Angels and Demons

Buckle in, this is gonna be a long one.

I considered numerous possibilities for this blog title as this last week unfolded:
"Land of the Mole People"
"What a long strange week it's been"
"Attack of the Mole People"
"The Mole People Strike Back"
"Grand Torino"
"Unlucky 13"
and
"The trip from hell"

But in the end I'd have to say that the blog title I picked probably picks up best on the major theme of this trip to Torino. We had both the good and the bad; we ran into angels and demons. (Houston, we have blog title.) It was the trip from hell to heaven. If only I'd taken the bus I could've called it The Great Divorce (here be spoilers). Okay, so now I might be stretching it...
(By the way, for the pop-culture-challenged, media-starved people out there, how can you not know about the title's sly reference to the famous novel-turned-movie by Dan "Da Vinci Code" Brown? It involves both CERN and Italy. I even made reference to it at the end of my last blog...)

Then I thought of how best to organize this blog: chronologically, or by participant? Maybe I'll do both and see how it works out.

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The first angels of our trip were a couple Italians from Torino who helped us find a place to stay, among other things. My colleague Paolo is a great guy to know and socialize with, an Italian with a lisp. He put us in touch with Nadia, an older Italian woman from INFN, the Italian institute that was putting on the workshop. She in turn told us about a hotel called Residence Sacchi that her husband's colleagues from Australia routinely stayed at. It was indeed a great place to stay, not even what you think of in a normal hotel, with a secure entrance off the street leading to a nice quiet courtyard, an office, and a collection of rooms. Our room afforded lots of amenities for a reasonable price: fridge, microwave, stovetop, dishwasher, high ceilings, hardwood floors, windows looking out on the courtyard, "Sky" British satellite TV, separate bedroom with a king-size bed, and a jacuzzi bath. Plus they had a high-chair and two pack-n-plays set up for each kid when we arrived, and free parking out front!



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In addition, Nadia lined up her babysitter to come over on Wednesday night to sit in our apartment while B slept and we went out for a dinner put on by CMS. And then she came to pick us up at the hotel because she knew the tricks of where to park better than me. She even offered to have K come over to her house on Thursday.

The dinner was at a fine Italian restaurant, with multiple courses. K was particularly impressed with the red wine, like no other dry red wine she had ever tasted. All of the courses were particularly tasty, and we enjoyed conversing with Paolo and his wife, who's from the U.S. Unfortunately I neglected to get a picture of them.

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The trip to Torino Wednesday morning was largely uneventful. The tunnel through Mt Blanc


("Bianco" in Italian) is long, and has a storied history. As a result, they tightly control the pacing of traffic through the tunnel, with a 70 km/hr speed limit and 150m spacing between vehicles. It costs 41 euros round trip to go through. Once on the Italian side we thought the tunnels were over, but they were just beginning - on the way back we counted seventeen tunnels leading up to the Mt Blanc tunnel. This led me to think of Italy as the land of the Mole People (please, I'm drawing no analogy with the Italians, I just loved this movie as a kid).

Lots of castles visible from the road in Italy...

Oh yeah, "uneventful" until we immediately got lost once we got to the outskirts of Torino. Yeah, we had google map instructions printed out, but these prove to be inadequate when you don't have a big picture map to look at - something I couldn't find in the parochial confines of our little communes here in France. Immediately I was plunged into despair thinking I would be forever wandering aimlessly in a foreign city with a language I knew nothing of (I couldn't find an Italian dictionary close by either). But as a matter of fact I kept following the little white signs that said "Torino Exposiziano", and then I recognized from the google maps I had seen more or less where I was. What, me worry?

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What made the trip stressful for me was that at the same time I was trying to prepare for the talk I was to give on Thursday morning, at the same time I was trying to prepare an application for a competitive fellowship (the "Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship", or DDF) that would help continue to finance P&K's excellent adventure ("P&K's bogus journey"? Naahh...).

