Remarkably, this is first time in three-plus years of blogging that I have ever made a post devoted entirely to Texas A&M football. And it comes after perhaps the worst loss of my being a Texas Aggie football fan. Twenty-point losses to the Baylor Bears are a good time to get philosophical about the fortunes of a football team, which is where this post has its genesis. I started thinking about the likelihood that, after a certifiably abysmal start, Mike Sherman will end up being a good Aggie football coach. I then started thinking about the fact that, according to the Aggie faithful, R. C. Slocum became a bad coach at roughly the same time that Mack Brown started coaching at Texas, or at least at the time when his recruits started playing at Texas.
Which raises an interesting question: which coaching change would most benefit Texas A&M, replacing an underperforming coach in College Station or replacing a legend-in-the-making in Austin? Does Texas being good make it less likely that A&M will be good?
I compiled the yearly winning percentages for A&M and Texas over the last 100 years. The correlation coefficient between those two sets of data is -0.262. (First off, a couple caveats. Doing any kind of statistical analysis using only correlation is dubious at best. Thankfully, none of the two people who read this blog are statisticians. And all of the correlations mentioned in this post are what scientists call "weak". The strongest correlation you can have is 1 or -1, and nothing mentioned here gets close to that. Still, I think some of the relationiships I am about to describe are real; it's just that there are far too many factors that affect a team's success, most of them internal.)
This negative correlation means that when Texas has a relatively high winning percentage, Texas A&M is more likely to have a relatively low winning percentage. In other words, it's more likely that Texas is good and A&M is bad (or vice versa) than that both of them are good. In 2004, when the two teams played the day after Thanksgiving in Austin, it was only something like the fifth time that both had been ranked. Kind of surprising until you consider that the teams have been good at different times.
But of course there is going to be a not very strong negative correlation between the two teams' success---they play each other once a year, right? So for each team, roughly 8% of its games will be played in a zero-sum environment---only one can win. To test that, I took a couple other teams that A&M has played every year. A&M and Baylor have a correlation of 0.066. That's a much weaker correlation, and it's not even negative. The next team I looked at was TCU. (Texas Tech, the only remaining team that has been in both the Southwest Conference and Big 12, started playing football in 1925, so TCU has actually played more against the Aggies in the last century.) TCU's correlation with A&M is -0.058, another near-zero correlation.
What about other rivalries? It would make sense that when one rival starts winning, he would get access to better recruits and more money, fostering an imbalance of power, at least for a little while. Michigan and Ohio State have a correlation of -0.073, another remarkably weak correlation. Army and Navy have a correlation of positive 0.294. This sort of makes sense. Both were good in the first half of the century and bad in the second half, when superconferences took over from Notre Dame, the Ivy League, and the military academies.
If access to recruits is a factor in the relative fortunes of two rivals, then you would expect in-state rivals to have a stronger inverse relationship than other rivals because there is a bigger overlap in recruiting territory. Auburn and Alabama have a correlation of -0.175, which is getting there. UCLA and Southern Cal, who have met fewer than 90 times, have a correlation of -.104. Now we're getting somewhere, perhaps.
So maybe there is something to the idea that it's tough for rivals to be good at the same time, especially when they are in close proximity. If that's the case, then it's probably the case that the historically dominant school has an upper hand in determining who will be successful. Darrel Royal coached for 20 years, and Texas A&M had a winning record in just 5 of those years (4 of which were his first year and his final three). The Aggies started the Mack Brown era by twice finishing the year in the top 25. Since then--you guessed it, zero times in nine tries (I'm counting us outside the top 25 in 2008, which is not going out on too much of a limb). So as the boosters are passing the hat around to buy out Mike Sherman, they might think they're doing some good. And they might actually be. But it could be that the key to success at A&M lies more than we realize in waiting out the situation in Austin.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Saturday, September 20: From Amerigo to America
[Brandi's comments are featured in italics.]
Our wakeup this morning was jarring, to say the least. The phone rang at 6:00 a.m. from the front desk telling us that our car to Florence’s Amerigo Vespucci Airport was downstairs and ready to go. It was one of those disorienting moments that takes you a few minutes just to believe that you’re not in a bad dream. I had gotten a wake-up call, but I reflexively picked up the phone when it rang and sat it back down. And for some reason my phone alarm that I have used numerous time for all sort of other hotel alarms did not sound. And with staying up late the night before and my smart decision not to pack up all my stuff so it would be easy to get up and go for our early flight, let’s just say this morning was my least favorite moment of the trip! Not to mention I was sad that we were leaving our dream vacation. Daniel had actually gotten his luggage packed before we went to bed, so as the calm one in these situations he threw his clothes on to go downstairs. He was going to talk to the driver to see if he could wait for us, and then he’d come back to help me with my luggage. I raced around and managed to get dressed and packed in 10 minutes flat, and we were out the door on our way to the airport before sunrise.As we drove away from downtown I welled up a little over the beauty we were leaving behind but was filled with all the memories Daniel and I had created in one week in a different world. It left us with a yearning to see more of the surrounding countries and cultures that we have yet to experience, so there will always be another adventure for us. But for now, I had to say good-bye to our Italy, or better yet, “Ciao Bella!”
Our wakeup this morning was jarring, to say the least. The phone rang at 6:00 a.m. from the front desk telling us that our car to Florence’s Amerigo Vespucci Airport was downstairs and ready to go. It was one of those disorienting moments that takes you a few minutes just to believe that you’re not in a bad dream. I had gotten a wake-up call, but I reflexively picked up the phone when it rang and sat it back down. And for some reason my phone alarm that I have used numerous time for all sort of other hotel alarms did not sound. And with staying up late the night before and my smart decision not to pack up all my stuff so it would be easy to get up and go for our early flight, let’s just say this morning was my least favorite moment of the trip! Not to mention I was sad that we were leaving our dream vacation. Daniel had actually gotten his luggage packed before we went to bed, so as the calm one in these situations he threw his clothes on to go downstairs. He was going to talk to the driver to see if he could wait for us, and then he’d come back to help me with my luggage. I raced around and managed to get dressed and packed in 10 minutes flat, and we were out the door on our way to the airport before sunrise.As we drove away from downtown I welled up a little over the beauty we were leaving behind but was filled with all the memories Daniel and I had created in one week in a different world. It left us with a yearning to see more of the surrounding countries and cultures that we have yet to experience, so there will always be another adventure for us. But for now, I had to say good-bye to our Italy, or better yet, “Ciao Bella!”
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Friday, September 19: So apparently there is a difference between the plug adapter and the plug converter.
[Brandi's comments are featured in italics.]
After a morning run taking us back by the Duomo, we had breakfast downstairs and went back up to the room to get ready. I was in the bathroom when Brandi was having trouble getting her hair dryer to work. We have a converter for it to fit into the European plugs, but it tends to operate with very little power for some reason. She was looking for a new place to plug it in to, when POP! There was a loud crack and all of the lights went out. When I went to Radio Shack to pick up a plug converter, the guy there actually sold me two, one adapter that is for appliances that are already at the right voltage, and a converter primarily for heated appliances like the hair dryer. When the converter wasn’t giving her the results she wanted, she decided to give the adapter a try. You see, Brandi has a philosophy that if she doesn’t have enough electricity to dry her hair, then nobody in the hotel should have enough electricity to do anything. It was really just our room that lost power, Daniel is just being double-headed two-horned jackass with a smelly butt.
Each of us had one thing that we had not yet gotten to eat while in Italy, so for our last lunch we decided to seek out a good restaurant for pasta alla carbonara (Daniel) and gnocchi alla Bolognese (Brandi). After some shopping in the rain, we went south of the Arno to Celestino’s, a restaurant recommended by our hotel. It was a perfect last lunch. We arrived right at noon, so we were the only ones there for a little while. I had spaghetti alla carbonara, which has bacon and egg yolks. Alla carbonara and alla matriciana are two pasta preparations you don’t see as often in the states. I think I prefer alla matriciana, but alla carbonara was definitely interesting and worth trying. The restaurant was great and their gnocchi was unbelievable! It was hearty and delicious, well-worth the traipse through the rain to get there.
The one thing Brandi requested for this trip was a wine tour in Tuscany. We spent the whole trip thinking that the tour listed for today (which included Pisa and Lucca and was slated for a full day) was going to have the winery tour. When I called the bus company today to see what the tour included, the lady said that it was just Pisa and Lucca with lunch in between. Not only that, but she told us it was canceled due to lack of interest (punctuated with another “Didn’t you get the fax?”). Luckily, when I mentioned that we’d rather sign up for a Tuscany tour that included a winery, the tour company happened to have exactly what we wanted.
We walked to the bus stop under a light but consistent rain---definitely not the best weather for visiting a winery. The bus took us along a similar route to the one we took to Siena, through windy, hilly roads and around some really tight corners. Once we got within a few kilometers of the winery, all you could see was vineyards on one side of the bus and olive trees on the other.
The winery is housed in a medieval castle that figured prominently in some of the Renaissance tug-of-war between Florence and Siena, and it’s about the most beautiful place we’ve ever seen. It looks very, uh, castle-y, with those little cutouts at the top of the walls (not sure what they’re called), as well as Spanish-style roofs and an amazing view out of the back. As if on cue, the rain cleared up and the clouds went away just as we were leaving so we could enjoy the view in all its glory. We walked inside and got to see the barrels that they use to age the wine, and then we got to see the wine cellar, an amazing collection of the winery’s production that includes bottles going all the way back to 1911.
We got to sample some of their wines (a chianti, a chianti reserva, and a dessert wine), plus some nice cheese and bruschetta. Then it was on to Greve in Chianti, a nice little town where we visited a butcher shop with very, very fresh prosciutto. They had these legs hanging in the window, and I don’t want to get too graphic, but I’ll just say that you could see the hoof. And some little hairs right by the hoof. Daniel is being polite; those legs were everywhere in the shop, so much so that he actually had to duck. I’m not a huge fan of meat on the bone (too graphically carnivorous for me), but I love prosciutto, and it ruined the mystique of not knowing exactly what part of the pig it comes from.
We spent just a few minutes at Pieve di San Leolino, a hillside village that has a 12th century church another spectacular view. We had dinner at Trattoria da Pordo on Via Valigondoli (which seemed like a country house on the side of a solitary mountain that we walked part of the way down to get to dinner) and we sat by Chris and Natalie, a couple from Richmond, Virginia, who were also on their first anniversary trip. We had talked with them throughout the bus rides all afternoon. It was great getting to know them---we haven’t gotten much of a chance to socialize with the people on our tours, and we really enjoyed getting to spend time with a couple our age. Interestingly, another table had a couple that was getting married the following day. The other people at the table gave them a pretty good “rehearsal dinner”---they were laughing the whole time and taking pictures afterward. We ended the evening telling Chris and Natalie good-bye and walking through downtown for our last taste of gelato, which turned out to be a gelato gorge. We went to two different places just to make sure we had all of the flavors that we were so dearly going to miss once we left Italy. My favorite one was the gelato made from nutella and peanut butter….delicious!
After a morning run taking us back by the Duomo, we had breakfast downstairs and went back up to the room to get ready. I was in the bathroom when Brandi was having trouble getting her hair dryer to work. We have a converter for it to fit into the European plugs, but it tends to operate with very little power for some reason. She was looking for a new place to plug it in to, when POP! There was a loud crack and all of the lights went out. When I went to Radio Shack to pick up a plug converter, the guy there actually sold me two, one adapter that is for appliances that are already at the right voltage, and a converter primarily for heated appliances like the hair dryer. When the converter wasn’t giving her the results she wanted, she decided to give the adapter a try. You see, Brandi has a philosophy that if she doesn’t have enough electricity to dry her hair, then nobody in the hotel should have enough electricity to do anything. It was really just our room that lost power, Daniel is just being double-headed two-horned jackass with a smelly butt.
Each of us had one thing that we had not yet gotten to eat while in Italy, so for our last lunch we decided to seek out a good restaurant for pasta alla carbonara (Daniel) and gnocchi alla Bolognese (Brandi). After some shopping in the rain, we went south of the Arno to Celestino’s, a restaurant recommended by our hotel. It was a perfect last lunch. We arrived right at noon, so we were the only ones there for a little while. I had spaghetti alla carbonara, which has bacon and egg yolks. Alla carbonara and alla matriciana are two pasta preparations you don’t see as often in the states. I think I prefer alla matriciana, but alla carbonara was definitely interesting and worth trying. The restaurant was great and their gnocchi was unbelievable! It was hearty and delicious, well-worth the traipse through the rain to get there.
The one thing Brandi requested for this trip was a wine tour in Tuscany. We spent the whole trip thinking that the tour listed for today (which included Pisa and Lucca and was slated for a full day) was going to have the winery tour. When I called the bus company today to see what the tour included, the lady said that it was just Pisa and Lucca with lunch in between. Not only that, but she told us it was canceled due to lack of interest (punctuated with another “Didn’t you get the fax?”). Luckily, when I mentioned that we’d rather sign up for a Tuscany tour that included a winery, the tour company happened to have exactly what we wanted.
We walked to the bus stop under a light but consistent rain---definitely not the best weather for visiting a winery. The bus took us along a similar route to the one we took to Siena, through windy, hilly roads and around some really tight corners. Once we got within a few kilometers of the winery, all you could see was vineyards on one side of the bus and olive trees on the other.
The winery is housed in a medieval castle that figured prominently in some of the Renaissance tug-of-war between Florence and Siena, and it’s about the most beautiful place we’ve ever seen. It looks very, uh, castle-y, with those little cutouts at the top of the walls (not sure what they’re called), as well as Spanish-style roofs and an amazing view out of the back. As if on cue, the rain cleared up and the clouds went away just as we were leaving so we could enjoy the view in all its glory. We walked inside and got to see the barrels that they use to age the wine, and then we got to see the wine cellar, an amazing collection of the winery’s production that includes bottles going all the way back to 1911.
We got to sample some of their wines (a chianti, a chianti reserva, and a dessert wine), plus some nice cheese and bruschetta. Then it was on to Greve in Chianti, a nice little town where we visited a butcher shop with very, very fresh prosciutto. They had these legs hanging in the window, and I don’t want to get too graphic, but I’ll just say that you could see the hoof. And some little hairs right by the hoof. Daniel is being polite; those legs were everywhere in the shop, so much so that he actually had to duck. I’m not a huge fan of meat on the bone (too graphically carnivorous for me), but I love prosciutto, and it ruined the mystique of not knowing exactly what part of the pig it comes from.
We spent just a few minutes at Pieve di San Leolino, a hillside village that has a 12th century church another spectacular view. We had dinner at Trattoria da Pordo on Via Valigondoli (which seemed like a country house on the side of a solitary mountain that we walked part of the way down to get to dinner) and we sat by Chris and Natalie, a couple from Richmond, Virginia, who were also on their first anniversary trip. We had talked with them throughout the bus rides all afternoon. It was great getting to know them---we haven’t gotten much of a chance to socialize with the people on our tours, and we really enjoyed getting to spend time with a couple our age. Interestingly, another table had a couple that was getting married the following day. The other people at the table gave them a pretty good “rehearsal dinner”---they were laughing the whole time and taking pictures afterward. We ended the evening telling Chris and Natalie good-bye and walking through downtown for our last taste of gelato, which turned out to be a gelato gorge. We went to two different places just to make sure we had all of the flavors that we were so dearly going to miss once we left Italy. My favorite one was the gelato made from nutella and peanut butter….delicious!
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Thursday, September 18: “Better than nothing.”
