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Link to PJs worldJuly 01 McKinsey Article: What health systems can learn from Kaiser Great insight into the challenges they faces and are facing, here are some questions I especially liked: By closely integrating care delivery, Kaiser Permanente delivers high-quality, cost-effective treatment. One of its senior executives outlines its approach.JULY 2009 
Kaiser Permanente (KP), the largest nonprofit health plan in the United States, is renowned for the tight integration of its clinical services. KP closely coordinates primary, secondary, and hospital care; places a strong emphasis on prevention; and extensively uses care pathways and electronic medical records. By doing so, it provides its 8.7 million members and patients with high-quality, cost-effective care. That KP can achieve such tight integration and strong results is especially remarkable in that it is not one organization but several cooperating entities (see sidebar, “Kaiser Permanente at a glance”). All these entities share a common vision: to deliver coordinated, comprehensive health care that keeps patients as healthy as possible. The Quarterly: What are the benefits of integrated care? Hal Wolf: KP carefully coordinates the work done by primary care physicians, specialists, hospitals, pharmacies, laboratories, and others. This approach offers several advantages. It improves care quality, makes care delivery more convenient for members, and increases communication among all the people providing care. It also enables us to find efficiencies that reduce costs, improve or maintain quality, and allow for innovation. We believe strongly in evidence-based medicine, and we are always looking for innovative ways of delivering care. When we find an innovation that is working well, we want to propagate it as best practice throughout our organization. The Quarterly: How do you provide integrated care?
Hal Wolf: We operate in nine states and the District of Columbia, and our operations are slightly different in each area. In all cases, however, we integrate care as closely as possible. In California, for example, we provide members with an end-to-end experience; we own and operate a large number of clinics, hospitals, laboratories, and pharmacies. At all our clinics, patients can receive primary and secondary care; at most, they can also undergo laboratory and imaging tests and get prescriptions filled. At some clinics, they can even undergo same-day outpatient surgery. This way, we take care of most of our patients’ health care needs in a single facility. Our primary and secondary care services are closely intertwined in California. Our primary care services include everything from basic health checkups to disease-management programs. Those programs include appropriate specialist consultations when needed, but primary care physicians remain in charge of patients’ overall care. Even if patients need to be hospitalized, care delivery is seamless because all physicians and other health professionals have access to KP HealthConnect, our electronic medical record database. In Colorado, our services are similar, but we don’t own our own hospitals. Nevertheless, we have extremely close relationships with our partner hospitals. For example, the physicians who take care of our patients at these hospitals are part of the Colorado Permanente Medical Group and have full access to KP HealthConnect. As a result, they are able to view a complete medical history for their patients, and we are able to compile a complete record of what happens to our patients while they are hospitalized. Because KP HealthConnect updates itself in real time, the records are never out of date. If a patient leaves a clinic and drives to a hospital, the physicians at the hospital can see the clinic records as soon as the patient arrives. The Quarterly: How do you develop your care pathways? And how do you support their use? Hal Wolf: The care pathways are developed by multidisciplinary teams using evidence-based medicine, and they are one of the fundamental ways in which we integrate care. Roles and accountabilities are clarified in the care pathways. For example, our physicians provide only part of patient care; the remainder is delivered by nurses, pharmacists, and other team members, following the pathways’ protocols. KP HealthConnect facilitates the care pathways because it includes documentation templates, alerts, reminders, and other clinical-decision support capabilities. That is the power of KP HealthConnect—the ability to bring evidence to the point of care. The Quarterly: How do you monitor performance? Hal Wolf: The IT system is critical; without it, we would not be able to gauge the performance of our clinics and physicians or identify differences among them. For example, our IT system allows us to identify when a clinic has made a change to a care pathway and what results the change produced. If it enabled the clinic to lower costs while maintaining care quality or to hold costs steady while improving outcomes, we want to know about it; we may well want our other clinics to implement the change. A good IT system can also help us determine whether a change that increased costs was justified by the improved outcomes achieved. The IT system also enables us to track physician performance on a regular basis. The physicians sit down as a group to pick the targets they want to achieve and the metrics that will be monitored. We then collect the data and share the results with them—each of them can see his or her performance. We