In Amsterdam airport on a layover

My first time in this airport. Nice airport, big, one big security zone: you don't need to go through security to go from one terminal to another.  Update: when you get to a gate for a flight to some destinations (e.g. USA, maybe others) there are security checkpoints that separate the main terminal from the waiting room dedicated to just that gate.

Food is pricey, but that's pretty much par for the course at an airport.

Free Wi-Fi. You can stay connected half an hour, and you can reconnect. They don't promise fast connections for the free service, and they offer a paid service for faster and longer connections.

Sagra Della Birra Artigianale

In Castellalto, a small mountain top village in the hills above Teramo, they hold each year the Sagra della Birra Artigianale, e.g. Festival of the Specialty Beer.  They even have a web page: http://www.festivalbirreartigianali.it/   It runs a whole week.   They have about 200 beers on tap!

This is the first year we went.  We were there on the 4th of August.  We didn't know what to expect.  Like most such festivals, they have the usual festival foods with the usual method:  you stand in line or in multiple lines, order your items separately, and then wait until your number is called to go get your food.  We did this, as usual, and as usual it's not very satisfying:  you and a dozen friends arrive at the festival, you find a couple tables together, and then practically everyone disappears in a rush to get in line and wait.  The few left behind basically are doing nothing except holding the table space.

What we really didn't realize is that you go to this festival for the beer, not the food. We should have eaten first, or just picked up a sandwich along one of the stands offering them, without trying to load up on the other festival food.   Once you've done the eating, you can settle down to the beer drinking.  Most beers were 2 euro for a 200mL glass.  A few high end beers were more expensive, with the most expensive being some special Danish beers that reached 17 and 18% alcohol.

There were some 14 stands serving beer.  The ideal thing to do would have been to go from stand to stand, each person picks a beer, then you stand around and drink them as you walk along to the next stand.  In the end that's what we ended up doing.

There was also various bits of entertainment.  The night we were there the Mo' Better Band was blasting out tunes.

We had a really good time and we look forward to making this sagra a regular stop each summer.

PS.  Giovanni, non c'è un benzinaio a Castellalto, ti devi fare il pieno di benzina quando parti da casa!

What a month at the beach does to you

So what does a month at the beach, taking the sun every day, really do to you?
You get some sun.

To more dramatically illustrate this, I've pulled out some pictures from myself from early, middle, and late this summer. These are cut out from larger pictures, trimmed just to show my face.

I've mounted them into a collage that shows you how my face looked at the end of July, early August, and late August.  The pictures were taken under different lighting conditions, so it isn't easy at first to look at them and obviously see the changes, but if you look carefully you'll see how my face starts out a little red (on July 30 I had already been getting sun for a few days -- sorry I couldn't find a good photo from earlier), then by August 7 it's starting to lose the redness and get darker, and finally at the end of August all of the red is gone and it's just a little darker than maybe you're used to seeing me.

Tortoreto Lido - changes on our street

This past weekend we moved down to the village where we go to the beach, Tortoreto Lido.
Quiet little village in the winter, explodes with beach goers in the summer. Weather has been mixed. On the weekend it was heavy rain, lighting, winds. Monday was good and we went to the beach. Today looks like it's going to be rain.

There are two pictures on this post. The first one is the little street outside our kitchen. This is traditionally what it looks like, small houses, quiet, narrow, little cars parked here and there. The second picture is the new monstrosity that's being built across the street in a formerly empty lot. It's going to completely block our view of the sun.

Oh well, that's progress.

First few days of Summer 2014

I got here in what has to be the earliest time of arrival I can remember ... landed in Napoli just before noon localtime.  No problems with connections, it's all smooth, no lost luggage, but it still tired me out.  No chance for sleep on the plane with such an early flight from the US to Europe, I was in Paris my 6am Paris time/midnight back in Ohio.

First day of course spent doing nothing and recovering.

Second day we take a Sunday drive out to the country to visit my mom's favorite cousin.
Nice 4 hour lunch under the trees in the hills somewhere outside Avellino.
I've gotten so lazy now that I didn't even have my phone with me during lunch, so the only pictures I got were these two of some of the desserts.

The first one is a store bough assortment of mignon desserts.

This one is a home made baba (on the bottom) with some store bought mini-baba's on top to fill in the hole in the center of the home made baba.

Today is actually day three.  Day two was hot, day three started out with heavy rains, winds, and has been much cooler.  Forecast for next couple days calls for more of the same.

The real vacation doesn't start until next week, I'm still technically working remotely this week, so don't expect a lot more until later in the month.

Summer 2014 Here We Come

The older I get, the more I hate winter.

Summer is coming, Tortoreto Lido awaits me.