We took a family mini-vacation to Bormio again. This time we stayed at the hotel of the Bagni Vecchi (old baths), whose price includes unlimited admission to the spa, and breakfast and dinner.
above: View from the window of the hotel restaurant
Tourist information for Bormio
^ Ceiling decoration of a pharmacy built in 1555
^ Bormio is a typically beautiful Alpine town, with ancient stone houses, their gray exteriors enlivened by bright flowers
Now that my MBA course is over and I can, without guilt, dedicate my time to non-studying activities, I’ve thrown myself into a couple of multimedia projects which had been on the back burner for some time.
One is a yearbook CD for my daughter’s middle school class. I did one last year almost by accident. During the class plays I sat in the front row videotaping for posterity (and for my husband, who couldn’t be there). Several parents asked if I could make copies of the videotape for them, but tape would have been a major pain in the butt. So I digitized the video using the old FutureTel gizmo (sold years ago by Adaptec as VideOh!) and its included software. Not great quality, but good enough for a small window on screen.
I had originally intended to just throw the raw video onto a CD and make copies of that. But then my creative juices started flowing. I already had Illuminatus Opus, a fun and powerful (and cheap!) software which can be used to create self-running, royalty-free multimedia applications. So, many hours of work later, the class yeardisc included a page for each student with photographs and answers to a questionnaire (favorite food, singer, etc.). As each page opened, the application would automatically play a song which Ross and I had chosen to represent that kid. There were pages on the teachers, the class trip and other activities. Each theatre piece had its own page with the video window and still pictures; there was even footage from backstage and the audience.
I made a copy for each student, with a personalized label, and Ross gave them out on the last day of school. We came home that night to phone messages of awed thanks from the kids and their parents: “This is a unique memento which will last forever!”
This year, of course, it’s taken for granted that I’ll do it again. Fortunately, Ross has gotten interested in Opus and is having great fun laying out the pages herself. We’re using one of Opus’ included background templates with bright, jazzy colors, and we’ve conquered the use of transparency to get interesting effects when laying photos over them. This year the classmates are supplying their own photos, and we have many more shots from class trips and other activities. Ross and I still reserve the right to choose a song for each – that was the fun part.
I’m doing something similar for my own high school class, the Woodstock Class of ’81. I have tons of material for this, since I was an avid photographer during high school, have been class secretary for the last 15 years, and I’ve kept things like old school newspapers. A few classmates have also supplied photos; it’s interesting to revisit our school days from someone else’s point of view, with totally different sets of people represented. One of my classmates is a designer and he’s doing the graphic design for the disc. Tracking down the music we used to listen to is both fun and scary. That was the age of disco: Abba, Boney M, the BeeGees… good lord, we actually listened to this stuff? Daily?
I’m having so much fun that I’m beginning to wonder if there’s a way to make a living doing this kind of thing. The music would be a problem: if I was actually being paid for these projects, I’d have to find a way to include popular music without incurring the wrath of the RIAA.
It was easy this year, as usual, to overlook the Oscar nominees in the Best Foreign Language Film category. If you did, you will have missed a great movie, Lagaan, (Amazon UK| US) India’s nominee.Set in British-ruled India in 1893, it’s the story of a village oppressed by heavy taxation (“lagaan”). The local hero rashly accepts a bet with the British army captain that the villagers can beat the Brits at cricket, a game the villagers know little about. (The bet is set off by the villagers’ disparaging remark about grownup British men so intent on a game “just like gilli-danda, which we played as children.”) If the villagers win, they will pay no taxes for three years. If they lose, they must pay triple the usual tax – and they’re already facing hard times due to drought.
The story is predictable and formulaic, with the British captain cartoonishly evil and the village improbably clean – those starving villagers seem to have quite a few changes of clothing! But who cares? It’s tremendously fun, especially the songs and dances. And it’s much more realistic than many Bollywood films: the young lovers, while singing and dancing, are not miraculously transported to the Himalayas, the tulip fields of Holland, or any other scenic locations meant to illustrate the height, depth, and intensity of their feelings.
The score by A.R. Rehman, a lush blend of western and Indian musical styles, is the most exciting film music I’ve heard in years; I wish A.R. would move to Hollywood and take over from John Williams. (Sadly, the full score doesn’t seem to be available on CD, only a collection of the songs.)
The film naturally climaxes in a three-day cricket match. Unfortunately, cricket has in the meantime become India’s national game, and the screenwriter assumes an understanding of it that I never achieved in five years of living in India, so some of the dramatic tension drained away as I puzzled about wickets, runs, and overs. But of course the home team does win, the local British regiment is dissolved, and the villagers deliriously celebrate as the long-awaited rain finally washes down.
Last September I joined the Slow Foodassociation, dedicated to the appreciation and conservation of good food worldwide. We’ve been to three dinners so far, two of which emphasized wine, and one in which every dish somehow involved chocolate. The wine dinners also featured excellent food, and vice-versa. The international Slow Food association is divided into local groups, in Italy called condotte. Outside of Italy they’re called convivia, which fits: after you’ve been drinking good wine together for an hour or so, everyone does get very convivial!
