Europe Excerpt #4: Cinque Terre

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The following is an excerpt of the journal I kept while in Europe for a month last summer. This entry details a day I spent in Cinque Terre, a national park on Italy's Mediterranean coast. Be sure to check out previous excerpts:

Europe Excerpt #1: The Europe Playlist

Europe Excerpt #2: The Awkward Couple (this excerpt is actually from the evening immediately preceding today's entry)

Europe Excerpt #3: Scaling the Mountain

For context, 'Cinque Terre' means 'five lands' and refers to the 5 towns in the park that are connected by a coastal hiking path.

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Woke up and got out of there after preparing for a long day of hiking. I resolved to consume something, preferably Italian, in each of the villages.

Village #1 (Riomaggiore). Consumption: salami and mozzarella panini for breakfast. Tasty.

After breck, I set off on the Via dell Amore (the road of love), aka the coastal path between Rio and Manarola. It was the shortest and most populated path of the journey. Manarola is similar to Rio, but a lot smaller (Rio and the northernmost village, Monterosso, are the biggest). (Ed. Riomaggiore is the southernmost town - the hike went from south to north.)

Village #2 (Manarola). Consumption: Mela e Cardamomo (apple and cardomom) juice. I have definitely never had a drink, or a food for that matter, where cardamom is one of the 2 principal ingredients. It wasn't amazing, but it was unique.

After the juice I kept going towards Corniglia. Corniglia is set much higher in the landscape than the first two; you have to climb a winding staircase containing 382 steps to get to the top (there's a sign letting you know and congratulating you). I stopped in at a cafe for:

Village #3 (Corniglia). Consumption: a small vegetable quiche. Decent.

It was while eating this quiche that I met Mark from Chicago and Pete from Detroit. They were 15-20 years older than me (Ed. they still are, presumably) but they were cool so I kept going with them. The third leg of the hike was the longest yet but not that hard, but it was very hot, so we stopped in Vernazza, a town jutting out on a bit of a peninsula, for some...

Village #4 (Vernazza). Consumption: gelato. I got melon flavour, and it tasted a bit like cantaloupe, but mostly like sweetness. Tasty.

Vernazza also happened to be where Mark was staying, so we stopped in for a pit stop. Upon starting up again, we found out from fellow travelers that a) the last train left Monterosso (our final destination) at 6:30*, b) the hike from 4->5, the hardest of the 4 legs, would take anywhere from 1.5-2.5 hours (some 55ish y/o Germans said 1.5, then revised it to 2 as if to say we North Americans suck at fitness) and c) it was 4:00. OK, that part we didn't find out from fellow travelers.

*because of the 24 hour train strike lasting from 9-9PM which luckily didn't affect me directly, though the spill over might. (Ed. it didn't)

Anyway, it ended up taking us one hour. Boo yeah. Take that Germany. Monterosso, the most northerly town, has the only real beach on the island (Ed. I think I meant in the park. it's not an island). I brought my bathing suit in case I felt like swimming, but we got a drink first and afterwards I had lost my swimpetite.

Village #5 (Monterosso). Consumption: Limoncino, as well as a couple beers and some complimentary olives and snacks. The limoncino (which we assumed was the same thing as limoncello, a regional specialty), was a lot more alcoholic than I was expecting, but not terrible.

Oh yeah, previously we had found a dude selling limoncello on an extremely narrow and treacherous part of the hike basically straight from his orchard. Hilarious. So anyway, Pete left, Mark and I had another beer and got on the train, with him departing at Vernazza.

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I did some more stuff that evening, but it wasn't particularly interesting, so I'll cut the excerpt off here. Hope you enjoyed, and stay tuned for more bloggy goodness!

The Day my Internet Life Changed

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If I wanted to be a big cliche, I would start this post like this:

August 14, 2008.

Except I don't want to be a big cliche. Also, I don't remember exactly what day it was, and I can't seem to figure that information out via web history or anything. But I think August 14 is pretty close.

So how did your internet life change that day, Dave? Well, I'll tell you! That is the day I got Google Reader.

If you've never heard of Google Reader or similar services, also known as "RSS feeds", "news readers" or any other permutation of the words "RSS", "feed", "news" and "reader", here's what it is. It's basically a service that lets you subscribe to various blogs and other websites, so that anytime new content is published, it goes straight to your inbox. All your subscriptions are managed in a folder system on the left, and you just have to click on whichever one you'd like to read. Here's what mine looks like:

So now I have all the news and stuff I like to read about delivered straight to my door. By the way, I should mention that almost every website ever has an RSS feed. It's not just for blogs. cbc.ca, for example, syndicates every story (I think) posted to their website to their RSS feed. Furthermore, there are different formats to RSS feeds - to continue with the previous example, CBC's feed only includes the headline and a one sentence-summary, but you can click on the headline to read the full story if you're interested. I like this format for CBC, since they obviously publish a ton every day, and I don't have time to read it all, but I have time to scroll through the headlines.

