Michelangelo's "Pieta"

Despite my being a bit of a Philistine when it comes to actually understanding great art and what makes it great, some things just smack you upside the head and leaves you quaking at the knees and in no doubt of its greatness. That was absolutely the case when I walked into St. Peter's Basilica, turned right, and saw Michelangelo's "Pieta" of Mary holding the dead body of Christ.
Commissioned to Michelangelo in 1499, when he was all of TWENTY-THREE years old, it's a cliche but I just could not take my eyes off of this stunning sculpture.
There's the sheer technical mastery (check out the incredibly intricate folds of the clothing) and the utter realism (look at Christ's right shoulder and the way it "hangs" on Mary's hands - the body is so clearly dead and limp). Yet there's the magnificent composition and unity, with Mary grieving and yet having the strength to hold up her dead child. Wow, wow, and wow again. In going through my Rome pictures, I just keep coming back to Pieta over and over again and staring in wonder.

smART history's piece on "Pieta"
The Roma Flickr

Ponte Milvio - That's Amore!

The Hotel Farnesina is on Via de Farnesina, which is a block up from the river and the very nice Ponte Milvio (Milvian Bridge). I'm going to need to look up some history of the bridge, but it certainly was incredibly beautiful walking across it in the late afternoon sun.

The Roma Flickr

 Being the bridge of love, there are well over a thousand locks tied up throughout the bridge. I love shots of reflections off the water like the one on the left, looking east from Ponte Milvio.

Roman Holiday?

Ethereal lighting - had to be there

How can you help but laugh? Had a problem-free but a very long day of travel today to get from Trikala to Rome for the IP-SPALC. 3h bus to Thessaloniki, 1h city bus to the airport (through some downtown roads that made Brussels roads look like wide boulevards), a few trips back and forth through airport security (what's the point of online checking in and printing off your boarding passes, not to mention not having checked luggage, if you STILL have to go to the check-in counter to get your passport cleared? And why don't they tell you that at security until AFTER you go through and get to the gate)? Then airport bus, metro, and tram for the final walk to the Hotel Farnesina. Total of about 11h travel time.

Scene from airport bus

Ah well, it's all made up for by being in Roma! Just driving in through the city on the airport bus was like a tour through history, what with amazing ancient buildings and ruins everywhere! You'd pretty much have a convenience store right next to an ancient Roman wall! The kicker was walking the final bit across the Ponte Milvio (Milvian Bridge, see future blog). 
The Roma Flickr

Church next to hotel

Anyway, the real point of the story is that I checked into the hotel (think Euro petite. Very nice but can pretty much touch all four walls at the same time), then walked the 10 min over to the Foro Italico (Sports University). 

I walk in at 1700h or so and see Carl Foster and my buddy Romain Meeusen giving their talks on monitoring training and overtraining, respectively. That's kinda weird - aren't they scheduled to give those talks tomorrow morning with my talk in a joint workshop? And what's Romain talking about with flying out tonight, he's flying out tomorrow (Friday) night. Did I completely mess up my days and missed the day for my talk?

Um, apparently the switch is because there's a forecast for a "massive" dumping of snow in Roma overnight, and the odds are 90+% that the uni will be closed, not to mention the whole city! Rome got walloped this past weekend with the same level of snow that we had in Trikala last week, to the extent that the first day of SPALC this Monday was cancelled, along with all schools most of this week. It was incredibly beautiful and warm today!

The football club "Lazio" plays at the Stadio Olympico at the university, and the crowd control was beginning for a home match Thursday evening.

So the upshot is that the uni, and SPALC, might get cancelled tomorrow! So I get the fun of possibly: 1) giving my talk here in the small hotel dining room with zero props, 2) being such a famous guest speaker that people invite me to come as a guest speaker without having to give a talk, or 3) simply getting stranded here in Roma for a few days! Stay tuned!

The scene just across from the Piazza del Popolo where I transferred from Metro to tram. The Piazza was getting ready for Carnivale.

Update #1: Seriously, tonight (Thursday night), the Mayor of Rome has declared all public buildings closed already for Friday AND Saturday! 