[Brandi's comments are featured in italics.]
Today we slept in until 8:00 and went downstairs for the hotel’s buffet breakfast, which I had heard was very good. It had eggs! Also, there was sausage and pancakes, as well as prosciutto and melon. And they made delicious cappuccinos to order---all in a lovely quaint room on the top floor.
Yesterday, we had a little trouble finding the bus (they are doing construction on the train station/bus terminal), but we figured it was productive since we needed to take a bus tour today. We were in the SITA (Florence’s bus company) bus terminal at 9:45, waiting for our bus, when a woman ran in, screaming to us and one other couple, “Hurry, the bus is across the street!!! It’s about to leave!!! Didn’t you get the fax???” Well, no, do you mean on the fax machine that I carry in my backpack? “You’ve got to hurry to get on the tour today, but if you miss the bus we can get you on the Saturday tour.” That’s good. Apparently SITA’s experience with foreign tourists is that they stay in Florence indefinitely. As we were planning to be going home on Saturday, we decided to run to the bus, leaving the other couple (one of whom was a gentleman who walked with a cane) in our collective dust. I thought we could warn the tour guide ahead that another couple was coming behind us, but Daniel makes it sound like we were in the amazing race!
The tour started at Piazza de Michaelangelo, which is a spot up in the hills overlooking Florence with an amazing view of the entire city, including Fiesole, a neighboring town that figures prominently in Etruscan history. We then drove across much of the rest of the city, stopping and getting off the bus for good near the city center. Except something didn’t get off the bus---Brandi forgot her sweater. She realized it and started getting upset just as the bus was driving off, and we were told there wasn’t a way to recover it.
This whole sequence had me worrying about spending the rest of the day with a very upset wife, until a woman in the back of the crowd started crying, realizing that she had left her camera at Piazza de Michaelangelo. Now, losing a camera is a horrible thing, and I felt really sorry for her, but it did mean that Brandi had to pass the Pout Pipe to her, which made me a little happy. Awful, I know. It was a taupe-colored goes-with-everything cardigan that fit my 5 ft frame perfectly and it was a bargain! He’s right, though, I can sometimes get a little upset with myself when I lose stuff…
We walked through the Piazza della Republica and toward the Duomo, the fourth-largest cathedral in the world. The Baptistry was built a couple centuries before the main church (between 1059 and 1128), and it is where Dante and several members of the Medici family were baptized. Built between the 13th and 16th centuries, the Duomo was conceptualized at a time when Florence had passed Rome as a center of European culture, and it was built to surpass the greatest churches of the time, though the new St. Peter’s Basilica clearly dwarfs it now. One of its best features is the fact that tourists can climb to the top of the dome, but unfortunately our tour did not go inside.
We walked on to the Accademia, which was originally meant to be an academy for the training of young artists. It changed into a museum, chiefly, in 1873, when Michaelangelo’s David was brought there, after previously being kept outside near the Uffizi, which sounds crazy. He was brought in to the Accademia to protect him from the elements, kind of like when my dad would tell me to bring the dog in when it had started raining, though I think it was more involved than that. The museum also houses several of Michaelangelo’s unfinished sculptures as well as a few other notable sculptures and paintings.
Unlike some of our pre-arranged tours in Rome, today’s tour had the feeling of being a little cheap. Our tour guide was pretty knowledgeable, but while most of the museum tours are equipped with little radios that allow you to hear your guide speak quietly, our tour relied completely on the lung capacity of the guide. If I had paid for a tour that included the radios, then I would be a little upset when another tour guide came in and started yelling at everybody, so it wasn’t too remarkable when the other tour guides started getting onto our tour guide. He started yelling back at them and being a little bit of a jerk in the process. He turned back to us and said, “They just don’t know what they’re talking about.” These confrontations repeated a few times throughout our tour, which made us all increasingly more uncomfortable.
Michaelangelo’s David was probably my favorite artifact that we saw in Florence! Just because you have seen it in a book, don’t second guess its perfection. It is truly breathtaking work.
After a quick lunch at a pizza by the slice place (our least memorable meal of the trip), we made our pilgrimage to the Dante Museum, a three-story Dante exhibit built in Dante’s renovated house. It’s definitely not a big tourist destination--there were two people there when we arrived, and the people who showed up after us just wanted to know where the American Express office was. But for a Dante fan, it was a real treat. We learned about Dante’s early life and his exile from Florence, and there were many depictions of his Commedia.
We tried to visit the Uffizi, but the line was about an hour long, so we went to the hotel and came back at about 5:00 p.m., an hour and a half before it closed. We got in right away, but unfortunately we were there after they stopped checking out the audio tours. I was wondering what we were going to listen to but Daniel was clever---before the trip he downloaded some Rick Steves podcasts of notable places in Rome and Florence, and this was one of several places where they came in handy. We saw Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus as well as numerous other Renaissance works, but unfortunately many of the works on the back half of the tour were missing descriptions.
As we were just about finished with the museum, a woman sidled up next to us, asking if the piece in front of us was marble or ivory. Turns out that she was an American who had spent time in Houston. Oh yeah, and she was annoying. She spent some time telling us how bad Houston’s museum scene used to be. (They only had an art museum and an opera, she said, which, last time I checked, is still ahead of Peoria and Siberia and a bunch of other places.) She kept up a 90/10 talking-to-silence ratio, telling us about every member of her family and the fact that she was in Italy for three weeks before asking us how long we were here. When we told her we were on a one-week trip, she said, “Oh, that’s better than nothing.” Thanks, lady.
It’s funny how quickly things can change in a tourist destination. The guidebooks are very helpful, but if you go to the places they recommend, you will find many more Americans than you would have if you happened upon it before it was “discovered.” Our dinner tonight was at Acqua al Due, a restaurant my friend Adam recommended to me. When he found it a few years ago, it was an unknown restaurant where nobody spoke English. When we went, pretty much every customer was an English speaker. So much so that in the middle of our dinner I distinctly heard the words Beaumont and Austin. We both popped up out of our chairs to go and introduce our selves to the two couples because it seemed so odd to run into someone from our own backyard!
The food was still very good, though. In addition to a bottle of wine, Brandi ordered a salad sampler (three different types of salad), and I got a pasta sampler (five different pastas). For our main course, I got their popular blueberry steak, while Brandi ordered cannelloni with ricotta and spinach. My first four samplers, vodka macaroni, blue cheese gnocchi, eggplant rigatoni, and spicy fusilli, came out before my steak, and they were all very good, as was the steak. I figured the fifth one was on its way, but when it didn’t come after a while I asked the waiter for it. After a couple minutes, he brought out a plate with “cannelloni”---a dollop of ricotta covered in red sauce. Besides being what Brandi ordered, it didn’t actually have any pasta. Brandi asked him about it, and he said, “Yes, it’s pasta with cheese and sauce. It’s very good, do you like it?” We pointed out that there was no pasta. “Oh, yes, that’s right. That’s how it comes.” We’re guessing he didn’t like it pointed out that they had forgotten 20% of the pasta sampler. Although I wasn’t thrilled with the waiter because I really felt like he needed to know that we know what pasta looks like but I still really enjoyed our meal there and our walk back through the cobblestone streets!
After dinner, we grabbed a Bailey’s on ice and went up to the rooftop patio to hang out. It was a great, relaxing end to our evening that mirrored the serenity of Florence. Since we had all sorts of extra battery space left on our camera, we both started taking silly pictures of each other. (Then I forgot to recharge the camera that night. Sorry we don’t have any pictures of the Ponte Vecchio, winery, or Tuscan countryside---but we hope you enjoy the million pictures of us mugging for the camera!)
Today we slept in until 8:00 and went downstairs for the hotel’s buffet breakfast, which I had heard was very good. It had eggs! Also, there was sausage and pancakes, as well as prosciutto and melon. And they made delicious cappuccinos to order---all in a lovely quaint room on the top floor.
Yesterday, we had a little trouble finding the bus (they are doing construction on the train station/bus terminal), but we figured it was productive since we needed to take a bus tour today. We were in the SITA (Florence’s bus company) bus terminal at 9:45, waiting for our bus, when a woman ran in, screaming to us and one other couple, “Hurry, the bus is across the street!!! It’s about to leave!!! Didn’t you get the fax???” Well, no, do you mean on the fax machine that I carry in my backpack? “You’ve got to hurry to get on the tour today, but if you miss the bus we can get you on the Saturday tour.” That’s good. Apparently SITA’s experience with foreign tourists is that they stay in Florence indefinitely. As we were planning to be going home on Saturday, we decided to run to the bus, leaving the other couple (one of whom was a gentleman who walked with a cane) in our collective dust. I thought we could warn the tour guide ahead that another couple was coming behind us, but Daniel makes it sound like we were in the amazing race!
The tour started at Piazza de Michaelangelo, which is a spot up in the hills overlooking Florence with an amazing view of the entire city, including Fiesole, a neighboring town that figures prominently in Etruscan history. We then drove across much of the rest of the city, stopping and getting off the bus for good near the city center. Except something didn’t get off the bus---Brandi forgot her sweater. She realized it and started getting upset just as the bus was driving off, and we were told there wasn’t a way to recover it.
This whole sequence had me worrying about spending the rest of the day with a very upset wife, until a woman in the back of the crowd started crying, realizing that she had left her camera at Piazza de Michaelangelo. Now, losing a camera is a horrible thing, and I felt really sorry for her, but it did mean that Brandi had to pass the Pout Pipe to her, which made me a little happy. Awful, I know. It was a taupe-colored goes-with-everything cardigan that fit my 5 ft frame perfectly and it was a bargain! He’s right, though, I can sometimes get a little upset with myself when I lose stuff…
We walked through the Piazza della Republica and toward the Duomo, the fourth-largest cathedral in the world. The Baptistry was built a couple centuries before the main church (between 1059 and 1128), and it is where Dante and several members of the Medici family were baptized. Built between the 13th and 16th centuries, the Duomo was conceptualized at a time when Florence had passed Rome as a center of European culture, and it was built to surpass the greatest churches of the time, though the new St. Peter’s Basilica clearly dwarfs it now. One of its best features is the fact that tourists can climb to the top of the dome, but unfortunately our tour did not go inside.
We walked on to the Accademia, which was originally meant to be an academy for the training of young artists. It changed into a museum, chiefly, in 1873, when Michaelangelo’s David was brought there, after previously being kept outside near the Uffizi, which sounds crazy. He was brought in to the Accademia to protect him from the elements, kind of like when my dad would tell me to bring the dog in when it had started raining, though I think it was more involved than that. The museum also houses several of Michaelangelo’s unfinished sculptures as well as a few other notable sculptures and paintings.
Unlike some of our pre-arranged tours in Rome, today’s tour had the feeling of being a little cheap. Our tour guide was pretty knowledgeable, but while most of the museum tours are equipped with little radios that allow you to hear your guide speak quietly, our tour relied completely on the lung capacity of the guide. If I had paid for a tour that included the radios, then I would be a little upset when another tour guide came in and started yelling at everybody, so it wasn’t too remarkable when the other tour guides started getting onto our tour guide. He started yelling back at them and being a little bit of a jerk in the process. He turned back to us and said, “They just don’t know what they’re talking about.” These confrontations repeated a few times throughout our tour, which made us all increasingly more uncomfortable.
Michaelangelo’s David was probably my favorite artifact that we saw in Florence! Just because you have seen it in a book, don’t second guess its perfection. It is truly breathtaking work.
After a quick lunch at a pizza by the slice place (our least memorable meal of the trip), we made our pilgrimage to the Dante Museum, a three-story Dante exhibit built in Dante’s renovated house. It’s definitely not a big tourist destination--there were two people there when we arrived, and the people who showed up after us just wanted to know where the American Express office was. But for a Dante fan, it was a real treat. We learned about Dante’s early life and his exile from Florence, and there were many depictions of his Commedia.
We tried to visit the Uffizi, but the line was about an hour long, so we went to the hotel and came back at about 5:00 p.m., an hour and a half before it closed. We got in right away, but unfortunately we were there after they stopped checking out the audio tours. I was wondering what we were going to listen to but Daniel was clever---before the trip he downloaded some Rick Steves podcasts of notable places in Rome and Florence, and this was one of several places where they came in handy. We saw Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus as well as numerous other Renaissance works, but unfortunately many of the works on the back half of the tour were missing descriptions.
As we were just about finished with the museum, a woman sidled up next to us, asking if the piece in front of us was marble or ivory. Turns out that she was an American who had spent time in Houston. Oh yeah, and she was annoying. She spent some time telling us how bad Houston’s museum scene used to be. (They only had an art museum and an opera, she said, which, last time I checked, is still ahead of Peoria and Siberia and a bunch of other places.) She kept up a 90/10 talking-to-silence ratio, telling us about every member of her family and the fact that she was in Italy for three weeks before asking us how long we were here. When we told her we were on a one-week trip, she said, “Oh, that’s better than nothing.” Thanks, lady.
It’s funny how quickly things can change in a tourist destination. The guidebooks are very helpful, but if you go to the places they recommend, you will find many more Americans than you would have if you happened upon it before it was “discovered.” Our dinner tonight was at Acqua al Due, a restaurant my friend Adam recommended to me. When he found it a few years ago, it was an unknown restaurant where nobody spoke English. When we went, pretty much every customer was an English speaker. So much so that in the middle of our dinner I distinctly heard the words Beaumont and Austin. We both popped up out of our chairs to go and introduce our selves to the two couples because it seemed so odd to run into someone from our own backyard!
The food was still very good, though. In addition to a bottle of wine, Brandi ordered a salad sampler (three different types of salad), and I got a pasta sampler (five different pastas). For our main course, I got their popular blueberry steak, while Brandi ordered cannelloni with ricotta and spinach. My first four samplers, vodka macaroni, blue cheese gnocchi, eggplant rigatoni, and spicy fusilli, came out before my steak, and they were all very good, as was the steak. I figured the fifth one was on its way, but when it didn’t come after a while I asked the waiter for it. After a couple minutes, he brought out a plate with “cannelloni”---a dollop of ricotta covered in red sauce. Besides being what Brandi ordered, it didn’t actually have any pasta. Brandi asked him about it, and he said, “Yes, it’s pasta with cheese and sauce. It’s very good, do you like it?” We pointed out that there was no pasta. “Oh, yes, that’s right. That’s how it comes.” We’re guessing he didn’t like it pointed out that they had forgotten 20% of the pasta sampler. Although I wasn’t thrilled with the waiter because I really felt like he needed to know that we know what pasta looks like but I still really enjoyed our meal there and our walk back through the cobblestone streets!
After dinner, we grabbed a Bailey’s on ice and went up to the rooftop patio to hang out. It was a great, relaxing end to our evening that mirrored the serenity of Florence. Since we had all sorts of extra battery space left on our camera, we both started taking silly pictures of each other. (Then I forgot to recharge the camera that night. Sorry we don’t have any pictures of the Ponte Vecchio, winery, or Tuscan countryside---but we hope you enjoy the million pictures of us mugging for the camera!)
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Wednesday, September 17: “I am the menu.”
[Brandi's comments are featured in italics.]
On our last morning in Rome, we put on our Human Race shirts and took a run by Vatican City, our third visit to the sovereign nation in four days. We got to see people milling about and crowding together for the Pope’s Wednesday visit. Breakfast was pastries and cappuccino (for Brandi) and orange juice (for Daniel) at a little café near our hotel. We spent the rest of the morning shopping, and Brandi got a Morellato watch. And Daniel is an awesome husband for entertaining my need to shop and buy a nice anniversary gift.
