Dori's 2008 birthday cake

When in Rome

I spent a couple of days in Rome, but it's all a big blurr right now. just leaving a space saver here, and i'll post some pictures and stories later. i know i still owe a gallery post, that's on the to-do list!

Florence restaurants

(this is a very incomplete list, and is based on a very small sample. to check for completeness, i would need to experiment with randomly selected establishments and this is beyond the prospect of this research)

we had some bad luck with restaurants the first two days, seems like finding a good and reasonably priced restaurant in florence is just as hard as finding one in Kikar Atarim. we therefore decided to ask for recommendations from people we sort of trust (like my advisor...). since this knowledge is probably more priceless than my thesis, i will document it here for future reference and future generations.

starting with 'Trattoria', which is the general name for a restaurant-like establishment. a fact that i completely ignored, when we arrived at the conference dinner meeting point and i argued that this can't be the place we're supposed to go to - we are supposed to meet at a restaurant named 'Il Cambi' and this place is 'Trattoria'! how embarrassing.
The place, however, was fabulous. i mean, the food was. well, it was the conference dinner, so it was free, and possibly expensive. but free. so who cares?!?
we were served the traditional florentine/tuscan cuisine, which included some broschettas with chicken liver, Ribollita (Tuscan Vegetable and Bread Soup), pasta (a 'first course' in Italy); then came the main course - meat, meat, meat! red meat!
mmmmmmmmmmm
i should add some pictures here. definitely.
the one thing i could not understand was those people who ate the side of white beans.
anyway, it's RISTORO DI CAMBI - VIA S. ONOFRIO 1R ZONA PORTA SAN FREDIANO, and they have a website too.

ROSSOPOMODORO
this one was actually recommended by the girl who sits at the front desk at our tiny hotel. this one seems to have had the best pizza of them all, but we didn't sample pizza everywhere. as i said, i'm incomplete.
Piazza del Mercato Centrale, 22/r Firenze

Trattoria "Le Mossacce"
Dani marked that one on the map, he didn't know the name of the place, but noted that they have a large green sign saying 'Trattoria' by it, not too far from another place with yellow lamps.
It's a tiny place, looks like a workers restaurant, and luckily we could find a table right away although we were like 10 people. we got some of the traditional tuskan bloody steak and salad. Via del Proconsolo 55R. www

[getting tired and being eaten alive by mosquitoes. so i'll stop here for now, and add some more stuff later on! to come: Yellow, Osteria Dell Agnolo, Noir, Michael Collins Pub]

Yellow:
That's the restaurant with the yellow ball-shaped lights. We got pizza - and it was good! the prices were reasonable. i think the thing to mention about this place is the service - the waitress was actually nice!
i guess i'm used to the waiters in america, where they come to your table with a fake smile and ask you how you're doing and help you with the menu. (as you all know, i do have complaints about american service as well, but that's not for now). here, in florence, waiters usually barked at us, were not nice or polite or anything. a normal situation is when a waiter approaches the table with a notepad and says YES or nothing at all, and just waits for you to say what you'd like to eat. and if you as a question (e.g., "how big is the lasagna?") they interrupt it as a request ("ok, one lasagna"...)
anyway, the service was good and the pizza too, so thumbs up.

Osteria Dell Agnolo
we saw this place a bunch of times on our way to and from the hotel. the first night it was full of people, so we didn't go in, and eventually we went there on the last night. assaf was very happy with the gnocci (tomato sauce) and i was happy with whatever i had. they have a big chunk of parmaisan cheese that you can just graba piece of on your way in/out. mmmm!!


Noir
a bar on the Arno river, one bridge down from the ponte vecchio. I suppose they have decent drinks, but the taquila in the picture was terrible. nice view of the river though, and you can walk with your drink accross the street and just stand by the wall overlooking the water.

Michael Collins Pub
in Piazza della Signoria, by the statue of the horse. it's just a bar, no food to speak of, but during happy hour you can pay with your us$ and 1$=1euro!!! best deal in town, really.

Leonardo's Signature

Leonardo's signature detail is a knotted thread that he includes in his paintings. "vinci" means "knot".

In our gallery tour, the guide (which was very good, btw) asked us to try and find it in each of his paintings.
one of the Italian astronomers had a very hard time finding it, as he kept looking for a signature signature, and was very frustrated when he couldn't find the name 'leonardo' scribbled anywhere, and everybody else could detect the 'signature' right away... when i explained to him what the guide meant by signature, and pointed out all those knots that we saw (one in the hair, one in the sleeve, one in the garment...) he explained that now he understand why I find all those supernovae.

