Daylight Savings!!! Praise the Lord!!!

I wanted to write a quick post here. I just read where, lord help me, Indiana passed a bill to adopt daylight savings time like most of the world!!! It’s incredible. I never thought it would happen. I’m so happy, I had to make this post. I don’t care which time zone Indiana joins (still to be decided). Anyone who lives in Indiana and has had to deal with people in THE REST OF THE WORLD (this includes far away places like Cincinnati and Chicago) knows that not observing daylight savings is a pain in the royal #$#$#%@. Now I will never have to adjust schedules for meetings and worry about time changes again. It will be soooo nice. Now true Hawaii doesn’t change their clocks but let’s see, they are an island paradise in the middle of the Pacific. Indiana is not!!! I don’t know why Arizona is a hold out too. Maybe too much sun. I don’t care. I still can’t believe it and it only happened because of ONE VOTE in the statehouse. Anyway I thought you all would like to know. Indiana is going to be a little better place in my book now. One less thing to gripe about. Keep it up and I’ll be moving back

Food Pyramid

I saw in the news where there is now 12 Food Pyramids in the States. It all depends on your "body type", what a joke. I found this a while ago so I thought now would be a good time to put it up. This is based on body type it's based on what people have been eating for centuries...

Amsterdam Weekend Write Up

Well I had a weekend that I won’t soon forget. At the last minute I decided to go to Amsterdam. Why well I’ve never been there and it’s one of those places I said I must see while I’m in Europe. I think it’s on the “must see” grand tour of Europe…right? I also hadn’t been outside of Italy in a while, well except to go home to the US. I needed to get back on my schedule to see all of Europe while I’m here. This city didn’t disappoint as it has its own special madness. Look at the photo below. Cars parked on the brink of falling in a canal and bikes, oh the bikes. They’re everywhere and they seem to just be cruising along at a reasonable speed until you walk into the wrong area of the sidewalk and they almost run you down. See in Amsterdam the bikes have there own paths, everywhere. Everything is in their way, except maybe the trams, which are also trying to run you down. I couldn’t understand why the tram tracks are going right through some of the plazas. You’re in a “pedestrian area” except there’s an electric tram sneaking up on you and/or a biker.
The Red Light District and drugs are well known so I won’t dwell on that here. I stayed on my path to sainthood and didn’t partake in mary jane or anything else that’s "legal". I was only there for the weekend so I just looked around the city center and saw a few museums but mainly I stayed outdoors. There are so many great sites and I will say that it was the best weekend I’ve had in a long time. It’s good to get out and explore!!! I’ll need to go back to see the dikes and windmills. I’m sad I didn’t get to see that but there should be time for that in the future. As you can see from the photo below I did get see the tulips. A nice young Italian lady stepped in front of the tulips to make the picture perfect. And I saw the wooden shoes! And…

Beautiful Amsterdam

My favorite picture from this weekend. I really like the nice young lady in the foreground and the tulips fom the flower market in the background. What more can I say?

Amsterdam

One of my favorite pictures from this weekend in Amsterdam. It shows a little of the madness. Look at the cars parked on the edge of the canals. Then there are the bikes in this picture, which only scratch the surface as too how many there are in town and of course the canal. A truly unique town with it's own brand of craziness.

Rust Bucket

I call this one "Rust Bucket". This ferry goes all year but I think now the trips are more frequent. Other ferries will be coming soon.

Bar Betty for Gelato!!

Bar Betty!! THE place to be in the summer and it's crowds are starting to swell. They have some of the best gelato in town and over priced beers. Hey noone's perfect.

Red Kid

Photo time again... This is the band "Red Kid" from Ireland playing at the Big Ben here in Brindisi. They rocked so hard I bought their CD and it's pretty good. They have a website www.redkid.info if you want to hear them.

What's going on?

Let’s see life is going on pretty normal around here. Of course that’s not the case a few hours away in Rome. I see on the TV, like you do in the US, that Rome is being mobbed with pilgrims for the funeral of Pope John Paul II. I expected the stores to be closed because people are leaving town for Rome but I don’t see that. If you look closely at the news you’ll see that most of the Italians that are there are kids. These are people that can take off to Rome at a moment’s notice or foreigners with a true interest or passion for the Catholic Church. Most people have to go about things as normal and go to the local church for prayers and remembrance. So yes there is big mess in Rome but the rest of the country is working.
Here is something that you won’t see in the news. Elections took place this week in 13 regions of Italy (of the 20 total regions). The biggest result is 11 of 13 regions elected a new regional president (governor) that is communist over the conservative right candidate. This shows how strong the communist party is here in Italy. This is a strange development for me, because I grew up when the communists were considered THE great evil of the Earth. I didn’t know much about them back then, just that they didn’t like America. Now I’m living in a country that embraces their concepts and beliefs. It’s also amazing to me that with 12 parties on the ballot here in Puglia there was only two parties that had a significant number of votes. That was the extreme left and the extreme right. It seemed there was no candidate in the middle that got more that 0.7% of the vote.The communists didn’t win by a big margin (50% to 49%) but they did win because they are against the war in Iraq and so are the Italian people. This would seem to be clear message that Mr. Burlesconi will not be reelected BUT never count him out. I’m interested to see what, if any, changes occur. I’m also amazed to see how polarized Puglia is.

What you keeping asking about....

Well I didn’t want to say anything but everyone always wants to know “Have you met any nice young Italian ladies?” and answer is “Yes”. I have met many, but recently I have started going out with one that seems a little better than the rest and her name is Arianna. We seem to be hitting it off well and I know a lot about her now. Let’s see... what should I tell you without writing a really long article. She’s very intelligent having completed her Master’s Degree studying Biotechnology in Bologna. Currently she’s studying the diseases of grapes at Bari University as part of a large research project. Her sport of choice was Volleyball but she hurt her knee so now she still plays but “very slowly”, which is funny because she walks faster than any Italian I have ever met. She knows some English from when she studied in Germany for a year so I don’t have to speak in Italian but I try to and I think I will learn a lot from her. She was born and raised in a small town 45 minutes from me where she and her whole family still live. She has those classical southern Italian looks with dark skin (compared to us Midwesterners) and long straight black hair. There aren’t many bad things to say about her but her town, Sava, is a good distance away like I mentioned before and she is the oldest of three kids in her family but you’ll agree those are minor things. One more important thing, she doesn’t smoke. I know the next thing is everyone will insist on a picture but I’m going to make you wait that. Hey, you’re lucky I said anything about her.