happy holidays!

city lights

my favourite tree

every time i would ride by,
i would say hello....

[christie and bloor]

back to barcelona

this time it was november - before leaving europe, i needed another fix...








wish i could take credit for this beautiful shot above. it was my camera, but ruben took it. my fascination with this particular building-the torre agbar-was overshadowing all others. i was mesmorized.

4 a.m.

cinque terre: more than just mugs

[monterrosso]


[vernazza]





[corniglia]

[manarola]








[riomaggiore]


i guess i had absolutely no idea what the cinque terre was when i went. i continually heard people saying they were going there, coming from there, hiking there...i never put it together really. so when i got on the train, i didn't have a sense of where i was going. in fact, at one point i thought i had caught the wrong train because i could have sworn they announced we were headed for geneva. no--genova. as in genoa. as in pesto. i had heard incorrectly. i was on the right track.
i was coming as a quick side trip from tuscany, having finished the season with a little time on my hands. i had some sound advice in hand as to which town to stay in. it was good to stay in monterrosso and base myself from there. i got off the train without a plan but it fell into place easily enough. with the help of a nice woman in a hotel, she connected me with a local woman who appeared from i'm-not-sure-where and rented me a small apartment there. cheap and self-contained. perfect.
i can't exactly explain what got into me the day that i did the hike between the 5 towns of the cinque terre. i was more than a little hungover, i will confess, which may have contributed to my agitation. it is a beautiful hike along the coastline [really beautiful!], and i really did appreciate that. but i would hit these waves, absolutely driven to distraction by all the other people on the trail. this motivated me to walk at an abnormally fast pace-like i was competing against the suggested times given for each leg of the hike. apparently i needed to create a buffer between me and the next people in front and in back...
so did i think that i would be charting new ground? again, i wasn't paying attention to the clues. but the tourists come for a reason. it was another beautiful spot to discover, even in an agitated state.