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.]

Fukuoka - eighth day

I'm trainblogging live on the Shinkansen, on the way to Fukuoka to have ramen noodle soup for lunch with a new friend from SL. How cool is that? [This was written on Sunday, but I was too tired to post it when I got home.]

I'm actually using my laptop on my lap, for perhaps the first time ever: there is a tray at each seat, but the spacing between rows is so remarkably wide that it's too far away to use as a base for typing. The Shinkansen is a strange beast to European eyes: it feels like a hybrid cross between a train and a widebody aircraft. It's nearly a metre broader than the ICE, with five seats across (3+2) and an aisle that is also significantly wider than ours. All seats face in the direction of travel (like Amtrak and VIA Rail in Canada, they swivel so they can be reversed at the end of the line. That means that there are no facing groups of seats, as in the ICE: I guess people travel alone or in triads at most, or they simply sit apart.

I had an unusual and rather charming dream early this morning: I was giving sex lessons in mime to a pair of shy but enthusiastic Japanese teenagers. The richness of my gestural imagination amused me, I was chuckling as I woke. The chuckles faded when I realized that it was 3:30 am, but that's another story. (It occurs to me to wonder whether this observant meta-self enjoying the entertainment was "lucid dreaming" or just me slowly waking up. I've heard the term often but never really arrived at a definite understanding of it.)

The Bishonen phenomenon is something typically and strangely Japanese. It's not cross-dressing and certainly not transgender, they dress male and don't appear to be gay (insofar as I would be able to detect the local clues and cues which are probably quite different to Europe or America). It seems to be almost a kind of cosplay, a joy in playing at a particular style of looking good. As far as I can see they are treated as normal guys by society and by their almost-always-female companions (who are usually equally well made up); I probably wouldn't detect sneers or rude comments if they were expressed without gesture and in a polite tone of voice, but the fact is that I've never noticed any kind of reaction to them at all.

Hiroshima. A brand-new city, obviously and unusually. I suddenly feel very obviously Western, though nobody seems to care.

I'm figuring out a few things about the language, both spoken and written. One oddity is that although Japanese is read right-to-left (ads, posters, most signage) or in top-to-bottom columns from right-margin to left-margin (books, newspapers, magazines, handwritten menus), single-line electric signs scroll from left to right! It must be very hard to read. There's no good reason for it, the text could just as well be set to scroll rightwards. (Yes, most such signs are bilingual, but English and Japanese are never on-screen at the same time; it could easily be made to switch direction when it switches language.)

I'm amused to note that there are exceptions to the linguistic rules here too, for all the claims of simplicity and straightforwardness of pronunciation. It is said that n is the only consonant that can exist on its own without a vowel (it has a conceptual silent vowel: Shinjuku is a four-syllable word); but the ts pairing is common and not intervowelled (e.g. Fujitsu). Actually, having written that I now wonder whether that is perhaps just an artefact of transliteration: whether there is in Japanese phonetic script a specific character for that pair. This is perhaps my long-awaited "Lost in translation" moment: not being unable to order food and drink, but being unable to satisfy my geeky curiosity.

Also, u is so clipped as to be almost silent unless it's a consonant-less syllable, e.g. Fukuoka is pronounced "F'k'oka." Ei and ai are barely distinguishable from plain "e" and "a:" the trailing "i" is just a grace-note, a barely-vocalized upward inflection. I confused everyone by making three syllables of the name "Eiko," when it's properly about two and an eighth. Another common mistake, from sheer linguistic habit, is to see ing as a single syllable, an English diphthong, whereas it is really the core of three syllables: Ji-n-gu.

Kokura, and we have reached the sea. Half an hour to go. The Shinkansen doesn't mess around, some of these station stops have been barely a minute long.

There is a conductor (who is evidently not a ticket examiner) who walks back and forth in search of something to do. When he walks from the front of the train to the rear (facing us) he enters the car without fuss; but when walking from rear to front (with his back to us) he pauses as he reaches the head of the car, turns around, and bows to us before proceeding.

(Later, homeward in the dark at 5:30 pm.)

Well, that was fun. The noodles lived up to their billing, and Fukuoka seems a nice enough place. Far fewer temples than in Kyoto, and fewer older buildings generally, probably because it was bombed and burned flat during the war. The city has something of an inferiority complex, apologising for not being as exciting as Tokyo or as historically-cultural as Kyoto, defensively proud of its (for Japan surprisingly high degree of) multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity. Being at the far end of the train line in a highly centralized country is probably plays a role in that.

The Tojoji shrine/temple (have to check which is which) surprised me: It was clearly buddhist, with golden statues of the Buddha and lotus blossoms etc; yet it also had what I thought of as Shinto elements, like an orange-painted pagoda and little guardian-stones (have to find out their proper name) wearing red bibs. Perhaps it's multi-denominational? or perhaps the divisions are less hard and fast than I thought.

I didn't get to see the famous thousand-armed Buddha (aka Kwan Yin), nor the statue of the reclining Buddha (one of only two in Japan, it says here). Next time.

A word of warning about JapanRail passes as I change trains in Shin-Osaka. The pass seems to be a steal: a week of non-Nozomi, non-Green carriage travel cost me 250€ plus 35€ handling fee, which I'm told is not much more than the cost of a single return trip from Kyoto to Tokyo. So if you plan to go farther than that or more often than once, it seems like a real bargain.

