Work and fun in Rhodes, Greece

I recently went on duty travel to Rhodes, Greece to attend the 12th International Conference on Environmental Science and Technology. (I know, poor me.) This conference was held in a resort/conference centre, a strange combination. It meant us geeks were walking around with bags and notes while most others were in beachwear and flip flops. It was a strange conference for another reason: the high number of no-shows. Not only were many posters missing, a number of presenters were too, even a session chair once! I get that this is a vacation site, and it is tempting to ditch everything and go to the beach, but at least show up for the few hours you need to present something! Do like the rest of us: go to the beach during lunch break. :-)

Funny, the first person I met and talked to (and vice versa) at the conference was a Canadian from the Saskatoon, working at the CLS and U of S! On the last evening of the conference, we had a “gala dinner”. It was really nice: we were set up on fancy tables around one of the pools, there was a really good buffet and we even had a DJ. The slightly strange thing is that the evening turned into a dance club scene (never saw that at a conference before). It was loud enough and had good enough music that other resort guests (the all-inclusive ones) kept coming to the edges of our party to look; they wanted to join us but didn’t quite dare.

The resort itself was...ok. My concept of resorts is based on those in Dominican Republic, etc., which cater to the demanding North Americans. This place was all right, clean and not too run down, but not state of the art either. There was no wifi in rooms, only cable internet (for a price, and not in all rooms, through thankfully I did have it). The room style was a combination 1970s and your cheap spare bedroom. And the food! I was hoping to indulge in delicious Greek food for days, but was faced instead with an insipid and very limited buffet. The only other option in the resort was a pool-side restaurant, and that wasn't open in the evening.

But the pools were nice, and the beach was right there. It was perfect beach weather too, hot and sunny but with a nice strong wind to keep things tolerable. I tried to go for a bit every day. The only downside was that while the beach itself was nice sand, the edge of the water and quite a bit into the water was lined with big rounded stones. This made it quite difficult and ungainly to get in and out of the sea. Unfortunately, it was also really hard on my poor healing toe.

I spent an afternoon exploring the medieval city of Rhodes. It’s quite charming, and is of course full of stores and restaurants. Finally, good Greek food! Two highlights were the Palace of the grand master, and the harbour. Unfortunately, some of the streets were made of a kind of cobblestone, except it was rounded beach stones that were used. Again, my toe objected strongly. But I had to get back to the conference, so I didn’t feel bad cutting the visit short.

Sunday was my play day. While walking along the harbour a few days before, I had noticed a few signs advertising beach tours and tours to Lindos, a cute village, with its claim to fame being an acropolis on a hill. So I got to the harbour around 08:30 to decide which tour to do. I found the perfect one: a smaller and better quality boat than the others. It is usually booked solid days in advance, but there had been a taxi strike on Saturday, and many people didn’t know it was over so there were many no-shows. Good news: there was place for me. Bad news: there ended up being so many no-shows that they cancelled the trip. Poo. So I took a spot on one of the more generic boats instead.

I opted for the Lindos tour, which turned out to be a good thing: the beaches were OK, but nothing to write home about. A nice 2.5 hour cruise along the shore, and we arrived in Lindos. I walked up to the village, wandered around for a while and had a rooftop lunch.

Then I started back down to meet the boat. Problem: my toe objected to so much downhill. Solution: Lindos taxis, i.e. donkeys!! I did the touristy thing and had a donkey ride down to the beach-harbour. Kind of fun, actually.

Overall, Lindos was lovely, but HOT! I noticed a huge difference between the west and east coasts of the island. The west coast, where my hotel was, had strong winds, making the water quite wavy at the beach but also keeping things relatively cool (as in, you could actually stand to lie in the sun in this Grecian heat wave). The east coast, however, had no wind whatsoever. Perfect weather to bake humans in! Even walking in the shade in Lindos, I kept going into stores just to get a bit of air conditioning and not overheat.

On the way back to Rhodes, I napped for a while, and then we all enjoyed the antics of a 14-month old boy wanting to touch EVERYTHING. We also stopped mid-way for a deep-water swim. When I got back in town, I took a cab back to the hotel, packed my bags and fell into bed by 9 PM. Not exactly party girl, but you know that’s not my style (plus I was exhausted from the heat).

Monday morning, I was to go to the airport early, which was a good thing because once again, taxi strike. Thankfully, the buses were running but were clogged with people heading to the airport.

Comic relief:

A dress made out of cut up and woven pop cans!

Who buys this stuff?



Quick visit to Copenhagen

I have always wanted to go to Copenhagen. I have no idea why, I just have. So when I saw a seat sale months ago, I booked a flight for myself for a quick weekend there - in on Saturday AM, out on Sunday evening. As I was only staying overnight, I packed only a shoulder bag and planned on carting it around all day. I arrived mid-morning, and went straight to the Nyhavn harbour. The colours! Even more lovely than in pictures! Plus, this old little harbour has been transformed into a kind of museum, and is lined with old sailboats. I love sailboats!

I wanted to do a boat tour right away. It was a lovely sunny day, but the wind had a bite to it. I was barely warm enough on the street, and knew I'd freeze on on open-top boat. So I first backtracked to a pedestrian shopping street and bought a cotton pashmina. Then, I went back and got on the boat. Well, it was the highlight of the weekend! Beautiful sights, great weather, an interesting tour guide. And to top it off, a cute 3- or 4-year old girl, sitting behind me with her parents, was full of hilarious comments.

