He's On The Move
It started out with a workshop/conference in Sweden. He allocated two weeks for that. The conference took place in Umea, at the university there with their fisheries biology faculty and grad students. There were workshops and field trips. At the conference papers were given, including his. The conference closed with a three-day road trip north of Umea, going to streams and rivers very different than those he's accustomed to in British Columbia. But he did see big adult Brown trout and Atlantic salmon (over three feet long) returning to spawn and jumping up to get past a dam. He found that pretty amazing.
They also did a detour above the Arctic Circle, where they watched some reindeer. Pretty neat stuff, he said. He made some good contacts, learned quite a bit, and, he said there is a possibility that they may be able to collaborate on future research, provided they can get the funding. Not at all certain to happen, he said, but applying from different sources, something may come up. The research interests as well as the landscapes and climate are sufficiently similar to those in British Columbia, so it's possible that collaboration could result in fruitful data.
The Swedes, he said, were a great bunch of people, genuinely nice, doing some excellent research. He'd be more than happy if they worked on research projects together, although where he'll find the time, when he has his own quite specific research on the go at all times, is beyond me.
From Umea his small group from B.C. went to Stockholm and stayed over a few days. Among the highlights of that part of the trip was seeing the Vasa Museum, housing a large 17th century Swedish naval vessel, with two decks of cannon, which had sunk but hadn't decayed because the water was de-oxygenated. The ship was raised in the 1950s and preserved, as it was pretty intact. Very impressive. While there he rented a kayak and paddled around the downtown harbour and nearby islands. Some of the islands which were up to 3 km long are beautiful parks, also housing old buildings and museums.
From there they flew to London, where he stayed at a hostel. He looked around a bit, but not nearly as much as he wanted to, and plans to return for a day later on in his trip. He found London interesting, particularly the architecture, but people seemed frantic in comparison to those whom he'd seen in Sweden. He found London to be a rat's nest of streets, as well. Primarily it's the natural history museum he wants to return to. From London the flight to Rome was cheap, but left at an ungodly hour.
In Rome he booked into a hostel and then began poking about. Walking about he checked out the Pantheon, but there wasn't time to see the Coliseum and Vatican City, so that's another stop he'll make on his return. He left Rome after a day there for the real meat of his trip, Trieste, where he stayed for a week or so with a friend with whom he'd once lived in Vancouver. His friend is doing a post-doc at an oceanographic institute there. While in Trieste he visited a concentration camp which had held Italian Jews and Italian partisans during the Nazi occupation. He and his friend did some mountain climbing nearby. They stayed over in the mountains in an old WWII installation which had been converted to a mountain hut for hikers. In fact, he said, they found the mountains to be littered with bits and pieces of old WWII armaments. That didn't detract noticeably from the adventure of the mountains, which he found somewhat similar in vegetation to those he's more familiar with; the bedrock was a colour very different, but there was lots of pine and larch.
With his friend he also did a day-trip to Venice. A few days later he returned on his own to spend three days by himself in Venice. He was really taken with the old city, completely surrounded by water and canals. Venice, as we know, is threatened by the fact that it is slowly, inexorably sinking into the sea. It becomes flooded during the spring, and people are accustomed to walking about in foot-deep water in the downtown area. Premier Berlosconi has pledged to build seawalls at the cost of tens of billions of dollars to ensure that this world treasure is protected and its monumental art works preserved for posterity. While in Venice, he took a trip to the island of Murano and there saw a glass museum dedicated to murano glass, and watched glassblowing in progress. He's really impressed with the process, feeling it to be more versatile than pottery making which he excels at, himself.
After Venice he travelled up to the Dolomites in northern Italy to see two other old friends; Austrian men who had come out to Vancouver several years back to conduct their own research under his tutelage. The three of them went hiking and rockclimbing. Right down his alley.
He's now in Florence for a week. The architecture there has astounded him, most of all the basilica; huge, incredibly ornate and intricate. The old part of Florence, he said, is amazing, old churches everywhere, intricately carved. We'll have to ask him when he returns if he saw Ghiberti's great bronze doors, Cellini's "Perseus", Michaelangelo's "David". He's looked around at some of the ubiquitous antique shops, and art galleries.
Fantastic opportunities this trip has opened for him, and we're glad he's taken them seriously. Our outdoors-enthusiast scientist has many facets to his character and interests. Among other things he excels at is building furniture by hand, with the use of old tools and never a nail hammered into the finished product. That, and his lovely pieces of pottery, ranging from great nests of bowls to teapots and oven casseroles. He's a jewel in his own right. But then, what else would you expect to hear from his mother.
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, October 20, 2005
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