Candice an I went to Athens for a weekend in March. Why a weekend in Greece? Job interview. But the job is in Boston — don’t ask why the interview was in Greece it’s complicated. I did get the job, I’m in a hotel in Boston as I write this.

When we arrived in Greece the taxis were all on strike, luckily the train from the airport was still running so we could get to our hotel. But given that the city has gone from strikes and protests to riots and firebombs in the bast two days I guess it could have been much worse.

Flying in on Thursday night and out on Sunday afternoon makes for a short trip and throw in an afternoon for a job interview and we didn’t see too much. But our hotel was within walking distance of Monistiraki, the heart of the tourists sites and the Acropolis. Which was good because the Acropolis was the only “must see” on my list.

I’ve been to Athens before [confusion.cc], a bunch of the people I knew in London were from Athens and I spent a week there in the winter of 2001 [confusion.cc]. I have a lot of film photos from then. I’ll have to dig them out and take a look but in my memory they are actually better then the shots I have from this trip. For some reason the sun was just harsh and the scaffolding was everywhere!

Anyway, we visited the various sites on and around the Acropolis — the Parthenon [wikipedia.org], the Erechtheum [wikipedia.org]. The ruins of the Agora [wikipedia.org] or Market from the ancient Greek and Roman eras. Which includes the best preserved ancient Greek temple in the world; the Hephaisteion [wikipedia.org] aka the Temple of Hephaestus. We even went to see the Acropolis Museum [newacropolismuseum.gr] which was lacking given that the best of the Parthenon marbles are, um, in London. (Oh yea, it’s like picking at someone’s open wound.)

Really that’s about all the sights we saw. The rest of the time we enjoyed the local food and wondered around the tourist shopping areas of Monistiraki and Syntagma. That’s all the time we had. One day I’d like to see more of Greece than just Athens; the islands and the other big ancient cities of Delphi, Sparta and Olympia. One day. It’s all on the list.

Click on the photos to go to Flickr and see the whole photoset [flickr.com].

Another [confusion.cc] trip [confusion.cc] to Japan in the middle of winter. More specifically a trip to Kyoto.

This trip was precipitated by a visit by my mother and sister to Singapore to see my daughter. Since their flight was via Tokyo, they decided to take a stopover and visit the land of the rising sun, a new destination for them to check off. Candice, Tori and I decided to join them.

Even though the flight was to Tokyo we spent the whole trip, sans train rides to an from Narita airport, in and around Kyoto. This was my planning — Kyoto has the highest density of places to see. And while I’d like to see stuff I’ve never had the chance to see it made sense for my mother and sister to see the ‘must see’ sites in Kyoto on their first trip. It also made sense to go to some place I was familiar with to make it easier to get around with Tori. So Kyoto it was.

We only had 5 days, so we focused on the big must see sites: Nijo-jo [wikipedia.org] the Shogun home, Ginkaku-ji [wikipedia.org] the Silver Pavilion and Kinkaku-ji [wikipedia.org] the Golden Pavilion. Fushimi Inari-taisha [wikipedia.org] and Kiyomizu-dera [wikipedia.org].

In addition to temple and shrine hopping, we spent our evenings wondering the streets of Gion [wikipedia.org] where we spotted not one, but two Geisha. We spotted both Geisha on the same night walking along one of the tea house lined streets. In fact as Tori was playing in a small water fixture next to a door we almost got run over by one of the Geisha when she came out of the door on her way somewhere. No pictures of Geisha though, it was dark and flashing people in the face is not something I am good at.

It was a good trip with the family, Tori had a lot of fun and I have a lot of photos of her. But overall I did not take a lot of good photos. The winter weather and focus on Tori were not conducive to taking photos. I took a lot of snapshots but few turned into good photos. There is defiantly a bent towards good photos in the morning, less time and attention to the shots as the day went on. Still, I did take a lot of shots and some turned out good. Click on any of the photos here to see the set over at Flickr [flickr.com].

I have visited Malacca [wikipedia.org] before but only took a few photos, because I was only there for a few hours. This time I was there overnight but I still didn’t have time to explore much other then the Chinese district and Stadthuys Square [wikipedia.org]. The problem is the drive up and back takes so long. I don’t think exploring Malacca should take more than a couple of days but that means staying a few nights when you factor in the drive and the oppressive sun and heat. Anyway, maybe I’ll make it back one day.

Malacca’s Chinatown, if you can call it that, fascinates me because it is what Singapore was or would be if not for the Singapore Governments intervention. The Peranakan culture filling the falling-down, left-over colonial era “Shophouses” [wikipedia.org]. On almost everything that could count the modernized Singapore has Malacca beat, but Malacca does retain an air of history which Singapore has lost with the leveling and fixing-up of the shophouses.

Click on the photos to see the whole set [flickr.com] on Flickr [flickr.com].

I originally drafted this post in May ’08 — more than 5 month after the trip — and now it’s January ’09. So not only am I a slacker, I’m a world class slacker. But without further sarcastic self-deprecation here is Candice & beggs adventures in Rome [wikipedia.org]!

Rome was the last big stop on our delayed honeymoon trip to Italy. The Eternal City deserves to be the icing on the cake. I mean, this was home to Julius Caesar [wikipedia.org], Cicero [wikipedia.org], a whole list of other famous Romans [wikipedia.org], not to mention The Roman Republic & Empire [wikipedia.org]! Few places rank this high on the history scale.