periodically repeat the process of target and metric selection to ensure that our treatment approaches remain up to date. Of course, physician performance cannot be assessed in isolation. For example, our best physicians tend to get the most complicated cases, but this means that they tend to see fewer patients, on average, than other physicians do. Our performance-management system has to take this into account. Also, physicians provide only one part of patient care, especially for people with chronic disease; nurses, pharmacists, and other clinicians are also involved. Usually, a wide range of information must be considered to determine why a specific outcome occurred. In Colorado, for example, we use balanced scorecards to gauge the performance of each department. These scorecards look at the care delivered by each team member, not just physicians. They also gauge member satisfaction, access, service, and more. The scorecards are developed with input from physicians, the other clinicians engaged in patient care, and the health plan—the payor side ofour organization. The Quarterly: What challenges is KP currently facing? Hal Wolf: Like all health systems, KP faces a variety of challenges. One of our newestis how to cope with the vast amount of data we have collected about our members. Who should have access to this data? Who should be able to use it, and in what ways? As more and more information has been gathered, we’ve realized that the cost of maintaining the databases underlying KP HealthConnect has increased. We therefore have to prioritize which types of data access are most important. For example, it’s very expensive to make all data available in real time; perhaps some types of information can be archived and retrieved on an as-needed basis. Like all health systems today, KP must focus on cost containment and efficiency improvements; we have constant discussions about the strategic needs of the organization and the investments required to support them. KP HealthConnect has enabled us to innovate in multiple areas of disease management. But we have to keep its costs under control. The Quarterly: What advice do you have for other health systems that are thinking about creating more integrated care delivery models? Hal Wolf: This is something we’ve been studying and talking to the National Health Service (NHS) about, and so I’ll offer a few suggestions. First, the health system must establish an effective method for creating and implementing care pathways. As part of this effort, it must set up the right handoffs between the various providers and make certain that incentives are in place to support providers working together. The NHS, through its world-class commissioning program, is attempting to do just this. Second, it is crucial that the health system think about how it collects and shares information. As it does this, the system must consider the needs of its constituents, such as its local providers, payor organizations, and national regulators. It must also make sure that its leaders are aligned on how and why information should be shared. We learned this lesson the hard way; developing a good IT system for a health system is a difficult task. Before we began using KP HealthConnect, we attempted to implement another approach to electronic medical records, and that implementation did not go well. We did not have focused leadership from the health plans or medical groups. That changed when George Halvorson became CEO of KP. The experience taught us that large-scale change can be achieved only if management is aligned on the same goals. Third, the health system must determine whether its internal channels of communication are sufficiently open—and if they are not, open them. Communication is not necessarily a question of putting everyone involved in a patient’s care in the same building (although that certainly helps). Instead, it requires that everyone talk openly to each other and maintain the same patient-centric focus. That last point may be the most important of all: the patient must always come first. We have found that the combination of a good data environment, strong end-to-end processes, clear communications, and a patient-centric focus creates integrated care. It also encourages everyone within the system to do their best.Vegetarians 'less likely to get cancer' I knew it.. some benefits from abstaining!!! Vegetarians less likely to develop cancer than meat eaters, says study
Vegetables on display at a farm shop. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA For years, they have boasted of the health benefits of their leafy diets, but now vegetarians have the proof that has so far eluded them: when it comes to cancer risks, they have the edge on carnivores. Fresh evidence from the largest study to date to investigate dietary habits and cancer has concluded that vegetarians are 45% less likely to develop cancer of the blood than meat eaters and are 12% less likely to develop cancer overall. Scientists said that while links between stomach cancer and eating meat had already been reported, they had uncovered a "striking difference" in the risk of blood cancers including leukaemia, multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma between the groups. The study looked at vegetarians, fish eaters and people who ate meat. Co-author Naomi Allen, from the Cancer Research UK epidemiology unit at Oxford University, said: "Previous research has found that processed meat may increase the risk of stomach cancer, so our findings that vegetarians and fish eaters are at