SAFUN

I use Flickr to store all my photos – all 7702 of them! Wow, I can’t believe I have that many photos. And no, they are not all photos of me hanging around with friends. They are mostly of my travel adventures and social events. I love Flickr because it’s so easy to share photos, add tags, organize them and most importantly they have API’s where developers can build applications that work with Flickr. I have used Blurb and Trippermap, both apps I wouldn’t have known about until Flickr. I really love their service.
Since I am able to tag my photos, they can be searched on. I received an email from Schmap saying that my photo of the Magic Fountain (Font de Montjuic) in Barcelona  has been short-listed for inclusion in the seventh edition of the Schmap Barcelona Guide, to be published early June 2009.

What is Schmap I wondered? I understood that they were a travel guide but I received a better definition by looking them up on Wikipedia:

Schmap is the publisher of free digital travel guides for destinations throughout Europe and the USA, as well as Canada, Australia and New Zealand.^[1] The company’s travel guides are available for download at www.schmap.com, along with a small computer program that interacts with a Web browser to display the guides called the Schmap Player.^[2]

There are currently^[when?] 199 city or island guides available for download from Schmap, purportedly more than the number offered by traditional paper guidebook publishers Frommers, Lonely Planet, and Fodors as individual city or island guides.^[3]

The Schmap Guides are entirely free to consumers, with Schmap relying on sales from its travel store, advertising, and licensing revenue from its commercial customers for financial support

Cool, I thought. I would love to have my photo used for their travel guide. I signed the agreement to allow my photo to be published in their travel guide. Two weeks later, I was notified that my photo was chosen.

Please note: I am not a professional photographer and don’t aspire to be. I do love to travel though and I love to capture images that sometimes I know I may only see once in my life.

When I was in college, I studied in Seville, Spain in the Spring of 2003. I vowed to myself that once I graduate from college, I would return. I graduated in 2005 and the week after I walked the stage, I headed back to Spain with my mom and sister for a 2 week vacation. Barcelona was our first stop and actually the Magic Fountain was the first monument we saw. I remember that day so clearly. We were all 3 jet-lagged but hungry. We went to a little tapas restaurant near the Magic Fountain. The clouds were coming in as if it was going to rain. We walked down to the Magic Fountain right at dusk and just in time to see the lights turn on in the fountain. It was beautiful! I only had my little Canon PowerShot S410 but it captured the fountain perfectly.

I am glad my photo is being shared on Schmap. I hope many others will have the opportunity to visit Magic Fountain and enjoy this beautiful sight.

I am sure everyone has already heard about this but I had to post about it because I just think it’s so cool. Google runs a contest called “Doodle 4 Google.” It’s a competition that invites K-12 grade students to reinvent Google’s homepage logo around a preselected theme.

Doodle 4 Google is a competition where we invite K-12 students to reinvent Google’s homepage logo. Both our country and our world are undergoing significant change and this year we invited students to doodle around the theme “What I Wish for the World”. At Google we believe in thinking big, and dreaming big, and we can’t think of anything more important than encouraging students to do the same.

And the winner? Christin Engelberth, a 6th grader from Bernard A. Harris Jr High School right here in San Antonio Texas. She titled her’s a “A New Beginning”:

My doodle, “A new beginning,” expresses my wish that in the current crisis discoveries will be made. That in these discoveries solutions will be found to help the Earth prosper once more. That those solutions will help the world get back on its feet, and create a better place for everyone.

The logo is being displayed today on Google’s homepage where millions of visitors come from all over the world. Christin will receive a $15,000 college scholarship, a laptop, and a $25,000 technology grant for her school.

She has been featured on many news websites including CNN:

A panel of independent judges and Google employees, along with close to 6 million online voters, disagreed, and chose her sketch as the overall winner from a field of over 28,000 other submissions.

Good job Christin! Way to represent San Antonio, your school and most importantly, yourself. This is awesome news and news we need to hear about more often. There are kids doing wonderful things out there and they need to be recognized.

I applaud Google for developing a program that recognizes our youth for their talent and creativity. We need more companies to be doing things like this. We also need to encourage our youth to search for competitions, programs and contests that challenge them to use their brains.

I am going to print this story and take it my class at Garner middle school, where I am a Junior Achievement volunteer. I want our kids to know that there are programs out there where they can get recognized for their talents. I hope this story will inspire them.

We arrived in Florence just in time for a late evening dinner. We stayed at the Una Hotel Vittoria which is about a 20 min walk to the city center. This hotel was ultra modern with optical lights in the bedroom, a massive glass door shower (see through to the bedroom) with the bathroom all decked out in the color purple. It is definitely not a hotel for a family with children – unless you want your kids to watch you take a shower.

