Made out of people

Photos are up

Sorry about the scarcity of messages. I've just finished posting images from my travels...

Channel 9 Guy Travels

Here's a first cut across my trip images: the Channel 9 Guy travelling the world . As seen on Channel9

danyelf_at_microsoft.com

"I've killed you!," I said. "Shot you in the head, I think."
"Well, did you go to jail?"
"Yeah, I did."
"I designed that feature. Pretty much everyone kills me."

I was sitting next to George Juntiff, and it was Microsoft's New Employee Orientation. We were on our first break: Tim had tried hard to keep up our enthusiasm for the variety of different dental plans, and what their implications for SSDPs are¹, but now we were free to talk amongst each other.

Currently my neighbor at NEO, George had been in the military until recently. He'd been on active duty in Thailand, Bosnia, and several other sites until he decided to go back to school. He trained up in modeling and simulation -- and got tapped to work on a game. He was the military lead for "America's Army," coordinating the team of contractors who would convert the "Unreal" engine over to AA and keeping them honest to military standards and training.

In the beginning of the game, a sergeant leads you around and trains the character who is playing, barking orders and pointing. Juntiff took the cameo and voiced that sergeant. He insults you if you don't keep up, he yells at you if your aim is off.

And, when they watched players, they saw that pretty much everyone takes a potshot at some point or another. Just to see what happens. (They go to jail, a sparsely-decorated room where they can't do much. I don't know how long it lasts.)

America's Army is now available for free download; Juntiff has coordinated massive promotional campaigns, and now is moving on to something else. In this case, it's an operational role somewhere in the depths of the Microsoft software release systems.

--

Three days later, I was set with temporary housing, a temporary car, and a permanent badge & office. I had a computer, a phone, a bus pass, and an email account. In other words, I was in place and a real employee.

That was Thursday. On Friday, I flew off to Chicago for CSCW. My trip to Tanzania was actually timed around this conference: I was co-running a workshop on the applications of social networks to computer-supported collaborative work, and so needed to get back in time to attend the conference.

Today is a day off. I'm split between "see Chicago sights" and "take a really long nap" as my major activities for the day. I was scheduled to see an old friend from undergrad for lunch, but he had to bail on me.

[1] "SSDP" is definitely my Acronym of the Day. Stands for "Same Sex Dependant Couple."

The Return Journey

At 6:30 am, Friday morning, Eastern Africa time, I stepped onto a shuttle from the beach town of Jambiani.

At 6:30 pm, Saturday evening, Seattle time¹, I stepped off a shuttle into the Bellevue Courtyard by Mariott. Where I promptly fell asleep.

It's now 3 am, and I'm a bit insomniac and rather jet lagged. I napped on and off during my two-day journey. I've got a day to get myself together, do some laundry, take naps, and maybe buy a first day wardrobe or something before work starts on Monday.

I seem to have developed a distressing degree of knowledge about Heathrow airport. Heathrow has bookended my trip--a dip in Heathrow broke the US from Denmark, Denmark from Spain, Spain from Africa. And a fried breakfast in a Heathrow pub was my last meal in Europe before coming back home. Terminal 4 has much better internet and phone stations than Terminal 3, which positions them in the middle of a large noisy room. (4 also has "quiet rooms" filled with snoozing travellers, which 3 lacks.)

---

I am stopping myself from bargaining for things ... a habit that was brought to a brutal skidding end in Nairobi airport. My pants no longer fit me, and my belt had died a day earlier. So I stepped into a shop, picked up a belt, and said something like, "This is a good belt, but it is not worth the $15 you are charging for it."

The saleswoman looked at me, shrugged, and said, "Ok, then don't buy it."

Huh? But -- but -- this is Africa, and I've bargained for EVERYTHING for the last month.

