The Swedes

August 26 2011, 22:15.

Sitting alone in a restaurant in Rome can be a very awkward thing.
I'm writing now in my notebook as the servers stare, and every other person at a table speaks with their party. I have been oddly placed directly in the middle of the walkway into the garden dining room, so there's no avoiding sticking out: tall blonde american alone = obvious freak show.

I ended up here, wherever here is, by chance; I had a list of six restaurants I wanted to try before leaving, and not one of them was open. So here I am, in a random little restaurant in the middle of nowhere. But as those tend to be the most interesting places, I'm actually not at all concerned.

I'm sitting at a table adjacent to a group of six older Swedish gentlemen and ladies.
[and how do I know this about them? when the server took their plates: "He say, 'you finish?', No, we Swedish". har har har har]
It turns out they're all neighbors in a small city in Southern Sweden, and they travel various places together. That sounds so lovely. This year is Roma, Madagascar, and Tunisia; next year will be California and Vegas.

We have had a very interesting conversation over the past couple of hours, a few plates of spaghetti pomodoro, and several glasses of vino tinto. Rather than describe everything about these guys, let me just state the particular things I learned from them:

• Northern Sweden is very desolate. Never visit there.
• Europeans are still very grateful for the American sacrifices in WWII, for "the sacrifice of young men, or else we would all be German or Italian".... so they don't harbor any hatred toward Americans, regardless of politics, for that reason alone.
• There is always a war going on somewhere. Someone's fighting. Just right now America's involved and it's close to home [for you]. [You] are involved but that doesn't mean anything. Thus there's no reason for bad feelings.
• There is no reason to hate anyone. At all. 

Not bad for two hours of discussion. And what life lessons I received in return for a little time and a map of Rome, directions, and a pen!

I again wonder at the fact that we are communicating in English. This city is such a strange collection of people from so many places, and yet, everyone knows some little bit of english, no matter where they hail from. So in this city in Italy, in the middle of Europe, with tourists out the wazoo, here we are, all trying to speak slightly different versions of English to understand each other.

I've known that was the case, but it never really hit home til today, when I was in the garden Quirinale. An old Italian man sat down next to me on a bench. I was sketching the statue in the middle of the garden, of a famous dude on a horse, with the late afternoon sun coming across. When I finished, he asked in broken English if I was an art student, and then whether I was English or American. I decided to go out on a limb because I didn't understand him well, and, as opposed to what I did all week, pretend I was German.

We proceeded to have a broken conversation in English, in which I almost copied his accent, thinking which words would be basic and building blocks for an ESL-speaker, which would allow us to communicate without one of us having "superior" grammar- that is always my least favorite part of speaking with a nonnative speaker, when one of the two has an upper hand by the mere fact that they spoke the language well. It's a strange power struggle, and seldomly does the nonnative speaker come out on top. But when neither knows it well, there is no such struggle, and all that is important is understanding and using body language (the most beautiful and expressive form of communication, in my opinion). I feel rather bad about pretending to be something I wasn't in my discussion with this guy, but to be fair, he was rather creepy in the way he approached me and decided to sit very close on the bench with me. It was half self-defense to avoid sharing too much information. But that's just an excuse. I was scared, a bit, and it also sounded interesting to try.

Net in net: try it. Put yourself in someone else's shoes sometimes. It's amazing what you'll learn. Especially if you have nothing to lose, and you can pretend without it hurting anyone.

Party like it's 753 BC!

So I said I was going to the “social dinner” last night. 

Well, go I certainly did. I arrived at the Hydrology garden (wish we had one of those! Next to the Colosseum!) and ran into one of Mark’s contemporaries, who, surprisingly, somehow knew who I was. We had a chat for a while; he is now a professor at Iowa (doing more hydraulics than EFM, apparently they’re ridiculously good at that, who would have thought?).  But knowing me, I have completely forgotten his name. 