So I had a practice talk on Monday, and Monday morning, almost a month after the first draft submittal, I got an email from the Physics Dept. Director of Graduate Studies (DGS) saying I have to punch up my research proposal for the DDF and get him a new draft in 24 hours, and if I can't improve it sufficiently, it would be "killed in committee", to borrow a metaphor.

Fortunately my second draft was good enough to continue the process. Then I had another surprise practice talk on Tuesday as well, and a last minute update of my talk late-night Wednesday. At the same time I needed one more draft of the DDF application submitted on Thursday, and had to dredge up "non-expert reviewers" to screen for jargon. Those of you who helped, you know who you are! And thanks.

By Thursday morning I woke up with very little voice with which to speak. But fortunately my voice recovered sufficiently by 9:30 a.m. to give the talk, which went very well, thank you, and I received compliments afterwards. And then Thursday afternoon, I had to leave the workshop to fold in my DDF reviewer comments and come up with some "squirrely words" (so one of my ex-co-workers used to call them) for a particularly intransigent paragraph. The final draft was submitted at the end of my day on Thursday, and I had my first full night of sleep all week. The application has been forwarded to the Graduate School for consideration; we hear back in May.

Little was I to know that the stress was only beginning...

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Besides the wine, K was also perpetually amazed by the Italian people themselves. "They're so small!" she kept saying. "I feel like a giant out here!" She also noticed many homeless beggars in the streets, some trying to look as heart-rendingly pathetic as possible, others not having to try. Older women with shawls over their bowed head, kneeling on the street with a cup in front of them. Men digging through the trash.

K also noticed that the Italians are generally way more fun to be around than the French. Many of them, particularly the women, just love kids, and they don't mind expressing themselves. Nothing will endear you faster to a woman than to compliment her babies! (Except maybe to ask her if she lost weight.) Plus she kept wanting to hear two Italians arguing in Italian. She was even goading Nadia and her friend to argue in Italian for her.

For K, but also for me, predictably the major stress was mostly having both of the kids to deal with, and we kind of knew this would be the case. Yes we were warned, we were. But did we listen? No.... We had tried to get a place for B to stay here while we were gone, but that fell through, and we were being encouraged by one of our "angels" (Nadia) to bring him along. With a kitchen and extra bedroom and DVD player for B we thought that would ameliorate the difficulty some. Still we were constantly planning around his meal- and nap-times.



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Just the stress of planning for the trip led K to do less than a thorough job of packing for herself. She had to borrow my sweatpants for pajama bottoms at night, and we actually had to go to a store first thing on Wednesday so she could buy stretchy black pants ("pantaloni neri") to wear as part of her outfit at dinner. Now that's stress, when you don't remember to pack anything to cover up the nether regions...

Watch out though, because even a "large" in Italy might not totally cover you either. She called them "low riders", and the "plumber's wife butt crack special" (guess that makes me the plumber). She put her gypsy tie-died red-and-black dress over them.

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Did I say the major stress for K was the kids?? Foolish me. The major stress for K was getting her purse stolen! Oh, yeah, uh huh, you got it. On Friday morning (Friday the 13th, actually) I played hooky from the workshop (sorry, J, but I had to blow off some steam) and we all took the trams into the center of town to see the Piazza Castello

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and the Piazza Vittorio Veneto, and the Mole Antonelliana.

"The Mole" as we liked to call it contains a cinema museum and also a central lift up to a turret high on the spikey steeple. Well we succeeded in the first two parts and failed in the last part. B's nap was coming up, and I had to get back to the workshop. B had already melted down from all the strolling and an insufficient breakfast. And then K thinks giving him some chocolate from the chocolate festival (another link) on an empty stomach might not have been the greatest idea either.

So we hopped the trams back to the hotel.


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Our tram tickets are stamped with the time 12:55 p.m. Here's K's account, with my edits in []:

I even know when it happened, in retrospect. I was even warned. A man on the [tram] had asked me a question, in German "Sprechen sie Deutch?" and an English-speaking passenger, who had been helping us navigate, said to me, in English, "Be careful" [another angel, one of our friends pointed out]. I had had my purse slung over the back of the stroller with my hands on the stroller handles. I answered the man in French saying we spoke English. Later, he asked me another question in Italian, I presume. I kept checking my purse and it was there. The man took or made a call on his cell phone. I was uneasy about him, thinking he might be taking a picture of G, so I closed the stroller up so he couldn't. [P: I had gotten on the next entrance over from K, and so I could see her conversing with someone but couldn't hear all of it.]

