My adventures so far this week
May. 21st, 2010 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kareinaTuesday’s good news was that my latest experiment was a success. I spent the day on the microprobe, where analysing the minerals which grew was much easier than for some of the previous experiment. This is because this time I actually managed to weld both capsules shut completely so that the water I put inside stayed inside, where it helped the new minerals to grow. This is such a relief, after the last two minerals were so poorly sealed that there were no analysable minerals at all.
Wednesday was a long day— I got up at 04:00 to get ready for the walk to the train station, and then took the trains to Siena. The first train to Frienze (Florence) is an express train, making only one stop (at Bologna) between Milano and Frienze. It is a 2 hour trip to Firenze, and there are electrical outlets available, so I settled happily in to doing uni work, processing the results from Tuesday’s microprobe analysis. I barely glanced up when the conductor came round, just fished out my ticket envelope and handed it to him. Much to my surprise he then stated that the ticket was no good! I told him that wasn’t possible, I only bought it yesterday, and he pointed out that the date on the ticket was for yesterday. I looked at the date on the ticket, and then at the date on the computer, and yes, indeed, the ticket was for yesterday. This confused me mightily, since I’d bought the ticket after work, and why would they sell me a ticket for a time that had already happened?
Eventually I remembered that it wasn’t “yesterday” that I’d purchased the ticket, but the day before—“yesterday” I was on the microprobe, so I’d gone to the train station on Monday. But it still didn’t make any sense that the ticket was for the wrong day, and I told him so. He told me that I am supposed to check when I purchase the ticket. I countered that I’d bought the ticket from a human, and I’d trusted him. He told me that I’d need to pay him €102 for the ride to Frienze. I told him that I’d already payed for a train ticket, he countered that my ticket was no good. I pointed out that the ticket I’d already paid for cost only €58 for all the way to Siena. The conversation continued in that vein for a while, me explaining that I couldn’t afford it, him stating that he couldn’t possibly help me, that only the ticket agents at the station would be able to do anything about the mistake. Me getting frustrated enough to cry. I even pointed out that the train was nearly empty, and it wasn’t like they needed the extra space.
Eventually he decided to cut me partial slack, and said that he’d ignore me for now, but after the stop at Bologna he’d come back and charge me €75 for the Blogona-Firenze leg of the journey. (He had given me the option of getting off at Blogona and negotiating with the ticket office there, but I pointed out that I was on my way to a meeting, and couldn’t spare the time to not arrive on the train I was supposed to be on.) Realizing that I wasn’t going to get a better deal, I accepted his offer, and returned to work. Sure enough, he came back after the next station and did charge me the agreed price (which is still way more than I’d paid in the first place, but what can you do? He did explain that they could take my passport details and write up a report if I didn’t have a way to pay (they take both debit and credit cards), but there are much higher fees associated with that option.
The second train was uneventful—it is a slower travelling regional train, and as such the tickets don’t have dates or times printed on them at all—you buy the ticket when you want, and then take the train at whatever day/time suits you—so long as you are going to and from the station marked, it is all good. However, these trains don’t have electricity, so instead of doing uni work I spent the 1.5 hours working on a nålbinding project instead.
Once I arrived in Siena I pulled out the maps I’d printed from GoogleMaps (one overview, and a bunch of close-ups showing individual street names for most streets) and started walking. The path GoogleMaps had suggested looked easy enough. However, this is the first time I’ve tried walking through a Medieval town with City Walls still intact. As a result I failed to correctly identify the archway I stopped to take a photo of as a street—from where I was standing it looked like an entrance to an enclosed space. Oops.
As a result of missing that turn I instead enjoyed a lovely walk around the outside of the city walls, admiring the lovely green valleys. Yes, it did seem like it was taking longer to do those couple of bends, but as there hadn’t (I thought) been a right turn, I knew I must have been on the correct road. It wasn’t till I reached the intersection at the nottom, which again had a gate on the city wall that I started to figure out I’d gone wrong—I could find the one street name I was looking for, but none of the others matched. I saw on my map that if I were where I was meant to be, I’d be at “Porta Ovile”, but the gate didn’t have a label on it. Eventually I found a person who spoke English, and was able to tell me where I was (fortunately, my overview map went this far over) and explained how to get from there to the city center, from where I could pick up my original planned path.
This is the path I actually wound up taking. 4.9 km, which the computer thinks takes ~ 1 hour, 15 minutes. In actuality I spent 1 hr, 13 minutes counting from leaving the train station to arriving at my destination, including time to stop to take photos, read maps, and ask for directions. Still a good bit longer than the suggested 3.1 km (~39 minutes, the computer thinks) suggested path, but I got to see more than I otherwise would have done, and got some extra exercise, too.