lower risk is plausible. But we do not know why cancer of the blood is lower in vegetarians." She said the differences in cancer risks were independent of other lifestyle factors including smoking, alcohol intake and obesity. However, Allen urged caution over the interpretation of the findings. "It is a significant difference, but we should be a bit cautious since it is the first study showing that the risk of cancer of the blood is lower in vegetarians. We need to know what aspect of a fish and vegetarian diet is protecting against cancer. Is it the higher fibre intake, higher intake of fruit and vegetables, is it just meat per se?" The study also reported that the total cancer incidence was significantly lower among both the fish eaters and the vegetarians compared with meat eaters. The study, published in the British Journal of Cancer, is part of a long-term international study, the European prospective investigation into cancer and nutrition (Epic). Today's findings were based on a study of 61,000 people who scientists followed over 12 years. During this time, 3,350 participants were diagnosed with cancer. Of those, 68% (2,204) were meat eaters, 24% (800) were vegetarians and 9.5% (300) ate fish but no meat. They found that 180 meat eaters developed blood cancers, while 49 vegetarians developed the diseases and 28 fish eaters. They found the risk of being diagnosed with cancers of the stomach, bladder and blood was significantly lower in vegetarians than in meat eaters but, in contrast to earlier work, they found the rate of bowel cancer was slightly higher among vegetarians than meat eaters. A spokesman for BPEX, the British pig executive, questioned the methodology of the study: "We are unable to take a view on this because there is mixed evidence based on the compounding factors to do with lifestyle that come into it." Richard Lowe, the chief executive of Eblex, the English beef and lamb executive, said: "We think that the link between diet and cancer is complex and as scientists themselves say, more research is needed to see how big a part diet plays." The Oxford research is the latest in a series of reports to discourage too much meat in the diet. Last year, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – which last year earned a share of the Nobel peace prize – urged giving up meat at least once a week as a way of combating global warming. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has estimated that meat production accounts for nearly a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions. Two years ago, the World Cancer Research Fund found a link between red and processed meat and bowel cancer and recommended that the average amount of meat eaten should be no more than 300g a week. In Britain, the current meat intake is about 970g a week for men and about 550g a week for women. In 2005, the Epic study, funded by the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK and the International Agency for Research on Cancer, concluded that eating just two portions of red meat a day – the equivalent of a bacon sandwich and a fillet steak – increased the risk of bowel cancer by 35%. It found that eating fibre, in the form of vegetables, fruit and wholegrain cereals, lessened the risk of cancer and that fish, eaten at least every other day, was also protective. Annette Pinner, chief executive of the Vegetarian Society, said: "It is widely recognised that a third of cancers are directly related to diet and what's interesting in this study is the findings on blood cancers. We wouldn't claim vegetarianism is a panacea for cancer but it is a step in the right direction." June 30 Vancouver best for business travel
The ranking takes into consideration both cost-related and environmental factors in assessing a destination's desirableness for a business traveller. Cities are rated in 31 categories, which are grouped and weighted in five sectors thus: 1. Stability (25%) Marks for the first four sectors derive from the liveability ranking that we have already examined. The "cost" mark derives from the city's per-diem rate: the price of a basket of goods and services typically required during a short business trip. So that's hotels, restaurant meals, car rental, taxi rides, etc. You can read the full methodology here, alongside the 2006 figures. When we revealed the recent liveability rankings, plenty of commenters suggested that Vancouver was a city of the "nice but boring" type. The rankings clearly cannot cater to all tastes, but the emphasis on stability and infrastructure means that nice but boring cities do indeed do well. The same sadly cannot be said of cities in the world's more troubled regions, and Karachi, Algiers and Lagos bring up the rear. Business Travel Ranking (December 2008, zero = ideal) 1 Vancouver 8.0% 2 Toronto 8.8% 3 Adelaide 9.6% 4 Honolulu 10.9% 5 Perth 11.5% 6 Auckland 11.5% 7 Detroit 11.9% 8 Atlanta 12.1% 9 Montreal 12.4% 10 Vienna 12.5% (Photo credit: Shutterstock) June 29 A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:Americana at Brand - Incredible new malls near LA Went to this place last weekend and its breathtaking, I thought Grove was one of a kind but then this came up in Glendale. Made by the same people, but even better this time: 75+ Shops, Restaurants & Theater. A New Shopping Experience. Glendale Link Some pictures: Movie theater  Outdoor:   Apartments:  June 25 US students hope to bring Twitterature to the massesThis is sooo cool, I cant wait for some of these to come out, now we can have the young'ens enjoy some classics, twitter style!
