Two days in Venice
Mar. 5th, 2016 12:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kareinaThe official purpose of my trip, for which I received a "Micro Travel Grant" from the Marie Curie Alumni Association, is to attend the MCAA Annual Conference and General Assembly, held this year at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Those micro travel grants provide up to €400 for MCAA members to attend such conferences.
I hesitated before applying for the grant, since the cost of the flights to get here and home again from Luleå is just about €400, more or less, depending on the day one does the currency exchange calculations. This means that I have to pay out of my own pocket all other expenses related to the trip. However, since the meeting is only about a three hour drive from the home of J., a friend of mine in the Alps, and I would very much like to see her, and her Archeoparc, and the beautiful valley in which her park is located, I decided to go ahead and apply--if they said yes, I would go to the meeting and then take a few more days for a side trip to visit J.
Therefore, since my flights are being reimbursed by the MCAA, I am being a good little member and attending the meetings. This means, of course, that I am making good progress on my sewing project. That beautiful blue herringbone wool twill tunic I am re-doing and adding the lovely blue-white laurel trim my seinor apprentice gave me for my birthday is nearly done. Now it needs only the second pass of stitching of trim around the hem and a bit of ironing.
Yesterday was a bit of a food challenge for me--I didn't have much remaining of the food I had brought with me, but I knew that they would provide both lunch and coffee break, so I was hopeful that what I had would be enough. Sadly, the snack that accompanied the coffee break was only store-bought cookies, which, of course, I am not interested in eating, so I ate the last of my fruit, and by the time we broke for lunch at 13:00 I was starving (no surprise there--meals in Italy are always served hours later than my body wants to eat). Sadly, the people who decided on the lunch menu have a very different opinion from me on what food is tasty. Luckily, it was served as a "help yourself to what you want, and eat it standing and chatting with others". This means I could select the five items that I recognised as food: fruit salad (which was really quite nice), fresh tomato, fresh motzerlla cheese (this is Italy, after all), walnuts, and bread rolls (these were not particularly good, but I ate several anyway, since I was hungry). I ignored the rice/vegetable dish, since it contained olives, I ignored all three sandwich options as the had meat. I ignored the meatballs and the thin sliced meat wrapped around hard bread sticks, etc.
I did, dutifully, chat with a few people during lunch, but the loud hum of conversation was soon overwhelming, and the line for the food table was long. So instead of going through the line again and getting more food, since I still felt hungry, I decided to flee back to the peace and quiet of my room, where I curled up with a book and a bag of store-bought popcorn, to which I added some yummy nutritional yeast.
When I had recovered enough to face leaving the room again, I went out to the grocery store around the corner and picked up some fruit, some carrots, salad greens, sprouts, ricotta, and a pack of three flat bread/wrap shells. Then I divided the greens, sprouts, and ricotta evenly over the three wraps, ate one straight away, and wrapped the other two in plastic and set them between the inner and outer windows to keep cool till today.
By the time I ate that wrap, and an entire package of fresh strawberries, I was feeling really full, and had eaten way more than usual for the day. This is one reason I don't like to push eating past when I first feel hungry. If I eat a little every hour or two during the day, the hunger goes away, and I eat a reasonable amount for the day. But if I don't get to eat when I start feeling hungry, when I finally get some food I am likely to eat way tto much before I start to feeling satisfied.
I felt vaugly guilty for blowing off the afternoon sessions, but none of them sounded interesting. So instead, after over-eating, I went out for a walk. I had considered joining the "walking tour" of Venice that the conference had organised, but then realised that such tours tend to be more standing and listening than walking, and thus I would be better off exploring on my own.
So I poked around and looked at interesting architecture and pretty window displays for an hour, and ate a gelatto, and then returned to the room, where I had an hour or so till the meeting of our "working group". That meeting actually wound up later than expected, since some of the members had joined that walking tour, which wound up taking three full hours! I am glad I didn't join them--they were looking pretty worn out afterwards.
