Awake (New York edition)

I'm in the Big Apple, in a moderately lousy (but also moderately priced) hotel. I woke just before 5am local time, 11am my time, after getting to sleep around 6am my time. I'm unsure whether or not to call this "insomnia", but it is far earlier than I hoped to rise.

I have to give a kick in the head to the airport bus service (can't remember the name, will update this if I do) for lousy service. The driver put people down near, not at, the stated destinations, e.g. one block east of Grand Central Station. In the rain, mark you. For Penn Station the miserable son of a bitch actually dropped us at Times Square! I took a taxi the nine blocks south to the hotel, grumbling all the while. The driver was cool about the short fare, fortunately; he left the meter off and just charged me a fiver.

My parents are arriving today (with the rest of the opera tour group), I'll move to our common hotel and then go to the airport to meet them. The tour operator has apparently stopped providing transport between airport and hotel, which seems to me a pretty stupid decision given their customer profile (elderly and rich). The justification was that it was too difficult to arrange, but that sounds like horseshit to me: the world is full of bus companies. I suspect the company that does the actual grunt work is getting lazy and the coordinator/guiding light/überboss, himself elderly, has chosen not to spend his energy on disciplining them. So there are going to be two dozen elderly Canadians standing in the taxi queue for hours and hours, wrestling with their oversized luggage and foreign manners and diction. Meh. Anyway.

I flew over on an Airbus 380, for the first time. It really is huge, but one doesn't always notice this because its proportions are similar to a Boeing 727: it can look like a small plane if you don't notice the details, for example that the tailfin is in fact larger than a 727's wings, or that when you are seated and looking out the wing obscures the three-storey buildings beside the taxiway — and I was on the upper deck, so in theory I was looking down on the wing.

It's a fine plane, the ride is very smooth. But in the end it's just air travel. There is no fantasy or romance in the A380, flying to NY in one is like spending the day at a tedious conference in the meeting rooms of a pretentious-but-only-middle-range hotel. The seats are the same as on any other Lufthansa plane, the food is the same, the general discomfort and annoyance before and after the flight are surely the same. Actually, having said that: Boarding and disembarking were quick and easy, and I got my luggage within 15 minutes of the plane landing. I should give some credit there.

The coolest thing about the A380 is the live camera views on the entertainment system. There are three low-resolution videocameras built into the aircraft: in the nose pointing forward; in the belly pointing down, and at the top of the tail looking forward over the back and wings of the aircraft. The latter plays on the overhead monitors during the flight. The belly camera is pretty useless, to be honest, the low resolution and the air haze make the ground images close to worthless. Should have hired a photographer-consultant to tell them about polarizing filters. But the view from the tail was cool, and it was quite exciting to be able to watch the plane landing and taxiing to the gate from the nose cam POV.

I'm going to try to sleep a little more (no hot chocolate for me, alas; it's typical of the Hotel Pennsylvania that while there is a minibar, it's empty. There is an ironing board and iron in the closet, but no kettle. My recommendation is to avoid the hotel unless you are stuck for a place to stay. It is at least clean and central, but has nothing else going for it.

Tokyo: tenth day

Trainblogging again on the way home from Tokyo, heading into the sunset. For the first half-hour or so out of Tokyo, the train follows the coastline; as when travelling along the Mediterranean coast of France/Italy one gets tantalizing glimpses of the sea between the tunnels. [Written on Wednesday, but I was too tired to post it. It's funny, I am not having any of the usual jetlag symptoms, but I am tired all the time.]

I was mystified for a while by irregularly-occurring flashes of diffuse reddish light, off in the distance, well above ground level. Were they aircraft warning lights on hilltops shining through low cloud? Eventually the train changed direction and I worked out that they had been caused by the sun reflecting on pylons and posts by the trackside, which were themselves flashing past too fast to see.

I've taken many photos from the train, one or two of which might turn out. I have quite a few shots of sound-protection walls and the broad and featureless sides of huge buildings, and a surprising number of shots of the insides of tunnels. The Shinkansen goes so fast that there is no warning at all of these things as they approach. Even the tunnels come as a surprise: on the ICE one usually has time to note the ground rising before the train plunges into darkness; here the first you know of a hill is when you dive under it.

I guess I won't see the peak of Fuji-san this time either: we aren't yet in Mishima and it is already pitch-black outside. I saw the base of Fuji on the way to Tokyo: even with its shoulders lost in clouds it is unmistakeable, not just tall but broad, truly massive. It's very much bigger than any other mountain in Japan, a sumo wrestler among schoolboys.

Tokyo was … well, where to start? It was many things: "huge" is one; "new" another; "exhausting" a third. There was simply too much choice for such a short trip. I found it hard work in a way that Kyoto wasn't. I certainly had more luck in finding English-speakers in Kyoto. (That is probably statistically insignificant, btw: I guess that every foreign visitor to Japan goes to both cities; given the cities' relative sizes those N visitors encounter, and infect with the meme of English-speakingness, a far higher percentage of the population of Kyoto than of Tokyo.)

