July 2005 Europe Trip: We left Fairbanks at 5pm Thursday, July 14 2005 (scheduled for 3:30pm, but our flight was held up for an hour and a half because US customs didn't like two of the transiting Canada passengers). The 8-hour flight on Condor airlines to Frankfurt, Germany went nicely. The flight stewards chased my out of an empty window seat (where I normally gravitate to take aerial photos), and put up a little curtained-off area around the back two window seats. This seemed mysterious in a Dune sort of way, like some bizarre mutated human would warp in there, but then we noticed the stews sneaking in there to sleep and relax. We arrived in Frankfurt at around noon Friday, July 15. I'm struck by how much Germany looks like "the future"--everything (sidewalks, buildings, people) is clean and shiny, with that subtly different feeling you get from purpose-built movie sets. We rented a nice little tiny Opal car, and immediately headed south on A5. Everything on Europe's freeways is about the same height as everything in the US, but about 30% narrower; almost like your display aspect ratio is off. The lanes are incredibly, nerve-wrackingly narrow until you get used to them. A European freeway lane is about 50% narrower than one US lane on a 30MPH country route. We jumped off the freeway shortly thereafter, looking for a meal, but instead found the nice Naturpark Bergstrasse-Odenwald, which is labelled "Castle Frankenstein". Apparently the Frankenstein family of German nobles built this enormous castle on a hilltop starting in 948 AD; Mary Shelly apparently visited here in 1814. A bit down the road, we found a small town with a liquor store (for water) and a little Turkish restaurant (for food). Germany is so well-kempt, even the traffic jams have nice informative signs. That day we kept driving to the small valley town of Engelberg, nestled in the hills of Switzerland. The Swiss alps are quite blocky--decent mountains, really--and every valley floor is cultivated. We stayed at the Hotel Engelberg, a decent little bathroom-down-the-hall hotel. We ate dinner in the Hotel Engelberg restaurant, which was quite good. In the morning of Saturday, July 16 2005, we hiked up from Engelberg to the Trubsee lake, which was several hundred meters of vertical, but a nice hike with incredible views. We took the tram back down, shopped at the (southern Europe-wide) COOP supermarket, ate in the room, and slept. Swizerland has amazing infrastructure--the hiking trails have tastefully spaced but useful restaurants, snack shops, tram lines, etc. Sunday, July 17 2005, we left Swizerland for Bologna, Italy. Driving is incredibly hectic in Italy, the signage is barely adequate, and gasoline (benzina) is incredibly expensive. In retrospect, it would have been easier and cheaper to take the train. The freeways are pretty decent (except for the traffic), but we joked that the state and local roads are clearly built along goat paths. The roads in Italy are almost perfectly maintained (flawless asphalt, probably because of the frequent road construction!), but wind around every house, barn, field, and tree that exists along the path, and are constructed at about 50% scale compared to America (i.e., a typical two-way road looks like a one-way American lane). This wouldn't be so bad if traffic were slow and calm, but car, busses, and trucks flow continually at incredible speeds--about 2 or 3 times faster than we were accustomed to--and with incredible vehemence. Motorcycles will pass on the right, drive the wrong way up one-way streets, and thread past traffic stopped at a red light in order to zoom through the still-red light. If somebody's trapped behind you on the winding curves for more than a few seconds, they weave (like an angry hornet) in the lane until passing is theoretically possible. Monday and Tuesday I visited CINECA, a high-performance computing center funded by a consortium of universities in Italy and beyond. CINECA was interested in Charm++, the parallel programming project I worked on during graduate school. