Mea Culpa

I’m totally embarrassed about how long it’s been since I last posted here.  In my self-defense, I’d like to point out that I’ve been busy working on a number of writing projects for a variety of publications.  That said, I promise—hand over heart as I type this—to be a more regular and dependable blogger in 2013.

About a week ago, Azza and I got back from a ten-day trip to Italy, a country fast becoming one of my favorite European destinations.  For this first-posting-after-a-long-hiatus piece, I’ve decided to write a little about our travels and to include a few of the more than 300 photos I took with our trusty Nikon Coolpix digital apparatus.

There were so many pictures to choose from that I immediately had to establish some criteria that would make the selection process easier.  After thinking long and hard, this is what I came up with.  I decided to post only photos of myself in which I didn’t look like a complete dork.  (Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot that met this basic requirement.)  Because Azza is so much more photogenic than yours truly, I had a larger pool to choose from.  For her, I decided to include those which made her look “European” or “cosmopolitan” or just plain “cool.”  (It helped that she was often wearing a hat that was very similar to a beret.)  The remaining photos were selected because they helped tell the story of our trip.

I’ll get my pictures out of the way first.  This first one shows me standing in front of a picturesque canal in Venice.  (By the way, we Cairenes just about froze to death in chilly Italy.)

  

In this second photo, I’m riding a merry-go-round that was located in one of the lovely piazzas in Florence.  (Azza didn’t initially want to get on the thing because she thought it was only “for kids.”  Quite ironically, most of the riders were fun-loving adults as we discovered during our five-minute spin.)

Like I said, Azza is pretty easy on the eyes.  In this first photo of her, again taken on our first day in Italy, she is beautifying an already attractive Venetian waterway.

This one was taken five minutes after disembarking at the train station in Florence.

In this photo, Azza is standing next to the carousel after we’d finished our ride.

In this picture, taken quite late at night during our wanderings in magnificent Florence, Azza is standing in front of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore.

During the first five days of our trip, we stayed with an Italian couple, Lorenzo and Monica, in their apartment located in Mira, a village not far away from Venice.  In this image, the four of us are having coffees and hot chocolates in a bar in Treviso.

We finished up our trip in Rome.  While there, we met up with Beshir and Noel, Egyptians who’ve been living in Italy’s capital city for the last twenty years or so.  The two are some of Azza’s dearest friends, going way back.  Here we are in front of a Roman shopping mall.

This one was taken in Venice at night, overlooking one of the hundreds of canals that crisscross the city.

I captured this image with the Nikon’s telephoto lens.  I pointed the camera up at the painting that adorns the inside of the dome of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore.  I didn’t notice the Grim Reaper until I zoomed in and focused on this part of the scene.

In Europe, I always feel so creative, so the following images, taken at a variety of Italian locals, are a touch artsy.  I’d like to include them as a way of wrapping things up.