Milan, Italy

So a couple of weeks back, Lydia and I decided to go to Milan, Italy. Not exactly because we had a burning desire to see the sights of that city in particular (in fact, we didn't really no exactly what Milan had to offer), but more so that we found some really cheap train tickets (around $100 CAD return) to get there, and hey, it was Milan, Italy, so why not!?!?! Were we ever glad that we decided to do this because we ended up having an absolutely AMAZING time there!

Both Lydia and I are on a very tight budget here, so even with a cheap ticket over to Italy, it wouldn't have been possible for us having to afford to pay for an expensive hotel, so instead we just decided to stay there for FREE! For more information about how we accomplished this....see my yet to be published entry about Couch Surfing (or just visit that link).

Anyhew.....one of the best ways to get a cheap ticket around Europe is to ride a night train. It is also two-fold on the cheapness scale, since not only are you traveling to around Europe for a cheap price, but you are also paying for your first night's lodging! The downside to night train travel is the fact that you're crammed in a tiny booth with a bunch of other people for like 12 hours. Luckily, on our way over, Lydia and I had our very own room (just by chance). Not only that, but we came prepared with snacks, and most importantly 'drinks'. What better way to depict this situation than two very unflattering photos!



Here I am with my tiny mouse shaped, ketchup flavored potato chip, feeling very tired in the middle of the night as the train passes through the Swiss Alps.




Here's Lydia getting ready for sleep.




The drinks knocked us out long enough to get us to Italy in a relatively short time....much shorter than the actual 12 hours! We woke up just as the sun was coming up, and the train was entering Milan.





The first thing we noticed about Milano (that's Italian for Milan :), was that there was a lot of interesting artwork everywhere. Above is a giant metal/paper mache woman walking her rock dog outside of the train station. Also outside of the train station was this guy:




An ode' to the hangover.



It took the Blair witch 6 months to make this basketball!




When we first arrived in Milan, we had a few hours to kill before meeting up with our couch surfing host, so we decided to walk around a bit. After taking in some of the more strange works of art, we realized that we were in the vicinity of one of the greatest works of art in history, Leonardo da Vinci's 'The Last Supper', which is stored inside a cathedral in Milan (see picture above). Wanting to see it, and remembering that it often has a very large waiting time, we decided to make it our first Milanese destination, and what a great decision that was. When we first arrived at the ticket office, we were greeted with a woman in the ticket booth shouting "There will be no tickets to view the Last Supper for 3 weeks.... It is sold out!" Needless to say, this did not sound promising for us, but we decided to wait to talk to the ticketing lady anyways. Once we got to her, she told us that tickets to view the fresco were sold out until mid to late December (this being the 3rd of November); however, (and this is the good part), a couple had just that moment decided to cancel their reservation, so there would be an opening in the next half an hour, and she wanted to know if this would be OK for us! In hindsight, we now know just how lucky we were, considering it is near impossible to see 'The Last Supper' without booking months in advance normally, but we just strolled in there and saw it in a matter of minutes! People often say that Lydia and I have a horseshoe stuck up (you know where), and I'm beginning to think that they are right!

So, without further adieu............... BEHOLD!!!!





'The Last Supper'.......well, actually, this isn't the actual 'The Last Supper', since they prohibited us from taking a picture of it, but this is a 'The Last Supper' that is inside 'The Last Supper' Cathedral's gift shop. I assure you that the actual fresco is much more fascinating. I was actually surprised by the sheer magnitude of the fresco. It took up an entire wall! An interesting tidbit of information that I learned while I was there, is that if you look at the painting, you'll see an out of place white arc in front of the table, blocking Jesus' feet. This is actually the door to the next room of the Cathedral, and originally, when da Vinci painted this fresco, the door was not in the way, but some years later, some guy got the bright idea to extend this door (which was already quite large - one could easily already get his king size bed through), by cutting into 'The Last Supper'! On the all time idiots list, this guy has to rank up there. One tip to go with booking well ahead, for anyone who plans to view 'The Last Supper' themselves, is not to get the audio recoding that you can rent whilst viewing the fresco. You only get about 10 minutes of viewing time in the room, and the audio recording goes on for like 12 minutes, meaning your still trying to pay attention to the recording when they kick you out, and you won't even get a chance to freely view the painting.

You have to hand it to Leonardo though, this is truly a masterpiece, and the mystery (ala Dan Brown) that surrounds it only adds to its appeal.




