Sapphire

I love Warsaw in the winter.  Warsaw is an amazing city, especially when the temperatures dips below freezing.  Street lights cast a beautiful glow through the snow especially on the pl. Trzech Krzyży (Three Crosses Square). 

Modulor Cafe (Located at pl. Trzech Krzyży 8) faces the Three Crosses Church and has an amazing international atmosphere, that is often over looked by tourists.   The food and drinks are awesome too.  The cafe is also located near the building that onced house the Communist Party Headquarters, and ironically, the Warsaw Stock Exchange too. 

jani

After e-mail, web, Google, tabs in Mozilla and Skype, I think YouTube represents yet an evolutionary leap in the utility of the Internet -- all of sudden, you have not just the information, but the sights and sounds of the entire world at your fingertips.

Want a flashback to sitting at the beach in a cheap Thai restaurant? Here you go. (Or a gogo bar, if that's your scene.) More in a Bollywood mood? No problem. Jonesing for the souq? Yalla yalla! (Although I haven't seen too many skirts like that in Gaza.) I mean, fer chrissake, you can even find low-budget Finnish gangster rap.

RichardOsinga

Autumn really started this week. September was great, warm and sunny, but now it's all over. Say goodbye to sunshine for six months.

Just a quick summary of how much I liked autumn so far: 

• I arrived in the office soaked this morning.  
• An acorn hit me hard on the head yesterday.I think they should forbid acorn trees. At the parking lot at the office they have put nets over the cars to protect them against chestnuts. There should be nets everywhere.
• Did I mention I got soaked already?
• And the acorn.

I need to be traveling, down south, way south. Maybe Morocco for the autumn break. I'd like to stay at the Club Med on the Jma l Fna. Outside the miracle of medieval morocco and inside French style luxury... 

evan

I've been planning to go to the local Wiki Wednesday here in Montreal, so I was reviewing the Montreal Wiki Wednesday page for previous events. Although we've made it to a few of the previous ones, we definitely haven't made it to all the ones we said we would... so be it.

One of the previous speakers was Hugh McGuire, a Montrealer who started an excellent project called Librivox. Librivox is a project to create free audiobooks, with chapters contributed over the Internet by readers around the world. They take books from Project Gutenberg (which is apparently a MediaWiki wiki site now... who knew?) and volunteers read them and then the whole thing gets munged into a nice little package. Everything stays in the public domain (bless their generous souls) and they even have a Librivox podcast just in case you swing that way.

evan

October is a busy month for us. October 14th is my birthday, and October 16th is our wedding anniversary. On our honeymoon in 2004, we took a trip to Charlevoix at the mouth of the Saguenay fjord in Quebec.

 Then, in October 2005, Amita June had just been born, so we took a short trip to Ottawa for the weekend. At this point, I think we've established an anniversary tradition of short weekend trips to cities in Eastern Canada.

 This year, Maj started arranging a trip to St. John's in Newfoundland. I'm pretty fascinated by Newfoundland -- it's one of the oldest settlements in North America, yet very isolated. Its culture is a unique blend of Celtic, English, and a smattering of French Canadian with an idiosyncratic accent and great music.

evan

Two of our good friends here in Montreal are Kate and Morgan. She's a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Rutgers, working on her dissertation here, and he's a game designer. They're from Australia originally, and they just got married Down Under about 4 weeks ago. Her dad and stepmom live in North America, though, so they're thoughtfully holding a wedding party next weekend for Kate and Morgan's American friends and family at their home in Hudson (New York).

We've driven through the area a few times in the past, but we haven't really stopped for long. From what Kate says, Hudson's a pretty town and early October means lots of leaf-peeping opportunities. Not that Montreal's any slouch in that respect right now, but it will be nice to see other people's leaves, I guess. There's also a Firefighter Museum and a Shaker Museum.

jani

Pop quiz, hot shot -- what and where is this?

Answer: Lloyd's of London, 1 Lime Street. And you thought insurance was boring.

reen

Perhaps slightly off-topic, I'm going to risk this text for a Crossroads test blog.

Why do Italians say Firenze and most others Florence?

In an old text on Florence's history it says (in Italian ... a translation in English follows): Primi insediamenti accertati nella pianura <florentina> sono tracce di un popolo (forse i liguri) che aveva importanti rapporti commerciali con la Grecia e la Sardegna. In plain English: Traces have been found that, round 2000 B.C., the plain of <Florentina> was inhabited by a population being in close commercial relationship with both Greece and Sardinia.

A friend of mine (he's not Italian) thinks that Florentina has finally become Firenze just because this fits the phonetics from early Latin flor <> later Italian fiore = (both meaning flower). Fior(entia), then, by phonetic reduction for the ending sounds [-tsia] > [-sja] > [-za] > [-ze] became Fiorenze ...

But the other step? How can be explained the last change from [jo] to [i] in F[jo]renze ??

JohnMc

I recently traveled to a great mountain lake, Rock Creek Lake in eastern California. The primary attraction in the area is the Little Lakes Valley hike from the Mosquito Flats trailhead. It is one of the best day-hikes anywhere. There are many lakes along the way, with a few particularly noteworthy viewpoints. Heart Lake has creeks running into it from three sides. A great spot is just left of the bridge as you approach the lake. The trail then passes an overlook of Box Lake, which is a great stopping spot. Long Lake is also very pretty, and a good lunch spot is toward the far end. If you want to go further, Chickenfoot Lake is fairly pretty.

evan

We made a special stop on the way home to Montreal through wt:Zurich. We flew on Swiss Air, which has a hub in Zurich, and they gave us a free 24-hour layover in town. Fortunately for us, we got to spend some time with our good friends Mark Jaroski and Allegra Biava. They're friends of ours from SF who moved to Switzerland around the time Maj moved there, and they now live in wt:Lausanne. Both are extremely funny, intelligent and clued-in people. They were passing through Zurich on their way back to the US for a family visit there.