Blogs of a bunch of friends

Day Fifty Three - Monday

27 March 06 - 11:19 am

Last Louvre day. Photos. I haven't looked at them yet, so that adventure still remains. No working LCD means I can't change the ISO for indoor shots, and can't review them to see whether I have a decent one or just a bunch of colorful smears. Took a few flash pix too, so it should be interesting to see how that worked out. Again, with no LCD, I can't check to see how well the flash bounced off the ceiling or wall, and can't change the flash power without the menus anyway. I expect a very low percentage of good shots.

(later)

I guess I'm just awesome. Those photos turned out way better than I expected: 17 of 57 are going up online. Also, this means new photos up. I think this one's my favorite.

Since I can't change ISO, I'm using other tricks to try to get clean shots, but the lens is still all the way open. So on most shots of curved things you can see the depth of field, occasionally to the point that I wouldn't even post the photo. A lot of exhibits had things being renovated, so I could sometimes steal a pedestal in lieu of a tripod and take the shot from far enough away to make everything work. And in all but a few cases, trying to bounce the flash off the ceiling worked pretty well, when I did flash photos. No pix of paintings: those rooms were all off limits. And no, I didn't see the Mona Lisa. Probably walked by it at least once though.

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Day Fifty Two - Sunday

26 March 06 - 12:06 pm

Woke up this morning and went downstairs for breakfast, mildly surprised that nobody was around. Someone fetched me food, which took longer than I would have expected, and was better than anticipated (good hot coffee, mostly). I got back to my room to find that whoever had been lending me internet access turned it back on again (the AP disappeared while I was talking on ICQ last night). I quickly noticed that my computer and alarm clock disagreed about the time. Turns out there was some sort of DST thing, and the EU's now an hour later. So breakfast was slow because I was quite late, and they had put everything away already. Whoops! boingboing says this applies to England and Ireland as well. And maybe Scotland and Wales? Went to the Louvre again. Saw some paintings this time. Vaguely wierded out by the 2D nature of some of the first ones I saw, until I realized it was because of a complete lack of softening (of focus and color) of "distant" objects in the paintings. I've forgotten at least one thing I'd intended to mention here, but I saw an amusing painting of a pair of puppies on what was supposed to be a red pillow, but ended up looking like a flying carpet. Also a still life as attacked by monkeys. Fruits and such, all normal, except things are knocked over and spilled and there's a monkey staring at you while grabbing a bunch of grapes. Got my laundry done despite the laundry I was initially directed to being closed, and the one I subsequently fuond being horrible. A payment station that gives no change and won't accept bills (nor nickels). So I couldn't even afford one washing; the hotel wouldn't give me change, and the supermarket I went to next would only give me 5 euros in change (I took another fiver to a bakery on my way back to the laundromat and bought a cookie to get more change). But I prevailed! And now have clean clothes, which will almost-but-not-quite last until it's time to come home. Also, I got my dates wrong - the Louvre is closed Tuesdays, not Mondays, so I'm going to stay here another day, as there's more to see yet. And lastly, it's been rainy here, off and on ever since I got back. On the plus side, it's rainy because there's a warm front coming in, and during dry spells it's quite pleasant walking around with no coat on.

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Day Fifty One - Saturday

25 March 06 - 1:32 pm

A travel day, so not much to say. "Long life skimmed milk with non milk fat". So I guess that's half way between cream and a non-dairy creamer? Saw a big cooling tower near the train tracks. Probably for a nuclear power plant, what with the "Hamon electrobel" sign on a nearby building. Though maybe non-nuclear power generation sometimes uses big cooling towers like that too: I don't actually know what I'm talking about. Anyway, it's 8:30, so I should probably get dinner, and then maybe there will be people online to entertain me when I get back. Bye! Dinner was...an experience. I like outdoor menus because it helps get a sense of what the food inside is like. Also, the English translations give some clue as to the level of difficulty I'll have communicating anything more complicated than "may I have the bill, please?". And lastly, the prices are informative. Not only to give a clue as to how much money I'll be spending on dinner, but also to judge the degree to which I'll be surrounded by old men in French cuffs, feeling very out of place. Tonight I picked a close-by Chinese restaurant on the grounds that it looked like it might keep raining, and I didn't want to try to find my way back to the hotel in the cold and wet. The dishes looked good; the translations amusingly uninformative; the prices reasonable. I walked inside. Immediately, an Oriental gentleman rushed to hold the door and get my coat, motioning me to a table, whereupon I was presented with a warmed, scented washcloth and the menu. Or rather, menus. One for drinks (beer, wine, spirits, water/coffee/cola/tea/etc), one for foods. I quickly realized, as I looked around, that I'd misjudged things horribly. The reasonable prices were for appetizers, not entrees. At the table nearby were some old men in suits (no French cuffs though). While waiting for my appetizer to arrive, a suited waiter came in pushing a gilt cart with silver tray bearing a crispy duck (or pig maybe. Anyway, some sort of animal of large-duck or small-pig size, missing non-torso bits that might identify it). Then, with tongs and a cleaver, he proceeded to remove the skin in 6 chunks from each side; swapped trays with another waiter; skinned a second beastie. The horribly-denuded animals were never seen again. I spent most of the meal wondering what the hell I'd gotten myself into. That, and counting plates. I went through 12 plates and bowls, plus a goblet, an earthenware crock for my curry, and a dragon-themed chopstick and serving spoon carrier thingy. All for an appetizer and main dish, no dessert or coffee. None of which they would let me serve myself. My spring rolls arrived, nicely arranged on a plate. Plus a plate from which to eat. The waiter put my plate down and carefully arranged upon it a sprig of mint, some lettuce leaves, and two of the eggrolls. When I finished them, he reappeared to serve the last two. After the appetizer was cleared away, they brought me another washcloth. This continued throughout the meal. Once, seeing an opportunity when none of the waiters was in the room, and feeling cheeky, I grabbed the curry and started hunting for the onions they tended to leave in the bowl. Almost immediately someone arrived to take the utensils away and serve me another portion. It was maddening, particularly since I'd gotten used to being ignored by waiters (unlike in the US, you can sit for an hour after a meal and nobody will come by to grab your plate or offer dessert or the check unless you flag them down). As soon as dinner was over, I asked for the check and fled. The end.