Regardless, after a ten-minute conversation about how I was going to tell Mark I saw him but not that he says hello because he was pretending to be miffed that Mark didn’t show up, we went our separate ways, him to join a group of older gentlemen, and me to join a couple of PhD students. As previously mentioned, I am ridiculously bad at remembering names, particularly those of whom it will be crucial to know their names at a later time (ie, five years down the road at the next ISSF). Alas, I do not have their names, but let’s call them Jean and Rolph. Jean was from France and Rolph from Germany but studying in the Netherlands (or something like that)… within the next fifteen minutes, we were joined by a guy from Germany studying in Canada, a guy from Korea studying in the UK,  the two girls from Jeff’s lab at Stanford, and one or two others. All in all, we had a very interesting discussion of how German would soon be the language everyone in the world was studying (as opposed to now- everyone must learn English! This hit me in a particular way last night… a large group of people from all over trying to convey important information in our different broken bits of English, the only language overlap we all have).  

They announced dinner, so being grad students we rushed up to the buffet and filled our plates with fresh ricotta, pancetta, bruschetta, little puffs of fried vegetable dough, eggplant, hunks of parmesan from a wheel, and slices of fresh braided mozzarella. And then we went back for seconds, because it was 1) ridiculously good 2) not all that filling because the plates were small and 3) free. 

On top of that, they had plopped a bottle of white wine on our table to begin, and came around filling up champagne glasses (we had a debate on which of the glasses was for wine, which for champagne, since none were quite right). In the following hour or so, our table probably went through about five or six bottles. And then dinner arrived, in multiple courses, much to our surprise: cannelloni filled with some sort of fish, followed by swordfish, and ladyfingers soaked in marsala wine with custard and fresh fruit. With every intervening course, the general surprise of the group was vivid; we had spent a week in Italy, but we weren’t familiar with the way a dinner like this would work; and none of us ever ordered beyond the primi on the menus at the restaurants, being cheap grad students who could easily deal with pasta for dinner, again. 

I apologize for the description of dinner; I’m being long-winded. 

At one point in the night, all of the senior research scientists, organizing and scientific committees gathered around one table; these people are the pillars of stratified fluid mechanics. I joined in and took a picture. How could you not? Okay, so maybe it was a little awkward. But I mean really.

The fathers (and mothers) of today's stratified fluid mechanics, aka scientific committee 2011.

After the main courses were finished, I was extremely amused to hear intense joy and perhaps drunkenness coming from the next table over, where J. Nash, Amy Waterhouse, some scared-looking Germans, an elderly Pole, and a couple of other Scripps scientists were. I decided they were having a lot of fun, so I picked up my chair and went over to join in. It was hilarious; we ended up moving our massive formal dining tables together, and generally being stupid and nerds of all ages, cracking jokes about (what else?) fluids.

Then they called for after-dinner drinks, and we all had to try limoncello (like a lemon drop, only alcoholic). Wandering around with Amy, the C. Winants, along with the other Scripps guys, we talked to most everyone (they know EVERYONE!). Larry Armi came back to say goodbye to Clint, and I just felt I couldn’t let him leave without introducing myself. And his reply “oh yes, I know your name, I was at your presentation, very nice! Good luck with your work.” WHA???? Really? He knows my name? This random old guy father-of-fluid-mechanics?

And then we decided to go dancing on the Island (in the middle of the Tiber). I ended up wandering around with the Scripps girls, a selection of European guys, and Jon through Rome to Trastavere, etc., until about 3AM. What an epic epic night. These scientists are people too. 

It was amazing to be in… my own shoes… this week. I’m not sure anyone else would feel quite the same shock and gratitude for this particular company and becoming part of it, but I awoke every morning (admittedly tired) with the knowledge that I was going to be learning and doing something important and meeting important and interesting people. How unbelievable and how fortunate I have been.

conclusione del congresso

okay, so I fudged this title too, thanks to the sign I saw outside the cloister today. BUT IT'S OVER!!!!
YAY.

I never thought I'd be so happy to see this wonderful thing end. But the truth is, I'm tired of thinking about 500,000 different kinds of stratified flows, and remembering everything I've ever tried to learn about the differences between the turbulent, gradient, flux, and stratification Richardson numbers, the convergence of vortices, and the appropriate Reynolds number at the transition from 2D to quasi-3D turbulence for Kelvin-Helmholtz billows. I'm over discussing SCAMP processing with every other person who has ever used one. I'm done with trying to sketch out code for derivation of vertical dissipation rate of TKE from ADCP measurements with Joe Schmo, and then realizing Joe wrote the definitive paper on internal wave steepening over continental shelves, so there is no reason to argue with him. Enough, enough, enough. phew.