At the end of the day my colleague looked at the map and drew on her suggested path, which would include the pretty tourist spots in the center, but then take a more direct route to the station than Google Maps had suggested. I followed her advice, and found it to be a delightful walk. However, while Google says that path is 3.4 km and should have taken me ~42 minutes, I actually took 1 hour, 11 minutes to return to the station, since I kept stopping to take photos.
My meeting itself was very nice. I first met one of the researchers in Siena shortly after I started my PhD project in Tasmania. He had come to Hobart for an Antarctic conference, and while there he visited our geology department and explained that they’d noticed that the eclogites they have been studying from Antarctic seemed similar to the ones in Tasmania which had been described in a recent paper my advisor was a co-author for. Therefore he wondered if anyone at UTAS would be interested in doing a collaboration comparing the two different rocks in detail. As luck would have it, I had just returned from a field trip, where I had collected, amongst other rock, samples of the eclogite. So I said that I’d be delighted to join them in the project, and gave him some pieces of the samples to take home with him, and e-mailed him maps showing their location and photos of the field location.
When he returned to Siena from that trip he passed the samples along to a woman at their Antarctic Museum, and she did the actual work on that end of the project. Eventually we published a paper on the topic for which my contributions consisted of sample collection, writing the “geologic context” section, and editing all of it for English grammar (as the only native speaker on the team). But despite the many e-mails exchanged over the years, we hadn’t yet met in person, which is why I did this trip.
Why didn’t I go sooner? Well, when I first arrived in Italy I was out of cash, so couldn’t afford to go. Then I was travelling lots and didn’t seem to have time for extra trips. Eventually I realized that my travel schedule wasn’t going to slow down, and if I wanted to go meet her, I’d better just do it.
Some of the highlights of the visit, besides simply visiting with these people in person (and very much enjoying their company) include seeing their Antartic Museum, their TEM, and their machine for doing Raman spectroscopy.
The explained to me that the pretty building housing the Dipartimento di Scienze Della Terra was built ~200 years ago to house the school of Anatomy, which is why there is a tunnel connecting the building with the cemetery at the end of the block—to make it easy for the students to obtain their research materials.
After a delightful afternoon discussing rock and life in Italy I returned to the train station, where the ticket agent explained that it is not possible for him to do anything about the fact that my ticket was for the wrong day—perhaps the conductors on the train could help me, but he is bound by rules and the only way he could give me a new ticket would be to pay for it himself, which he was not willing to do. He said that if I’d turned in the other ticket within an hour of when the train was meant to depart I could have gotten a new ticket for it. However, since I didn’t know that I had an incorrect ticket until 24 hours after it was meant to depart, I wasn’t able to meet that requirement. He did, however, sell me a replacement ticket from Frienze to Milano for €52 when I told him that I still wanted to get back to Milano that evening.
My next misadventure started when I looked at the display which said that the 18:18 to Frienze would depart from platform #2. Accordingly, I went to platform #2 and sat down and ate the food I’d packed for my evening meal while waiting. There was quite a crowd of people waiting, and when the train arrived at the station some time after I’d finished eating, we all boarded. The train was one with a map above the door showing all of the stations along its route, which made me happy, as it is nice to be able to track the journey. I started doing nålbinding, and paused to note that the tracks must have some serious east-west component, since this is a north-bound train, yet the sun was shining in the right-hand window, but I would have expected it to be on the left-hand side that late in the afternoon. However, I didn’t make the connection, then, that this could be a clue I should pay attention to, and I stitched happily on. Then we stopped at a station, and I compared the station name with the map, to discover that I was not, in fact, on a train heading toward Firienze, but rather on one heading the opposite direction! (and so the sun was exactly where it was meant to be). So I hopped up, grabbed my bag, and walked to the door, where there happened to be a conductor, so I asked him if I was on the correct train, I needed to get to Firenze, and he said that I should cross under the tracks and wait at the other platform. I did so, and finally looked up the time, noting as I did that the 18:18 wasn’t yet due to arrive in Siena for another 10 minutes. Sure enough, short time later a train did arrive, I hopped on board, and it got me to Siena soon thereafter. However, I most certainly did walk to the door at that stop and ask the people boarding if this was the train to Firenze. It was, and the rest of my journey went smoothly from then on.
The good news is that since I had to purchase that new ticket, I made a point of asking the ticket guy for the next possible train. Therefore, instead of taking the 19:18 to Firenze followed by the 21:14 to Milano (with 16 minutes at the station during which to change trains), which was scheduled to arrive in Milano at 00:05, I wound up taking the 18:18 to Firenze and the 21:00 to Milano (which got me to Milano at 22:45, so I had time to walk home (30 minutes), do yoga, and get ready for bed before the train I thought I’d be taking arrived in town.