The train to Florence was nice and relaxing. The signs and staff at the train station tell you that there are no porters and not to let anyone take your bags, but once we got on the train there was someone offering to find a place for our large suitcase, and he had basically taken it and put it up before I had a chance to refuse (it was actually fairly helpful, though). The dumb move on my part was letting him put up my backpack, which allowed him to ask for an extra euro in tip.
We were seated next to a couple Australian girls who were doing a three-week tour of Europe. They had about half our luggage. Daniel commented to me that he thought they probably hadn’t brought their 1800 watt hair dryer and diffuser on the trip. But I am still pretty proud of myself for filling only one suitcase for 8 days. The Italian countryside was very beautiful, and we crossed through a number of tunnels as well.
Florence is different than Rome, but the same. You see many of the same types of buildings, but it is much smaller, more laid back, and easier to navigate than Rome. I left Rome after four days still pretty unable to get my bearings, but Florence felt pretty comfortable after a couple hours. Streets that run north-south and east-west are a sight for sore eyes. Immediately when we arrived in Florence I realized that this was going to be the more relaxing part of our vacation and I knew immediately I was going to love Florence.
Brandi had mentioned on the train that we might want to go to Siena that night, which sounded fun but a little quick to be going to a new city. But with nothing planned for the evening, we headed back to the train station after dropping our bags at the hotel and grabbing a quick lunch at a wine bar with, yes, a touch of wine.
The bus to Siena was a little over an hour and took us through some hilly terrain in central Tuscany. Rather than ending up at a station as it had started, the bus dropped most of its passengers on several stops on the outskirts of Siena. We got off at the final stop, unsure of where exactly we were. We started heading downhill, taking in some amazing mountain views along the way, and eventually saw signs pointing us toward Il Campo (the large piazza at the center of town that is the biggest tourist destination) and the Duomo (the big church; actually the name of every town’s big church). The Duomo is a very impressive cathedral, with a mix of different colored marble that is characteristic to the region. Il Campo is one of a million things in Italy that pictures do absolutely no justice.
Siena was even more of a country town than Florence and felt a little sleepier in many ways. This one pottery shop I walked into fit perfect into my idea of what a country store would look like in Italy. The potter was managing the store and let me alone to walk into the different rooms to shop his wares. While I was marveling at the way the shop looked like an old house with almost rounded walls and ceiling made out of stucco, I heard something happening at the front of the shop, and the potter was groaning in Italian as a grey kitten scurried out of homemade pitcher. I couldn’t help myself as I immediately felt like I had to help the guy get this cat out of his shop and I also just wanted to hold a cat from Sienna. I came out of the store with a cat in my hands and I think Daniel thought I was going to ask to take it home with me! I let the cat go and we headed off to dinner.
We decided to eat just off of the piazza, as you usually have to get a little distance away from the touristy areas to find the best food. In the case of the Piazza del Campo, you don’t have to travel very far.
Trattoria la Torre is a tiny family restaurant that occupies a single room. As we walked in, the son was in the corner making fresh pasta while dad was serving customers and mom walked us to our seats. The dad came up to us to take our order---he started rattling off six or so pastas, and then just looked at us. I asked for a menu in Italian, and he said, “I am the menu.” After he repeated the choices for me, I got the tagliatella (it came alla Bolognese), and Brandi had the ravioli (filled with cheese in a fresh sage and aioli sauce). The food was out quickly, about two minutes after we ordered, and it was amazing. Pretty much all the pasta we’ve had in Italy has been an order of magnitude fresher than anything we get in the States, but this was something else. We also had a bottle of wine (of course) and finished the meal off with prosciutto and pecorino cheese. This was kind of a weird “dessert” but it just looked so fresh at the table next to us I couldn’t pass it up!
When we arrived, there was one other group eating, plus about eight empty tables. By the time we were close to finishing our meal, the place was packed, and people kept coming in to try and get a table only to be turned away. We felt badly that we were causing these people to lose business, so we asked the owner for a check so we could clear the table. He looked offended: “No, no, finish!” It was so admirable—an Italian cook and restaurateur who was so dedicated to his craft that he won’t fill your seat before he’s ready, even if you volunteer it.
But we did eventually get out, finding our way back to a bus stop and enduring a very bumpy ride back to Florence. We stopped for gelato, which, for me, was the best yet. Panna cotta is like caramel, but they do it as ice cream a million times better than any caramel ice cream I’ve ever had.
On our last morning in Rome, we put on our Human Race shirts and took a run by Vatican City, our third visit to the sovereign nation in four days. We got to see people milling about and crowding together for the Pope’s Wednesday visit. Breakfast was pastries and cappuccino (for Brandi) and orange juice (for Daniel) at a little café near our hotel. We spent the rest of the morning shopping, and Brandi got a Morellato watch. And Daniel is an awesome husband for entertaining my need to shop and buy a nice anniversary gift.
The train to Florence was nice and relaxing. The signs and staff at the train station tell you that there are no porters and not to let anyone take your bags, but once we got on the train there was someone offering to find a place for our large suitcase, and he had basically taken it and put it up before I had a chance to refuse (it was actually fairly helpful, though). The dumb move on my part was letting him put up my backpack, which allowed him to ask for an extra euro in tip.
We were seated next to a couple Australian girls who were doing a three-week tour of Europe. They had about half our luggage. Daniel commented to me that he thought they probably hadn’t brought their 1800 watt hair dryer and diffuser on the trip. But I am still pretty proud of myself for filling only one suitcase for 8 days. The Italian countryside was very beautiful, and we crossed through a number of tunnels as well.
Florence is different than Rome, but the same. You see many of the same types of buildings, but it is much smaller, more laid back, and easier to navigate than Rome. I left Rome after four days still pretty unable to get my bearings, but Florence felt pretty comfortable after a couple hours. Streets that run north-south and east-west are a sight for sore eyes. Immediately when we arrived in Florence I realized that this was going to be the more relaxing part of our vacation and I knew immediately I was going to love Florence.
Brandi had mentioned on the train that we might want to go to Siena that night, which sounded fun but a little quick to be going to a new city. But with nothing planned for the evening, we headed back to the train station after dropping our bags at the hotel and grabbing a quick lunch at a wine bar with, yes, a touch of wine.
The bus to Siena was a little over an hour and took us through some hilly terrain in central Tuscany. Rather than ending up at a station as it had started, the bus dropped most of its passengers on several stops on the outskirts of Siena. We got off at the final stop, unsure of where exactly we were. We started heading downhill, taking in some amazing mountain views along the way, and eventually saw signs pointing us toward Il Campo (the large piazza at the center of town that is the biggest tourist destination) and the Duomo (the big church; actually the name of every town’s big church). The Duomo is a very impressive cathedral, with a mix of different colored marble that is characteristic to the region. Il Campo is one of a million things in Italy that pictures do absolutely no justice.
Siena was even more of a country town than Florence and felt a little sleepier in many ways. This one pottery shop I walked into fit perfect into my idea of what a country store would look like in Italy. The potter was managing the store and let me alone to walk into the different rooms to shop his wares. While I was marveling at the way the shop looked like an old house with almost rounded walls and ceiling made out of stucco, I heard something happening at the front of the shop, and the potter was groaning in Italian as a grey kitten scurried out of homemade pitcher. I couldn’t help myself as I immediately felt like I had to help the guy get this cat out of his shop and I also just wanted to hold a cat from Sienna. I came out of the store with a cat in my hands and I think Daniel thought I was going to ask to take it home with me! I let the cat go and we headed off to dinner.
We decided to eat just off of the piazza, as you usually have to get a little distance away from the touristy areas to find the best food. In the case of the Piazza del Campo, you don’t have to travel very far.
Trattoria la Torre is a tiny family restaurant that occupies a single room. As we walked in, the son was in the corner making fresh pasta while dad was serving customers and mom walked us to our seats. The dad came up to us to take our order---he started rattling off six or so pastas, and then just looked at us. I asked for a menu in Italian, and he said, “I am the menu.” After he repeated the choices for me, I got the tagliatella (it came alla Bolognese), and Brandi had the ravioli (filled with cheese in a fresh sage and aioli sauce). The food was out quickly, about two minutes after we ordered, and it was amazing. Pretty much all the pasta we’ve had in Italy has been an order of magnitude fresher than anything we get in the States, but this was something else. We also had a bottle of wine (of course) and finished the meal off with prosciutto and pecorino cheese. This was kind of a weird “dessert” but it just looked so fresh at the table next to us I couldn’t pass it up!
When we arrived, there was one other group eating, plus about eight empty tables. By the time we were close to finishing our meal, the place was packed, and people kept coming in to try and get a table only to be turned away. We felt badly that we were causing these people to lose business, so we asked the owner for a check so we could clear the table. He looked offended: “No, no, finish!” It was so admirable—an Italian cook and restaurateur who was so dedicated to his craft that he won’t fill your seat before he’s ready, even if you volunteer it.
But we did eventually get out, finding our way back to a bus stop and enduring a very bumpy ride back to Florence. We stopped for gelato, which, for me, was the best yet. Panna cotta is like caramel, but they do it as ice cream a million times better than any caramel ice cream I’ve ever had.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Tuesday, September 16: Etta, Brute
[Brandi's comments are featured in italics.]
Without a pre-purchased tour to go on this morning, we slept in, and we didn’t get out until lunchtime. It doesn’t mean anything that we didn’t get out of bed until almost 11AM---it certainly has nothing to do with jetlag! We decided to ride the bus down to the Colosseum, and we purchased a couple of panini (in Italian, “panini” is the plural of “panino”) at a nearby café. They were excellent---we ate them on the bus. The bus was interesting---you can purchase tickets at bus stations or on the bus itself, but it seems to rely on the honor system more than anything. The machine you use to buy a card or get your existing card punched is in the middle of the bus, so you’re already past the driver and can pretty much do what you want.
The Colosseum was bustling with people, and we were prepared to wait in a long line until someone approached us saying that an English-speaking tour was about to start. The tour was led by an Italian woman who initially looked like she was going to be good but showed her inexperience early (we later discovered it was her first tour to lead). After a grueling two-minute, 100-meter walk past the long lines and into the Colosseum, several people indicated they needed a bathroom break. Our guide pointed out the restrooms and stood with the rest of us for about 30 seconds before saying we should go on in. What the third of our group that was in the bathroom missed was an amazing view of the Colosseum, with a fascinating commentary provided by…hmm. I thought the little radios we had been given were so we could hear interesting facts from our tour guide, but instead we got to hear her responding to the older British couple that was peppering her with questions. “Yes.” “Over there.” “80 A.D.” “I don’t think so.”
We went back by the restrooms and found some (but not all) of our group, and the guide muttered something about how foolish it was for people to use the bathroom at the beginning of the tour. The British couple perked up: “Bathroom? Where’s the bathroom?” She pointed to her right, and they scampered off. Our inspiring tour guide commented, “This is like being with children,” before taking us up to the upper level of the Colosseum. More great views, more lacking tour information. It was obvious that our tour guide was lacking as a guide but she looked good doing it. She was fantastically Italian, like she had stepped out of a movie with subtitles. We saw some other groups enthralled with their tour guides, and we thanked ours and walked on to the second half of the tour, the Palatine Hill. We handed in our radios and were transferred to our next tour guide, not knowing what to expect.
Observing the difference between our two tour guides was like observing Bullwinkle pre- and post-Kirward Derby. If you didn’t get this reference, don’t worry, I didn’t either. It’s one of those moments in time where Daniel gets to be the only one laughing at his own joke. The second guide was a Ph.D. student from Denver, studying in Rome, and he was incredible. Every piece of information was relevant and interesting, and he linked everything together to give a pretty complete narrative on the Roman Republic and its place in the history of Western culture. A few tidbits (paraphrased):
Apart from the tour information, Palatine Hill itself was remarkable. To walk across a marble floor that’s been standing there for 20 centuries is unreal, and although the hill itself is much sparser than it once was, everywhere you look from atop the hill is amazing, from the Colosseum to the Arch of Constantine to the Forum to a panoramic view of Rome to the north.
Our daily gelato stop was at Ciampini, a more upscale shop in a nice little piazza along Rome’s main shopping street. Brandi had banana, chocolate chip, and lemon, and I had banana, peach, and cherry (with cream on top, which is apparently what they do in Italy, even on cones). We then did a little shopping and headed back to the hotel.
My aunt had suggested a place called the Supper Club for one of our Rome dinners. Supper Club is like a cross between a speakeasy, a massage parlor, and a restaurant (you lounge on a bed while you eat), and unfortunately they were closed (a barely noticeable door along a tiny alleyway was shut, with about seven motorcycles parked in front of it), so we visited Pierluigi.
Pierluigi is a very nice restaurant tucked away a few blocks from the Tiber. We started sitting outside with an English-speaking waiter, but Brandi got cold, so we moved inside, where our waiter spoke not a word of English. For the pasta dish, Brandi had risotto alla crema di scampi (with a whole crawfish on top), and I had some oriecchette con broccoletti (ear-shaped pasta with broccoli). Both were very good. All of the fish dishes were priced per etta (100 grams, or about a quarter pound), with a 3 etta minimum. So we asked our waiter for 3 ettas of the sea bass. He took the order and, after a couple minutes, came back telling us something about the fish and “pochino” (a little bit). With a little difficulty, we determined that the sea bass is not a fish that can be subdivided into small portions---you have to take the whole thing. He weighed the sea bass for us: 0.96 kilos. No sale. He pointed out a few fish that you could get 3 ettas out of, but we were so confused with what was what (and a little eager to not look at all of the fresh fish on ice (the lobsters were still moving around)) that we just ordered scallops, which were also excellent. The tiramisu we had for dessert, though, was half frozen. We also had a nice bottle of wine and toasted our 1st year anniversary feeling blessed to have the opportunity to experience another wonderful day in Rome.
Without a pre-purchased tour to go on this morning, we slept in, and we didn’t get out until lunchtime. It doesn’t mean anything that we didn’t get out of bed until almost 11AM---it certainly has nothing to do with jetlag! We decided to ride the bus down to the Colosseum, and we purchased a couple of panini (in Italian, “panini” is the plural of “panino”) at a nearby café. They were excellent---we ate them on the bus. The bus was interesting---you can purchase tickets at bus stations or on the bus itself, but it seems to rely on the honor system more than anything. The machine you use to buy a card or get your existing card punched is in the middle of the bus, so you’re already past the driver and can pretty much do what you want.
The Colosseum was bustling with people, and we were prepared to wait in a long line until someone approached us saying that an English-speaking tour was about to start. The tour was led by an Italian woman who initially looked like she was going to be good but showed her inexperience early (we later discovered it was her first tour to lead). After a grueling two-minute, 100-meter walk past the long lines and into the Colosseum, several people indicated they needed a bathroom break. Our guide pointed out the restrooms and stood with the rest of us for about 30 seconds before saying we should go on in. What the third of our group that was in the bathroom missed was an amazing view of the Colosseum, with a fascinating commentary provided by…hmm. I thought the little radios we had been given were so we could hear interesting facts from our tour guide, but instead we got to hear her responding to the older British couple that was peppering her with questions. “Yes.” “Over there.” “80 A.D.” “I don’t think so.”
