You Tube Video - Festa dei Serpari (Snakes)

A number of years ago we took a trip to the south of Italy. We visited the regions of Campangna and Puglia. On our way back to Rome we visited a small town in Abruzzo called Cocullo for the annual Snake Festival (Festa dei Serpari)

The whole town comes out with real snakes and they put them on a statue of their patron saint and march around town. Local television is always there and many people dress up in historical costumes. It's one long crazy day.

Here's a You Tube video of the event. The video is from an Italian variety show so you have to wait a minute for the snake festival to start. It's in Italian but you don't need to speak Italian to know what's going on when they get to the snake part.

Enjoy
John

This is the end, beautiful friend...

I didn't want to quote Jim Morrison's "The End" but when I read the title of 23rd thing I couldn't get the song out of my mind. But this is not the end. On the contrary, this exercise made a beginning for me by getting me to start this blog.

It is my hope that now I'm "out there" I can develop this blog and maybe a Wiki or two into a resource for Independent Travelers. My next step is to fill these sites with enough critical mass to attract others to contribute.

From the above you may deduce that the simple starting of this blog is the thing that I believe will most affect my pursuit of life long learning. My new online presence opens opportunities for learning. By using this blog and other blog and feed searches like technorati and Web 2.0 tools I will try to find other travel enthusiasts to share in this independent travel forum.

My only critique of the of the learning program is that some of the learning sections were too librarian centric. This is a mild criticism and I would enjoy completing other learning programs librarian centric or not.

John

Audiobooks and Other Downloadables

I visited SuffolkWave to see their offering of downloadables and very impressed with their selection.

One comment I'll make though is that it would be nice if they had a search parameter for only items that were in stock.

My mother likes mysteries and I was able to sort this list by author but it would have been nice to see only the authors in stock. As a consolation you can reserve but I'm not sure how the notification system works.

I did download an Italian language course that was interesting. "Learn in your car Italian complete" I've tried one chapter so far and found it helpful.

John

Podcasts

I had trouble recommending a podcast on traveling in Italy not because there wasn't alot to choose from but audio descriptions of Italy somehow seam lacking. I did try one that had nice descriptive sections on different tourist attractions in Florence, Venice and Rome.

http://podcasts.yahoo.com/series?s=93c93279bdd1299175e84cafe87a08e5

I will recommend one that I liked on learning Italian. It has a different take on learning. You learn through jokes. They tell typical Italian jokes and then translate. It's not for beginners in the language but if you have a background in Italian they can be fun.

There are 116 episodes so far and you can subscribe. This is one that I will add to my list of things to get done. I hope I find the time.

http://podcasts.yahoo.com/series?s=b1fab0f82e0c6427daa33591d3ed574e

John

You Tube Video - Festa dei Serpari (Snakes)

A number of years ago we took a trip to the south of Italy. We visited the regions of Campangna and Puglia. On our way back to Rome we visited a small town in Abruzzo called Cocullo for the annual Snake Festival (Festa dei Serpari)

The whole town comes out with real snakes and they put them on a statue of their patron saint and march around town. Local television is always there and many people dress up in historical costumes. It's one long crazy day.

Here's a You Tube video of the event. The video is from an Italian variety show so you have to wait a minute for the snake festival to start. It's in Italian but you don't need to speak Italian to know what's going on when they get to the snake part.

Enjoy
John