And here are all the photos from my Italy trip that were not of Courmayeur itself. 
I went for a 'walk' (which turned out to be hiking -- I hate hiking). But it was pretty (pics above and below). 
On one afternoon off (there was more than one afternoon off: it was that kind of conference), we went into Aosta itself. Here is the town hall, but there were a lot of nice Roman ruins too. 
Arco d'Augusto:
Porta Praetoria and the Torre dei Signori Sancti Ursi:
And a Roman theater:
For the conference dinner, we went to some 'agriturismo' place with a field full of cows with very very loud bells attached to them. 
And somewhere behind those clouds and thereabouts is Mont Blanc.
Finally, back in Milan, I stayed one night in a hotel before catching my flight back to the US. It had a garden and pool area crawling with these (kinda cute) little lizards, which did not want me to photograph them.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Not Courmayeur, Mostly Valle d'Aosta
Saturday, July 02, 2011
Italy II: the revenge (Courmayeur)
I went on a week long trip to Italy for a repeat of the 2009 Italy conference I went to: lots of the same people, same organizers, same week in June, same region of Italy. While still in Valle d'Aosta, this time the little town was Courmayeur not Cogne. And this time I was going to be prepared. 
Imagine June 2009: winding mountain roads, wildflowers everywhere, cheese at every meal (even cheese soup). Me: lactose intolerant, allergies and no antihistamines, antiemetic chewing gum that made my whole mouth numb and freaked me out.
This time I brought piles of Lactaid and Claritin and Dramamine. How did it go? Well, for some reason (maybe they had an early spring), there were no wildflowers. The Dramimine seemed to work okay. But even though I took Lactaid like vitamins, everything I ate made me sick. The first few days were the worse; I felt terrible and I was starving because I couldn't eat anything. Still, I guess two out of three isn't bad.
Here's a photo of my hilariously tiny bed:
And a bunch of photos looking out of my hotel room in different weather conditions:
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
How Weird Is This?
I'm working on a post or two about my trip to Italy, but I thought I'd post about this since it happened today. This morning, when I went to put my laptop in my backpack, I noticed that one of the rubber feet had fallen off. I wasn't surprised since it had been loose for a while:
The odd thing is that it turns out that the rubber foot is structural. Without it, you can see straight into the inside of my computer. I tried to take a pic: 
How weird is that?
By the way, I found the missing rubber foot on the floor of my office and currently it's held in place with tape. Should I try to glue it back on? With what?
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
At the AAS
I'm attending the AAS meeting in Boston right now (yes, right now). I brought a poster to justify my presence here and a lot of people bring flyer size copies of their poster to give out. The work in my poster is already published, so that seemed a little silly for me (people should just read the paper). At the printer, however, they made a proof of my poster and I figured I might as well bring that and see if anyone took it. I really didn't believe anyone would though. It's not regular paper -- it's like a square foot big (maybe bigger) and much much thicker than regular paper. But it's already disappeared from my table! It was gone before lunch. So someone here is carrying an oversized, cardboard-y version of my poster.
Sent from my iPhone
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Random Germany Thought #3-- Strawberries and Doing the Dishes
I've been eating grocery store strawberries lately. On the whole, they're crap: giant monstrosities that taste like crunchy water. In Bonn, you only buy strawberries for a few weeks, when they're in season. They're always very local -- small, but super sweet and full of strawberry flavor -- and you have to eat them right away. Many farmers set up road-side stands (there was a very good one across the street from work, in front of the bakery) where you can buy them in giant boxes. Mmmm.
Is this a German / European thing? When I do the dishes, I wash, then rinse, then dry (if for some reason I didn't have a place to air-dry them). When I would do a dinner thing with the students in Germany, they would wash, then towel dry. No rinsing. I got used to it although I think it kind of freaked out the Canadian postdoc.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Pufferfish Cake
For Sean's birthday, I bought this cake in Chinatown.
Isn't it awesome? I didn't even bother to ask what it tastes like. Even the box it came in is cool. 
We thought it'd be really funny if it turned out to be durian flavored, but it turned out to be something angel food cake-like. 
There was fruit inside (pineapple, grape, apple, and unidentified others), and the layer that looks like fruit in the photo turned out to mango flavored custard (or maybe more like jello). Yummy.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
My Gym Is Closing!
This post is 100% pure whine. My gym is closing at the end of the month -- just two weeks notice! And I'm very sad about the whole thing. What will I do when it's gone?! Reasons why my gym is awesome:
1.) Conveniently located between our apartment and the train station.
2.) Reasonably priced (including towel service and all the group classes).
3.) Sean and I get to be gym buddies every day.
4.) Nice facilities, always clean locker room, never really crowded, no sign-ups for cardio machines, no waiting for a shower. [These features are probably not unrelated to the reasons for their closing.]