------------------- Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman aim to squish literary classics into series of tweets Is there no end to Twittermania? Last week we saw the social networking tool Twitter deployed on the streets of Tehran. This week, moving seamlessly from the sublime to the ridiculous, it is being used to aid the digestion of the world's greatest literature. Fans of the classics will either be delighted or appalled to learn that the New York-branch of Penguin books has commissioned a new volume that will put great works through the Twitter mangle. The volume has a working title that will make the nerve ends of purists jangle: Twitterature. In it, the authors will squish the jewels of world literature - they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling - into 20 tweets or less - that is 20 sentences each with fewer than 140 characters. The book is the brainchild of two 19-year-old first-year students at the University of Chicago who claim to be starting a cultural revolution from their college dormitory. Bashing their heads together one evening in their university digs, Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman asked themselves what defined the grandest ventures of their generation, and best expressed the souls of 21st century Americans? Pretentious, maybe. Precocious, certainly. The answer they came up with was double-headed. They identified high literature as a crucial pillar for any generation. But they also latched on to Twitter, the website where users compress all of human experience into 140 characters. Twitter, they thought to themselves, epitomised the short attention span and info-deluge that defined the contemporary age. So what if you put the two together? If great literature and Twitter were combined into one new form - Twitterature. "We have embarked on an attempt to bring the two pillars of our generation together, once and for all," the students said. In the blurb for the new book the authors give a clue to their incentives for writing it, which are not entirely ethereal. Aciman and Rensin, from New York and Los Angeles respectively, both harbour ambitions to become writers and both clearly also hanker after cash. They say they are aiming for a book that has the literary merit to wow the blogosphere, as well as the "pure-money genius to take the market by storm". Whether they are right and fulfil their dreams depends on the appetite for reading Dante's Divine Comedy reduced from its 512 pages in Penguin's own Classics edition to 20 short sentences. Or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last in the JK Rowling series, rendered in 2,800 characters down from 784 pages. All should become clear in the autumn, when Twitterature is scheduled for publication. June 16 Best Airport: Incheon I totally agree with this, its one of my favorite airports also. They have 4 hour block hotel rooms available on the airport and massages, I did both of them and loved it! The best airport in the world
Incheon opened in 2001, so still has some of the shininess of youth. Unlike many other Korean airports, it is not particularly quiet, and served around 30m passengers in 2007. Indeed quietness appears not to have been a determining factor throughout the ranking. Hong Kong and Singapore are among the 20 busiest airports in the world, and the fourth busiest, Dallas/Fort Worth, was named the best airport in North America. Zurich, Tel Aviv, Cape Town and Lima were named the best airports in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and South America respectively. Top ten airports: 1. Incheon 2. Hong Kong 3. Singapore Changi 4. Zurich 5. Munich 6. Kansai 7. Kuala Lumpur 8. Amsterdam 9. Centrair Nagoya 10. Auckland Tips for Tackling Team Tension This is a great article, I had friends advice me the same things when earlier this year I was going through some tensions with my team. This puts it all together! Tips for Tackling Team Tension There’s nothing like a high-stress project environment to amplify personality differences into team tension and even conflicts. Projects can often lead to higher levels of stress even when things are going well, and team members will inevitably clash sometimes. Tempers can flare. Egos get bruised. The antidote for this potential productivity problem is to set expectations early—and deal with tension swiftly. Here are some tips from the experts for dealing with conflict and keeping your team (and project) on track. Before the Project Begins As the project manager, you can encourage your team to contribute to the project management plan before the project actually