I walked around Akihabara last night, checking out the otaku/manga/animé/geek culture. At first I was taken by the stores selling electronics and gadgetry (e.g. a tiny shop selling only sixty different types of electricians' pliers) but eventually the animé/manga scene captured my attention. The stores selling manga/animé figurines were a revelation. I'd heard about them, about the collectors and their seriousness, but I wasn't prepared for the reality. There are differences of quality and purpose (for want of a word) in the figures that even an outsider like myself can see, and the prices reflect this: from around 800¥ for a simple, static, two- or three-inch figure, to 2500¥ for a six-inch articulated figure with exchangeable heads/hands/accessories (i.e. different gestures and facial expressions), to around 5000¥ for the Gundam weaponized cyborgs that we Westerners call "Transformers," and on upwards to 20000¥ for a seriously creepy foot-high too-young-even-for-Lolita figurine.

Most of the smaller stores specialized in a single animé "franchises;" in the case of larger stores these were displayed on different floors. I'd guess that there is little overlap between the fans of e.g. Evangelion and those of Gundam, or between them and the fans of Dragonball and the Sailor Moon imperium. Not to mention the Star Wars imperium, which is nowhere near as present in Japan as in the west.

When I first started walking around Kyoto, looking at the Japanese, I thought that Japan looked like Second Life; having been to Akihabara and Harajuku, I now think that SL looks like Japan. So much of the common dress and appearance in SL is rooted in Japanese styles: the thigh-high boots, the straps and buckles, the stripes of fur along the touchable edges of jackets and boots, the mini-skirts that are hardly more than wide belts worn low. The "sexy schoolgirl" is common in Japan, but then she was already an erotic archetype in England thirty years ago so that doesn't really count towards my view of SL. (There sure are a lot of them, though most seem to be in their early twenties. I admit to enjoying the six or more inches of bare skin between the tops of their over-the-knee boots and the bottom of their miniskirts.) Even the tiny heads and bulging muscles of many male SL avatars have a Japanese root: most male action-animé characters have heads far smaller than their biceps. (Bishonen and yaoi animé characters, and the male supporting-cast of animé featuring women, are improbably good-looking but do have realistic bodies.)

In sadder news, I left my kangol (flat hat) on the subway train on the way back from Ueno, so I'll have a chance to investigate a question that puzzled me all last week: Kyoto is full of hat shops, I noticed at least six of them while walking around — yet nobody wears hats. No-one. So who buys all the hats, and what do they do with them? Is there a secret indoor hat-fetishing scene? A mystery.

One more point about the JapanRail pass: I forgot to mention that you should allow at least forty minutes to have it validated before you first use it. In Tokyo there is a special office for this near the Yaesu central exit; in Kyoto it was just a desk (singular) in the ticket office, where a young woman struggled valiantly against the tide. And note this too: visitors to Japan, especially those who don't speak Japanese, should allow a good fifteen minutes extra time in each station for getting lost and misdirected (or rather correctly directed to a misunderstood goal).

Kyoto is next, I'll pack up and get ready.

[Later: An amusing thing happened during the subway journey home to Uda-san's B&B. While standing around on Kyoto subway station platform waiting for the train, I was approached by a pair of Europeans with a map and a problem: Which train should they take to get to their B&B, and how would they go about finding it when they got there? As it happened we were heading the same way, so we talked for a while in the train. I was able to tell them roughly what to do, and how to go about getting the information they'd need to get to the rest of the way. Being able to help them promoted me from "stranger" to "insider." Nice.]

Kyoto - fifth day

I'm settling in well after nearly a week here, finding my way around the city and the mentality. I noticed yesterday a particular sign of the process of getting accustomed to the place: People in the street don't look "Japanese" any more, they just look like people. I still have terrible trouble judging ages (at least from a polite social distance), but then that sometimes confuses me in Germany* too.

I haven't had a Lost in translation moment yet, but that is probably due to having Piet and Eiko as my hosts and guides. It would be much trickier were I on my own. Yes, fewer Japanese speak English than I expected, and (more significantly) many of those who can are reluctant to do so because they fear embarrassing themselves or inconveniencing me by their mistakes; but on the other hand I've managed to buy food, books and batteries for my camera, and take the subway, a bus and a taxi by myself without causing offence or laughter. I'll expand on this at another time. (The Japanese love that movie, by the way, they recognize the truth of Bill Murray's confused isolation and their inability to help him. I like it too, and would recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it yet.)