Oh, and I'm ready to be done with the 100degF conference rooms and lack of oxygen... talk about feeling lightheaded. phew. If I haven't said it before, don't visit Rome in August, unless you have a portable ice box.

Cool thing I learned today: Chloe Winant and her dad, Clint, are in the same field (fluids). COOL. they're both at the conference. I guess fluids runs in families.

So. One more day in Rome. I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I've been invited on a biking trip with a couple of grad students and post-docs from Scripps, and a tour with a couple of people around the city. I think I might just head out on my own, though, even if it would be a great idea to "network". I have an intense desire to wander the city alone, though I'm not sure why. Maybe I'll find some more random people to talk to, maybe I'll be spat upon by another crazy lady, maybe I'll stumble upon the most beautiful little place in the city, or walk along the Tiber, or head out to the beach.

I don't care about the tourist places. Rome is lovely, but I think it's more lovely for the city it is now than the city it once was, 2000 years ago. History is wonderful, and I love how it is integrated into the very fabric of this place, every old building still lived in, frescoes randomly scattered among the posters for 'NUOVO CELLULARI' and 'Rent Scooter'. But the ruins... they're ruins. I'm glad they're preserved and still around for the world to appreciate, but what makes a city isn't its tourist destinations.

What makes a city, and what makes each city different from others, is the unique ways its citizens make it their own. No one ever thinks they can own a city. But everyone lays claim to a corner of it, from sheer familiarity if nothing else. And those people change the place while they're there, they change the feel and the use of the space, the decoration and the purpose and the reason it exists.

Even those who visit change a place. I've become familiar with this corner of Via Cavour in the last week, as it has become familiar with me. No longer do I have to think before choosing which side of the street I'll walk on. No longer do the cafe owners offer me 'ice cleam' and 'gelatopizzaflenchaflies' as I walk by. They know I'm not a first time tourist, they recognize me. The guy at the cafe downstairs who cat-called me the first night I was here now nods and smiles respectfully. It's amazing the change a single week can make.

But I won't have a lasting impact on this city. Only those who can claim it as home really will. There seems to be some sort of threshold of involvement, time spent in a place, signing a lease, or something... that decides if you will change it. I don't know what that threshold is. And I think it changes from city to city. But all I can do is sit and appreciate the people who make this city their own, who love the buildings as home, who take every day here as part of their lives, dealing with tourists and making it work.

In Honor of Fred Browand, who is Actually Still Alive and in the Front Row.

well, then.

Day 3 of conference: complete.
Since I've unfortunately been getting very little sleep while staying up writing these blog posts, I'm going to keep today's short and sweet in the hopes I sleep more than 6 hours (I'm all screwed up with jet lag still anyway, so it might not make a difference).
Today was LONG, though they actually managed to get the air conditioning working, which was SWEET. It's ridiculously hot here in the middle of the day. We have lunch out in the courtyard of the cloister, meaning we're in about 95degrees. Fortunately, though, they understand that and feed us random cold things (it's also a great way to keep people from eating very much and thus saving on catering, cha-ching!).

Highlights of today:

• morning coffee break was spent with Lynn Gelhar in front of my poster, discussing AUVs and potential methods of calculating dispersal (turns out that was his niche of hydrology)
• played Set during one of the lectures with a random guy I never learned the name of 
• managed to catch Jon Nash and pick his brain for twenty minutes about how to identify internal wave packets in my data
• learned that my data might be crap, or that our IW calcs might be advected fluid instead of mixing...
• Larry Armi gave a ridiculously good lecture on the "touching case" of exchange flows 

Larry Armi giving a lecture on the "touching case" of stratified exchange flows *BRAIN CRUSH*

• one of the Canadian professors dressed up as Jorgen Holmboe in honor of Fred Browand, who has heralded the importance of Holmboe instabilities since the 70s (part of a set of two lecture blocks in his honor, Audric thought the guy was dead until "Jorgen" walked in and started addressing a guy in the front row)

One of the Italian professors (bottom left) as Jorgen Holmboe, the colors didn't turn out, sorry.

• visited St Peter's again, arriving 20min before closing, found that the cathedrals of California had sponsored a plate in the floor of the basilica (WHAT DOES THIS MEAN??), and saw the creche where Pope John Paul II is buried (is he a saint yet? I though I heard something about that)

inside St Peter's looking west. basilica panorama forthcoming.