---

I bought a Coke in a bottle, and I wasn't asked whether it was to walk with or drink locally. (If you drink at the bar, you pay Tsh 300 [$0.30]; if you walk with the drink, you pay Tsh 800 [$0.80], and get back the change when you return the bottle.) The bottle was new and shiny, and didn't have the distinctive scratch marks from hundreds of refills. It was made with sugar cane, and tasted kind of weird. And I couldn't get a Stoney Tangawizi, an East African ginger beer bottled by Coca Cola, and surprisingly good.

On the other hand, you can get a mini-pizza in Chicago O'Hare to munch on while you wait for your flight. No lamb curries, though.

---

I heard the word "Chicago" spoken with a Chicago accent by a flight attendant on the flight from London, and I almost jumped -- the only American I'd spoken to for a while was from New Hampshire, and my ears were unused to our regional accents.

---

I seem to have a persistent impersonator on this blog, which is truly an honor; however, I still haven't seen a Shark's Tale. Not in Nairobi and not in Madrid [2]

---

Feel free to give me a call, or drop me an email -- I'll probably be a little more responsive now.

¹ Which by my count is 6:30 am Sunday morning, Eastern Africa time. But I could be wrong.

² ... and I am surprised, looking back at that comment, that I typed the words "roman a' clef." That's not usually in my vocabulary.

Nairobi Airport: The Return Odyssey

And so it was that all good things come to an end. I've posted fewer and fewer times about computers and social network analysis, and more times about culture and language. My mind is currently wondering whether the blue doors of Zanzibar are culturally blue like those in the middle east to ward off the evil eye, and why dolphins don't get the bends (and, for that matter, how they drink) and what the evolutionary advantage of silly-looking punk rock haircuts is to Red Colibus Monkeys.

And whether $11 is too much to pay for a Tom Clancy thriller in the duty-free. And who I can convince to tilt back a glass of Konyagi (Tanzanian Gin) with me.

I'm still bemused by the dolphin boat captain on the edge of Zanzibar who was curious about Bush or Kerry, and my feelings on gay marriage¹. About sitting around a drum and chanting circle on a Thursday night in Zanzibar, sipping soda and chatting with a couple of guys sitting around, just enjoying the waves and the water and the wind: the first time I had a conversation that didn't end with trying to sell me a batik. My head is still wobbling a little from the choppy waters in the diving boat yesterday, and the ferry ride this morning, which stopped dead in order to repair "rudder on the propellers."

I'm still proud of the patches on the soles of my shoes. $5, cannibalized from a dead pair of Converses. (I'll show you.)

In other words, I've had a good vacation. I've stuck my nose into somewhere else, and begun to feel like I was getting a little bit of a hint of another place and another culture.

I've got a few more reflections -- on the oldest town in Zanzibar, and on what happened to the Zanzibar wealth (the revolution was not kind to it) and on ferry rides and everything being negotiable -- but perhaps right now isn't the time.

I have a flight home to take. Nairobi to London, in four hours. London to Chicago, then Chicago to Seattle. And a temporary home in Seattle that I'll have to start turning into my own place.

I have photos to sort and post. A mailbox to get into, and boxes upon boxes waiting for me to sort through. Loads of wash to clean up. Souveniers to sort. Pictures of fornicating giraffes² to scan.

Thanks for following along with me. I'll be back soon to clean up a little, to remove spam, and to complain about jetlag.

¹ This might have been a reflection on the fact that all of us on the trip were male: six guys in a boat with him. He let us know that one male-male couple who had visited him had later gone home with two Tanzanian wives, one of whom is pregnant.

² Sorry, Paul, but no baboons. At least not on the runway, and not fornicating. And not enough to delay a flight.

Zanzibar

"Relax, this is Zanzibar."

These were the first slow words from Ali, our laid-back tour guide for the Zanzibar part of my trip. Ali is not in a hurry, for anyone or anything, and he sits comfortably at the front of the shuttle. Everything is in control.

We'd just landed in an antique plane on the Zanzibar airstrip. It seemed to be an old American plane that had probably been through a couple of owners and a lot of coats of paint, but it puttered away across Tanzanian desert and scrublands before landing on this old island.

