Recently in Adventures Abroad Category

I have finally finished compiling the web-based album of photos from our Italian honeymoon. You can find them at: Honeymoon.

This album has four parts, with photos from each city we visited:

• Venezia (Venice)—where we spent our first four days,


• Siena—where we spent the next week,


• San Gimignano—which we visited on a day trip from Siena, and


• Firenze (Florence)—where we spent our last four days,

The cities aren't listed in the order we visited them because the program I used to create the album, Jalbum, put them in alphabetical order.

A note about the web-based wedding photos
In the coming weeks I will be creating an expanded version of the web-based wedding album to include captions and to add some of the many wonderful photos (and possibly videos) from the friends and family who were able to attend.

This should be a lot easier with Jalbum versus the crappy freeware tool I used to create the original version that only contained proofs from our photographer. That tool was far too cumbersome and very pretty limited in its formatting options to deal with again.

This weekend Melissa and I went down to Florida on a weekend getaway, hoping to find some warmer weather. While it was only slightly warmer than Boston, averaging low 50s during the day and frost-warnings at night, it was sunny and there was no snow! We didn't get to work on our tans, but we did have a lot of fun.

On Saturday morning I set the culinary bar high for our first trip together and took Melissa to her first-ever breakfast at Bob Evans. Needless to say, we had a hearty, if not heart-healthy breakfast. After the antacid breath mints, we drove over to Busch Gardens in Tampa. As the photo below shows, this place was a lot of fun.

If you're not familiar with it, Busch Gardens is an odd hybrid of amusement park (with 10 roller coasters), wildlife refuge, and life-size beer commercial. We saw and fed the giraffe while on a Serengetti Tour, which was well worth the extra charge beyond the park admission price. Here's a few more photos from the trip:

Since 1929, Harry's Bar has been a popular watering hole and elegant eatery for writers, artists, celebrities, and aristocrats. It's most famous patron was Hemingway. Now while I don't consider myself a great fan of "Papa" and I'm not exactly known for my exotic palette, I'd say I was both interested and excited at the prospect of eating at one Venice's swankier restaurants that had a literary legacy. What I did not realize was just how much I would pay for the experience, fiscally and physically.   The average meal at Harry's consists of an appetizer, a first course, a main course, and a dessert. I chose the Minestrone Soup which was amazing, especially considering it cost 19 euro (which is about $24 US given that 1 euro was about $1.30 US during our trip). I skipped the first course and selected a main course, the Sole Calabresi, which was 57 euro ($74 US). Total, the meal cost me the 85 euro I had in my wallet, and I had to borrow a few dollars from the other members of our group. It was embarrassing, but they were very generous.

Here's a picture of our group of fine diners outside the entrance of Harry's following our meal:

(Left to right: Tom, Barbara, Beth, Dakota, Jill, and me)

I just returned from a 9-day vacation in Italy. It was a tour with 30 people through Rome, Florence, and Venice. Here's a few photo highlights, I'll have more from each city over the next week or two.

Here I am at St. Peter's Square in Rome following our tour of the Vatican Museum and St. Peter's.

Here's a few more photos from my trip to New Mexico in 2001. These are from a side trip to a sculpture park we visited on our way to Santa Fe.

This one is exactly what it looks like: me with a giant armadillo...something you would have expected to see in Texas more than in the Land of Enchantment.

Here's some photos from my 2001 vacation to New Mexico. My friend Greg took me for a tour of a local store called "The Black Hole." The place is run by a former Los Alamos National Laboratories employee-turned peace activist who now sells surplus items from the lab. The stuff inside the store was an odd cross between an Army surplus store and the prop department for Dr. Strangelove. [Note: Movie title corrected on 2/17/05, per Marjorie's comment]

Yes, the photo here shows me holding a decommissioned sea mine and behind me seems to be a pile of assorted missle casings.

While my folks were in town a few weeks ago for my niece's birthday, we went to the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site in Brookline, MA. My folks are interested in Olmsted's work because as the father of modern urban landscape design, his first professional project was Delaware Park in our hometown: Buffalo, NY.

After Olmsted worked in Buffalo he went to New York and played a key role in designing Central Park. He moved to Boston in 1890 to seek refuge from the stress of dealing with the politics of public works in NYC. Once in Boston Olmsted started his design firm and, among other projects, designed the park system that surrounds Boston known as the Emerald Necklace. The office was open until 1980 when the owners moved to New Hampshire. They turned the building, all its contents, and the grounds over to the U.S. National Park Service for preservation.

Here's some artistic renderings of the photos I took on our trip: This is the entryway to the grounds.

To top off our trip to Santa Barbara office, my boss (Elizabeth), co-workers (James and Deanna), and I went to Hollywood for the evening. James wanted to meet up with his brother who lives there, I wanted to have dinner with my friend Pam who lives there, and Elizabeth and Deanna went sightseeing on their own.

On the way into town we passed the Capital Records building...somehow I doubt this would look the same if it was a stack of compact discs.

I met Pam at her condo and we walked down to Hollywood Boulevard to have dinner and see a few sights. Our first stop was Grauman's Chinese Theater.