There are several kinds of passes, which let you on different types of train and classes of carriage. In my humble opinion the Green (first class) carriage pass is in itself unnecessary, "ordinary" carriages are good enough; however it does let you take the Nozomi trains. Given that these make up the great majority of intercity trains, the convenience of travelling whenever you like may be worth the difference in price. In the current case it would have meant two fewer changes and being home nearly an hour earlier.

Trainblogging, American edition

En route from Durham NC to Trenton NJ, driving up the eastern seaboard (though at present far inland) in overcast and light rain; it's 10:45 a.m. and the carriage is close to full. The train is small by European standards, for such a distance: two locomotives, baggage car (how quaint), cafe car, six coaches. There are no tables on Amtrak, all seats are in airline-like pairs, all facing the same direction. The fold-out tables are oddly high, about four inches too far above my lap for comfortable typing.

There are no over- or underpasses on train routes in the US (outside of major urban areas), every road we've passed so far has been a level crossing with barriers and flashing lights, which means that the train has been whistling pretty well nonstop. I like listening to the strange moaning roar of a train whistle, when I hear them at night or in the city, but this constant noise is going to get old pretty fast.

Raleigh NC.

On the other hand, given that there is only one train per day and direction on this section of the route, it would be absurdly expensive to build and maintain overpasses at every road. (Oh, that's right, Americans don't maintain infrastructure; but even so…) This stretch is single-track only, there is no provision for more than one train at a time to travel here. This means that the stations all have only one platform, which I find really odd: in Europe even hundred-person pissawful villages on the far periphery of civilization have two platforms.

I'm listening via iTunes and headphones to music that I acquired (cough piracy cough) in Milwaukee at the wedding. The song of the moment is "Willie the Pimp" by the late, sorely missed Frank Zappa. This song may need to go onto repeat for a while.

Well, that was interesting. In addition to the working train staff who punch tickets, there is a Volunteer Train Host on board, who seems to be here to walk about and chat semi-idly with passengers — no, sorry, I meant customers. I'm not sure why we are not "passengers" but it is clear that we are not, that word has not yet been used today. Presumably there is some dire legalistic-horseshit implication in the difference. Bah.

Wilson NC. Wow, quite a crowd waiting to board. I shall probably lose the empty seat where my backpack rests. On the edge of town, a huge and largely empty cemetery. No European cemetery would have so much empty space between stones, nor paths between the rows that were large enough to drive a golf cart down. [Later: having seen several cemeteries, I think that the difference is not the spacing but the typical size of the average memorial, which in Europe would be much larger.]

Outside Wilson, there is a double-tracked section. We waited ten minutes for a southbound freight train to pass by, then continued north on the single track.

Rocky Mountain NC. Boxy building by the roadside proclaims itself the home of the Improved Order of Redmen. Yeah, whatever.

Petersburg VA. Had lunch (hawt chickn sammitch) and a coffee from the cafe car. It was adequate, reminded me of British Rail food (which is not a recommendation).

Just saw my first kudzu infestation, a whole creekbed covered in the stuff. I can't figure out why people aren't worried about it. But then, there is much that I can't figure out, for instance why nobody seems interested in the sudden increase of food allergies during the last two decades. There was no such thing as being allergic to food when I was a kid, people would have thought it was a joke. Today, every second child is allergic to nuts. Why does this not strike anyone at all as being unusual and potentially significant? Is it that worrying might interfere with the food industry's dividends? Bah.

Richmond VA, and the smokers are stepping out to get a fix. Amtrak doesn't post the names of the stations, presumably they are so few and so far apart that there could be no possible uncertainty (hollow laughter). For a country founded by immigrants and whose national mythos is of the Drifter, it is surprising that America cuts absolutely no slack for people who lack local knowledge. Signage in public spaces (parking lots, streets, airports) is minimal by European standards, and worse it is sometimes false. It took my parents and I twenty minutes to get out of an underground garage in Toronto last week, because the way to the exit was not signposted. "Everyone knows that!" seems to be the attitude. Bah.

Fredericksburg VA. A pair of buzzards circle low over Main Street.

Quantico VA, home of the FBI and the Marines. Steward tells a pregnant woman waiting to disembark "You know we don' actually stop here, right? We jus' open the doors an' you jump an' roll." Hilarity ensues.

Alexandria VA. A real city, with suburbs and double-decker local commuter trains.

Washington DC, where half the passengers customers disembark. I'm surprised what an enormous city Washington is. Coming into the city from the south, past the Lincoln Memorial and the Needle, I find myself thinking of Lincoln, King, Kennedy and yes of Obama, and choking up.

Remind me to look up "Acela," that looks like a long-distance high-speed train in the European sense, which this sure ain't. We have been travelling at 60 mph or below for most of the day.

Population density is increasing rapidly as we get further north. Maryland is at least one order of magnitude more densely settled than NC.

Baltimore MD. Good god, this is a bleak city, entire districts seem to be boarded up.

Several long causeways across water; are these estuaries? Google will know.

(At this point I had to pack up and prepare to disembark. The post is (a) missing the last three or four stations, but (b) already quite long enough. It remains only to say that despite dire predictions of Amerian friends, the train arrived in Trenton nearly 10 minutes early.)

Catching up

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed - why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall, and why a man whose father less than sixty years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.