• had a delightful Neapolitan style pizza at the first restaurant we've actually found open that was mentioned in my Rough Guide

Recafe ovoline pizza nom nom nom

• walked up the Spanish Steps (nothing next to Berkeley Hills!) and tried to convince one of the guys selling laser pointer things that we'd buy one only if he could catch the top of St Peter's from there with it (it was dark)
• walked past the crazy stores on the upper part of Via del Corso, and learned that you can spend >900eu on a down jacket in the middle of 95degree heat, and that Hermes scarves will run you in the several hundred euro range (what?????)
• walked along the Tiber and oggled the ridiculous summer restaurants on the banks (which must smell nasty, there's so much gunk and marsh), listening to a band pretend to be Simon and Garfunkel
• got kicked off the bus and a 50euro ticket for not having stamped my bus ticket correctly

This last one deserves some explanation. We got out of the conference around 5:45, back to the hotel around 6ish, and decided to head to St Peter's before it closed at 7. Now, this is rush hour, so we ran to the Via Nazionale to catch the 64 bus over to Vatican City (else it would have been about 30min walk). The bus was crammed to the gills, and we split up to get on. On Roman buses, you have to get a ticket at a Tabaccheria (tobacco/lottery shop) and stick it in a machine in the middle of the bus when you get on, or else you risk getting thrown off by the occasional police that come on the bus. Well. There was no way to the middle of the bus when we got on because it was chock-filled with people, and in my hazy post-conference-day-staring-and-sleep-deprivation-mode, I forgot to punch said ticket on my way to being shoved into a seat by oncoming passengers. So when the guys came on the bus to check tickets, of course I hadn't managed to get mine stamped. The guy asked for my passport (!?!) and took it with him (!?!) to the front of the bus and made me get off at the next stop (!?!?!?!?!). Fortunately, Audric and Julia saw this and got off with me. The guy promptly gave me the option of paying him 50 euros or paying 100 euros later at a post shop. I assumed this was a sour deal, but it would be cheaper this way (probably?), so I handed him 50eu. I'm not unaccustomed to having to pay people off (in other countries...). He wrote me a ticket for 50eu, though, so maybe that wasn't all crap... anyway. that was the most expensive bus ride I've ever taken. And we didn't even get to our destination! Boo. Note to self: no more traveling while tired.

Overall, though, I'd say today was a success, despite my wallet being $70 lighter. :)

And the best part of the day: walking by a restaurant late tonight and seeing this beautiful tomato art:

yes, please. all you ever need on one plate.

liquidi stratificati meravigliosi

okay, yeah, I used babelfish for that one. Sorry. I wasn't about to try to find the word "stratified" in my Just Enough Italian: How to Get By and Be Understood. Not that I think it'd be in there, unless the reference was to a vinaigrette or something (nerd overload, I know, sorry).

Well, today started in an interesting manner, as I was awoken by a knock on my door that made me literally jump out of my bed. Fortunately, I did not hit anything on my way to answering it (not sure how I managed to find my keys to unlock it either, but apparently I was startled into a sixth sense... I can't usually even find them when I have my contacts in, for that matter). There was a shape leaned over in a hunchback-like manner, mumbling to me in broken it-english. I had no idea what it said until later, but nodded, hoping it would leave me alone to find my eyeballs. And the figure scurried off after five seconds of this, and I was left to slow my heartbeat and splash water on my face to wake up (as it was already about 85degF at 7:30am, I was ready to go jump in the Trevi Fountain NOW PLEASE). When I woke up enough to reprocess what the guy said, it occurred to me that he was the dude on duty at the front desk. I asked yesterday if I could borrow an alarm clock since my phone doesn't know what time it is (Verizon apparently doesn't travel to Europe, only to NZ). Unfortunately, no, they said, but we can call you in the morning to wake you up (my room has a TV and phone line and sink, but no clock or toilet or shower). But apparently the phone line in my room is broken (as is the mini-fridge), so he had to come knock on my door to wake me up. Phew. That gave me a fright.

