Total Dismay

When I read the hard to decipher ‘news’ coming out of Chinese ruled Tibet this weekend I was sad and I thought that there was no way to know what was really going on. I am probably right about that for the most part, but there were foreign blogging tourists in Lhasa and they did what we do. They ‘blogged it.’

They took a calculated risk by taking some pictures and video. Some of this material may end up on the evening news. BBC left a comment on the blog.

I am not reflexively risk averse, but I am married to an incredibly quick witted woman who has a major GTFO response when anything dangerous is burgeoning around us. If we had been in Lhasa, there would not have been any pictures on my blog.

I was surprised to see peat being a commonplace heating fuel in urban and suburban areas of Ireland. We made it out to the kind of land that produces peat.

Peat occupies an interesting gray area in that people debate whether or not it is a renewable resource.

Peat can catch fire in the bogs where it was formed and burn indefinitely. Some scientists believe that peat fires in Borneo and elsewhere are big causes of C02 pollution. There are bogs in Siberia that are thawing after having been frozen for 11,000 years and they are releasing huge amounts of methane.

Say what you want about Cheap Hotels, but you can’t deny that they cost you less money than expensive hotels. I am going to relay my best and worst experiences, starting with the worst. We decided to have a night out at the big clubbing district on the island that we were visiting. It was a spur of the moment thing. We realized that we were officially too old to go clubbing so we figured that we should go one last time before we admitted it to the world. We booked a room at the only reasonably priced hotel that wasn’t full. It was smelly. It wasn’t that bad of an experience, since it was just meant to be a place to crash for 6 hours after our night out. we did have headaches from the mold, but how could we really be sure it was the mold after our bar hopping?

The best experience by far was our stay at Archi Rossi in Florence. It is actually a hostel, but they have a few private hotel rooms on the top floor. We actually had a desktop computer with free internet in our room AND free wireless. The ground floor’s walls are covered in frescoes that were created by artists who have stayed at the hostel. The walls that don’t have ambitious artwork have graffiti. Here is my favorite, it is written on the wall of the breakfast room:

JAPAN IS NOT THE LAND OF MANGA, WE HAVE GOOD CULTURE !!!

If you are visiting a strange city in the near future, you would do well to check out a city guide at HotelsByCity.net. You don’t want to copy my worst experience. As an example, I looked at Dublin. I am going there this weekend

The Holiday Inn seems like a good deal. Many hotels that showed up on my search featured a Best Rate Guaranteed logo beside them. You will find that booking hotel stays online can save a lot of money. Even when a hotel has lots of vacancy, people walking in off the street asking about a room will pay more than the person who shopped around online. Hotels in Europe seem to vary quite a lot in terms of quality and value.

This is not meant to be a parody of the movie Babel. It is simply a tower of YouTube videos that replicates the effect of the movie. Juxtaposing widely divergent cultures is a very easy way to send sheltered, fearful American viewers on a head trip. I have to admit that the original movie was faithfully recreating these environments in a work of fiction, which is harder than just doing a few searches. Playing all three videos at the same time creates a pretty neat effect.

Last week’s self portrait was taken at the Ponte Vecchio. While I was fact checking on the Internet, I found out that Hannibal was partly filmed in Florence. Catherine and I watched the movie one evening this week and we saw a lot of familiar scenery. You can see the bridge where I took my self portrait in the background of this unaltered photo of me and Sir Anthony Hopkins.

I just watched Babel. I didn’t enjoy it. It is not a CRAPPY movie. I think it is the best example of a movie that is trying hard to meet the specific needs of a very specific group of people. I like a lot of independent film. I like movies that challenge me. I think Babel has a pretension of being exclusive and avant-garde. I think it excluded me and I resent this. That being said, there are good performances and gripping scenes. If you are someone who subsists on a steady diet of passive entertainment, you might find it very refreshing.

In case you have any doubts, let me assure you that they sell meat products derived from wild boars in this shop. I had one very small dry sausage. It was pretty good. Here is a randomly selected YouTube video showing some wild boars hanging out in some woodland.

This sculpture is a masterpiece, or a copy of one, that stands outside a building in Florence. When I saw it, I couldn’t help wondering about the discussion that must have taken place before the models posed for this work. The lower figure does not look like he is in a very comfortable position.

The mannerist movement took things a lot farther than what you see here. Florence is the epicenter of this movement. I didn’t photograph a lot of art because I felt that the camera shouldn’t mediate my experience of the art. There were also a lot of signs indoors forbidding photography.

This is just a quick post to let readers know that I will be posting lots of neat stories and pictures from my vacation in Italy as soon as I have time to move the pictures and also get caught up on my work. I really enjoyed the week that I spent in Tuscany. I would have liked to spend more time out in the countryside and less time in museums, but there were a lot of works of art that we had on our list of must sees. I did not take a picture of the original David by Michaelangelo. I was amused by watching scores of people blatantly disregarding the sign forbidding photography. The photo on Wikipedia is better than anything that I could produce.

If anyone is reading this and they have seen the original and also the Vegas replica, I would love to here a comparison of the two experiences.

We are so lucky to have a working computer with free internet in our room. I just noticed that there are a whack of searches from past occupants in the Google drop down. I found a few interesting search queries like how to clean recent screen names in msn messenger and ginzu jet sex, which , it turns out, is a band name and song title. I had to look to make sure.