Cinque Terre is in the Italian Riveria and consists of five villages:
Riomaggiore:
Manarola:
Corniglia:
Vernazza:
Monterosso al Mare:
We stayed in Manarola. Here's the lemon tree garden in the back of the hotel:
And here's the view from Manarola. In the distance you can see a bit of the hiking paths that go from village to village. In the foreground, you can see a small swimming area. I took a quick dip there (never been in the Mediterranean before). 
Cinque Terre is a fairly popular tourist desination and the thing to do is hike between villages and enjoy the scenery (if walking isn't your thing, you can also take the train or a ferry). By the way, you need to buy a ticket to access the trails. Our first day there, we walked the Via Dell'Amore to Riomaggiore. This is the easiest path -- 20 minutes, flat, well-paved. Then, we walked back and went the other way, to Corniglia, which probably took an hour.
A little bridge on the path!
One stretch of the path ran through a row of abandoned one-room shacks. What the shacks were for, who would want to live there, I have no idea. 
These cool flowers were everywhere. It's hard to tell, but the 'petals' are just like leaves.
When you get to Corniglia, you have to climb some 380 steps to get up to the village at the top of the cliff.
The second day, we took the train to Vernazza. 
I thought Vernazza was maybe the nicest of the villages. It has a little beach (there's a (larger) beach at Monterosso too, but it's much more beach resort-y there). And we wandered steep, little streets with stairs, like this, 
up to this castle (you could even climb to the top of the very narrow tower),
which had some nice views. I think I took this picture of the ferry from there. 
From Vernazza, we took what is supposedly the most difficult trail to Monterosso (then took the ferry all the way back to Manarola where we had the best gelato ever). The trail was probably 2 hours and has a lot of steps at the beginning and the end. Here you can see the trail ahead of me along the mountainside: 
And, as I mentioned, stairs:
The trail, while not super tough, was definitely more rustic. At places, it was very narrow and basically consisted of the top of the retaining wall for the mountainside terraces. 
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Italy - Cinque Terre
Friday, July 10, 2009
Italy - Cogne
As I alluded to before, getting to Cogne from Milan required a subway ride followed by two bus rides up into the mountains. Before I left Germany, I was very worried about the possibility of getting motion sick while riding a bus through mountain switchbacks. So I went to the pharmacy and, after some confusion on the difference between 'motion' and 'emotion,' the lady there gave me antiemetic gum. Her instructions were to start chewing up to 30 minutes between getting on the bus and to chew no more than 3 pieces at a time. Here's a picture I took out the window of the bus, but, believe me, the gum story gets better after the jump.
The first leg of the bus trip was from Milan to Aosta, the main city in the Valle d'Aosta. I popped in a piece of gum when the bus started moving. Within 4 minutes, my entire mouth from my lips to my throat was numb. That, understandably, totally freaked me out. I spit out the gum, then spent several long moments trying to decide whether my throat was swelling closed and whether it was overly silly to 1.) do nothing or 2.) to raise some sort of alarm. I did decide that my tongue wasn't swollen at least, then promptly passed out. 20 minutes later, I woke up, feeling totally normal and undrugged. I put the package of gum away. Here are a couple more pictures from the bus. 
Cogne, itself, is a very small town. And I suppose that summer is the low season, as I saw lots of nearly empty, mostly shuttered vacation rentals. Here's the view out my hotel window. 
And the view back to the hotel (the main part of town was more densely populated with buildings. 
The conference excursion was to Forte di Bard -- a 19th century fortress.
An aside: did you notice that gorgeous field outside my hotel window? There were ones like it all over -- full of wildflowers -- but I noticed on the bus ride that many were watered by sprinkler (I guess to keep them tourist-ready!).
Here's the outside of Forte di Bard: 
The tour of the fort was fairly underwhelming, but the view was nice:
And I got a photo of the stone roofs you see in this area:
Here's a random picture I took on the way to the dinner:
On the last full day, some of us went on a short hike to Lillaz (a nearby village) to see the waterfall there. On the way:
Look at all those gorgeous fields and wildflowers. Unfortunately, for all my worries about motion sickness, it never occurred to me that I might be allergic to the Alps. I sneezed constantly. The waterfall:
On the way back:
I like how the tree sprouts horizontally from the slope:
There's water running everywhere in the Alps. Here is a stream running down the mountain. Right next to where I took this photo was a small wall with a spout and water running out. The sign -- in Italian -- said it was okay to drink. I tried it: it was very cold. 
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Cupcake Digression
Today is my birthday. In the German tradition, this means that I bring the cake. After a discussion a few weeks ago about the difference between muffins and cupcakes, I decided to make red velvet cupcakes with icing based using this and this recipe from the New York Times. I've never baked anything that wasn't brownies out of the box in my life. But I figured that most of the baking horror stories you hear about are because people are bad and reading and following instructions. I am very good at that.