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Day Fifty - Friday

25 March 06 - 1:29 pm

Amsterdam is a pretty touristy place normally, but apparently becomes tourist central on the weekends. This means 1. hotels are really expensive; 2. they're mostly full; and 3. you often have to commit to 2-3 day stays. I managed to find a place for tonight that's booked for the rest of the weekend, so I think tomorrow I'll just leave instead of fighting with everyone else for a place to stay. The woman at the train station where I bought my ticket back to Paris answered all my questions from memory. Yay for quick answers. Yet another recommendation. Amsterdam in general. The city clearly enjoys its libertarian bent and the reputation that's given it. It also brings a lot of tourists, which means lots of hotels and restaurants and shops of all sorts. Somehow it manages to be cheery rather than 'touristy' about it, and it really is a nice city. Bikes and pedestrians everywhere and not that many cars. There's a lot of water here; not like Venice, but still quite a few canals. It's raining, which discuoraged too much adventuring (especially since, although I cut out the map from the free tourism book at the last hotel, I neglected to keep the part that tells me what attractions the numbers on it refer to) but I did wander some, trying to stick to buildings with awnings. There are a variety of pubs in the city center. English pubs (one advertising a real English Breakfast "Cooked By an ENGLISH MAN!"), Irish pubs ("English, Welsh, and Scottish welcome"), etc. Tomorrow I'm going back to Paris. There's more of the Louvre to see, and maybe other things, and then I think I'll leave Monday when the museums and whatnot are closed. That will give me a week to either spend in London, or to go elsewhere for a few days and then come back. I'll need to be in London the first monday in April because my flight is, I think, at about 11:30 Tuesday morning, so I'll probably need to be at the airport a bit after 9, which probably means leaving the hotel at 8-8:30, depending on where I end up staying. And then I get home (yay!), in theory, at about midnight. Or, more likely, 1-10 hours later, what with the lovely delays that will probably happen again. I know /I/ haven't forgotten my lovely Atlanta experience...

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Day Forty Nine - Thursday

25 March 06 - 1:28 pm

[late Wednesday, but technically Thursday, so there] It's 1am local. I can't sleep. Part of this is because I'm in a big city and there are cars outside. Buses too. Maybe even one of those big trucks they use in mining where you can't even see the driver in the picture because he's three pixels high, and your house would fit comfortably in the back, along with your neighbor's. But I'm on the fifth floor, and I'm used to it now. No, what's really keeping me up is trying to decide whether I'd be more comfortable sleeping on the floor. This room has a big closet-looking thing in the corner, except it has a sink and a stove and a fridge in it. There's a TV listing sheet. Lots of TV in French and Dutch, but a total of 10 different languages are represented (I counted). It's pretty nice. But the bed is absolute shit. I've slept in only one hotel bed bad enough to give it a run for its money. This would, barely, be forgivable if I were paying $100 a night less. So if you're ever in Brussles, stay away from Hotel Ustel. [Thursday really] I saw sheep in a field. Yay for sheep! I guess Brussles is just boring or something, and I was pissed off anyway because I slept right through my alarm (no doubt because I couldn't get to sleep until late), thus missing breakfast, so when I failed to turn up a more interesting-looking part of town on my way to the central train station, I hopped on a train for Amsterdam and washed my hands of the whole affair. So now I'm somewhere more fun. It's going to get really cold tonight. It's pretty chilly already, but with the sun it's not too bad; when night falls it'll be like a real winter and everything. The train station here is located in a proper part of town, with hotels and restaurants and things to do and everything. Not that I'd be so crass as to compare it to where I ended up in Brussles, of course. Bought some foodstuffs at a grocery store that has either a problem with forgers or a problem with paranoia. I'm not sure which, but the checkout woman had the least-trusting till setup I've seen thus far in Europe, and ran my two fivers through some sort of scanner before accepting them. Actually, I've been surprised by the lack of concern with forgery in Europe, especially considering the large cash transactions that happen fairly regularly. I don't know whether that's due to euros being particularly hard to forge, or whether it's due to different banking laws, or what the deal is. Lest you think I can do naught but rant, I have a recommendation to make. Eat at "Indian Restaurant Vijaya", a few blocks from the central train station in Amsterdam. Don't order an appetizer: the meal comes with more than enough extras. I came in at 6pm, a bit early for dinner, but all I'd had to eat that day was a pair of chocolate pastries (at a cafe in Brussles that was playing Roxette) and I was hungry. I ordered a lamb curry. I forget what they called it, but it was roughly a less-spicy vindaloo. Very tasty. It came with rice, a little salad, and a spicy potato / veggie curry. Plus dal (that's the spicy cracker-like thing with dip, yes?), and the naan I ordered. Tons of good food. On the way back to the hotel, I was tempted by various live music, but I really should get to bed early and get caught back up on sleep.