begins which, in turn, establishes clear expectations. Make sure your team members clearly understand—and agree upon—the project’s parameters and how those parameters fit into the overall scope. Clarify each team member’s role as well so that they understand how each person will contribute to the project. This also confirms what is expected of them and allows them to plan and prioritize their responsibilities so the project will stay on course. If Conflict Arises You may need to seek out the other people involved and hear their side of the story as well. This allows you better understanding of the situation and helps you form an unbiased response. Tip 3: Be the catalyst, not the problem solver. After you identify the sources of the tension and get both sides of the story, bring the team together. Invite each person to offer his or her perspective, while other team members listen without responding. Finally, encourage team members to come to a consensus, working toward a common goal to solve the conflict and refocus on completing the project. This last step may include developing an action plan with small steps toward conflict resolution. Tip 4: Escalate progressively. If the functional supervisors do not help facilitate resolution, you should progressively escalate the situation up the chain of command until you find two members from the organization who will work through the conflict. You may also consider consulting a third-party expert such as a company counselor or human resources specialist. This expert, who is not involved with team members or the project, provides the project team with an open forum to discuss more effective ways for working together and also provides a neutral analysis of the situation. Tip 5: Step in and make a decision. As the project manager, your main concern is to do what is best for the project and the team. If conflict continues and has a negative impact on the project, impose a resolution that will keep the project on track. Your resolution may have to involve replacing someone on the team so you can still meet deadlines. Once Conflict is Resolved People respond favorably to positive reinforcement and positive feedback. Further, team members will be more willing to overcome their differences and work together if they know they will be recognized. Panel of Experts Nick Clemens, PMP, owner of the Columbia, Maryland, USA-based consultancy Analytic Risk Management. He spent much of his career managing large government programs in the Departments of Defense and Education. (Contributed to tips 1, 2, 4 and 6.) Michelle LaBrosse, PMP, owner of Carson City, Nevada, USA-based Cheetah Learning, a PMI Registered Education Provider (R.E.P). Ms. LaBrosse focuses on a range of projects, from large-scale, long-term IT efforts with 20-person teams to short-term course development efforts that involve teams of three to five people. (Contributed to tips 1 and 5.) Related Articles: June 01 How to Eat a WolfThis poem is so awesome, I love the way she talks about the wolf with so many sexual innuendos... How to Eat A Wolf
Posted on November 20, 2007 by Sharanya Manivannan
Does all lust start and It’s just that he was How do you douse a So I fantasised I set traps. Mine is the deepest void, Mine is the darkest smoulder, I became desperate. you finally looked up and said, and only then did I see that your love *** Sharanya Mannivannan was born in India in 1985, grew up elsewhere, and now divides her time between different dimensions of home and exile. She is working on her first novel, Constellation of Scars and her book of poems, Witchcraft, will appear in 2008. She can be found at http://sharanyamanivannan.blogspot.com May 29 Greece Trip: Day 5 For some reason I had a pretty rough night, couldnt sleep much so ended up getting ready at 5 am when the ship reached Piraeus. After we disembarked we got a cab (who charged us more than 25 instead of 10 that we was supposed to) to get to the hotel. Since we were very early we just dropped off our luggage and proceeded to the Acropolis. This place we pretty crowded but at the same time a must:  We walked through the entire ruins to finally get to the Parthenon:  The view from the top is pretty amazing, you can see the entire Athens city from there.  