We dropped off our bags and got ready for dinner. The front desk recommended a restaurant named Sergio’s located down the street. We walked down the street and actually passed it up the first time. We turned around and finally found the sign. It is a tiny little restaurant packed with people. Luckily there was a table for two still open. When we sat down, we were practically sitting with the couple next to us because the tables were so close. It was actually uncomfortable NOT to speak to them.

The waitress went through the entire menu with us and explained their specials. She was super nice and accommodating. We ordered the meat and cheese plate for our anitpasta. I had the special: pasta made out of potato with Bolognese sauce. Jason had the spaghetti with pesto and artichokes. We then had our main dish, peppered beef. Seriously, this was the very best meal we had out of all the restaurants.

The atmosphere was great – warm, friendly loud, the service was outstanding, and the price was so inexpensive.

So back to the tightness of the tables. Our neighbors realized that we were speaking English and they happened to be from Washington state. We visited with them during our dinner. The husband was there on business and his wife joined him. We talked about our trip and what we have done thus far. Great conversations.

The next day, we visited the Accademia and the Uffizzi Gallery. The Accademia in Florence holds the one and only original David – standing at 16ft tall. It was mighty impressive and surpassed my expectations. We were not allowed to take photos, of course I did, but the photo did not come out as great as I wanted.

The Uffizi Gallery was also very impressive holding masterpieces such as the Medusa, Birth of Venus, Annunciation and Two Angels.  We were somewhat galleried out (if that is a term). The Uffizi Gallery is located in one of the main plazas -Palazzo degli Uffizi . This plaza is filled with statues – mostly replications such as the David.  We wandered around the statues and plaza.

Then we headed to the San Lorenzo plaza where there is an outdoor leather market. Florence is known for their Italian leather goods. This was the first we had the opportunity to shop. We walked to the food market as well scoping out olive oil and wines. Then of course it rained. It wasn’t cold so it wasn’t uncomfortable. Everyone was just wandering around with their umbrellas.

Although we had an umbrella, we managed to get pretty damp.

We headed back to the hotel to dry off and get ready for dinner. We went to another restaurant called L’Osteria Giavanni located in the city center. We didn’t have reservations but they did have an open table for us. It was excellent and something they do different is their bread – it’s fried. Yum! It was so addictive. I don’t know how the Italians stay so slim and beautiful. Oh ya, they have to walk everywhere and climb endless steps.

The next day we had a bicycle tour scheduled to go through the Tuscan countryside and do a Chianti vineyard tour. It was daylight savings so we had to wake up an hour early. When I woke up, I heard drops on the window. I looked out and saw that it was still raining. I called the guy doing the bicycle tour and he said that it’s best to cancel because the rain is scheduled to go on all day. Bummer.

We slept in a little more debating on what to do that day. We decided to catch the train to see the Pisa. So we saw the Pisa. Everything you’d expect. Not much else to do in Pisa.

We came back to Florence and wandered the streets a bit more. We then headed back to Sergio’s because we loved it so much. They remembered us. We felt like family.

We packed that night and got ready for our train ride back to Rome.

It doesn’t sound like these 2 words go in the same sentence but I have discovered that this is a new trend. Jason and I go to Los Barrios Mexican Restaurant, a local favorite, very often. We were there one night and of course, there are your traditional mariachi’s trying to sell songs to table after table. They found a table filled with all ladies. They were celebrating a birthday or something – it was girl’s night out. The mariachi’s found their gold mine! The mariachi’s begin playing and half way through the song, they mix it up and start singing “Apple Bottom Jeans” by Nelly. They would play hip hop and then finish it off mariachi style. I had never seen anything like it. Jason and I were laughing so hard. They kept going, song after song, mixing hip hop into their mariachi songs. The ladies LOVED it. Too bad I didn’t have my FLIP video camera.

About a month later, Jason and I joined my parents at Los Barrios for dinner. As usual, there was a mariachi band, a different one than from our last visit. I was telling my parents the story about the hip hop mariachi band. They were laughing. As I was telling them the story, the mariachi band there started mixing it up with hip hop. This time I had my FLIP video. Check it out. A guess this is a new trend?

We attended the San Antonio ADDY’s last night held at the Incarnate Word Sky Room to support Daniela Gauna, Chris Bartel’s girlfriend. Daniela is a student at San Antonio College and her professor submitted one of her creative pieces to the ADDY student competition. She won a Silver ADDY for the non traditional advertising category. She was pleasantly surprised and excited for the opportunity. This was my first time at the ADDY ceremony. The ADDY’s is a competition held by the American Advertising Federation that recognizes creative excellence in various forms of advertising. Some of the companies that were recognized numerous times in various categories were HEB, The Atkins Group, Bromley Communications and Rudkin Productions. The ADDY’s will also recognize students for their creative excellence and it serves as an opportunity for students to network and hopefully land an internship. It’s great exposure.

Overall, I thought the ADDY’s was fun. It was cool to see all the various creative pieces in one room and great to realize that all the work being represented were from individuals located right here in San Antonio. Great job Daniela!