We went back by the restrooms and found some (but not all) of our group, and the guide muttered something about how foolish it was for people to use the bathroom at the beginning of the tour. The British couple perked up: “Bathroom? Where’s the bathroom?” She pointed to her right, and they scampered off. Our inspiring tour guide commented, “This is like being with children,” before taking us up to the upper level of the Colosseum. More great views, more lacking tour information. It was obvious that our tour guide was lacking as a guide but she looked good doing it. She was fantastically Italian, like she had stepped out of a movie with subtitles. We saw some other groups enthralled with their tour guides, and we thanked ours and walked on to the second half of the tour, the Palatine Hill. We handed in our radios and were transferred to our next tour guide, not knowing what to expect.
Observing the difference between our two tour guides was like observing Bullwinkle pre- and post-Kirward Derby. If you didn’t get this reference, don’t worry, I didn’t either. It’s one of those moments in time where Daniel gets to be the only one laughing at his own joke. The second guide was a Ph.D. student from Denver, studying in Rome, and he was incredible. Every piece of information was relevant and interesting, and he linked everything together to give a pretty complete narrative on the Roman Republic and its place in the history of Western culture. A few tidbits (paraphrased):
- What allowed the Romans to conquer such vast territories was their ability to move men and equipment. They built roads and an infrastructure to get places fast, and then they built aqueducts and sewers in conquered territories to help keep them loyal.
- If you were coming to Rome from another land, and you saw the structures they had built and the visual record they kept of the battles they had won, you would have no choice but to think that these people were superhuman.
- When people think about what made Rome great, what they’re thinking back to is the Roman Republic. The only people who look on the Roman Empire as a great example are Hitler, Napoleon, and Mussolini. The Roman Republic is the foundation of Western civilization, and that is what Brutus was trying to save when he killed Julius Caesar.
Apart from the tour information, Palatine Hill itself was remarkable. To walk across a marble floor that’s been standing there for 20 centuries is unreal, and although the hill itself is much sparser than it once was, everywhere you look from atop the hill is amazing, from the Colosseum to the Arch of Constantine to the Forum to a panoramic view of Rome to the north.
Our daily gelato stop was at Ciampini, a more upscale shop in a nice little piazza along Rome’s main shopping street. Brandi had banana, chocolate chip, and lemon, and I had banana, peach, and cherry (with cream on top, which is apparently what they do in Italy, even on cones). We then did a little shopping and headed back to the hotel.
My aunt had suggested a place called the Supper Club for one of our Rome dinners. Supper Club is like a cross between a speakeasy, a massage parlor, and a restaurant (you lounge on a bed while you eat), and unfortunately they were closed (a barely noticeable door along a tiny alleyway was shut, with about seven motorcycles parked in front of it), so we visited Pierluigi.
Pierluigi is a very nice restaurant tucked away a few blocks from the Tiber. We started sitting outside with an English-speaking waiter, but Brandi got cold, so we moved inside, where our waiter spoke not a word of English. For the pasta dish, Brandi had risotto alla crema di scampi (with a whole crawfish on top), and I had some oriecchette con broccoletti (ear-shaped pasta with broccoli). Both were very good. All of the fish dishes were priced per etta (100 grams, or about a quarter pound), with a 3 etta minimum. So we asked our waiter for 3 ettas of the sea bass. He took the order and, after a couple minutes, came back telling us something about the fish and “pochino” (a little bit). With a little difficulty, we determined that the sea bass is not a fish that can be subdivided into small portions---you have to take the whole thing. He weighed the sea bass for us: 0.96 kilos. No sale. He pointed out a few fish that you could get 3 ettas out of, but we were so confused with what was what (and a little eager to not look at all of the fresh fish on ice (the lobsters were still moving around)) that we just ordered scallops, which were also excellent. The tiramisu we had for dessert, though, was half frozen. We also had a nice bottle of wine and toasted our 1st year anniversary feeling blessed to have the opportunity to experience another wonderful day in Rome.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Monday, September 15: “Where do you work?” “The Vatican.” “Wow! What do you do there?” “I shoosh people.”
[Brandi's comments are featured in italics.]
Today’s morning tour brought us to the Vatican Museum. We had a very good tour guide who used something that comes in very handy in Rome---the microphone that transmits to individual radios held by each tourist. It was a little crackly but an excellent way of communicating in a place like the Vatican, where there are just too many tour groups for people to be shouting over each other.
As far as most people are concerned, the Vatican Museum tour might as well be called “The Sistine Chapel and a Bunch of Other Stuff.” But much of what is in the “other stuff” is quite fascinating and does a good job of illustrating the artistic and political relationship between the Catholic Church and Rome.
One thing you notice a lot going through Rome is that along with the date in Roman numerals, most buildings of a certain age have a pope’s name, preceded by “PM” or “Pont. Max.” This goes back to the Latin for “high priest” and originated in Pagan times, but the title was carried over for the reigning pope, most notably in the 16th through 19th century. Even buildings like the Colosseum carry the names of Popes who undertook restoration projects (which, to me, kind of goes against the idea of restoration). At the Vatican, you see over and over again the great art that was commissioned during the Renaissance by powerful popes as well as the impressive collections they amassed from previous periods.
The Vatican’s Official Shooshers have a daunting task: to keep people quiet. Though you’re reminded numerous times that there is no talking or photography of any kind allowed in the Sistine Chapel, it turns out to be a rather loud room with a number of flashes going off. However I must point that it is rather easy to forget the no talking rule as I found out when we first entered the Sistine Chapel. I was so awed that I kept looking up and then at Daniel and couldn’t help but say I can’t believe we are actually here! So a handful of men in suits walk around saying, “Shhh!” and giving scornful looks to people who take pictures. And really, it’s not like you’re going to take a better picture of the chapel than one that could be found on a post card. Your time is best spent just taking it all in.
Michaelangelo’s nine scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and final judgment on a short wall are absolutely magnificent, but the two long walls, painted by well-known artists from the same time period, are great as well. One side shows six scenes from the life of Moses, while the other shows six scenes from the life of Jesus. They are not chronological---I think they are meant to parallel each other, or at least that’s what the Latin verbiage around them seems to suggest. That’s right, he even knows a little Latin which is definitely another plus in Italy. That’s three languages that he works his way around if you are paying attention. Like me.
A quick aside, one of my favorite things to see plastered all over the place was four little letters, SPQR. I learned in Latin class that this stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus, which stresses the link between the Roman people and the government in the old Roman Republic. SPQR was on a purple shield that was in the back of the classroom, and it was burned into my brain. It is really cool to see it all over Rome.
Lunch was good but not great. Brandi had a buffet that included mostly vegetables, and I had fried veggies and a cheese pizza. I would like to point out that my half bottle of wine and Daniel’s Coke were each 3 euros which is good enough excuse as any for me to have a drink at lunch. We took an afternoon break in the hotel room, and Brandi got in touch with her parents, closing the last chapter on the uncertainty under which we started the trip. They are without power, but they’re all right, which is pretty much the story with all of our families. Brandi also took a nap, her second in as many days, but she wants to make it clear that this was not due to jet lag. Nope, no jet lag, I was just enjoying the opportunity to sleep during the day, thank you very much for the clarification!
For dinner we decided to try Il Posto Accanto, a restaurant a decent distance away that was recommended by Lonely Planet. Despite some pretty hard rain, we decided to walk it, and I ended up getting us lost in a not so great part of town. We did have one umbrella that we tried to share but it was interesting (read: near impossible) with the tiny height difference between us. But it definitely felt like an adventure which is worth getting a little wet for any day. Rome can be tough to navigate because a) the roads tend to be short, at odd angles, and prone to changing names every couple blocks, b) street names are not always displayed where you would want them to be, and c) landmarks are not entirely helpful. They provide a good visual cue, but they often have ten or so streets radiating out from them, and you sometimes have to travel a couple blocks to discover you’re gone down the wrong one.
The restaurant is basically a little house with seating for about 20, and the waiter told us the menu verbally but did give us a hard copy when we requested one. We surveyed the unconventional menu and started with a pumpkin ravioli, thinking that we might leave and have a more traditional “second dinner” at a nearby place. But we were impressed with the homemade quality and decided to stay, finishing with pumpkin-covered pork and a side of eggplant. Now reading this it sounds funny that we ate more pumpkin in one meal than I usually eat in Thanksgiving, but it was delicious! We then walked to the Colosseum, which is incredibly beautiful (romantic) at night, and back to our hotel via the Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps. We left the Spanish Steps just in time---a crazy man broke a bottle in some sort of dispute and started yelling random craziness.
Today’s morning tour brought us to the Vatican Museum. We had a very good tour guide who used something that comes in very handy in Rome---the microphone that transmits to individual radios held by each tourist. It was a little crackly but an excellent way of communicating in a place like the Vatican, where there are just too many tour groups for people to be shouting over each other.
As far as most people are concerned, the Vatican Museum tour might as well be called “The Sistine Chapel and a Bunch of Other Stuff.” But much of what is in the “other stuff” is quite fascinating and does a good job of illustrating the artistic and political relationship between the Catholic Church and Rome.
One thing you notice a lot going through Rome is that along with the date in Roman numerals, most buildings of a certain age have a pope’s name, preceded by “PM” or “Pont. Max.” This goes back to the Latin for “high priest” and originated in Pagan times, but the title was carried over for the reigning pope, most notably in the 16th through 19th century. Even buildings like the Colosseum carry the names of Popes who undertook restoration projects (which, to me, kind of goes against the idea of restoration). At the Vatican, you see over and over again the great art that was commissioned during the Renaissance by powerful popes as well as the impressive collections they amassed from previous periods.
The Vatican’s Official Shooshers have a daunting task: to keep people quiet. Though you’re reminded numerous times that there is no talking or photography of any kind allowed in the Sistine Chapel, it turns out to be a rather loud room with a number of flashes going off. However I must point that it is rather easy to forget the no talking rule as I found out when we first entered the Sistine Chapel. I was so awed that I kept looking up and then at Daniel and couldn’t help but say I can’t believe we are actually here! So a handful of men in suits walk around saying, “Shhh!” and giving scornful looks to people who take pictures. And really, it’s not like you’re going to take a better picture of the chapel than one that could be found on a post card. Your time is best spent just taking it all in.
Michaelangelo’s nine scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and final judgment on a short wall are absolutely magnificent, but the two long walls, painted by well-known artists from the same time period, are great as well. One side shows six scenes from the life of Moses, while the other shows six scenes from the life of Jesus. They are not chronological---I think they are meant to parallel each other, or at least that’s what the Latin verbiage around them seems to suggest. That’s right, he even knows a little Latin which is definitely another plus in Italy. That’s three languages that he works his way around if you are paying attention. Like me.
A quick aside, one of my favorite things to see plastered all over the place was four little letters, SPQR. I learned in Latin class that this stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus, which stresses the link between the Roman people and the government in the old Roman Republic. SPQR was on a purple shield that was in the back of the classroom, and it was burned into my brain. It is really cool to see it all over Rome.
Lunch was good but not great. Brandi had a buffet that included mostly vegetables, and I had fried veggies and a cheese pizza. I would like to point out that my half bottle of wine and Daniel’s Coke were each 3 euros which is good enough excuse as any for me to have a drink at lunch. We took an afternoon break in the hotel room, and Brandi got in touch with her parents, closing the last chapter on the uncertainty under which we started the trip. They are without power, but they’re all right, which is pretty much the story with all of our families. Brandi also took a nap, her second in as many days, but she wants to make it clear that this was not due to jet lag. Nope, no jet lag, I was just enjoying the opportunity to sleep during the day, thank you very much for the clarification!
For dinner we decided to try Il Posto Accanto, a restaurant a decent distance away that was recommended by Lonely Planet. Despite some pretty hard rain, we decided to walk it, and I ended up getting us lost in a not so great part of town. We did have one umbrella that we tried to share but it was interesting (read: near impossible) with the tiny height difference between us. But it definitely felt like an adventure which is worth getting a little wet for any day. Rome can be tough to navigate because a) the roads tend to be short, at odd angles, and prone to changing names every couple blocks, b) street names are not always displayed where you would want them to be, and c) landmarks are not entirely helpful. They provide a good visual cue, but they often have ten or so streets radiating out from them, and you sometimes have to travel a couple blocks to discover you’re gone down the wrong one.
The restaurant is basically a little house with seating for about 20, and the waiter told us the menu verbally but did give us a hard copy when we requested one. We surveyed the unconventional menu and started with a pumpkin ravioli, thinking that we might leave and have a more traditional “second dinner” at a nearby place. But we were impressed with the homemade quality and decided to stay, finishing with pumpkin-covered pork and a side of eggplant. Now reading this it sounds funny that we ate more pumpkin in one meal than I usually eat in Thanksgiving, but it was delicious! We then walked to the Colosseum, which is incredibly beautiful (romantic) at night, and back to our hotel via the Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps. We left the Spanish Steps just in time---a crazy man broke a bottle in some sort of dispute and started yelling random craziness.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Sunday, September 14: Italy 2, Luggage 0
[Brandi's comments are featured in italics.]
We got up at about 6:00 and headed down to our hotel breakfast at about 7:00. Many American breakfast favorites, like eggs and bacon, were not available, but there were some breakfast cereals there to cater to American tastes. Italians don’t eat big breakfasts---a typical breakfast consists of a cappuccino and a pastry which isn’t really my cup of tea so I decided the protein bars I brought would be the way to go for me on most mornings!
Our morning tour today was called “Classical Rome,” and it picked up at 8:00. While Brandi waited inside, I stood outside and looked around. A woman came up and asked me (in Italian) where something was, and I told her, “Non parlo italiano, mi dispiace.” That was my most complete Italian sentence so far this trip! I also saw a big tour bus loading up with people from our hotel. There seem to be two activities that occupy the guests at our hotel: getting onto and off of tour buses during the day and sitting at our hotel’s bar and chatting with each other at night. It could be a generational thing, but it seems like a lot of the adventure of going to a new place comes from getting lost, screwing up the language, and otherwise making yourself uncomfortable. Of course, there’s a spectrum along which people are going to immerse themselves into a culture, but I would say that saying “buon giorno” and “grazie” is pretty much a bare minimum. Surprisingly, they’re not in everyone’s game plan.
Anyway, I was very excited when our ride pulled up and it was not a giant bus but a smallish van, with a couple of British couples and a Spanish couple. So I was a little disappointed to find out that this van was just shuttling us to a bigger bus, and that English speakers and Spanish speakers were segregated onto different buses. Oh well---it was good for tour logistics, if not for my dreams of a United Nations tour of Rome.
The tour was a great one, filled with lots of information and amazing views. We first saw the Trevi Fountain, which we had already seen, but I was more than happy to visit again. I had a nice mini-conversation with a man from Spain. His English was very limited, but he knew enough to tell me he had been to New York and DC in the spring. Just a little tidbit, it was especially sexy to watch and hear Daniel attempt to speak two different languages in one day. His Spanish is not bad and he understands a lot more than he lets on. It was great to see the Trevi Fountain again, and I know it is cliché but the pictures don’t do it justice. We took pictures during both visits to the Trevi Fountain, but you can’t really tell because we’re wearing the same clothes!
We then walked to the Pantheon, which was another pleasant surprise. To be walking in and around something as old and storied as the Pantheon felt like stepping through time. I’ve visited some really old historical sites, like Aztec pyramids and Hindu temples, but nothing that’s part of the narrative of Western civilization like the Pantheon. And that, to me, is what Rome is all about. I tried on the flight over to describe to Brandi how BIG the visit to Rome is to me, but nothing can make it hit home like the Pantheon.