Another amazing site in Milan is the Duomo. Which is one of the 2nd largest Gothic Cathedral in the world (next to the Cathedral of Seville in Spain). A really magnificent building, which is partly spoiled by these billboards (due to construction), but apparently, a short time ago, the entire building was covered in these billboards, so I guess I can't complain.




A beautiful pigeon covered statue in the Duomo square.




The amount of detail that went into this building is absolutely amazing! The building started construction in the 14th century, and continued on well into the 19th century, and considering the billboards, blocking off the renovation zones, it is still being constructed today!




I have many pictures of the inside of the cathedral, but none of them gave it justice to how immensely grand it was inside, so I've decided to post an image of one of the many intricate stained glass works instead. To be honest, the inside of the cathedral was quite spooky, since it was so incredibly dark inside, they had thousands of statues that looked like they were straight out of Bram Stoker's Dracula, there was what seemed to be 'The Phantom' piping away horror music on the largest organ I had ever seen, and there was a dead guy in the middle of the church encased in glass! Not my idea of a happy place of warship, if you ask me, but very interesting to see none the less.





More of the Duomo.




Probably the main thing that Milan is known for is fashion. In fact, it is the fashion capitol of Italy. Throughout the city you will see building after building of designers, hawking clothes as expensive as cars and houses. I thought about getting a sock there, but then I decided I wanted to go back for the Jan school term, so I decided against it.




The Duomo at night! Look to the top to see the golden statue of Madunina (actually made of bronze).



While in Milan, we decided to take in a football match.... and why not, not only are the Italians the current world champions, but Italian fans are known to be some of the craziest fans in the world! Apparently, it's a common spectacle to see smoke bombs and other objects thrown on to the field during matches (i.e. one time a Vespa was thrown on the field)! The match we got to see was AC Milan vs Torino.



The stadium was absolutely massive, and the roar of the crowd was intense! Have a look at this video, which shows the stadium (unfortunately, there is no sound).




Unfortunately, the game we saw kind of sucked (at least game wise), and it ended up, in traditional soccer fashion, as a 0-0 tie. Probably the most exciting thing that happened during the game was the sprints that the medical staff had to make onto the field every time a player performed a swan dive and faked an injury (seen above). I'm still very glad that we went to the game though. The crowed was great (although no smoke bombs or riots), and it was still an AC Milan game (minus Renaldo, who was injured at the time)!




During our last day in Italy, Lydia and I took a recommendation from the Director of empirica, and did a day trip to Como Lago, an amazingly beautiful mountain encased, village on a lake, about 1 hour outside of Milan by train.



When we arrived there, we really didn't know too much about the place, other than the fact that it was supposed to be a beautiful town, so we just decided to explore. The first thing that we came to was this gondola up to the first peak of one of the mountains overlooking the lake. It looked like a larf, so we decided to hop on.



The view from this first peak was very pretty, but we noticed that at the furthest peak of the mountain, there was a tower, and from that tower (we thought) the view would be better.




So we started walking up....




and up.....




Until a while later we reached the tower. So then....



We went up some more.



We then got to one of the most amazingly beautiful vantage points I had ever seen! This tower gave us a 360 degree view of the absolutely stunning village on the lake. Even though these pictures don't give the view justice, have a look:















Tyrone, Tyrone, where art thou Tyrone?



Here is a depiction of our long journey to the top of the mountain. Make sure you look at this picture, I worked long and hard at this!




Here is one of the pretty churches along the way on the hike down.




Bella!



After our amazing hike, we decided to rest up with a nice boat ride on the Lake.



Along the way, we got the chance to take in some amazing Italian villas and other sights. Including this little charmer below. Does anyone recognize this villa from a certain heist movie....



This is George Clooney's villa, which was used in Ocean's 12 (if you remember, the French thief lived here)! Apparently, George gives out stays at his villa to famous couples as their wedding presents...... stick that in your fact bag!



Another beautiful villa on the Lake.



After the boat ride on the Lake, Lydia and I continued to float back home to Bonn on a cloud of our own joy. Our Milan experience was a great one, and we owe a lot of this experience to this guy:



Spike de Saint Victor. He was our host from couch surfing, and he was one of the coolest, most hospitable people I have ever met. So much so, that I'm going to create another blog entry just talking about how cool he was, and our experience with him in Milan....and, oh yes, couchsurfing.com