I haven't really done very much, mostly just walked around and looked at stuff. I haven't yet been out of the city, for example, nor out to the suburbs to see Katsura-Rikyu (by appointment only, booked out until after Christmas!) or Ryoan-Ji. My plan for the remaining time is to keep my room here in Kyoto as a base and do day trips out, with at most an overnight stop in Tokyo.

The temples are beginning to merge in my mind, or at least their names. I'll remember the Buddhist prayer ceremony I happened to see (and hear) at Choin-Ji, and the hanging terrace above the woods at Kiyomizu-Dera, and the sand garden at Ginkaku-Ji, and the mirrorlike reflection of the illuminated autumn leaves in the pond at Eikando Zenrin-Ji last night, and my feeling of awe in the shrine at Kennin-Ji. On the whole, Kennin-Ji was probably my favourite so far, for the beautiful painted screens and because almost all of the shrine complex is open to visitors. It reminded me of the courtyards and ambulatories and ancillary spaces of the European cathedrals (though entirely different in scale and materials, obviously). Kennin-Ji is one of the few shrines I've seen where you can actually walk into the building and approach the altars; Choin-Ji is another.

Time for a walk in the garden at Heian Jingu, before lunch and more discussion with Eiko.

* I first typed "real life" instead of Germany. Japan is very much like Second Life!

In Kyoto

Survived the flight and the first day (nearly two days actually: landed at 9am).

Had a nap and a shower (in that order), walked around town, had some marvellous food, slept nine hours straight through, went walkabout this morning, had a great lunch and a walking tour of a few shrines, then packaged dinner from the local convenience store. More details about that in the next post, let's just say that the experience was typically and deeply Japanese.

In transit

Sitting at the gate in FFM, with an hour to go. There is of course no free public wifi here, but I still have the UTMS usb stick that I used to access the Internets all those months (I now have a working ADSL connection at home, btw, after two false starts when the installers screwed up). The stick works here just fine.

This will have to be a brief post as the battery is running down faster than the hour of stick-time that I bought.

Next stop Osaka and Kyoto. It's been a really hectic couple of weeks lately, getting everything shipshape for the holiday season. And it is a season: I'll be away in Japan for two weeks, then two weeks home, then off to Canada and the States for two weeks over Christmas and the New Year.

I'd been a bit apprehensive about the chance of flying on an A380, given the recent engine trouble. As it happens, this is a 340; definitely large enough. I've now seen a 380 "live," there is one across the way loading up at one of the A terminal gates. It's huge. It's REALLY huge, even bigger than I thought it was. Imagine taking two 747s, slicing the roof off of one and the belly off of the other, and glueing them together along the seam. That's a 380. It's as long as longer than a 747, but at first glance it seems short because the body is so oddly tall. I'll admit to being relieved that I'm not flying on one, but I am also vaguely disappointed.

So, to Kyoto. I'm invited by friends from SL to talk to them for a week about the societality (nice word) of Second Life; specifically two topics: identity and character, and how these are developed; and the development of ethics and community values in a virtual world where neither of these needed to develop (consider the level of vitriol and abuse in the typical chatroom for an example of VWs where they did not develop). After that, I've got a guide book and a handy-dandy-phrasebook and a JapanRail pass that takes me almost anywhere on almost any train, and I'll let the Moment move me. I'll keep you posted, here or on Twitter or even on the dreaded FB.

Next post, gods and terrorists willing, will be from Kyoto.

Finished, said Sisyphus

After two weeks of more than full-time work, we posted the competition drawings last night with twelve minutes to spare. G will be out of the office for two days of on-site meetings, Thursday is a public holiday (Christi Himmelfahrt aka Ascension Day) and I'm taking Friday off (as one does). it's going to be a good week.

So, hey, I have a four-day weekend coming up. What to do? Several options are open:

1) Train to Paris, or for that matter to Nice. Haven't been there in a decade. (Weather online says "rainy and as cold as Germany." Ah well.)

2) Last-minute flight to Tel Aviv. (Just looked at prices, the cheapest flight on an airline that I would actually trust to convey my body and worldly goods costs 788€. Ah well.)

3) Train to Hamburg. I really liked the city, and it would be nice to see AY and Ingrid again. (Assuming they would be there and available/interested.)

4) Stay home and not answer the phone, spend the time in Second Life and/or playing Dragon Age: Origins and/or installing Ubuntu on my PC.

Number four is the clear favourite for many reasons geekish and practical. I could cook for myself instead of eating fast food or going to restaurants, after two weeks of competitioning this has a strong appeal. I could go to the Staatsgalerie for the first time in 2010. I could walk up to Vaihingen on the Blauer Weg, or down to the river, both for the first time in 2010. I could sleep in every day.

[Updated] I read this again and had to smile at myself. What a homebody geek I am, that I would choose staying in and cooking over going to Paris!

Tel Aviv miscellany, part two

Being a further round of meanderings and babblings from the southeastern shores of the Med.

