Rome: the start of "A Month In"

As I mentioned in this post, we are spending a month in Rome. Now that we a are actually settled in (a 2 day process), it's time to bring y'all up to date.

We left home Monday, and had a relatively uneventful trip here, with the following exceptions:

• The cat did not pee on the hour long drive to Calgary -- not the first time but close;
• We ran into a friend who happened to be working as a Calgary gate agent for KLM;
• There was no real sleeping on a fairly nice 8 hr flight from Calgary to Amsterdam (yes, we waved at The Netherlands on the way in and out);
• We arrived in AMS late, providing only an hour's connection to our flight to Rome, necessitating a mad dash across the airport, though immigration, through a security check -- but we made it;
• It was a straightforward location of our train out of the FCO airport;
• However, we missed our train connection at Roma Trastevere because we were on the wrong platform. Fortunatly, the next train was only 15 minutes later;
• We arrived at the Valle Aurelia station near our apartment, loaded down with luggage, but wandering around it for 15 minutes as we couldn't figure out where we were, which road was which since none had signs, and we walked in circles for a bit.

Rome's road signs are beautiful when you can find them

Our apartment is fairly spacious and pretty nice...

The living & dining room. Spartan but spacious.

...including a really nice private balcony/deck covered in plants (and strawberries!)...

Set up for al fresco dining

...though I have a closet for a kitchen.

The entire kitchen

Size of kitchen does not affect cooking ability.

Coteletta di pollo con salsa tomate y fungi, with other stuff

Our apartment is in an out of the way mostly residential neighbourhood with no tourists, offering lots of apartment buildings and not that much else. We have 4 supermercatos of varying sizes within a 10 minute walk, most of which hide.

Parking garage entrance left. Store entrance right.

And that Pam store is the size of the old Calgary CoOp near where I lived.

Still, the neighbourhood's a busy place, where there's lots of traffic and silly parking.

My local grocery store (Punto)

Double parked parents wait to pick up kids at school

Flowers cascade from most balconies

Some people have ruins in their front yard

On-street flower vendors. Flowers probably came from Holland

A framing shop

So Tuesday was spent checking in, getting some essentials and getting over the jet lag. Today was a real meeting with my landlord (a nice old retired lady) to sort out the WiFi and other stuff, arranging a SIM card for my phone and getting transit passes. You can only get the passes at one of a few ATAC offices, and in typical Italian style, the one closest to me was closed for renovations. So we had to run out to Termini train station on the other side of town, a bustling and fun place.

And so they come and go

I have already learned that living here will be bad for my liver. Turns out most wines in the supermercatos is under €5. Many are under €3. This one's €1.97 (or $2.60 Cdn).

What the heck. Have 2.

Tomorrow we're actually going to get up at a reasonable hour and check out the local daily markets.

Efficient (perhaps too efficient?) service

In yesterday's post, I mentioned we had called the septic tank pump out dudes to come on Monday. The plan was to have them pump the tanks out, then get back the dudes with the camera to look back into the drain and see what was up.

In Canmore, plans rarely work as planned.

In a fit of outstandingly good service -- excessively good service, in this case -- we got home from skiing today to a phone message. The septic tank dudes had come today "because they were in the neighbourhood" and pumped the tank out for us.

Because we weren't here, we couldn't ask them why the level was high. Or why the two tanks seemed to not be well connected. Nor if they could pressure wash the connection, or wash the line in from the house.

So we called and explained what was happening with our sewage fountains. They apologized. Apologized? For coming ahead of schedule and doing the service early? I'm not sure why they should apologize. A whole lotta Canmore businesses could learn customer service from these guys. No, this was my fault for not telling them in advance what our issues were.

I've just become so accustomed to "Canmore time" with the businesses here that the folks who actually deliver on time -- like these septic tank dudes, my general contractor and a handful of others -- well, they just impress the heck out of me. And having lived here a while, I'm not used to the good service I get from them.

As I said, we called them. Once I told them what was happening, they promised to come back Monday as scheduled to help us sort out our problem.

Live in Canmore? Got a septic problem? Call these dudes.

