A Nano Adventure in Venezia

Winter Olympics in Torino

Anton, his parents and I went to Torino to watch some of the Olympic games.

We arrived and headed to attend the Women's Freestyle skiing in the mountains ready with our Canadian flags.













The Freestyle skiing entrance.














The slope where they ski down the moguls. There are 2 ramps for the freestyle jumps - halfway and down at the bottom.












The Canadian cheering team!!! Go Canada!

Our cheering must have worked because the Canadian Jennifer Heil won the gold!!!








The arena where we saw the crushing women's ice hockey game between Canada - Italy.

Guess who won??

That should be obvious...it was 16-0 for Canada!!! Ouch. We started cheering for the Italian team after it was 7-0. We felt bad for them. They tried.

You probably know by now that the women's Canaian hockey team got the gold.



The arena inside...if you have really good eyes you can see the words "Team Canada vs Team Italy."

There were a lot of crazy Canuck fans wearing red and white and face paint and waving Canadian flags. What an awesome time!








Part of the Canadian cheering squad, completely outfitted with Canadian flags!!!

We weren't the crazy Canucks though.









The other part of our cheering squad!












A picture with Gliz, who's an ice cube..one of their mascots.












Anton's parents with the other mascot, Neve, who is a snowball, which coincidentally in Italian, means 'snow'.









The Men's Downhill skiing event where a French skier just found out that he got gold. You can see him collapsed on the snow.

Only Anton and his dad went to this event. Apparently they spent almost 45 minutes to reach the event from where the bus dropped them off, including a massive hill to hike up. It was very nice of the Italians to give all the spectators a pin for their efforts to hike up that hill!!


The awards ceremony right on the slope! I thought it was strange that it was so informal looking. On TV...it always looks like it's a bigger deal with people surrounding them.

posted by Suanne Tse @ 5:18 AM 2 comments

A Routine Day in Venice

So what's it really like living in Venice and going to school? Well, have a look. First I walk along the boardwalk to catch the vaporetto (ferry). Our stop is called Palanca.

Here's the gang of us going to the ferry.

Here's the view from the ferry to go to the main station Piazzale Roma.

Here's our class....can you tell who's our professor?

On a lab tour at the Nanofabrication facility. We got a talk about Power Press Metallurgy using a combination of micro and nano powders to make metal products, which are stronger than the normal melting and molding process. And they use significantly less energy and tools to create them. The woman in brown was the Bulgarian researcher explaining the process.

Heading to the moon in our spacesuits! No..just going into a 10,000 clean room..which means that 10,000 particles are allowed in the room. So it's really not that clean, but good enough for us students.

Here's a small canal in front of our residence building.

A view of the Residence (Ex)-Junghans...that's what they officially call it since it used to be called that..but they haven't renamed it yet.

This is my part of the residence. My room has the 2 windows on the top floor to the right.

The local Coop grocery store where we pick up groceries for our dinners! And they pronounce it "Coawp".

Hanging our laundry out to dry. No....not really..we have washing machines and dryers to wash our clothes.

And finally, here's a picture of my small room...it' not bad...I use my window sill as a natural refrigerator for some food. One time, I believe a seagull was hungry and grabbed my bag of food!! Not kidding. Another incident was when the heater broke down...it was so cold..I slept my 2 layers of clothes!

posted by Suanne Tse @ 8:01 AM 1 comments