Zanzibar is a relaxed place. In the 19th century, it was discovered by the rest of the world as a spice port (for Europeans) and a slave port (for Middle-Easterners) and as a vacation spot (for the Sutan of Oman). It had been generally known for a few centuries before, and had always been a stop on trade routes -- but in the 19th ecntury, it was part of the center of the world. The shortest war on record (in a matter of hours, Britain won after one brief bombardment that damaged one building) in 1898 brought it into the European colonial collections.

In the 1940s, it was still shipping around mangrove wood and cloves in the hulls of slow wooden dhows across the Arabian ocean. Meanwhile, steel shipping had taken over the rest of the world, and Zanzibar was left behind. The beautiful Arabian buildings with their marvelous flat roofs and limestone walls melted in the daily rains. And the country found itself marginalized next to the huge tropical fruit and spice plantations that were built up in Asia, India, and South America.

Today, Zanzibar is a startlingly poor town, with stunning stretches of beach. Tourists bring in most of the dollars, enjoying the view and the sun and the scuba diving. The old Stone Town is filled with hawkers selling paintings of Masai warriors and lions, and offering snorkel trips and spice tours and wanting to tell you where Freddie Mercury was born.

But it's a great walk, and the beach truly is marvelous. After a week with mind and body squinched up to survive Kilimanjaro, this is a relaxing change.

The city is in Ramadan, so restaurants are somewhat half-hearted during the day. At night, though, after the sunset and the first evening prayers, the city fills up. Men and women chat on the staircases and the front steps of their houses; the food vendors at the gardens start cooking for both tourists and locals, and the street corners fill with games of chess, dominos, and some rather odd board game that looks to be a cross between parcheesi and billiards.

Down from the Mountain

I made it up to 5900-odd meters yesterday, looked around, and deemed it rather cold, and the air a little thin. Then I hiked down.

That is: the Kilimanjaro climb may have suffered from poor weather throughout -- an hour or two of clear morning, followed by a day of rain and thick fog -- but thirteen of our sixteen members got to the Uhuru summit and have pictures of themseves there to prove it. I'm on that list, and it's good to have made it.

We then dropped three kilometers in five hours' hiking; I have a photo of Kili's peak looking very, very far up and very, very far away. I'm glad I've done it, but I'm looking forward to flatter hiking now. Like the Cascade mountains.

Our return was a little bit muted by the news that someone had just broken the world record for Kili ascent: 8 hours, bottom to top and back. That's a 4500 meter vertical ascent and back, going from full to half-atmosphere.

Wow. Makes our five day amble on the Mechame track with 36 porters and a dozen tents feel a bit ... slow.

Off to Tanzania now...

Yes, I know about the blog spam. Later, ok?

Moshi

Moshi is the medium-size city, tucked into the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Besides outfitting Kili expeditions, it survives on the Tanzanian crop staples: banana and coffee¹. I don't have time to write details now, so I'm back to summaries again. Sooner or later, remind me to tell you about ...

• Crowding into a dalla-dalla, listening to hip-hop
• Climbing (and being chased off by rain) Mt. Meru
• The sexual frustration of 13 single men -- and effectively no women -- in tents together. (Can sheer testosterone change the weather? Mt. Meru suggests that the answer may well be "yes").
• Food poisonining at 2500 meters
• Seeing an elephant up close (from inside a vehicle, to be sure), and simians and avians and ungulates of all descriptions (not inside a vehicle).
• Watching a flamingo migration, tens of thousands of birds simultaneously leaving the same alkaline lake and heading off into the distance

Tomorrow morning we head off to climb Kilimanjaro.

¹ A fair bit of Tanzanian coffee is apparently relabled as "Kenyan" before it is sold in the US.