Update #2: Just woke up Friday and there's NOTHING on the ground! Seriously!

Daffodils in December

Between Christmas and New Years, our former exchange student, Stefan, from Germany visited us. He is currently studying at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. We were very pleased that he could come and visit even for a short time. I think Jacob did a blog about some of the things that we did.

One of the things I enjoyed that day was going to the Cathedral of St. Michel and St. Gudula. The history of the church extends back for 12 centuries. In the 9th century A.D. there was a chapel dedicated to St. Michael. In the 11th century there was a Romanesque style church built there are after relics of St. Gudula were moved there, it became the collegial church of St. Michel and St. Gudula. In 1226, the present church was build in Gothic "Barabancon" style. In 1962 it was promoted to cathedral status.

The stained glass and confessionals date back to the 16th century;  the pulpit was carved by H.F. Verbruggen in 1699 and intricately depicts the fall of Adam and Eve and the Redemption. The church also contains the mausoleums of the Dukes of Brabant and Archduke Ernest of Austria. You can go down under the church to see the remains of the older parts of the building.  

When we visited the grass along the walkways was dotted with yellow nodding daffodils (December 28) while inside the church were displays of Nativity scenes from different countries and communities. One of my favourites was from Slovakia; I think it was made in a prison and was completely made of intricately carved wood.  

Street busking on the left, dinner with our friend Charli Aron at Mamma Roma's pizza.

Greek Cabin Fever

Jacob & Molly

A bit of cabin fever setting in here in Trikala, as we're in the grips of a miserable week or more of weather ever since our return from Bansko. First two days of bitter cold, then the snow dumping, and incessant cold rain the past four or more days. It's not so much just the cold and damp air/wind, but that the department doesn't heat the offices (or cafeteria). So we're just blasting the electric heaters to stay warm and are wearing all our different layers of clothes throughout the day.
I'm supposed to be escaping for Thursday - Saturday to Rome (Euro country #12) to give a lecture to the EU-sponsored Intensive Program in Sports Performance - a Lifetime Challenge consortium of 7 EU countries/unis, including VU Brussels), but it's looking like rain and snow there too. That is, of course, if I even manage to catch my flight, as there's more snow supposedly hitting Trikala!

Flying by Instrument = Flying Blind = Flying Stupid!

Just got back from Bulgaria and, if there's one thing I've learned, the GPS is no bloody substitute for checking out a map beforehand! Our drive from the Bulgarian border to Bansko was a total nightmare. Right from the border, the GPS took us off to the right and through a few ancient villages that might not have changed since medieval times, except for the "modern" update of a lot of Ladas parked in the driveway! 

The road, to use my buddy Olaf's vernacular, can only euphemistically called "high quality paved roads" in the most theoretical sense of being paved. 20 km of this and then we proceeded to drive up this switchbacked mountain pass in the dark. On the good, the GPS maps are so detailed that it even had this dirt path taking you up an even steeper set of switchbacks in between bigger switchbacks. On the negative side of the ledger, it actually tried to lead us up it! Eventually, partway up the mountain, we stopped because of a herd of horses grazing by the side of the road.

Then pretty soon after that, the snow was bad enough that it required Debbie and me trying to figure out how to put unfamiliar chains onto the car in the middle of climbing the mountain in the darkness by flashlight - wasn't that a treat! I practiced putting the chains on back home in Trikala in the morning, but it was still >60 min in the cold and lightly falling snow before we figured it out again in real life! It was so quiet there in the deep mountain that I was half-expecting Jack Nicholson's crazed "The Shining" character to be calling.

Things were fun going up and then down the switchbacked pass, then having to take them off at the bottom of the pass. Getting to the driveway of the apartment in Bansko, we then had to put them back on and then off again just for more fun. End result was that the 90 km or so from the Border to Bansko took nearly 4 h to complete!

Just fun and games so far, right? So coming back, we follow Andreas back to the border and realized that our GPS had completely ignored the major highway route that featured minimal elevation and was ludicrously simpler, safer, and MUCH more direct to drive! No wonder people get stranded in the middle of the mountains in Nevada when they blindly trust their stupid GPS!


