I spent this week in class from 9 to 5 learning about tsunamis. My professor was italian. He could talk that whole time without even pausing to sip some water. Actually the last day he went past the end of class by 35 minutes without even pausing to breathe in...almost beating the previous record made in France when an even worse talker droned on 45 minutes into our lunch break without stopping for air. I don't know how they do it, these european professors. It's like the energizer professor...they just stand up there, look at their computer screen and talk talk talk to themselves. Amazing.

Anyway, even though the entire class content could have been condensed into one day instead of five, it was really quite interesting. Tsunamis are unbelievable. There was actually a tsunami more than 500 meters tall in a bay in Alaska caused by a landslide! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lituya_Bay_megatsunami, and here's a video about some guys in a boat who survived it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN6EgMMrhdI&feature=fvsr), though most tsunamis are nothing like that. Most are only a few meters high and they don't come as one huge wall of water, but instead like the tide comes in really fast and turbulently and then keeps rising and rising and rising (because tsunamis have an enormous wavelength). We actually learned about the tsunami caused by the collapse of the Santorini that I mentioned in my last entry, and interestingly, there was a local tsunami caused recently in Stromboli, a volcano island in Southern Italy. The most interesting part of that island though, is that this volcano is continously erupting and has been for thousands of years. And people still live on the island even though hot rocks shot out from the volcano occasionally land on their houses. The tsunami was not caused by the volcano directly, but from a landslide of cinders and lava rocks that have been building up on a steep slope since the volcano is always erupting. I am now determined to go there and see it before I leave here. Maybe end of July. I'll have my 4th of July fireworks a little late this year http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LHwI62uJfk.

The most jaw dropping day of class was when we studied the 2004 Sumatra tsunami, which essentially woke the world up to tsunamis in a very unpleasant way. More than 200,000 people killed, the Indonesian town Banda Aceh was one of the worst hit. We watched some videos survivors took and the destruction and sheer power of water is unbelievable. It went several kilometers inland, some say up to 50 meters in some places, though I think it was on average around 10 meters in the hardest hit areas. The water actually shot through one town, over a little hill and wiped out the town on the other side. Completely and utterly unbelievable. Some of the videos were really shocking, you could see people swept away and houses and couches and cars floating in the raging water, but here is one that is milder...this is in the Maldives, 1500 miles from the source. This video is interesting because the tsunami water is so clean and blue here. The Maldives are surrounded by coral reefs and not much mud as in other places. The wave height here was only a few meters, but the highest point in the Maldives is 2.3 meters above sea level...so...yea...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiBKrkpMQ1c

Anyways, enough about tsunamis, lets talk about other disasters going on in the world. Pakistan... as you all know there is a lot of trouble with the Taliban in the North of Pakistan, and several of my friends here are from the North of Pakistan. I was discussing the events with one of them, and he told me that the reason they are having so much trouble is because the Taliban is getting more and more supporters and members...the reason? he said it was because of the drone attacks by the US. Civilians are being killed by these foreigners, and hardly any militants, and he described it as..."its like if your own family slaps you, you aren't so mad, but if some outsider comes and slaps you, it is completely different" So we are the outsiders slapping them with killer flying robots...(what is this world? by the way) And the Taliban is getting more and more support because of it. But luckily, he said, the fighting was still 50 kilometers away from his town...or it was then... They must be really loyal to their fellow Pakistani 'family' because thousands and thousands of people are forced to flee their because of the fighting caused by the Taliban, and my friend said that no one is helping them or giving money (of course the US did give them money to secure the border and keep out the Taliban to prevent this sort of thing, but apparently they spent it all on nuclear weapons to fight India and now they are asking for more...though I think all this money is generally aimed towards buying weapons for one party or another, not so much for refugees) And then of course a few days after this conversation, there were some huge suicide bombings in Peshawar (which is exactly where my friends are from) and Lahore last week. When we talked about it he told me that luckily his family is all safe, but the bombers did it because of the oppression in the north. Hearing a native pakistani calling it oppression really surprised me because according to the newspapers I have seen lately (even Al Jazeera!), this is not oppression in the north, but rather bad-guy Taliban militants trying to topple the government! So who knows what reality is. Certainly not me, my reality is just what the newspapers and other various media outlets, primarily the Daily Show, tell me.

Ok, that's all for now I guess. Not too much new in Italy. I'm packing up to leave for France, so talk to you from there.