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday nights, we stayed at the TOP Park Hotel Bologna, which is in neither Bologna (as the name would imply) nor Pianoro (as they state on their website and literature), but in fact is in a little industrial area just north of Pianoro on SS65. We found the fastest way to reach the hotel from Bologna was to take the tollway A1 to Sasso Marconi, then follow the winding highway through the mountains to the Pianoro area. Just be sure to turn left (north) onto the straight road before crossing the bridge into Pianoro, or like us, you'll drive into, up and down the town of Pianoro searching in vain for the hotel. The hotel was quite nice, with an excellent and reasonably priced restaurant. Rooms in decent hotels in Italy seem to have several standard features: TV with pay-per-view, bidet, minibar, and some sort of bizarre electronic controls in the room. The Bologna hotel had an in-room radio. The hotels in Empoli and Treviso had a roomkey-based authentication system for the lights: to keep the lights on, you need to leave your room key in a reader built into the wall. We left Bologna Wednesday, July 20, in heavy traffic. We were initially headed south to Rome, but highway A1 to Rome passes through Firenze (Florence). The car navigation system warned us of a 18km traffic jam just north of Firenze, so we got off the jam-packed freeway and headed south on the state road, SS65. Firenze has an excellent set of churches--the huge dome is visible from the hills above. We parked on a street just north of the Fortezza da Basso, got some excellent and cheap food at a little restaurant on the Piazza della Indepenza, but weren't allowed (so we gathered) to sit and eat at the restaurant--apparently the cheap prices are only for takeout. Layla hit the row of covered tourist shops in the Piazza del Mercato Centrale, and I continued around the Basilica di San Lorenzo. We then both wandered the main Piazza San Giovanni area, gawking upward at the enormous Duomo church. After Firenze, we were planning to continue on to Rome, but after much dithering, decided to skip Rome and go directly to the Hotel da Vinci near Empoli, where we had a room reserved for Friday night. Our new rule is that if you only schedule one night in a town, you're not sightseeing--you're on a death march. We had to negotiate a room rate for Thursday night, which wasn't difficult. Expensive hotel room prices are not at all fixed: the lobby attendant's duty is to fill up empty rooms at whatever price the market will bear, down to some minimal amount that covers cleaning and damage probability. One of the most effective bargaining tactics seems to be to just sit and wait (which I'm good at!). It's very stressful to wait 30 seconds while a person mulls over an offer, and tempting to make a lower offer just to get it over with. We really liked Empoli. Our hotel was on the north side of the river Arno, right next to two supermarkets and several decent restaurants. We've decided that "Sphagetteria" in Italy means approximately "Denny's"--good, filling food at a reasonable price. Virtually all restaurants also serve beer, wine, and harder liquor. The food in Italy seems different both from American and northern European food and from what is sold as "Italian Food" in America. Unique ingredients include: Prosciutto: a whole cured, salty leg of hog (available at finer supermarkets) sliced into sub-millimeter sheets. As such, each piece of prosciutto includes a rim of fat and bits of connective tissue in addition to just muscle meat, which makes an intersting taste. Prosciutto hog legs are sold at room temperature in supermarkets, and the sliced product also appears decay-resistant, either because of the curing process (it's a dry meat) or because of the salt. Taking photos of the prosciutto making process would be a good way to build a 3D model of a hog leg, except that to avoid slicing through the bone, slices are taken at various angles which would have to be combined. Panna: polymerized milk protein. This is made by boiling milk or cream until the protein forms curds on the boiling surface. It's a sort of thick yellowish protein paste with a unique and not particularly milklike taste. On Thursday morning we visited Vinci, the little hilltop villiage near where Leonardo da Vinci was born, and then continued on to Pisa. Pisa's got the leaning tower, a set of decent (but not-quite level!) churches and domes, and a fairly well-preserved city wall, but that's about it. Pisa is just jam-packed with tourists, so we snapped our photos and got the heck out. Friday we drove up past Bologna again on our way to Treviso, where we stayed at the Maggior Consiglio hotel just south of town on the Terraglio--the road to Venezia. Treviso has a virtually complete city wall surrounded by river-moats, a variety of beautiful bridges and houses built over rivers, and isn't particularly packed with tourists. It's a beautiful city--perhaps the most attractive we'd