9/30 - 10/01 - Seattle

I booked a room in the Mediterranean Inn . Driving from the airport and having been to New York and Rome I thought I got a hotel in projects. I was wrong, there are no projects in Seattle. From my window I saw the Space Needle.

Seattle is fun, compact, cool, clean, even neat. By New York standards the streets are empty. Seriously there are very few people on the streets. I found that refreshing. The air was refreshing too.

I started my explorations with visit to the Space Needle and the Experience Music Project (EMP) created by Paul Allen. The view from Space Needle looks like this:



After enjoying the view, I did my duties in the gift shop. There I discovered that amazing master of the glass, Dale Chihuly, is from Washington. I bought a desk calendar with his works and learned that there is a gallery with his works on 5th Avenue.

Next stop was EMP live. I knew about this music museum because I used to work for Plumb Design, the company that created the web site and the software for the digital lab. The museum turned out to be cool, but pretty small. Of course the staff members never heard of Plumb Design and had no idea of what Thinkmap (software used for the navigation of the museum artifacts) was. Luckily I found it in the lab; 4 years later it is still awesome.



After that I drove downtown. I parked near the Art Museum and went to the Pike Street public market. The place was really cool. It was a labyrinth of shops, flower stands and food. The thing was that there are a lot of market places, but a few of them are cool. This one was cool, because people sold neat stuff not the crap that they did not need.



Near Pike street market is the first location of Starbucks. I obviously could not miss that. I confirm it does smell old. But the original sign is different! Take a look:



From the market I headed to old downtown via 2nd avenue. That's when I realized that Seattle is pretty small. In about 15 minutes I was in Pioneer Square. On the positive side, I took a lot of pretty pictures while I was walking.



From the Pioneer square I walked to the Elliot bay book store. One the way, I saw a lot of cool arts and crafts shops. (Again not crap, cool). This book store also turned out to be large. I was tired and needed coffee so I bought two books and head out. I found a perfect spot in Occidental square were I relax, had coffee read book by Linus Torvalds and checked out local folk.



My walk back to the car was via 4th and 5th ave. Since there were a lot of really beautiful buildings I could not resist taking pictures. Here is the picture of Seattle public library.



To sum up. Great town. At least great first impression. I think I could live there. Who knows maybe one day I will.

P.S. A worthy place to eat is sea food restaurant called Saltys.

All pictures from this trip...

9/27 - Portland, Oregon

Portland is a fairly small, but very pleasant town. I strolled around its streets thinking how clean and peaceful it is. I also thought that it could probably get boring rather quickly. But maybe not.

Maybe the combination of surrounding nature with this piece of urbania could be the recipe for perfect life.



A few things. I saw the supposedly ugly Portland building. Well, its not really ugly. But the facade of Oregon Historic Society is definitely overhyped. And the Pioneer Square is worth while visiting.

Portland has the US largest physical book store, called Powell City of Books. There are both new and used books, which is a bit of a turn off for me. I browsed around for 1/2 h and book 2 books. One thing I really liked about this store is that it had separate section of books on Complexity science. I was pondering if I should by Norbert Weiner's Cybernetics books, but I did not. It was used and had formulas :)

P.S A good place to eat is Novo Peruvian cusine Andina.

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9/18 - Barcelona

We were lucky to finish our trip in beautiful Barcelona.

In the morning we visited Gaudi's Casa Battlo. This Gauidi's building is located close to the Casa Mila. Its imaginatively colored facade is decorated with wavy, curved balconies. We bought a 16 euro expensive to tour that included the voice tour. At least this tour beat Pompeii tour :) And of course, the building itself was pretty unusual. Girls really loved, while I was skeptical about the functional aspects of the house.

After the Case Battlo we headed to the Picasso museum. On the way, we passed by the Concert hall building, which was magnificent. We decided that we did not have time to go in for a tour. That turned out to be a mistake. The Picasso museum was a complete rip off. There was only one or two famous works, the rest were unknown and quite frankly uninteresting sketches, paintings and pottery.

