July-June 2015: 20 days in Seoul.
I was there for a Summer School about Biopolymers. Intersting eh? Ahahaha… Well, for me it was pretty cool. Before these 2 weeks of summer school I stayed in Seoul with a good friend and colleague in a hostel. We went around, most of the time without checking the guide book.
Work in progress…
In July 2013 (yeah… I did a lot in 2013) I did BUNGEE JUMPING!
Valle Verzasca in Ticino, the italian speaking part of Switzerland is very famous for various reasons: well, it’s a beautiful place, and James Bond did bungee jumping from there in the movie “Goldeneye“.
It was a beautiful sunny day… so perfect to enjoy a free fall in the nothing.
I was with 3 friends: Jovana, Nadine, Alicia… the third one was the moral supporter. Nadine was super excited… until she actually saw the dam! It impressive! The road to go there has a lot of turn… suddenly, after a curve, we saw it. Wow! And we heard the scream of a person doing the jump.
Well, we arrive, we signed “yes, if something happen is my fault”, they trained us, and…. JUMP!
It’s really difficult to describe the sensations… during the first 5 seconds I wasn’t breathing. Free falling is different from the sensation you can have on a roller coaster. Launch ourself towards the nothing is unnatural I think. It’s against our survival instincts.
Then I started to scream and then to think “when the rope will ends?!”.. and boooom! First bounce back! In my case it was a big one because I’m 52kg.
And down again!
The second bounce was small… and then I stop. Head down I enjoyed the peace to be hanging by a 220m dam. I pulled me up I positioned myself in the seat positions with the harness, and I called for the recovery cable. I attached the cable and they pulled me up… also the way up was pretty relaxing.
We enjoyed the rest of the afternoon with cold beers and swimming in the cold and crystal water of a river.
I had such a burst of adrenaline… I didn’t sleep for the subsequent nights.
In 2013 I had the opportunity to attend a wedding in India… an indian wedding!
A colleague of mine invite the whole lab to India, in Ahmedabad for his wedding. I tought: “this is a great occasion to actually participate to ndian wedding! I must go”. So, I sent an email to the whole group “I wanna go! Who would like to come with me?”. We end up to be 4 girls: a Greek, a French, a Macedonian, and me. It seems almost a joke.
We decide to reserve a tour since we didn’t have so many days available and we wanted to see as much as possible. I booked with viaggitourindia.com, everything via email. We flew with Finnair thru Helsinki. On the 12.01.2013 we lended in Delhi.
We landed on the 12.01.2013 at 6 in the morning, but this didn’t stop us to start the tour. Our lovely driver did took us during the whole week around from city to city, from temple to temple.
We started visiting the Old Delhi (Shahjahanabad), the Red Fort, the Mosque “Jama Masjid”. We had to get rid of the shoes in the temples… I got a cold immediately (so I started to bring with what I started to call “my temple socks”). We also had an exciting ride with a rickshaw through the narrow and crowded streets of Old Delhi. It was scary and at the same time funny when we ended up in the middle of a crossroad and everybody were shouting at us.
Colors, parfumes, flowers. So different from Europe!
The next day we moved to Agra… Taj Mahal! No need to say that it is so beautiful to be out of breath.This amazing building is completely made by ivory-white marble. Actually the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum in honor of the favourite wife of the emperor Shah Jahan (reigned 1628–1658).
To be continued…
13.01.2013 -> Agra
14.01.2013 -> Jaipur
15.01.2013 : Jaipur
16.01.2013 -> flight for Ahmedabad
17.01.2013 : Wedding
18.01.2013 -> back to Dehli
19.01.2013 -> back to Switzerland
Once upon a journey... 