Fountains of sewage

Just after Christmas, we noticed something strange going on with our basement bathroom. It features a "pumping toilet" since it lies below the level of our septic tank.

The pump started pumping occasionally for no apparent reason.

At first we suspected a slight leak in the toilet. To test it, we turned the water off to the toilet. It still pumped, but with less frequency. Then we noticed that it seemed to pump mostly when we had guests using our upstairs guest bathroom.

And one day, we went downstairs, and found that a fountain of sewage had erupted from the shower drain in the basement bathroom. It was right after some guests had been in. We cleaned it up, and it happened again the next time we had guests in.

Hmmmmn...

So we called a plumber, who generously said they couldn't help us, but re-directed us to a Canmore company that inspected and put cameras down drain lines to diagnose problems like these. They came by today. They popped the covers on the septic tanks, and found the first tank REALLY full, and the second tank just half full with water gently dripping into it. In fact, the first tank is SO full that the level is ABOVE the level of the drain line in the basement. They put a camera down that main drain line running to the septic tank and found it clear of debris but half-full of water. 

Hmmmmn...

The current diagnosis is that there's a blockage somewhere between the two septic tanks, backing up the water into the house. It will allow some water to flow slowly between the tanks, but when guests are in and we all shower at once (say, in the morning before skiing), the water backs up from Tank 2 to Tank 1 into the drain line of the house, flows into the vent line of the basement bathroom, fountains out the shower and into the toilet where it is pumped back up.

So we're scheduled to have the septic tanks pumped out and cleaned on Monday -- a semi-annual thing the previous owner has been doing for 20+ years. We'll try to clear any blockage, and check why the level is so high (and we might try to get a high level alarm installed).

But it doesn't explain how the water in the septic tank is higher than the level of the line draining into it -- a line that has some water in it, but is not full.

Hmmmmn...

The next "Month In" is...

When we retired, we wanted to embrace the concept of an annual "Month In..." where we went to live somewhere else for a month each year.

We picked going in May as it is the "spring skiing" end of the ski season -- and we're not huge spring skiing fans -- yet before the beginning of the way-to-short hiking season. I'm also anchored by my annual trip to Montreal to see the Formula 1 Grand Prix, which is in the beginning of June each year.

We wanted to live somewhere else, not just visit somewhere else. The idea wasn't to play tourist every day, but rather to live like locals.

Our first year, we went to Amsterdam. Great place. Loved the city, loved the surroundings, loved the Dutch people, loved the canals, loved our apartment, loved Dutch basketball, loved riding bikes, and had a great time. Highly recommended.

Last year, we spent a month travelling around the Southeast USA. Not really a "Month In..." but I got a new car out of it. Liked Washington DC, the swamps of South Carolina, Shenandoh National Park, the Black Hills of South Dakota, and eating a LOT of genuine barbecue. There was lots of stuff we didn't like (Kansas City springs to mind). But it wasn't really a "Month In..." anywhere, and love them as I do, I'm not sure living anywhere in America is so much different from living in Canada.

For our 2013 "Month In...", we started with a big desire to visit South Africa. We bought guidebooks and other such things last Fall, but we got busy and planning went by the wayside. Six weeks ago, we noticed that May was getting pretty close and we had booked nothing. We had a long discussion and came to the conclusion that we could not go somewhere too new for our "Month In..." as we had run out of research time. We also realized that unless we got on it, we would lose all opportunities as finding a furnished apartment to rent for a month on short notice is a challenge, even in big cities. We did some random scoping on the interweb and proved that to be the case.

So another two weeks went by, and we narrowed it down. We could really only do a "Month In..." one of three major European cities. We like all three cities, as we have been to each before. All three were big enough to have lots of accommodation options. All three allowed us to get past a language barrier, since we don't have time to learn much of a new language. All three are reasonably easy to get to from Calgary. We put them in priority order, and took a day to study accommodation options. We made "must have lists" in that accommodation, one of which was that we could book it on line (or at least see a current availability calendar on-line). We found 3 possible places to stay in one city, but none in our second choice. We sent out one apartment enquiry Monday, but found out this morning it was unavailable (so much for on-line calendars). We sent out a second immediately and got a confirmation within minutes. Ladies and gentlemen, this year we're spending a "Month In..."