By taking an hour earlier train out of Siena, but only fifteen minutes earlier out of Milan I had enough time in Frienze to step outside to take a single photo of the church across the street from the station and purchase some cookies from the shop in the station forclovis_t, since, unlike most store-bought cookies, these actually contain only ingredients I’d use if I were baking (like real butter) (the web page is the sort where no matter what button is pushed you get only the home page in the address bar—if you want to see which ones I bought, click (in the English version of the page) on their specialities > Typical Pastries > > Rustici (for clovis_t, and Amarelli dell'Amiata (because I wanted to compare their almond cookie to the almond-based recipe I invented (Answer: similar texture, but sweeter, and more strongly almond flavour, since my version uses coconut, too, since clovis_t loves coconut but isn’t terribly fond of almonds. That said, I’ll happily eat these over the course of the next however many days it takes to finish them—not something I can say about most store-bought cookies.)
Thursday I slept in to 8:30 (hey, compared to Wednesday, that was sleeping in!) and didn’t do much beyond Uni work, searching Couchsurfing for places to stay in Norway next week, going to a grocery store, and catching up on reading e-mail, LJ, Facebook, and blogs (since I hadn’t been on line at all on Wednesday, that took a while).
Today I’ve accomplished more uni work, more couchsearches, and typing up this week’s adventures. I’ve got the weekend to prepare my next experiment and the first part of next week to finish updating all of my graphs to show the latest experiment and to upload the next one before flying to Oslo on Thursday morning. I then have the weekend there to do tourist stuff before flying to Trondheim for a meeting of the entire international research team. Part of the meeting will take place on a boat, which we will sail to Bergen, stoping along the way to look at rocks. We will overnight in Bergen before taking the train back to Oslo, and then fly back to Milan the following day (6 June). I’m bringingclovis_t since his birthday happens to fall during the trip, and it didn’t seem fair to leave him alone in Milan for 12 days, including his birthday, while I was off having fun in Norway.
Once I return from that trip I’ll need to download the next experiment right away, since I’ve got more microprobe time booked for that week, and the following week![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aelfgyfu arrives and we set out in a rental car for Drachenwald Coronation.
No, I am not certain it ever does slow down, really…
(I had thought to upload photos tonight, but it has gotten to be too late, so that part will have to wait.)
Wednesday was a long day— I got up at 04:00 to get ready for the walk to the train station, and then took the trains to Siena. The first train to Frienze (Florence) is an express train, making only one stop (at Bologna) between Milano and Frienze. It is a 2 hour trip to Firenze, and there are electrical outlets available, so I settled happily in to doing uni work, processing the results from Tuesday’s microprobe analysis. I barely glanced up when the conductor came round, just fished out my ticket envelope and handed it to him. Much to my surprise he then stated that the ticket was no good! I told him that wasn’t possible, I only bought it yesterday, and he pointed out that the date on the ticket was for yesterday. I looked at the date on the ticket, and then at the date on the computer, and yes, indeed, the ticket was for yesterday. This confused me mightily, since I’d bought the ticket after work, and why would they sell me a ticket for a time that had already happened?
Eventually I remembered that it wasn’t “yesterday” that I’d purchased the ticket, but the day before—“yesterday” I was on the microprobe, so I’d gone to the train station on Monday. But it still didn’t make any sense that the ticket was for the wrong day, and I told him so. He told me that I am supposed to check when I purchase the ticket. I countered that I’d bought the ticket from a human, and I’d trusted him. He told me that I’d need to pay him €102 for the ride to Frienze. I told him that I’d already payed for a train ticket, he countered that my ticket was no good. I pointed out that the ticket I’d already paid for cost only €58 for all the way to Siena. The conversation continued in that vein for a while, me explaining that I couldn’t afford it, him stating that he couldn’t possibly help me, that only the ticket agents at the station would be able to do anything about the mistake. Me getting frustrated enough to cry. I even pointed out that the train was nearly empty, and it wasn’t like they needed the extra space.
Eventually he decided to cut me partial slack, and said that he’d ignore me for now, but after the stop at Bologna he’d come back and charge me €75 for the Blogona-Firenze leg of the journey. (He had given me the option of getting off at Blogona and negotiating with the ticket office there, but I pointed out that I was on my way to a meeting, and couldn’t spare the time to not arrive on the train I was supposed to be on.) Realizing that I wasn’t going to get a better deal, I accepted his offer, and returned to work. Sure enough, he came back after the next station and did charge me the agreed price (which is still way more than I’d paid in the first place, but what can you do? He did explain that they could take my passport details and write up a report if I didn’t have a way to pay (they take both debit and credit cards), but there are much higher fees associated with that option.