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Day Forty Eight - Wednesday

22 March 06 - 08:40 am

I hate when people change seats on the train before it's started moving. That results in things like my interpretation of the train ticket not agreeing with reality: the seat I think I have is full already. And then I have to try to mime "Is that my seat that you're in? I think it is, but I'm not sure" because I don't speak nearly enough French to get that across. rrrar. Especially when I'm pushing the departure time so hard that the train was already moving before I'd managed to sit down. I seem to recall having ranted about this before. It's still annoying. Though once again there's power here so I can play with my GPS toys - at least they still work right:( Those are fields, and that was a wagon with hay (or maybe straw) on it. So there: I'm officially traveling the French countryside by train. And in comfort too, as I do believe that's the sound of lunch coming up the aisle. Yep. Hake. Tiny little graveyard between the road and the railway here. Not sure what that's about. It's too small and compact to have been there before the road & train came along and been preserved rather than moved. And it's too big to be the result of a car crash or some such that might be memorialized there. Unless it was just a really enormous pileup, maybe aided by the train. Looked like several dozen little crosses, at least. And right.....now....I'm touring the Belgian countryside rather than the French, and am about to cross the Escaut river. Isn't technology fun? We'll totally have to play with this on the way to Gencon. Maybe we can get the lat & long to show up in the movies. So, amused as I am by eating lunch surrounded by men in suits and ties (I'm 'dressed up' - that is, my shirt's tucked in), I'm more amused by the PDA situation with the guy across from me. He's checking appointments or something so he pulls out his Clie, which is in one of those thin metal cases. I notice an odd glint from the case, so I look over, and the glint is from where he's attacked the case with a Dremel tool to provide a cut-out for the memory stick slot. [later] Ok, so puttering about online seems to indicate the LCD problem is relatively common and probably caused by rotating the screen. Ordinarily, over-rotation pulls out tiny plugs that attach the LCD to a board in the main body of the camera (or causes the wires to break). I'm hoping that in this case the cold stiffened the wires such that normal rotation pulled the plugs out. I hear Canon wants something like $200 to fix it, but hopefully 4 tiny screws and some friction-fit plastic are all that stands in the way of pushing those plugs back where they belong. *crosses fingers*

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Day Forty Seven - Tuesday

22 March 06 - 08:39 am

Just a short move, probably under 6 blocks. Egad the front desk woman is extroverted. Her name's Moun ("moon"), so I guess that shouldn't be much of a surprise. The cheap places are all booked in this part of town, so I've been staying at nicer hotels, which means there's space to walk around in the room, and there are little details like someplace to put luggage so you're not reaching down to the floor, etc. An amusing result of the hotel situation is that the more expensive hotels have a lot of vacancies, but usually not in single rooms, so if you ask for a single room, they'll often give you a double for the same price. And, in this case, free breakfast too. Now, if the wifi situation were better, it'd be just about perfect. Laundry. Check. Arc de Triomphe. Check. Eiffel Tower. All the way to the top. Check. Got some good pictures too. Though not of the Arc, because I refused to pay anyone to walk under it (or indeed within about 100') since it wasn't that interesting from a distance. Walking down the Eiffel Tower, I moved the viewfinder on the camera, and zzzzzt. Dead. Probably just the LCD, not the whole camera, but with the frostbite-inducing wind chill I wasn't about to investigate much. On that note, my right hand still feels not right, so I think it got a bit colder than I'd intended it to. The east corner of the tower was wicked cold. Now that I'm back in the hotel, I'll hook up the camera to the computer and see what remotecapture makes of it. Right, then. I don't know what error 24 is, and the manual refuses to help. It gives the oh-so 'modern consumer electronics' advice to "Note the error code number and take the camera in for servicing". And Canon, the bastards, distribute their manual as a PDF that you can't copy and paste from, so I had to retype that quotation. What was the point of that? I'm sure I'm just sniping, but I'm kind of pissed off. The camera's not new, but it's new to me, and it's survived a whole 6 months. Six months to the day, in fact. Frell! Ok, so it's not a complete loss. The camera seems to work fine with the LCD screen folded closed. The camera knows when it's closed and I guess doesn't try to use the screen, thus avoiding whatever error causes it to malfunction. Unfortunately, by "seems to work fine" I mean that it works the way it's intended to work with the LCD off, which disables a bunch of stuff that requires the LCD to use. So nothing hidden in menus is accessible. Manual focus shuts off. Some other things. As a P&S, it still works, but there's a whole lot less fiddling I can do between the initial pointing and the final shooting. Frell.

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Day Forty Six - Monday

22 March 06 - 08:38 am

Today shall be the Louvre day. Also, it shall be the day of unanticipated return to the previous hotel where hopefully they've saved my toothpaste, which I seem to have left there. Whoops. I thought about bringing my camera, but I think I won't bother. Apparently in some of the rooms they let you set up tripods even, but the Louvre webpage hints that the museum's always busy. If it's even as busy as the Prado, I'd waste a lot of time waiting for a clear shot, and since I'm not planning on doing strange things with the photos, I suppose it doesn't matter if I have my photos or other random ones online. I hear the museum has its own photos up, and while I haven't checked them out myself, they ought to be better than anything I'm going to get. Resolved: to go and just look. So there. Lunch / pitstop. This jacket has to go. Apparently the Louvre is "air conditioned" (so sayeth a sign), but when it's 75 degrees or more in there and the air vents are blowing hot air, at least one system is a bit confused. So the coat's staying here and I'll be a bit chilly on the walk back to the museum. It's short. I've seen Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Persian (et al - "oriental") statuary, sarcophagi, etc. Also Charles IV and V ivory bits, sceptres (C. V had a mini statue of himself (or someone) carrying a Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch on it), reliquaries, and the like. This took about three hours. So I estimate I've seen about 1% of the stuff there, and the museum's closed tomorrow. I guess that makes tomorrow laundry day and moving day, and if there's time it'll also be taking-prohibited-pictures-of-the-Eiffel-Tower day, and maybe also seeing the Arc de Triomphe day. The museum has cool stuff in it. It's in a pretty cool building. Big glass pyramid outside though: totally unimpressive. Oh, it's pretty big. And it (and the two mini-pyramids next to it) lets in light which is nice inside the museum. But it's neither big enough nor sparkly enough to really attract much attention. In fact, it's only big enough to let you know which way the entrance is if you're already inside the courtyard. But, as I said, there's cool stuff inside. And the museum itself is pretty on the inside too, so I guess I can forgive the pyramid. Surprised by the presence of iced tea as a drink choice at dinner, I ordered it. I like these little food mysteries. Sometimes I can decipher enough of the French to sanity check the English translations; sometimes not. This seemed legit, but what's iced tea going to look like at a Chinese restaurant in Paris? Answer: Peach-flavored Nestea in a can. Continuing the pattern of odd-but-not-bad surprises, it was odd, but not bad. Certainly drinkable, though not remotely iced tea, regardless of what its ingredient list might have said. Also a tasty cone around the corner for dessert. Or rather, tasty ice cream in a crummy cone.

