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Homemade pizza

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Some experienced travelers say that in order to fully experience the benefits of long-term travel, one needs to live in the new country for longer than 3-4 months. This initial period is needed to learn the rhythm of the community android establish new routines. I think we are getting to the point of settling in Milan only now, after living here for five months.

Our daughter’s school has a fantastic lunch program. We are certainly going to miss it when we come back to Canada. The menu, which is catered in from a restaurant, is healthy and diverse, but pizza Margarita is her favorite item. They had it for lunch today, which our daughter told us on the way from school. And then she added perhaps the best compliment my wife could hope for as a cook: “But you know, mum, I like the pizza that we make at home much better.”

Making pizza at home is our daughter’s favorite pastime. She always insists on picking up some pizza dough when we go to a supermarket. Ever since reading Pamela Druckerman’s “Bringing Up Bébé,” I have been convinced that cooking is an excellent educational activity for kids. Apparently, the quantity of our practice is starting to convert to quality, if such a discerning critic as our daughter thinks that our homemade pizza rivals one from a real Italian restaurant.

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Ducati!

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Today, we took our daughter’s bicycle to a shop in Isola to fix a hand brake cable. Actually, it is not her bike. We are borrowing it from a colleague during our stay in Milan, because his children have outgrown it.

Last summer, when we signed our daughter up for a week-long Pedalheads camp in Victoria, we could not imagine that her riding would be one of the most important and enabling skills for our sabbatical stay in Milan. In fact, she has been riding the bike so much over the last five months, that the brake cables stretched and had to be replaced.

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On our way to the bicycle shop, we came across a motorcycle dealership/store that occupied tree corners of an intersection. Before coming to Italy, I was half-expecting a Ducati dealership at every corner. If I had seen this particular corner sooner, it would have certainly exceeded my expectations.

As we were passing by, I peeked inside the mechanic’s shop, where some bikes were being serviced. It reminded me of a documentary series that I saw a few years ago, where they compared the manufacturing processes, with all the inherent cultural nuances, of Japanese and Italian bike makers. For example, at Honda, the managers knew up to a second how long it takes to assemble a new bike (something around a minute). When they asked a Bimota mechanic the same question, he was a bit puzzled at first, and then replied: “As long as needed.” Later, as he was building the bike, he stopped a couple of times to wipe the partially-assembled motorcycle clean, because “he didn’t like how it looked covered with oil”.

There is definitely a flair of art about Italian bikes, and the un-rushed way they are built and maintained. Too bad we were pressed for time and did not stay longer and observe the masters at work. Oh, the irony!

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Being selfish

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“Most people think self-oriented and other-oriented motivations are oppositeness of a continuum. Yet, I’ve consistently found that they’re completely independent. You can have neither and you can have both.”
— Adam Grant

It’s a counterintuitive idea that you have to improve yourself in order to be able to help others. That means that at every given moment, as you work on something, your motivation is is both selfish and altruistic. But the fact (demonstrated by Adam Grant’s research, for example) that these motivations are independent is even more difficult to grasp.

In the end, I think that a selfish interest comes first. This is what sparks the initial interest in whatever we decide to do. Later on, as we develop some expertise in the subject, we might be able to maintain the interest as we find the purpose (as the answer to the “Why?” question starts to involve other people beside ourselves).

In my case, I am interested in photography first of all because I am a geek and love technology. Second, I love art, and photography lets me combine the tech and art aspects. Third, I like to photograph my family and the places I visit. Finally, I like the fact that my images are useful to other people: the athletes get to see the moments of their performance that otherwise only the spectators can enjoy, parents have memories of their kids practicing and performing dance numbers, etc.

Paradoxically, we do things we love mostly for ourselves, yet we seek external validation and are delighted by it.

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Lake Como

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Last Saturday, we went to Lake Como. Here are some notes, if you are coming just for a day trip, as we did:

  1. The town to visit is Bellagio. On the map, the lake famously looks like a stick-figure man with legs striding apart. Bellagio is located right where … it makes it a subject of crude jokes.
  2. There is no train from Milan to Bellagio. The way to go is through the town of Como, which is located at the end of the left foot, and not through Varenna (although we didn’t try the latter route).

