Signing THE contract, museum of science, Italian lessons

So, I'm happy to tell you that I signed the contract for (what will be) my rented apartment here in Milan. I'll be going into it on the 24th of Oct. Hopefully, my stuff will have arrived by then but this remains to be seen. It was supposed to be shipped today from Israel and arrive at Genoa by the 19th. I know the schedule is tight but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will be OK.

You may be wondering if I stood behind my promise to trot in the Terry Fox Trot. I did. It was a lot of fun although I did go on my own in the end (a friend who was supposed to come didn't feel well). Like everything else, also when Italians do sports they are very elegant, they've got these nice sports clothes that they wear. Some even dressed their dogs with the Run's shirt. I have some pictures but they're in the telephone and I haven't figured out the technology of downloading them onto the computer (I have, but the computer is warning me that dire things will happen if I activate it... and since I've had many problems with computers here lately, I'm not risking it) so you'll have to take my word for it.

Last weekend I also went to check out the Science Museum. It's OK, but I've seen much nicer museums of this kind - such as the transport museum in Luzern or the Air and Space museum in Washington, DC. I think its not interactive enough. and also, it's a sort of mishmash of things, the museum is not organized in any logical sequence that I could understand, and you can go from checking out telephones and how they work to looking at photos of fashionable people in Milan, to some reproductions of pictures from the renaissance and then to musical instruments. The connection? I didn't get it... What were very interesting to see however over there were reproductions of Leonardo Da Vinci's models. Really a pleasure to see how his mind worked. That was worth the whole visit as far as I'm concerned.

I've started to take Italian lessons. I took two this week. We're a group of 7 women. Why only women? I don't know. We were the ones who signed up. We've got someone from Slovakia, Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Romania, and I don't remember from where else. Looks like a nice group. I hope I manage it because the lessons start at 6:30 in the evening which is a bit hard for me.

Yesterday I went to a gala dinner in a palazzo in Como. Very fancy. We had dessert at 23:30 at night. I'm not built for this, my stomach shuts down around 21:00 max... But we did some good work promoting WATEC there so I think it was worth it. Italians are very easy going and so it's nice to work with them.

Finally, what do you think about Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize? I read somewhere that his own electricity bills are very high (30,000 USD a year...) But like Yoni said, the fact that he spends a lot on electricity doesn't mean that we don't have a problem regarding the environment. Still, I'd be happy if he practiced what he preached, would sound more sincere to me.

That's all folks for this edition of my blog.