P.S. When I said that Lydia floated home on a cloud of our own joy, it was only a figure of speech. We actually took another 12 hour Deutsch Bahn night train home, accept this time, we were in a crowded room with 3 other people. If this wasn't bad enough, we had the spawn of Satan as our Coach attendant, who liked to yell at us in German for no apparent reason. It started when we first got on the train, and in the room that Lydia and I were staying in, there was a backpack on one of the beds, left by one of the other attendants in the room (who had left to go visit with one of his friends in a different room). The Coach attendant then walked over to me and started completely blowing up in my face, shouting away in German, pointing at the bag and shaking his head. I told him in German that it wasn't my bag, and that I don't speak German, but he decided to yell at me for another 5 minutes or so (in German). I then met a few other travelers who told me that they too had run ins with this Coach attendant, and he shouted at them for no reason as well. If this isn't bad enough, when the train was pulling into Bonn, the train stopped about 200 meters outside of the main train station. Lydia and myself, along with about 5 other people were waiting by the train exit with our bags, when all of a sudden this train attendant came barging into the coach crazily shouting away in German again. He stood there, shouting at everyone for about 1 minute, then stormed out to a different train car. Everyone then looked at each other with a stainge look, wondering, what the hell was the matter with him. Then all of a sudden, the train started going again.....and going....and going....and went right on through the Bonn train station and didn't stop again for another half an hour! It appears that shouting obscenities in German means, "Excuse me kind passengers, please follow me to the train exit." This sucked because it made me late for work, which I had to go straight to after the 12 hour train ride. I didn't manage to get a picture of the train attendant, but I found a picture with uncanny likeness to him, so here is a depiction of our coming home train experience:

Work update - November 9, 2007

Disclaimer: this post contains information that may only be interesting to people in the field of health informatics!

Wow, my first post talking about current events....it's almost like I'm caught up in my blog (but in reality, I still am behind at least 3 posts).

It's just before the weekend, and I'm kindof in the eye of the storm at work right now, so I thought that I'd give a little update for my Hinf cohort, and for Dave, who told me that I need more work information in here for me to use this as my co-op report.

Over the past few weeks, I have been mainly working on 4 different tasks here at empirica. My main task has been working on a report for the European Commission regarding the current and future status of e-Health standards and standard development organizations (SDOs). For the most part, as explained earlier, this has involved a lot of research, and a lot of getting up to speed on the myriad of different e-Health standards that are out there in the world. Probably the main challenge that I faced, whilst working on this task, was the fact that there is a real lack of critical information about the standards and their development organizations available. In fact, for the most part, the only information that you can find on a standard, is the information that its development organization puts out. This makes assessment incredibly challenging, considering the obvious bias that a SDO would have regarding the information that they release about their own standard.

To give us a more critical view of the standards and SDOs, empirica chose to conduct an online survey of e-Health experts around the world, to get their opinion on how the current and future e-Health standards game is actually played out - my second job. This was an interesting task to undertake in that the survey tool that I worked with, Limesurvey, has a lot of features, and with a lot of features comes a lot of understanding. Also, the fact that this survey was going to be released to top experts and industry leaders around the world (i.e. CIOs, ministries of health, etc) with empirica's name on it, the survey was going to have to be flawless. It was my responsibility to actually implement the survey with the Limesurvey tool, which was set up on a local empirica server. It took a while to get use to, especially compared with some of the more user friendly, plug and play type surveys like surveymonkey, but after a while, even I was impressed with the types of things Limesurvey was capable of. With the tool, you can use html and css programming to create templates for the aesthetic design of the survey, then with those templates, you can add in numerous different types of questions (i.e. drop boxes, tick boxes, text boxes.....pretty much any type of box the heart desires....;) Another cool feature is that you can use regular expressions to perform validity checks on the text boxes. It had been a while since I had written any regular expressions, so that was another thing that took me a while, but once I got the hang of it, it was quite cool! To run a survey, you can either open it up to the public, or create a user 'token' table, which assigns one token to every user that you want to use the survey, and those users can only use their token one time, creating a secure, closed access survey. Once a survey is up and running, you can monitor the progress on the survey, run queries for stats on the answers that are coming back, send automated invitations and reminders for people to fill out the survey, and much much more. The main flaw in Limesurvey, thus far, is the fact that a user needs to have cookies enabled in their web browser when they are filling out the survey, and since a lot of businesses regulate whether or not their employees can have cookies excepted on their work computers, a lot of people are left not being able to complete the survey due to these policy reasons. The survey is currently out and we are waiting for our responses to come back before we start running our analysis of the results.

