Venice: Like No Other City on Earth

Venice is a great place to visit, but I understand why its population is quickly shrinking.  While 16th century Venice city planners were probably giving themselves a pat on the back for their successes, I'm surprised that 21st century Venice city planners are not committing more suicides.  

Sorry that's a cruel joke, Venice was not intended to be viewed through the lens of a practical engineer, but rather the lens of a hopeless romantic.  Fortunately I'm both.  It is true that Venice is on it's way to becoming a tourist-only museum; it takes a special kind of person to live here full time, and their numbers are few.

One of my favorite pictures for no particular reason

I heard many of the ground floors are empty due to flooding

Closest we got to gondola (why I'm hopeless)

Just another old church - I've lost track of what's what, there are so many

As the only guests in our hotel, the staff put out 2 hardboiled eggs, 2 croissants, and some nice coffee.  Kerry grabbed both eggs.  We then caught the vaparetto back to Venice for our first full day exploring the city.  First stop was the market.

Me admiring more seafood I can't buy - next time we book a room with a kitchenette

Cuttlefish before

Cuttlefish after, I can't tell if the ink actually tastes like anything

Then it was time to walk over to San Marco to tour the church.

We found it using only a compass and the free tourist map from the airport... well the signs helped too.

Kerry tricking a pigeon into thinking she had food for them, they wised up quick

View from the bottom

View from the top!  This view is worth 8 euro(?).

Luckily we visited on the quarter hour.

We then hopped on a vaparetto to tour the grand canal, thanks to Rick Steve's Audio Guide mp3s which we downloaded to our phones.  These give you some nice bits of information abut the history of the magnificent buildings lining the canal.

Kerry got a front row view during our self-guided tour

I question how "romantic" this is with massive boats buzzing by you chopping up the water.

"You don't say, Rick?"

The mailboat

We had one more tour stop that turned out to be the best:  the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.   We saw one of Donatello's wood sculptures, and final resting place of his bo staff.

Jethro Tull fanboy street performer near church

The Friari is big, but not much from the outside.  Beautiful paintings that I can't take pictures of inside, though.

After this visit I decided I'm a fan of Titian; he did some pretty interesting things with paint that I would have never appreciated had it not been for Mr. Steve.  

After this, we were pretty much worn out of looking at things, so we decided to wander and find a place for a glass of vino, and we did a bit of window shopping.

Stopped in a local grocery store and had a good laugh:  Pasta shapes!  Collect them all!

Shops in a narrow alley, probably selling those creepy carnival masks from Eyes Wide Shut

I was right!

It was common to hit a dead end

Stopped for some wine, and they broke out into a tasting session - but then found out it was not free :(.  It was fun listening to a wine presentation in Italian.  Well, I assumed it was wine; I could only make out bianco and rossi.

Best window shopping display in Venice.  A mannequin holding a mannequin baby, wearing a thong that spells out "Love My Virus" in rhinestones.  So bummed they were closed.  A quick post-trip google search later I found this blog post which talks about her experience in this store - Fiorella Gallery.  Here.  She links to the store's actual webpage, but I'll warn you it's weird and uptight folks may find it offensive.

After a late dinner of mediocre, overpriced pasta (we were so hungry, I didn't care that much that I could have made it better myself at home), we headed home to rest up for our 2nd full day.

It started with a bicycle tour around Sant Erasmo (using the hotel's free bike rental).

Dangerous stunt:  self shot while riding.  Don't tell Carol!  Her camera was fine.

Kerry hadn't ridden a bike in years, but as they say, it's like riding a bike.

In America my Ford Ranger looks small...

The local cemetery - beautiful fresh flowers everywhere

A goat

Burano from far away

and then a long vaparetto ride to Burano...

Burano from up close - like walking into a painting

The leaning tower of Burano - it will have have to do, as I'm not sure we'll make it to Pisa this year.

Walking down the street is like going through the home improvement store paint swatch section

Perfectly acceptable house color; wonder what HOA meetings here are like?

Feral hunting cats, classic 3-point tactic:  remain motionless until a bird lands within striking distance.

And then to Murano...