One of the attractions of the theater is the hand and footprints of many stars. Here's Clark Gable:

Now that I'm back in the U.S. and have caught up on some of my lost sleep, I've spent some time preparing a few of my photos from London! Take a look:

Here's Big Ben and Parliament:

On my last day in London I went to Buckingham Palace but changed my mind when the rain started coming down and I saw all of the protesters yelling about Bush arriving on Tuesday. Instead I turned around and headed up the road to Westminster Abbey to kill a few hours in a warmer, drier, and certainly quieter environment.

On Thursday, after two nights at The Regent Palace, a real flea bag hotel--one bathroom per 20 rooms, gross mattresses that must have been bought at a fire sale from a former French brothel, and a housecleaning staff whose idea of making up a room is rotating the sheets 90 degrees to hide the scuff marks from my shoes--I was glad to have the chance to visit my friend George in Eastbourne.

On Day 3 in London (my second full day), I spent most of the daylight hours in the British Museum. in which I could spend a month alone exploring. It?s really quite amazing. Here you can see more Egyptian, Roman, Greek, and Near and Far Eastern artifacts than most people can imagine.

Early this morning I discovered that I have run out of credit on my mobile (cell phone). A conversation with the friendly, neighborhood Vodafone sales rep revealed that any calls I receive while traveling outside of Spain result in my being charged the international roaming rate of 60 cents (Euro) per minute. This is the same cost as if I were making the call myself. I was very disappointed to hear this and the nauseating d?j? vu about this info didn't help either as I vaguely seem to recall that while purchasing the phone the sales woman told me of this little money-sucking caveat.

So today I am leaving Barcelona. I have spent just over five weeks here, enjoyed most of it, but now it is time to relax a bit more and find a cheaper place to live while I look for work. The place to relax is England and the cheaper place to live, in my humble opinion, is the U.S. Therefore I am returning to the Boston area on November 17th.

Just a quick note about the recent lack of photos on my blog. I've run into a few technical snags, mostly a lack of availability of a PC on which to edit the photos I have taken down to a size that will load quickly on the web. My good friend James was kind enough to let me use his laptop PC last week, but after I got the photos to school I found that I had managed to copy the photos onto a now corrupted floppy disk. Not to worry, I still have the originals on CD, but they are over 1 megabyte in size each and therefore will take far too long for me to upload or for you to download.

Now that class is over, several people have asked what I am doing now. Most of my days consist of the grind of getting up, a shower, dressed, quick breakfast, getting out the door, and then going to either the school or the local internet cafe to work on the job search.

What do you know about Barcelona and the strange attraction it holds for anarchists, militants, and general political miscreants? Well, I haven't read much, but I do have a sense that with Franco long gone, the upheaval of the past will remain there and this is now a warm and welcoming city to both the citizens of Spain and foreigners alike. I offer this photo as evidence of their hospitality. My friend James took it today while he, Megs, and I were out for a bit of sightseeing near Parc Guell.

Did you notice that there are two police motorcycles in the photo as well? Curious.

Alright you bunch of smarty pant conspiracy nuts, if you think that I'm hiding in New Hampshire (which wouldn't be a bad thing), then how do you explain the following photos of me at Park Guell in Barcelona? No, I really don't want to hear your theories, just be quiet and take a look at some of the pretty pictures I took this weekend while visiting the park designed by Antoni Gaudi...it's a beautiful place. Some of them are a bit dark or the color is off, sorry I don't have access to Photoshop to clean them up. ;)

I got a "PASS" grade on my course. I'm not thrilled, a "PASS B" would have been better, but realistically I didn't do enough of my paperwork for lesson planning to warrant one, so I'm okay with it. I'm hoping that my professional experience will boost my job prospects.

For our last teaching practice class one of the teachers was planning a lesson for the upper intermediate students about telling jokes. The joke she was going to use was a tad on the questionable side because it had a scatalogical reference. J?em offered a quick edit to make it suitable for the class and she was all set.

Listening to the joke prompted the other members of the TP group to share their favorite jokes and then make a judgement on their appropriacy for class use. My jokes were just gross and wholey inappropriate. The best of the jokes, while still not appropriate but very funny in my humble opinion, came from someone who wishes to remain anonymous:

A man goes to his doctor and says, "Doctor, I've got a head of lettuce stuck up my bum!"

The doctor says, "Drop your pants and let me have a look."

After my adventure with the Spanish medical system this past weekend--helping a friend who got ill (and is now better)--I'm happy to report that I've safely begun my fourth and final week of the course. I've survived the transition from the Intermediate students to the Beginners class, and have successfully taught two 1-hour lessons. Yesterday I was working on question forms and got into a bit of a tough spot clarifying the difference between "how much" and "how many"...can you explain that one?

This weekend has been exhausting, not much of a break between the third and final chaotic weeks of the course. Friday night I discovered the joys and terrors of the Spanish healthcare system as I played the worried big brother for my friend Sarah who took ill while we were at dinner.

Here's another sample of my students' work from my last lesson with the intermediate students. This one appears to have ignored most of my instructions, specifically about writing dialog, but still managed to come out more coherent than the previous one.