Rome

We really wanted to go to Venice, but we could find nowhere to stay. Karen found an OK place, but it had no internet, and that's crucial for us. We also thought about London, but everything we saw was at least 50% more expensive than any of the three places we found in Rome.

Our apartment is a little less central than we wanted; it's 10 min west of the Vatican. The first one we found was in Rioni Monte, our favourite Rome neighbourhood, but alas, we couldn't get it for the full month. So we'll be spending more time on Rome's transit than we wanted (and that's not that great, because Rome's transit system isn't as good as London's or Paris'. Or even as good as Red Deer's.)

But we'll be there from May 7th to June 3rd. And given how much we love Italy, we're really looking forward to it.

We learned a few things from this process:

• There's LOTS of apartment rental sites. Many times, the same apartment shows up on several of them, often with different calendars.
• Most people don't keep their availability calendars up to date. Even those that look up to date commonly aren't.
• Many people are crappy at getting back to you. 36-48 hrs is a fast response in VRBO or other sites.
• Most don't want to map their places. They'll provide a paragraph of approximate locations, but rarely an address
• The rates shown are commonly not the rate you'll pay. In some cases, you'll see the "lowest of the low" season rates. In some cases big discounts (25-40%) will be offered for stays longer than 3 weeks. So sifting through rates is an issue
• People take crappy photos of their apartments. They'll show 40 pictures of the Colosseum, Trevi Fountain and Vatican, one shot of the kitchen (that you can't make out if they have a stove), and no pictures of the bathroom
• Some really nice people offer approximate floor plans. We like these people.

Ah well. It's a driving blizzard here. All the more reason to think about spending May in Rome.

Animal encounters

I'm still skiing, and writing about that over on my other blog. However, I've had some animal encounters recently that don't qualify for reports about how deep the powder is, so are worth sharing.

On our way to Big White, we once again saw bald eagles. Some were flying, but one was hanging out in a tree. The same tree we have seen eagles in for years on our trips to Big White.

Majestic in the tree 

I got too close, so he left 

Off he goes

No mistaking an eagle in flight

One year we saw 3 in that tree. We think they are used to that tree because not only is it close to the Shushwap River, which is full of fish and ice free all year, but that long narrow building next to the tree used to be a chicken farm, now closed (with biohazard signs all over it). One year, we saw 3 eagles sitting on what could only have been the farm's manure pile.

Two nights ago, I thought I saw a coyote in my back alley. I was right. An hour later, I saw him through the slats standing behind the fence. Then he sauntered down my alley...

Here he comes

Pausing to check stuff out

...and ducked into the neighbours yard.

Looking for something, but what?

About 2 minutes after that, we heard the unmistakable yelping and howling of a coyote, and a second came down the alley and joined the first in the neighbours yard.

Today, we saw two of them in the woodlot across the street.

On the bright side, coyotes are pack animals when they live or travel together, but are solitary hunters. This is mating season, so two travelling together are typically a "new family" looking for potential den sites.

On an unrelated matter...

I've been fending off lots of spam comments to this blog for the last few months, deleting literally hundreds of similarly nonsensical comments a day, mostly from from older posts (one 2011 post on Biking the Kananaskis Valley has had over 2,500 hits in the last month alone, with about 1,000 spam comments being posted to it, all of which I have to delete). I've now limited comments on older posts, plus turned on word recognition to prevent automated bots from putting up comments on recent posts. So I apologize to my 5 regular readers for any inconvenience.

Wandering around in knee deep snow

No, folks, I have not been sleeping. Rather, I have been skiing my face off, which I write about on my other blog. I'm up to 42 days, almost 300,000 vertical meters and over 500 runs so far this season.

My daughter, however, does not ski, despite my bestest efforts to convincer her to try (and now with KC being a Level 1 instructor, she doesn't have to listen to me...). In general, she doesn't like winter that much (she's living in the wrong place). But she does like snowshoeing.

