October 22nd, 2007, No Comments »
Julie just spent five days at Fontana Del Papa, a cooking school outside of Rome (booked via the excellent folks at Responsible Travel). That’s kind of an anti-holiday for me, but she had a great time. She took a bunch of photos, and here are three of my favourites:
She also spent a day in Rome, and some time in Barcelona and the south of France. I quite like this photo of seats awaiting Catholic bums in the Vatican.
It’s really a photo-bloggy kind of day today, isn’t it?
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April 26th, 2007, No Comments »
Over the past week or so, I’ve taken a few random photos which each merited commentary, if not their own blog post. In all cases, click the images for larger sizes.
We visited Minerve, which is a charming hilltop medieval town. Beside the church, there was a little museum of archeaology and paleontology. There were a series of, well, high-school quality dioramas inside, including this awesome one. The context, I think, is fairly obvious:
There was another diorama of the Siege of Minerve in 1210. The Cathars, a religious group declared heretics by the church, had been mostly slaughtered by Crusade armies at Beziers. A couple of hundred escaped to Minerve, where they were besieged and eventually burned alive:
I turned on the TV in our Dublin hotel, and surfed to a new (to me, at least) channel called Setanta Sports (man, that URL ought to be a lot shorter). Low and behold, there was ice hockey on TV. And it was those embattled giants of the frozen game, Ireland vs. Luxembourg.
By Canadian standards, it was amateur hour all around, from the on-ice play to the commentary to the charming scale of the Dundalk Ice Dome. Still, I was pleased to see that Ireland will be promoted from Division Three to Division Two after a shootout victory. The other teams in the tournament: New Zealand (who took home the gold), South Africa, Mongolia (they got their Yak-riding asses handed to them by everybody) and Luxembourg. Awesome:
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April 23rd, 2007, 3 Comments »
After a busy weekend in Dublin, attending Barcamp (more on that later) and recovering from the jetlag, we’re done in the tiny village of Argeliers (population: 1237) in the Languedoc-Roussillon region of southwestern France.
Our friends have a gorgeous villa down here. This was my first time seeing it, and it’s pretty specatcular. It’s called La Lavandiere, which means ‘The Laundry’:
Built in 1836 in the small Languedoc village of Argeliers, the Barn was originally built by adding on to the neighbouring barns and distilleries. During the mid 1900’s the Barn was used for storing agricultural and wine-making equipment, a collection of which has been saved and moved into the back garden.
The surrounding grand homes had their laundry serviced by the “ancienne lavandiere”, the soap-making fireplace and wash-house. This outbuilding remains in the back garden.
They have a dog, and a small tortoise who lives in the backyard. He hangs out in the pool shed a lot, because he apparently likes the vibrations. Whenever he’s feeling a bit randy, he tries to get amorous with the pool pump. You can hear the clink, clink, clink of his menage a un if you’re standing nearby.
I had an exceptionally uneventful day, which is just what I need this week. Finished a pretty bad Steven King novel, took a walk around the village, and then went for a short but sweaty (I’m so unfit) bike ride to Montouliers, a nearby village (population: 201) where there are some nice ruins of a 12th century chateau and a 14th century church.
I also did some laundry, and hanging the clothes out in the midday sun was surprisingly pleasant. There are, of course, photos from the day’s non-adventures.
Tomorrow, I may do pretty much the same thing.
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April 10th, 2007, No Comments »
Posting will probably be a little light and unpredictable through the rest of April, as we ramp up for departure. In case anybody’s wondering (and I can’t imagine why), here’s where I’ll be:
April 18 - Leave Vancouver, fly to Dublin via London.
April 21 - Participate in BarCamp Dublin.
April 22 - Fly from Dublin to Carcassonne for five nights at our friends’ villa–this is vacation, so I’ll hopefully be totally unavailable.
April 28 - Fly back to Dublin to speak at ShareIT.
May 1 - Fly to Malta, stay overnight.
May 2 - Take the ferry to Gozo, meet our letting agent and, Flying Spaghetti Monster-willing, find a place to live.
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