So Monday of this week was my last teaching practice session with the intermediate students. For my final lesson with them, I had them write some movie plots with vocabulary of ocean travel in the narrative tenses (simple past, past perfect, past progressive, and past perfect progressive). Here's a sample of one of the stories two of the students wrote...exactly as I received it.

I have finally found a computer with both a working floppy drive and an Internet connection!!! What this means is that you can finally see the photos from my only sightseeing trip in Barcelona so far...to the Sagrada Familia. This is proof positive for anyone who thinks I'm really just hiding in the hills of New Hampshire to get away from my ex-girlfriend, Maria. ;)

Here's an artist's rendering of what the final building will look like, or at least one end of it:

Sorry about the depressed tone of that entry on Friday night. As you could tell I was very sleep starved. Today, after 11 hours of solid sleep, plus a hot shower, I am feeling much better. My flatmate, James, and I found a laundromat with dryers (which are VERY uncommon in Spain due to energy costs). I also realized that with the end of yesterday's classes that I have 10 class days remaining and then *SPLASH* into the job market.

Just a quick word about the two tutors for my class. J?em is the lead tutor on the course and Roger is the "assistant" tutor. It's silly that Cambridge University insist on these labels because both men have 20+ years of EFL teaching and school admin experience. They are both very nice, incredibly smart men who are good teachers with great senses of humor.

Just a quick word about the two tutors for my class. J?em is the lead tutor on the course and Roger is the "assistant" tutor. It's silly that Cambridge University insist on these labels because both men have 20+ years of EFL teaching and school admin experience. They are both very nice, incredibly smart men who are good teachers with great senses of humor.

I've now finished my second week. My first lesson this week went better than the other two, but the one I taught on Wednesday was pretty weak because the subject--greetings and small talk on a job interview--was neither interesting or particularly challenging to the students. Luckily for me, I managed to spark their interest in the last 15 minutes with a discussion of what "genuine" means and whether they thought the characters in the tape we listened to were being genuine. I think that's the only reason they didn't lynch me or fall asleep.

I taught two classes in my first week. In the first class my tutor said I was good but a bit serious. The students responded well to the topic--favorite books. I was pleasantly surprised by the students' choice of books: cheesy romance novels, to "Angela's Ashes," to much more serious books about the political struggles in Chile and finally, one about an American doctor's travels among the Australian aboriginies--sorry, the titles of the last two escape me. In case you wondered, my favorite book is "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Teaching was fun once I got into the rhythm of being in front of strangers and leading the group. I only had to teach for 20 minutes which at some points flew and other points dragged, just like most things.

So my first night in Barcelona--2 October--I'm completely exhausted, running on adrenaline, and need to keep moving to avoid my own stink--I'm in Spain, not France, so people notice (sorry Jane)--and I ask Jordi for directions to the nearest market so I can pick up some food and basic personal hygiene items while I wait for my luggage. Jordi sends me to a bargain market called "LIDL"--no idea what it means. My first challenge is to find a shopping cart, which is harder than it sounds.

Thanks to guilt inflicted by my host, Jordi, on the clerk from Air France, both pieces of my luggage showed up at the flat at 11:30 a.m. yesterday, just 30 minutes before I had to leave for my course orientation session.

My flatmate James and I went to the orientation session and met our other classmates for the course. There's 36 people taking the course and we were split up into three groups of 12 and then we'll be subdivided again into teaching practice teams of six. The people in my group--five Americans and seven Brits--all seem very nice and I'm looking forward to working with them.

Wednesday morning I awoke at 8:00 a.m. at my friends' Nancy and Karl's house . They put me up for the night so I wouldn't have to spend my last night in the U.S. on the floor of my apartment and so that I could make it to my final dental appointment on time. After the dental appointment--my teeth are in good shape--I finished, or should say reached a time-driven compromise regarding the fate of the remaining contents of my apartment. My divinely wonderful friend Amy made yet another trip from New Hampshire to Waltham and helped me shovel the last of my belongings into either the suitcase or the stack of bags, buckets, and boxes that either went to her house, my brother's place, or with me in a suitcase. She was even generous enough to efficiently pack my suitcase while I ran away for an hour to have a massage to loosen the knots from my back so I could have a reasonably comfortable 6 hour plane ride.

My car is a 1997 Saturn SL2 with 115,000 miles on it and I'm ready to part with it to help fund my adventure abroad. An earlier sale to a friend of a friend fell through, so I've entrusted its sale to my friend, Stephanie and her husband, Jim.

The school where I'm going to take the ESL teacher training course next month is called International House Barcelona. It is in Barcelona which is in the northeastern corner of Spain and on the Mediterranean. Here's a map of Spain:

I'm moving to Barcelona so I thought I'd start posting the answers to some of the frequently asked questions that folks have been asking about where I'm going. So, here goes...

Q: What's the weather going to be like over there?

A: I'm going to a training class in Barcelona in October. I found the answers on the World Climate web site (http://www.worldclimate.com/), so it looks like the temperature ranges between 59°F and 69°F, and averages about 63°F and there's an average rainfall of 3.8 inches.