The third, and probably the most interesting task that I am working on, is the conduction of expert telephone interviews, again to gain more critical insight on the standardization situation. Again, this is polling experts, but instead of using the online survey, we are going more in depth, by using a semi-structured interview to gather the information. I helped create the questions for the interviews, and I also get to be one of the participants during the interview, which is quite interesting hearing the opinions of the world leaders in my field. It's also quite interesting to get the European prospective on things during these interviews. During the first interview I was involved in, I was made aware of the idea that e-Health standardization (or lack thereof) may be more of a market issue, rather than a complexity issue, and to get even more into detail, it may be an issue of battling for market dominance between North America (i.e. HL7) and Europe (i.e. CEN). This is something that I never really thought of before, nor is it something that I really think is the actual case (entirely), but it's an interesting opinion to take, and could be debated at length, but I'll leave it at that.

The last task that I was working on isn't quite interesting enough to mention at length (like all jobs, not everything can be interesting), but it basically involves editing.

Since I only really have about a month left here, I guess I still have my work cut out for me. Next week, I'm going to be giving a presentation to the staff at empirica regarding the use of the Limesurvey tool, which I had been working with over the past month or so. With that, I will be creating a guide of use for whoever takes my place on this survey role. I have also been told that I will be given the opportunity to work on a couple of other different projects here. Probably what I am most excited about is that I will (hopefully) get the chance to sit in on a meeting where international policy decisions are going to be made (it was one of my co-op work term requests). I haven't been informed of when or where this meeting will be taking place yet, but I will surely keep you posted.

Last but not least, Dave wanted me to write a quick blurb about who empirica is, and what empirica does, so here it is:

empirica has been in operation for (as far as I know) around 25 years or so. It is a consulting firm for projects relating to concept development, the application and development of new information and communication technology, and the information society. The bulk of project work, and project funding is granted by the European Commission. There are currently 38 permanent employees listed on the empirica web site; however, there are also quite a few student interns at the company as well. empirica projects are far reaching, giving them partners in the following countries:

(taken from empirica.biz)



Working at empirica is very interesting and very rewarding. I'm gaining a lot of knowledge about my field that I would not have been able to get anywhere else.

That's it for the work posts for now.

To be continued.......

New posts to come....

Just a bit of a heads up on some posts that I will be trying to write soon.....

Lydia and I have done a lot of little side trips around the Bonn area that will need to be mentioned, including the beautiful area of Konigswinter.

I've had quite a few requests for a post about our current apartment, so I will get on that.

I need to give you guys an update on my working activities.

Most importantly though, this past weekend, Lydia and I decided to go to Milan Italy, on a whim, and we had an absolutely amazing time, so we have to tell you all about that.

I've been working all day though, and before that, I had a 12 hour train ride from Milan, so I'm a wee bit tired now, meaning, I'll leave those posts for some other days.

Berlin

Sorry about the delay of this post, as you can expect, life gets a little busy traveling through Europe whilst trying to keep up with work term activities.

A few weeks back, Lydia and I made a trip to Berlin, the new/old capitol of Germany (regaining the capitol status from Bonn in 1990). Berlin was an absolutely amazing city that we would have loved to spend weeks in; however, duty called at work, so we were only able to stay for the weekend.

Getting to Berlin seemed to be too good to be true on the Deutsch Bahn (the German rail system), because it was. We had direct tickets from Bonn to Berlin; however, our train ended up breaking down half way across Germany, so we didn’t arrive in Berlin until 10:00ish at night, which wasn’t really that good considering we still needed to find a place to stay that night.

We managed to find a rather cheap hostel (Backpackers Hostel Mitte), for the weekend, although I wouldn’t really recommend it, since it was quite dirty, but mostly because there’s a far better way to budget travel that I didn’t find until after Berlin, called “couch surfing” (but I think I’m going to write an entire blog post about that soon, so I won’t go too much into it). The hostel did provide us with two great opportunities though, the first was the cheap and plentiful breakfast, and the second was a free (yes, I said FREE) walking tour of Berlin. It wasn’t actually the hostel that offered the tour; however, they did provide us with the information for it, and the tour guide actually stopped at the hostel to pick anyone up who was interested, which was quite nice. The tour company actually does tours in a few different places, and it was really quite ‘infotaining’, so I would strongly suggest checking it out here: New Berlin tours, and if you don’t believe that we were actually there, you can find our pictures on their web site, although you have to play a fun game of ‘Where’s Tyrone and Lydia????’

The guided tour was a great start to Berlin, because it gave us a good overview (4 hours or so) of the sights, and a good layout of the city. Although the tour is free, they do suggest tips for the guides at the end of the tour, but it’s tip what you want, if you want, and after the great experience we had, it would be hard to see how anyone couldn’t tip these guides making no salary for their full time job (although there were certainly a few people who didn’t tip anyway).