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Day Forty Five - Sunday

22 March 06 - 08:37 am

Quiche Lorraine for lunch. Or technically breakfast, since I slept in this morning instead of eating. Or maybe something else. What do you call a lunch that's really a breakfast but is eaten at 3pm? Linner? Just doesn't go together as well as brunch. We'll see if this is a bad idea or not. Generally things with this much egg in them are bad things to eat in foreign countries, but Paris isn't exactly Phnom Penn (sp?), and it was in a refrigeratey case. [ed, later: Yeah, bad idea]. I decided I'd go to the Louvre tomorrow, since it was only open for a few more hours today, and I think that was a good idea. I stopped by a supermarket near the hotel and grabbed some food, and then came back to munch and play online and read. I discovered a nice strong AP with internet access when I got here, but as of this evening it's dead. Or rather, it's still there but it won't let me associate, and it hasn't blocked my MAC for bad behavior (downloading big PDFs). So I don't know what the problem is, but now the rest of the world has disappeared:( Read some, decided the book really wasn't interesting, and ended up napping for several hours.

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Day Forty Four - Saturday

19 March 06 - 05:59 am

Well, "The Golden Age of Arab Science" was a bit of a disappointment. The exhibits themselves were pretty neat, by and large, but the museum let too many people in, so it was hot and crowded and I really glossed over several displays just to get away from the guided tours which were especially bad. I did have the amusement of going through a security checkpoint to get into the museum though. I walk in, not entirely sure it's even the right place to get tickets (many museums have outdoor connections between different parts of the museum, so you can inadvertently try to walk in, sans ticket, mid-museum), and there's a metal detector, X-ray machine, and a guy. I put my camera on the belt and walk through the metal detector, which dutifully beeps at me. The guy indicates a tray. So, out comes the GPS receiver, flashlight, some change, my knife. I scan through again, and everything's fine. The guy checks out the tray and decides it's OK for me to walk into the museum with that stuff. If none of that gave him pause, I wonder what exactly it is they're scanning for. Technically, the protests have been going on since at least noon (I saw a small gathering about then), but now, five hours later, they've kicked up a notch. A lot more people, a lot more hardware, a lot more noise, and a lot more cops. After dinner, as I was preparing to feel enormously cosmopolitan upon completion of my plan to go to an entirely different restaurant for dessert (I know. I'm easy to amuse.), the waitress arrived and asked if I wanted dessert. The answer of course was no, but I asked for their menu anyway. This was my first mistake. Reading through it, there were several tasty-looking things, several of which had to be abandoned for largeness (a 3-scoop bannana split is a bit much for dessert). Then I noticed something translated (erroneously, as it happens) as "pineapple pie". Well, I couldn't very well pass on that, could I? I said I'd try the pineapple pie, and the waitress smiled as if I were in for a real treat. It turns out that "pineapple pie" is really a code name for "deep-fried pineapple rings". Sounds pretty awful, doesn't it? It's not bad, actually, but certainly wasn't good enough to compensate for my crushed dreams.

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Day Forty Three - Friday

17 March 06 - 08:37 am

St Paddy's day! This is one of those holidays whose very existence I forget from late March until I start seeing ads for it the following year. When I was younger, this meant the sudden appearance of green things on classroom walls. Now it means placards in bar windows and sandwich boards. And, as a special gift this year, it means confusion because my watch thought yesterday was the 17th, which conflicted with other things saying it was the 16th. Turns out the watch was wrong, so I reset it, and now it's really the day for green things. Why is it that all the Americans I meet are southerners? Not that I mind, but it seems odd that all these people are from Virginia or Georgia or the Carolinas. At breakfast today I chatted with a couple young women who'd just gotten in from Paris a few days ago and were heading back tomorrow. Just in time for the next scheduled round of demonstrations, I said. Apparently they ran into some of that when they were there earlier this week, and had some tales of narrowly-averted mayhem to tell, involving being locked in a store when the protesters came by because the proprietor pulled down the security gate and such until they'd gone past. I don't know where the big universities are, which have so far been the focus of the protests, but the news says there were 250k people out demonstrating, though it's unclear if that was on one day, or the total for the week. In any event, with the labor unions coming in to support the students, and high schoolers and kids from the suburbs coming in to join the mayhem, it should make for a memorable Paris experience. At breakfast we were discussing how it doesn't seem like such a big deal, but to the French it's obviously a big shock with such a high percentage of the population in steady government jobs, and the rest accustomed to such strong job security. The train ride to Paris kind of sucked because the tracks jogged back and forth. This might be merely notable at low speeds, but at almost 300kph, it was downright annoying to be jerked side to side for an hour and a half.