Firenze

Astronomers usually know where to have their conferences. it's a well known thing, that they like the nice exotic places, and the organizers strive to lure more and more people to their meetings just by locating them at attractive locations. some very common examples are Aspen (possibly the fanciest ski resort in the US) and Hawaii. Unfortunately, although all those nice places i've been to make me seem like a well traveled individual, i always feel like all i ever see is the inside of a lecture hall.
since i was never rich, and those conferences can be expensive and time consuming, i usually scheduled my flights to exactly bracket the days of the conference.
at some point i decided to leave a couple of days to exploring the places i go to, and this is sort of the first time it happened.
I arrived Florence (Firenze) on saturday, met with Assaf, and we spent the day walking all around town and the hills above it. The city of Firenze is dotted with sculptures, fountains, extravagant buildings and churches, all created by the most famous artists and architects of the 13-15th centuries. The streets are very narrow, and the sidewalks don't leave room for more than one person, but still there's quite a lot of traffic - tourists and cars seem to crowd the streets with very little order.
After going through some Piazzas, we decided to cross the river, and climbed up on the hill overlooking town on a whim.

The river you see in the picture is the Arno, and the closest bridge is (the famous) Ponte Vecchio. The top part of the bridge is actually a long corridor, that starts from the palace to the left of the picture, goes over the bridge, bends 90 degrees and goes along the river, then bends again and goes into town, all the way to Palazzo Vecchio - the palace in which the governors of the city sat. This allowed the important people to go frome home to work without stepping in the streets. It is (if i remember correctly) about 1km long.
The next day, we stood in line in the rain for about an hour, and entered the Academy Gallery (to which i think i will dedicate a post), so totally worth the wait!!!! i enjoyed it very much. Later that day, we checked in to the hotel in which we stay for the duration of the conference - Villa Agape. It's actually a convent, and a few tiny old nuns run a guest house in it. It's pretty nice, except for everything being very small (the beds, the shower...) and the curfew that we have to obey by getting back no later than 11PM. This curfew thing is very weird, especially at a conference with social activities (probably the most important thing in conferences is to meet people and make connection, usually by spending the nights getting drunk together). I sort of liked that curfew idea for the first three nights, since i still had to prepare my lecture (i didn't have anything prepared until i got to florence!).
The afternoon of the third day of the conference was dedicated to a guided tour in the Uffizi Gallery, an amazing art gallery displaying works of art fromt he glorious days of Florence. The main attraction there is Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus". I have a lot to say about my experience there, so will keep it for a coming post :)
in short, i was very moved.
today is the last day of the conference, and tomorrow we will have some more time to explore and then off to Rome!

Other pets

Keren is gone until the end of June. I'll be joining her in Israel in a couple of weeks. Before we hand Keren's plants off to our friends, I've been charged with caring for them. One plant (I think they're zinnias -- they should flower someday) really likes the water...EVERYDAY!. Over about 12 mins this morning it went from sleepy to wide awake:


[Well, I guess the background light kind of killed the pictures this time. But you'll never hear me brag about what a good photographer I am.]
I'll be keeping an eye on these guys, watering, petting, and encouraging them to grow, as I was instructed. I don't have to change their litter, brush them, clean their hair balls, or be awoken by them at 4:30am to be petted, so they're pretty low maintenance.


OK, gray scrooge wants to play fetch. So going to try and wear him out so he'll sleep tonight.

Porter

my new favorite beer is the Pivo Baltic Porter at ABC.

flood

A couple of sharp knocks on the door woke me up at 4AM, and even before getting the door I realized what it was about: there was water everywhere.

The problem was with our toilet -- the water tank in the back never shuts off so water just continuously flows into the tank. This isn't too much of a problem...unless the toilet becomes plugged. We had spoken with the management and with Miguel (the building's handy-man) several times about fixing this over the last two months, mostly because of the total waste of water, but also because of the potential overflow if the toilet ever became backed up. For reasons we don't understand, they never fully fixed the problem, and so sometime last night the toilet was plugged, and the tank just kept pumping water and overflowing into our apartment.

maybe it was the early hour, or just plain confusion, but the first thing Miguel did (rookie mistake!! i wouldn't expect that from him!) was to flush the toilet. which of course made everything even worse.

So at 4 in the morning (or should i say, before-morning) ben and i and a few towels tried to minimize the damage, while Miguel unplugged the toilet.

what a wonderful way to start the day.