more stories from italy...
This is a photo i took the first night in trieste, during our march of the dead. We had a little debate about whether or not this was the moon or the sun. i said sun, since it was moving fairly fast in the sky, and appeared to be setting. Others claimed moon. Either way, i thought it was a cool photo. The ICTP sat right on the adriatic sea, nestled between mountains and the ocean.....much like Santa Barbara.
This is the view from the other side of the ICTP. It looked like this for the entire week we were there, except for about two hours in the morning on Monday. I managed to get these photos before heading down to breakfast that morning:
this is ½ of the view from the balcony of my room. I would have LOVED to have been able to take tons more photos, but since it was the morning of the first day of the conference, i figured i shouldn't be late. Unfortunately for me, this was the only clear day the whole time in trieste. So i never got to roam around getting the beautiful shots i wanted. (though i still managed to get some good ones, in my opinion)
this is the other half of the view from my balcony. You may recognize the boats from the sun/moon picture. We spent a good amount of time walking along that dock while drinking vending machine beer. Yes, you can buy beer in a vending machine. No, it doesn't taste good. But we're grad students, and it was during a poster session that we discovered the vending machine beer. And seriously, what's a poster session without alcohol. (and to be fair to us, it was one of the speakers who told us the secret of the Forst in the vending machine) (and at only 0.60 euro, it was by far cheaper than the sodas we could have had) (though, again, i must reiterate. It did taste like a 0.60 euro beer)
this is the next photo i have, which is also the only one i took of the group (sans me, since i took the photo). Eric joined us in trieste, but he's also from UCSB (he works for craig hawker, whom i know from my time at IBM, and who's always been good for a laugh since). Then there's yennifer, zeric, and wes. This was by far the longest i'd ever seen wes go without wearing a baseball cap (and i've spent nearly every day for the past year and a half seeing this guy). He dubbed himself “european wes”, and did a funny/weird dance to signify it. Later on in the trip, this led to “international waters wes”, where he started talking like a pirate. But i digress.....
this photo was taken on the day that eric and zeric left for a trip to slovenia. (i know, it sounds like a show on discovery kids) They decided it would be fun to visit slovenia, instead of the usual touristy places in italy. And i kinda have to agree with them. If we didn't already have hotels booked, i might have opted to join them. Though they did end up staying in a hostel that used to be a prison..........perhaps i was better off going to firenze and sticking with the itinerary.
For those of you observant people, you may notice that the second to last picture taken was from Monday. This last one was taken on Friday. I somehow managed to miss the whole week in photos. Which is a bummer. I ended up forgetting to take my camera with me a bunch of the nights. Luckily, i have a couple of photos from zeric, so i can fill in some of the details (on the next post).....
Italy Stories
i figure that i'll start back up with EPoD with some pics and stories from my trip to italy back in january. plus i gotta show off these photos somewhere...
this was the first photo i took on the trip. We were at the airport in trieste, having just arrived from the grueling trans-atlantic flight. And i was fascinated by this sign. It's one of those old-school ones that flip insanely for a few minutes while they update. I guess i'm just used to everything being digital, but this thing fascinated me WAY more than it should have. (just ask anyone i was with at the time)
wait, let me back up. First, the flight. Getting up at 3:30 am after going to bed around 1:30......then spending the day (or whatever part of it i didn't lose to timezones) in airports and airplanes. And somehow not leaving an airport until 10:30 the next morning. (perhaps it was the sheer boredom of an 11 hour flight, or the exhaustion from traveling, but i spent a good long time contemplating time zones and how i was losing a whole day, but that i would be gaining it back at some point......and ending up very confused about it all)
anyways, we eventually made it to trieste, the city where the conference would be held. Trieste is in northeastern italy, right near slovenia. trieste is a fairly small city, without much tourism. Except for us, of course. But we were there on business, so we weren't really tourists. Right???
the conference was held at a place called the Abdus Salem International Centre for Theoretical Physics, or ICTP. I forget how many different countries were represented at this conference, but it was somewhere between 30 and 50. (i know, i'm making up numbers again) the conference itself was on recent advances in nanomaterials, or something like that. i know, it was fun and exciting times.
this is a photo of the 'main square' in trieste. i have no idea what all the buildings were, but this was perhaps the most picturesque part of trieste. Though i found many other places far more interesting, I still had to take the requisite photos. (damn, i guess i was a tourist after all....)
this is zeric and yennifer. Zeric works for tony cheetam at ucsb, and yennifer (okay, so her real name is jennifer, but for whatever reason i gave her a new one) is the person in charge of coordinating everything for the ICMR, which is the group at UCSB that funded my trip. (international center for materials research)
zeric and yennifer and wes and i were all on the same flights (all 4 of them) from SB to trieste, though on different parts of the planes. We arrived at 10:30 am on the day after we left, so in order to avoid jet lag we attempted to stay up until it was night time in trieste. (even though that meant staying awake for waaaaaay too many hours..... and if i could do math, i'd tell you how many. I think around 36). this meant that we spent many hours doing the “march of the dead” around trieste, trying to keep each other awake and kill time til we could sleep. We walked all around the city (and saw a good majority of it) that day. And with every passing hour we got more and more delirious. We were giggling at everything, and walking around in a complete daze most of the time. It was quite amusing (in hind sight, of course).
Anyways, that last picture was on the bus back to the ICTP. Zeric and yennifer were dozing and it was cracking me up. unfortunately, they woke up when i was gonna take a photo. I told them to pretend to sleep again, and this is what i got. Like i said, we were delirious....and this picture cracks me up. =)
*sigh*
(in a completely nerdy way, i know)