Beyond that, it was the second day of the conference. Audric and I listened to a bunch of interesting presentations, a bunch of boring-as presentations, and a bunch of poor PhD students you just have feel extreme pity for because you can tell they've never given a presentation before. Jon Nash gave a wonderful keynote lecture about the unpredictability of internal wave behavior in the presence of inhomogeneous topography, essentially telling me that my PhD is going to be ridiculous and I won't be able to draw any real conclusions given the data I have, and then failed to answer my question regarding wave packet identification by telling me that they were identified by changes in the vertical velocity (no duh, but that doesn't define packets, just IWs). On the bright side, this prompted Sonya Legg one of the three or so female senior researchers in the conference, to introduce herself to me. That was nice. And I had lunch with Lynn Gelhar again, along with a discussion of the pros and cons of presentations and posters. I think he was just trying to make me feel better.

The poster session went well enough, though unfortunately Rocky Geyer didn't show up, though I really wished he had (he was signed up for a poster... and I wanted to plant a seed in his brain that I would love to do a postdoc with him in three years or so at Woods Hole). Actually, of about thirty posters, only about ten of us showed up. And only about five of us actually were with our posters during the session time (which happened to correspond with coffee hour in the afternoon). I was hoping that Larry Armi would come over, but he just stopped by and moved on. Christine (a Stanford student who had also made her poster the wrong way) and I stole one of the Nortek dude's easel boards to put up our posters, and it was a madhouse trying to keep them up. Unfortunately, not very productive... the most productive comments/questions came from Audric, though I did get a chance to talk to several other SCAMP users and find that my swinging velocity isn't abnormal... it appeared off the coast of France, as well.

It turns out there are some people from NZ here, so I'm going to try to get a chance to meet them tomorrow. The scene in the keynote lectures is hilarious: in the first row near the door sit about seven old men with white hair and beards. They are rowdy and talk over each other, even during the lecture, and you'd think they were graduate students. But if you were to read their nametags, you would find yourself in the presence of many of the fathers of modern fluid mechanics and oceanography, from Scripps to MIT to Woods Hole to Oregon State to Cambridge to U. Western Australia. It's a ridiculous bunch, but knowing there are such great minds in the room simply enthralls me.

After sweating through the poster session (both literally and figuratively, as the posters were outside), there were more lectures (including Audric's) and I finally had a chance to sketch a little more. The cloister the conference is being held in (the Faculty of Engineering) is ridiculously gorgeous. I wish O'Brien were this nice!

 

 Sangallo Cloister, Universita di Roma la Sapienza

But I guess that's what you get for being around since the 12th century. 

At 7:30pm, Julia, Audric and I headed out to roam and have dinner in the Trastevere neighborhood, across the Tiber from where we're staying (and a bit). It's supposed to be the best place for nightlife, and if the packed cafes were any indication, they were right.

 

Via Della Scala, 8:45pm

We ended up finding the place we wanted to go for dinner was closed (not surprising, really, as this is the time of year when lots of restaurants have vacations). We ended up somewhere that ended up being pretty dang good, even without knowing anything about it and despite the high tourist population. So now commenceth food blog: we shared mozzarella di bufala with shaved black truffles:

and then for dinner, risotto with porcini, sausage and ricotta salata (yes! meat! though now my stomach isn't happy):

AND a bottle of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo (nom nom), called "Ilius". Amazing.

And as we were walking back to the hotel (gotta love those nighttime city streets), there was a place selling ricotta granita. If you're familiar with granita, you will understand that is rather strange, as the creaminess isn't associated with granita much. It wasn't the best thing I've ever had, but hey, when in Rome, right?

What a day.

en Roma, Senatus Populusque Romanus

Thus commenceth ISSF2011, or, the 7th International Symposium on Stratified Flows. We have ridiculous backpacks (Audric managed to escape that fate) and four days of lectures to look forward to. Today was the 'master classes', meaning they broke up the grad students according to research topic (kinda) and had us present our work to each other. The main issue being, there was no real organization, so nobody really knew what to present. I threw together something last night, primarily from the presentation I gave to EFM in April (and heaven knows how things have progressed since then). By a horrible twist of fate, my presentation was eaten by PPT2003, and in a rush I had to convert it to a pdf (bye bye effects, hello confusing images). And about ten extra slides that I had hidden from the original presentation about Batchelor theory. gah. what a nightmare.

So something I learned today: when Larry Armi is going to be in the crowd, DON'T MESS UP. [dang.] That man doesn't like to listen to things he is bored by.. and he was bored by a lot of the presentations, and asked me to cross off which ones had been given already (he came in late). Fortunately, though, Clint Winant came over and introduced himself afterward, and said he liked my presentation (ha! yeah right). That was nice, at least.