Fuck yeah. Watching the Inauguration made me happier than I have been in quite a while, and I'm not even an American. How lovely to be given a reason for optimism again, after eight years of being shat on.

Will he disappoint us? Well, yes, he probably will. He is human after all, and the problems are immense and complicated, and he is President not Czar: he cannot simply issue instructions to the serfs. But as Zhoen rightly said, "If Obama just doesn't keep us going at top speed down the mountain to the cliff, I'm calling it better."

The inauguration address was a model of grace and decorum, as all of Obama's speeches have been. One thing that strikes me on reading it, is how seldom he used the first person singular. If my count is correct, there were only three "I"s in the entire speech, all in the first five paragraphs. It was all "we", "us", "our". Good.

I spent a day in Zürich last week, giving an introduction/training to some new database customers. Oddly enough, one of them turned out to be a very old nearly-customer, who had been in the audience when I gave a demonstration at A Very Large Bank Indeed five years ago. They didn't buy, but she remembered me and proposed us when her new company needed a database.

Zürich is a lovely city, big enough to be interesting but small enough still to be pretty and comfortable. And they make very good chocolates. I'll have to go back sometime with a few hours of daylight to wander around in.

The trip home, however, was a … well, I nearly said "disaster" but that is not how it felt. What should have happened, is that I boarded the last ICE of the day at 19:10 and was comfortably home with tea and slippers at about 22:15. What did happen, is that a half-dozen of us stood at the entry to platform 11, whence the train should have departed, looking at a blank indicator board. The main signboard (in the station hall) said "Wait for announcement" so like the good little Germans we are, we waited. And waited and waited and waited.

And then, quite suddenly, without any announcement or explanation, our train disappeared from the signboard.

We looked at each other in wild surmise, then stormed the Information kiosk. The woman behind the counter said that the train had been cancelled, and stated that it was our own fault that we had missed it. "Why did we not ask her for advice before it was cancelled?" Well, really. We explained, politely I thought under the circumstances, that her statement was unacceptable, and after a few minutes of "Yes it is" "No it isn't" she directed us to the Customer Service Desk hidden away at the other end of the building. They, bless them, immediately apologised and sprang into action, finding connections and rebooking our tickets. So we (by now a highly integrated team) went out to platform 16 and boarded the express train to Basel.

Arriving there, we found another messup. We were supposed to change to a train from platform 5, but there too the indicator board was blank. An SBB employee was standing in front of it, talking on his cellphone and gesticulating. When he hung up, he turned to us and said that he didn't know where the train was or when it would leave — and with that, tried to walk away. It was explained to him, politely I thought under the circumstances, that his statement was unacceptable, and after some grumbling he tried again, discovering as though by magic that the train was on platform 9 and on time, i.e. about to leave during the next 50 seconds. So we ran.

The train in question was a sleeper to Prague via Berlin, which we were going to take up the Rhine as far as Karlsruhe, for the second connection to Stuttgart at 23:18. We settled ourselves in one of the seating carriages (not beds) and went to the bar, which was actually quite nice. Comfy chairs, a true bar with a footrail and music, tiny LED lights in a Milky Way sprinkling along the ceiling, fine food and very good beer. The catering in the SBB is miles ahead of the Deutsche Bahn's attempts.

We arrived in Karlsruhe at 23:25, seven minutes after the connection left, and found the station deserted but for the McDonalds and the cleaning ladies. There was one more train to Stuttgart, at 00:30 the next morning, arriving at 02:45. Since we should already have been at home for over an hour, little enthusiasm was expressed for the idea of waiting an hour for a slow train. Six of us hired a minibus taxi to take us all home for a flat rate of 200 Euros. The bus took half an hour to arrive at the station, and an hour and a half to get from Karlsruhe to my doorstep (I was second off the bus).

The trip had taken six and a half hours.

What interested me in this whole mess was to observe our reactions to it. I have been more affected by the meditation and discussion I've been doing in Second Life than I had realized, because I was able to "step back" from myself as we were arguing with the moron in the Info-kiosk in Zürich, and see that the situation did not determine our response. We had a choice of how to react to what was happening. I chose to see it as an adventure, and relaxed into whatever was going to come.

The group dynamics changed as we sat in our compartment on the way to Basel and then in the bar, without my arguing or trying to pursuade anyone. I simply acted on my decision that I was going to enjoy this unexpected adventure, and over time this quiet acceptance came to be the common attitude.

Fascinating.

Sunday

The second competition has been judged already, in a manner of speaking, and we were among the winners. It was the first stage of a two-part competition: in the first stage, 45 competitors presented ideas for improving the centre of a small town and some sheltered housing, all in rough and simple outline form. Fifteen have now been selected to develop these rough ideas into reasonable, feasible projects. In other words, what we won was the right to take part in another competition. Better than the proverbial kick in the head, but not by much.

I spent two days in Hamburg last week, visiting with Ageing Yuppie and his crew, and doing a bit of work too. Eleven hours in the train for three hours of customer hand-holding? not quite right somehow; but flying would only have been about an hour shorter door-to-door considering security lineups and waiting for baggage and all that crap. I'd rather spend the time on the train, where I can at least walk about and look out the windows.

Time for sleep, it's been a long day.