It was really incredible to see---I hardly even knew it existed before I got here and to see it really was the first artifact that made me catch my breath and say, wow, we really are in Rome. The original Pantheon was built in 31 BC and was destroyed in a fire in 80 AD, and the one we saw was then rebuilt in 125AD. (How often do you get to use BC vs AD in a sentence, so I took the opportunity!) The current Pantheon is mostly intact and is sitting in the middle of a courtyard. Since the 7th century it has been used as a church. In fact, we had to time our visit to fit around the mass schedule. Also, having Raphael’s tomb there is a nice bonus.
We next walked to Piazza Navona, a picturesque square with all sorts of restaurants and artists and people watching. Then we got back on the bus to head to the Vatican. Vatican City is so small that if you wanted to fit the world’s one billion Catholics comfortably within its boundaries, you would need to stack them 75 feet high (made-up statistic). St. Peter’s Square is huge, however, with hundreds of columns on either side of the huge basilica.
We had a relatively short wait that included our only view of the Swiss Guard, and once we got past the metal detectors and the dress code enforcers we were in the church. Built in the 16th century and decorated in the 17th, the “new” basilica is built on an absolutely massive scale, with more statues than you can take in, plus seven-foot lettering going around the top representing every quote Jesus spoke to Peter in the Bible. Pretty much the first thing you see, off to the right in the back of the church, is Michaelangelo’s Pieta, created when he was 23, or 24, or 25 (the guide books and tour guides are not in agreement). I snapped a couple pictures of the Pieta and then put away the camera. The basilica is really too big to do justice to, plus for me there was a very spiritual aspect of being there, and it took away from it a little bit to have people treating it as just a tourist destination. Seeing a girl having her picture taken next to a big, stone holy water container was especially bizarre.
We attended 12:15 Mass at the basilica. I’m hoping that Alitalia, the official airline of the Pope, CC’d God on their decision not to return our luggage, because otherwise He probably would have been pretty disappointed with our appearance. The staff had the whole front of the church blocked off for the (almost hourly) services, and they were being very strict about letting in only the people who were headed for Mass as well as hurrying along the people coming from Mass so they wouldn’t stick around to take pictures.
Mass was very nice, though it was in Italian with a little Latin thrown in. A few “moles” did happen to slip in however. A guy right in front of us was taking pictures (with flash) of every part of the Mass. And as I was taking part in Holy Communion, another woman tried to take the communion home with her as a souvenir. She walked up in line, grabbed the host and tried to leave with it, and was told by a server to put it in her mouth. This is quite a weird exchange for a cradle Catholic to see, maybe even slightly weirder than being in church in clothes I’d been wearing for three days.
The recommendation our tour guide gave us for lunch was Il Matriciano, a restaurant almost on the way to our hotel from the Vatican. It was very good---we had an antipasto plate with all sorts of fried veggies, and I had linguini funghi while Brandi had tortellini soup followed by prosciutto with figs. When we arrived, every table was speaking Italian (the ladies next to us were conversing with the waiter in both French and Italian for some reason). We felt like the Americans who had found the local hotspot. Even better, it began to rain, I mean pour, as we were sitting outside under the awning, almost as if Italy were convincing us to have our second three-hour traditional meal and not without again meeting great people along the way. As the rain started to slow we met a couple vacationing from London—she was British and he was American. They were super nice—they asked us all sorts of questions about our trip, and he was especially keen to find out the scoop on Sarah Palin and the presidential race. The British woman gave us some good advice on our luggage but I never caught her name as I’m afraid we never introduced ourselves. She also happened to be event planner as I am. Oddly enough, so was Jill, the woman from our flight to Rome. Anyway, she gave us good advice on our luggage: we should call American Airlines since our flight originated with them and we have points with them. Of course, why hadn’t I thought of this, being the recent past frequent flyer with American! They also said that nothing was likely to happen today, because nothing happens on Sunday in Italy, and tomorrow could be tough as well.
The rain dried up and after picking up some gelato and walking to the hotel, the front desk told us that one of our bags had arrived and had been brought up. They did not know whose bag it was. Now, when today began I thought of the four luggage possibilities and ranked them. I think if you’re married you can understand the preferences I came up with:
1) Both bags arrive.
2) Brandi’s bag arrives but Daniel’s does not.
3) Neither bag arrives.
4) Daniel’s bag arrives but Brandi’s does not.
Thankfully, we got the second best outcome instead of the worst outcome. I hated to be overly celebratory when Daniel was still in a bind, but WHOO-HOOO!!!!
I called American Airlines, at the exorbitant international-call-from-the-hotel-room rate, to find out about the bag. The number for lost baggage is a toll-free number, unreachable internationally, so I called an 817 number and was transferred a couple times (on hold a few minutes each time) before getting disconnected (we think the hotel puts a time limit on the calls). The second time around we reached Tina, a representative whose sarcasm and rudeness knows no bounds. Brandi explained our predicament to her, and Tina explained her side, something about an agreement among airlines that the destination airline would be wholly responsible for the luggage. Then she said that if we couldn’t speak Italian well enough to get our bags back from Alitalia then we shouldn’t have come to Italy. I took the phone, and she said that no information on a bag becomes available until it reaches its destination. I asked, from the perspective of American Airlines, whether that would be Paris or Rome. She responded, curtly, “Excuse me, sir, where are you right now? Did you not land in Rome?” I reminded her that Alitalia was not an airline we had asked to be put on, and she was unfazed, saying that if I was going to be uncomfortable with the baggage policies of the airline then I shouldn’t have accepted the connection. (Just writing it down here makes me so mad all over again---AAAHHHH!!! SERENITY NOW!!!!) So the next time you have an international flight, be sure to thoroughly research the baggage records and policies of every major airline in case you have to make a quick decision while running through an airline terminal.
So we headed to dinner, Brandi in clothes she had been wearing for five minutes and me in the clothes I had been in for 53 hours. There we toasted to never worrying another minute about luggage.
Le Coppelli Taverna is a perfect little pizza place not too far from Piazza Navona. It’s situated off of a little cobblestone alleyway, with checkered tablecloths and a large, grey-haired man working a wood-fired oven in the back. I couldn’t believe my eyes when we first saw the restaurant. Seriously, it was the cutest pizza joint I’ve ever seen anywhere and I’m not just anywhere at this moment, I am IN Italy (and in clean clothes). We had bruschetta (with olive oil and with tomatoes) and fried mozzarella (theirs is in balls instead of sticks) before splitting a great, super thin sausage pizza (with a cheap but good bottle of wine, of course). Strangely, my credit card was denied, another thing you don’t want to have to deal with 5000 miles from home. (It was working the next day, thankfully, after a second denial later in the evening.)
After dinner we happened along this great gelato shop (Della Palma) that had just about every flavor you could imagine, along with a bunch of interesting candies. Brandi had "after eight" (mint chocolate chip) and spicy chocolate, and I had peach, strawberry crème, and banana. We walked back and stopped at the Pantheon and hung out on the steps of the fountain across from it, watching all the teens and tourists while eating some of the best ice cream we’ve ever had.
When we got back to the room, my luggage had arrived! I had all my stuff, but I had lost an airtight excuse for being a slob. The first two days of our trip were wonderful even with a giant cloud hanging over them, so we couldn’t wait for what the rest of the week would bring.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Saturday, September 13: Buon giorno, Roma! Dov’e luggage?
[Brandi's comments are featured in italics.]
Though I’ve never been to Paris, I’ve been through its airport twice before, though I got to see much more of it this time around. We landed and were met by a shuttle, which pulled up to a little entrance where we waited, and waited, and waited. The woman taking us around was having a fairly spirited argument with the shuttle driver, we think about whether to let us through. But enough people started trickling off the bus that she finally gave up, so we all poured off the bus and into the airport. Once our passports were looked at, we met back up with Jill (our new friend from Austin) and started searching for our Alitalia flight to Rome.
Arriving at 8:30 for a 10:10 flight seems like plenty of time, but by the time we went outside security, got our tickets and came back inside security, the plane had already been boarding for ten minutes. And by "boarding" I mean sending people down a jetway to climb on a shuttle bus and wait. The flight was pretty uneventful---we both slept for about the last half of it, and we got a great view of the Italian countryside and the Mediterranean sea on our approach.
We wound our way down to the baggage claim with Jill, and along the way we asked her if she knew a good place for lunch near the Spanish Steps. She recommended Mario's, a place that has a family tie to a couple Italian restaurants in Austin. When the baggage carousel stopped circling, there were three people waiting for their luggage: Jill, Brandi, and me. The Alitalia baggage people were fairly helpful, explaining that our bags were in Paris and that they would be in on the next flight and at our hotel by 5:30 that afternoon. A customs checkpoint beyond the baggage area was surprisingly nonexistent. We found a taxi service that offered us a flat rate of 50 euros to our hotel, so we took it. I spent much of the ride calculating our distance, converting it into miles, and converting euros into dollars to see if we were getting hosed—I don't think we were, but who knows. Our driver was very nice---he knew a little English and a little Spanish and kept apologizing for his language skills and for taking a phone call while he was driving.
Our hotel, Visconti Palace, obviously caters to English-speaking clientele: all of the guests speak English to each other, and even the staff immediately break into English after a token “buon giorno” or “buona sera.” The guy we met at the counter was about as quintessential an English-speaking Italian as I could have imagined. Not the pizzeria proprietor with a mustache and bushy hair, but a little bit more of the Roberto Benigni type. He was short, thin, and eager to please, with greasy hair held against his scalp with lots of product, including a Superman-like curl cemented to his forehead. With the characteristic “-a” punctuating every word out of his mouth, he pointed us the way to the “Spanish-a Steps-a.” Without any clothes to change into, we immediately took to the streets.
The buildings around our hotel could easily be found in New York or a dozen other cities, but once we crossed the Tiber (about three blocks away) we were in a different world. For two people who have never been in a really, really old city, Rome is so impressive and such an overload for the eyes that it defies description. A few of the things we noticed on our walk: there are no street signs, but the names of the streets are carved into stone on the sides of buildings; for many buildings the year it was built is found in Roman numerals (along with the name of the reigning pope in most cases) across the front; in a few places around town you’ll find a faucet of constantly running water feeding out of a building into a tub or simply coming up from the ground, and people will stick a water bottle or a bucket under there and use it for drinking and cooking.
The Spanish Steps were pretty cool. Looking up at them from the plaza beneath is impressive, but climbing the steps and looking out among the Roman rooftops (and the crowds of people below) is pretty amazing.
After some initial difficulty in finding the right street (streets veer off in all different angles and have names that run together, and the map tends to omit some streets, as you have to when there are a billion of them), we found Mario’s. Brandi ordered buffalo mozzarella and tomato salad, and I had rigatoni amatriciano. Right after our food arrived, Brandi looked right over my head and smiled as if she recognized somebody. Her eyes got really big, and I thought, “Who on earth could she know here?” I turned around and saw Jill (from the flight) and her husband Michael. We sat for a long time and talked about our trips (Michael had had a similarly frustrating time getting in via Continental) and our plans. We also talked about the travel habits of our fellow Americans. Michael is very good at painting a picture with his hands, which is one of the recommendations of the Italy travel books. They also tell you to a) make an attempt to speak the language and b) not be loud and obnoxious, and you can see why. Most everyone is very nice and interested in immersing themselves into the Italian experience, but it seems there is a brand of visitor here determined not to speak a word of Italian, and unfortunately they tend to come from the States.
Our meal was one of those three-hour lunches you hear about being so common in Italy. Michael and Jill let us have some of their antipasti, which had great prosciutto, white beans in olive oil, and seasoned zucchini. For dessert, we had a passable crème caramel (basically flan), and Brandi had a cappuccino that she was delighted with. We enjoyed our time with our fellow Austinites---they were even nice enough to loan us a phone for me to try and call my family, though I couldn't get through. Soon we said our goodbyes and were on our way to more Italian adventures.
Our trip back to the hotel took us by Trevi Fountain. Like many major landmarks in Rome, the fountain is in among many narrow alleys and newer buildings, so it comes up as if out of nowhere. And the Trevi Fountain is unique in that no street approaches it directly, so you always hear it before you see it. We came upon it from behind, so it kind of revealed itself bit by bit. The fact that the fountain appears out of the side of a building is part of its mystique. Lots of people crowded around, trying to throw their coin in to assure another trip to Roma! We only had a euro, so we threw in 100 times the money of most visitors. That should purchase a return trip for us, plus a couple generations of our offspring.
The last word from Alitalia was that the luggage didn’t make it on either of the flights from Paris, but they were hoping to get it on the 5:30 flight, which would get it to our hotel at about 8:30.
Our hotel room is pretty nice---apart from a shower that would fit about 1 ¼ of me, there’s not too much to separate it from what we’re used to. The TV has CNN International and Sky News (both in English), plus about 10 Italian stations, a French channel, and a German channel. We got little bits of news about the hurricane, and we tried to call our families but didn’t get an answer.
Dinner was at Grotto Azzurra, a restaurant a few blocks from our hotel. We sat outside on the sidewalk, and the waiter was very friendly. We started off with a bottle of their house wine (8 euros---are you kidding me???). They brought out a basket of bread, but Brandi was disappointed with the lack of olive oil. Of course this was due to the Americanization of the Italian meal, but it proved not to be a staple at the table in Italy. I had half moon pasta with sausage and mushrooms, which was great. My gnocchi, on the other hand, was just okay. I didn’t realize how unsavory it was until Florence, but I'll tell you more about that later...
With a little effort, we found our way back to the hotel, but our luggage still hadn’t. I went downstairs to try and make some sense of the situation, but there was no sense to be had. The latest update was that our luggage would be on the first flight in the morning and at the hotel shortly after that. I tried to question the guy at the desk about Alitalia’s lack of certainty about our bags, but I didn’t get a straight answer. I started getting frustrated with the hotel staff, but I think that the staff just can’t get a straight answer from Alitalia. We’ve had different hotel employees tell us different stories about airline strikes and customs delays, and it seems like it’s something they have come to accept is not very reliable. After giving up on the hotel staff, I tried calling Alitalia directly but couldn’t get someone who spoke English. I’ve had my luggage lost before, but only for a few hours as the airport has usually delivered it to my hotel within a few hours. My most recent experience was on the way home, which make a big difference. Without our luggage, not only can we not change clothes tomorrow; we also can’t recharge our camera battery, so we are limited in the number of pictures we can take. Oh yeah, and Alitalia is basically going day-to-day in terms of whether they will continue to operate, so I’m sure getting our luggage back to us is not at the top of our list. I was asleep by 9:30PM (since we had now been up for 24 hours) dreaming about what our next day in Rome would like!
Friday, September 12: All Roads Lead to Rome, Though Some Take Longer Than Others
Traveling abroad is an amazing experience, but it can be tough to leave the good old USA. An adventure awaits, but you might feel a little sad leaving behind the creature comforts of home for more than a little while. Of course, it’s tough to feel bittersweet about leaving America when the final kick out the door is provided by Chicago’s O’Hare Airport.
After waking up at 5:00 a.m. (to try and prepare ourselves to sleep on the flight), Brandi and I finished packing, went to the gym, got ready, and made it to the airport at 10:00. Despite concerns about hurricane traffic causing problems at the airport, we got through security without any problems, and we were all ready for our 12:00 flight.
Make that 12:40.
Make that 1:30.
So Chicago, apparently jealous of all the weather attention that Texas was getting, decided to have a little storm of its own, pushing much of the incoming traffic back a little. We were assured that our connections would be pushed back as well.