Sitting today at my favourite cafe (I already have a fav. cafe, the imaginatively named Espresso Bar on Dizengoff at Ben Gurion; I have breakfast there every day and sometimes an afternoon/evening latte) it occurred to me that there are no mosquitoes in TLV. The explanation is simple given a moment's thought: their life cycle has an aquatic phase that requires pools of stagnant water, which are not common in deserts. Call it an unexpected advantage.

Thinking about being an obvious tourist, one subtle clue is the matter of facial hair. There are only two styles of facial hair to be seen in Israel: either completely clean-shaven (not even what the rest of the world would consider fashionable stubble) or else a ZZ-Top diaphram-length full set. My soul patch is even more exotic than my pale skin.

I am (pleasantly) surprised by the secularity of Tel Aviv, I was expecting something rather more like my uninformed notion of Salt Lake City or the backwoods of the Bible Belt. The overtly religious are a minority here, the great majority wear no signs of religious affiliation that I can recognize.

I wonder what percentage of tourists to Israel are Jewish? Pretty high, I'd guess. My impression is that many, perhaps most, tourists do speak Hebrew. Sitting next to a table of touristy-looking people debating local politics in German, addressing the waitress in Hebrew and English, brought this to mind. I don't know why I should be surprised, given the size and historical age of the Diaspora it does seem pretty logical. Thinking back to my flight from Munich, I would say that the great majority of passengers were Jewish, and many of them were overtly religious in the way that the locals are not. (My friends nod and tell me that TLV is not Israel, that the rest of the country views the city as a pit of depravity and temptation.)

The military is less present than I expected, although having said that I did notice a destroyer cruising a few miles off the beach and a patrol boat circling near the breakwaters and a helicopter flying up to the second airport by the harbour, while having my midday drink at a beach bar. I heard a pair of military planes fly over the city towards the Med last night, about two minutes apart, flying fast and high in the darkness. Soldiers in uniform are a common sight, the train from the airport to TLV was full of kids going home on leave (with their guns on their laps pointing casually at each other); but again there are fewer of them than I had expected.

The local corvids are the same slim-bodied grey and black crows that I first noticed in Russia. The local pigeons are very pretty, reddish and beige-grey. Sparrows abound, of course. Haven't seen any rats yet, though I am told they are also common. (Eh, it's a city. What do you want already?)

Interlude

I forgot to mention a few utterly trivial points about the journey here. I got upgraded to business class again for the second leg of the trip, from Munich to Tel Aviv; as I said before, it's very nice but I would not pay for it. Why me? who knows. Perhaps because I'm a fairly frequent flyer and travelling alone?

The security inspection in Stuttgart confiscated my shaving cream, first time that I've ever had anything taken away. In fairness they did offer me the alternative of checking my bag (i.e. not carrying it on), which would have let me keep the stuff; they would have tagged it with a huge great big label and I would have given it to the gate personnel and received it again on the "finger" in TLV. I didn't know that system and thought they meant that I had to go back to the checkin, wait in line, give them the bag, then fight my way through security once more — which had already taken nearly an hour the first time I did it. Ah well, live and learn. (The reason I didn't give it up to the baggage handlers in the first place is that it contained my laptop, and I felt no need to expose them to the temptation to steal or break it.)

Security did allow me to keep my toothpaste and aftershave, but I had to take them from the plastic bag that they were in and put them in a specific and special 1-Litre Transparent Resealable Plastic Bag, which by an astounding coincidence was available from a vending machine right there. In a package of two, though you are only allowed to take one such bag on board. The bureaucratic mind at work is a thing of wonder.

Oh, by the way and on the subject of security, here's an important Public Service Announcement. If you have a connecting flight, e.g. Stuttgart to Munich to Tel Aviv, do NOT purchase anything even vaguely liquid-ish at your first airport! There is a chance that it will be confiscated at the second airport's security check, even though the goods are obviously bonded and sealed and clearly purchased in the airport, behind the first security check. The duty-free shops all know that this will happen but most of them don't warn you, which in my considered opinion borders on fraud.

Ah, it's sunset, the [forgotten which denomination] are out in their speaker vans calling us to prayer. Israel is very far south, and so sunset is early and rapid: pitch-darkness comes barely an hour after you notice that the clouds are getting red.

I bit the bullet and bought shampoo (400 ml), shower-gel type soap (200ml) and a package of razors to throw away. The latter are utter shit: "Life" brand twin-bladed disposable razors* in a packet of 5 for €2.50. The blades are rough and scratchy, it's like shaving with a handful of broken glass. Avoid. The former are good enough products, but obviously far too large. I will not be able to take them back with me, unless I check my bag and risk losing my laptop. Why do the hygienic article makers not produce small sizes for travellers? Perhaps they prefer for us to buy a huge bottle which gets confiscated? I guess our loss is their shareholders' win. Bah.