On the road again

Rolling home in the afternoon on a cool and misty day, under a seamless, colour-suppressing light overcast. There are some patches of snow on the ground, in the shade of trees and buildings and along the thicker limbs of particularly stable trees. Munich was almost bare, only a few shreds and patches remained. The rivers are flowing fast and high, presumably the runoff from this recent snowfall.

It is cold, though: ponds along the way are frozen over.

Spent the morning with Georgette and colleagues (though not my unnamed partner, who is in Spain at a trade fair), discussing the state of the database and a few future improvements.

In geekish news the purpose of yesterday's conference was to present the forthcoming version of the database toolkit, which is going to be very exciting when it gets formally released next Spring. (Non-geeks are encouraged to stop reading at this point.)

It is already very stable: although what we saw was officially beta-test software, it didn't crash once during the demo. The engine has been substantially rewritten, the indexing has been separated out of the datafile and completely rewritten using newer techniques, and the application now runs natively multi-threaded on multiple-core processors; together these changes bring astonishing performance improvements.

The lead developer spent a quarter-hour demonstrating how to optimize databases using the new indexing: text search in 100 million records using old (B-Tree) indexing: 34 seconds; recreate the index as a Cluster, unload the cache, same search was done in 0.6 seconds. (Sound of 80 jaws clattering on the floor.) And that on a normal MacBook! not even the Pro model. So you can imagine what a server with a fast disk-array and 16Gb memory would be able to do.

The best improvement in indexing is that plain-text fields are now fully indexed and searchable: the database can generate indexes on every single word in a 2Mb text field. This allows clever, user-pleasing tricks like live real-time searching. To demonstrate this, they imported some 10 gigabytes of data, three million records' worth, from the various Wikipedias into text fields, then searched for "macintosh." The database engine filtered the records in real-time: type "m", 3m records; type "a" to give "ma", 2m records; type "c" to give "mac", 1m records; type "i" to give "maci", 600k records; and so on. Very impressive.

But possibly the biggest news is that this version finally has a built-in SQL engine, it's no longer a plug-in. SQL searches now run as fast as native-language queries. Watching this part demonstrated took me back twenty years to my first computer experiences, using SQL databases on mainframes and large UNIX systems. The language hasn't changed a bit (ha).

Heady stuff. It's going to be such fun to get my hands on this software.

Twenty-one down, nine to go.

Travel notes

Like a vertical
small town, an office building
comes slowly awake.

---

We travel through fog
in the way that one lives through
time: in a bubble

of permanent present tense,
of absolute here-and-now.

The destination
we know in general terms
(on the one hand Death,

on the other Düsseldorf)
but the details are unknown.

On a clear day we
can see the road ahead, and
think life just the same,

a clearly laid-out path; with
care we can avoid those rocks.

---

I'm in pretty good
shape considering that I
only slept three hours.

---

Factory ruin,
the name "von Aschenbach" is
oddly apposite:

jobs were globalized to a
factory named "Tadeusz."

---

Dinner in the old
town: Wiener Schnitzel, Salat
und Bratkartoffel.

Sometimes I just feel the need
for fat, salt, and a glass of beer.

Memories part four

There isn't much that I regret after these 48 years, and the regrets I do have are almost without exception things that I didn't do (youngsters who might be reading: take heed). One such case came to mind last night while listening to Ravi Shankar on the radio.

In the last few years that I was in England, I lived in London and worked in Sprawlville (a city a hundred miles away), and commuted there and back by train every day. Some Friday evenings, I would stay in Sprawlville and go boozing with my mates from work, then take the train back on Saturday morning. There would sometimes be half a dozen of us sleeping in odd corners of Smiler's home. (Even then I was the early riser, I'd let myself out and buy bacon, eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes and a loaf of fresh bread from the market, then cook breakfast for everyone.)

On one such occasion, there was something happening in Sprawlville old town (a fair perhaps) and so I stayed the whole of Saturday and boarded a late afternoon train. It was midsummer and the train was hot, stuffy and quite empty; I sat in the restaurant car and treated myself to a beer. There was only one other passenger, an elegantly-dressed man in his fifties, by appearance an Indian. The train rattled on towards London, and the day wore on towards evening. As the sun was approaching the horizon, I heard the man speak to the waiter:

"May I ask your help? I'm blind, could you please tell me when the sun touches the horizon?"

The waiter agreed (naturally), and we three sat as if spellbound, two of us watching the sun. The waiter spoke: "A couple of minutes yet... about another minute... soon... now."

The man sat up straight and folded his hands, and he began to sing.

It was obviously a prayer.

I couldn't tell you what language it was in, nor any details of the melody or style other than "not English" and "not Western."

He sang for the exact length of time it took the disc of the sun to sink below the horizon, then relaxed and thanked the waiter. I sat entranced and curious, I wanted to know more but didn't ask (the English disease of hyperpoliteness).

To this day, I regret not having approached him. He wouldn't have been offended at my questions, I'm sure; he would have been glad of the contact and happy to tell me about the prayer.

Trainblogging

I am once more on the road to Munich for database business. Customer support this time, hoping to fix problems that couldn't be resolved on the telephone. I am quite certain that all three cases are user error, but cannot prove this without being there and putting hands on hardware. I hope to be finished with the customers in time to meet Georgette before the last train back to Stuttgart.

