Winter Wonderland

Winter wonderland shots from this weekend. I don't know what it is, but it really seems like precipitation is a weekend thing in Milan. This weekend we got about six inches of snow, and next weekend is supposed to add more to that total. These pictures are just around my neighborhood.

Explain This One To Me...

So I was hanging out with one of my friends in her office on campus. Because of the difficulty in locating stairs, you always have to take the elevator in her building. I noticed these buttons in the elevator.



One set of doors, two "door open" buttons? She pushed the door closed button when we got in, and it stayed lit until the doors closed, but I didn't have the nerve to press the rest of the buttons just to see what the difference was between them. Huh.

Random Neighborhood Stuff

At the Penny Market they are taking down the wall to the parking lot part-way to get more visibility, which means they are destroying some of the cool street art that's there. Sad.



At the Politecnico campus closest to my house, they have some great industrial relics. These wooden "wheels" are molds for sandcasting up on one of the buildings. They look pretty cool!

Giò Pomodoro Again

These three are clustered together in a weird nook in my building. The first is "Hermes con Verga", Hermes with his staff.



These next two are both just titled "Arco". I like these ones, they are pleasantly abstract.

More Gio

There are actually a huge number of these Giò Pomodoro sculptures in my building. I do like a lot of them. This one is one of my favorites.



It's entitled "Folla", which means a crowd, like of people. This next one is "Marat", I think we are talking about Jean-Paul Marat. This is definitely a similar depiction of a person as in the Castor and Pollux sculpture shown before.



My friends Esther and Tom are here visiting this weekend, so you may not hear much from me in the next few days!

Design

My Italian class (and the reconfigurable manufacturing class that I am listening to) are both in the Via Durando half of the campus, as I mentioned, and also in the same building. The building is part of the design center complex. The building is just a huge classrooms complex, no Professors or anything, but classes for a variety of fields in design are taught there. Design incorporates textiles and fashion, architecture, stage design, and mechanical system design. So this means you see different stuff hanging around. For a few weeks the lobby had student designed stage costumes. In the central atrium of the building, there are banners of various famous interior furnishings designers, along with some of their designs. The building itself also has a very defined structure.



Note: that coat-rack in the top was also represented at the Triennale design museum!

Laurea

Yesterday was graduation laurea at Polimi Bovisa. I am not sure about the graduation schedule, I think this is people who finished up fall classes (which have an exam period ending in January and February) but I don't really now. The cutest part was the laurels that were the unofficial garb. I saw lots of folks with the headbands, mostly leafy, a few with some flowers too. Here's a surreptitious snapshot I took before class last night!

Poppies

The spring flowers in the grass patch near my building are a great variety of weeds. But one flower that has turned up along the edges of the pavement is poppies. These blazing red ones.



The long exposure makes the red perhaps too vivid, but it's still much closer in color than the washed out from flash version below. They are a strong red shade.

Finally! An Access Card

This week I finally got an access card to my building. Before, they were giving out the RFID key tags, and they seemed to be in short supply. I was able to do without pretty well, but in the last few weeks, they have started to lock the doors to my section of the building even during working hours, so it was becoming a little more necessary. I ended up asking the secretary in my group, which I should have done from the outset, she is very helpful. She filled out a form, sent me to a funny office, and they gave me this card.



Well, that was Wednesday, and it still hasn't gotten registered in the system... The guy said up to ten days for it to work, and I am well within that window, but I hope it works on Monday!

The Other Half

My Italian class is on the other side of the Bovisa campus of Polimi. The half where I work is right next to the train station, while the "Durando" half is about at 10 minute walk off on the other side of the train station. Basically, a 10 minute walk from my house.

The "Durando" campus has a lot more bright-colored buildings. It looks more like an undergrad campus than my half, which looks a lot more like offices and labs. The sculptures are more silly, too.



There is this odd structure I can't figure out near the building I have class in. It looks like a functional structure in some ways, but I can't figure out its purpose at all. It's in a recessed area, with a bit of underground building. It looks a little like the base of the ever-present cranes, but the cranes don't have so much mesh work or permanent bases. It's so strange. I'm going to have to investigate closer some time I'm not in a rush.

Rainy Italy

So it's rained a little bit every day or night since I returned to Italy. Not a lot. Not enough that I regret not having an umbrella. Just a little bit each day. This has the plus side effect that everything is exploding in green. In walking to school and around my neighborhood, I haven't been exposed to many manicured gardens, but there are lots of trees and grassy patches. The trees at my building look the lushest they ever have. The big guys here are birches.



Anyplace that was grassy has exploded in green weeds, particularly dandelion puff-balls... I am sure at some point they will get mowed, but the groundswork here happens pretty slowly!



Coming in to town on the airplane I was pretty entranced by the green scenery. I want to get out to the countryside soon while things are still so lovely!

