The Italy Diaries: Photos

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Outside the VaticanFlickr is my friend. That's where I have uploaded the approximately 1 billion photos we took while in Italy. Blair complained I was putting too many pics up on Facebook, so I have deleted over half the pics we took.

What's here is not labeled, for the most part. Trips to Europe always end up with us taking 30 close up pics of some object or statue a tour guide emphasizes as being important, then us having no idea what we're looking at when we get home. Anyway, I find the pictures I return to are the ones of friends, or good meals, or simple street views that remind me of my time in a certain place. 

I've more or less categorized the pictures by city. I skipped Pompeii and Vatican City. Pompeii because ruins tend to look like little more than big gray rocks in photos, and the Vatican because really, how many pictures of religious icons and tapestries can you look at? 

Here are the links to the slideshows. There's only about 30 pics in each show, so takes about 2 minutes per city to go through them: 

 Below is my absolute favorite photo of the entire trip. Blair and I at the Colosseum, deciding whether or not someone lives or dies. Our choices are rather indicative of our personalities, don't you think?

I also like the photo of us on our last night in Rome, heading out for the group dinner.

Ciao!

 

 

 


Ignite Charlotte - Fizzled Out

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For those who didn't see my FB post, I will NOT be speaking at Ignite Charlotte 5 this coming Tuesday. I was unable to complete my slide deck before I left for Italy and they couldn't accept the deck once I got back.

The event organizer was quite gracious about the whole thing--much more so then I would have been. I've organized my fair share of events and am (I'm now embarrassed to say) snide about people who fall short on their commitments. "Do these people not own a calendar?" I ask. "How hard it is to do what you say you're going to do?"

Lesson: We become what we mock. 

I have my reasons for being unable to complete my deck before my trip, but the bottom line is I knew I was cutting it close getting the slides prepared. I didn't leave any room for contingencies that might arise and, as this blog post shows, a few landmines blew up. I should have started the process much earlier. 

The good news is I don't think I burned any bridges and I'm still interested in participating in an Ignite event. You can bet the next time, I'll have my deck ready before I even send my application in.

Best Wishes to all the Ignite Charlotte 5 speakers!!

Dena

The Italy Diaries: Random Encounters Maybe Aren't So Random

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Buongiorno! Ciao! Grazie! Gelato!

This concludes my study of the Italian language, undertaken during our recent 10-day foray to the land of pasta, wine, and really expensive leather shoes. 

I've got a lot to say about the trip. While any trip to Italy is of course fabulous, this trip was also fraught with landmines - tour buses almost overturning on hairpin turns in Tuscan hills, being trapped on a ferry during a storm with passengers tossing their cookies right and left, lost luggage, misplaced passports, fevers, sickness, and much more. But for all of that, I'd do the trip again in a minute. I fell in love with Italy and the people we traveled there with.

But all that is for a later blog. Today I want to write about the "random" encounters of the trip. (And yes, photos are coming. We just haven't had a chance to go through them yet. Soon, I promise.)

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