found. Like Pisa, instead of parking meters, when parking in the blue spaces, you're supposed to display a little ticket on your dashboard purchased from a standalone machine (hidden somewhere on the block!), but we didn't get ticketed though we parked at least an hour at several places--perhaps tourists are exempt, or they only mail in tickets! Saturday we were burnt out, and attempted to drive down to the sea coast past the town of Jesolo. On a beautiful Saturday afternoon, everybody was trying to go to the beach, and the traffic was bumper to bumper for several kilometers *before* the town of Jesolo, so we turned back. We decided to spend the day in the hotel sleeping, reading, and lounging--every vacation needs a bit of that. Sunday we resolved to go to Venezia (Venice). There are several ways to get there: train, bus, and car. The cheapest approach would probably have been to drive to Mestre (the nearest city), use the free tourist parking, and take the bus in (about a 10 Euro fare). We found a bus stop, but couldn't figure out the bus schedule, so we headed back to our car. As you might expect, as soon as we were out of range of the bus stop, a clearly labelled bus to Venezia stopped there! Having no way to predict when the next bus would arrive, and still a bit unclear on the fare structure, we decided to just drive. You can't drive to most of Venezia, but you can get onto the island fairly easily, and there is a huge amount of very expensive parking. We chose the ferry parking garage, whose parking spots were tiny, and we scraped the bumper of our rental car against a concrete wall on the way in. Grrr. Venezia is indeed as beautiful as they say, but the most amazing feature of Venice, to me, is that there is *nothing* natural left. Like much of Italy, the buildings are uniformly stone or brick, with tile roofs and wood beams supporting their upper floors and porticos. Streets (pedestrian only) are all paving stones, and larger piazzas have closed-over wells. Every building is between two and five stories tall, and either stuck directly onto an adjacent building, or separated from it by a tiny pedestrian alleyway, a canal (Riva), or both. Canals are lined with brick or stone to at least several meters below the water level. There are no ditches, lawns, shrubs, or even dirt to be seen. Occasionally a private citizen will have a garden, but the total number of trees on the entire island seems to only be a few dozen. Tourists form a thick, oppressive mass along the main paths between the Piazza Roma (where parking, busses, and trains arrive) and the main square, but streets even a few blocks distant from these paths (which remind me of ant trails) are nearly deserted. We checked out all the things Venezia is famous for: gondolas (everywhere, but expensive [like 40 Euros per person] and manned by taciturn Turkish-looking guys, so we skipped them), glassworks (scattered, but cheaper off the beaten path, so we bought some), and architecture (everywhere, and very impressive). Everything in Venezia is about twice as expensive as on the mainland--food and drink (a soda on tap is 3 Euros), travel (floating "bus" fare is 5 Euros), and parking (18 Euros in the farthest garage). But you can see why: to resupply a restaurant in most cities, a truck can pull directly up to the back of the store. But in Venezia, the truck stops at a port, the goods are transferred to a small supply ship, the ship goes across the bay and gets stuck behind a long line of Gondolas as it works its way up the canals, finally docks near the restaurant, and some poor guy has to unload the supplies from the ship onto the sidewalk and finally pack them by hand into the restaurant. Venezia also appears to be quite close to a final reckoning with the sea--a typical sidewalk was about one foot above the current sea level (not clear if this was high or low tide); larger piazzas were even closer. Stairs that presumably once led down to a dock now go one or two steps and directly into the sea; several more steps now seem to be permanently below water. After Venice on the 25th we drove north through the alps, through the hills of Austria, and stayed two nights at a little hotel in the little town of Sauerlach just south of Munich. We took the immaculate public transit on the 26th into Munich, wandered until we couldn't move, and on the 27th were off to Frankfurt. Just off the freeway outside Frankfurt is a cool little village nestled in the forest, where we stopped to relax and soak up a bit more nature.