Pretty disappointed we left to a different part of Barcelona called Montjuic. We took a cab to the Placa d'Espanya and enjoyed the views of the National Museum of Catalunya.



We headed up the hill to the place called Pueblo Espanyol. This mini town features over 100 houses in different architectural styles of Spain. The place turned out be pretty fun to walk around. We wish there was a voice guide for this one :)



Our travel guide proclaimed that Montjuic was a happening place, but we could not find much. Instead we gave up and took a cab to the Columbus monument at the beginning of La Rambla. The walk through this street proved to be unexciting. And so did the market that was suppose to be one of the Europe's best markets.

Yet, in the end of the walk we were rewarded. We found a great place to eat called Troubadour. The place was at 2 Ramla Catalunya, right off the Placa Catalunya. There we took time to enjoy house wine and real paella made with chicken, shrimp and local fish.

We spend the rest of the day walking around Rambla Catalunya. Around 9 we found a nice and tasty cafe called Iustinianus on Corsega 300, right off the Rambla Catalunya. We sipped wine, ate cheese and looked at night Barcelona. It was a perfect place to finish our vacation.


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9/16 - Naples / Pompeii

We took an 35 minutes / 80 euro cab from Naples to Pompeii. The cab driver agreed to wait for us there for 2 hours. Taking a cab would be good idea because riding to the train station and taking a train would cost us about the same, but would take much longer.

In Pompeii we got the voice guide and were determined to learn about the famous city. Unfortunately the guide was terrible. It was almost impossible to find the numbers on the ruins with the map that we were given. When we succeeded matching the guide was pretty boring.

Most of Pompeii looked, well, ruined. It seems that unless you are a serious archeologist the whole thing looked like bunch of stones. To be fair, a few place looked interesting. For example, the house of Faun.



The funniest thing about Pompeii was that all tours and people converged in one place. The ancient whore house. The walls there were featuring sexual adventures of Pompoiiean man and were causing a healthy amount of interest in modern tourists. Having gone though this house in 15 seconds we were ready to leave.

We came back to Naples the home of Pizza! Except we were impatient and had one in a touristy place. Needless to say it was below our expectations. Naples proved to be quite different in different place. In the beginning we were disappointed wondering around its less pleasant neighborhoods. But things picked up after we headed up via Toledo.

The central Naples is interesting with its narrow streets and open people. People are really open. A lot of doors are open too. Inside you see people eating, watching TV, talking. It must be a cultural thing to keep the doors and windows open when staying home.

We headed through the labyrinth of streets towards the local Duomo. On the way we hit lots of small streets crowded with all sorts of local pottery and souvenirs. We stopped by a few churches, had coffee break in one of the local cafes and finally reached the Duomo. Despite the rain and the long wait at the cafe we thought the trip was worth it. Especially because of the Duomo, which was pretty impressive.

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9/15 - Rome

The train to Rome took 1.5h. We got off at the central station and started on our Rome marathon. The plan was to cross through the city all the way to Vatican and to catch a few landmark.

First on our way was Trevi Fountain. It took us about 1/2 h to walk to the fountain from the train station. We did notice how incredibly dirty the city was. The sculptures and buildings were plain black. The streets were dusty and dirty. It was literally difficult to breathe.
Things got a bit better as our lungs adapted, but we were sneezing quite often.

The Trevi Fountain is one of the most magnificent fountains in the world. It is hard to do justice to it with words, so here is the picture.



And here is the detail which is particularly striking:



Near the fountain we found a stand with fresh produce and bought super tasty grapes. This boosted our spirits (and cleared lungs a bit). We headed straight towards the Pantheon. From the Pantheon we headed to Plaza Novona, where we admired the Bernini's rivers fountain and had a quick lunch.

Our last stop was Vatican. It took us 10 minutes to get to the bridge and to cross the Tevere river. From the bridge we took this picture of St. Peter's Cathedral.



