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.

Baseball Stuff

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Hey blog, how's it going? Guess you're feeling left out; I posted two (count 'em, TWO!) new entries tonight at the other blog I write for, Batter's Box. I won't re-post them here, since that's kind of cheating (even though I've done it before), but I will link to them.

Tonight's Jays' Minor League Update - the first I've ever written! I just joined the Minor League Crew this year.

The second item is a "Twinterview" (an interview conducted over Twitter) with Jordan Bastian (the Jays' beat reporter for MLB.com).

Gitwich (Sandtar?)

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Today the grade 10 applied science class that I'm teaching on my current placement (haven't blogged about the placement yet.... guess I should do that soon) went on a field trip to a bakery. The unit they finished just before I arrived was the chemistry of baking (the ministry-mandated unit is something stupid about WHMIS symbols and hazards or something, so my associate teacher decided to make it way better), so yes, this field trip was relevant to their studies.

It was a lot of fun, and the kids, who rarely seem to enjoy science class as is probably typical of applied students, loved it. The guy who is probably the biggest *ahem* slacker in the class, got right into it and created a beautiful loaf of bread which required him to learn how to braid on the spot and then apply his new skills to sticky, not-exactly-the-easiest-thing-to-braid, dough. Afterwards he informed my AT that he was going to take it home and show his parents.

Anyway, the field trip primarily involved us going backstage at the bakery, learning a bit about the ingredients that go into making a loaf of bread, and then designing a bun. Most of the students stuck with the classic bun shape, a couple molded the first letter of the name, and of course there was the aforementioned Loaf of Braid. The student teacher, on the other hand, went a little outside the box (being an engineer and all), and created this:

Yep, that's a bun-guitar with a bite taken out of it. It's really not that well-crafted, but I got a lot of compliments from the bakery staff - I guess they've settled into a routine and don't get creative very often, which is hard to believe given all the tasty looking items scattered all over the place.

Most of the students ate their creation soon after it came out of the oven, but I decided the bun-guitar needed to be turned into a gitwich. What sandwich could live up to such a bun? Why, a toasted BLT with cheese of course. The delicious result, minus a fretboard (I got hungry after school):

Ten Questions About the NL West

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The following is re-posted, with permission, from Batter's Box, a Blue Jays fan site that I write for.

Over the weekend, John Northey and I had a chance to sit down and talk about the NL West. After our ghostwriter had condensed the multi-day rambling into a manageable chunk and thrown out the words that don't exist, it sort of resembled English. So we translated it into several dead languages, back into English, and the result, which may or may not be an NL West Preview, is shown below.

John: Which Manny will show up? This is the #1 question in this division by a landslide.

Dave: BostonManny hit .299/.389/.529 with 20 homers in 100 games last year, while LAManny hit .396/.489/.743 with 17 homers in 53 games. I think you've gotta expect something in the middle this year - barring his 2007 season (in which he may or may not have been trying), Manny hasn't had an OPS lower than .953 since 1994. This year he's playing on a team he likes, presumably, and he's playing for a contract as well. It seems unlikely he'll bat almost .400, but an OPS bordering on quadruple digits is certainly possible.

John: Will Arizona - aka NL West Jays - find some offense (93 OPS+) to go with their pitching (115 ERA+)?

Dave: It seems like the young core of Arizona's offense - Chris B. Young, Stephen Drew, Conor Jackson, Mark Reynolds, Justin Upton - has been around for years, and every year we wonder if they're going to finally collectively break out. To be honest, I'm not wondering that anymore. It's not unreasonable to expect improvement from some of those guys - Upton, in particular, is significantly younger than the others, so we can expect him to build on a solid first full season. After an off-year in 2007, Drew was much improved last year, and he could build on that in 2009. Jackson, Reynolds and Young, on the other hand, may have plateaued at levels of performance well below what many had hoped for them. Though Josh Byrnes is generally regarded as a fairly astute GM, Carlos Quentin seems to have been the wrong guy to trade.

