July 3, 1997 - Wednesday 

---

Whereas yesterday was a day of great progress, today seemed to stymie itself right out.  The kids and I started out earlier this morning having breakfast by 08h00 here at the Accademia.  We then headed off to Sodalia to give the information about the apartment to Marina to get the utilities and the phone turned on.  She said she would contact us later in the day.  It turns out that she got a hold of the owner and for some reason now thinks there is a problem.  But the man is supposed to be there tomorrow with the contracts.  I'm not real clear what is going on all of the sudden.  I'm not sure if we are signing the contract for the flat tomorrow or Friday.  Not that it really matters to me.  I have the money together to pay the rent.  Well sort of.  Most of it is in US dollars.  I'll offer to give the man dollars if he gives me a reasonable exchange rate instead of changing it at a change place.  Or maybe someone at work will want to buy the dollars.  At any rate, nothing progressed today in getting into the apartment.  I hope this doesn't delay beyond the weekend because I'd like to be into the flat by Sunday.

Being sent away by Marina left us with more sightseeing to do.  There is a castel in Trento where a WW1 pilot was held in a prison and killed.  There is a monument in the mountains that you can see from the town.  As soon as I can get a good shot of the monument you'll see it up here.  We went into the castel and it is large!  Most of the castel isn't even open to the public.  It took the better part of 2 hours to walk through everything.   The walls and ceilings here are covered in artwork.  Everything from religion, wars, portraits and even a display of colorful ceramics can be found here.  The ceilings in all the rooms and hallways are either ornately decorated or painted. While many of the exhibits here are labeled, it is all in Italian.

There are a tremendous number of room guards.  The most I have ever seen in any museum.  I am assuming this is the case due to the lack of any cameras in the rooms.   The garden you see in this left shot is actually on the third floor!  It is interesting how the interior of the castel is laid out.  There are various open spaces and this one has a garden in it.   The ground floor has a spacious well tended garden.  There are a variety of flowers grown here, along with the customary grape.  I would have taken some pictures of the prison where the WW1 pilots were held before their execution but the space was small and didn't lend itself to being photographed by the digital camera well enough.  A wider angle lens would be needed.  But suffice it to say, these men spent their last days in a 2 meter square room.

After having done our tour of the castel it was time to head back to the hotel and grab some lunch.  We stopped off at our regular gelataria along the way.  We got to the hotel and ate through the last of our food supply.  Another trip to the super mercati was in order but wouldn't happen until after 15h00.  We relaxed in the room for a while and when 15h00 rolled around headed out to the market.  We got our supplies and brought them back to the room.  Stuffed the rig and went out for a walk around town.  We went by the swans again and remembered to bring the unused bread this time. Kristie was hoping to pet one but they are too aggressive for her and she didn't feel up to it.  We made our way back to the chess board but a bunch of long haired backpackers beating on drums were sitting around it.  I convinced the kids that they really didn't want to play.  The polizia came around after a while and started talking to the group.  At that point I figured it was better to head back and grab dinner.  After dinner no one felt like walking anymore because our feet were killing us.  We hung out and now the kids are in bed and hopefully going to sleep soon.

I did try to log into the internet last night but the modem insisted on tone dialing even though I had set it up for pulse.  I'm hoping I can figure out how to get it to pulse dial in Windows NT.  Otherwise I'm going to have one heck of a time getting logged on and getting these entries posted.  Nothing I tried worked so I'm going to have to get a hold of some of my friends back in the states to look into this for me.  I know this modem can do pulse dialing because I had it working under Windows 95 before so it has to be some setting in Windows NT.

Some interesting observations I've made.  On local television there are advertisements by companies in both Trento and Verona and many of them advertise their web sites on the commercials.  It seems the WWW is not only a US phenomenon anymore.

 Click here to see the day's pictures - Warning this will download about 2M of data. 

Copyright @ 1997, Alexandre POLOZOFF.  All Rights Reserved.