And another thing. I'm sure I speak for 99.3% of men when I say that we do NOT want to have to examine an entire stock-island-gondola-thing of shampoo, five shelves high and 150cm long, to find something to wash our damned hair with. Perhaps women appreciate being able to choose between low-fat daily-wash creme-rinse-without-brighteners for curly straw-blonde hair and low-fat daily-wash creme-rinse-without-brighteners for curly wheat-blonde hair, but we just get utterly pissed off by the needless complication. I have been known to leave stores empty-handed and enraged, refusing to play this insulting game of too many fake choices. And it's not just shampoo either: when I was a kid, you bought Crest toothpaste or you bought Colgate toothpaste. Now there are over 40 varieties of Crest alone**. Ridiculous!

Attention makers of shampoo for men: Want to drive your competition out of business within a single month? Produce a yellow package with clear black writing that says

This is shampoo.
It will make your hair clean.

No alternatives, no variations, no phony pseudo-distinctions that are (we suspect) either unfounded or based on differences so minute as to lie within the bounds of experimental error; just one single simple product. We would queue up — nay, we would fight each other — to buy that.

* Google bomb, hoping maybe to save someone else from buying them.

** Really. I counted them in the Duane Reade near Columbus Circle.

Tel Aviv: first impressions

… and we all know how often these are false and/or incomplete. Google tells me I have an hour before I have to walk to Savtadotty's weekly soup salon, so I will jot down my thoughts without any pretense at putting them into a sensible framework.

It is really odd being in a place where I cannot read the alphabet. This was brought home when I was texting with Savtadotty, trying to describe where I was. How to tell someone the name of a cafe, when you cannot even begin to pronounce that name let alone repeat the letters that your keyboard doesn't possess? Fortunately, all service-industry people speak at least one European language. I am obviously foreign here, twice I have been addressed in English before I had spoken a word. (My pale-as-the-belly-of-a-dead-fish skin might just be a clue.)

This is a marvellously exciting and active city, I haven't seen this much bustle anywhere but midtown Manhattan. I was quite lucky to get a hotel right in the middle of downtown. (My first impression of the hotel was deeply negative, but I am coming to terms with it. Is it acceptable? eh, sure. Would I recommend it? no.)

Pedestrians and drivers are impatient, pushing and honking at the slightest perceived delay, but they are also surprisingly law-abiding. Almost nobody jaywalks, and absolutely nobody crosses a street in the middle of the block rather than at a corner.

Very dry air, at first surprising given the presence of the sea less than six hundred metres away as the crow flies; but then again, this is the Middle East, and just a few kilometres in the other direction is what I would not hesitate to call "desert."

Rules about societality and communication are subtly and not-so-subtly different to Europe. Israelis love their cellphones, you see people cycling along with a phone jammed between cheek and shoulder. It's common and apparently accepted for two people to sit together at a cafe, both talking on their cellphones and occasionally speaking to each other. Internet access seems paradoxically to be both omnipresent and difficult, one often sees people standing on the street or in malls* with their laptops precariously balanced on one splayed hand, doing e-mail or some such thing. Why don't they sit in a cafe or do it at home? A mystery.

I sat outdoors last night at a cafe in Dizengoff, eating an endive and avocado salad with sweetish lime dressing and carraway/cumin/seasalt/whole-wheat bread, and did an hour or so of peoplewatching. There was a nearly-all-male celebration (birthday party?) happening indoors at the cafe, at a pair of very long tables; since smoking appears to be prohibited in every cafe I've seen (coincidence or a general ban?) the guests kept walking out to the curb in half-dozens, to stand and smoke. One of them spoke for a good dozen minutes to the male of a couple who were sitting near me — without either of them acknowledging the female other half in any way! He stood right beside her, his thigh nearly rubbing her elbow (Israelis don't seem to need much social space), and did not even glance at her. She played along, apparently content to be silent and still all that time. What to make of this? In Germany, for me to speak to a friend for so long without introducing you, would be understood as an insult.

There seems to be little consumption of alcohol here. I asked in the cafe for a local beer, and was told that they didn't have any (ambiguous: is there no local beer, or do they not stock it?)**, and looking around the only alcohol I could see was the champagne that the celebrants were consuming (they typically drank one glass and then switched to cola or water). The club-type place across the street, next to the walk-in botox clinic that was open for business at 10:30 pm, was probably serving alcohol, but I didn't bother to go and find out.

Weather is marvellous, high twenties (mid-eighties to the Americans) and clear skies.

Time to go. Shabbat shalom, my dears — and fancy my being in Israel to say that!

* I went to the Dizengoff Center to look for the Friday food court thingy that Lisa wrote about in her Tel Aviv City Guide (great book, I would recommend it even if she weren't a friend.)

** Savtadotty pointed out that this was probably a misunderstanding, as there are several breweries in Israel: the waiter probably thought I wanted a particular brand of beer named "Local."