He got off at the same stop as us. I remember seeing him standing there as we approached him from behind, his hands in his pockets facing away from us...I stopped checking my purse by then thinking we were out from the crowd, away from danger. I didn't notice my purse missing til we were leaving for dinner [six hours later] and Phil said, "Where's your purse?" I first thought someone had stolen it from out of our room while I had been napping and Phil at his conference.

They have video tape of people coming and going from the hotel, so maybe they can see if my purse was on the stroller. But now I think not. Phil suggested that perhaps the thief had cut the strap of my purse. I wonder now if he was calling his helper on his cell phone. Maybe he cut the strap and his helper took the purse somehow. Wow! Right out from under me, in broad daylight, when I was even suspicious!

Well. We were headed out for maybe a quick meal when we discovered this, which immediately changed our plans. Start calling the credit card companies. Yep, turns out shortly after the theft, around 13:30 we think, they managed to withdraw approximately $250 from our most frequently used credit card. Somehow none of the other cards got touched. This brackets the theft to somewhere in the vicinity of 13:13 on Friday 3/13 - or at least, it makes a good story that way, doesn't it? :)

We also lost K, B, and G's passports, and their French cards, and K's CERN badge, and apartment keys. Suddenly, though, once her purse was stolen, she didn't have to worry about it getting stolen anymore. It already happened.

So now K has come to a new conclusion about people living in Italy: most of them are great to be around, just keep your eyes peeled. Now the French, they just stick to themselves. Not particularly enjoyable, but you can bet they don't want to bother you any more than they want to be bothered by you.

K actually came up with a brilliant idea, which I have since augmented, that I want to immediately go out and implement: the next time we go on a trip to Italy, buy a cheap purse. And then fill it up with all sorts of junk; first of all you have to get those springy wormy things that fly out of whatever you open into your face. Then add orange rinds, rotten banana peels, Monopoly money, and particularly little slips of paper, all written in Italian, that say: "Hah, hah! Fooled you!" "Thought you were going to get money out of *me*, did you??" and "Get a real job!" And fake credit cards that say "AIG - Under New Management", and "CitiBank - Bankrupt Since 2009", and "Wells Fargo - Ooh, maybe there's some good money in *this* one! Go ahead and give it a try." Fake passports under the name of Gullible American Tourist and Easy Mark Klodhopper (that one probably won't translate). And then flaunt this purse all over Italy. Dare them to steal it! :>

Okay, reel it back in, P. Back down to earth...no, I know, I know. Bless your enemies, bless and don't curse them. Fill the purse with gospel tracts instead. Urge them to turn from their wicked ways...

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Enter two more angels: Aldo (left) and Caruso (right). Aldo manages the hotel, and Caruso, who also works there, is his friend. Caruso is everybody's friend. He explained to me very carefully that he only knows 10 words in English. I said for only 10 words he does very well.

Aldo came up on the night we discovered the theft and gave us a 20 euro loan to get delivery pizza for our missed dinner. (By the way, the pizza in Italy was far better than in France - and forget about getting delivery in France - but I still miss American pizza.) He told us that he had just gotten out of the hospital three hours before, after recovering from quadruple heart bypass surgery!! And here he was offering to accompany us to the police station the next morning, on his day off.

So when Saturday arrived, instead of implementing our original plan to visit the Mole again in the morning and get in this time, we went to the police station, where Aldo had connections and could get us seen immediately. It took a couple hours to fill out the police report - they didn't even ask any details about the suspected robber. Meanwhile B was crawling all around, back and forth through the police station. It was all I could do to keep him from going places he shouldn't. Aldo sat with us the whole time and helped us to translate.

Aldo and Caruso even fulfilled K's wish and argued in Italian. Until they saw her come into the office.