Glass garden

Murano is certainly odd.  Just loads of artistic glass shops; but they almost hate tourists.  You walk into a store and they just can't wait for you to break something.  I saw a glass trout that was going for 6000 euro.  We quickly made our way to a nice cafe for the WC, lunch, and prosseco.

I should time out to say that toilets in Venice are tricky.  When you're out all day, you have to plan bathroom stops with food or drinks (a viscous cycle), or pay the 1.50 to use the public WC.  

For dinner we headed back to Venice to find another restaurant and more walking in different neighborhoods.

Found chestnuts roasting on an open fire!  First time, they're like sweet potatoes, kinda.

The 11 pm vaparetto is nice and warm.

Well, that about wraps it up... we had a morning flight out the next day, so we had an early start to allow time for all the transfers between boats and buses.  It was a weekend to remember for the rest of our lives, and many travel lessons were learned.  Thanks for reading.

Prologue to Venice: Like No Other City on Earth

The weekend of November 10 was [mostly] quiet as Kerry and I spent it in town again.  While the weekend didn't deserve it's own blog post, now that we're more seasoned expats and have gotten bored of silly UK/US comparisons, I do want to share one highlight.  We were invited over for dinner with our wonderful neighbors; a retired couple who know how to have a good time.  We started out at a proper pub, loaded with taxadermied wildife, where we gents had 2 pints each.  We then made our way back to their house where I had another pint with a prawn appetizer, and then the four of us collectively took out 2 bottles of wine with the take-and-bake pizza.  After enjoying our hostess's wonderful homeeade creme brulee, they broke out the amaretto and congac.  Hours of wonderful conversation later (when I noticed Kerry was sipping on straight congac and saying how good it was) I knew it was time to bid our hosts farewell and stumble home across the street.  The next morning I could only hope we didn't say anything too embarrassing.  But I can't wait to return the favor at our bungalow!  

Before I get on to our Venice experience,  first and foremost I must thank my coworker Carol who let us borrow her camera.  She was a lifesaver, as the photos we took in Venice are irreplaceable.  What happened to our camera?  Well, as I was in a rush to get in the car to get out of the cold rain in Swansea to return home, I threw my camera in the armrest cubby, and slammed the top down.  The Audi I'm renting has this horrible design where there's a plastic support rib on the inner wall of the armrest cubby lid which applied sufficient pressure to my camera's LCD screen to cause failure.  I was nauseous with regret!  There's no way we can afford another camera.  It still takes pictures but you can't see what you're taking a photo of, or know what the settings are.  Luckily we found a service that will repair it for roughly half the cost of replacing it, but that still stings.  

Lesson learned - the outcome of haste is always a lot more painful than you bargained for.  Haste clouds judgement and causes stupid mistakes.  This year is about constantly being in unfamiliar situations, and it's all the more important to keep a level head.  Sometimes it's too easy to get worked up over the unknown and I lapse into this weird paniky hyper vigilance mode, especially in other non-English speaking countries.  But, even here in the UK on occasion I've had to stop and take a deep breath (usually related to traffic).  But seriously, it's not THAT different, so just chill out dude.

Well that was a bit too cathartic, but I'm not going to delete it.  I did just change the title to Prologue, so that means this will be a 2-part post.  

So finally let's talk about Venice.  It started like most of our trips with a 3:30 am alarm clock to get to the airport.  Birmingham has some great deals on offsite car parking, but the level of complexity we experienced to park made Rube Goldberg look like Jack Welch.  It's still not clear to me how we got to the airport, but sometimes people tend to pick up the slack for you if you appear to be incompetent.  A similar situation came up after we landed, where the ticket machine which issued us the discount Venice bus passes for the weekend was broken. The bus driver told us to go to the ticket office and the ticket office said just to get on the bus with the voucher I printed out.  Fed up with it, we just got on the bus and the driver gave up his argument (only after giving me the classic Italian hand motion, which reminded me of this scene from Raging Bull).

"I got no choice!"

The ticket machine in Venice did work, so we were had unlimited access to the vaparetto (Venice's boat bus system) for 3 days.  

Enough jibber jabber, pictures please!

On our first vaparetto experience a taxi boat nearly missed ramming into us.  Instead it just glanced off the side.  Hand gestures were made. 

