Bye bye Trieste

OK I am pretty sure I'm gaining a good bit of my weight back. It's definitely due to the freaking way I've been eating, my screwed up biological clock, and the lack of running capability here (no treadmill). The streets are too crowded and weird to run. I can't take another minute of Italy simply because soon I won't be able to fit into the clothes I brought with me.

OK maybe it's not THAT bad but I am pretty sure I am undoing about 1 month's worth of weight loss in just one week. That's the sucky part about being a slow loser. I am hoping I can make up for some of it in Germany. Let's face it, I don't think I like German food (hell I don't really know) and my hotel has a fitness room. So no excuses, I can bust it out next week. Especially since I will have a little less committed schedule. The few rounds of the boot camp-derived exercise sessions I've done in my hotel room just isn't enough to battle the calroies I've no doubt taken in.

But tomorrow's Venice, a 2 hour train ride from here. I will be staying at Hotel Luna Baglioni, the oldest hotel in Venice, right on San Marco's square. Once it housed Templar Knights passing through during the Crusades. I am hoping to learn some fabulous history. As for my train ride, Rail Euro screwed up and never sent me my train passes so now I have to piece meal my train trip from Venice to Bonn, Germany on Monday. Wish me luck, considering I've only ever ridden an Amtrak in the US! People have been giving me tips on how to do it all so I'm hoping for the best.

NASA screwed up on my iPhone and never gave me international roaming for data. So I've had no iPhone capability like email or internet the last few days, other than phone calls (yay for that at least). They're trying to resolve the problem but it's one troubleshoot after another and hopefully it'll get fixed soon.

In the meantime I found a little "farmacia" that sold me some all natural "Digestivo Antonetto", finally. Apparently the sign for "heartburn" is universal ;) Actually as soon as I cut out the wine, the heartburn went away. Noted. Didn't need the calories anyway. And I'm WINED out. Then I realized in my haste to get on the plane here I forgot to pack enough hairspray. So back to the Farmacia, where they gave me "All Natural" hairspray. Really? How in the world can hairspray be "natural"? Isn't it required to be a chemical mess? The first ingredient is still alcohol. There seems to be pictures of plants all over the bottle but I can't see it in the list of ingredients.

The cool thing is that most of the stuff the Farmacias sell here are "all natural". How easy it is to walk into a pharmacy here and get something that's all natural, and likely to work, without any research. There's a Farmacia everywhere you look. It's as easy as eating pasta for dinner, then walking across the canal to eat pizza. Which I did one night. (Oh the weight gain).

Today was the last day of the conference. It was an entire day of exercise countermeasures for use in space. Ironically, they talked about Paul's exercise device as one that's under evaluation for future exploration class missions. Talk about feeling weird?! So I took a photo of that slide for him :)

Yesterday they took us on a bus tour all around Trieste, and we went to the castle of Maximillian, who lived here with his young wify Charlotte until he went over to become the emporer of Mexico. Then in a revolt of which I don't remember, the Mexican's (Republicans) overthrew him and executed him. His wife had fled, came back to the castle, went nuts, and then moved out 9 months later. It was my first visit to a real castle, though its only purpose was luxury living and not defense. I am told it was small in comparison to other European castles. Then for lunch we went up to a vineyard and had a freaking feast of fantastic local cuising. No pasta here, it was cured meats and spreads and wine of all types. Water flavored with rosemary, mint, lemon, and something that looked like little weeds but tasted really good. Then dessert and finally real schnapps. PEOPLE. These things were in little shot glasses and it was like drinking Chloraseptic. Just a taste numbed the tongue! I couldn't do it. None of us could, except one JSC researcher who slammed TWO then talked me into it once we got outside of the building. I buckled to peer pressure, feeling like if I was gonna puke, at least it was outside :) I slammed two not even a spinning head came from that horrid moonshine! Thankfully, because I did preface the shots with the fact that I did realize that the last place to get drunk was in front of my NASA peers, which included the deputy division chief of a Life Sciences division at JSC and the head of the Human Research Program. And oh yeah, a couple of guys from Headquarters. But we all had so much fun on the tour, it was great to get to know each of them personally. I had only heard of them through their research or through emails, etc. They really were down to Earth. And I learned TONS from talking to them.

With all of the craziness of travel going on tomorrow and the wacked out time difference, I suspect I am totally going to forget Father's day. SO HAPPY FATHER'S DAY! And sorry in advance if I'm a loser.

Paul and Anna are at his parents' camp for the weekend. He says she's being a little bratty and just oppositional. It's included Time Outs and it started the morning before they left to go to the camp. I hope she straightens up. I know she really wanted to go and has been asking to go for WEEKS and it's nothing we'd even put into her head or mentioned. One look at peanuts and she starts asking about Papa (he shares his nuts with her). It sounded ike other than her bratty attitude (good timing, baby, make us look like we're raising a spoiled brat who needs a good beating), she's having fun.

Anyway, I guess I'd better go do some exercise, then pack and get ready for the travel tomorrow. Without having data and who knows about internet till I get to my next hotel room in Venice, who knows when I'll post again.

I did get a lot of pictures posted to Facebook and Twitter before I lost data. As soon as I get it back, I'll post more.

Good night!