I must say, I love the Italian way of doing things... rather slow, methodical... with lots of coffee breaks (though the accent isn't the same, I hear Andreas in my head every single time one of the organizers announces it). In the States it'd be.. well actually, it would probably be similar, except every coffee break would be accompanied by five-day-old pastries. At least here it's espresso and cookies.

So random list of memorable things that happened today: found a real Salumeria (this one); was spat upon by a signora pezzasca (crazy lady) in the Piazza Navona, who a minute later proceeded to start yelling across the square; had pizza bianca from Forno for lunch, on the east bank of the Tiber; was complimented in Italian on my tiny sketch of gothic windows, and tried (but failed) to have a conversation with him; realized that not only is my poster the wrong size, it is the wrong direction (is hamburger, not hot dog orientation), and found a solution (one of the Stanford students did the same thing, so we'll put them together on two boards); met Lynn Gelhar over pizza; wandered around the city for the night and watched traffic, and buses, go by the piazza.

I don't know why, but I've always loved cities at night. I'm not sure what it is about them, but somehow they feel more alive than during the day. All of the ugly bits become fuzzy, all of the stark sadness goes away. There is a special kind of energy, particularly on summer nights, particularly in cities where people stay out until all hours... eating at cafes on the street, wandering around with a gelato, or just wandering in general. You can feel the city's heartbeat in the background, thump-thump-thumping to an unknown band, a set of accordionists playing over each other to form a beautiful inharmonious symphony.

And a guy playing the accordion is sitting below my window right now, at the restaurant that closes at 1am. (he just struck up 'when the saints go marching in') Via Cavour is still busy, even now. But the shutters on my windows open up onto the corner, and all is well with the world.

To appease those not on facebook, here is one picture to go by so far:

yeah, Coloseo.

Roma walkabout

After sleeping for 11 hours last night (with the time difference and -52hrs, I was zonked), I awoke to Julia knocking on my door. Surprise, surprise! Audric had told me she'd be arriving in the morning... I suppose I just didn't expect to get up so late. But Rome is an easy place to be lazy, especially when it's 90degF out and 80% humidity. That's why August is not a popular month to visit, and why my hotel room only cost 290Eu for seven nights (besides the fact that it's the exact shape and size of a closet).

Julia and I had a lovely time being mostly asleep, wandering around the city. It was hilarious, she kept mentioning that it all felt surreal, like she was in a dream. I had felt the same the day before, so I wasn't as comatose, though there were several times when I thought I'd lost her.

After lunch at a wee cafe, we sort of went searching for a skirt for me. Unfortunately, all I packed was business casual, so I've been panting like a dog for the past two days... hence skirt search-age. But alas, to no avail... it's hard to remember that I am simply freakishly huge, and the idea of a "tall" doesn't exist in Italy. Most of the sundresses wouldn't cover my derriere significantly. Such is life.

We found a couple of nice little back streets, as you are wont to do while roaming in Rome, and purposely avoided the most touristy places. And we fell in love with the misters- lots of outdoor cafes have fans that simultaneously blow and mist their customers under umbrellas. And as most cafes have outdoor seating in the street, it's easy enough to continue walking along the sidewalk to catch the edge of the mist plume.

After a nap, Audric arrived in town, and we headed out to dinner, via the Colosseum. The light was perfect for photos, so we had a good time with that... and then wandered around trying to find a place to have dinner. On the way we found one of Rome's famous public fountains- drinking fountains everywhere! with delicious cold water running! (this part scares me, env engr that I am). And beyond the typical fountain, this one had THREE spouts, so we all filled up simultaneously. It was hilarious, and I wish I had gotten a picture. And here we were, worrying about drinking tap water in Rome.

None of the places recommended in my Rough Guide were open, so we ended up at a little place called Restaurant Tempio di Mecenate, near the Vittorio Emanuele. The food was decent, prices about normal, though they had a heavy hand with the salt. Not too bad for walking in off the street. Dinner was followed by gelato at one of the oldest gelaterias in the city- Giovanni Fassi. It was actually a MASSIVE place, and filled with people (primarily tourists). But the gelato lived up to its name, so that's fortunate at least.

What a day. what a day.