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  3. There are two train stations in Como. A more convenient one (closest to the ferry harbour) is Nord Lago. Unfortunately, you cannot get to it directly from Milano Centrale (you need to start from Cadorna FN). The trains from Centrale come to the other station in Como (St. Giovanni). It took us 20 min to walk to the habour from there.

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  4. From Como to Bellagio, there are four options: bus, taxi, “fast boat” and “slow boat”. The ride on a slow boat is fantastic and is actually the highlight of the day trip. We took the fast boat on the way to Bellagio and the slow boat on the way back. The latter is much better – you are not locked inside the cabin, and the views are spectacular. It is really slow though (the one-way trip takes more than two hours). We were lucky that our five-year-old daughter was a seasoned traveler, but at that age you can get excited by only so many views of posh lakeside villas in a day.
  5. A single day trip might be too short for a truly relaxed experience. We were not rushed per se, but we were aware of the boat and train schedules, which was a bit distracting for me personally.

For photography, a telephoto lens is a must-have. The slow ferry does stop at nearly every town and brings you close to the beautiful buildings, but a long lens is indispensable for compressing perspective of the multiple layers of mountain rangesMy 70-200 weighs as much as the rest of my gear, but I used it 90% of the time (not counting the GoPro, which I camped to the railing on the ferry and just let it run during the entire ride).

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Work or hobby?

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“First comes interest.”
— Angela Duckworth.

My former PhD advisor used to tell his graduate students that in order to develop expertise in one’s field of research, the study itself, i.e. reading scientific papers, working out the details of math and physics, has to become a hobby. This is what Richard Feynman called “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out”.

I recalled this as I have been reading an excellent book by Angela Duckworth called “Grit” on the importance of stick-to-it-iveness and ways of cultivating it. One point that she makes, which is kind of a truism if you think about it, is that it is easier to stick to something if you love what you do, i.e. if you have a personal interest in the subject.

What is less obvious is that this interest develops gradually. For example, I don’t expect my students to be gung ho about fluid mechanics right away, even at the graduate level. Likewise, my daughter didn’t have much enthusiasm for her first golf lessons.

Curiously, and conversely, what initially starts as an exciting personal interest inevitably acquires less enjoyable (read ‘boring’) aspects of a real job. With photography, for example, they say that to become a professional photographer is a sure way to kill a good hobby.

Personally, I am glad to have an opportunity to do photography at a professional level. I think that it adds a lot of quality to the craft, both technically and in terms of the purpose. It is satisfying to know that my photos have a life beyond my hard disk. This is the answer to the all-important “Why?” question that keeps me chipping away at processing a high-wolume dance photo shoot or getting out to a late-night basketball game.

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Bosco Verticale

DSC00239_03-31-2017I read about this building, called ‘vertical forest’, six months before coming to Milan for sabbatical. It really captured my imagination. Just think about the concept: large trees growing on every balcony of a skyscraper, so that even the upper floor apartments have a forest-like view! I was really excited when I found out that my daughter’s school will be near the ‘forest’ – I would be able to see it every day!

That’s a beauty of travel – the fun begins long before the trip itself. The anticipation accounts for half (if not more) of the fun of the experience itself.

Nowadays, I pass Bosco Verticale almost daily on my way to and from the university. I’ve seen it from all sides and admired its reflection in the glass wall of the UniCredit Tower (haven’t been inside, though.) I’ve seen it at night and during the day, up close and from the roof of my building, without a single leaf in the Winter, with blossoming cherry trees in the Spring and now in full green.

Although the initial excitement of seeing this fascinating piece of architecture is now lost (I suppose, due to a kind of hedonic adaptation), partly because of this incredible building, I am glad to be able to call this part of Milan home for these few months.

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UniCredit Tower in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.
UniCredit Tower in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.
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Personal space

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I wouldn’t say it’s culture shock, but there is a noticeable difference between Italy and North America in terms of how people treat each other’s personal space: you have substantially less of it here in Europe. People stay closer to you, they wave their hands and sometimes touch you as they talk, they pat your child on the head as she walks past them on the street. To me personally, this has never reached the level of being uncomfortable. Just noticeable, that’s all. In fact, I’ve grown to kind of like it.

One detail that I notice about these mini-intrusions into each other’s personal spaces is that the fundamental motivation for it is to take some degree of personal responsibility about your and your family’s well-being. People notice what’s going on with others around them, and they genuinely care about it.

