The last time I was there...so much raw sewage goes into the canal system that I felt like we were in a tidy bowl commercial. Lots of fecal matter floating in the water very close to your face as the gondolas sit very low in the water. Sure spoils the expected romance of the situation. Good food...just don't drink the water unless you are ok with returning hime with your own personal collection of parasites. On the other hand... I lost 15 pounds very quickly afterward.

Fintstone, I have noticed that there is definitely a difference in Venice depending on the time of year, if they have had rain, then the canals can be "polluted", and they can be flooding, if it is summer, the place stinks because it hasn't rained, so many people peeing in the shadows at night, and the rubbish around the streets!

So it is hard to find a happy medium, but even with all that I really love Venice, all those tiny little alleyways, the beautiful old buildings and churches. Didn't get any stomach bugs, but that is a problem through most of the warm areas around the Med, you don't drink the local water unless it is chlorinated and filtered. Never had a problem, that's why they all only drink bottled water over there, in summer everyone is carrying a bottle of water, even they don't drink the stuff coming out of the tap.

In Provence it wasn't a problem, their water, which mostly comes from aquifers, is beautiful.

I could do with losing 15 lbs!

Off to work. At least there is a Nespresso machine waiting for me to get there!!

How'd the presentation go tweeze?

Mirrors our experience.

Combine that with paying $250/night for a converted broom closet with twin beds set at 90 degrees and we were just thrilled. Not much romance to Venice that we found.

Morning All

Hi guys and gals. Off to the dentist shortly.

My wife's uncle had a funny description of most of Italy. Just go to the park with lots of pigeons and start feeding them. When you have ten of thousands of them all around you everywhere you are in Italy! And there is a absolutely positively endless supply of OLD churches everywhere. There are more old churches than pigeons! Hundreds of them in every city, old churches and pigeons and people eating strange food and never ever any ice in a drink. Europeans must be allergic to freaking ice in a drink. If you ask for some ICE water you might get one little ice cube that melts in seconds.

His idea of heaven was his 80 acre ranch with horses and cattle.

I do want to visit Europe, but I want to visit all 50 states in the USA first.

Good Friday morning folks!

Morning all. Tgif!

I have no interests in visiting Italy..i hear its a real dump for the most part.

I have been laughing at it for days, but have been too busy to look it up.

Its the Portsmouth Sinfonia Orchestra. A college experiment that stuck around. The idea was to see if you could recognize music played by people who did not know music or their instrument.

Here's the best quality version I've found.

Portsmouth Sinfonia - Also Sprach Zarathustra - YouTube

Survived the dentist. See my smile :D

Our last trip out of the US was to Iceland. A great/interesting country to visit. I'd like to go to Scandinavia next time we go to Europe. I also want to go to Oz and NZ.

I disagree wholeheartedly. There are parts of the country that certainly are, any big city has it's issues.

Med. Riviera thru Tuscany, Umbria, and on down south is beautiful. Get inland off the coast and it's beautifully rural. You have to get off the autostrada and away from the major tourist spots, most of the people I met were wonderful and welcoming. And damn can you eat well....

Until we got to Venice. You could tell there was a significant change in priority when you hit the tourist spots.

You should go - it's worth the experience. Gotta respect a society that charges 2 bucks for a bottle of wine and 6 for a soda.

Does Canada count? LOL. Never been to Europe. My loss I know.

I'm with Pete, out of the busy cities, the rural parts of Italy are beautiful, and loved Sicily as well. The driving in the cities is manic, everyone thinks they are Fangio, and you are being beeped even before the lights turn green lol.

But on the whole I have found the Italian people to be so very welcoming, and every Italian (and Greek) has a couple of relatives living in Australia, so they are very friendly towards Aussies.

I got my Paul McCartney tickets today!!! 14th row centre stage!! WOOT! WOOT! :D

Those of you who have even a slight mechanic’s mind will love this.

A toothpaste factory had a problem. They sometimes shipped empty boxes without the tube of toothpaste inside. This challenged their perceived quality with the buyers and distributors. Understanding how important the relationship with them was, the CEO of the company assembled all of his top people. They decided to hire an external engineering company to solve their empty boxes problem. The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, and third-parties selected.
Six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solutution - on time, on budget, and high quality. Everyone in the project was pleased.

They solved the problem by using a high-tech precision scale that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box weighed less than it should. The line would stop, someone would walk over, remove the defective box, and then press another button to re-start the line. As a result of the new package monitoring process, no empty boxes were being shipped out of the factory.
With no more customer complaints, the CEO felt the $8 million was well spent. At the end of the first month, he reviewed the line statistics report and discovered the number of empty boxes picked up by the scale in the first week was consistent with projections, however, the next three weeks were zero! The estimated rate should have been at least a dozen boxes a day. He had the engineers check the equipment and they verified the report as accurate.
Puzzled, the CEO travelled down to the factory, viewed the part of the line where the precision scale was installed, and observed that just ahead of the new $8 million dollar solution sat a $20 desk fan blowing the empty boxes off the belt and into a bin. He asked the line supervisor what that was about.

"Oh, that," the supervisor replied,"Bert, the kid from maintenance, put it there because he was tired of walking over, removing the box and re-starting the line every time the bloody bell rang.”

Hahaha!

I figured with all the engineers and folks that work with engineers this was the perfect forum to post that in.

I had a presentation pretty much every day... All went well. Thanks for asking. :)

I love Italy. Venice is like Vegas to me; two days is good for me. Rest of Italy beautiful!