The Hobbyist version is proceeding well, the tests are coming back mostly positive with very few bugs to report. The user's guide is being fine-tuned and will be ready this month. It's all coming together nicely, which is just as well as I'll be gone in 32 days and whatever is not done at that time will remain not done.

Grey and cold, a dull evenly overcast sky as we climb the escarpment at Geislingen. The forecast for the weekend is for cold (15°) and rain, even sleet in higher areas.

The one last swallow is still in Stuttgart! I saw it flying last evening, on my way home from work. Is it crazy? Was it spurned by the others, outcast and forbidden to return to Africa? Or did it just sleep through the alarm call and now doesn't know anything else to do?

Just before Ulm there is a very large and prosperous-looking farm in a smallish valley, with a huge two-storey barn and other buildings. I have always wanted to photograph this, but never remember to bring the camera. An oddity: Munich is east-southeast of Stuttgart, but according to the position of the sun, we are travelling southwest at the moment.

Work with the architects has been interesting the last few days. I have been checking and correcting the engineers' drawings for the concretework, and the steelwork fabricator's drawings. It's fascinating to see (reconstruct) how they think, in particular the concrete work is instructive. Architects and users of buildings think of concrete as an inflexible and dogmatic substance; the engineers see it as something nearly fluid, they bend it and shift it around at will. One beam (imbedded in the change in height where two floor slabs meet) has acquired a Z-shaped jog just before it meets a wall. This would be heresy to a steelworker: imagine a straight beam twelve metres long, that makes a dogleg in its final twenty centimetres. It would be difficult and expensive to do that in steel, the rotational moment would be immense. But concrete doesn't care, it takes such trickery in its stride.

The checking itself is not complicated, but very thought-intensive. Five hours of that is all the work that I can do in one day. It takes over an hour to check a table-sized drawing: a quarter-hour of thought to understand the system and purpose behind a piece of work, at least half an hour to check the drawing for internal consistency (e.g. 1+1=3, which even in these days of computer-aided drafting happens more often than you would believe), and a final quarter-hour to compare the drawing against other drawings, the walls and floors that this particular section of concrete connects to.

Going past the Donau (Danube) at Günzburg I notice that the river is very high. It has indeed been raining a lot in the last few days.

What makes this job (the checking and also the project itself) so tricky is the differing scales and accuracies of concrete and steel. Concrete work is traditionally done in high winds and pounding rain, up to one's knees in sticky mud; it is therefore necessarily imprecise. If the resulting walls and columns are wrong by "only" two centimeters it is considered a good result.

The steelwork which will sit on these future walls and columns is measured - and pre-cut made-to-measure - in millimetres.

Pair of black-winged herons in the reeds around that pond.

Normally this discrepancy is not a great problem: You set up the steel columns on the up-to-two-centimetres-false walls and level them up with lasers; if the top of the wall is higher than expected, then you just get out the circular saw and cut a bit off the top of the column (simply expressed, it is slightly more complex than that).

Eagle, working hard against the wind.

For reasons that I won't elaborate on, this project is different: there is a very high corrosion risk, all steelwork is prefabricated and sealed in zink. There will be no welding, no cutting, no boring of holes on-site. In other words: no chance to correct mistakes. The final assembly of these pieces on site will be, shall we say, very interesting.

Field of green (unripe) sunflowers at Kutzenhausen, hanging their heads in the gloom.

Munich.

Trainblogging (Hamburg)

The day got off to a bad start: I missed the train. My own damned fault, pure overconfidence: I thought that I knew when it started, but I'd misremembered the booking. And the worst part is that I thought while brushing my teeth that I should confirm the time, but said "nah, I know when it leaves." Pride goeth before a fall, to coin a phrase.

So, an hour later I'm sitting in an unreconstructed first-generation ICE, radio via headphones but no power for the laptop. To make matters even more annoying, the carriage is full of schoolkids returning from a trip, and they are full of beans and correspondingly noisy. If I overheard correctly, they will be changing trains in Hannover, so there is hope that the final hour may be more or less peaceful. What was that about "small mercies?"

Anyway.

Spring is turning into early summer, the rapeseed fields are already half yellow. (Mind you, that particular yellow field was in fact a fine crop of dandelions.)

Oh, I know where we are (roughly): I saw this reservoir on the way to Berlin some months ago. Looks very different now, of course. There are many more tunnels on this route than I remember from the first time.

Thinking about my complaint in that post, that the names of rivers are not signposted, it occurs to me that there is (at least for the computerati) a possible better alternative. G and U have bought themselves a new toy, an in-car navigation system, which G and I set up and played with on Friday afternoon while U worked on (boys will be boys). It's a very cute little machine, the version they bought knows the names of every street and automotive-commercial feature in eastern Europe (Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and one other that I can't remember), and can position any house-number to within fifteen metres along that street, and also highway and principal road connections to every town and village in all of continental Europe and Scandinavia. All this info is stored on a single chip the size of the first phalanx of your thumb, the thickness of a stick of chewing gum. The machine has a GPS receiver and compass, so it knows where you are and which direction you are facing. It cost 350 Euros = 445 US$ = one-and-a-half round trips to Hamburg. Amazing.

Now, if one were to build that into a laptop and copy the chip onto its hard disk, you'd have a very spiffy "where are we and what's that?" system. It'll be standard equipment in three years, but right now I can only wish. I suppose I could go online via cellphone and attempt to follow the railroad on satellite photos, but that would be (a) inaccurate, (b) hard work, (c) ruinously expensive and (d) it still wouldn't know the names of the things that really interest me. Actually points A and B need not be true: the laptop's GPS system could select satellite photos that display where it currently is.