5.) People working there are friendly (some even knew my name) and a relaxed (non-douche-y) atmosphere.
6.) Little things: the big bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and body wash in the shower stalls (and, yes, I used them -- I'm too lazy to tote my own product); hair dryers and lotion too; the translucent glass shower stall doors (curtains inevitably lead to someone ripping the curtain opening while you're inside showering); and probably a lot of things that I'm forgetting but will remember and shake my fist about when I'm working out somewhere else.
And now it I will probably have to migrate to the further away women-only gym and Sean will have to go back to the university gym. Sigh.
Monday, January 17, 2011
My Morning
I'm at work today -- at least for a few hours. Since it's MLK day, school is closed and I have to swipe my ID card to get in the building, to call for the elevator, and to hit the button for my floor. I'm usually only here during business hours, so this is rare behavior for me and it took more of my concentration than you might expect.
So I get into the elevator in the lobby (I notice that there's only a couple of people around), try to hit '3' for my floor, remember I need to swipe my ID again, swipe again, and then finally get '3' to light up. The door closes and the elevator starts moving. Then I turn around. And there's a little black toy poodle standing next to me in the elevator. There's no one else in the elevator. It looks at me inquisitively. Oh crap.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
I Made It to Work Today
It snowed a bunch yesterday and I never made it out of my apartment at all. But today, I thought I'd try to make the slog to work. Fortunately, I ordered a pair of waterproof boots the very morning after the last snow storm. They seem to work pretty good. 
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Lambic Beer
I went to Brussels a few years back (and blogged about it) and had lambic beer for the first time. It is traditionally brewed in only a few places in Belgium by spontaneous fermentation (from the medley of wild yeast in the environment of the brewery and not from carefully controlled yeast strains), taking several years to make, and has a distinctive sour taste (maybe more winey than beery). Often flavored by fruit, the authentic stuff adds real, whole fruit with a secondary fermentation. The imitators add sweeteners and syrups. Here's a good article I found on lambic, and here's the wiki page.
Some of the best of the real deal comes from the Cantillon brewery in Brussels. Thankfully, it is acquirable in the U.S. The most commonly found 'lambic' in the U.S. is Lindemans. It's dangerously yummy, but if you've had Cantillon at the brewery in Brussels, you will immediately know that Lindemans' not the real deal. It's sweet, never sour.
Given the complexity of the lambic-making process, blending and aging is as important as the spontaneous fermentation. Hanssens Artisanaal is a blender -- buying lambic from brewer before fermentation takes hold and aging and blending in their own cellars.
Which brings us to the beer in the photo: Hanssens Artisanaal's Experimental Cassis. A friend found it in a local liquor store. Fruity, sour, dry, with little aftertaste -- it's great. Here's the Beer Advocate listing. All of the reviews which rate it below an A are written by idiots with no taste buds.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Best Food Day (in Boston) Ever
On Friday, we went to Men-Tei, a tiny hole-in-the-wall Japanese noodle and rice bowl shop near Newbury and Hereford. It was our first time, and it was awesome. I had fried pork chop noodles. It was exactly like the noodles you get in Taiwan -- fried pork goodness and chewy noodles for a good price ($9 in Boston, probably $3-4 in Taiwan).
For special occasions, my Mom makes a roasted duck stuffed with sticky rice dish. Since Sean and I are staying in Boston for the holidays this year, we decided that Sean would try to make it. But my Mom outright refused to tell us how -- she decided that deboning a duck, stuffing it, and sewing it up again was beyond our abilities. (She said she's show us how next year.) Anyway, we compromised and made the duck and sticky rice, separately. The sticky rice is made with sweet rice, onions, mushrooms, chestnuts, and a little ground pork. The key ingredient in the sticky rice, however, is duck fat collected from the roasting duck. For dessert, Sean made raspberry pie. It was a glorious meal: 
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Das Räuchermännchen
Sean went to Germany a few weeks ago and came back with a räuchermännchen ('little smoking man'). A figurine of a woodsman or craftsman (is this little guy a shepherd?), there is a little plate in the center of it on which a little cone of incense is burned, and the smoke comes out of the mouth. 
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Germany is on the Honor System Redux
I wrote a post a long, long time ago on how the German public transportation system operates on the honor system. You buy and validate tickets, but bus drivers are not checking boarding passengers for valid tickets (you can get on in the back of the bus) and there are no turnstiles in the subway. The honor system is probably the reason that you can go to the bus stop in Germany, look at the bus schedule posted, and know at what minute the bus will arrive. There are random checks and fines if you are found without a valid ticket, but I cannot remember ever being checked in the entire time I lived there -- never on the bus for sure, never on the U-Bahn, maybe once on the S-Bahn (actually, that might have been a Deutsche Bahn train). I assumed that the system works because Germans are just more honest than Americans. Anyway, Sean is in Germany right now and he says that today when the ticket checker came into his S-Bahn car, 4 of 8 people did not have a ticket. There goes that theory.