The most recent dinner we attended began with a tasting of Sfursat, a wine from Valtellina, an Alpine valley northeast of Lake Como. Sfursat (dialect for sforzato – “forced”) is made by drying the harvested grapes for three months before pressing, so that their sugar content – and therefore the percentage of alcohol in the wine – is high, at least 14.5%.
The best of the four Sfursat we tasted that night was Sfursat 5 Stelle from the Nino Negri vineyard, and we had the privilege of sharing a dinner table with Casimiro Maule’, the vintner who created it. He told us a great deal about winemaking in Valtellina, most of which I can’t remember (too many glasses of Sfursat and other grand Valtellina wines!). I do remember that it’s difficult to grow wine there; the terrain is steeply mountainous and the soil not extremely fertile. But Sig. Maule’s Sfursat, and other excellent wines from the region, prove that it can be done, and done very well indeed.
I’m not sure how easy it is to obtain Valtellina wines outside of Italy, but if you love good wine, it would be worth the effort to track them down or demand them from your local supplier. A more common type is called Inferno – yes, it’s a hell of a wine. A good example of this is Giuseppe Rainoldi’s Inferno Barrique, which has a wonderful complex flavor because it’s aged in small wooden casks.
In the spirit of Slow Food, last week Enrico and I explored Valtellina, making our first stop in Morbegno at the renowned shop of Fratelli Ciapponi. We spent two hours there with one of the senior brothers Ciapponi, taking a tour of the shop and its underground wine and cheese rooms, and got a complete explanation of how the local bitto cheese is made and successfully matured. (“I caress these cheeses more than I do my wife,” said Sig. Ciapponi, probably not for the first time.) We tastedbitto of various ages. There were noticeable differences at one, two, and six years, partly due to ageing, but also because this is a handcrafted cheese that depends heavily on environmental conditions: more rainfall means better grass in the high Alpine pastures, and tastier milk from the cows and goats who produce the raw materials.
Sated with cheese, we continued on our way to Bormio, a ski resort town. I don’t ski, and it’s been a bad season for skiing anyway, so why did we go there? For the natural hot spring spas. These date back at least to the Romans; Pliny the Elder described the baths in the first century AD. The Bagni Vecchi (“Old Baths”) have been expanded and refurbished over 2000 years to their present glorious state, which includes:
It was heaven. We spent all afternoon there, and I went back the next day while Enrico went skiing. If you love to get into hot water, this is the place to do it.
Caveat: The Bagni Vecchi are closed in May, and in the summer the water is not nearly so warm – for some odd geothermal reason, when the ground freezes, the water gets hotter. Best and least crowded times to go are probably November before the ski season really gets underway, and March/April when the season is ending.
Speaking of air pollution: What is it about cars, anyway? Personally, I’m not fond of them. Because I went to high school in India, I did not learn to drive at the usual American age of 16. By the time I did learn, I had already been involved in two spectacular accidents (someday I’ll tell you about the Fabulous Flying Jeep Trick), so I am a nervous auto passenger, let alone driver.
However, Austin, Texas, is one of those American cities designed on the assumption that everyone drives, so when I transferred to university there, it was time for me to learn how. It was a triumph when I got through driving school and actually earned a license. I lost a few points on the road test for poor parallel parking, and was surprised when the driving instructor told me: “I thought you’d get 100%.” I didn’t know then that this is actually easy to do in the US!
I inherited my grandmother’s ancient AMC Hornet and began cautiously to drive it. Within a month or two, I accidentally ran a red light in a fit of nerves while trying to get onto Interstate Highway 35 (which has some of the worst-designed entrances and exits ever to grace a highway), and ran head-on into someone else’s car. That was the end of the Hornet, but at least no humans were hurt.
After that, I had few opportunities to drive, and even less desire to. My college roommates both had cars, and were kind enough to ferry me around when needed, in exchange for cooking or helping them study for exams.
During my college study abroad year in Benares, we all rode bicycles, and I travelled across northern India by train and bus. I do not recommend bus travel in the Himalayas: after a harrowing trip from Simla to Mussoorie, I understood why so many of those buses end up plunging down mountainsides!
When I began my working life, in Washington, DC, I was able to rely on the subway. But then I moved out to suburban Virginia. After several months of valiantly trying to do everything on bike and foot (even in the snow), it was time to face that car thing again. My boss let me borrow his Pontiac Fiero to practice on; I didn’t tell him about the time I accidently made it spin out on gravel. <grin> When I finally felt ready, my dad accompanied me to look for a new car. We bought the first thing we saw, a Dodge Colt (actually manufactured by Mitsubishi), on ruinous financing terms.
The Colt and I got along all right. I never wrecked it, but neither did I drive it long distances (I let Enrico do that). We gave it to his brother when we left for Italy, and it went on to sturdily face winters in the northern US and Canada.
I have never yet driven in Europe. That would mean getting an Italian driver’s license, which is hard – people routinely fail the written exam several times. I could probably handle the traffic in Milan, when it moves slowly (the other drivers would hate me, because I’d be moving even more slowly). Stopping, however, would be a challenge, since it requires parallel parking in spaces only ten centimeters longer than your car, or head-in parking with half the car on the sidewalk. I’ll stick to public transport for now. It’s the ecologically responsible thing to do.