So last Friday, in an effort to show her the joys of skiing while snowshoeing, we went up to Sunshine and into the backcountry.

Our walk started on the top of the continent, at the Continental Divide marker.

Goat's Eye on the left, Angel on the right, my daughter in the middle

There's a summer trail that starts here and heads down to Rock Isle Lake. Trails are easy to see in the summer. There's nothing to show them in the winter. So we basically made up our own route, and wandered through the forest.

Yours truly, breaking trail

Looking back

Our main goal was to stay out of avalanche terrain, as the avi report called for Considerable avalanche danger above treeline. In many places we found the 20 cm or so that fell in last weeks storm.

Coming down in 20 cm is easy

The snow depth back here was outrageous. Some examples from when we did find the summer trails:

A trail sign. 4' tall

This guardrail protects you from falling into a waterfall in the summer

In spots, the snow was VERY unsupportive, and even with snowshoes on we sank in up to our mid thighs. Each of us got stuck at least once.

That's actually a lake with an island in the middle

Our tracks across the lake to the island

Snacking on the island. The ski hill in the distance

Sunshine runs a groomer out to the lake because it has utilities back there. So the walk back was easy, all the way to the backcountry access gate, and you really didn't even need snowshoes.

One of the several gates on the resort's boundaries

I volunteered to design an in-bounds snowshoe route for Sunshine's hotel guests, and so after bush-bashing (snow bashing?) our way out to the Rock Isle Lake environs, we wandered around in-bounds for a while after lunch.

The Gondola and the old ski out

What better way to end the day than by making everyone cook their own dinner? Well, sort of. We like to cook on hot rocks. Makes a big mess but it's a lot of fun.

The hot rock spread

Skiing accomplishments

Once you get to a certain advanced point in skiing, it becomes hard to progress that next step. For some, lessons just don't cut it, for you need to acquire some very specific skill or other that requires personal coaching. So at that point, a lot of people gain their instructor's certification. It was the same way when I was a glider pilot. First you learned, then you flew solo, then you flew cross country, then you flew higher performance aircraft, then you learned to teach.

Karen decided recently that she had reached "that point", so she signed up for the Canadian Ski Instructor's Alliance Level 1 course. I got my Level 1 way back in the late 1970's. Level 1 instructors teach beginners how to snowplow and progress to an intermediate level of skiing, primarily to kids. It's not really advanced skiing, but the course teaches you how to ski a technique "perfectly" and how to plan and deliver classes. And one key to the course is the absolute requirement that your skiing improves. Because it's Level 1, you really don't have to be that incredible a skier to take the course, but no matter how good you are, you MUST get better.

She passed, of course, and the limited opportunities I've seen say she's skiing better to boot. So I am (as usual) proud of her for getting it done. Will she teach? I doubt it, because that seems like work. But it wasn't about trying to get a job as a ski instructor. It was about setting and achieving goals.

While she was in the class, I was skiing on my own. A few weeks back, I posted this on how I managed to ski a 3rd best ski day ever, by setting a goal to ski a lot one day. At the end of that day, I wondered if I would ever get the chance to break 50,000' again.

Well, I did, and then some. This past Monday featured fast snow, fairly good viz all day, some powder and a bit of hero snow around. As Karen was in class, I was on my own, with no reason (but wobbly legs) to stop during the day. On the downside, I have been (and continue to be) fighting a cold, so wasn't feeling 100%. But circumstances on the hill caused me to ride the Goat's Eye lift -- with it's 1,900' of vertical -- exclusively for the day. Karen's early start for her class got me onto the chair at 9:05 AM, and her late finish caused me to catch the last lift at 4:00 PM. Add to that the briefest of lunch stops and I managed to get...

18,040 vertical meters or

59,186 vertical feet

...in 29 runs in my day. That's 2,610 m more than my best day ever.

What did that look like?

As seen in Google Earth

As seen on my iPhone

And lest you think I took it easy this day, simply blasting up and down green runs, or doing hard stuff early and easy stuff later...