Chicago

Arrived in the Windy City last night after a very pleasant flight: I was upgraded to Business Class because the plane was overbooked. The food was much better, the service almost embarrassingly attentive, the seats comfortable (mechanized things that folded out almost flat). Would I pay the extra for this? No. Because the problem with travel is not the food or the discomfort, as much as having to do it at all. I would pay extra for a flight that was two hours long instead of nine, but not even First Class can offer that.

There was some last-minute (almost literally) change of plans: My father was ordered to remain within car-driving distance of the hospital that is treating his circulatory difficulties, so they will not be at the wedding in Vancouver and therefore will not be in Regina with my sister next week. In the circumstances, my father's comment that "it would be nice if I could visit them in Toronto" felt pretty much like a command, so I dropped the Regina leg of the trip. Sorry Sis, but we'll catch up at Christmas.

Travel confounds expectations. One hears that Chicago is a big and dirty and dangerous city, as all American cities are; yet the first thing that Jubi said was "if you want to go out for coffee, just leave the front door open." We are right on a main street, close enough to downtown by American standards of space and distance, and yet it is no more noisy than my own apartment. I do miss hills though, Chicago is as flat as a tabletop.

I watched a tribute to Michael Jackson on the flight (without sound, my headphones didn't work and I couldn't be bothered to ask the crew to deal with them), and found myself feeling really sorry for that cute little kid Mikey. How and why did he end up as that ghostly, ghastly figure? Poor guy. Too much fame, too much pressure, far too much money. I wonder whether he had a life as a kid at all? Did he ride a bicycle and play baseball and hang about the mall exchanging half-truths and boasts? "Rosebud!"

Weather is grey, very warm and humid. Planning to take a boat tour of the river(s) and wander about downtown for a while, then to Milwaukee this afternoon/evening. But first, I shall go to the coffee shop across the street (whose wireless bandwidth I am currently scrounging) to charge up my inner batteries and clear my conscience.

On the wing

God and terrrorists willing, my next post will be from the bosom (or is that "bowels"?) of my family in Canada. Merry Christmas / Chanukkah / Festivus / Yule / seasonalities to you all, my dears.

[Updated after 19.5 hours under way, of which 11 hours actually in transit. Waiting in Calgary airport for the third and thank gods last connection of the day. Nearly home, which is just as well as I am fading fast. Arsehole neighbours held an open-windows party last night until 3 a.m. Now in desperate need of a shower and a bed, only about 3 hours away.]

How the future doesn't look

It's a fine summery Monday midday in Toronto, 12:52 pm at present whatever Blogger might try to tell you. The weather has changed: after two days of cold and rain, today is sunny and warmish (16°C) with a gentle breeze and only few decorative clouds.

I'm alone at home (in my parents' house): Sis and BIL are downtown seeing friends, Niece and Nephew are at the Science Centre, parents are shopping. I have taken advantage of their absence to open up windows front and back, to get some fresh air into the house. I find the recycled air of these tightly-sealed North American houses unpleasant: it feels used, stale, flaccid somehow compared to the fresh crisp vitality of the air outside. I can hear birdsong — such a profusion and variety of birds here! — and airplanes, a lawnmower and the vague dull background roar of traffic on the Don Valley Parkway, which together were the soundtrack of my childhood. One thing is sorely missing though: the sound and smell of the row of poplars that stood at the back of our property. Ah well.

The neighbourhood has not changed much visibly, many houses are still inhabited by families I knew forty years ago. In some cases, the parents moved out and left the house to the next generation (my generation) who are now raising children here; some others simply never left home. One can't even buy a cardboard box in the gutter for under C$199,000 these days, let alone a proper house where one might raise a family. There are apartments and condominia going up all over downtown, which is generally a good thing, Jane Jacobs was entirely right about that, but they start at C$ half a million for a one-bedroom flat. Who the hell buys or rents them, and how do they pay for it?

The better question is: Where on earth does everyone else live? The answer is, sadly, "In a bedroom suburb 90 minutes by car away from their jobs downtown." This is not a model for the future. Oil is running out (in case you hadn't heard), and the automotive suburban lifestyle will die with it. How do you think people will survive in so-called "communities" where there are no shops? How will you get to the big-box store by the highway intersection when there is no gas to put in your car? For that matter, the big boxes won't be there: how will WalM*rt and the rest survive when the price of diesel makes their warehouses on wheels as expensive as the brick-and-mortar warehouses of their competitors? They will die before peak oil really hits, because their sole justification for existing is their low price: people are willing to buy shit from them because it is cheaper than non-shit, but who would still shop at WalM*rt if their shit were the same price as other stores' higher-quality goods? The big-box stores are dead, take that as a given. The Internet shopfronts like Amazon, who are really just negotiators between you and somebody else's warehouse on wheels, will die immediately after from the same cause: their business model also depends on cheap and plentiful fuel.