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Still Alive ... For Now
I accidentally ate some moldy pie (apple, if you're curious) this morning -- yes, for breakfast --which puts me one step closer to actually being Homer Simpson.
Also, it gives me an excuse to post this classic clip:
This was the best resolution clip I found. It has the added features of being the German version and, for some reason, mirror-reversed. (German Homer is weird, right? Very pimply-faced kid-like. I tried to explain this when I lived in Germany, but they were just too used to it to hear it.)
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Still Alive
Sorry about all the blog neglect. I've just gotten really, really busy. I promise that I'll be back again with more posts in a couple of weeks.
Monday, September 06, 2010
Taiwan
Even more delinquent, here are a few pictures from my trip to Taiwan in April. 
Above is Longshan Temple in Taipei. It is crazy in there with people and lots of lots of incense smoke. Here's another picture:
1.) Tourist-y things to note about Taiwan. Stay long enough and you will be in an earthquake. Usually they're pretty mild. I was on the 13th floor and it was a significant rocking motion, but if I'd been on the street I probably wouldn't have noticed a thing. The biggest tourist attraction in Taiwan is probably the National Palace Museum with a giant collection of ancient Chinese art. (The "National Palace" in question is the Forbidden City in Beijing. The tourists in question are Mainland Chinese.) We also went to Taipei 101, now the second tallest building in the world. Nowadays, Taipei has a very nice, very convenient subway system. Below are pictures from the Chiang Kai-Shek memorials. It's massive. 
2.) Food. You would think that a week in Taiwan (a sub-tropical country) would be bad for my digestive system, the dreaded 'Delhi belly' and all. But I was basically fine, as was Sean. (Oddly enough, Japan was much worse for the both of us.) That was a relief because Taiwan is full of good (and often incredibly cheap) things to eat. Din Tai Fung (twice). Department store food courts are really good -- a giant meal for about $4 USD. Night markets. The Taiwanese love to eat. My grandparents organized a little 13 course banquet for us. And giant shrimp. I can't find the photo now, but we ate some shrimp that were larger than my hand and we saw at the night market these shrimp-like things where the front two legs extended two or three times the length of the shrimp's body. Crazy!
3.) I suppose it's true of anywhere, but Taiwan has really changed from what I remember from trips when I was a kid. The old, dirty, smelly, pushy Taiwan is still there -- in parts. But now there's a new Taiwan: clean (really clean, not just less dirty), orderly, cosmopolitan, yuppie, where the only pushy-ness is from busloads of Chinese tourists. The dog of choice is a toy poodle -- in an elaborate and adorable costume (i.e., you have a cute toy poodle, you must put him in an even cuter bumblebee costume). The parks. The fancy subway. The live MLB baseball shown on multiple channels. The acknowledgement and celebration of aboriginal culture at some tourist spots. The clearest example are the taxis. They still dart through traffic, seconds away from the a crash (one taxi ride involved a full block of driving on the wrong side of the road right in the middle of the city). But they used to be foul, full of cigarette-stick affairs. Now they smell actually good. Really good. Better than any taxi in the U.S. and all the drivers have tiny HD TVs to watch while waiting.
One last thing about old Taiwan. I went to see my Dad's old house. It's in the old part of the city -- a place that was developed early and was probably cutting-edge many decades ago but now seems pretty old in comparison to the other quarters. Across the street is still the same bakery that my Dad loved as a kid. I'd been to the house before, but this time my Dad pointed across the street and to the corner, a few buildings down. That building was (naturally) under construction, but he said very casually, 'that's where the 228 incident happened.' Holy cow. In the annuals of Taiwanese history, 228 is one of the biggest events (read the wikipedia entry about it here). As it turns out, my Dad and his family had gone out that night (to the movies, I think) and missed the actual precipitating incident.
4.) One morning, we tried to fly to Hualien (on the East coast) from Taipei for a day trip, but with poor visibility, the 20 minute flight because 75 minutes of flying in circles before we landed back in Taipei.
Crazy messages on baseball hats worn by actual tourists at the airport: 1.) "World Terrorism. Wow." 2.) "This is my Fuck Cap."
We tried again the next day -- this time via the train. Taroko Gorge is gorgeous, the kind of scenery where -- as Sean whispered to me in the car -- "that's where the pandas are!"
5.) We also went to the Southern end of the island. There are a bunch of little beach towns there (by the way, it doesn't matter where in the world you are, beach towns all look the same). And I guess it was onion season because we drove past miles and miles of onion stands.
Old Ching-era city all:
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Alpaca
