Cycling Around Trento

We moved back to Italy in April 2008. No other place I've been puts as much money into biking infrastructure as Trentino, our region in northern Italy. You can ride on this bike path from Verona to Munich. There are probably 350km of other paths around Trento. In the video I veer off the path 10km from my house and head east into the Val di Cembra, climbing up one of the valley walls to a lake at Molina di Fiemme. I had chosen this route originally to look for real estate in the town of Cavalese, but was too tired to do the extra 15km that would have required.

10 Years Ago

Precisely ten years ago I was living in a sprawling farmhouse made of tin and grass in rural Paraguay. I had been sent to this very poor community of 100 people by the Peace Corps organization to teach the women how to raise killer bees for honey production, thus providing the families with extra income.
Needless to say, I was not extremely successful in this endeavor. After only a few months of getting stung all over my arms and legs and even up the nose, I too grew weary of attempting to domesticate a seriously aggressive insect that obviously did not want to cooperate.

Have you ever opened a beehive?
Even approaching a humming box of 10,000 stinging creatures can be unnerving, but if the work "killer" is included, the adrenaline really starts thrumming in your veins.
You have to carry a smoker, in my case a tin can with burning wood chips inside and an umbrella-cloth air pump. The smell is lovely, wood in Paraguay is often from orange trees, and it decidedly calms the bees. They are in fact tricked into thinking their hive is on fire and so they slurp up as much honey as their bellies will hold, thus making them too pudgy to sting.

Large gaps of time between the last entry and now. In a few words, I finished my Masters in Italy and my boyfriend became my husband-to-be and we moved to the Netherlands.
Amsterdam in fantastic, as you may know.
I've never visited the ubiquitous coffeehouses, but the atmosphere of creativity and determination in everything is inspiring.
And you can speak easy fluent English with 99% of the population.
That's almost more embarrassing than convenient.
Wait - it's sunny outside - must go take advantage of this...