I am extremely pessimistic about the future of North America late-phase free-market globalized capitalist democracy, I'm sorry to say, not because the problem is insoluble but because I see no willingness to admit that it exists at all. Hard rains are coming, folks, and I'll tell you right now, for free, that neither prayer nor technology will provide a solution. Nor will the kind of eyes-tightly-shut denial that is currently being practiced by almost all politicians and media.

The coming crisis is not about the kind of fuel we pour into our cars, that is a technical matter (albeit one with wide-reaching social, environmental and global-political side effects, obviously).

The root problem is the car itself: the kind of lifestyle it forces (apparently...) us to live and the kind of national economy it requires (apparently...) us to support. How and with what will we replace a society based on the immediate gratification of childish whims and on private, individual mobility? Because these are not sustainable in the long term, probably not even in the middle term, and the sooner we begin to face this problem the more likely we are to solve it without falling into chaos and bloodshed.

Our desires and our lifestyle must change, if we wish to save the rest of what we now call "civilization."

Thus endeth the lesson.

London scorecard

Birthday parties attended: 1
Combined age of attendees, in years (estimated): 1118
Average age of attendees, in years (estimated): 46.6
Number of attendees who were the same age as the host/guest of honour: 9
Languages that I heard spoken at the party: 7
Languages that I spoke at the party: 2 (French 70%, English 30%)
Hours away from home: 98
Hours spent in transit: 16
    of which actually in flight: 3.3
Hours in London: 82
Hours spent waiting for taxis, busses and Tube trains: 1.25
Hours spent walking in Richmond Park: 3
Minutes spent attempting to get online via Post Office DSL: 45
Minutes spent online: 0
Indian meals consumed: 3
    of which vegetarian: 1
Italian meals consumed: 1
Greek meals consumed: 1
English breakfasts consumed: 2
Pints of Guinness consumed: 1
Pints of Cobra beer consumed: 2.5
Pints of other beer consumed: 3
Glasses of Jameson's Irish Whisky consumed: 1
Glasses of Remy Martin VSOP consumed: 1
Glasses of Italian red wine consumed: 5
Books carried with me from Germany, to read on the way: 1
Pages of said book that were read on the way: 0
Locally-available books read: 1
Books bought: 10
Music CDs bought: 1
Music CDs "ripped" i.e. stolen: 1
Strangers flirted with in the Tube: 1
Strangers flirted with in bookshops: 1
Art exhibitions viewed: 1
Sightings of St. Paul's Cathedral: 2
Visits to St. Paul's Cathedral: 0
Sightings of Sir Norman Foster's Thames Bridge: 1
Crossings of Sir Norman Foster's Thames Bridge: 0
Blogging buddies met in RL: 1
SecondLife buddies met in RL: 0
Persons I met who had heard of either blogging or SecondLife: 0

Arrived

... in the Stampede City (as it calls itself, as though Boston were to be known solely for its marathon). Flight was pleasingly uneventful, good weather and often clear skies. I saw the mountains of eastern Greenland for the first time in all these decades of regular trans-Atlantic flying: very rugged, very high, quite impressive. There was no sign of human activity between crossing over Iceland three hours into the flight, and seeing the first electricity lines in northern Alberta six hours later (an hour before landing). I thought (as I often do) what a peculiar thing it is to fly halfway around the world on a whim, just for a party; and how strange that this mid-air tin can should be some people's regular place of work.

There was, alas, a screwup with the tickets: somewhere between my booking window seats on all four flights and the agent reading me back the seat numbers, and when I turned up at the airport in Frankfurt, all these reservations were lost. Either the Lufthansa agent forgot to carry them forward when he changed my first flight to the train, or (more likely) they were lost during the transfer between Lufthansa (where I booked the tickets) and Air Canada (who actually ran the flight). In the end it was OK, because I was able to change at the gate to a window seat; I just hope that my return trip won't be spent in the middle of the plane.

Memo to Lufthansa and Air Canada: Pardon me for interrupting your tenth-anniversary backslapping, but this Star Alliance partnership thingy of yours still needs a bit of debugging.

Weather coldish and grey, seamless overcast and 3°C as I landed. The forecast is for warmth, Sunday should be sunny and mid-teens.

My favourite cousin and her family are well, everyone seems healthy and happy. The kids are growing, my gods, her son is as tall as she now.

Mail is downloading as I write, some 6923 messages on the server which are new to my laptop but not to me. There seems to be no way to delete mail without downloading it. Ah well, it's a flat-rate broadband connection so what the hell. Just saw a subject line flash past: "Now you can have sex up to 10 times a day." Dear gods, what kind of unhappy, uninformed, gulllible clod believes this crap? Somebody does, else the spammers would find another game.