This morning I spent the first session sewing, but decided to update this during the second. After lunch is the voting for the new board for MCAA, and then I will go pick up the rental car and head to the Alps.
I hesitated before applying for the grant, since the cost of the flights to get here and home again from Luleå is just about €400, more or less, depending on the day one does the currency exchange calculations. This means that I have to pay out of my own pocket all other expenses related to the trip. However, since the meeting is only about a three hour drive from the home of J., a friend of mine in the Alps, and I would very much like to see her, and her Archeoparc, and the beautiful valley in which her park is located, I decided to go ahead and apply--if they said yes, I would go to the meeting and then take a few more days for a side trip to visit J.
Therefore, since my flights are being reimbursed by the MCAA, I am being a good little member and attending the meetings. This means, of course, that I am making good progress on my sewing project. That beautiful blue herringbone wool twill tunic I am re-doing and adding the lovely blue-white laurel trim my seinor apprentice gave me for my birthday is nearly done. Now it needs only the second pass of stitching of trim around the hem and a bit of ironing.
Yesterday was a bit of a food challenge for me--I didn't have much remaining of the food I had brought with me, but I knew that they would provide both lunch and coffee break, so I was hopeful that what I had would be enough. Sadly, the snack that accompanied the coffee break was only store-bought cookies, which, of course, I am not interested in eating, so I ate the last of my fruit, and by the time we broke for lunch at 13:00 I was starving (no surprise there--meals in Italy are always served hours later than my body wants to eat). Sadly, the people who decided on the lunch menu have a very different opinion from me on what food is tasty. Luckily, it was served as a "help yourself to what you want, and eat it standing and chatting with others". This means I could select the five items that I recognised as food: fruit salad (which was really quite nice), fresh tomato, fresh motzerlla cheese (this is Italy, after all), walnuts, and bread rolls (these were not particularly good, but I ate several anyway, since I was hungry). I ignored the rice/vegetable dish, since it contained olives, I ignored all three sandwich options as the had meat. I ignored the meatballs and the thin sliced meat wrapped around hard bread sticks, etc.
I did, dutifully, chat with a few people during lunch, but the loud hum of conversation was soon overwhelming, and the line for the food table was long. So instead of going through the line again and getting more food, since I still felt hungry, I decided to flee back to the peace and quiet of my room, where I curled up with a book and a bag of store-bought popcorn, to which I added some yummy nutritional yeast.
When I had recovered enough to face leaving the room again, I went out to the grocery store around the corner and picked up some fruit, some carrots, salad greens, sprouts, ricotta, and a pack of three flat bread/wrap shells. Then I divided the greens, sprouts, and ricotta evenly over the three wraps, ate one straight away, and wrapped the other two in plastic and set them between the inner and outer windows to keep cool till today.
By the time I ate that wrap, and an entire package of fresh strawberries, I was feeling really full, and had eaten way more than usual for the day. This is one reason I don't like to push eating past when I first feel hungry. If I eat a little every hour or two during the day, the hunger goes away, and I eat a reasonable amount for the day. But if I don't get to eat when I start feeling hungry, when I finally get some food I am likely to eat way tto much before I start to feeling satisfied.
I felt vaugly guilty for blowing off the afternoon sessions, but none of them sounded interesting. So instead, after over-eating, I went out for a walk. I had considered joining the "walking tour" of Venice that the conference had organised, but then realised that such tours tend to be more standing and listening than walking, and thus I would be better off exploring on my own.
So I poked around and looked at interesting architecture and pretty window displays for an hour, and ate a gelatto, and then returned to the room, where I had an hour or so till the meeting of our "working group". That meeting actually wound up later than expected, since some of the members had joined that walking tour, which wound up taking three full hours! I am glad I didn't join them--they were looking pretty worn out afterwards.
This morning I spent the first session sewing, but decided to update this during the second. After lunch is the voting for the new board for MCAA, and then I will go pick up the rental car and head to the Alps.