Now, with no baking experience, shopping for ingredients would be baffling in the U.S. With the added twist of finding the German equivalent, it was basically a day-long chore. Go to store 1, look at shelves. Go home, Google. Go back, buy. Repeat with as many stores as necessary to find all the ingredients. Some things I've learned:
Cake flour = Weizenmehl Type 405 (No surprise, flour types are strictly regulated in Germany. Type 405 is the most popular, but there seems to be no equivalent of American "all-purpose flour." The other flour types seemed more suited to different kinds of bread.)
Canola oil = Rapsöl (Rapeseed oil)
Baking soda = Natron (and they don't sell boxes, just tiny packets, unless you go to an Asian grocery)
white vinegar = Essig (Essig means 'vinegar,' of course, but I guess the default is 'white.')
Vanilla extract is difficult to find in Germany. In general, I hear they use vanilla sugar to flavor. In the grocery stores, you'll find a light colored liquid labeled something like 'vanilla aroma.' It's not the right thing. I did find some vanilla extract in the basement grocery store of Galeria Kaufhof (a German dept. store), where they stock a lot of international stuff.
Food coloring isn't the same as in the U.S. The only kind I could find was less concentrated although thicker in consistency.
Unsweetened cocoa was also tricky. For one, I couldn't find anything but 'Nederland Kakao' in the baking aisle (which I presumed was Dutch processed). I looked at the chocolate drinks aisle (they're more popular than in the U.S.) and found something that looked promising.
I borrowed someone else's kitchen to do the baking (I don't have an oven!) and used some tools that I never had even when I lived back in States: an electric mixer, a sifter, a whisk (I don't think I even owned a whisk). Despite some difficulties with the baking times (the oven didn't really work properly), the cupcakes turned out pretty good -- maybe a little dry but not over or underdone -- and the frosting (despite being just fat upon fat) was quite light and yummy.
In total, following the recipes exactly produced 37 German-sized cupcakes (they looked fairly similarly sized, but I'm not sure how my cups compared to American ones) and maybe not quite twice as much, at least 1/3 more even if you love frosting, than the amount of frosting necessary (doh, oh well). Yay, cupcakes!
Unrelatedly to cupcakes, some friends got me flowers for my birthday. Wasn't that sweet?
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Italy - Milan
I'm back from Italy and armed with tons of pictures (seriously a ton, be prepare to wade through a lot). The plan is to do a post for each stop on my trip, but it may take a while to sort through all my photos and write it all up. First up, Milan.
The motivation for the trip was a week-long workshop in Cogne, in Valle d'Aosta, up in the Alps near the French and Swiss borders. Getting there meant that a friend and I had to fly to Milan. We left a day early and got in 1 1/2 days of sightseeing before heading to the conference. With no guide book (we only had a guide book for Florence at the end of our trip), the only things I knew were in Milan were da Vinci's The Last Supper (which requires a reservation months in advance to see) and the Duomo of Milan. 
The Duomo is the fourth largest church in the world (according to Wikipedia). Here's the back:
Here you can see it from across the plaza:
And the inside:
A trip to the tourist information office gave us a few ideas of other things to see. The Basilica of San Lorenzo has some cool things about it. 
For one, outside of the church is the Colonne di San Lorenzo, a row of Roman columns marking off the church from the street. The street, however, is tiny (one lane) and, across it, it just looks like an ordinary street in Milan.
Inside, in the Chapel of Saint Aquilino, there are 4th century mosaics. This one shows "Christ the Lawgiver."
And stairs going below the chapel show the old Roman foundations:
The Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio was built by St. Ambrose in 379-386, although it's current appearance dates to 1099 (Wikipedia again). 
Inside the courtyard, the walls were embedded with what I assume are remnants from the older building. 
We were there on a Saturday and it was a little odd because there were plenty of tourists around at the same time that there was a wedding being performed inside. After the wedding was over, I wandered inside where -- after a few minutes -- I noticed an odd uptick in the number of wedding guests (yes, another wedding was about to start). 
Our last stop of the day was Castello Sforzesco. Currently, it houses a bunch of museums, but since we had arrived late, all we did was wander around and take pictures. I tried to capture how big it is, but it was tough.
In front, was a big park.
The following morning, before hopping on the subway (followed by a bus, followed by another bus), we went to the Teatro alla Scala, one of the most famous opera houses in the world. In fact, they had performed Aida the night before. For 5 euros, you can go to the museum, the highlight of which is, of course, the chance to stand in the balcony of the opera house for a few minutes. A display of costumes from different productions, some dating to the 19th century and including several different productions of Aida in different decades, was also pretty neat. 