URGENT GREETINGS

DEAR SIR,

I AM SENDING THIS BLOG ENTRY BECAUSE I KNOW THAT YOU AS A READER OF MAID OUT OF PEOPLE ARE AN INTELLIGENT AND RELIABLE PERSON. I AM A RESEARCHER FOR THE MICKROWSWIFT CORPORATION, FOUNDED BY MR GILL BATES HERE IN NAIROBI. AS YOU MAY KNOW, THE MICKROWSWIFT CORPORATION HAS BEEN SUED BY UNFAIR AND BRUTAL LAWSUITS RECENTLY, AND SO HAS HAD TO PUT AWAY 1 BILLION DOLLARS ($10000000) US IN SECURE PLACES. I HAVE BEEN ENTRUSTED WITH STORING THIS MONEY IN A SWISS BANK ACCOUNT WHICH WILL BE TIED TO AN AMERICAN BANK ACCOUNT IN THE FORM OF PATENTS AND PUBLISHED PAPERS.

I TURN TO YOU, READER OF MAID OUT OF PEOPLE, TO HELP ME STORE THIS IMPORTANT MONEY. IF YOU CAN HELP ME, I WILL BE HAPPY WITH FORWARD YOU A PURELY NOMINAL FEE OF 30% OF THE SAVINGS.

PLEASE SEE EXTENDED ENTRY FOR MORE INFORMATION, AND THANK YOU FOR YOUR KIND HELP.

... because if it's Friday, it must be Africa. Or, perhaps, vice versa. (Ok, that's tehcnically Nigerian spam, but I am not going to Nigeria. So you'll have to accept that it's Nairobi spam instead.)

Yesterday afternoon, I left Madrid at four in the afternoon. I had three hours in Heathrow -- enough time to go through customs and passport control, hike through Terminals 1 and 2, get to the Heathrow Express Train, take it to Terminal 4, and check in for my flight. I was on the plane shortly before the doors closed.

Now I'm in Kenya for a day. The air smells different here -- in the city, to be sure, from pollution -- a mix of spices and trees that I don't know and don't see. The birds hanging on the trees are large scavengers looking down at the floods of cars and shared-ride vehicles making their way around traffic circles. Baboons wander on the side of the road, and herders drive their goats and cows along the shoulder. Boys drag carts on their shoulders on the slow lane of highways.

Prices are all listed twice--for residents and for travellers.

And I stand out for a mile. As I walk around, my skin is a beacon for everyone to offer me guide services, directions, rides, food, or photographs. Merely keeping my mouth shut (as in Spain) doesn't cut it -- I am the embodiment of tourist. (There is a very very small local white population.) It's a very startling experience.

Tomorrow, early, I'm on a bus to Arusha (Tanzania).

International anti-Americanism

Dammit, it´s OUR election to screw up.

I´m ok with foreigners asking me "Bush or Kerry"? I´m largely ok with foreigners following the election. But it feels really weird to see American cultural critique translated into Danish or Spanish in store windows, or featured prominently on Heathrow shelves.

(Spain is also being flooded with ads right now for the Spanish opening of SuperSize Me, on October 16th. Apparently, while it was indy in the US, it´s getting big play here. WHY? There are not that many McDonalds, and--for that matter--obesity isn´t becoming a serious issue yet. Is this just a "make fun of the Americans" thing?)

Incidently, this relates vaguely to an odd attitude I noticed in the Spanish about language. I´ve mentioned already, I think, that many Spaniards don´t speak English. Two major influences of this is travel and television: most Spanish travellers are from (Spanish-speaking) Latin American and most imported Spanish TV comes from the huge Latin American market.

Which means that they aren´t dosed with English regularly the way that, say, Danes are. (The Danish film and TV industry is strong, but not THAT strong).

Danes seemed rather unsurprised that my Danish was poor. Spaniards seemed stunned that "me hablo pocito espanol". Most Americans seem to travel in packs with a translator who took a few years in high school, and so many Spaniards -- especially outside the almost-exclusively-tourist city of Toledo -- are used to communicating with everyone else in at least broken Spanish.

Indeed, while getting a haircut, I was treated to a substantial (and largely incomprehensible) harnague about those people who just show up not speaking any Spanish and think that they can get around town or get themselves a haicut y no comprende Espanol.