Residual Snow

The snow stopped falling Thursday afternoon. There's residual stuff, of course, but a lot of it's started to disappear. The few places that have pristine snow include the tops of cars that haven't been driven since then (a surprisingly large number) and by my building.



This is the largest stretch of snow that's left. The sidewalk outside my building. The fields seem to be clearing up faster!



So as I was sitting in my office today I saw these guys come and break it up, to make a cleared path.



They scraped and shoveled, with some of the dinkiest tools I have seen for this kind of stuff, and scattered some salt.

Gio Pomodoro at Polimi

So there are a bunch of sculptures by Gio Pomodoro at Polimi, we have several in my building. His work fits the sensibility of the school rather well. His pieces are structural, but not without humanizing features.



All the ones I have seen in my building have been carved stone, like this one, with some soft and natural curves, some raw edges, some hard lines.



This one is called Leda e i Dioscuri, after the Greek myth. The dark columns, I think, represent Castor and Pollux. I will take some more pictures of the rest of the Pomodoro sculptures in the building at some point, this is just the one I see the most! I may even go on a hunt to the other buildings, there are a bunch in the Gestionale building too.

Building Decor + The Difference 4

So on the other side of the offices, the decor in the cases is manufacturing products, and cool old lab gear. There are these two bonus cases of lab gear at the end of the hall!



These strobes are some of my favorites. I have to try to get a better picture of them, the lighting didn't quite work out right. You can see my reflection...



I figure I should mention something different that drives me crazy here. Paper napkins. Here, they are very thin, and almost waxy or plasticky. The paper towels are similar, but less waxy. These things do not pick up liquids. And they don't hand out big handfuls of them when you buy food. I managed to snag some fancy ones from a meeting which I am storing in my office for future use, since the ones you get if you buy lunch are awful!

Mechanicals

You've seen the lab space and my office already, but there's a lot of other cool stuff in my building. In the corridor to my office, there are a few display cases. Several of them have old mechanical models in them, and I think there are more of these hidden around in other parts of the building.



I love these sorts of demo models... pumps, eccentric gears, etc. Most of these have little cranks to turn so you can see the progress through their cycles.



I also really like the contrast here of the shiny new building and display cases and the old-fashioned models.

My Lab...

The last day or two has been pretty crazy, as things always are after the holidays, so I don't have anything unusual to share. I've been walking really fast to get places before they close so I don't have too many street pictures! Hopefully I will add some more soon. The train station has new event posters up, I want to take pictures of the ones I want to check out online, so perhaps I will share those soon.

Here's a picture of my lab space, taken from the second floor. (My office is on the second floor, basically on the upper right in this image.)



There are lots of laser cutters and welders, that's basically what you are seeing in this photo!

Italian Class Letdown + The Difference 1

So the bad news is that due to disorganization at the university, I am no longer in the official Italian class. Bummer. They say I can start in the next session, in February. To which I ask, if it's OK then, why isn't it OK now? However, I have been looking at my labmate's notes, and frankly I don't think the class is going very fast. It will not be hard for me to keep up with the written and grammar parts of the class. The bummer is the spoken part. I would like to do more of that. I should start just forcing my Italian speaking comrades to talk to me more. And my listening is improving just being around here. So, I have decided to continue more with the Pimsleur, and that is going well.

The disorganization can be one of the toughest parts of Italy, as far as I can tell. People often don't respond to emails, and then when you call them to follow up act all surprised. You have to be very proactive to get things done. People will often casually give you wrong information. My friend Nati told me that it would drive me crazy, and it is doing its best. I mean, we say we have a lot of beaurocracy in the US, but Italy might be tougher to navigate. And not just because of the language barrier in my case.

Lots of things are different here. I figured that it might be cool to start mentioning these things a bit here, so I present to you the first "The Difference" moment in my blog:



This plaque on the fence? That's a street sign. Street signs in Italy seem to be designed for pedestrians. They are flat plaques against the side of buildings or fences. The heights vary. Some are up 10 or 15 feet, some, like this one, are at eye level. Often, they are roughly the same shade of stone (or whatever it really is) as the building. The letters are carved in, but not colored in any way. They are incredibly easy to miss. I don't know how people driving cars manage to spot and read them. The only advantages I can see over American street signs is that they can't shift positions or get lost. (Though I did miss one while walking somewhere... How was that possible? Must have been the sand on sand coloring.)

My Office!

Not 100% sure if I will be alone in this office for the next few months. I am in the Mechanical Engineering Building, which is a new building, next to the old aerospace/wind tunnel area. This is in the Bovisa campus of Polimi, very near to the Bovisa train station.

Anyway, enough talk, here's my temporary office:



The view from my office:



They are doing a lot more construction on the campus. Actually, all over Bovisa area, there are tonnes of cranes. And in many different spots.

I only have wired internet in my office, as that's what available to visitors at Polimi... Kinda a bummer!