Jimmy Akin

Well, I’m back from the pilgrimage/cruise now and am semi-recovered. (It was very rewarding but also very exhausting!)

I thought I’d pass along something that I discovered during my preparations for the trip in case it would benefit others.

It turns out that there is a web site that forecasts airplane turbulence. It’s name, unsurprisingly, is TurbulenceForecast.Com.

On our flights back we encountered enough turbulence that they kept the Fasten Seatbelts sign lit for most of the two flights, making it really hard to sit in the airline seat for hour after hour–which was frankly more annoying than the turbulence was!

In any event, you might want to check out the turbulence forecast site if you have an upcoming plane trip and would like to know what kind of turbulence you may encounter on your flight.

Above is a screencap of a forecast from last night (when I was blogging) that shows color gradations on where the most intense turbulence is likely to be.

THAT PAGE IS HERE.

They also have a bunch of other turblence maps, including international ones and live pilot reports of where they’re hitting the turbulence, as well as information about the phenomenon in general.

CHECK IT OUT.

So you know how they say Italian pizza is really different from American pizza?

It is.

Well, it can be.

Some actually isn’t that different, but some is.

It’s all pretty thin crust, which is fine by me. (I did decide to go off my diet during this trip, but thin crust ain’t as far off as pan pizza would be.) Some of it also doesn’t have tomato sauce, though a lot does.

Here we see a selection of pizzas from a pizzeria just a few blocks from our hotel in Rome, and also just a couple blocks from St. Mary Major.

Some of these have toppings that are pretty obvious (or at least normal for American pizza), but a few don’t. The one with white stuff on it is slices of fresh mozarella chese on tomato sauce. The one with green is fresh arugala (a sour, peppery-tasting leafy vegetable . . . which they oddly call "rocket" in English translations over there) with feta cheese crumbles. And on the lower shelf there is actually a french fry pizza.

Now, I’ve read that they do unusual things with french fries in other countries (like serving them with mayonnaise, for example), but I’d never heard of a french fry pizza before.

And that’s not the only unusual use of french fries I encountered. At the same pizzeria they offered hot dogs for sale that had the french fries built in . . .

 

Nor was creative french frying confined it Italy. In the Greek port town of Katakolon (pronounced ka-TAK-o-lon), I ordered an gyros sandwich and got this . . .

Eat up!

And the hucksters were really shouting "Fake watches! . . . Fake watches!"

(Meaning, I gather, imitations of name brand watches–not things that look like watches but do not tell time.)