Next we walked by the new Acropolis Museum (to open on June 11) and to the National Gardens  Exited from the Sundial exit to get to the Parliament and the Syntagma Square  We also saw the changing of the guards at the Tomb of the unknown soldier  After that we went straight to the hotel, ate some of the snacks we had at home and decided to take a nap. Evening we trip to go to an indian restaurant by taking the metro, walked a lot to get to it but it ended up being closed and so we just ordered some pizza in the hotel room. Next morning, we dropped mom off to the airport, took the bus on our way back and then relaxed some in the hotel room. I finally got on the plane by 3 pm, to get to Paris CDG by 6. The new lounge at CDG is really nice, after which I took my flight to New York. Stayed a night in New York and finally got to LAX by 10 am on Wednesday morning. Long flight.. but enough breaks to make my recovery pretty speedy! Greece Trip: Day 4 - Crete and Santorini This time we werent missing the historical excursion even though we did not sign up for it. We got out on time at 7 am and decided to take a cab right from the port. This time we bargained with the cab so that we got the price we thought was right and we decided to hold him for a good 3 hours that we had on the island of Crete. The port was at the capital city of this large greek island: Heraklion. As we went through the city we saw a lot of shops, a hospital and a school - all closed because it was a sunday. First stop Palace of Knossos. We shadowed some guides to get some of the historical information, we gained the rest of reading the little palques with all the information on there. This place has been restored fairly well to be able to imagine how this palace may have been. They also have an orange grove outside with the most amazing fresh orange juice and an entertaining guy who is selling it in Greek, French, Spanish and English!  Next we drove around the vineyards which are really typical of the area and finally ended the tour at the venetian fort. This was a nicely restored castle from the outside where one could walk around and watch the fisherman get ready for their daily expeditions.  We boarded the ship back at 12 and were told not to take a nap because we were approaching the best island of the trip:Santorini and we should be on the deck to see it when it arrives. We were also warned that since the two excursions were on different parts of the island that if we missed when they called out our tender boat number, we would miss the excursion. One went to the volcano and the other to Thira and Oia villages. We took the latter. We got in our buses and started to tour the island, initially it didnt seem like that big a deal, we saw ridges on the mountain which denoted the different lava formations and indicated time of different explosions and then we started climbing higher, we noticed the white greek orthodox churches with blue domes, saw some of the vineyards and next thing we know, we are in Oia.  Then we were told to hang out there for a few hours, the moment we started walking we noticed the breathtaking views that everyone was talking about and thats when we saw the most beautiful picturesque view ever! We couldnt stop gazing, finally we decided to get some frappe and sit down in one of the cafes so we can keep looking at the view for a complete hour before we had to head back. If I ever go to Greece next time, thats the place I want to go!  Next we proceeded to take the bus around the island to Thira where we were left by ourselves to walk through the little town and get to the cable car and go back down to the dock where our tender boats were waiting to take us back to the ship. So we enjoyed a few more hours of this breathtaking view, walked around some nice stores and then headed back via cable car.  The last night ended uneventfully as we packed and got ready for a whole day in Athens before we head back to our homes abroad. Greece Trip: Day 3 - Kusadasi and Patmos After a relatively peaceful night, we woke up to sounds of docking in Kusadasi, Turkey. Since we werent taking the excursion we decided to take the breakfast at the buffet restaurant on the deck and then proceed to the town to check it out. In hindsight we should have done the Ephesus Neopolis excursion, instead we took a stroll through the local bazaar, got scammed by a riskshaw driver, pleasently surprised by a shopkeeper who spoke gujarati and finally had a long inviting conversation about how the turkish fought the war and who they make their wares in a shop run by a family for 3 generations.   