Related to that, Ken just pointed out a recent NY Times article all about how reliance on GPS erodes our cognitive abilities...

Boarding in Bansko!

Last weekend we went snowboarding at Bansko ski resort in Bulgaria for three days. We went with Andreas and two of his friends, whose names are Takis and Vassilis. Takis and Mom rented skis, but me, Jacob, dad, Andreas and Vassilis all rented snowboards. The peak of the mountain about 2700m high we went all the way from there down to about 900m where the town of Bansko is. On the way to Bansko the GPS took us right over a mountain and we had to put the chains on the wheels, but when we came home with Andreas we went on the highway that doesn't go over the mountain. The good part of the GPS taking us over the mountain is that we saw some wild horses and some huge nests at the top of hydro posts in the middle of a town. Thanks to our Aunt Donna we got some hats with some money she sent us; they were really crazy hats. Some of the hats had just had big, thick locks of hair and another kind like it had curly locks. I got one that had 2 horns and some fuzzy hair on the top. There was another kind like it but it only had a thin strip with a furry tail at the back.

Yummy Bulgarian Food!

Our last night in Bansko, we joined the Greek contingent at their "home" restaurant, a nice authentic Bulgarian restaurant a bit beyond the main resort places. Considering that this was their 4th straight night at the restaurant, I was expecting to staff to treat Andreas like "Norm" from Cheers! The food was awesome, and they are even cooking our spare ribs there in the grill in the middle of the dining room. My former student Dessi from Bulgaria can make comments and tell you what the actual dishes are called, but I'll just describe them and call them yummy!

 We started with flatbread that were grilled and based like garlic bread, only milder. They were excellent, and followed up with feta-stuffed mushrooms.

 Next up was our introduction to Bulgarian style french fries. No mayonnaise here like in Belgium frits, but instead there's grated cheese sprinkled on top and you dip them in a type of flavoured salt. So good we got another dish!

 Our main course were "Such" on the left, a big griddle of vegetables and pork. You can see the steam coming off. Then there's the spare ribs on the right. Yes, both tasted as good as they looked! Vassilys's dad is a vet inspector for the food agency in Greece, and he likes his meat!

The happy customers. Myself with Andreas, Jacob, Zachary, Vassilys, a sleepy-looking Takis, and Debbie. All the food plus drinks cost only 105 BGN, or about 80 for the seven of us all in!

Snow Day in Trikala!

The hazards of living an online existence with homeschooling, and of actually going to a physical brick-and-mortar school, is what happens when you're socked in by 50 cm of snowfall overnight in Greece! Our first snow day in 7 years of homeschooling! As coincidences go, the famous "Dr. Freeze" gave a talk to the Sport Science Dept. here Wednesday 1700h, and that's about when the snow started and has been going ever since (so guess who gets blamed for it?). Up top you can see a video of just how much snow came down overnight. Needless to say, Greece isn't exactly ready for such snow, and Petros says that it's the most snow he remembers since 1987.

The left is a view of our backyard, and the right is a view of the street outside. There was no way we could get the little Fiat Punto out of our small street!

Crazy Petros was such a keen student that he walked the 4.5 km through the snow to the lab anyway! We hunkered down at home, had snowball fights, wrote postcards, did knitting, lots of reading, etc. After I prepared my lecture for Rome next week, I spent the rest of the day reading "Band of Brothers" by Stephen Ambrose. Great read!

Whack my hat!

2 bull moose butting heads!

At Bansko we saw some people with very cool hats, and we saw some more of those hats and in different colours there was blue yellow black and white that we saw and all of them had a fuzzy top and tail and 2 horns me and Zach both really liked them so on the third day we looked in the souvenir shop at the bottom of the gondola and we didn’t see them so when we were walking back we saw a lot of hat shops on the main road. When we went down there with daddy the price was 15 Lev (7-8 EUR) and finally we went to one that looked good and bought 2 hats as you can see on the background.