The second train was uneventful—it is a slower travelling regional train, and as such the tickets don’t have dates or times printed on them at all—you buy the ticket when you want, and then take the train at whatever day/time suits you—so long as you are going to and from the station marked, it is all good. However, these trains don’t have electricity, so instead of doing uni work I spent the 1.5 hours working on a nålbinding project instead.
Once I arrived in Siena I pulled out the maps I’d printed from GoogleMaps (one overview, and a bunch of close-ups showing individual street names for most streets) and started walking. The path GoogleMaps had suggested looked easy enough. However, this is the first time I’ve tried walking through a Medieval town with City Walls still intact. As a result I failed to correctly identify the archway I stopped to take a photo of as a street—from where I was standing it looked like an entrance to an enclosed space. Oops.
As a result of missing that turn I instead enjoyed a lovely walk around the outside of the city walls, admiring the lovely green valleys. Yes, it did seem like it was taking longer to do those couple of bends, but as there hadn’t (I thought) been a right turn, I knew I must have been on the correct road. It wasn’t till I reached the intersection at the nottom, which again had a gate on the city wall that I started to figure out I’d gone wrong—I could find the one street name I was looking for, but none of the others matched. I saw on my map that if I were where I was meant to be, I’d be at “Porta Ovile”, but the gate didn’t have a label on it. Eventually I found a person who spoke English, and was able to tell me where I was (fortunately, my overview map went this far over) and explained how to get from there to the city center, from where I could pick up my original planned path.
This is the path I actually wound up taking. 4.9 km, which the computer thinks takes ~ 1 hour, 15 minutes. In actuality I spent 1 hr, 13 minutes counting from leaving the train station to arriving at my destination, including time to stop to take photos, read maps, and ask for directions. Still a good bit longer than the suggested 3.1 km (~39 minutes, the computer thinks) suggested path, but I got to see more than I otherwise would have done, and got some extra exercise, too.
At the end of the day my colleague looked at the map and drew on her suggested path, which would include the pretty tourist spots in the center, but then take a more direct route to the station than Google Maps had suggested. I followed her advice, and found it to be a delightful walk. However, while Google says that path is 3.4 km and should have taken me ~42 minutes, I actually took 1 hour, 11 minutes to return to the station, since I kept stopping to take photos.
My meeting itself was very nice. I first met one of the researchers in Siena shortly after I started my PhD project in Tasmania. He had come to Hobart for an Antarctic conference, and while there he visited our geology department and explained that they’d noticed that the eclogites they have been studying from Antarctic seemed similar to the ones in Tasmania which had been described in a recent paper my advisor was a co-author for. Therefore he wondered if anyone at UTAS would be interested in doing a collaboration comparing the two different rocks in detail. As luck would have it, I had just returned from a field trip, where I had collected, amongst other rock, samples of the eclogite. So I said that I’d be delighted to join them in the project, and gave him some pieces of the samples to take home with him, and e-mailed him maps showing their location and photos of the field location.
When he returned to Siena from that trip he passed the samples along to a woman at their Antarctic Museum, and she did the actual work on that end of the project. Eventually we published a paper on the topic for which my contributions consisted of sample collection, writing the “geologic context” section, and editing all of it for English grammar (as the only native speaker on the team). But despite the many e-mails exchanged over the years, we hadn’t yet met in person, which is why I did this trip.
Why didn’t I go sooner? Well, when I first arrived in Italy I was out of cash, so couldn’t afford to go. Then I was travelling lots and didn’t seem to have time for extra trips. Eventually I realized that my travel schedule wasn’t going to slow down, and if I wanted to go meet her, I’d better just do it.
Some of the highlights of the visit, besides simply visiting with these people in person (and very much enjoying their company) include seeing their Antartic Museum, their TEM, and their machine for doing Raman spectroscopy.
The explained to me that the pretty building housing the Dipartimento di Scienze Della Terra was built ~200 years ago to house the school of Anatomy, which is why there is a tunnel connecting the building with the cemetery at the end of the block—to make it easy for the students to obtain their research materials.