They also gave us free apple tea which was pretty awesome in the cute turkish cups. Another interesting place was the water fountain in the middle of the bazaar. There was also a burger king with bean burger and a starbucks with turkish coffee! After we came back aboard and got some lunch, I decided to sit at the sun deck for a while. The swimming pool was so small that there wasnt a single person in there, so I skipped that and only layed out in the sun for a big. We were taking our first excursion in Patmos that evening so we got ready for that. Once we arrived in patmos, we were taken in by Tender boats to buses which were going to give us an island tour. We had chose to go to the scenic tour as opposed to the tour of the monastery.  First we visited the cave where John the Evangelist/divine wrote the Book of Revelations.  Next we visited a little town-Chora by the monastery and then drove around the island and back to the port town of Skala where we had our 'coffee time' and drank the Greek Frappe for the first time. It was just like a cold coffee.  Day 2: Cruise Begins, Mykonos Free breakfast is always a good way to start the day :-) We check out from the hotel, catch the taxi to Piraeus and off we are to board the cruise. Ours was Louis cruise lines and we were taking the Aegean legends tour with 4 islands in Greece and 1 in Turkey in 3 days and 3 nights. Our ship was called the Aegean Pearl:
 The ship was not what I expected, its a lot smaller than the standard cruises that we have in the US with a swimming pool that's almost non-existent. the rooms were decent size, with one restaurant where we first gathered for our safety seminar and to note our muster stations. The beauty salon and casino were really small, also the piano bar and other rooms were nothing to write home about.  The point however of the cruise (and I didnt know this then) was the islands and we were pretty much going to hit an island every morning and evening. We signed up for excursions in Patmos and Satorini. In Mykonos we took the shuttle - tender boat to the town center. In the other islands we decided to do things on our own. After a nice meal and a quick nap, we arrived in Mykonos after early evening about 4 pm. This island below me way, the whole place was totally catering to tourists, it was incredibly beautiful and clean. the scenery was breathtaking and it was so convenient to walk to the windmills, little shops, cobbled streets and cafes with incredible views.. I felt like I was in a fantasy world.   We walked up to the windmills and then sat in a cafe for a bit before we bought some souviners and headed back to the ship. After getting back, we had another round of our wonderful 5 course dinner and joined a bunch of people for a show in the clipper lounge: New York to Paris. This turned out to be a buncha songs in different languages done by a group of very bad singers and dancers... all the same it was enjoyable to wind down with some music... Greece Trip:Day 1 -Athens, Microlimano and Plaka I just got back from Greece, I didnt keep good notes on places we visited this time around but I am going to try and chronicle from memory: Day1: Delta flight: LAX->NYC->ATH Starts at 4.30 am, when I left for the airport. Flight's on time and the layover was a very quick hour and half and then we were in Athens before I know it. Flight to New York had screens per seat but I could only watch TV, everything else was pay per view in coach. Flight to Athens was worse, aisle seat and no screen at all. Which worked out pretty good since I managed to read The Blind Eye for most of the 8 hour flight. Such an gripping and horrifying book! Immigration was very simple and then I waited in the baggage claim area for an hour waiting for mom-dad to come from Istanbul where they had spent the previous week. Once they arrived, we got a taxi to the Hotel: Parthenon right by Acropolis. The country at first sight looked more like asia with the density and pollution. The traffic was pretty crazy also, the way no one respects the lane dividers, most people seemed to drive between the lanes. In terms of infrastructure it does look pretty good, we saw the first 1896 Olympic stadium: Panathinaiko Stadium on our way there:  Since the Acropolis museum is set to open on June 11, they closed down the road to go to our hotel so getting there through all the one ways and no-u-turns was quite a nightmare for the taxi driver. He finally decided to take the risk and take a turn where he wasnt supposed to. We probably saw Hadrian's arch and Temple of Zeus about five times before we finally get to the hotel. We had no idea that it was this 'must see' ruin that we kept repeatedly pointing at...   