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Day Forty Two - Thursday

17 March 06 - 08:34 am

I'm writing this in a laundromat conveniently near the hotel where I'm afraid I'll be depositing half my remaining fortune. However, the central payment point takes bills (why don't all of them work this way?!), and thus produces lots of change when I give it a EUR20 bill for one washer. Among the change was an Irish coin, which I hadn't thusfar seen. That brings the total to 7, I believe. French, Italian, German, Spanish, Irish, and two I can't immediately identify and don't remember to look up when I have 'net access. Heh. I got here and there was an older woman waiting for her laundry to dry. Assuming she was French, I didn't bother trying to talk to her. It turns out she assumed the same about me, so we ended up sitting on either side of a picnic bench (why that's the seating they provided is beyond me...) until an actual French woman came in and asked us something, and we discovered we both speak English. We chatted for a while until her laundry was done. Turns out she's in town with her husband for a weeklong WHO conference in Geneva. I'm watching CNN over lunch, and they just had a human-interest story about people using dummies to sneak into the carpool lane. Their featured arrestee got a $125 fine and had to spend 4 hours holding a sign by the freeway. He said it saved him half an hour a day for a year. That's totally worth it; hardly a deterrent. I'm surprised the fines for using a dummy aren't higher. [later] I should watch more news, and not just of the Comedy Central variety. It's really quite amusing, as long as you can get past the fact that there's maybe 5 minutes of new content an hour and the rest is repetition. BBC World interviewed a guy talking about the big military offensive outside Samarra, and at one point he wanted to compare anti-insurgency operations to a big game of Whack-a-Mole. Only he's not sure people will know what that means, so he detoured a moment to describe the game. In a very British fashion. Hilarious. "So far, the military here is being fairly stingy with the details." Yeah, I got that based on the fact that the only video is of commentators, interviewees, and file footage, while the same dozen Reuters photos are being cycled through by both BBC and CNN. Oh, yeah. And today is the answer to the question...

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Day Forty One - Wednesday

17 March 06 - 08:33 am

Checked out; left the hotel ("located on the very site of Claude Lumiere's factory...") and headed west, across one of the two rivers, in the general direction of the old city. Found a hotel that happens to serve breakfast until 11am. Good for them! Then headed out to the print museum, which I didn't end up going to because I couldn't find it. I found the address the map told me to go to. It led into a courtyard with a bunch of apartments around it. There were signs for the museum cafe. But the signs pointed up some stairs, which went all the way up to the top floor, all residential, no museum to be found. After a bit more wandering, I eventually gave up and went elsewhere. As it happens, elsewhere ended up being a big hilltop Roman excavation / museum / gardens / etc that was pretty neat. I got some good pictures (I hope), and sore feet because it's not quite warm enough to walk around in shirtsleeves, but I did anyway. No, leaving my coat at the hotel doesn't make my feet sore. But it does mean I don't have my watch with me, which means I wander until it seems like a good idea to stop, which in this case ended up being four hours later, in addition to the hour-long trek from the old to the new hotel. This is apparently one of those towns where it's just not good to change money. It's not just a matter of what part of town I land in, since I've been in more parts of Lyon than any other city on my trip so far, and they all suck. The train station had an American Express place just next door, which sounded good until I realized it was inside and up an elevator into an office building structure, which looked decidedly non-retail and turned out to be a corporate travel agency; I saw one change place in the station, but it offered very bad rates and was closed too. All the hotels I've stayed in so far that have offered currency exchange have been more than 10% off the rate I want, plus fees or commission. Accordingly, I haven't changed any money in a while, so I have exactly 35 euros in cash, which has to get me to Paris (the train ticket goes on my credit card). We'll see how wide-spread the not-quite-riots over new labor laws there are. I saw on the news that Greece is having awful weather. Awful in the severe flooding sense of the word. I didn't hear anything about flooding in France, and while it's not exactly cause for pandemonium, there are underground parking lots near the rivers that are flooded. The river's flowing high and fast (evidenced by partially-submerged graffiti, staircases leading down to nowhere, etc.), but it wasn't until I saw the windows of a car park that ordinarily would look out onto the river now looking out INto the river that I realized exactly how high the water really is. The water's quite muddy, so when the river finally calms down, those parking lots are going to need some serious de-mucking.

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Day Forty - Tuesday

17 March 06 - 08:31 am

A fairly good breakfast, though the shower situation sucked, which somewhat dimmed my morning. You'll have to ask me in person about the various ways I've seen bathrooms done wrong. And not just Brian-type nits, either. I mean major head-whacking (sometimes literally) errors. Now that I have the scale on the map correct (I somehow read 1:14500 as 1:45000 for the scale), things aren't quite so far apart, and I've headed down to the Lumiere museum area since the other museum I'm interested in (and historic area) are on the other side of the river. Also, this museum doesn't close during the day. Siesta's supposed to be a Spanish invention, so why are so many businesses closed from noon to 2pm or thereabouts? Anyway, I was worried there wouldn't be hotels near there because there don't seem to be any major distance transportation spots (airports, train depots, ferry stops, etc) near there, but I did find a hotel, part of the all-encompassing Accor brand. I'm not sure why they give their various sub-chains their own name, since Accor is always prominently part of the signage, in contrast to their US operations (Motel 6, Red Roof Inn, etc.). It's a pretty nice room, notably lacking only free wifi and a small cache of English language books for the taking. And it has Eucalyptus-scented soap. I'm normally anti-perfumed soap, but there are exceptions. The Lumiere museum was pretty neat. I get a kick out of oldtech. Film got a whole lot better from 1890 to 1910. Much better contrast ratios, to say nothing of the grain size and sensitivity. Also, I'm amused that the technology to record stills in quick succession (10+FPS) was developed before the tech to play them back. Does it make me a bad person if I found a dead lightbulb in the hotel but don't want to deal with people to get it replaced, so I unscrewed it, put a big Sharpie X on it, and left it in a glass on the desk? That was a predictably uninspired CNN piece about cellphone tracking, despite (snippets from) interviews with Bruce Schneier and someone from the EFF whose name I didn't catch. [and, later on, a similarly uninspired piece about RFID tags on merchandise, by way of CeBIT] The restaurant situation in this part of town is mostly take-out. A typical example is a pizza joint called "Space Pizza" (and indeed its logo is an LGM delivering a pizza), mostly take-out with maybe a half-dozen tables stashed on a balcony.