Update: Slightly incoherent paragraph snipped. It was an editing error. Really.

Update 2: I didn't see Shark's Tale. I don't know who logged in under the name Danyel to say they did, but indeed it is showing in Spain. And I feel honored to have an impersonator.

Oops

This is roughly a mental note. So it´s in the extended entry.

(Quick everyone! Click through! See what Danyel has as mental notes!)

I realized a few days ago that there are major universities in Copenhagen, Madrid, Seville, and Granada. This trip could have been tax-deductible and partially paid for by all sorts of interesting locals (_Community Computing at Microsoft_ and Computing is Made Out of People are two talks I can give easily).

On the other hand, this would have required a great deal more prep. Coordination with the towns in question, flights, timing, and no deciding at the last moment not to show up somewhere.

But for the future: when I think travel, I really should think "... and give a talk."

Toledo, La Mancha, Madrid

I´ve meditated on literature as a driver for tourism before, in my discussion of Elsinore. It didn´t apply to Seville, but it certainly does to La Mancha and (I now realize) to Granada.

You see, La Mancha -- as a province -- is boring. It´s large, it´s flat, it´s dry and dusty. It´s the sort of place where a tired old man might push his ancient horse across the flat plains and, out of sheer eagerness and the heat of the day, imagine giants where only windmills stand. It was the genius of Cervantes--expat, traveller, criminal, refugee-- to realize this and to lay it out in a massive epic, incidently creating the modern novel on his way.

La Mancha has, in turn, taken Don Quixote under wing. A scribble of an old man and his horse (by Picasso) is all but the official symbol of the region, and appears on a wide variety of La Manchan paraphenalia.

Something slightly different happens in Granada. While now a tourist site on its own merits, it was kicked off by Washington Irving (or was it Irving Washington¹?) who, while touring Spain, decided that the Alhambra looked pretty cool and moved in. He then wrote a travelogue documenting his adventures, which in turn brough others there.

(... and Toledo, and future plans, in the extended entry ... )

--

¹ Bonus points if you recognize this completely irrelevant reference.

I should probably mention Toledo, too. Toledo is in La Mancha, but isn´t quite so boring. Indeed, it´s a major tourist trap: some come for the El Greco paintings that decorate the cathedral, the museum, and the El Greco House; some for the marzipan and wild game; some for the Jewish quarter; and some for the fine Spanish steel for which the town is known. And so everywhere there are swords in display windows. Replicas, models, reconstructions, new designs; swords with skulls and knives and all sorts of things.

And now there is a good movie tie in. Many sword windows record that they sell the official jewelry for the Lord of the Rings Sword-and-Jewelry collection. Get all five (I think) swords and all the various rings (Aragorn´s, the One Ring, etc).

---

I´m now back in Madrid, which seems less cursed this time. (My first time in Madrid, my camera broke and I got sick. My second time in Madrid, I missed a train. Third time, fortunately, seems the charm). I catch a plane out tomorrow afternoon: Madrid to Heathrow, then a red-eye to Kenya. Where they have lions and tigers.

Arcos, Ronda, Granada

So I got into the Flamenco in Sevilla. The scalper should be fired, though: half of my section was empty. And this isn´t top balcony: half of left center orchestra was empty!

(... more ... )

Anyway, the show was magnificent. Most of the Flamenco I´d seen was of the castanets-and-flashing-lights variety; this was at the opposite end of the spectrum: highly traditional, trying to reconstruct and reperform the agonized songs of working-class life around Sevilla, where Flamenco originated. It was sad, painful, and wonderfully done. My Spanish is still miserable, but getting better; I got almost none of the lyrics except for the closing song, with its chorus "I don´t want to die."

This was the emotional high point ,and the audience left singing. The mind boggles.

The next day, I took a bus to Jerez (about which virtually nothing need be said; the Sherry Bodgea tours looked too much like Winery and Brewery tours to be of any real interest) and thence to Arcos.