Just after the taxi incident as an elderly Italian woman started talking to me as I nodded and smiled.

This stop could not have come any sooner!

We did not stay on Venice proper, but we found a good deal on a nearby island, Sant Erasmo.  It is a quiet farming island that is sparsely populated with wide open spaces.  It could not be more opposite than Venice, which is literally packed from edge to edge with buildings.

The vaparetto park and ride on Sant Erasmo; we had to walk.

Our bus stop

Beautiful clear weather all weekend!

We were the only guests the first night - the hotel was owned by a woman from Iowa who has lived in Venice for 30 years

Hotel neighbored a vineyard

After a quick nap after the long morning we had, it was back on the vaparetto to get lost in Venice and try to find a place for dinner.

Rialta bridge at night

The grand canal!

Sliver of a moon over the city

We rested on the elevated walkway in a dry San Marco's Square

San Marco's Square 3 days before we arrived

Around 9 pm we randomly went into a fun looking restaurant and had a decent meal.  With Barcelona under our belts, we were ready for the late dinner.  It's well known that everything in Venice is expensive, little did we know this was the best deal we would have found all weekend.

A decent wine that reminds us of our hometown of Valpo, IN

Room keys were attached to skeeballs - they were left hanging in the lobby while you were out, and front door was never locked.  There was no one a.t the desk

So I'm going to pause here for now.  Our first 1/2 day in the city was fun just wandering and getting lost in the winding alleys.  Venice is a magical city, like no other.   (I just realized this is probably because there are no cars, scooters, or bicycles to be found, walking only.)

Swansea: Divided We Fall Games

It's been quiet on our end for a few weeks; we had a pretty tame weekend October 26-27 that I wasn't really able to stretch into a post.  The more exciting things we do out here the the harder it is to write about the more "normal" weekends we have sandwiched in between.  Not to say we didn't have a great time!  We met up with work friends and visited the Nottingham Castle to watch some Medieval times-esque jousting.  When we couldn't stand the cold any longer, we hit up the pub and enjoyed some very good burgers - the first I've had that actually qualified as a burger and not a meatloaf sandwich.

Falconry demonstration

So let's press on to more interesting things - the biggest UK-based CrossFit team competition Divided We Fall 2012 in Swansea, Wales.  109 teams from around the country competed over 2 days, with the top teams completing 8 grueling events before the winner was declared.   A team consisted 2 women and 4 men, and the events required combinations of 2 to 6 members.  Kerry made the team to compete for CrossFit Nottingham!   While I was beat out of the top 4 by some respectable men who put up some amazing qualifying performances, I did have the opportunity to be a part of the event as a judge.

Posh 4-star hotel so Kerry could recover properly

Partial team checking-in:  Rob, Katie, Scott, Ben, and Kerry.   Team Captain and Coach Andy had run off somehwere, sorry!

The stage is set, the crowd hums in anticipation

While the venue was large, it was in a basketball gymnasium, which posed a problem for a competition which involves a large amount of overhead weightlifitng.  No drops from overhead were allowed, and if it was done intentionally penalties were incurred.  It was ironic because CrossFitters love to drop bumper plates from overhead.   Dropping weight is half the reason CrossFit gyms ("boxes") exist, since big fitness complexes usually have rules against it.  There's not much more satisifying really.  I still give the event organizers a lot of respect for their organization, but hopefully a venue with concrete flooring can be found next year.

Andy, Katie, and Ben after Event 1- 8 minutes of  as many rounds as possible of 1 burpee, followed by a single-leg squat on each leg.  As a team they averaged 11 per minute!

Me from behind demonstrating a proper burpee finishing position after having to take away a valuable repetition

CrossFit Nottingham fans can be spotted by their tell-tale Robin Hood hats, modeled here by Dani.

Kerry's participated in the 2nd workout of the day, named "Jackie".  This is a deceptively difficult full-body workout consisting of a 1000 meter row on an ergo rowing machine, 50 20 kg barbell thrusters (thrust the barbell overhead from a squat position), and 30 pullups.  As this was a team workout, 1 man and 1 woman from the team must complete the work as fast as possible.  Rob's incredible rowing ability - maintained a pace of 1:35/500m - plus Kerry's efficient pullup ability resulted in a strong finish for Nottingham in about 13 minutes putting them in 15th place overall after

Kerry rocking some "butterfly" pullups with teammate Rob.  Check out those guns!  Be afraid, notice how Rob keeps his distance.