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Day Thirty Nine - Monday

17 March 06 - 08:30 am

I tend to assume that that train stations, if not located in the center of town, are at least vaguely downtown-ish, but occasionally that assumption proves false. The station here in Lyon, although serviced by the aforementioned high-speed train, actually seems to be a fairly minor outlying station. Or perhaps they're all minor stations, since the map seems to indicate there are five or six, depending how you count. There are maybe a half-dozen hotels within reasonable walking distance of the part-dieu station where I arrived, and none of the big-name hotels you'd expect crowded around where a lot of people will be disembarking. Last night's hotel was booked today, so I had to go find another place to stay, which didn't take too long despite the relative scarcity of hotels in the area. I also got a map that quantifies exactly how far I am from anything interesting. Not that I could be visiting the print or film museums anyway, since they're both closed today, and one's closed tomorrow too. The old city, "a UNESCO world heritage site", is quite a hike away. Tomorrow I'll check out the area where the museums seem to be clustered and see if it's got hotel rooms available.

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Day Thirty Eight - Sunday

17 March 06 - 08:29 am

Though I was on a "high speed" train (and indeed it did hit 300km/hr briefly), the combination of circuitous route, frequent stops, and half-hour delay (actually closer to 40 minutes) just before the Lyon stop meant I got in about 9pm, just in time to grab a hotel room and a bite to eat, and then go to bed. Oh, yeah. And to notice with displeasure that the sunny warmth surrounding me when I got on the train had been replaced by below-freezing darkness.

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temp

15 March 06 - 3:03 pm

Still here...

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Day Thirty Seven - Saturday

12 March 06 - 04:58 am

There's a big hill a mile or two from the hotel that apparently has some sort of old building on it. I never actually saw the old building, but there's a park and trails and such, so I went for a little hike and got pictures for a couple panoramas. There are thousands of little buildings in the shot, and the sheer number of angles and corners seems to have confused the automatic stitching, so I'll have to redo them manually. I thought I'd also experiment with panoramas more than one photo high (two dimensional rather than one dimensional stitching), but so far that's been a bust. I'm really not convinced that using over 600MB of memory is actually necessary. Though I suppose "mmap() it and let the OS handle the consequences" isn't, per se, an invalid strategy. Except in this case it doesn't work because I turned off virtual memory because Windows was doing stupid stupid things. *sigh* At least, I'm assuming that's the problem: it doesn't actually throw the out of memory error, but that's the most reasonable explanation considering previous memory errors as I worked up to this method. More investigation must be done. Speaking of photography, and investigation, I have more data on The Dark Spot. Changing resolution, exposure length, or focus distance has no effect on the spot. However, changing aperture does. The spot gets larger and less distinct (less darkening of the photo within the area of the spot) with wider apertures, and narrower and darker with small apertures. I'd been using narrow apertures outdoors to get a nice wide depth of field for landscapes, but today I just turned the neutral density filter on to keep the exposure lengths reasonably long (5ms or so) and took the photos at F/4, which helps but you can still see the slight darkening if you know where to look. It's a bit early for dinner time, especially on a weekend, but I skipped lunch to avoid the crowds so now I'm going to go try to find the Indian restaurant I saw yesterday. Mmm, naan and curry. Ok, I'll be honest: mmm, sauce-that-comes-with-naan. And curry. Tasty lamb vindaloo, in fact.

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Day Thirty Six - Friday

10 March 06 - 2:17 pm

Indeed there is a nearby laundry, though I somehow managed to walk past the large windows looking into a room full of washing machines, as well as a 2-foot-high sign plastered across the top proclaiming the machines' purpose. So I ended up at a farther-away laundry, which was OK since it wasn't all that far in the grand scheme of things, and the weather's lovely. Also the farther place was cheaper, though I didn't know that at the time. It had a respectable centralized payment point too, which would take bills up to 20s, and dispensed change for my 3.5 euro load in coins. Oddly, though it will accept one euro coins, it doesn't give them in change, only 2s and 50c coins. In any event, I got my laundry done and now I think I'll check out the map and see what there is to see. A few pictures, but the fingerprint is back. Further investigation indicates it's probably not a fingerprint, since 1) I see nothing wrong with the lens, 2) it's resisted repeated cleaning, 3) it's changing in size and color, getting smaller and darker over time. The test I conducted after the first cleaning which seemed to indicate I'd successfully removed the thing I couldn't see was probably just insufficient. Hopefully I'll be able to come up with a solution which doesn't involve replacing the camera:( Interesting note on the hotel here. It's got electronic locks like many hotels, but these aren't the old Ving cards with the holes in them. They're not magstrip cards either. They're smartcards. This by itself would be just a minor technical note, however I discovered something more interesting. I checked in and said I'd stay for that night and let the hotel know the following morning (this morning) if I were interested in staying longer. This gave me some time to decide how interesting Nice would be. I decided to stay, told the desk, and left to do laundry. When I got back, the key had stopped working so I got it redone at the front desk, where the receptionist remarked in an offhand manner that the key stopped working at noon, which was checkout time for the initial day I'd asked for when the key was programmed. She said she'd add another day, and it would die again at noon tomorrow. I don't know that I've ever tried to use an electronic hotel key after checkout time, but now I'll have to give it a try. Clearly the magstripe cards just give the doors a message such as "I'm key number nnnn" and let the hotel systems decide whether to open the door or not, since the cards have no way to do any computation on their own. However, if the system were that simple there would be no need for rewritable cards, and thus fewer of them should fail (consider how hard it is to screw up a credit card). On the other hand, going to a more expensive smart card sytem implies that the card itself is contributing in some nontrivial way to the decision whether to unlock the door or not, which seems inherently insecure (not that I suspect that's a high priority to a hotel that vehemently disclaims any liability for a room's contents, and has the maids leave readily-accessible windows open...). Also, more photos up.

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Day Thirty Five - Thursday

10 March 06 - 2:12 pm

It's nice to be in Nice. See, by starting with a horrible pun, I lower expectations (crafty, neh?). Ok, so the train ride took approximately forever because it was a slow train and went via China, and got delayed by almost half an hour along the way (maybe at the French border, where we seemed to sit around for a while). And yeah, I got in pretty late. And yes, the train station was amazingly mobbed by teenagers for no apparent reason. But just a few blocks from the train station I came upon Hotel Madrid, with the magic three stars under its name. The reception looked a bit more posh than I usually aim for, but what the hell. Unless I horribly mis-heard, I'm paying $60 a night, plus an expensive breakfast that I hope will be on par with much-missed German breakfasts of weeks ago. Initially this is cause for concern: they're not spending all their money on a nice reception to lure folks into their crummy rooms, are they? Turns out not. My "single room" has 3 beds in it, which always amuses me. More importantly, there are good towels, and a table to put my luggage on. Also it's claimed there's a laundry nearby, which is good news.