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Here is one example: our daughter rides a bicycle to and from school, while my wife and I walk behind her. We travel along a busy street with heavy traffic, and our daughter stops in front of every driveway and intersection to wait for us, so that we cross the street together. As she rides ahead on a sidewalk, people, who go in the opposite direction, stop and check if she stops safely an the intersection. They scan the street for her adult guardians and continue on their way only when they see and make eye contact with us (we are easily identifiable by a our daughter’s pink school backpack that we are carrying). This is not an isolated episode; it happens all the time.

Our daughter also regularly receives free sweets at patisseries and cafes (to her great delight) and pats on her head and cheeks from old ladies (to a much lesser delight).

It seems that respecting other people’s privacy and personal space comes secondary here to the notion that “it takes a village to raise a child”. As much as I’ve grown accustomed to being left alone most of the time, this feeling of being a part of the tribe is surprisingly comforting.

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A new orbit

I have overheard an expression regarding a sphere of someone’s interests: “being pulled into a new orbit,” which I think is a near-perfect analogy of how our children expand our horizons. It resonated with my own experience, and I was compelled to draw this cartoon to illustrate it.

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The analogy goes like this: when you don’t have children, you have a familiar sphere of interests, which develops under various influences throughout your life. If you were a planet, this would be your personal orbit, shaped by your parents, friends, teachers, and other “celestial bodies”.

Then, a major cosmic event occurs, and you have a child. Paraphrasing Neil Armstrong, it might be a small step for mankind, but a giant leap for a man (or a woman).

At first, this child is like your satellite. Her life revolves around yours. But as she grows, her interests and inclinations shape what you are interested in as well. You are being pulled out of your orbit. This implies a certain level of instability, so it can feel unnerving and uncomfortable. But even if you don’t settle into a new (wider and more exciting) orbit and instead get slingshot into the space, think about the alternative – going around and around along a familiar path year after year. So have no worries and enjoy the ride. Maybe that is the reason we have kids – so they can shake our universe apart.

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Here is my personal example. I studied art as a child, and have been painting occasionally in my adult years, in addition to doing photography. I think that might have affected my daughter’s early interest in art. Now, next to her, my own sphere of artistic interests is expanding. We now sketch and paint together regularly, and I even took a sculpture class last fall – my first art class since the high-school years. Isn’t it wild? I think it is.

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A flashback to colder months

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The weather in Milan has so rapidly changed from “jackets-and-pants” to “shorts-and-T-shirts” over the last couple of days, that it felt strange editing this video about a cold January weekend that we spent at the Children’s Museum, about which I wrote earlier in this post.

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Is multitasking avoidable?

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One of the tactics for productive writing (academic and other kinds) is separating the tasks of generating content and editing it. We commonly suggest to students to “write to a deadline” (even and artificial, self-imposed one) and then take time editing the article. John Irving said, “Rewriting is what I do best as a writer. I spend more time revising a novel or screenplay than I take to write the first draft.”

I am wondering is a similar principle can be applied to photography. Wouldn’t it be nice not to worry about exposure, colours, noise, even composition, during a photo shoot and only focus on capturing the moment or the model’s expression? Theoretically, everything except capturing the action can be delegated to the post-processing stage.

To some degree, we already do this in sports photography, where action is arguably more important than image quality. But this is only partially true. In fact, image quality is what separates great photos (even in sports) from mediocre ones. Image quality has many components: composition, subject isolation (from the background), sharpness, exposure, colour balance, noise level, etc. Some of these aspects, like sharpness and composition, have to be taking care of at the time of shooting, at least with the currently available hardware and software. Other aspects, like choice of equipment, shooting angles, need to be addressed even earlier.

Photography is, fundamentally, capturing the light, and if it is not done (mostly) right, there won’t be another opportunity to do it. Even with staged shoots, it is never possible to “enter the same river twice,” figuratively speaking.

In research, we tell the students that an experiment is only valid if it is repeatable, but I wonder if this is ever the case if we consider the physical phenomenon in its entire complexity and not a subset of conditions that constitute the model or hypothesis being tested.

UVPCS Christmas Cracker swimming competition. December 7, 2013 (apshutter.com)