As with everywhere else we went in Italy the choice to go in November was a bit of a cramp — sun sets too early. But most of the big sights in Rome were within easy walking distance of our hotel on the forum side of the Quirinal Hill [wikipedia.org]: Trajan’s Forum [wikipedia.org], the original Roman Forum [wikipedia.org], The Colosseum [wikipedia.org], The Trevi Fountain [wikipedia.org], The Pantheon [wikipedia.org], and a ton of other things too numerous to mention let alone visit in the short time we were in Rome. (Add to that the Vatican which will be separate post and the amount of sightseeing you can do in Rome is awe inspiring and mind numbing.)

Two slightly annoying things; the Spanish Steps were covered in scaffolding. And, the number of people was amazing, I can’t imagine visiting at the height of the tourist season if late November is so crowded!

On the non-sightseeing side of things; we stayed in a very nice hotel, great view of the tops of the building leading down the Quirinal Hill to Trajan’s Forum. It was the best hotel we stayed in while in Italy, save the best for last. Most expensive too. We found a couple of brilliant places to eat, great Italian food and we at Euro-infected Chinese food at a small place near the Trevi Fountain, but off the beaten path.

Rome is defiantly a city I could live in for a long time and not get tired of; the food the sights! Oh man, and the people are not as obnoxious as the Parisians. But I think Florence just beats out Rome in my list of dream cities to live in. Just walking around the streets in Rome is amazing, the palpable history and the wonderful feeling the mix of buildings give you is amazing.

Novosibirsk [wikipedia.org], dead smack in the middle of Siberia, is not some place I think I would normally travel to. So, why did I go to Siberia… in November? Work. Unfortunately I showed up, so I’m told, in the three week gap of “nastiness between the beauty of fall and the beauty of winter.” That means something about the fall leaves color and the winter wonderland of permanent snow. When I was there everything was gray and mud, rain and wind. But it was not all that bad.

I actually spent most of my time in what could be called a satellite city to Novosibirsk, called Akademgorodok [wikipedia.org]. During the days if the Soviets this was the larges of a number of purpose built closed towns filled with the brightest brains of the Soviet world. Akademgorodok is filled with large academies of every possible discipline; Math, Physics, Geology, Chemistry and the piste-de-resistance the Nuclear research academy. Wide roads, tree lined boulevards and parks must have provided a happy escapist world for the scientists.

Too bad it did not last. Since the end of the USSR Akademgorodok has seen better days. The end of government money funding pure research seems to have hit Akademgorodok hard. Recently foreign money has started to make its way in and local entrepreneurs have started a ‘Silicon Forest’ of high tech companies.

I only spent a single day in Novosibirsk itself — and a winters days is not long enough to see everything I wanted to see. But what I did see is an interesting hodgepodge of a city. I felt the same hectic uncontrolled pace that I felt in Shanghai. Novosibirsk is a city that has grown too fast to keep up with itself.

One of the things I wanted to see but did not get photos of is the Novosibirsk train station — a big stop on the Trans-Siberian Railway [wikipedia.org]. Unfortunately I did not get to take the train to or from Novosibirsk, it takes three plus days to Moscow or Beijing, the bosses thought that was too long. Oh, and it’s not cheap. I did see the big green exterior of the station, but it was after dark in a car on the way back to the hotel in Akademgorodok. So no photos. Maybe next time.

Speaking of the railroad, Novosibirsk has a rail history museum. Everything from steam powered pre-soviet era locomotives to trains make in Novosibirsk in the ’90s.

I did see the Nikolai Chapel, (sorry no link for this one,) once supposedly the geographical center of the Russian Empire. Now, not so much, the Kazakh border is only a few hundred kilometers south.

And what Soviet city would be complete without a statue of Lenin?

The hill top city of Siena [wikipedia.org] is a few hours by train from Florence. I suspect the bus trip would have been better but we had more days than we could use on our rail pass so we took the train. From the train station we walked the 2 kilometers or so to the top of the hill and into the center of the medieval and renaissance town.

The center of Siena, Il Campo [wikipedia.org] sight of the famous Palio di Siena [wikipedia.org] a twice yearly crazy hours race between representatives of the various wards of the city for bragging rights. By the time we got to Il Campo it was time for lunch so we pulled out our friendly Lonely Planet Italy guide [lonelyplanet.com] and looked for a good place to eat.

The first place we tried was only open for dinner in the off season. The second place was closed completely for the off season. The third was an empty shop. The fourth we never found. So after an hour of back and forth around the city center and it’s steep hills and steps we decided to just go back to Il Campo and eat at one of the many places there. The food was not bad but it was a bit frustrating after looking forward to the highly recommended menus of the places in the guide

An unfortunate side effect of our hour looking for food was that we could not enter one of the major sites I wanted to see in Siena; the Palazzo Pubblico [wikipedia.org] or town hall and it’s museum and the Torre del Mangia [wikipedia.org] the 102 meter high bell tower dominating the Campo. Problem was these sights close an hour before sunset in the off season, sunset was around 4:30 when we were there and it’s was just after 3:30 when we got there. The only thing we could do was go the the Siena Cathedral [wikipedia.org].

The cathedral is one of the most beautiful in Italy. The exterior is similar to the cathedrals in both Florence [confusion.cc] and Pisa [confusion.cc]. The inside is much more amazing; whereas the inside of the cathedral in Florence is, aside from the painted dome, sparse, Siena’s Duomo is beautiful. Filled with mosaic floors and frescoed alters.

By the time we finished touring around the cathedral it was dark outside and we did not do much more in Siena. A cup of coffee in a small cafe and one more stop at il Campo before taking a bus back to the train station and heading back to Florence for the night. I hope we can go back and visit the sights we missed some day, Siena was one of the most beautiful places we visited in Italy.