Thousandapologies

Yesterday started of with some meetings at 9:00 and carried on from coffee break to coffee break. Luckily coffee breaks in Italy last a lot longer than back in the Netherlands and although there’s no “vlaai” also come with very nice food and snacks of various kinds. Halfway through the day, the groups was split up into a technical and a conceptual group; for us not bother the architectural people with geek speech and for the architectural people not to bore us with conceptual stuff. I expected do some coding during the technical meeting but it turned out to be deciding to use several standards we already decided on before.

After the first day of the meeting we went to a neighbouring village of Ancona called Porto Novo; according to our Italian friends literally meaning “take an egg”. In Porto Novo the MACE meeting’s social event was held. Porto Novo itself is very small, for Limburg people, about the size of “Rimburg”. One very long street laying below a big mountain, with some very nice houses for the local rich and famous. Beautiful beaches, full of bathing people and surfers inspired some of us to take a dive. We were taken by Massimo to see a very old church from around 1000A.D. Somewhat after we went to the beach and sat down at the terrace there, drinking some Italian alholic speciality called ” Negroni”, very strong indeed. We very much enjoyed the view and gazed across the adriatic sea and were later joined by more and more people from the MACE project.

Later in the evening we went about 300 metres down the beach and sat down outside a nice restaurant called “Da Giacchetti” for a candelight dinner under a starry starry night, enjoying the calming sound of the sea and the excellent Italian food. Especially, I, as a major fan of Italian food enjoyed the meal and company of the awesome MACE people a lot: it made me even question why I was not born in Italy. Unfortunately, there came a time when we had to drive back to the hotel; Lorenzo offered to drop us off there and after half an hour, with a wee tour of Ancona included, we came back to our hotel for a very needed good nights rest.