I got off the boat and started walking. I walked up and down the harbour area, then had lunch inside the Magasin du Nord. Then, I walked down that pedestrian street to City Hall. Once there, I discovered 2 things: 1- Gay Pride day was that day, and the plaza was taken over by festival goers. 2- My microwave-injured foot was far from healed. I had ditched my last crutch only a few days earlier, but by mid-afternoon my toe was screaming. So I ended up going to my hotel right then, and having a 3-hour rest. I went back out around 5PM to go to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek art museum. Nice collection and fringe benefit: a view of city hall from the rooftop. Then, I walked through the Tivoli, an old amusement park. In fact, it is said that visiting this place was Walt Disney's inspiration for his own theme parks. But my toe was objecting strongly, so I retreated to my hotel and spent a nice evening reading a book and snacking.

On Sunday morning, I wisely got on one of those hop-on, hop-off buses. I toured about half the city, getting off only occasionally, for example to see Rosenborg castle and the Little Mermaid statue. I had a fantastic lunch at the Havfruen (Mermaids) restaurant in Nyhavn, with fresh mussels (the best I have ever had), a beautiful setting, good buskers, and nice people to chat with at the next table. Then I wandered a bit, but stopped very soon to sit and listen to another set of buskers, an excellent jazz duo. They were very popular and I stayed for about 15 minutes.

But my toe was annoyed again and I was very tired from limping so much, so I went to the airport very very early. But this also turned out fine: I found a kind of quiet area, with nice padded lounge chairs, a view of the tarmac, and best of all, door to keep out children, food and noise. I happily spent a few hours there, again snacking and reading my book before catching my flight home.

I fell in love with Copenhagen. It is a charming little city, with a cheerful atmosphere and happy, helpful people. Other than the 9 months of winter, I would happily move there. :-)

 Peculiar things I found along the way:

Have seen variations of this in several cities around the world: large statues of an animal scattered around town, each painted differently. Here are my 2 favourites:

The face!

It just looks so happy!

 

Tried for 5 minutes to get a shot of just the statue of Hans Christian Andersen without tourists.

This was the best I got.

Had a little toy army, did you? I bet it wasn't jewel-encrusted solid gold like this one!

They had a thing for viking / trolls. This one was about 4 feet tall. Lifesize?



Tuscan Sun holiday

My friend Margaret flew over from Winnipeg to Vienna for a visit early August. We toured Vienna a bit, and then went on to Tuscany for a few days.

Our flight down was uneventful, but then came the train ride from Rome to Cortona. First, it took us a few minutes to figure out the main train station, as the place the train from the airport arrived was not well indicated at all. When we finally figured things out, we realised that we had to walk to the complete opposite end of the station to catch our train. No worries, plenty of time. We stopped on the way to pick up some salads and drinks for the trip, which turned out to be a good thing. So we got there, and saw that many many people were standing around waiting (in the full sun at 30 degrees, of course). Our train was supposed to come in 10 minutes, so we settled in to wait. And wait. And wait. Every so often, there would be an announcement on the loudspeakers, but the sound was so garbled that we could barely make out if it was English or Italian. Almost an hour later, there was a mass exodus of people from the area, and we followed, figuring they knew something we did not. We finally found someone who helpfully told a group of us what was going on: "The train didn't come. (Gallic shrug) Take the next one." Gee, no kidding! We now had about another hour to kill, so we had a chance to eat our salads in a fairly nice travellers' waiting room. (Note: this room had an information desk, where the lady behind the desk had no information to give, except the location of the bathrooms - which we already knew.) So the time came, and the train did too. We got on, but so did TWO trainfuls of passengers. All seats were occupied, and all hallways were full. We sat on our luggage or on the ground for half of the ride, until a bunch of people got off at a connecting station. Italian efficency!

We finally arrived in Cortona, and easily found a taxi and our hotel. We were there to enjoy the Tuscan Sun Festival, started a few years earlier by Frances Mayes, the woman whose book was turned into the movie "Under the Tuscan Sun" starring Diane Lane.

We had a lovely relaxing few days in Cortona, including lazy afternoon naps and leisurely strolls.

In the evening, we saw 2 concerts. These were fantastic! The only bad thing was that we were on the third floor, in a concert hall without air conditioning or seemingly any air flow. Sauna!

The best concert was a combination concert and theatre: love letters written between Frederic Chopin and George Sand were read in theatrical style, and were interspersed with music by Chopin and the occasional ballet dancers. The actors were supposed to be Jeremy Irons and Sharon Stone, but Ms. Stone pulled out 2 weeks before the show. So they called in a pinch-hitter, Jeremy Irons' wife Sinead ?. Turns out she is an excellent stage actress, and far outshone her husband. Before the show, I was ambivalent, but afterwards I can truly say she did a fabulous job!

 

The last 2 days in Italy, we played tourist. On Friday, we spent the day in Florence. It was just as lovely as I remembered. Margaret climbed all the way up the tower of the Duomo and got a great view of Florence, but I was unable to accompany her as I was still limping from my foot vs. microwave accident in June. Poo.

On our last day in Italy, we left Cortona early, intending to spend the day in Rome before catching our evening flight. When we got there, it was about a million degrees, and we instantly started to melt. But we wisely decided to join a tour group - one of many hawking their services at the Coliseum. We got to jump the queue into the Coliseum, get a tour inside and then a tour of the Palatine hills. Both lovely, but the heat was oppressive, and we were glad to go to the airport early. This turned out to be a good decision, as it took us about twice as long as expected to make it out there.

Back in Vienna, we had one last day together before Margaret flew back home.

A nice vacation, all in all.



And now, as usual, here are a few random pictures:

Almost very not badly done!!

A statue of Salvador Dali. But why is he holding a dolphin and a...?

So many bad English signs everywhere!