Apart from the young'uns, the DBacks are mired in mediocrity: Felipe Lopez, Chad Tracy and Miguel Montero/Chris Snyder round out the starters. Apart from Upton, I don't see much improvement from this group.

John: Aaron Cook & Ubaldo Jimenez - a pair of home grown aces in Colorado or victims of the mile high city?

Dave: Cook and Jimenez formed a very good 1-2 last year for the Rockies, pitching over 400 innings of sub-4 ERA ball (in Coors Field no less). Cook is a sinkerballer who has solidified himself over the last three years as a consistently above average starter, and Jimenez is a 24 year old with great stuff who started to put it together last year. There are still holes in his game, though - notably, the 103 walks he issued last year. However, 2008 was a solid first full-year, and he should be able to build on it this year.

It's after Cook and Jimenez that things get dicey in Colorado. Jeff Francis is out for the year, so the rest of the rotation will be made up by the likes of Jorge De La Rosa, Greg Smith, Taylor Buchholz and Greg Reynolds.

John: Tim Lincecum - will his arm go bye-bye under the high stress?

Dave: Lincecum's total innings over the last three years: 157, 177.1, 227. Last year was a big jump, but not unreasonable. Lincecum's durability is seemingly always under scrutiny, because of his size and his delivery. I'm no expert on mechanics, but I've read expert opinions on both sides of the mechanics issue. As far as size goes, it's true that Lincecum is smaller than your average major league starter, but then again your average 5'10 160 pitcher doesn't throw 97. I can't say I'm terribly concerned about his workload.

John: Will SF find any more starters or is it Lincecum & Cain, pray for rain?

Dave: The Giants could actually have one of the better rotations in baseball next year. Jonathan Sanchez was mediocre last year with a 5.01 ERA in 158 innings, but he also struck out 157 batters and allowed slightly less than a hit per inning. If he can get his walk rate down, which his minor league numbers suggest he is capable of doing, he could be a #2 or 3 starter. The Giants also signed Randy Johnson this off-season, and at the ripe old age of 45, The Big Unit can still bring it. Last year he pitched 184 innings with a 3.91 ERA, while maintaining an almost 4:1 K/BB ratio. The Giants' 5th starter will also be their highest-paid starter, the 126 million dollar man, Barry Zito. Zito was awful last year, much worse than his 5.15 ERA would have you believe. If he's that bad again this year, odds are the ERA will balloon much higher. Unfortunately, the amount of money the Giants have invested in Zito probably means he's staying in the rotation.

John: Will SD have anyone other than Jake Peavy starting in 2009?

Dave: Yeah, Chris Young. Other than that, no. After the top two, the Padres' rotation options include: Cha Seung Baek (4.79 ERA in 141 IP last year), Josh Geer (4.54 in 166 AAA IP), Kevin Correia (6.05 in 110), and Wade LeBlanc (5.32 in 138 at AAA). Petco will hide some of the ugliness, but it still ain't gonna be pretty.

John: No Hoffman no problem in SD?

Dave: Heath Bell will close for the Padres, and should be fine. After Bell though, things thin out a bit. And with the the lack of depth in the San Diego rotation, the bullpen could be overworked, meaning the starters will have to go for longer, creating some sort of space-time vortex whose end result states that the Padres' pitching will be bad. Of course, Petco will ensure it doesn't look that bad. But it will be.

John: Dodgers replace one ex-Jay (Jeff Kent) with another (Orlando Hudson) - how will it work out?

Dave: The O-Dog should be a significant upgrade over Kent. Kent was an excellent hitter from 1998-2007, never putting up an OPS less than .860 in that span, but he dropped all the way down to .745 last year, with poor defense to boot. PECOTA projects Hudson at .290/.363/.431, about .50 points of OPS better than Kent's 2008 production, and as we all know, Orlando will provide a huge boost with the glove. Health is a minor concern - Hudson only played 107 games last year - but he averaged about 141 games/year from 2003-2007.

John: What young players can we expect to impact the division race?