We are simultaneously close to and far from William Gibson's vision of the intelligent eyeglasses that know where you are and follow your focus of vision to inform you about what you are looking at. G's navigator can handle the first part already and the US air force is experimenting with eyeball-following systems for hands-free weapon guidance, so the hardware is possible. What's missing is of course the data: some poor sod has to spend a few lifetimes entering all that information. A wiki could be used to spread the burden and also to give that essential human touch, the moments of whimsey and poetry: not just street names, but "a pair of falcons is nesting in that chestnut tree" or "watch for white-water kayaks on this river." I'd sign up for that.

Listening to Die Zauberflöte on the train radio, a live recording of a new production in Baden-Baden last year, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra directed by Claudio Abbado. The reviews are mixed, heady praise and a few complaints; I found it quite good. Zauberflöte is a nice piece, very glittery and cheerful, a treat for musical magpies.

Microclimate is a funny thing, that rapeseed field was already full in bloom although only about 8% of the first field that I noticed (near Heidelberg) was blooming. I wonder what makes the difference? I remember my farming uncles talking about their land, how two fields a few miles apart would consistently get vastly different amounts of rainfall - and that was on the Prairie where there aren't even hills to cast a rain-shadow. It's odd that the rapeseed fields are on average getting steadily riper, the further northeast we go. Very peculiar, other vegetation is generally less advanced as one proceeds northwards. I shall have to look into this sometime or other. Or not.

Here too I have been before: I remember this wide, shallow valley and the double row of birch trees along that road. Last time, it was snowy, now it's a sea of dandelions.

Hannover, and the kids are getting out. Peace and quiet at last. Actually, they weren't that bad, I shouldn't complain; they made less noise and caused less trouble than some drunks I've seen. The carriage is now as good as empty; there are only four of us left, sitting around two adjacent tables. But it would be rude to move apart, so we remain together in the middle of an otherwise empty car.

A field of blackbirds (ripening nicely - or where did you think they came from?) reminds me of a system I invented for calculating ballpark figures for such groups, back when I rode the train an hour to work every day. Look over the group, and divide the space they cover into a number of equal squares, visualising the grid lines as clearly as you can. Take one of those squares and count carefully the birds or animals in it, and multipy by the number of squares. Now look over the group again, and determine how evenly spread they are, and add or subtract five to ten percent if the square you chose was under- or overpopulated. That's your figure. (There were 36 blackbirds in the field.)

Harpier cries; 'tis time, 'tis time.

[Homeward bound, six hours later.] Always read the fine print. I'm sitting bolt upright (the dog trainer's classic "sit up and beg") in a Regional Express train, crawling home slightly faster than a Nordic Walker would manage it. REs really are the pits: noisy, bumpy, drafty, fixed-position benches (not seats), no tables (not even airline-style foldouts), no radio, no electricity and obviously no Bistro. Memo to self: the 20 Euros this saves are not worth the discomfort, or the wasted time.

Other than that, it's been a fine day.

More trains

Trainblogging again, I'm getting good at this. Today's destination is Munich, for a discussion with my partner and his assistants of our Hobbyist project. I haven't managed to push this on as far as I'd hoped, there have been too many distractions and crises in other areas.

I haven't been as good a citizen of the Internets as I should be and would like to be, for the same reason. By the time I get home these days (between nine and ten p.m.) all I want to do is to read a few blogs and go to bed. I have been following your adventures, dear bloggers, even if I haven't been commenting regularly.

But I confess that I haven't been sitting as much as I should, nor even as much as I would theoretically like to do. I notice myself posting the Number on 100 Days as a displacement activity: Can't really not be meditating if I'm still an active part of the group. Pah.

Time, and music. I'm currently reading The Time of our Singing by Richard Powers, a book about time in the Einsteinian sense, music as a profession, and racism as a fact of life in recent American history. One might think of it as a comment on Philip Roth's The Plot against America which I haven't yet read: Why invent a past of repression, oppression and murderous hatred when there was such a past right here in our home town? The foreshadowing is as deep and dark as a solar eclipse, that this tale will not end with a "happily ever after".

Climbing up the box canyon at Geislingen, there is again snow on the ground. Winter is taking a long and drawn-out farewell, like an actress unwilling to leave the stage coming back for curtain call after curtain call, although the audience is applauding only out of politeness and will soon stop altogether.

This is an IC train which has been partially retrofitted, with power points at the tables (but not the normal seat rows) and no music. The man across the aisle from me is watching Mangas on his laptop (not a Mac, it's one of those other things), and I'm amused and pleased to find most of my prejudices confirmed - as far as one can tell without hearing the soundtrack. I wonder whether what I'm doing confirms his prejudices about Mac users?

Leaving Günzburg, the train runs alongside a river that I never notice when riding the ICE's (which don't stop there), where I saw a Nordic Walker striding along the riverbank behind his dog. I haven't mentioned yet that I went Nordic Walking with Slim two weekends ago, when the snow was still deep and treacherously slippery. It's hard work, especially if you take it as seriously as Slim takes nearly everything. She was constantly nagging at me offering helpful advice about my posture and movement, and criticising any other NWs who crossed our path. I enjoyed it, once I got the rhythm and movement sorted out (and no, it is not "just walking with sticks"). It was a good workout, and quite enjoyable, if somewhat too active for either conversation or enjoying the riches of Nature around us.