We were planning to go inside the Cathedral, but when we reached to St. Peter Square it became clear that we are not going to get in because of the long line. We decided to try our luck and to get into the Vatican Museum to see Sistine Chapel. Miraculously it worked. We got in 15 minutes before last entry and spent 1/2 h admiring the famous Michelangelo ceiling.


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9/14 - Florence

The next port of call was Livorno, our first destination in Italy. We debated for a while what we should do and finally decided that we are better off taking a train to Florence instead of going to Pisa. And that was despite the fact that we all have been to Florence before.

The train was cheap, but took over an hour. We arrived on the train station and headed towards Duomo. The Duomo is unforgettable and breathtaking because of its details. When it emerges out of the busy Florence street one is simply stunned by its beauty. Last time we went upstairs to the roof, but this time the line was just too long, and we decided to pass.



After enjoying the Duomo we headed towards the Uffizi gallery. The streets where quite busy, there were a lot of tourists and local 'artists' trying to sell copies of various famous works, like Boticelli's 'Birth of Venus'. We did not go into Uffizi, again, because of the long line. Instead we turned right and headed towards Ponte Vecchio.




Ponte Vecchio is a small bridge covered with tourist-trap-quality jewlerly stores. Naturally, it did not take a long time for us to cross. Once on the other side, we felt hungry. I remembered that 5 years ago we uncovered a small restaurant with amazing food about 5 minutes from the bridge. We were lucky to find the place again.
The food was cheap and delicious. The waiter was friendly and from Albania. To our horror he cited some of his Soviet childhood heroes. But, the best was the house wine. We took 3 liters aboard. The place is called Tratoria 4 Leoni, it is located on Plazza della Passera - Via dei Vellutini.

How un-renaissance of us to say that the restaurant was the highlight of the visit. Well that and the Duomo. After the restaurant we did some more strolling and then headed back to the train station. We were unanimous that there is no need for the third visit.

Finally, this entry has to conclude with the note that you can never guess who can speak Russian around you. Really, you can't. We were in the train and oriental-looking woman was sitting next to us. For the duration of the trip she was pretty absent minded. She just stared at the window and did not even look at us. But when the conductor went through and said that we should have stamped our tickets at the station, she turned and without a trace of an accent explained in Russian where and what we should have done. When we got off the train and grabbed a taxi to the ship, the two women on the back seat who spoke perfect English suddenly switched to perfect Russian.

The moral is: You never know how many Russian speaking people are surrounding you at any given time.

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9/13/04 - French Rivera

The next was stop small pretty port town Villefranche-Sur-Mer on Cote de Azur. We have booked a car in Nice and took a 15 minutes ride along the coast. In Nice we loaded into almost new Peugeot and headed east toward Ez.



Ez is a small medieval village with breathtaking views of the coastline.After an uphill walk through the steep, narrow streets we reached the cactus garden on the top of the village. We spent 1/2 h admiring the views and taking pictures. Without a doubt, that cactus garden was one of the most memorable and beautiful places we have ever visited. After exiting the garden, we browsed around Ez and found a lavish hotel tucked in the remote part of the city. Prices on the restaurant menu were totally outrages, but the view from the restaurant made us envious.



We left Ez and headed further east. Our plan was to got to X, which was described as a neat town in our guide. We enjoyed the stunning views on the way. Unfortunately, we could not figure out where the entrance to X was. Instead we went through to Menton.



Menton is the last French town on the east end of the Rivera. We parked and found rather suspicious restaurant right on the boardwalk. There we were pleasantly surprised for two reasons: one is that food was not disgusting and and secondly, occasional women on the beach were topless.

After lunch we walked around Menton and found it to be much quieter and much less touristy than Nice or Canne. Streets and building were clean; Menton really looked like French French Rivera. We could not spend more time in Menton, because we had to return the car. We headed back to Nice captivated by the unforgettable views.

Rivera is definitely a place that we need to come back too!


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