(*Note - For this picture section I got Lydia to help me with the picture commentary, since I've been so busy at work, and I've been falling behind on my posts)

We forgot our camera in our hostel on our first day in Berlin, so we missed out on photos of the tour and decided to come back later that night. Luckily for us, Berlin looked even more enchanting at night. Here you see the Brandenburg Gate with Viktoria, the goddess of victory, perched atop it, driving the Quadriga. This statue was once stolen by the French after defeating Germany in a war in the early 1800's... Yet, a few years later, Germany won the next war and took the statue back to further prove their victory over the French... it has been said that the goddess now watches over the French embassy, which is around 50 metres to the right of this photo.

Here is Berlin's most famous hotel - the Avalon. It has very high priced and swanky hotel rooms... but the best part about it is that out of one of those window's, Michael Jackson made history by dangling one of his children, blanket clad, over a swarm of fans below.

Late on the Saturday night, we decided to take a free tour of the Reichstag - German's original parliament building that was once burned down (can you guess when... how about by whom?) and restored in the 1990's. It was open quite late - until 1:00 am. This dome is new - it was constructed so that the people of Germany could look down on the Bundestag, or German parliament.

The view down on the seats below.

The next day, we set out on adventures again. Only, we couldn't walk anywhere until the red traffic light stopped offering us hugs...

And the green "walking man" took off reading his newspaper. The walking man is very famous in Berlin - there are entire shops dedicated to him. He was designed back in the days of East and West Berlin for the East Berlinners in order to cheer them up... whatever works, I guess. After reunification, West Berlin fought to get rid of this happy little guy, but the East won that battle and kept their walking men in tact.

After crossing the street and walking some more, we made our way to Museum Island, which was named after this musem... the Old Museum. Behind it is the New Museum. They created a better naming system for other museums after they realised their little problem.

Littered across the front lawn of the museum were these ginormous, sorry "pleasantly plump", statues... an interesting installation piece that we admired and couldn't resist posing in front of.

That entire day, neither of us could get Mika's "Big Girls are Beautiful" song out of our heads! And just mentioning it, it's in there again...

Ty - On a side note, after these fat bottomed girls made our rokin worlds go round, Lydia and I took in a Cabaret show in downtown Berlin, which was really cool. The play itself was really cheesy, but some of the stunts and special effects in it were really cool to watch. The cabaret included a set of mexican twins who ran across this enormous revolving pair of death wheels, a high-tower-multi-hi-bar chinese flipping act, and an underwater-with-no-air-supply-making-out-naked-duo-dance.......now tell me you wouldn't want to see that!!!

Perpendicular to the Old Museum lies the Berliner Dom. Although this church looks extremely old, we were informed by our tour guide that it was built in the early 20th century.

This oddly plain photo is of Babel Plats - the place where the famous book burnings took place. Thousands upon thousands of books with "differing ideas" from those of the Nazis were burnt at this very place, right outside of the university... not only did the students take part in the horrifying act, but some professors participated in the mass destruction as well.

This is the Humboldt University, named after Alexander von Humboldt, which is situated across the street from the Babel Plats. Einst

The scholar, himself, perched outside the university.

Here is Lydia smiling away, pretending to be Checkpoint Charlie.

These stark masses of concrete make up the "Holocaust Memorial", also named the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe". The slabs vary in size and height, and grow larger and taller in the centre of the piece and shorter and sparser around the edges. The ground actually dips in the centre, so from the outside, each concrete rectangle looks relatively similar in height.

In the distance you can see the standard apartment buildings that were constructed around the time of WWII.

The masterpiece was designed by the famous architect, Peter Eisenman. It is meant not only to be looked at, but also experienced. One must walk through the maze of grey concrete in order to fully understand the artwork and the message that it gives out.

Here's a shot to show the sheer gigantism of the memorial.

After re-visiting the Holocaust Memorial, we headed across the road to Tiergarten Park. We thought this statue was rather nice, picturesquely surrounded by the quickly changing autumn foliage.

Some more foliage... this photo was obviously Lydia's doing.

Another random and beautiful monument hidden in the Tiergarten.

A shout-out to my pops!

This is one of our last photos of the day before we caught the train home... and before our camera stopped cooperating with us. This giant monument, the "Victory Column" is located in the centre of the Tiergarten Park. The gold statue on the top is again of Viktoria... Goddess of Victory. Apparently some Berliners have given this statue the nickname of "chick on a stick". Seems fitting!