I’m at a hotel in Italy on day two of our Europe tour, which has been fun so far.
Yesterday morning the plane landed at around 6 AM local time, and we headed to the colliseum afterward. Today we visited a different city (whose name I now forget and will have to fill in later) and then went to Piza to see the leaning tower.

Overall, Europe seems much, much more expensive than the US (even compared to San Francisco). Prices here are numerically similar to there (a little more, sometimes… for example pizza and a coke are about 9 euros), but euros are worth more than dollars, so bleh. In any case, the tour we’re with did a really good job with meals and hotels. Every meal is really good, and both dinners so far have been four or five courses with decently good red wine (tonight was steak!). Nom nom.

That’s basically it. I’ll see if some of the other hotels have internet later in the trip. Tomorrow is to Venice.

We’re heading to Europe today for a 10-day tour. I’m not taking my laptop, so this’ll be the longest I’ll ever have gone without having internet connectivity since middle school. Kind of scary.
We’ll be back on the 15th. Send me email in the meantime.

The past few days have involved nothing but spending money and receiving cheap but awesome goods in return. Whee.

So I’ve been here for a few days now, and I’m not actually sure what I can write about, since not much has really happened.

Yesterday we had food at a Thai buffet. The food was rather bland, but at least they had a large selection (including a few things I had never eaten before). Nom nom.

I bought the first season of Torchwood and the Planet Earth series here, as they are cheaper (and region free). Unfortunately, the other 4 movies I bought that were marked as all regions are actually region 3, so I will likely want to buy an external DVD drive at some point so I can watch them without changing the settings on my laptops’ drives.

Turns out that I was right, and the shutter on my D50 is shot and needs replacing. This will run upwards of 5000 baht ($150), so I’m basically going to be getting rid of it once I return to the US and buying a D90. It’s not worth the repair cost.

I still find it silly how full-service everything is. Buying something at a department store involves one person to hold the merchandise, one person to scan it, one person to bag it, and one person to take your money and give change. Restaurants aren’t much better… one person to refill water, one person to remove plates, one person to take your order, and one person to bring you food (often on a per-table basis), not to mention the people who bring you to your table, park your car, whatever. I guess labor is so cheap here that you can afford to basically hire a 1:1 ratio of staff to customers, but it feels kind of wasteful.

Besides that, we’ve been driving around getting some legal issues resolved and eating lots and lots of food. Mmm food. Mmm tasty Thai fruit.