Team Crossfit Nottingham worked their way up the ranks after day 1.  Scott and Ben knocked out huge numbers of reps for 2 minutes of 155 lb push jerks, 2 minutes of 45 lb weighted pullups, and 2 minutes of nimble ball catches.  OK - I'm an outward critic of the 3rd event, which was a test of agility by bouncing a lacrosse ball against a board and catching it.  We might as well have played hopscotch - boring to watch, silly to judge, and in my opinion does not qualify as a fitness event.  It's ok, sometimes bad ideas propagate all the way to the international CrossFit games *cough* softball throws *cough*.   The sport of fitness is still fun.

To wrap up Day 1, Kerry and Andy knocked out the longest workout of the day, which required them to move a bumper plate from the ground to overhead 84 times (21-18-15-12-9-6-3), between each set they had to complete 7 pull ups and 30 double unders with a jumprope.  More pullups, yikes!  Kerry did 79 pullups in a competition environment in one day, in addition to a host of other grip-destroying movements.

Andy and Kerry jockeying for 1st place in their heat

We finished Day 1 in 8th place!  The Nottingham crowd was going wild with this result.  This easily qualified us to continue on Sunday, when the cut the field from 109 to 50.  The night was tame; even watching a competition is exhausting, with most people standing for nearly 10 hours.   For the competitor, recovery performance is just as important as the workout event.

Swansea at dawn - plenty of rain here

Day 2 increased in technical difficulty, with the first workout of the day requiring the team of two men and two women to complete 80 hang snatches (to a full squat), 60 toes-to-bar (an abdominal destroyer), and a shuttle sprint relay with burpees, twice!  As a judge I had to issue a lot of "no-reps" for improper range of motion.

Lots of counting today...

Some amazing performances were put on by other teams.  One highlight was watching Train CrossFit out of Manchester, home of Sam Briggs.  She was a strong finisher in the 2011 Games, took 2012 off for a knee surgery, but looks healthy and ready for a strong 2013 season representing Great Britain and Europe.

Kerry (on the floor doing burpees) racing against Sam Briggs (running backward in black sports bra and shorts)

The huge number of snatches required in this workout really separated the field.  If you had bad form or a team where 1 or 2 members could not perform the movement, you would not finish.   Nottingham was prepared, and a strong finish resulted in a bump up to 5th overall  -well beyond expectation!  The field was cut to 20.

A strength component followed, where Katie and Rob had to complete the Bear Complex - a compound exercise of clean+front squat+push press+back squat+rear push press.  They had 50 seconds to complete before moving on to the next, heavier weight in 10 lb increments.  There were some super strong teams here, and while Nottingham had a great result, the field was cut from 20 to 10.  Nottingham was 11th, and missed the cut by 1 place!  While we were upset by this temporarily, the team put on amazing performances and had nothing to be sad about.

We stayed to watch the finals, where the top 5 teams completed their 8th workout of the day.  This time, every team member had to contribute, and the winners emerged from CrossFit Bath, who had hovered near the top the entire weekend.

Well, this could easily be the most exahusting weekend yet!  We unfortunatly had no time to explore Swansea or southern Wales, as we had to drive 3.5 hours home so I could go to work.  We spent the entire weekend in a gymnasium, haha!  It was a great time hanging out with friends from our gym, and fun to be a part of such a huge UK event.  

CrossFit Nottingham cheering section

Well, if you are not a Crossfitter I'm surprised you made it this far through the post.  Big weekends coming up, folks!

Birmingham, Baby

Ahh Birmingham, England's "second city".  I just looked up the statistics, and while it is true that Birmingham is the 2nd most populated city in the UK, it's a distant second at less than one-third the size of London, and in close competition with 3rd place Manchester.

In addition to the Poland trip we just took, this month we've paid lodging for 3 upcoming trips (Nov, Dec, and Feb).  Then, United Cargo FINALLY decided to charge me for the cats flights.  I'll admit I kind of forgot about it in the midst of all the other expenses as part of the move.  Point is, we need to reign in the travel spending for our shorter day trip weekends until we get back on track.