But that wasn’t the story once we got into the air—Rome was not listed among the connecting gates, and we asked a couple flight attendants about our flight. They didn’t have much information, but they were doubtful about our being able to connect. We apparently made quite a stink, because when the plane landed several people around us were wishing us luck and telling us to go ahead of them. One pretty old man said to me, “I hope you make your flight, and [turning to Brandi] I hope you miss it so you can stay with me tonight.”
Our flight had left when we got off the plane. The solution ended up being a flight to Paris (itself half an hour late) and an Alitalia flight to Rome. Brandi and I were given seats two rows apart, but we were able to get someone to move so we could sit together. Not only that, but the other person in our middle section never showed up. The woman seated right behind us was also on the flight to Chicago---we talked briefly about our struggles and our plans in Italy. She was planning on meeting her husband in Rome.
Once we got in the air and had some dinner, our little game of musical chairs began. We kept squirming around and switching seats to try and get comfortable, but even with three seats it was really difficult.
Almost halfway through our flight, when we were close to the southern tip of Greenland and the outside temperature was -65 degrees Fahrenheit, we decided to break down and take our sleeping pills. The pills were some sort of off brand that had these impenetrable security features built in---I think the idea is that you expend so much energy opening the pills that you are too tired to actually need them. But they helped---we slept okay on the second half of the flight.
After waking up at 5:00 a.m. (to try and prepare ourselves to sleep on the flight), Brandi and I finished packing, went to the gym, got ready, and made it to the airport at 10:00. Despite concerns about hurricane traffic causing problems at the airport, we got through security without any problems, and we were all ready for our 12:00 flight.
Make that 12:40.
Make that 1:30.
So Chicago, apparently jealous of all the weather attention that Texas was getting, decided to have a little storm of its own, pushing much of the incoming traffic back a little. We were assured that our connections would be pushed back as well.
But that wasn’t the story once we got into the air—Rome was not listed among the connecting gates, and we asked a couple flight attendants about our flight. They didn’t have much information, but they were doubtful about our being able to connect. We apparently made quite a stink, because when the plane landed several people around us were wishing us luck and telling us to go ahead of them. One pretty old man said to me, “I hope you make your flight, and [turning to Brandi] I hope you miss it so you can stay with me tonight.”
Our flight had left when we got off the plane. The solution ended up being a flight to Paris (itself half an hour late) and an Alitalia flight to Rome. Brandi and I were given seats two rows apart, but we were able to get someone to move so we could sit together. Not only that, but the other person in our middle section never showed up. The woman seated right behind us was also on the flight to Chicago---we talked briefly about our struggles and our plans in Italy. She was planning on meeting her husband in Rome.
Once we got in the air and had some dinner, our little game of musical chairs began. We kept squirming around and switching seats to try and get comfortable, but even with three seats it was really difficult.
Almost halfway through our flight, when we were close to the southern tip of Greenland and the outside temperature was -65 degrees Fahrenheit, we decided to break down and take our sleeping pills. The pills were some sort of off brand that had these impenetrable security features built in---I think the idea is that you expend so much energy opening the pills that you are too tired to actually need them. But they helped---we slept okay on the second half of the flight.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Italy Pictures!!!
http://picasaweb.google.com/daniel.lauve/ItalySeptember2008
You may notice, faithful reader, that the appearance of the pictures is a little different. My photo gallery upload tool has quit working, so I'm switching to Picasa for the time being. I will switch to something else if I get enough complaints.
Our trip to Italy was incredible! The pictures (and the travel journal that will follow over the next few days) can't possibly do it justice, but we've done our best to capture the best (and worst) of our week in Rome and Florence. Enjoy!
You may notice, faithful reader, that the appearance of the pictures is a little different. My photo gallery upload tool has quit working, so I'm switching to Picasa for the time being. I will switch to something else if I get enough complaints.
Our trip to Italy was incredible! The pictures (and the travel journal that will follow over the next few days) can't possibly do it justice, but we've done our best to capture the best (and worst) of our week in Rome and Florence. Enjoy!
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
The Human Race
http://pictures.thelauves.com/humanrace0808.html
Getting into better shape has its advantages, and for Brandi and me, our increased running schedule allowed us to participate in the world's largest product placement exposition, the Nike Human Race 10K. We first found out about it at Niketown in Chicago---Chicago was one of 25 host cities around the world to hold a 10K on August 31, and Austin was another one. In the following weeks we trained on treadmills, at Town Lake, and in the neighborhood, eventually working our way up to a little over 5 miles.
On the day of the race, our friends Amber and Jed Comeaux and their daughters Kaylin and Madison arrived in their flight from hurricane Gustav. The race was at 6:30 p.m., and we ended up going to Macaroni Grill at about 2:00 for lunch. Pasta is full of carbohydrates, right? (Well, yeah, but apparently Daniel and Brandi can't be trusted to go to an Italian restaurant without loading up on oils and spicy sauces and having a few bites of a few different desserts.)
The Comeauxs dropped us off near 6th and Congress before heading off to Zilker Park. Brandi and I took our places among the 15,000 racers stretched along five city blocks.
Brandi's Race
Daniel and I headed to the start line, and I immediately had the thought that that Nike was genius for creating our shirts as our bibs---Congress was red all over! I also think the race shirt was the best I've ever gotten. It is dry fit material and will be more useful to me than the oversized tees they usually give away.
The race began and for the first couple of minutes we waited to walk to the front of the start line and I could feel the itch to run coming on. Daniel stayed with me to start the race but I wanted him to get going and have a chance at his own personal best. We quickly kissed bye and I had the thought as he sped away "don't go too fast in the beginning baby!" but I resisted the urge and began focusing on the race ahead of me.
Earlier in the afternoon Daniel had helped me create my race mix on my iPod and I have to say it was exactly what I needed. I'll never forget the warm up speed of "Lebanese Blonde" mixed with the hot and steamy Sunday afternoon start. After turning the corner onto Red River I picked up speed to the cheesey 1980s rock song "Hit Me with Your Best Shot". But once I was about two miles in (all uphill by the way) I hit a little bit of an opposition to what began as an otherwise usual run--my lunch. With the Human Race starting at 6:30PM we weren't sure what to eat. Most people have heard of carb-loading before a race. Let's just say that I figured out the reason why runners do that the night before and races start at 7AM.
I was on Dean Keaton with the stadium behind me and crossing Wichita when I realized I could probably walk up the hill faster than I was able to run. With the overcrowded water stations contributing to my dehydration and my lunch weighing me down I walked just long enough to get accross Wichita to reach the water station and waited as the poor volunteers tried to keep up with pouring hundreds of cups as easily packs of 300 runners tried to grab a cup and go.
By the time I got to Guadaloupe I started to feel a little better and the trail started to get a little easier with the turn downhill. I even remember a distinct breeze as Eminem's "Loose Yourself" caused me to pick up the pace a little.
But just before the 6 mile mark I started bargaining with myself to quit. I was so exhausted that I felt emotional and I almost convinced myself that it wouldn't be that terrible if I just walked the rest of the way. As usual I must have been wearing my heart on my sleeve as this guy looked back and saw me struggling. Within a moment he was ready to rally the troops. "No way!" he said, "You are not quiting now, you've gone this far, you can do this! Come on!" as he waved me in. I felt as if he was talking to me, but several people were around all benefited from it. I was able to sprint to the end, moaning in pain the last 528 feet of the race. He gave me a High-5 and I turned around to find Daniel behind me and before I could turn around again to introduce them he was gone.
Daniel's Race
I decided to start the race with Brandi (starting in the 11-minute mile zone), even though I planned on running a little faster during the race (my five-mile training runs were a little under nine minutes per mile). So once things got going, I zigged and zagged through the crowd to get ahead, though I quickly discovered that running past a lot of people doesn't get you in the clear; I was in a crowd for pretty much the entire race.
I started feeling a need for water pretty early, like in the second mile. So at the end of mile three, after the second of two big hills, I decided to get as much water as I could. The volunteers at all water stops, and especially at mile three, couldn't serve water and Gatorade as fast as runners were coming by, and at the third water stop they had simply left jugs of water on the grass alongside Red River. I grabbed a jug from someone who had just finished, drank from it for 10 or so seconds, then got a cup of Gatorade, then had another big drink from another jug. At that point, I knew that mile four was not going to be a terribly fast one.
The fourth mile was where things got pretty painful. I started re-tasting my lunch, and I encountered another decent hill after thinking the rest of the race would be downhill. After about four and a half miles, I was really slowing and looking for water. I walked along Guadalupe for about 50 yards, frustrated that I couldn't see the fifth mile marker yet. At that point, I recognized that my goal of 58 minutes was basically out of reach, and I set a new goal of finishing the race without walking. The last mile and a half were super grueling, as the chart of my race can attest. Compared to everyone else, who sped up through the last quarter of the race, I crawled to the finish. At 1:02:55, I found myself a bit disappointed with the result and regretful about the preparation, but I was elated about the experience.
A minor perk associated with having the Comeauxs in town was that it facilitated a Pickleheads reunion. The Pickleheads were the Rock Band persona that we created the last time we visited Nederland, and this time we shook off the rust, learned some new tunes, and rocked out on Sunday and Monday. Brandi mastered singing Blondie's "Call Me," I got 99% on vocals for Radiohead's "Creep," Jed did double duty on Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Simple Man," and Brent learned the ropes on numerous songs, most notably "Baba O'Riley."
Getting into better shape has its advantages, and for Brandi and me, our increased running schedule allowed us to participate in the world's largest product placement exposition, the Nike Human Race 10K. We first found out about it at Niketown in Chicago---Chicago was one of 25 host cities around the world to hold a 10K on August 31, and Austin was another one. In the following weeks we trained on treadmills, at Town Lake, and in the neighborhood, eventually working our way up to a little over 5 miles.
On the day of the race, our friends Amber and Jed Comeaux and their daughters Kaylin and Madison arrived in their flight from hurricane Gustav. The race was at 6:30 p.m., and we ended up going to Macaroni Grill at about 2:00 for lunch. Pasta is full of carbohydrates, right? (Well, yeah, but apparently Daniel and Brandi can't be trusted to go to an Italian restaurant without loading up on oils and spicy sauces and having a few bites of a few different desserts.)
The Comeauxs dropped us off near 6th and Congress before heading off to Zilker Park. Brandi and I took our places among the 15,000 racers stretched along five city blocks.
Brandi's Race
Daniel and I headed to the start line, and I immediately had the thought that that Nike was genius for creating our shirts as our bibs---Congress was red all over! I also think the race shirt was the best I've ever gotten. It is dry fit material and will be more useful to me than the oversized tees they usually give away.
The race began and for the first couple of minutes we waited to walk to the front of the start line and I could feel the itch to run coming on. Daniel stayed with me to start the race but I wanted him to get going and have a chance at his own personal best. We quickly kissed bye and I had the thought as he sped away "don't go too fast in the beginning baby!" but I resisted the urge and began focusing on the race ahead of me.
Earlier in the afternoon Daniel had helped me create my race mix on my iPod and I have to say it was exactly what I needed. I'll never forget the warm up speed of "Lebanese Blonde" mixed with the hot and steamy Sunday afternoon start. After turning the corner onto Red River I picked up speed to the cheesey 1980s rock song "Hit Me with Your Best Shot". But once I was about two miles in (all uphill by the way) I hit a little bit of an opposition to what began as an otherwise usual run--my lunch. With the Human Race starting at 6:30PM we weren't sure what to eat. Most people have heard of carb-loading before a race. Let's just say that I figured out the reason why runners do that the night before and races start at 7AM.
I was on Dean Keaton with the stadium behind me and crossing Wichita when I realized I could probably walk up the hill faster than I was able to run. With the overcrowded water stations contributing to my dehydration and my lunch weighing me down I walked just long enough to get accross Wichita to reach the water station and waited as the poor volunteers tried to keep up with pouring hundreds of cups as easily packs of 300 runners tried to grab a cup and go.
By the time I got to Guadaloupe I started to feel a little better and the trail started to get a little easier with the turn downhill. I even remember a distinct breeze as Eminem's "Loose Yourself" caused me to pick up the pace a little.
But just before the 6 mile mark I started bargaining with myself to quit. I was so exhausted that I felt emotional and I almost convinced myself that it wouldn't be that terrible if I just walked the rest of the way. As usual I must have been wearing my heart on my sleeve as this guy looked back and saw me struggling. Within a moment he was ready to rally the troops. "No way!" he said, "You are not quiting now, you've gone this far, you can do this! Come on!" as he waved me in. I felt as if he was talking to me, but several people were around all benefited from it. I was able to sprint to the end, moaning in pain the last 528 feet of the race. He gave me a High-5 and I turned around to find Daniel behind me and before I could turn around again to introduce them he was gone.
Daniel's Race
I decided to start the race with Brandi (starting in the 11-minute mile zone), even though I planned on running a little faster during the race (my five-mile training runs were a little under nine minutes per mile). So once things got going, I zigged and zagged through the crowd to get ahead, though I quickly discovered that running past a lot of people doesn't get you in the clear; I was in a crowd for pretty much the entire race.
I started feeling a need for water pretty early, like in the second mile. So at the end of mile three, after the second of two big hills, I decided to get as much water as I could. The volunteers at all water stops, and especially at mile three, couldn't serve water and Gatorade as fast as runners were coming by, and at the third water stop they had simply left jugs of water on the grass alongside Red River. I grabbed a jug from someone who had just finished, drank from it for 10 or so seconds, then got a cup of Gatorade, then had another big drink from another jug. At that point, I knew that mile four was not going to be a terribly fast one.
The fourth mile was where things got pretty painful. I started re-tasting my lunch, and I encountered another decent hill after thinking the rest of the race would be downhill. After about four and a half miles, I was really slowing and looking for water. I walked along Guadalupe for about 50 yards, frustrated that I couldn't see the fifth mile marker yet. At that point, I recognized that my goal of 58 minutes was basically out of reach, and I set a new goal of finishing the race without walking. The last mile and a half were super grueling, as the chart of my race can attest. Compared to everyone else, who sped up through the last quarter of the race, I crawled to the finish. At 1:02:55, I found myself a bit disappointed with the result and regretful about the preparation, but I was elated about the experience.
A minor perk associated with having the Comeauxs in town was that it facilitated a Pickleheads reunion. The Pickleheads were the Rock Band persona that we created the last time we visited Nederland, and this time we shook off the rust, learned some new tunes, and rocked out on Sunday and Monday. Brandi mastered singing Blondie's "Call Me," I got 99% on vocals for Radiohead's "Creep," Jed did double duty on Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Simple Man," and Brent learned the ropes on numerous songs, most notably "Baba O'Riley."
We had a great time with the Comeaux family enjoying Austin, shopping, cooking, and having them join us after we finished the race. Luckily Hurricane Gustav kind of fizzled out and headed north, but it was a great excuse to see our friends again over the Labor Day Weekend.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Beach and Birthday Fun
http://pictures.thelauves.com/crystalbeach0807.html
The summer was fast approaching when I realized that my parents' 60th birthday was a big deal. Not that I didn't know it was a milestone, but when Dad and I were talking about it one day it dawned on me that it was kind of a lot for him to swallow, too. Never had a birthday really given my Dad pause---he's always been the kind of guy to believe that age is just a number, and he's been active at every age. He didn't even want to talk about it! Well, I started thinking that maybe the best way to address the big day would be to invite family and friends to help us celebrate during my parents' yearly vacation in Crystal Beach. I figured an invasion of birthdayness would force Mom and Dad to celebrate their lives with those who love them. And that's just what we did.
