weren’t ANY other cars to be seen. We kept joking that the roads were out and if we weren’t careful, we would drive up onto the lava…

We saw what we thought was a pretty good view and stopped for some pictures:

You can see an eruption of the lava in the top part of this one!! As I was taking pictures, this scary red van stopped and asked if we were OK. Thankfully Leif speaks pretty decent Italian and let him know that we were just taking some pictures of the lava. He said that up about 2 km was a great view and we should get in the van and he’d take us there.

NOT A CHANCE IN HELL. The van didn’t have any windows in the back and all Jim and I could think was that there were body parts and a saw stashed in the back. Leif kept admonishing us that we watched too many movies, but then he started joking around about it too. We told him that he obviously watches the same movies.

We compromised and said that we would follow in our own car.

About 3 km, he turned off the main road and up a dirt road. OK. Starting to get a little nervous here. But he stopped by a ruined house and we all got out of the cars and MAN what a view.

This is the only photo that isn’t enhanced. The colors are exactly was we saw. It was AMAZING. The gentleman had binoculars and let us use them a little bit. He spoke to Leif and told him that the lava was flowing down some ravines and that there wasn’t any danger. The house where we stopped had been at the edge of a lava flow in the 1970s. They tried to board it up to save it, but no luck.

The little spurts up to the left of the main flow were the most active. We watched for about 10 minutes and saw it spurting lava up into the air. I would guesstimate that we were about 2 km from the flow. I got a video of it, but the resolution is bad and the file size huge. I’m going to try to mess with it later and see if I can post it.

Jim and Leif could have sat and watched the show for a long time. Me, on the other hand, I got a nervous the more that I saw those geysers of lava. It was getting a little TOO active for my tastes. We picked up a few lava rocks from the 1970s eruption as souvenirs and headed out.

We had our own little “Apocalypse Now” moment on the way down the mountain. We were driving through a little town and started hearing show tunes from Grease.

There was a carnival going on and the whole town had turned out! If we could have found a place to park, we would have stopped too. But it was getting late and Jim was getting tired from all of the twisty-turny roads. Leif and I were fine. We’re excellent backseat drivers.

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Lots more photos to post, but I’m getting short on time! I haven’t posted any of the Syracusa photos and I have a whole new set from Taormina! It’s going to be odd posting from the states…

Earthquakes and volcanoes make for good wine…

Sometimes, it is really cool being a scientist. Especially when you are invited to talk at a meeting at a resort in Sicily. Of course, I would never know this. But it is fun being married to such a scientist!

Our last bit of work in Italy is a conference. Well, Jim’s last bit of work. I’m relaxing by the pool most of the time. When Jim was invited to talk at a conference in Sicily at the end of June, of course he accepted. It was just fortuitous that we would be in Italy already.

We flew down from Florence on Monday afternoon and arrived in Catania airport. We decided to be a little crazy and rented a car. The talks didn’t start until Thursday morning, so we had to have some way to get around the island!

The island is a beautiful place. It reminds me a lot of Hawaii. Same arid landscapes, volcano in the background…

Etna dominates the landscape on the eastern coast. She is still active and you can see the smoke that she is giving off. She erupted in May of 2008 and has been pretty active since then. They have had over 200 minor earthquakes and smaller eruptions in the past month. Great. I don’t like visiting California because I’m afraid it will fall into the ocean while I am there. Now I have to worry about volcanos in Sicily.

Driving in Sicily has been a little more hair raising than in Tuscany. In Tuscany, people honk their horns to let you know that they are behind you, and only occasionally in anger. The drivers are much more aggressive here. A friend said that driving was the worst in Naples and slowly tapered off the further away you got. We are pretty close to Naples. ‘Nuff said. (Actually, his analogy was much more scientific and geeky. I decided not to bore you with that.)

We made it to the hotel with only a minor difficulty. The sign to the hotel was facing the wrong way. It makes it difficult to know where to turn when you can’t see the signs! The hotel is gorgeous and definitely a resort.

We are on the other side of the hotel, which is OK with us. No sun in the morning.

The pool is saltwater, which is kind of fun. You float a lot better in salt water than in fresh water. Even cooler, it is an infinity pool:

I think they should have painted the pool a deeper blue though. It would have made the effect more convincing. Not that I’m complaining or anything.

The hotel has a great restaurant, right on the water. We ate at the hotel that night and watched the moon come up. It was about 2 days off of being full and lit the coast line up.

Unfortunately, the waiters have recommended international style wines every night. We haven’t been able to convince them that we don’t want an oaky white wine. We want to taste Sicily!