On reaching the hotel, I practically just crashed since it was 3 am my time. Got up in 3-4 hours and then we decided to make our way to Microlimano. We had a hard time getting a Taxi since none of them would stop on flagging, some guy try to scam us by charging 30 euros to go there but luckily my mom already knew its less than 10. Finally we did manage to hail a cab, a nice new mercedes with a young driver who spoke pretty good english.. he kinda became our tourguide. on our way there, he shows us the 2 new stadiums that were built for the olympics:   Microlimano ended up being just a pretty strip of exclusive restaurants with the view of the marina. We ate some yummy pasta at a place called Pesto Pasta and Pizzas after walking up and down the strip twice and looking at the beautiful boats and view of the marina.  our view:  The restaurant called a cab for us after I overtipped them since I forgot that you dont tip more than 10% in europe, they even gave us a free shot of Limencello in a chocolate shot class and on my mom's request their little dip cups for the pesto and red sauce that they served with the bread! Once we got back, we decided to hit the Plaka area which is full of restaurants and shops but it also a nice place to walk around. There was live music, roasted corn and beautiful sunset...  May 15 Paris–Athens Related to the story I am reading right now:
TODOROVDEN (St. Theodore's Day) St. Theodore's Day is celebrated six days after Shrovetide. It is also known as "Horses' Easter" because of the horse races (kushii) commonly held on that day. According to folk tradition, the newly married women would make a ritual Theodore's round loaf of bread decorated with a dough-modelled image of a horse's head. Pieces of this bread used to be given out to neighbours or strangers by the women who would accompany the ritual with bouncing and neighing like mares.
Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton (October 4, 1895 – February 1, 1966) was a prominent American comic actor and filmmaker. Best known for his silent films, his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".[1] Keaton's career as a performer and director is widely considered to be among the most innovative and important work in the history of cinema. He was recognized as the seventh greatest director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.[2] In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Keaton the 21st greatest male actor of all time. A 2002 worldwide poll by Sight & Sound ranked Keaton's The General as the 15th best film of all time. Three other Keaton films received votes in the magazine's survey: Our Hospitality, Sherlock, Jr., and The Navigator.[3] Jacques Tati (October 9 1907–November 5 1982) was a noted French comedic filmmaker. He was born Jacques Tatischeff, the son of Russian father Georges-Emmanuel Tatischeff and Dutch mother Marcelle Claire Van Hoof, in Le Pecq, Yvelines, and died in Paris. Paris Airport in the 60's Greek military junta of 1967–1974The Greek military junta of 1967–1974, alternatively "The Regime of the Colonels" (Greek: Το καθεστώς των Συνταγματαρχών, To kathestos ton Syntagmatarhon), or in Greece "The Junta", (English /'dʒʌntə/ or /ˈhʊntə/, Greek Χούντα, /'xunda/) and "The Seven Years" (Greek: Η Επταετία, I Eptaetia) are terms used to refer to a series of right-wing military governments that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974. Rule by the military started in the morning of 21 April 1967 with a coup d'état led by a group of colonels of the Greek military, and ended in July 1974.
Turkish invasion of CyprusThe Turkish invasion of Cyprus, launched on 20 July 1974, was a Turkish military operation against a coup which had been staged by the Cypriot National Guard[citation needed] against president Makarios III with the intention of annexing the island to Greece[citation needed], but the invasion ended up with Turkey occupying a considerable area on the north part of it and establishing a government on it that only Turkey recognizes, in contradiction to the terms of the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee. The invasion came after more than a decade of sporadic intercommunal violence[citation needed] between the island's Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots resulting from the constitutional breakdown of 1963.[citation needed]Turkey claims that she invoked her role as a guarantor under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee in justification for it. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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VANCOUVER, we salute you. Not only is it the world’s 
ANOTHER
aviation ranking and another strong performance from Asian operations.
Skytrax, a company specialising in airline and airport research, has
named Incheon, near Seoul, the 
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