We all had a great weekend of relaxation and sun in Crystal Beach, Texas, with a very different atmosphere but the same strong family fellowship as our Lauve family weekend in Chicago, Illinois. In fact, the Lauves made it to the surprise birthday party for Mom and Dad, along with my mom's sisters, many of the Domecs, a few Breauxs, and the Heberts. All in all, there were 55 people in attendance to help Mom and Dad celebrate!
The summer was fast approaching when I realized that my parents' 60th birthday was a big deal. Not that I didn't know it was a milestone, but when Dad and I were talking about it one day it dawned on me that it was kind of a lot for him to swallow, too. Never had a birthday really given my Dad pause---he's always been the kind of guy to believe that age is just a number, and he's been active at every age. He didn't even want to talk about it! Well, I started thinking that maybe the best way to address the big day would be to invite family and friends to help us celebrate during my parents' yearly vacation in Crystal Beach. I figured an invasion of birthdayness would force Mom and Dad to celebrate their lives with those who love them. And that's just what we did.
We all had a great weekend of relaxation and sun in Crystal Beach, Texas, with a very different atmosphere but the same strong family fellowship as our Lauve family weekend in Chicago, Illinois. In fact, the Lauves made it to the surprise birthday party for Mom and Dad, along with my mom's sisters, many of the Domecs, a few Breauxs, and the Heberts. All in all, there were 55 people in attendance to help Mom and Dad celebrate!
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
The Joy of Being Wrong
About nine years ago, I noticed a dearth of information on the 1972 Olympic basketball final, so I wrote about it and put it on the Web. A few years later I bought my own website and started putting some more writing up there. Having that kind of written record is fun to look back on, but a decade is a long time, and it's occasionally sobering to look back on something you now feel differently about. After the Beijing Olympics, I can proudly say I've changed my mind on USA Basketball.
My proclamation in 1999 that the US Olympic basketball team should no longer feature professionals was an idea that had an extremely short shelf life, if any. My contention, which I still stand by, was that the NBA players who lit up other countries for their first few Olympiads were not Olympians in the true sense of the world. In 2004, the American team gave the biggest test to the notion that NBA players belong in the Olympics with their bickering and their embarrassing behavior. They were, in many ways, the culmination of the attitude that had caused me to write that "in the coming decades, the Olympics should be less about getting the marketability and results we desire and more about developing the type of people we want to serve as instruments of 'friendship, solidarity and fair play.'"
http://www.sportshistory.us/dream.html
Interestingly, the guy I chose to quote as an exemplar of sportsmanship ended up coaching the 2008 team that proved me wrong. Mike Krzyzewski was one of two architects (along with Jerry Colangelo) of a team that restored USA Basketball's reputation. This year's Olympians defeated the toughest field ever while displaying the kind of camaraderie that had been sorely lacking. They hung out at the Olympic village, they rooted on their teammates, and they got along. Yeah, it doesn't sound like much, but it's something that the previous Dream Teams (or whatever you want to call them) managed to fail to do.
For good or ill, the age of unspoiled amateurs competing in the Olympics is over (and it's debatable whether it ever existed). Jerry Colangelo's key insight when he took on the challenge of rebuilding Team USA was that it would take more than an all-star team. He looked at character, starting at the top, and put together a team that could play the international game while holding true to an American style of play. In 1992, you got the feeling that the Americans were playing basketball about as well as it could be played. In 2004, they were still playing well, but they looked like they were up against a style of play that was superior. In 2008, they looked like they had the best of both worlds.
I have no idea whether the basketball rebirth we witnessed in Beijing is sustainable (like the slam dunk contest, it could be something an elite player does once and then passes on for the rest of his career), but it was fun to witness. Another thing that was fun to witness was all of those traveling calls! Maybe we could have the international refs sit in on an NBA game or two a year---the looks on our guys' faces when they get called for steps are just priceless.
My proclamation in 1999 that the US Olympic basketball team should no longer feature professionals was an idea that had an extremely short shelf life, if any. My contention, which I still stand by, was that the NBA players who lit up other countries for their first few Olympiads were not Olympians in the true sense of the world. In 2004, the American team gave the biggest test to the notion that NBA players belong in the Olympics with their bickering and their embarrassing behavior. They were, in many ways, the culmination of the attitude that had caused me to write that "in the coming decades, the Olympics should be less about getting the marketability and results we desire and more about developing the type of people we want to serve as instruments of 'friendship, solidarity and fair play.'"
http://www.sportshistory.us/dream.html
Interestingly, the guy I chose to quote as an exemplar of sportsmanship ended up coaching the 2008 team that proved me wrong. Mike Krzyzewski was one of two architects (along with Jerry Colangelo) of a team that restored USA Basketball's reputation. This year's Olympians defeated the toughest field ever while displaying the kind of camaraderie that had been sorely lacking. They hung out at the Olympic village, they rooted on their teammates, and they got along. Yeah, it doesn't sound like much, but it's something that the previous Dream Teams (or whatever you want to call them) managed to fail to do.
For good or ill, the age of unspoiled amateurs competing in the Olympics is over (and it's debatable whether it ever existed). Jerry Colangelo's key insight when he took on the challenge of rebuilding Team USA was that it would take more than an all-star team. He looked at character, starting at the top, and put together a team that could play the international game while holding true to an American style of play. In 1992, you got the feeling that the Americans were playing basketball about as well as it could be played. In 2004, they were still playing well, but they looked like they were up against a style of play that was superior. In 2008, they looked like they had the best of both worlds.
I have no idea whether the basketball rebirth we witnessed in Beijing is sustainable (like the slam dunk contest, it could be something an elite player does once and then passes on for the rest of his career), but it was fun to witness. Another thing that was fun to witness was all of those traveling calls! Maybe we could have the international refs sit in on an NBA game or two a year---the looks on our guys' faces when they get called for steps are just priceless.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Chicago
http://pictures.thelauves.com/chicago0807.html
After trips to the Big Apple and our nation's capital, the City of the Big Shoulders seemed like a logical choice. The impetus for this trip came from the fact that Wicked, which my sisters have been anticipating since hearing a sample on our wedding CD, is playing there. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the city also hosts Wrigley Field, Millennium Park, and a number of other really cool attractions. We arrived late on the night of Wednesday, July 9th, and checked into Hotel Monaco, a great hotel right by the river.
On Thursday morning we got on the train and headed for Wrigley Field. I was very excited for Brandi to see a game in a really big baseball town, even if that town doesn't happen to be St. Louis. Wrigley was everything I could have hoped for---we took pictures at the Harry Caray statue and the big red Wrigley Field sign, and during batting practice we got to take a really good look at the stadium. The ivy looks especially nice in person.
The Cubs fell to an all-time record of 0-4 in games I have attended, falling to the Reds by a count of 12-7. It was so much fun seeing a lot of offense at Wrigley---the Reds had seven homers, including one by Ken Griffey, Jr. (his swing, like the ivy, looks even better in person) and a Sheffield Avenue shot by Adam Dunn. The seats were a little further under the overhang than I had expected, but it ended up perfect as a light rain fell throughout the final five innings.
After the game we ate at Gino's East, Chicago's original deep dish pizza place, where we feasted on a giant sausage pizza and a really good spinach and mushroom pizza.
On Friday morning Brandi and I went out for a run through Chicago's beautiful Millennium Park, and later the whole family went on an architectural boat tour on the Chicago River. I had never realized all the differing architectural styles Chicago is home to, nor did I realize that it is such a leader in architecture. From the Tribune building to the new Trump tower to the Marina City Buildings (which I recognized from Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album), we saw numerous amazing buildings and were treated to some great weather.
Friday night was our Wicked excursion. For the uninformed, Wicked is a retelling of the Wizard of Oz, presenting the origin stories of both the Wicked Witch of the West and the Good Witch of the, uh, Far West. The songs are very catchy and well performed, and the story is interesting in the way it makes you rethink about the Wizard of Oz. I, for one, thought they went a little too far in making every plot element dovetail with the events of the original, but I was emphatically outvoted.
Saturday brought with it a trip to the Museum of Science and Industry. The museum contains all sorts of interesting exhibits like glass blowing, baby chicks, and old-timey vehicles, but its most impressive feature is an honest-to-goodness U-Boat from World War II. The exhibit followed the rise of the German naval fleet, the effort to disable and capture U-Boats, and the return of this particular U-Boat back to the States.
For dinner we ate at McCormick & Schmick's after deciding not to endure a 90-minute wait at Harry Caray's. The food was great, and the waiter was extremely entertaining.
On Sunday, Brandi and I ran out to the Navy Pier, another fantastic destination that figures prominently in the city's bid for the 2016 Olympics. We all attended Mass at St. Peter's in the Loop, were treated to a refreshing but challenging sermon, and had lunch at an Italian restaurant that claims to be Chicago's oldest. I thought that the atmosphere was good but the food was pretty poor---the only underwhelming meal of the trip.
The Chicago trip was like a breath of fresh air. We weren't overscheduled, so we got to spend much of our time just enjoying a beautiful city. Next up is Italy!!!
After trips to the Big Apple and our nation's capital, the City of the Big Shoulders seemed like a logical choice. The impetus for this trip came from the fact that Wicked, which my sisters have been anticipating since hearing a sample on our wedding CD, is playing there. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the city also hosts Wrigley Field, Millennium Park, and a number of other really cool attractions. We arrived late on the night of Wednesday, July 9th, and checked into Hotel Monaco, a great hotel right by the river.
On Thursday morning we got on the train and headed for Wrigley Field. I was very excited for Brandi to see a game in a really big baseball town, even if that town doesn't happen to be St. Louis. Wrigley was everything I could have hoped for---we took pictures at the Harry Caray statue and the big red Wrigley Field sign, and during batting practice we got to take a really good look at the stadium. The ivy looks especially nice in person.
The Cubs fell to an all-time record of 0-4 in games I have attended, falling to the Reds by a count of 12-7. It was so much fun seeing a lot of offense at Wrigley---the Reds had seven homers, including one by Ken Griffey, Jr. (his swing, like the ivy, looks even better in person) and a Sheffield Avenue shot by Adam Dunn. The seats were a little further under the overhang than I had expected, but it ended up perfect as a light rain fell throughout the final five innings.
After the game we ate at Gino's East, Chicago's original deep dish pizza place, where we feasted on a giant sausage pizza and a really good spinach and mushroom pizza.
On Friday morning Brandi and I went out for a run through Chicago's beautiful Millennium Park, and later the whole family went on an architectural boat tour on the Chicago River. I had never realized all the differing architectural styles Chicago is home to, nor did I realize that it is such a leader in architecture. From the Tribune building to the new Trump tower to the Marina City Buildings (which I recognized from Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album), we saw numerous amazing buildings and were treated to some great weather.
Friday night was our Wicked excursion. For the uninformed, Wicked is a retelling of the Wizard of Oz, presenting the origin stories of both the Wicked Witch of the West and the Good Witch of the, uh, Far West. The songs are very catchy and well performed, and the story is interesting in the way it makes you rethink about the Wizard of Oz. I, for one, thought they went a little too far in making every plot element dovetail with the events of the original, but I was emphatically outvoted.
Saturday brought with it a trip to the Museum of Science and Industry. The museum contains all sorts of interesting exhibits like glass blowing, baby chicks, and old-timey vehicles, but its most impressive feature is an honest-to-goodness U-Boat from World War II. The exhibit followed the rise of the German naval fleet, the effort to disable and capture U-Boats, and the return of this particular U-Boat back to the States.
For dinner we ate at McCormick & Schmick's after deciding not to endure a 90-minute wait at Harry Caray's. The food was great, and the waiter was extremely entertaining.
On Sunday, Brandi and I ran out to the Navy Pier, another fantastic destination that figures prominently in the city's bid for the 2016 Olympics. We all attended Mass at St. Peter's in the Loop, were treated to a refreshing but challenging sermon, and had lunch at an Italian restaurant that claims to be Chicago's oldest. I thought that the atmosphere was good but the food was pretty poor---the only underwhelming meal of the trip.
The Chicago trip was like a breath of fresh air. We weren't overscheduled, so we got to spend much of our time just enjoying a beautiful city. Next up is Italy!!!
Monday, April 21, 2008
Backe v. Pujols
I had started to address this minor conflict a couple weeks ago (when it actually happened), but I got busy and left it alone for a while. Then the other day I was reading in Predictably Irrational about how people's expectations affect their perceptions, and it gave the example of sports fans who come to opposing conclusions about the same play. I'll hopefully post a review of the book at a later date, but until then, here's the entry I originally intended to create:
Yesterday's spat between Brandon Backe and Albert Pujols is barely worth paying an ounce of attention to, but I'm writing about it anyway. Sort of. What makes the argument interesting is not the argument itself, but the disparity in the reaction by two different fan communities.
We are more connected than ever, but it could be argued that we are also becoming more sheltered than ever. I was at dinner with one of my business school professors last week, and he told a story of a research project he was working on. It involved monitoring financial message boards to pinpoint the contributors who could most accurately predict the behavior of the market. Unfortunately, he found that there's not some sort of marketplace that promotes the best ideas; instead, there's a sorting into two diametrically opposed camps where people reinforce each other's (usually incorrect) prognostications.
The same can be said for the message boards at Bill O'Reilly and the Daily Kos, which have produced some pretty hateful talk, and unfortunately it appears to be true of the comment sections at baseball blogs. Viva El Birdos and Crawfish Boxes are two members of the SportsBlog Nation community of blogs, and they're the two baseball blogs that I read regularly. Here's some of the reaction from both comment sections on yesterday's altercation:
St. Louis:
Houston:
Something in each blog's respective comments section reeks of lack of exposure to differing opinions. So in the interest of fairness, here are some comments to each team's fans:
To the Cards fans: First off, there should be no bitterness regarding Brandon Backe's crowing during game 5 of the NLCS. Remember how that ended up playing out? Pujols goes off the back window, the Astros get swept out of the World Series, and the Cardinals take it in five the next year. All things considered, I think the Cardinals came out pretty well. Let them "squeal" three years ago. No biggie. Secondly, maybe we can all admit that, were Tony LaRussa managing in the other dugout, there would be more than a couple aspects of his extreme fidelity to the unwritten rules of baseball that would anger us from time to time.
To the 'Stros fans: Take a lesson from Carlos Beltran. The guy wasn't the savior of the baseball world for the half a season he played for the Astros and then a complete jerk after he left. Similarly, Albert Pujols is not a bad guy just because he doesn't play for your team. We all root for laundry to a certain extent, but don't take it to the extreme. It's bad for the soul. If Pujols were an Astro, he'd be the greatest player ever, and if Backe were a Cardinal, he'd be the punk from your high school who sat in the back of the class and drew the logos of heavy metal bands on his binder. Also, calling the clubhouse to apologize is not the bare minimum; it's a pretty decent thing to do.
Yesterday's spat between Brandon Backe and Albert Pujols is barely worth paying an ounce of attention to, but I'm writing about it anyway. Sort of. What makes the argument interesting is not the argument itself, but the disparity in the reaction by two different fan communities.
We are more connected than ever, but it could be argued that we are also becoming more sheltered than ever. I was at dinner with one of my business school professors last week, and he told a story of a research project he was working on. It involved monitoring financial message boards to pinpoint the contributors who could most accurately predict the behavior of the market. Unfortunately, he found that there's not some sort of marketplace that promotes the best ideas; instead, there's a sorting into two diametrically opposed camps where people reinforce each other's (usually incorrect) prognostications.
