Bonjour and Ciao

This will be a bit disjointed and possibly more nonsensical than usual because I am in a cafe in Venice with a molases slow inet connection and twice now i have realised that I caqnnot reach the shift key where it normally is, do not know where the apostrophe is and do not want to waste any time finding a hyphen on this italian keyboard. much to my chagrin, it is going to get ugly in the blog folks. :)

So, we are currently in venice and it is a great place to rest. we checked out a vivaldi violin concert last night and though erin and i dozed every so often, it was a nice show and a beautiful venue...though it is hard to look at anything around here and not hav ethe word beautiful come to mind.

since weàve been in italy, i feel like our diet has consisted of pizza and gelato mostly. it is kind of like being at a childrens birthday party. the gelato is cheap though which is helpful to these travellers.

i must pay homage to swangs birthday before i forget...countdown is at 10 days now. barcelona doesnt have any idea whats coming!

prior to arriving in venice, we were in paris, france. eiffel tower was the first order of business after the hotel check in. i had been to the eiffel tower before as had nick and steph, sandras best friends who we are also travelling with. they hung out in the park near the eiffel...what a view, eh...swang and erin went up into the tower, and i decided to mill around. i took a few photos and then sat in the park but not uninterrupted. a huge guy who turned out to be swiss and italian or something like that, and when i say huge i mean body builder huge, and his small italian friend started to talk to me. Great...Arnold and Danny DeVito, straight out of the movie Twins, up in my business. Well, just after that thought crossed my mind, sure enough, the Arnold guy asks where i am from and then asks what i think of the governator. he actually said governator. so, even over here that has caught on. ends up the guy knows ahrnold from body building way back. I dont know that i believe him but dont care enough not to. i chatted until i could get out of talking to these guys any longer and was able to find steph and nick. it was a mundane and painful conversation about anything they guy could think to ask about the u.s. and my plans for the evening.

i got into a minor tiff with a canadien on the Batobus. he made a comment about us being american. pretty much it was my backing down and not really making anything of it to him but being really angry about it for a while. only erin even knew what happened...on my best behavior.

the other site we caught was the louvre. very cool...or is that an understatement? the mona lisa did not affect me profoundly but there was a picture of Christ that i found quite moving. his tears were painted in the most lovely way and it really got to me. that is the only moment of overwhelming emotion i had among the louvre art collection.

otherwise, things have been rather calm over here in europe. we are off to rome tomorrow and then to barcelona.

hello to all regular readers and guests! i will try to write again soon.

Ciao!