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Day Thirty Four - Wednesday

08 March 06 - 2:13 pm

The guy at the hotel mentioned that the price he quoted included breakfast, so I headed downstairs this morning, curious what exactly that entailed since the first floor was entirely gutted and the reception area had no doors that might lead to a dining room. The guy gave me a xeroxed breakfast token thing and said to go around the corner. This actually, it turned out, meant 7 doors away where I got mediocre coffee and a surprisingly good croissant. Egad, I understood every word of that announcement. "Train 9440 direct to Milano Centrale will be making its departure in just a few minutes..." So I went to the train station, checked the departure board, and noticed a train to Milan at 11:30, in exactly half an hour. That's perfect timing. I started looking for ticket machines. Plenty of banks of phones, but no machines. Finally I saw an office that said train tickets, so I headed in there and stood in line for 14 minutes for the person in front of me to give up and leave. I got the impression that the delay wasn't entirely the ticket agent's fault, but it was still increasingly aggravating. When it was finally my turn, she explained that there was something wrong with the computer's connection and that I should try "over there". I thought back to the two not-entirely-satisfactory hotels I spent he past two days at, which both claimed problems with their credit card processing, citing connection problems. Initially I'd assumed it was a ploy not to have to pay 3% to the credit card companies, but it sounds like maybe they are having problems. Anyway, craning my neck, I saw a far-off set of doors labeled tickets, so I went in there and grabbed a machine. This is one of the touch-screen ones, which are way nicer because you can use an on-screen keyboard to type in your destination, which is way faster. The machine says ticket sales are "not available at this time". Shit. Without much hope, I turn to the machine next to it, which actually seems to work, so I quick snag the ticket I want, mindful of the fact that there's not much time to find the platform and walk all the way down to my car. I remember that you have to validate your ticket before getting on the train, though I've never figured out what exactly it's for, so I stick it in the validation printer slot. Nothing. Repeat. Nothing. Third time's the charm. Nothing. I try the machine next to it, which had refused to sell me the ticket. Nothing. I try the machine next to that. Finally, it works. I trot out to the platforms, find my train which is conveniently right there at platform 16, and run all the way down to the second-to-last car where my seat is. And it turns out I needn't have bothered, since the train's already 3 minutes late for departure. Train's finally leaving, 8 minutes late. More than "just a few minutes" after the announcement. They probably held the train for the people who couldn't get a ticket in time. Good thing we have computers and good algorithms to deal with the fact that suddenly 400 miles of track usage has to be recomputed, which may cascade to affect quite a bit more of the infrastructure. Oh well. At least I have a power outlet so I can spend the next 6.5 hours listening to an audiobook. And if I can get decent reception, I may play with the GPS receiver too. I'm not sure it's entirely kosher, but plugging the USB cable into the back and jamming the cable into the windowside air vents holds the antenna at an almost ideal angle. Now we'll see what the software does with a live feed from the receiver. Cool. After a bit of error involved in figuring out how the application works, it looks like it pretty much does the right thing. Gives me basically the same info the GPS unit does but it has a lot more pixels, and colored ones at that, to do it with. It also updates a bit faster. We'll see how many things the GPS unit can do at once, since it's getting GPS data, displaying a tracking map of satellites in the sky and signal strength from each, should be maintaining its own track log every 15 seconds, and is sending data to the computer somewhat more than once a second, where it's also going into a track log. The computer's track log looks to be more sophisticated than the GPS unit's (though maybe the GPS unit would do the same if I set it on "auto" rather than timed for the logging interval), keeping more datapoints along turns than along boring straightaways. Not as exciting as highway 1, but we're right on the coast. Yay ocean! Ok, so it's a sea, but it's still big and salty and you can't see the other side of it... Speaking of other sides, we just went through a tunnel over 10mi long, and passed another train most of the way through. Little smart cars sure look rediculous on the highway next to semis.

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Day Thirty Two - Monday

08 March 06 - 2:12 pm

I'm in Naples. Naples doesn't look very prosperous. It's big enough to have some fancy hotels, and the train / bus station is pretty big, but I saw what looked like several half-completed and abandoned building, completed but abandoned buildings, and general disarray in the suburbs as the train inched into town. The downtown has a selection of skyscrapers which I haven't checked out yet and which may be in a nice part of town, but here by the train station doesn't qualify. Also, Naples is cold. It's farther south than Rome, and it's also on the Mediterranean, but it's chilly again. I guess a warm spell happened to correspond to my being in Rome and it's over now. The cold front caused a bunch of rain (the streets were puddly and sopping when I got here) that the train must have just missed since I didn't see any rain along the way, and it had stopped by the time I got to the station. In fact, it had stopped long enough ago that the clouds had broken up though the sky still had the just-rained cast to it. I tried staying in a cheaper hotel here since I wasn't getting my money's worth at a more expensive hotel in Rome, but the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction and I'll be moving up again in the morning. Let's just say that the rooms aren't heated if nobody's paying for them, and I've had the heat on high for the past six hours and it's just now gotten nice in here. I snuck a look at a map posted in the train station, and there are museums and other such things here so I may stay a few days rather than use this as a stopover point on may way elsewhere. If I can get to Palermo without too much trouble, there are flights out of there that will take me other good places, though maybe not to Greece. I'd have to check that again.