Arcos is perched on top of a hill with cliffs on both sides. It´s not of great value or importance, but it IS easy to hold.

Which means I need to reveal just how much of a computer geek I am by talking about these places in terms of the game Civilization. Jerez de la Frontera--"Jerez on the Frontier"--was founded on the frontier of the continuing Christian/Moorish wars that pretty much describe Spain´s history¹. It isn´t much of a city (actually, it´s kinda California-sprawl right now, but historically speaking, it wasn´t), but it was useful as a medium-sized town. For one, it was near good horse grazing land, and apparantly got its start there. Nearby is also the Grape resource, worth +1 to military morale and +1 to commerce.

So the leader build a Stables and a Barracks and a Winery and a Cathedral and then started cranking out military units.

Arcos de la Frontera isn´t near the resources, but the Moors had controlled the small town on the mountain top (+200% to defense, +2 sight) and so once it was taken, the Chrisitans kept building on it and used it for enforcement. Built a Temple, maybe some other minor military emplacements that weren´t on the tour. Same goes for Ronda (not de la Frontera), which was also perched on top of a steep hill with brutal drops on most sides.

From Arcos, and from Ronda, 100 km apart, you can see a substantial chunk of the south-western coast and mountains.

I suppose this just suggests that Civ actually manages to be a partially-reasonable model, or at least descriptor, of the way we actually do stuff. Which was the point, to be sure, but it´s startling to see it so clearly laid out: this city is for grapes, that city is for defending the hills.

Both of those towns, by the way, are now well-worth visiting; while touristy, they are beautiful: white stucco crouched over steep hills; plummeting chasms.

Arcos happened to be running a festival for the weekend ... but more on that some other time.

I´m in Granada now, which I´ve fallen a little bit in love with. A mountain city on the edge of the Sierra Nevadas (um, the Spanish ones, not the CA ones), it has a substantial college population, beautiful scenery, a famous castle on the top of the hills looking down, and a very multi-lingual group of people walking the streets all hours of day and night. When I arrived at 8 pm, the streets were thronging; when I returned from an evening of clubbing (I was recruited by a bachelorette party as the token American, I think) at 3 am, they were still going strong; as I walked up to the Alhambra at 7 in the morning, a little hung over, the last revellers were singing their way home and the morning population was heading off to their days.

The college-town parts have twisty little streets with hookah bars, tea shops, Moroccan-import stores, internet cafes, and tapas-and-beer places. (The local beer is named Alhambra, in honor of the castle.) The alt.culture shop that was going to feature in my (entirely hypothetical) movie about Berkeley, "Turban Outfitters," is pretty much here already in the tiny shops: islamic weavings, beaded cloths, bean bags, and tie-dye.

Tomorrow: more tourism, then the bus to Cordoba. Thence Cordoba to Toledo, then back to Madrid, Heathrow, and into Phase III. (There is something marvelous in my mind about the fact that the three parts of my trip are each punctuated by a boring and expensive few hours in Heathrow).

(Oh, and vote Kerry for purely financial reasons. Maybe the dollar will rise, and future trips to Europe won´t be quite so expensive. A Euro buys about a dollar of stuff here ... but costs $1.20. Sheesh. Also, I don´t think I´m going to be physically able to vote this year: I´ll get the absentee CA ballot in my hot sweaty hands on 11-1, but they have to be in on 11-2, and I´m not sure the mail will be that cooperative.)

---

¹ Columbus´ journey, for example, comes into new perspective when I realize that it was approved by Queen Isabella in Granada in February of 1492. In January, 1492, Queen Isabella and King Ferdind finally captured Granada and the hill castle of Alhambra after the Moors had occupied the area for 600 years. (Yeah, ít´s still called "occupied.")

Seville, afternoon

So today, I followed the Lonely Planet´s advice to check out the Thursday market (it is Thursday, right?) and was sorely disappointed. By its complete and utter non-existence, and the tremendously confused looks from the locals who I asked.

