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).....

Posted by *erin* | 12:24 PM