2021.05.30 09:35
2021.05.30 09:53
2021.05.30 12:10
BB Lee
P.S. I still give a priority to the train whenever possible while traveling in Europe. Though some are ridiculous to have made me so angry and frustrated, but it rather made the trip more memorable when I should look back. Indeed, my best friend Prof. Raul Mattassi of Milan is an almost professional world traveler with such extensive experience so that whenever we travel in Italy he always arranged the schedule from A to Z including booking the hotels and the transportation by train, ships as well as automobiles, and even local restaurants. But the train travel in Italy in particular among the EU countries is full of a totally unpredictable experience. Since my wife speaks Italian, I dared to travel with her to a remote corner of Puglia/Apulia, the heel part of the Italy peninsula, for example, and able to deal with a surprise like ‘cancel the train connection’ on a certain portion of the training course for the rail repair, etc. They don’t announce it clearly since NO tourists would venture out to come to such countryside but everyone knows how to catch the connecting bus from one train station to another station to get back on the train. Sometimes, they cancel the whole schedule to replace it with the bus. How about that? But I still love the train more than the car though it takes much more time.
2021.05.30 14:17
Thanks for the interesting story and comments, Professor.
My wife and I used to enjoy trips to the downtown theatre district of Toronto
by train from Windsor, Canada, to Toronto. This was a sort of convenient substitute
for going to NY Broadway. Windsor, as you may know, is connected to Detroit
by a tunnel as well as by the Ambassador Bridge.
We were thinking of making a trans Canada trip from Toronto to Vancouver but never did.
The train service here in California is considered pretty good, and so far we have enjoyed
multiple trips to LA and Burbank to the north and San Diego to the south along the coast.
The business class is even better. Certainly far more enjoyable than driving your car thru traffic.
2021.05.31 10:10
So, Toronto is that close to a driving distance from Detroit! What a luxury!
I heard TSO has their own beautiful music hall - I have a couple of TSO records playing Mozart and also Elgar, etc-. It must have been fun to drive to Toronto and the vicinity!
BB
2021.05.31 10:42
It's only 4 hr drive from Detroit and has a large Korean community.
Downtown is clean, and the city is clean and international indeed.
Indeed my wife and I went to the music hall along with friends once.
I had some close friends there. One of them, CY Kang, Ph.D., Professor,
The University of Western Ontario, London, an internationally well-recognized virologist,
is one of my high school classmates and a golf nut as well. He is still fully active
as a researcher and overseeing a clinical trial of the AID vaccine he has developed in the last 10 yrs.
Some 4 or 5 couples used to get together in Toronto.
We have some fond memories.
2021.05.31 11:05
Wow, Toronto was a sort of cultural hub, then! By the way, my high school classmate, SooBin Park, professor, is still there even after he retired. So, Toronto is still good for the retiree, I reckon!
Anyhow, I didn't know London, Ontario also that close to Detroit!
London, Ontario- I presume Univ of Western Ontario- used to be THE leading group of transplant surgery in Canada in my days and we had one joint project, then, on the liver transplant, part of which I brought to Korea to imply on living-related partial liver transplant to complete, thanks to Samsung for almost unlimited funds I never dreamed.
BB
2021.05.31 11:20
London, Ontario, is only 120 miles from Detroit.
You had a connection there as well. Amazing.
Dr. Banting who discovered insulin was at the University of Western Ontario.
My friend was Dean of Science there once while pursuing his research.
I visited his research institute which was awesome. For the first time,
he showed the HIV virus under an electron microscope.
He gets credit, I believe, for making it possible to produce a massive amount of the virus
by culturing it in the caterpillar's intestinal cells which were shown to me.
He made a vaccine that is going thru a clinical trial. If successful, he may well be the first Korean
who may receive Nobel Prize.
By the way, he is a good friend of 서울의대 이호왕교수 and did DNA sequencing for Han Tan virus, the culprit of epidemic hemorrhagic fever.
I live less than a mile, a walking distance, from the train station
so that this is great news for me and my wife.
We would go to LA downtown by train, 2 hr ride, and stay at Omni Hotel, which is the only
hotel that sends their shuttle taxi to the train station. We enjoyed going to Disney Concert Hall
and Broad Art Museum, etc, all walking distances away.
The real nice thing about it is that my three grandchildren, Burbank, always join us.
My wife and I once did cross country trip by train from Detroit to
San Francisco some ten years ago. What an adventure it was!
Our train had to replace the engine near Denver and while waiting hours,
I remember calling our WM just to say I was nearby and was always late
on schedule by 8 to 12 hours and once ran out of foods because of
delays so that the chef had to come up with a sort of POW type soup
to feed all passengers. When we arrived in Chicago on the return trip,
it was 1 AM, some 12 hrs later than scheduled, and all 300 passengers had to
be brought to a hotel by bus some 40 minutes away from the station
for overnight stay. My final word was "Never again!"
We, however, did have great moments appreciating the landscape of
this great country.