The same can be said for the message boards at Bill O'Reilly and the Daily Kos, which have produced some pretty hateful talk, and unfortunately it appears to be true of the comment sections at baseball blogs. Viva El Birdos and Crawfish Boxes are two members of the SportsBlog Nation community of blogs, and they're the two baseball blogs that I read regularly. Here's some of the reaction from both comment sections on yesterday's altercation:
St. Louis:
- "Backe needs to do something in the majors before he starts talking"
- "Smart move dumbass...your team thanks you"
- "If it wasnt for this does anyone know who brandon backe is anyway?"
- "Fox had Backe mic'd for that game [game 5 of the 2005 NLCS] and all i remember before Pujols' bomb was his shrill squealing throughout the game."
Houston:
- "Calling up later to apologize is the bare minimum, but it seems like LaRussa's Cardinals are always involved in dirty stuff like this"
- "First, it was a malicious slide in an uncontested play at the plate. Secondly, Pujols is a BITCH and needs an attitude adjustment to wipe that arrogant smirk of [sic] his stinky fat face."
- "He should get dotted every time up. He's been due for years, dating back to ruining Brad Lidge for us.
Something in each blog's respective comments section reeks of lack of exposure to differing opinions. So in the interest of fairness, here are some comments to each team's fans:
To the Cards fans: First off, there should be no bitterness regarding Brandon Backe's crowing during game 5 of the NLCS. Remember how that ended up playing out? Pujols goes off the back window, the Astros get swept out of the World Series, and the Cardinals take it in five the next year. All things considered, I think the Cardinals came out pretty well. Let them "squeal" three years ago. No biggie. Secondly, maybe we can all admit that, were Tony LaRussa managing in the other dugout, there would be more than a couple aspects of his extreme fidelity to the unwritten rules of baseball that would anger us from time to time.
To the 'Stros fans: Take a lesson from Carlos Beltran. The guy wasn't the savior of the baseball world for the half a season he played for the Astros and then a complete jerk after he left. Similarly, Albert Pujols is not a bad guy just because he doesn't play for your team. We all root for laundry to a certain extent, but don't take it to the extreme. It's bad for the soul. If Pujols were an Astro, he'd be the greatest player ever, and if Backe were a Cardinal, he'd be the punk from your high school who sat in the back of the class and drew the logos of heavy metal bands on his binder. Also, calling the clubhouse to apologize is not the bare minimum; it's a pretty decent thing to do.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Washington, D.C.
http://pictures.thelauves.com/washingtondc0803
On March 28-31, we spent a weekend in Washington, D.C. It was Daniel's eighth trip to our nation's capital and Brandi's first.
Brandi arrived by way of a trip for work. She had events in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and Adelphi (near College Park), Maryland. Upon discovering that the mascot for the University of Maryland is a terrapin (turtle), she thought that that was "so cute!" She finished with her work on Thursday and waited patiently for me to arrive---it was going to be a late night for me.
I was scheduled on a 7:55 flight from Austin to Dallas, then a flight from Dallas to Baltimore that would get me in at 1:10 a.m. Add on the taxi ride to College Park, and I was expecting to get in to the hotel at about 2:30 a.m. So I tried to stand by on one of the two earlier flights to DFW, and I got on the second of those two. This allowed me to stand by for a flight that would get me in to Reagan National at 12:20 a.m. I was the last passenger let on---not only did I not have to pay a change fee, but I also got to sit in first class for the first time ever! The taxi ride to College Park was long but not nearly as long as it would have been from Baltimore, and I was at the hotel by 1:00.
Our first event scheduled for Friday morning was a tour of the U.S. Capitol, given by the staff of our Representative John Carter. We got on the Metro in College Park, dropped off our luggage at our hotel in Foggy Bottom, then hopped on another train to the Capitol. Staff-led tours of the Capitol begin in the tunnels underneath the building, and when we got down to the basement we found a two-hour wait just to get in. This was a theme for the entire weekend---being in D.C. on the opening weekend of the Cherry Blossom Festival meant being exposed to crowds everywhere we turned. We were advised that it would be better to tour the Capitol later, so we decided to take a trip down to the National Air & Space Museum.
The Air & Space Museum has an amazing amount of history from the last hundred plus years of flight. Among the exhibits featured there are the original Spirit of St. Louis, several vehicles from the early days of the space program, and the original Wright Brothers Flyer. The museum is also the temporary host for the Smithsonian's National Treasures exhibit, which includes the hat that Lincoln wore to Ford's theater, the original Kermit the Frog, R2D2 and C3PO, and the original ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz (definitely Brandi's favorite).
We arrived back at the Capitol to find much shorter lines, and before no time our tour guide (currently a student at Texas A&M) was telling us about the history of the Capitol Building. We got to see the place that was originally intended to be George Washington's burial site, we saw the original home of the Supreme Court, we walked through the Rotunda and Statuary Hall, and we got to sit in the House chamber.
On the recommendation of our guide, we had lunch at Tortilla Coast, a Texan-owned TexMex restaurant that sits caddy corner to the House office buildings. We had some good food and some really good margaritas. Brandi was going to get a margarita, but when I noticed that a pitcher of margaritas cost less than two margaritas, I thought that getting a pitcher would be a good idea. Considering that I had slept three hours the night before, was getting over a cough (for which I was taking medication) and had no food in my stomach when we started eating at 3:00, it ended up being a great idea!
The next stop on our D.C. trip was a 90-minute tour of the men's bathroom at Bed Bath & Beyond. Since I wasn't feeling too well, we decided to come back to the hotel and take it easy on Friday night. We ordered 27 Dresses from our room, and I got to rest up and catch up on the NCAA Tournament.
On Saturday morning I got us breakfast at a Safeway located within the Watergate Hotel, and then we were off to get tickets to the Holocaust museum. With the crowds being insane all over town, we had to get there early before the tickets ran out. (Each ticket lists a time after which you are allowed to come back to see the exhibit.) After getting the tickets, we went to the National Gallery of Art. We saw numerous amazing pieces of art from the likes of Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, and da Vinci, and Brandi explained to me the difference between impressionism and all the other isms.
Our Saturday lunch was at a tapas bar. It was good, but among the items we ate was a particularly salty salad. It's also the answer to a trivia question---the first thing Brandi has sent back since we've known each other.
On our way to the Holocaust museum we wandered by the Washington Monument, which was hosting a kite festival as part of the Cherry Blossom Festival. It was amazing to see hundreds of kites being flown by the numerous people standing on the lawn of the monument. We got to the National Holocaust Museum at a little before 2:00, and it was extremely crowded. But it was amazing. The entire museum (which occupies a four-story building) is so well designed, and the visual elements used, from the construction of the museum itself to the Holocaust artifacts on display, were so evocative. The museum does such a good job of bringing together cultural history, religious history, and military history (the rise of Hitler, the history of antisemitism, the arc of World War II), and it packs an incredible emotional punch as well. It was an experience that I doubt either of us will ever forget.
We then walked by the cherry blossoms on our way to the Jefferson Memorial. Cherry blossoms can be found all around the city, but they are primarily located along the tidal basin. The Jefferson Memorial is one of my favorite places anywhere, and it was great to be with Brandi as she saw it for the first time. It's known for being a little more secluded, but it was super crowded on this day---it's pretty much the epicenter of the Cherry Blossom Festival.
Our Saturday dinner was at Filomena, a nice Italian restaurant in Georgetown. We really enjoyed the atmosphere, but our food choices unfortunately left something to be desired. But it was fun to be in Georgetown on a Saturday night.
On Sunday morning we attended mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral, which is within a block or two of Legal Sea Food and the National Portrait Gallery, our next two stops. Legal Sea Food was very good; it's a place Brandi has been wanting to introduce me to, and I really enjoyed it. They offered some interesting varieties of calamari as well as great fish and crab cakes.
The National Portrait Gallery is a place that I had never been, but we both thoroughly enjoyed it. It has portraits of pretty much every great American historical figure, including a room featuring all of the presidential portraits. The portrait gallery was also hosting Stephen Colbert's portrait, which was located above the water fountains and between the bathrooms. Remarkably, it had the longest line of people waiting to have their picture taken with it, besting George Washington's portrait by a factor of two or three.
Dinner on Sunday was at Old Ebbitt Grill, which is one of my favorite places to eat in D.C. The food was really good, and the atmosphere was great. The restaurant, which is a little over a block from the White House, has been a favorite of many presidents and is reputed to contain several of Teddy Roosevelt's personal belongings.
The walk by the monuments was something that I was looking forward to since we first arrived. We started by walking past the White House and then visited the World War II Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The thing that always gets me about the Lincoln Memorial is his second inaugural address. It sits to Lincoln's left (the Gettysburg Address is on his right), and it's just amazing to me the timeless wisdom he was able to inject into his speeches in the midst of such turbulence. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was, as always, sobering.
(Brandi is making me write that the temperature was under 70 degrees when we were at the Lincoln Memorial---hence the bundliness.)
Brandi's first time in Washington, D.C. was a great weekend for both of us. With our trip to New York in October, Brandi got to show me her favorite city, and now she's gotten to see mine.
On March 28-31, we spent a weekend in Washington, D.C. It was Daniel's eighth trip to our nation's capital and Brandi's first.
Brandi arrived by way of a trip for work. She had events in Fredericksburg, Virginia, and Adelphi (near College Park), Maryland. Upon discovering that the mascot for the University of Maryland is a terrapin (turtle), she thought that that was "so cute!" She finished with her work on Thursday and waited patiently for me to arrive---it was going to be a late night for me.
I was scheduled on a 7:55 flight from Austin to Dallas, then a flight from Dallas to Baltimore that would get me in at 1:10 a.m. Add on the taxi ride to College Park, and I was expecting to get in to the hotel at about 2:30 a.m. So I tried to stand by on one of the two earlier flights to DFW, and I got on the second of those two. This allowed me to stand by for a flight that would get me in to Reagan National at 12:20 a.m. I was the last passenger let on---not only did I not have to pay a change fee, but I also got to sit in first class for the first time ever! The taxi ride to College Park was long but not nearly as long as it would have been from Baltimore, and I was at the hotel by 1:00.
Our first event scheduled for Friday morning was a tour of the U.S. Capitol, given by the staff of our Representative John Carter. We got on the Metro in College Park, dropped off our luggage at our hotel in Foggy Bottom, then hopped on another train to the Capitol. Staff-led tours of the Capitol begin in the tunnels underneath the building, and when we got down to the basement we found a two-hour wait just to get in. This was a theme for the entire weekend---being in D.C. on the opening weekend of the Cherry Blossom Festival meant being exposed to crowds everywhere we turned. We were advised that it would be better to tour the Capitol later, so we decided to take a trip down to the National Air & Space Museum.
The Air & Space Museum has an amazing amount of history from the last hundred plus years of flight. Among the exhibits featured there are the original Spirit of St. Louis, several vehicles from the early days of the space program, and the original Wright Brothers Flyer. The museum is also the temporary host for the Smithsonian's National Treasures exhibit, which includes the hat that Lincoln wore to Ford's theater, the original Kermit the Frog, R2D2 and C3PO, and the original ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz (definitely Brandi's favorite).
We arrived back at the Capitol to find much shorter lines, and before no time our tour guide (currently a student at Texas A&M) was telling us about the history of the Capitol Building. We got to see the place that was originally intended to be George Washington's burial site, we saw the original home of the Supreme Court, we walked through the Rotunda and Statuary Hall, and we got to sit in the House chamber.
On the recommendation of our guide, we had lunch at Tortilla Coast, a Texan-owned TexMex restaurant that sits caddy corner to the House office buildings. We had some good food and some really good margaritas. Brandi was going to get a margarita, but when I noticed that a pitcher of margaritas cost less than two margaritas, I thought that getting a pitcher would be a good idea. Considering that I had slept three hours the night before, was getting over a cough (for which I was taking medication) and had no food in my stomach when we started eating at 3:00, it ended up being a great idea!
The next stop on our D.C. trip was a 90-minute tour of the men's bathroom at Bed Bath & Beyond. Since I wasn't feeling too well, we decided to come back to the hotel and take it easy on Friday night. We ordered 27 Dresses from our room, and I got to rest up and catch up on the NCAA Tournament.
On Saturday morning I got us breakfast at a Safeway located within the Watergate Hotel, and then we were off to get tickets to the Holocaust museum. With the crowds being insane all over town, we had to get there early before the tickets ran out. (Each ticket lists a time after which you are allowed to come back to see the exhibit.) After getting the tickets, we went to the National Gallery of Art. We saw numerous amazing pieces of art from the likes of Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, and da Vinci, and Brandi explained to me the difference between impressionism and all the other isms.
Our Saturday lunch was at a tapas bar. It was good, but among the items we ate was a particularly salty salad. It's also the answer to a trivia question---the first thing Brandi has sent back since we've known each other.
On our way to the Holocaust museum we wandered by the Washington Monument, which was hosting a kite festival as part of the Cherry Blossom Festival. It was amazing to see hundreds of kites being flown by the numerous people standing on the lawn of the monument. We got to the National Holocaust Museum at a little before 2:00, and it was extremely crowded. But it was amazing. The entire museum (which occupies a four-story building) is so well designed, and the visual elements used, from the construction of the museum itself to the Holocaust artifacts on display, were so evocative. The museum does such a good job of bringing together cultural history, religious history, and military history (the rise of Hitler, the history of antisemitism, the arc of World War II), and it packs an incredible emotional punch as well. It was an experience that I doubt either of us will ever forget.
We then walked by the cherry blossoms on our way to the Jefferson Memorial. Cherry blossoms can be found all around the city, but they are primarily located along the tidal basin. The Jefferson Memorial is one of my favorite places anywhere, and it was great to be with Brandi as she saw it for the first time. It's known for being a little more secluded, but it was super crowded on this day---it's pretty much the epicenter of the Cherry Blossom Festival.
Our Saturday dinner was at Filomena, a nice Italian restaurant in Georgetown. We really enjoyed the atmosphere, but our food choices unfortunately left something to be desired. But it was fun to be in Georgetown on a Saturday night.
On Sunday morning we attended mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral, which is within a block or two of Legal Sea Food and the National Portrait Gallery, our next two stops. Legal Sea Food was very good; it's a place Brandi has been wanting to introduce me to, and I really enjoyed it. They offered some interesting varieties of calamari as well as great fish and crab cakes.
The National Portrait Gallery is a place that I had never been, but we both thoroughly enjoyed it. It has portraits of pretty much every great American historical figure, including a room featuring all of the presidential portraits. The portrait gallery was also hosting Stephen Colbert's portrait, which was located above the water fountains and between the bathrooms. Remarkably, it had the longest line of people waiting to have their picture taken with it, besting George Washington's portrait by a factor of two or three.
Dinner on Sunday was at Old Ebbitt Grill, which is one of my favorite places to eat in D.C. The food was really good, and the atmosphere was great. The restaurant, which is a little over a block from the White House, has been a favorite of many presidents and is reputed to contain several of Teddy Roosevelt's personal belongings.
The walk by the monuments was something that I was looking forward to since we first arrived. We started by walking past the White House and then visited the World War II Memorial, the Korean War Veterans Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The thing that always gets me about the Lincoln Memorial is his second inaugural address. It sits to Lincoln's left (the Gettysburg Address is on his right), and it's just amazing to me the timeless wisdom he was able to inject into his speeches in the midst of such turbulence. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was, as always, sobering.
(Brandi is making me write that the temperature was under 70 degrees when we were at the Lincoln Memorial---hence the bundliness.)
Brandi's first time in Washington, D.C. was a great weekend for both of us. With our trip to New York in October, Brandi got to show me her favorite city, and now she's gotten to see mine.
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