RIMINI, ITALY--If you get on a plane at SeaTac and fly west, you'll arrive soon enough in Old Europe. Air France would drop you off in strike-bound Paris, but Delta lands in Amsterdam (no smoking at the airport, dude), from which the KLM CityHopper (tone-deaf translation of puddle-jumper) takes you to Bologna and a bus from there along the ancient via Romana to Rimini, a lively resort on the Adriatic Coast. Lively in summer, anyway, judging from the number of "Sexy Disco" joints along the beachfront.
I'm here for the annual Travel Trade Italia show, the largest event of the year in Italy for tourism professonals. Everything's run Italian-style, that is to say with a combination of passionate precision (think Lamborghini) and fashionable indifference (think silk scarves). It's as if the Italian language had no future tense; Italian events often resemble last-minute creative improvisations. I'm not complaining, but dinner, at the fairgrounds, was scheduled for 8, moved up to 6:30 at the urging of jet-lagged delegates, and actually began (after 300 guests had been seated for an hour without food or adult beverages) at 7:45. The tourism councillor of Naples, who sponsored the dinner and wanted to thank us for attending, arrived too late; we were back on the buses, comatose, before he even started to talk.
That full moon, those blue towers? Outside the fairgrounds tonight. A cross between Avatar and 2001: A Space Odyssey, no?
Update: On second thought, maybe the tourism guy just didn't want to talk about the stinking mess in Naples.
So. In the emails back at the hotel, news of two fascinating new iPhone apps. The first is from Deborah Ashin, former Gayot staffer, former LA restaurant critic. She published what she calls the first ("and so far only") iPhone app specific to Seattle restaurants. "I thought there was a need for an app that was locally produced but not affiliated with a magazine or newspaper," writes Ashin, who is donating half her royalties to Farestart (the non-profit restaurant that trains homeless people to work in the food service industry). Our good friends at UrbanSpoon.com might take issue with the "first and only," but when it comes to restaurant sites, anything that helps drown out Yelp has to be commended. The app is available here.
The other, not limited to Seattle, comes from Snooth, the wine-finder website. They've launched an iPhone app, Snooth Wine Pro .You can literally take a picture of a wine label, and the app finds the wine, shows you a map of nearby stores that have the wine in inventory. There's more here.
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