But lunch was good: I´m getting better at this meal thing. (Sevilla likes its smoked cod. So do I).

And I added to my black-market housing adventure a black-market flamenco adventure by buying tickets for tonight´s sold-out Flamenco Bienal from a scalper. Which means I will thoroughly deserve it when my backpack is gone from the place I´m staying and the ticket turns into pixie dust half an hour before the show.

Madrdid & Sevilla

One of my friends is shortly travelling to Spain for his honeymoon (um, with his wife. Obviously.) and his itinerary starts with "Arrive Madrid. Leave Madrid immediately."

I spent a little more time than that--two nights and a day--but there is something to be said for his wise advice. Madrid is a big city, a crowded city, and it takes a fairly substantial degree of extroversion to just hop into it and make yourself feel a part of it. I was already fatigued from playing menu roulette (difficult in a country where the two basic staples are ham and shrimp and both locals and travellers take pride in eating as many things at as many places as possible), from using a combination of sign language and high-school Latin and bus-stop Spanish (hey, So Cal helped!) to try to get by.

And so I gave up, and ran to El Escorial, a small town in the mountains outside Madrid that had been chosen by Philip II as the home of his monastary / castle. The monastary was nice; turning away and just walking uphill was nicer. I found bicyclists, professions of love and politics scrawled on the sidewalk, cows grazing on the hills, out that I didn´t have any water, a model being photographed for a stunning photo shoot, and a great view.

( ... more )

I got back to Madrid, and realized that my vague headache wasn´t just an effect of Madrid, but also an effect of a growing head-cold. Allegra, nasal spray, tylenol, and ten hours´sleep made the place a lot nicer.

(I also paid $40 for two pair underwear, and decided that my camera didn´t need repairs until I get to Seattle.)

The next morning, I meant to catch an early train to Sevilla, but somehow didn´t leave town until 7:30 pm.

That´s ok: I visited museums, enjoyed more of Madrid, and am now wandering happily through Sevilla.

Sevilla (´Seville´) was not nearly as affected by either Rosini (´The barber of...´) or Bizet (´Carmen´) as Elsione was by Shakespeare. This is probably not surprising.

Were this John´s LiveJournal, I´d now put in a poll: "Where do I go next?" with choices like "Jerez" and "Some random tourist city on the coast" and "The national park in the important wetlands [=really big swamp]". But this isn´t, , so I will make my decisions and you will read about them later.

You are in a maze of twisty little streets, none quite the same

I just spent this afternoon saying "farewell" to Copenhagen by getting lost. This isn't too surprising, really: Demark welcomed me by getting me lost; I've periodically greeted it with (guess what) getting lost, and I may well get lost tomorrow morning running errands before I leave town.

(... more ...)

For a town where nothing is very far from anything else--and it really isn't, this place is a brisk fifteen-minute walk from one end to the other--the roads in the middle twist an awful lot. For example, Louise's place is right at the bottom of one of the major pedestrian paths, which runs (roughly) at right angles with the next major path over. Most places that I've walked to seem to be on that second path--and that's the one I keep finding myself on.

And somehow, the easiest way to get between them keeps turning out to be to just to walk up the one, walk left half a block and turn, and walk down the other. Now, when Louise does it, anywhere on the one path is a two minutes away from the other. (This town really is really small.)

Euclideans will note the probable existence of a hypotenuse. City streets are non-Euclidean, but they are also also highly interconnected. Indeed, Louise's two-minute path suggests that it's not hard to get from one to the other.

Louise apparently has the ability to bend space and time.

Today, for example, upon discovering myself on the major path, I turned LEFT at the church, RIGHT at the Arabian restaurant, and ducked THROUGH the dogleg footpath UNDER the apartment building, then LEFT on the major road. Which, dammit, twisted hard left, and so I turned immediately RIGHT on the minor road (where did that come from?) and found myself completely turned around ... and on yet another parallel road.

Fortunately, I could get back easily along that parallel road, and proceeded to. It took barely five minutes.