Dave: Max Scherzer followed in the footsteps of Cole Hamels and Tim Lincecum by being labeled a "phenom" last season after putting up ridiculous minor league numbers. He'll be in the DBacks rotation this year, and they plan to increase his innings to about 170 assuming good health. Scherzer could be a huge boon to the back of Arizona's already very good rotation.

Scherzer's Dodger counterpart is Clayton Kershaw, a southpaw who made an impressive debut for a 20 year old last season. If he can continue to K a batter/inning and can get his walk rate down a bit, look out.

Colorado will need significant contributions from its untested youngsters if they hope to compete. Ryan Spilborghs is just a stopgap until Dexter Fowler is ready, and Franklin Morales is a once highly-touted prospect who has fallen to the wayside a bit.

John: What happens when you throw all this info into a blender?

Dave: Assuming it blends (better use a Blendtec), this discussion can lead us to some conclusions about the NL West in 2009. I see the Padres at the bottom of the division, and by quite a bit: they don't really have a rotation, a bullpen, or an offense. Need I say more? The Giants could have a great rotation, but it carries some risk, and the offense is no better than the squad that scored 640 runs last year. The Rockies have some valuable pieces, including an offense that scored the most runs in the division last year, but probably have too many holes to compete.

For me, it comes down to the DBacks and the Dodgers. The Snakes have an excellent rotation fronted by Brandon Webb and Dan Haren, and Max Scherzer could be a 3rd ace. But the offense will be the Diamondbacks' achilles heel, and for this reason I'm picking the Dodgers to win the division. They have a more balanced team, with a solid pitching staff, and an offense that is probably the best in the division.

Predicted final standings:

Dodgers: 90
Diamondbacks: 85
Rockies: 79
Giants: 74
Padres: 68

Thoughts

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Here are some thoughts for your Sunday evening.

• I blogged ten times in February after blogging twenty-six times in January. This may make it seem like the blog is dying, but you know what, double digits isn't bad, and I made a late push, so I've got some good momentum right now. Also, as I explained in a January post, I never intended this to be a dailily updated blog. Finally, February has fewer days than January, so I think my posts/day actually didn't decrease at all. So stop whining!

• This one's for the dudes. Don't you hate when a brand has like 9 different kinds of shampoo, and none of them are "normal"??! I was in Shopper's today, and Garnier Fructis was on sale, and consequently I spent like 7 minutes deciding between "sleek and shine", "ravishing curls", "insta-mohawk", and about a million other types. Eventually I went for "anti-dandruff", even though I don't have dandruff, since it seemed like the only option that would keep my hair normal. Unfortunately, I also had to settle for the fact that it's a combination shampoo-conditioner, and given that my hair is short enough not to warrant the use of conditioner, I feel like I'm getting less shampoo for my buck. Ultimately a disappointing experience.

• Speaking of Shopper's Drug Mart, how much of a rip-off is the Optimum Card?! (well, I guess it's free so it can't technically be a rip-off, but I digress.) Seriously, I think I got mine in 1st year, so I've had it for over 4 years now, and I go to Shopper's almost every time I need toiletries, and sometimes when I need food, and I use my card every time I'm there (kudos to them for reminding me so consistently), and if I wanted to redeem my points I could get....... 10 bucks??!!? Oh yeah, and after buying shampoo and soap today, I gained 100 points.... which is 1/80 the number of points separating my current reward level from my next reward level! Great show of customer-appreciation there Shopper's.

• I'm going to an Arrested Development party next week. The plan is for it to be AD-themed in as many ways as possible - costume, food, drink, decoration, you name it. It's been a long time in the making, so I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about my costume. For a while I thought I'd go as the guy with the fake freckles and orange hair who's in every Spanish language soap opera, and I also considered the literal doctor, but today I had a better idea: I'm going as Maggie Lyzer. Pros: it's an easy costume, I just need to stuff my shirt so it looks like I'm pregnant, and wear sunglasses. I'm even taking Maggie's lies one step further, as I'm pretending to be a woman. Also, it'll be really easy to stay in character, since I just have to lie all night.