Travels, Milestones and Public Enemy

"Greetings readers."  That's how big time bloggers have to address their readers.  And as of late October, 2010, Anne and Mark are officially big time bloggers.  The count of visits to this blog has now ticked over the total of 1,000 (!).

Anne and Mark did a little research to figure out who, exactly, is making these visits to our little corner of the internet.  The website gives us some information (country of origin, type of operating system), but not much.  However, we were undaunted and searched out the remainder of the data to figure out who our audience is.  The readers of this blog are in 5 basic categories, as shown in the pie chart below:

For those who are wondering, Anne and Mark have no information on the lost colony of New Bulgaria. Other conclusions to be gathered from this data: First, hi, mom.  Second, if the 3.3% of you keep logging on, Anne and Mark will continue to check to see if you wrote any comments.

In other news, Anne and Mark just returned (Nov. 1) from a week in Italy.  We visited Rome, Venice and the Amalfi Coast.  Obviously, there will be several posts forthcoming covering such thought-provoking topics as "What does that sign mean?" (we have some guesses), "Does that little old lady really think she can push Mark?" (yes, she does) and "Why does the Vatican Museum have an entire wing of exhibits from ancient Egypt?" (umm... we got nuthin on this one)

But before we get to that, we should probably note that the trip almost did not happen.  You see, normally, the entertainment options here are ... "hit or miss."  For an example of a "miss," please note this advertising for an upcoming, local concert:

As far as we can tell, this is some type of Village People cover band (without the Indian).  This type of entertainment, we can live without.  However, every once in a while a true, legendary giant of music stops by, and it would be almost an insult for us to miss them when they do.  This was the situation we faced immediately before our scheduled departure for Italy when we saw this advertisement:

Public Enemy?  Live in Sofia?  Are you kidding me?  Flavor Flav in cyrillic?  It was almost worth canceling our trip so that we could be in town to see this.

Almost.

But if we had, we would have missed so many awesome sights.  Like this one (spotted on the jacket of the guy in front of us at the Passport control stop in Rome - looks like officially licensed gear to me):