Ok, enough of that. It's time to go see The Wild Bunch subtitled in Danish at the film institute. I just turn right at the corner...

With the Bling Bling

Yesterday, I made it to Rosenborg Palace, the old Danish summer-palace of Christian IV (1600s). This particular king pretty much created the city: it was his vision that it could be more than a little parish, and started expanding it as a trade center on the Baltic. He built a combination observatory / church / library to combine the religion, arts and sciences, he built the city outward on landfill, and he built a fair number of palaces.

He apparently fathered 24 children, some in wedlock. And died broke, having apparently near-bankrupted the Danish treasury and fought in several unsuccessful wars. Fortunately, his investments paid off -- see that last post about Elsinore.

Walking from the Danish Design Center to the Copenhagen "Church of Our Lady" to the Rosenborg palace made for a fascinating day. The DDC (and read the part about the flow exhibit) is stark in its Scandanavian simplicity: plain lines, polished wood, square buildings. The central church was remodelled in 1977, and as such looks like the Ikea take on a church: plain white walls, white statues spaced evenly throughout, minimalist-but-colorful art high up on the sides.

But just in case you think that stark minimalism is the only way to go, you get to Rosenborg. Apparently, the Danes once liked shiny things: the upper floors are coated in Roccoco ornaments: porcelin and gold, coral and wool, paintings everywhere. The basement holds the royal jewels: the crown, the various beglittered cups and boxes and treasure pieces that remind us the eternal lesson: It's good to be the king.

Travels begin

I'm at Heathrow now in an internet cafe & waiting area (£16 buys you three hours of open bar, unlimited tea and internet, and far more comfortable couches than the rest of the world--it's like buying a-la-carte access to the premiumlounges--it's named, punningly enough, the 'Holideck.'). Waiting for my flight to Copenhagen.

The flight over was uneventful and fast--we got in an hour early, which just meant six hours to kill at Heathrow rather than five. It's very strange that London is closer to New York than Seattle or Los Angeles is. I fly to LA all the time in little 5-seats-across planes, while all the international flights are Big Deals, with passports and ten-seats-across and similar.

Heathrow is a hypnotic, strange, endless stream of consumerism filled with oddly loud boarding announcements for Dubai and Mozambique... I felt, almost, an urge to buy Thomas Pink shirts (cheaper than high street prices!) and silk scarves and wallets and camera cases and ...

... and then sanity kicked in, so I found this nice quiet place, and tucked myself away. (Heathrow has other quiet places, too, but they have far less comfortable chairs: I almost want to phootgraph the ways that people reshape their comfort area, by pulling them about and stacking furniture and carry-on bags to make themselves, somehow, fit.)

(I still may. It's a kind of William Whyte thing.)

My trip so far has managed to hit Washington DC, Philadelphia for an afternoon, and Brighton Beach for a morning.

(more below...)

Brighton Beach is an interesting place. It's the next neighborhood down from Coney Island--the old Brooklyn (New York) boardwalk and amusement park. The Coney Island boardwalk continues down, but Brighton has always been an 'end of the subway line' sort of place.

In the turn of the last century, it was a Jewish immigrant area; over time, the Jewish families prospered and--like all other immigrants--moved to the suburbs. The area was in serious decline in the 70s, until it was resettled by new Russian immigrants through the 80s and 90s. It's now home to open-air marketplaces, stores with signs in Russian (and, as often as not, without English).

And a great many restaurants serving pierogies, including two named Tatiana's within a block of each other. They are both places that look out across the boardwalk, and turn into nightclubs late at night with wall displays of bottles of strong drink. Indeed, the answering machine message for one beings with 'Thank you for calling Tatiana's, where the vodka flows like the mighty Volga.'

We held a family gathering there, with cousins coming in from their various outer-New York reaches: New Jersey, Long Island, Philadelphia, Manhattan. We went easy on the flowing vodka, but the gathering was rather nice still: a delightful send-off before a few weeks of travel. More here as I get it--but don't expect any photos until my return.