Rotarian Rich Hill recently returned from traveling in both Italy and southeast Asia. He was going to show us numerous pictures from his trip to Italy that he took with his camera, but strangely our tech guru had technical difficulties and couldn’t get his photos to share on Zoom. He quickly moved to sending pictures that he took with his phone to the club’s computer so that we could still see some of the highlights of his trip. Italy was his first trip to a European country, and he mainly traveled around Milan and some other Italian cities nearby. When Rich is traveling, he wants to use it as a way to learn about an area and not just a vacation to get away. His goal was to walk 10,000 steps each day while seeing the city. He would get up early to start that process, but quickly learned that nothing was open early in Italy. He did manage to eat a lot of croissants and drink lots of coffee. There were less English speakers in Italy than he thought, but Rich had fun trying to communicate where he wanted to go and used Google Translate to talk to the people he met. Oddly, the first restaurant he tried in Milan was a Filipino restaurant. The people who worked and owned it spoke English, and he asked them lots of questions about the city of Milan. One thing that he loved in particularly about Italy was the architecture and the age of the buildings. Rich showed us a number of pictures that reflected his interest in Italy’s architecture, including one photo showing the massive size of the churches with their large domes and another showing the skyline of Turino. While traveling, Rich observed that people are very similar no matter where they live. He enjoyed observing the different outfits people wore and also met a lot of dog owners and learned how they get dogs in Milan. He even played chess with two guys in a park. Hopefully we will get to see some more pictures of Rich’s Italian trip as well as hear about his adventures in southeast Asia at a future meeting.