Trento and Venice, Italy

Hahaha, I'm not quite done with my travel log yet. The weekend after Düsseldorf, I went to Italy for my scholarship/studies program's workshop. It was a great opportunity to finally meet all the EuMI scholars and get to know one another. We had quite a few fruitful discussions on improving the program as well. Left Bonn on Thursday evening after German language test and arrived in Trento at about 2am. As the hotel was on a hill, we took a taxi, not just any taxi but a Mercedes C-class (could have gotten a BMW 3-series but a fella cut our queue and so we had to wait for another one). The trip up the hill was quite a good lesson on uphill drive. Throughout the whole trip, the guy's revs never went below 2000 rpm. He never braked unless necessary and just relied on down-shifting to show the car down. Fantastic!

Anyway, the workshop lasted till Sunday. Some photos on Trento



Went to Venice after the event as well for a day and night trip with 2 EuMI friends (you'll see a lot of their photos in the slideshow) and another EuMI friend with his family (wife and cute baby:). The place is really beautiful. The first day was a bit cloudy and so the view wasnt so great but on the next day, Mama Mia! I now understand the magic of Venice and its attraction. Just walking around the island, taking photos was quite sufficient:)



Then, I found the Ferrari Store. Being one of the 8 Ferrari stores in the world (a few in Italy, 1 in Spain, 1 in Las Vegas and 1 in Shang Hai), I knew I had to get something there. Bought one of their colognes. Extremely pleased. They had a F2005 on display. Not allowed to take video but you can take photos. I tested that rule and found that they are quite strict in the implementation:P

Then I went on another mini spending spree. I bought a pair of Oakleys. My eyesight's quite bad lately and been wanting to get a pair of sunglasses. What better place to get then Venice, right? No, not really. Everything is super expensive here. But just thought after events of past few months, I needed to treat myself to a few things nice:) I hope people from EuMI dont read my blog:P

The only mistake we made during this entire trip was to fly Ryanair back to Germany. Partly our fault, we didn't do enough research on where we're landing in Germany. Ryanair says we're going to land at Düsseldorf airport when in fact, it's actually Düsseldorf (Weeze). Get the difference? I dont but the difference is that we landed in an airport which has very limited buses back to civilization. So although we reached Weeze at 11pm, there was only a bus at 12am and we finally got to Cologne train station at about 2am. And the next train back to Bonn is at 5am. The travel mishap bug has struck again!! I'm ready for it this time and didn't complain much. Just take it as it comes. Again, I met someone nice to chat with. This time, it's a Romanian journalist who works in Deutsche Welle. We just shared about our traveling experiences and she talked quite a lot on Romania and Transylvannia. Learnt a lot about Romania from this single conversation.