December to January

Sorry for not writing for so long. As you can imagine, I have been very busy for the last few months. I have not even had time to update my blog. The courses on Structural Analysis Techniques and Dynamics were very difficult and the work time consuming. I finished the Dynamics course right before Christmas. The last week before Christmas we started the fourth course, Diagnosis and Investigation. This course was very interesting but also a lot of information to study. We learned all about different types of damages that can occur in all types of structures, the process of the historical survey and investigation, diagnosis of damages, non-Destructive and minor-destructive testing, dynamic identification, and monitoring of structures. We had the exam for this Diagnosis and Investigation course on Monday.

The day of my last class before Christmas break my mother and two brothers arrived in Padova. They stayed in Italy with me until Dec.31st, when they flew back to the U.S. During that time we were very busy traveling to Venice for two days, Bassano del Grappa one day, Verona one day, touring Padova two days, going skiing in the Dolomites one day, and touring Milan on the last day.

When my family returned home on Dec. 31st I flew to Frankfurt, Germany for New Years Eve. I joined some friends there for celebrations and amazing fireworks on the river. We spent three days in Frankfurt seeing the sites.

On January 3rd my friends and I flew to Egypt to join a German tour. We paid extra for our own guide in English and we got two wonderful guides, one in Upper Egypt on our cruise and the other in Cairo for the last two days. We spent four days on the cruise that went Luxor, Edfu, Kom Ombo, Aswan for two days, and then back to Luxor. Then we flew to Cairo for the last two days to visit the sites in Cairo, Giza, and Memphis. We saw so many ancient sites and they were all so amazing! Our guides were so great, making sure that we got to see everything that we wanted to see, waking us up at 3am and 5am most mornings to get to the sites, and even patiently waiting for us when we were late.

On January 10th we flew back to Frankfurt from Cairo. I enjoyed one more night at a hostel in Frankfurt and went out to a nice German dinner with a traveler I met at the hostel from Australia.

On January 11th I flew back to Venice and took the bus back to Padova. As soon as I got back I went to class to find out what I had missed that day and started to catch up on studying for the Investigation and Diagnosis Course.

Just now am I getting a few extra moments to write about my trip and to post some of the pictures. I have also been working on getting the necessary documents together for getting the VISA for Portugal. Next week I am flying to Rome to apply for the VISA at the Portuguese Embassy.

Today SA5 started, Repairing and Strengthening Techniques. We had a lecture today by Professor Modena about repairing historic ordinary reinforced concrete structures, mainly focusing on some case studies on RC bridges in Italy built after WWII. Professor Modena will also be organizing a trip for the whole class to L'Aquila in February to see the historic structures that are being worked on there. It will be a great opportunity to learn from Professor Modena who has so much experience in analysis of historic structures and repairing and strengthening of these structures.

The weather here in Padova has been mild as compared to Minnesota winters. It has been around 0 to 7 Celsius (32-46F) most days. We had snow one day in November but no sign of the white stuff since then. I am sad that I am missing all of the snow in Minnesota (but not the cold). I really love snow and, of course, this is the one year that Minnesota really gets a lot of it.