Cappuccino awaits, and there are hares on the lawn that need watching.

Half-day off

Had a beer with Ingrid and AY at his third-favourite restaurant late last night, sitting outdoors under a clear, starry sky. The curators were decisive and un-farty and generally pleased with the project and our work, all systems go but my gods what a lot of going remains. AY saw the extent and quality of our work for the first time yesterday, and declared himself to be highly impressed with both. And it was indeed impressive even to me: we produced an inch-thick pile of drawings from a standing start in three weeks. Pats on the head and skritches between the ears all round.

We talked about "home" and what it means to feel "at home" in a city (we are all new to Hamburg, AY and I are from Stuttgart and Ingrid from Kiel): finding five or six places to which one can return, "my" newpaper stand and "my" cafe and "my" grocery store; being recognized and greeted by someone who is already at home in the place; being able to give directions to someone who asks for help. And of course, having a familiar and comfortable room of one's own to stay in.

Yesterday was spent principally in dodging sudden, violent rainstorms and basking in the quarter-hours of brilliant sunshine that followed them. The weather up here is strangely rapid: one might forecast "overcast with clear skies, bright sunshine and heavy rain" all summer long, and be right nearly every day. Ingrid and I sometimes walk to the Bootsmann for lunch in bright sunshine, huddle against the rain under an umbrella while we eat, then walk back to work in sunshine again. The rain is often of a kind previously unknown to me: nearly invisible tiny raindrops barely the size of a pinprick in paper, almost undetectable on the skin but which still soak you to the core after an hour.

I walked downtown, browsed in a few bookshops (but bought nothing), visited the Speicherstadt office (very dubious wall-to-wall carpet reeking of industrial chemistry), and took a canal boat tour which I am sadly unable to recommend. There are at least two different tours; that which I took duplicated the Alster boat trip on Saturday with the addition of two smaller waterways. Don't take that, it adds little to the experience of the Alster trip; search around until you find the tour that goes along the Goldbekkanal and take that instead.

Today will be a half-day only, which still means about eight hours' work; we will meet at noon to consider how my remaining three days are best spent. The programme is unlikely to include "biting her arse."

Something else that I've been meaning to mention concerns a bit of self-knowledge, always a good thing, which I have acquired through this project: I miss cooking. (My sister is now laughing hysterically.) I almost always cooked lunch for myself when working at home, and after three weeks here I'm getting quite sick of bought food. I shall be glad to be home and pottering about in my kitchen again.

Epi oinopa ponton

The title is, of course, Homer's famous epithet the wine-dark sea; when applied to the Alster it would need a slight change to "the miso-soup-dark sea" in view of the lake's very dubious greenishly-tinged brown.

The rain stopped about 1pm, so I went out and walked down to the Alster and from there to the Rathaus (town hall), then the length of the pedestrian area to the train station and back, then took a cruise boat up the Alster to Winterhude, thence home with the same bus that I take to & from work. Very pleasant. I would recommend the cruise (an hour each way) to anyone with a day to spare and a relaxed spirit; there is also a two-hour cruise along the canals and riverways that I will try to take before leaving Hamburg.

Now, happily tired, drinking tea and listening to iTunes music, thinking of picking a book from the pile (literally: my absent colleague doesn't believe in shelves) and retiring early to bed.

But first: a public service announcement. Anyone who wears in-ear headphones with their iPod-type personal-music-player device should try these new earphones from Bose. The sound quality is just amazingly good, no other word for it. Changing from Apple's bundled iPod earphones (good as they are) to these is like moving from a car radio to a well-chosen home stereo system. The bass doesn't shake your guts, obviously, but it's vastly louder and more present than in normal earphones. The whole tonal balance is different to the Apple earphones, the simple description would be that it's shifted an octave down the scale: the highs are less shrill and there is more and deeper bass. The sound is very detailed, listening to Glenn Gould playing Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven's Sixth (thanks again, Antonia!) I can hear the pedalwork and him humming along.

Highly recommended, worth every penny of 99 Euros. Two caveats, though: first, the Apple earphones were very transparent, one could clearly hear environmental noise while wearing them, e.g. the honking horn of that oncoming bus. The Bose earphones are not at all transparent, do be especially careful if/while wearing them on the street. Second, having had these on for an hour or two now, I noticed that I'd tended to set the volume on the Apple earphones by the level of distortion I was hearing rather than the volume of music per se. There is no distortion in the Bose earphones, you may find yourself putting the volume up much higher than you would otherwise, waiting for it to kick in.

My coming to purchase them was proof that advertising works. I'd seen a review of them in a magazine quite some time ago and had been impressed enough that it registered vaguely; when I saw a Bose store (sign of the times) in an arcade here I remembered that they'd recently launched something quite amazing, though I couldn't think what it had been. So I went in and looked around and these caught my eye.