But as beautiful as the scenery is, the hotel room is pretty uncomfortable. It is pretty typical in Italy, that the windows have an interlock that shut the AC off if the window is open. Well, we didn’t know this the first night and spent a pretty warm evening trying to sleep on a slab of granite that they call a bed. We figured out the AC problem early in the morning, but have decided that the hotel shuts the AC off from about midnight to 6AM. (Have I made you feel sorry for us yet?)

But somehow, we have managed to survive.

Old stuff, REALLY old stuff.

A couple of weeks ago, Jim and I made a list of things that we still wanted to see in and around Florence. We didn’t want to be in Florence on our last day and realize that there were still six museums still to see but we couldn’t do anything because we had to pack and get everything ready to leave. The list was pretty short. We had been pretty good about making sure we got out every weekend and did something in the area.

Among other things, there were couple of churches on the list. We went to one of the churches and then realized that they were all starting to blend together. Yeah, we have pictures and I’ve been captioning the photos in iPhoto, so in a year I’ll actually know what they are, but really, how many Annunciation of Mary’s can you look at and really appreciate? So we struck the rest of the museums off the list and focused on the rest of it.

The one place that was left was the Fiesole Archeological Park. Fiesole is a small town up on a hill overlooking Florence. The Park is in the guide book, but Rick doesn’t have too many great things to say about it. He implies that it’s overpriced and because few of the signs are in English, not worth the trip. We had run through most everything else in the book and like looking at old things so wanted to give it a try. To get to Fiesole, you take the bus. We just missed one and had to wait for the next.

What’s better when you are waiting than a nice gelato?

Frutti di Bosco is Jim’s favorite. This was pretty good with chunks of berries mixed in. My favorite is Lemon and Strawberry, mixed. YUM!! But when you are done with your gelato, you might need these:

Thankfully, before we could make that impulse buy, the bus to Fiesole showed up. Off to the Archeological Park. Rick, I respectfully disagree with your assessment of it. After four months of churches and other religious sites, this was a nice break.

The ancient Romans LOVED Fiesole. It catches the nice cooling breezes during the summer and has wonderful views of the countryside. The whole area is littered with ruins and it seems like every time they dig they unearth more ruins.

Fiesole is the site of one of the best preserved Roman Amphitheaters. They still use it for performances today. They had a stage set up for performances later in the month.

I couldn’t get over the shape it was in! The seats were all smooth and able to be used. I’ve seen other theaters like this where they have to lay wood over the seating areas because the stones are so broken up. The stairs were all usable and safe.

You know those crazy Romans though:

A play isn’t a play unless someone is throwing up!

There are other well preserved ruins in the park too.

I just liked these columns. I don’t know what they were part of.

There was a huge excavation of Roman Baths:

The three arches were very cool. I’m amazed that they stayed up for 1700 years.

The tower is the bell tower that is associated with the cathedral in Fiesole.

There is also an Etruscan/Roman temple that has been uncovered:

Part of the structure dates to the Etruscans and the rest to the Romans. It seems like the Romans used a lot of the Etruscan buildings when they were constructing temples and their houses. Everything is mingled together and it’s hard to tell the different between the two sometimes. (At least for me. I’m sure historians have it all straight in their head.)

There were several stone-lined pits in the ground:

Jim and I think they were graves. They are about the right size for the people of the time. But there wasn’t a lot of information available, either in Italian or English. In the picture of the temple, you can see the guide that tell you what each of the structures are. That was in Italian, English and Braille… Yeah, I don’t get that last part. There was a brief description in Italian that gave some context of the site, but we didn’t spend too much time trying to figure it all out. It was a beautiful day and just nice to walk around and soak in the sights.

The park also included a museum that showed artifacts that had been dug up in the area. I was really amazed at the size of the of the museum. It was enormous. The building had been built around some of the ruins on the site.

There was even a little spring running through the building! I thought it was very cool how they tried to respect the land and the culture of the site. The building was not situated in a rectangular layout. It would have been very easy to get lost in there!

They had an exhibition of one of the graves that was found in 1989. They brought everything to the museum and set it up like they had found it.

The blue glass at the bottom was found in the grave along with the skeleton. It was still intact. There was a very pretty decoration of white swirling along the drinking edge. It was amazing to think that it was over a 1000 years old.

They had a large collection of pottery that had been donated by a local Professor about 20 years ago. One of the panels was discussing how they had analyzed the glazes used on the pottery:

FTIR!! Bonus points to anyone who can name the functional groups in the glaze!

We really enjoyed the visit to the park and would recommend it to people who are tired of looking at churches, walking past art and getting jostled by a million other tourists. There were only about six other people at the park at the same time we were there. If the lack of information bothered you, there were books available in the gift shop that had some explanations of specific items. We didn’t mind just walking through and admiring the artifacts though. Who really takes the time and reads all that stuff anyway?