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B for his part had mixed feelings about this trip too. He loves adventure and to explore. He loves chocolate, too, we found out. "Eeeeeeeeat", he kept saying after that. He doesn't like it when his dad keeps him from visiting the police officer behind the desk, or from crawling into the dirty bathroom, but he can be easily redirected. He likes it even less when he's overtired and hungry, and then you offer him something he doesn't want to eat after he's had chocolate, even if he is hungry (like say slimy ham and cheese without the tough bread), or if you offer it and you don't have a musical toy for him to play with at the same time.

B really doesn't like it when you do finally get to the Mole after the police visit, 'cause his dad wants to try to redeem what little remaining time we had in Torino,


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and then take him up the central lift of the Mole which hangs from cables in the open without a shaft.


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And then after that trauma take him outside high above the city -

even if the turret is so well protected there's no way to harm yourself. No, no comforting little B then, no matter how hard you try, until you get him back down on the ground.

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But B most of all doesn't like it when G cries, particularly when he's tired, which both of them were after a trip home that took almost twice as long as it normally would take, and only a marginal nap in the car. First of all it took a good half-an-hour to navigate the Torino streets out the outskirts where we could pick up the freeway (now that we had a map of Torino from the hotel). Then I missed the last turn off the roundabout onto the freeway. We ended up outside a huge discount fashion store, when G woke up and had to be nursed. For my part I took advantage of the respite to go inside and get a bathroom break. We ended up being there almost an hour. After having left K in the car with the kids and the radio running on battery, guess what?

Yep, car wouldn't start. We prayed, and K immediately swung into action - find an angel! First unsuspecting family that came along almost immediately graciously jumped our car back to life and left with an admonition: replace the battery! "Took two full quarts of 40-weight oil just to get 'er to the Conoco station..." We finally left Torino at 4:30 in the afternoon.

The majority of our trip back home was taken up by what K now tells me was the highlight of the trip for her: K and I having a relationship talk - yeah, you do that in marriage, all the time it seems - talking to each other about things we have to work on between each other.



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After counting the tunnels and passing through Mt Blanc we had to gas up again, feed B supper and nurse G, and change diapers. That was another hour-long stop.

The final insult happened close to home. G was reaching the end of her rope and starting to "uff", and I was trying to beat tracks, as home was only 10-20 minutes away. That is until I took a left turn at Albuquerque. What I didn't realize was that in order to keep going straight on the highway, I had to take the cloverleaf with signs that said "Lyon/Paris", and NOT the straight-ahead route that said "Geneva" - because guess what? That road takes you through the center of town, with dozens of stoplights that take forever; this added at least another half-hour to our trip and put both of them in full-tilt meltdown, with every single stoplight. "Wanna get away?" the Southwest commercial says. Oh, yeah.

Picture Yoda the Honda tearing around the circles in a desperate bid to get home while K is singing what might as well have been "Nearer My God to Thee" to keep the kids and herself somewhat contained. She did better than me..."Bless the French, bless and do not curse them"...

K now says her lust for travel to Italy has been satiated. Guess we won't get to implement the purse idea after all. Not at least until the kids have grown up some.

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So what about G, you say? Apart from the trip home, how was it for little G? Sleep, wake, nurse, cry, poo, get diaper changed, watch her brother, rinse and repeat. Oh, and:

"Oh, ché bello bambino! Bella bella bella! Bellisima! Mi amore! Piccolo quello caro! È adorabile! Quanto vecchia è? Che cosa è il suo nome?"

'Nuff said.

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Addendum: We went to church this morning and found out that whenever you have a story like this, someone can always top you. One guy explained to me that (somewhere else in Europe, I think maybe it was Germany) he caught someone in the act of stealing out of his backpack and bam! punched him in the nose. Immediately out of nowhere nine gypsies materialized with knives in their hands. And just as fast after that the police materialized out of nowhere and all the gypsies scattered. See? How can you beat that? I'll bet someone of you can, actually.

Get some sleep, you've read enough,
-PKBGD