After a delightful afternoon discussing rock and life in Italy I returned to the train station, where the ticket agent explained that it is not possible for him to do anything about the fact that my ticket was for the wrong day—perhaps the conductors on the train could help me, but he is bound by rules and the only way he could give me a new ticket would be to pay for it himself, which he was not willing to do. He said that if I’d turned in the other ticket within an hour of when the train was meant to depart I could have gotten a new ticket for it. However, since I didn’t know that I had an incorrect ticket until 24 hours after it was meant to depart, I wasn’t able to meet that requirement. He did, however, sell me a replacement ticket from Frienze to Milano for €52 when I told him that I still wanted to get back to Milano that evening.
My next misadventure started when I looked at the display which said that the 18:18 to Frienze would depart from platform #2. Accordingly, I went to platform #2 and sat down and ate the food I’d packed for my evening meal while waiting. There was quite a crowd of people waiting, and when the train arrived at the station some time after I’d finished eating, we all boarded. The train was one with a map above the door showing all of the stations along its route, which made me happy, as it is nice to be able to track the journey. I started doing nålbinding, and paused to note that the tracks must have some serious east-west component, since this is a north-bound train, yet the sun was shining in the right-hand window, but I would have expected it to be on the left-hand side that late in the afternoon. However, I didn’t make the connection, then, that this could be a clue I should pay attention to, and I stitched happily on. Then we stopped at a station, and I compared the station name with the map, to discover that I was not, in fact, on a train heading toward Firienze, but rather on one heading the opposite direction! (and so the sun was exactly where it was meant to be). So I hopped up, grabbed my bag, and walked to the door, where there happened to be a conductor, so I asked him if I was on the correct train, I needed to get to Firenze, and he said that I should cross under the tracks and wait at the other platform. I did so, and finally looked up the time, noting as I did that the 18:18 wasn’t yet due to arrive in Siena for another 10 minutes. Sure enough, short time later a train did arrive, I hopped on board, and it got me to Siena soon thereafter. However, I most certainly did walk to the door at that stop and ask the people boarding if this was the train to Firenze. It was, and the rest of my journey went smoothly from then on.
The good news is that since I had to purchase that new ticket, I made a point of asking the ticket guy for the next possible train. Therefore, instead of taking the 19:18 to Firenze followed by the 21:14 to Milano (with 16 minutes at the station during which to change trains), which was scheduled to arrive in Milano at 00:05, I wound up taking the 18:18 to Firenze and the 21:00 to Milano (which got me to Milano at 22:45, so I had time to walk home (30 minutes), do yoga, and get ready for bed before the train I thought I’d be taking arrived in town.
By taking an hour earlier train out of Siena, but only fifteen minutes earlier out of Milan I had enough time in Frienze to step outside to take a single photo of the church across the street from the station and purchase some cookies from the shop in the station for
clovis_t, since, unlike most store-bought cookies, these actually contain only ingredients I’d use if I were baking (like real butter) (the web page is the sort where no matter what button is pushed you get only the home page in the address bar—if you want to see which ones I bought, click (in the English version of the page) on their specialities > Typical Pastries > > Rustici (for clovis_t, and Amarelli dell'Amiata (because I wanted to compare their almond cookie to the almond-based recipe I invented (Answer: similar texture, but sweeter, and more strongly almond flavour, since my version uses coconut, too, since clovis_t loves coconut but isn’t terribly fond of almonds. That said, I’ll happily eat these over the course of the next however many days it takes to finish them—not something I can say about most store-bought cookies.)Thursday I slept in to 8:30 (hey, compared to Wednesday, that was sleeping in!) and didn’t do much beyond Uni work, searching Couchsurfing for places to stay in Norway next week, going to a grocery store, and catching up on reading e-mail, LJ, Facebook, and blogs (since I hadn’t been on line at all on Wednesday, that took a while).
Today I’ve accomplished more uni work, more couchsearches, and typing up this week’s adventures. I’ve got the weekend to prepare my next experiment and the first part of next week to finish updating all of my graphs to show the latest experiment and to upload the next one before flying to Oslo on Thursday morning. I then have the weekend there to do tourist stuff before flying to Trondheim for a meeting of the entire international research team. Part of the meeting will take place on a boat, which we will sail to Bergen, stoping along the way to look at rocks. We will overnight in Bergen before taking the train back to Oslo, and then fly back to Milan the following day (6 June). I’m bringing
clovis_t since his birthday happens to fall during the trip, and it didn’t seem fair to leave him alone in Milan for 12 days, including his birthday, while I was off having fun in Norway. Once I return from that trip I’ll need to download the next experiment right away, since I’ve got more microprobe time booked for that week, and the following week
aelfgyfu arrives and we set out in a rental car for Drachenwald Coronation. No, I am not certain it ever does slow down, really…
(I had thought to upload photos tonight, but it has gotten to be too late, so that part will have to wait.)