The clear choice to save money was a trip to Birmingham, only 50 miles away with plenty to see.  I've been hanging on to all my coins to be prepared with exact change for pay-and-display parking, and I'm glad I did.  I found a carpark just outside of the Bullring mall that covered me for 6 hours for £6.50.  Not cheap by any means, in Indy that same amount (about $10) would cover you for 24 hours at the downtown mall garage.  It was however a good deal relative to the cost of parking in the Bullring garage.

OK, enough obsessing about parking.  As you might guess, I don't have a lot of material to work with this week.

The futuristic Selfridges at Bullring Shopping Center from a distance

Up close

The Selfridges in London is 2nd only to Harrods, and here in Birmingham it just dominates.  We had fun walking around the food and drink areas.  I even found an upscale beef jerky display featuring about 15 different kinds, including the African version "biltong", which is popular out here.

Don't break eye contact!

So you might wonder why the hell I'd bother to blog about a trip to the mall -  it's really not about shopping for us.  These massive shopping centers in the heart of the bigger cities are where everyone is hanging out.  It's not "just the mall" in a big field like back at home; there are numerous shops and attractions around the mall that all benefit from the concentration of shoppers.

The usual architecture juxtaposition of very old with very new

It's fun to get caught up in the crowds, and walk around and watch people.  You're bound to find street performers and artists, some folks in costume collecting donations, and some folks that look like they're in costume but not.  Not to mention plenty of cafes, pubs, and sausage stands to refuel as needed.  It's all very pedestrian friendly, and all stages of life were well represented.  One in 10 people are in a pram (stroller) or a wheelchair, and all were having a good time.

The "American food" display, probably the only place to buy Lucky Charms in a 100 mile radius.  Hilarious.

Christmas displays were in full force at the massive department store Selfridges.  Yeah its too early to really care about Christmas yet, but it was fun to see what British folks will be buying this year.   I will say that the prearraged gift boxes are much classier out here; but we were at a pretty classy department store, not WalMart.

We wandered away from the mall and crowds slowly, following pedestrian signs to the Jewelry Quarter.  I later read that 40% of all jewelry in the UK is made here.  We walked around the block and it was literally one shop after the next;  I was surprised the storefronts were not more, shall we say, inviting.  I didn't feel that the stores really cared to compete with each other for business either.  I really don't understand why so many jewelry shops need to exist in such close proximity - if they were pubs I'd understand.

Like many things here, the reason most things exist as they are is because that's how it always was, and no one really remembers before that, so why bother changing it.  That's my impression anyway, but I'd love to hear some other explanations.

A clocktower in the Jewelry Quarter

After grabbing some street food (kangaroo burgers!), the final stop was the market.  I always find myself surrounded by beautiful cuts of mammals and fish when I have no means to transport them home in a reasonable amount of time.  And then I never return "just to buy food" because I have to consider the pain of the parking situation.  These markets are designed for the locals who can walk home, and I get depressed that I can't join them.  Next time I'll walk around all day with a cooler if there's a slight chance I can fill it somewhere.   The seafood selection was more than impressive considering  our inland location; and not in bad shape for it getting later in the afternoon.

We walked past the protein and toward the produce, where end-of-the-day bargains were beginning.  We found ourselves in a very fortuitous situation; yes we couldn't spend much, but at 4:30, the produce stands wanted to close up in the next 30 minutes, and I had my extra coins meant for parking weighing heavy in my pocket.

I didn't even have to haggle (I'm terrible at this anyway), they were selling large bowls of fruit and veg at £1.50 a pop.  I tried to grab bowls of things I knew were pricier at Sainsburys, like mangoes.   I also got a load of limes, peppers, okra, and some cauliflower and cabbage to round it off.

£4.50 later

I made roasted cauliflower with a chili, lime, and garlic.  One fun thing about limes is that when you roast the rind, they get chewy and slightly sweet, in addition to sour.  They taste like sour patch kids, and go well with the heat from the chilis.

So we had a fun day on a budget.  Being a bit worn out, we stayed in Saturday night and watched a Netflix movie - the first one we've seen since we've been here!