A close up of the South Side Chutes

...that's one in Mother in Law, one in Goat's Head Soup, one in Wildside Main, one in Farside, one in Think Again, two in Renegade, one in Stampede, one in Saddledome and one exit through Eagle Meadows. All but 2 of those are double black, and one was my 26th run of the day.

Now I have a new goal: 18,288 m, or 60,000 vertical feet in one day. Given the "perfect storm" of conditions that caused me to get 18,040 m, I doubt it will happen soon.

But you never know...

I gotta share this

Sometimes, you get to be in the right place in the right time. This dude in my neighbourhood was, last Friday. He caught a lynx and her cub on camera.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Disappointment

I have never been one to go to very many movies, and it's harder where I live now. We have one 4 screen theatre, and they rotate movies weekly. A really popular movie will last 2 weeks. By the time I figure out something's on that I want to see, it's gone.

I liked the LORD OF THE RINGS series, so I wanted to see THE HOBBIT. It's in town on a rare 3rd week of showing, but I guarantee it will be gone this week. So I caught it before it disappeared.

For LOTR, I though Peter Jackson did an amazing job of condensing the books into their essence. He kept the story moving. He made the characters engaging. His special effects augmented the story, not dominated it. He took three long books and made 3 long movies. 

THE HOBBIT is not like that.

Jackson took one short book and is making 3 long movies. He padded the beginning of the movie with stuff to tie it to LOTR, including an appearance by Frodo. He padded pretty much every scene with junk not in the books and not really true to the story. Examples:

• In Rivendell, both Galadrial and Sauruman show up. Neither is in the book.
• In Rivendell, the dwarves "escape", and Elrond isn't pleased with them. In the book, Elrond wishes them luck and escorts them away with music.
• Gandalf has a fellow wizard called Radagast show up who rides in a chariot pulled by rabbits. Not in the book. Radagast has a morgul-blade sword. Not in the book. Radagast saw a necromancer in the Greenwood (that has become Mirkwood). Not in the book.
• After leaving Rivendell, they are caught in a storm in the Misty Mountains -- a storm that takes only 3 paragraphs in the book. This is a 10 min scene in the movie where they cling for life on a rock ledge (not in the book) while rock giants fight (in the book, but it doesn't affect them, and its a 3 line throwaway).
• After the storm they hide in a cave, where the floor falls in and they drop on a huge slide to the goblin's dungeons below. Not in the book. In the book, the back of the cave opens and the goblins come in and capture them.
• At Weathertop, it's Gandalf's arrival that causes the trolls to turn to stone at sunrise. In the book, it's Bilbo's wit and skill that trick them into ignoring sunrise. Gandalf isn't even there. It's Bilbo's first demonstration of his true worth to the dwarves and Jackson wrecked it.

Jackson spent $180 MM mostly making silly battle sequences. Is it me, or:

• Do all folks who live underground have rickety swinging bridges that fall apart on a moments notice?
• Does no one understand the concept of "railings" on stairs or bridges or platforms on the precipices of 2,000' drops?
• Is there magical some way hobbits/dwarves/orcs/goblins survive 1,000' falls into rocky chasms that would kill everyone else?
• Do all underground caves have natural lighting systems?
• Does every battle scene look like it's designed to become a video game or ride at Disneyland?

I could go on; my list of complaints is nearly endless. In THE HOBBIT, Jackson covered 6 chapters and 107 pages of the 279 page book. Each of the LOTR volumes is over 400 pages, and took only one movie. I guess he had to pad in order to make his billions. THE HOBBIT has been out about 4 weeks and has already made $850 MM. No wonder they're making a trilogy.

I've read that Jackson is a stickler for Tolkein details, and has merged stuff into THE HOBBIT from books like THE SILMARILLION and the appendices to the LOTR. For instance, Saruman is there because he actually turned evil already and wants the ring.

Horse hockey. Let him go make a prequel to LOTR. He should have left the book -- an excellent book, a wonderful story -- alone.

Why we read newspapers

A while ago I posted a rant about newspapers and how I miss them. I saw this on YouTube today, and it explains it better.