I should perhaps mention for musically-knowledgeable, romantically inclined non-Germans that the river in Günzburg is in fact the Danube, made famous by Richard Strauss' waltz. Not very blue, but then again it never was. "Poetic license" and all that.

At Oberhausen, the sky is full of crows, a flock of at least fifty heading south across the tracks. We are already (spiritually) in Bavaria here, the church on the hill has a Russian-style silver onion dome. This is an example of cultural cross-fertilization: the German architects and builders whom Peter the Great imported to bring classical architecture to St. Petersburg, saw such domes in Russia and carried the idea back home whem they returned. (Actually, remind me to check that this is true, wouldn't it be funny if it were the other way around and Russia were full of Bavarian churches?)

On trains

I am halfway to Berlin on a cloudy and cold day. This is an older, first generation ICE, which are slower, noisier and less comfortable than the new ICE-3's - though they are much quieter and comfier than the British Rail 125's which I rode daily when I worked at a computer company in the west of England.

For some reason, the train is nearly deserted (at 11am on a workday, on what I expected to be one of the busiest routes in Germany). I have a compartment to myself, and am typing contentedly as the world flashes past my window. The corridor is full of babies crawling happily back and forth while their parents stand guard.

This particular train has been retrofitted with power points for the laptop but not with canned music, so I am limited to what's still lying around from when I last topped up my iPod. Since the iPod has a larger hard disk than the laptop (o tempora, o mores!) this isn't much at all for a five hour trip. Currently playing is "A Stream with Bright Fish" from The Pearl by Brian Eno and Harold Budd, which is exactly what anyone familiar with either of them would expect it to be; excellent music for being alone and thoughtful on a cloudy day. Budd's contribution is clear, the songs are much more melodious than Eno's rather austere recordings in this vein. Serene, very beautiful in a minimal way, the album is highly recommended if you are into ambient sounds but certain to appall anyone hoping for a tune that they could whistle in the bath. Listen before you buy.

The further north we go the more snow there is on the ground, although even here the temperature seems to be above freezing, the ice on that lake was definitely rotting. The snow looks to be only ankle deep, no danger here of roofs collapsing under its weight.

I have to amend the impression I gave earlier of the flatness and decaying-industrial-sprawl unsightliness of northern Germany, which seems to apply only to the Rhine valley and the coal&iron complex around Essen. This is a different route from what I took then, we are heading northeast from Frankfurt through what I guess are the Taunus mountains, and the landscape is correspondingly open and hilly, at times quite pretty.

Just saw a big whitish hawk, recognizable as such by its beak, the upswept feathered-out wingtips and its sheer size, but it was gone too quickly to identify it exactly. There have been a few rabbits in the fields, and some larger birds. I think I saw cormorants on a river near Frankfurt.

Germany is threaded through with quite large rivers, the names of which I don't know and cannot easily discover. It's odd that each Autobahn bridge is clearly labelled with its name, length and height above the valley bottom, in a little sign beside the road, but there is no equivalent sign for the rivers that we cross. I should suggest this to the Powers That Be, surely other people would also be glad to know?

I will spend some 220 Euros (not counting my time = lost earnings) and nearly 12 hours in trains, buses and taxis, to attend a two- or three-hour meeting. 762 kilometers each way, not counting the local ground transport at each end. Call it 1540 kilometers, just under a thousand miles, in one day for one meeting. Is this not absurd, foolish, frivolous and wasteful?

(Going by plane would have cost about the same and taken nearly as long, door-to-door. This way I can avoid airports and enjoy the scenery, both big advantages from my point of view; on the other hand, Lufthansa's coffee is free and much better. 'Tis an imperfect world, and we must live with compromises.)

The purpose of the journey is to sell a client/server system (worth nearly what I earn in a month from the architects) and additional data import (worth half a month of work), with possible knock-on effects should they in turn recommend us to other companies, which is of course the reason we are I am knocking ourselves myself out. This pair of Dilbert cartoons seems relevant to the trip: in theory I am responsible for development and my partner is responsible for sales, however when the going gets rough I am the one who stands behind the car and pushes. Pah.

[Continued at 7pm on the journey home] And now, the punchline:

It was a complete waste of time and money.

Their server runs on Linux, our database does not. End of story, thanks but no thanks, don't let the door hit you on your way out.

I am so mad that I could just kill somebody, but I'd have to start with myself: I too have spoken to them, I too failed to ask this particular question. I just assumed that someone among my colleagues would have cleared this up before wasting my time by passing on the inquiry, and further assumed that the inquirers would have read either the website or the promotional bumpf that came with the CD, both of which clearly state that the DB does not run on Linux. (In my defence, when we spoke they mentioned "Mac" and "server" in the same sentence, they are running the demo on a Mac, and they never mentioned any other operating system. But still: Bah.)

For all the good it has done us, I might as well have spent the day at home, drinking beer and picking my nose reading blogs.