Now, I have a lot to say on this topic, and there will probably be many follow-up posts including my favourite blogs and some of the reasons I don't like Google Reader, but I suppose we should stick to today's topic: how exactly did Google Reader change my internet life? There are a couple answers:

1. It's my default thing to do on the web. If I don't have any e-mails to answer, don't feel like playing some stupid Yahoo Game, and don't want to while away the hours on Facebook, I'm probably reading Google Reader. In fact, I'd probably read Google Reader ahead of those things most of the time.
2. I'm much more current in certain fields. It's not like Google Reader has caused me to become interested in different topics; now, it just requires less effort keep up my interest. I've always liked astronomy, but now that I subscribe to a couple of astronomy blogs, I actually have some knowledge to go along with that interest.
3. I'm all over the internet. One of the great things about blogs is their ability to link to other blogs. If something big happens on the internet, there's a pretty good chance one of the blogs I read will link to it, even though I only subscribe to about one googleth of the blogs out there.
4. I'm into the blog culture. I didn't read blogs much before getting Google Reader, but now I'm all up in this bitch. I think there's a very good chance I never would have started this blog if not for Google Reader. Can you imagine how much worse all your lives would have been without my hilarious stories?!?

Okay, I'm gonna cut myself off here, since I could go on for hours about Google Reader. To be continued...

The Phone Debacle

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Last night, I was at a friend's house, and when I left to bike home, it was raining pretty hard. It wasn't too far, so I just grun and bore it, and arrived home 15 minutes later, soaking wet. Needless to say, I rid myself of my soaking clothes ASAP, not thinking twice about tossing them in a heap on the floor.

When I got up this morning, I couldn't find my phone, and eventually realized I hadn't bothered to take it out of my pocket when I arrived home last night. Well, when I eventually recovered the old girl, I discovered that it had tragically passed overnight. I was even presented with a time of death: 3:10AM. This was several hours after I arrived home, so perhaps if I was a little more diligent with my bedtime routine, I could have prevented the unthinkable. But alas.

I've got a new phone now, so all is (mostly) back to normal. However, being phone-less for one afternoon was long enough for some CRAZY PHONE ADVENTURES.

The first crazy phone adventure wasn't that crazy - I just went to school to meet some people when I was supposed to go one of their houses, an instruction that had been revised via text (the reviser knew about my phone dilemma, so this one's on her).

While at said classmate's house, I mentioned my plans for later - playing basketball with some people in the evening. I invited a friend (Ian) who I thought would be into it, and told him I'd be by his house shortly before seven, since I had been informed the bball was going down at, you guessed it, seven. (Isn't this exciting?!?)

OK. Fast forward to about 4:15. I got home, and was in a rush because I had to eat dinner and shower before tutoring at 5, since I thought I wouldn't have time between the hour-long tutoring session and bball (it was a half hour bike ride away). Since I was in such a rush, I didn't check my e-mail until shortly before 5. This was unfortunate, since I had an e-mail waiting in my inbox informing me that basketball was at 8, not 7. Well, okay, fine for me (I had no other plans), but I had to tell Ian, and this proved to be difficult since I had no phone, and on top of that, had lost all of my contacts. Oh yeah, one more thing: it just so happens that Ian has been without internet for a few days, so I couldn't simply e-mail him. This leads me to believe I have discovered some sort of anomaly in the age of communication: when one party has no phone, and the other no internet, communication becomes impossible.

Well, I didn't have time to worry about that, since I had to rush off to tutoring. After tutoring, I went straight to the Rogers store in an attempt to get a new phone. They required the postal code of the billing address; unfortunately, since my family is on the family plan, that billing address is my parents', an address I do not know since they moved a few months ago, and I've never mailed them anything.

So I headed over to my friend Janet's house, with two goals: retrieve my parents' California address, and get in touch with Ian somehow. Luckily, I had asked my mom about her address within the last 48 hours, so it was fresh in my inbox. The second mission, contacting Ian, proved to be more difficult. None of my friends who would have his phone number were online, and given the nature of the age of cell phones, I don't know anyone's number by memory. Eventually I had a brainwave: check facebook for friends' phone numbers. I checked 3 or 4, with zero luck, until I came across a friend who lists the website of his home business. Luckily, the phone number for this business is just his cell phone! So I borrowed the use of Janet's roommate's cell phone, and sent a text to Matt, to be forwarded to Ian.

Unfortunately, I couldn't stick around to find out if it worked, since I had to go back to the Rogers store, with billing info in hand. Of course, when I got there and told them my parents new postal code (i.e. zip code), the chick got confused since it wasn't a Canadian address. I eventually figured out she had all my info right in front of her, so I guess the billing address thing was more of a confirmation than anything. Anyway, I was worried at first, but she just had to put a call in to her boss (in which she had to speak some sort of weird password that included her name and "zulu" and a few other words...?!?) and it all worked out.

At this point, she described my options: since I've had my current phone for more than a year (more like two and a half), I qualify for a "hardware upgrade". Great! Except that a hardware upgrade requires a new 3 year deal. Given that I'm likely leaving the country in a few months, this didn't seem like a good deal. Option 2 was to buy a new phone outright, and with the cheapest one being 70 bucks, I just didn't feel like it.

So I asked if they had some sort of temp phone I could take for a few days. Well, it turns out they have a big box of crappy lost and found phones or something, and after a few minutes of digging, she found a functional one, complete with charger! I am now the proud owner of a (free!) Nokia 3120b, which, according to Google, is a 2004 phone.

So while I'm still missing almost all of my contacts, at least I've got something. But boy, let me tell you, losing your cell phone is a lot more devastating than losing your... home phone? I'm not even sure how that would happen. I guess address book is a better old-timey analogy. Whatever.

This has been another installment of CRAZY PHONE ADVENTURES.