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. =)

Posted by *erin* | 12:07 AM