Munich, winter

My previous train-travel post didn't mention a feature of this particular route (Stuttgart to Munich). About a third of the way in, at Geislingen, the track climbs a 200-metre escarpment by running up the side of a box canyon. The ICE's are so powerful, they can just shift down a gear and roll on; but the old diesel-electric IC's don't have enough muscle for that, you really feel the locomotive struggling to make the grade at a pace that a fast cyclist could match (on the flat (if you see what I mean)).

I am writing in the train, on my way to Munich for a conference given by the makers of the database software toolkit that I use. It's a nice combination of education and fun, we are meeting up this time in a Museum of Aviation History on a disused military airfield. I had hoped for a chance to meet Chirpy again (she lives in a town halfway to Munich), but she is booked up. We'll meet in December when she comes to Stuttgart for a day.

We are travelling in bright sunshine, the sky is brilliant blue with just a few decorative clouds. The high plains of southern Bavaria are covered in fresh snow; the trees at the edge of the fields are frosted with lines of snow along their thicker, higher branches. At moments like this, the origin of the Bavarian flag (a diamond-checkered field of light blue and white) is obvious: sky and snow. It (the snow) looks only ankle-deep, but still it's there. Winter is here, hooray.

And me with no camera, damn and blast again.

[continued later] Munich is definitely colder than Stuttgart, it's below zero and breezy, but still very sunny and clear skies.

Conversation

Udge: I've been travelling often between Stuttgart and Munich, because of this database project; I've been on the train at least twice a month since summer.

Dinner guest: That must get really boring, seeing the same stuff all the time.

U: Actually no, it's fascinating, not "the same stuff" at all. It's always different: one week the rapeseed is in bloom, next week the first poppies are out. You can really watch the change of season happening. And it also depends on which train you take.

DG: What do you mean?

U: Well, that route is served by ICE and Intercity trains, which obviously travel at greatly different speeds. The ICE is so fast that you cannot focus on things near the train, they just blur. So you are forced to look off into the middle distance, which gives you a greatly enhanced impression of perspective: It sometimes seems like cardboard cutouts being moved past each other at different speeds, like in a child's model theatre. You also get a feel for the larger shape of the landscape in the ICE, the horizon becomes a dynamic thing, always in motion, like the sea. The rivers bend and turn before your eyes; the hills rise and fall, they surge towards you and drift away.

The Intercity is much slower, so you can actually see what's right beside the track. You can see much smaller things, finer details, like which flowers are blooming where and who's forgotten to put the garbage out. You can see where there is a low spot in a cornfield which traps moisture, where the plants grow more vigorously. You can watch buildings going up, new gardens being planted. And then there's the agriculture, all of the field work.

DG: Which is best, fast or slow?

U: Faster is prettier, but slower is more interesting.

No place like home

Just in case anyone was wondering, there are better ways to spend a day than by commuting four hours each way to work. However, I survived without catching cold (yet! knock on wood, spit over my shoulder) and got some fine sightseeing done.

The trip could be taken as an object lesson in disbelieving weather forecasts: it was generally not as bad as predicted, and specifically very variable from one place to another. South of Bonn, there was no snow at all but temperatures were far below zero, even quite large ponds were frozen over; half an hour further north, closer to the predicted cold&nasty, there was snow on the ground but the temperature was above zero and melt-water was running everywhere.

(I should mention, that I was riding on the ICE, so that half hour translates to something like 120 km. The train-makers understood the appeal of speed, and placed a spedometer readout in each carriage. My brother-in-commonlaw has a photo taken on a stretch of flat and straight track north of Stuttgart, where the spedometer stands at 274 kmh. (The French TGV is even faster, if memory is correct that one reached 320 kmh north of Avignon.))

The three-and-a-half-hour train journey took me up the Rhine to Cologne, then northeast to a small town, literally at the dead end of the railway line, then a further twenty minutes in a taxi to a tiny village with a huge factory (something fairly common in Germany) where I held the training session, then the same journey backwards with the fillip of a forty minute delay. At one point, the train conductor annnounced "We are currently running ten minutes late, however you will make the connection at the next station, because that train is running thirteen minutes late." Ragged cheers.

The northwest of Germany is very different from the south. Towns in Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg are small and dense, and kept apart from each other by hills and valleys and great tracts of forest. The north is one single low-density light-industrial suburb smeared across a largely flat non-landscape, where the demarcation between towns is often just a legal fiction. The north is also, in a word, dirty. I have become accustomed to Swabian standards of cleanliness in public places. No Swabe would allow a factory roof to fall in and rot, nor would they drive to the edge of town and dump their rubbish on common land.

I apparently misled Red Eft and others on Tuesday, I should have said that eagles are common in the south, as I didn't see a single one yesterday. There were generally fewer birds in sight, probably due to the aforementioned light-industrial smearing: two swans, a few miscellaneous ducks, three magpies, many crows (but fewer than on Monday), two hawks, one of them "treed" by a pair of crows, and a flock of at least a hundred terns floating together on a single pond. I also saw two rabbits, a possible badger, and what may have been a fox (or just a large ginger cat) far off at the edge of the woods.

Passing through Wuppertal, the train runs parallel to the Wupper river and thus to the Schwebebahn familiar to fans of Wim Wenders' marvellous film Alice in der Städten. It's a very strange thing, a monorail local-transit train that hangs from a track suspended above the river on rusting green-painted steel frames. The trains themselves are modern, plastic shells in garish colours, not at all the characterful rattletraps of the film.