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Day Thirty Three - Tuesday

08 March 06 - 2:12 pm

No, and no. Can't get to Palermo from here (not sure why not, but it's right out). And no, the skyscrapey area of town isn't magically more prosperous than near the train station. Also, drivers don't make their decisions based on street signs or traffic laws but rather where their car will fit and how many people they'll have to run over to get there. As a result, there are horns honking all the time. Also objectionabl was the heavy machinery (sounded like road construction) operating at 1am last night outside the hotel. I've since switched hotels, but shan't be staying long. I think I might just go back to Milan and then to France. Hopefully I can get a train directly from here to Milan. The train I took from Rome was a diesel train, even though it looked like the tracks were equipped for electric trains, and I'd like to take an electric train back since it'll keep my laptop happy so I can listen to music for the many hour ride. After lunch I got back to the new hotel and the front desk person was gone, probably to eat his own lunch, leaving only a maid to keep an eye on things. She doesn't speak a word of English. This would have been OK since we managed to communicate that I've got a room there and would like the key, but I screwed things up when pointing out what room it was. I thought the room numbers were under the boxes with keys, when they are in fact above them, so she thought I was asking for a key to room 146 or something (which is probably torn up and unusable because they're in the middle of renovation), rather than the room I've actually got. Fortunately, she called someone who speaks English and I told him what's going on, and he told here, and I have the key now. Why are there never any books in the hotel rooms I'm in? I leave people books; why don't they leave me any?

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Day Thirty One - Sunday (part 2)

06 March 06 - 05:16 am

(Separated out since I wrote a lot on Sunday, I guess.)

Today's rant starts with a simple question: What is the proper way for maids to turn the lights off in a hotel room after they're done cleaning? "Why, that's simple," you may say, "There are light switches." While this sounds simple in theory, in practice it's a bit more complicated than that. Just to the right of the door there are 2 switches. One controls the light directly above the door; the other controls the light in the main room. In the main room there's a lamp, but its switch is midway down the power cord which puts it about a foot off the ground. In the bathroom, there is a main bathroom light, an above-the-sink light, and a left-of-sink light. On three separate switches. In two differet panels, on two different walls. The astute will note that's 6 light switches in my room. The maids enter the room, turning on light switches as necessary to see things. Leaving the room, they hit the breakers just inside the doorway. Problem one: I come into the room and the light switches don't work anymore. Problem two: I hit the breakers and ALL the lights come on, except the one I wanted on, whose switch is now in the off position. Problem three: my laptop, which was on when I left, is now off, with a dead battery, because the outlet I plugged it into mysteriously stopped working some hours previously.

I like minibars. Why? Oh, for the $4 cans of Coke and $3 candy bars. No, actually I have no respect for the business model. Hope I'm too dumb to plan ahead, too lazy to go outside, and too desperate to mind the prices. Of course, the effect of this is that people have to be really dumb, lazy, and desperate to cause any churn, thus the ancient Coke. Meanwhile, the can has to be refrigerated for 6 months, so the eventual purchase price has to cover buying the can, paying someone to stock the minibar, and paying its share of the refrigerator's purchase and operating costs. No, I like that this rediculous business plan puts a refrigerator in my room, which can store things like salame and brie (President brie, no less, but not herbed), and I don't feel the least bit bad emptying the thing out to make room for stuff I actually care about, particularly since everything in there has been run through months of nasty warm/cold cycles already, thanks to the maids' expedient use of circuit breakers in lieu of light switches.

The BBC's doing Oscar coverage. For all I know, they'll televise the whole damn thing, but I plan to be long asleep by then. In any event, the pre-show news blurbs are amusing, especially the BBC correspondent's explanation of Jon Stewart. BBC's crawl line looks like shit. I wonder why. It's usually clearer than that, but it's obviously tacked on after the decision is made as to what to show - I just watched a thing on golf where the entire shot from tee to hole occurred under the crawl, and there was room to move the video up without losing anything important on the top. Things like that surprise me. It's not exactly a new phenomenon, either the crawl or the problems it causes. It stars getting funny like a car crash when you've got a video source that already has a crawl and/or text labels at the bottom that's then fed into a news program that splashes its own distractions on top of it.

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Day Thirty One - Sunday

05 March 06 - 09:22 am

Know what's fun to eat without appropriate tools? Coconut. Yeah, minor damage to my Gerber opening that sucker up, but I still say I did a darn good job of it, considering. The milk's bitter, but the flesh is good. Several places were selling coconut slices in Venice but I decided against paying a euro for a little slice of coconut that's spent hours having hose water dripping over it, and none of the stalls had whole coconuts I could buy. So when I saw one here in a grocery store in Rome, I bought it. At Venice by-the-slice prices, I've probably eaten over $10 worth, am conspicuously less than halfway through the coconut, and paid about $3 for it. rawk. Who sells coconuts by the kilo? They're like grapefruit, sold by count, darnit! It didn't even occur to me that I'd have to weigh the thing and print out a price label for it. Yeesh. Walking home with my very-late-lunch fixings (brie!), I passed a little hole in the wall selling pizza by weight, so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised.

Saved myself $20 comparison shopping for a foreign exchange place this afternoon, in the process getting the record for best effective exchange rate. Couldn't find a good bookstore though. One academic bookstore, one regular bookstore that didn't happen to have anything I was interested in, one car-themed bookstore. Car-themed bookstore, you ask? Yes, and a pretty decent-sized one too, amazingly enough, and it even had customers (yes, plural) inside. I'm hoping there's an outdoor market tomorrow since I'm less than an hour away from finishing my last book, and they're good places to get English-language paperbacks.

I want to go to Sicily. If I remember correctly there's a train that'll take me there but it's over 500mi and 12 hours. Only 280mi by plane, including the trips from the city to the airports on both ends, probably under 3 hours. Tomorrow it's forecast to be raining but hopefully in the morning there will be a more accurate forecast telling me what part of the day I should spend out hunting for books and what part I should spend indoors looking for cheap plane fare online.

Can you eat too much coconut? And how much is too much? What's the LD50 on coconut? I'd say I'm still under half and I ate almost a whole coconut one day in Belize, so I'd guess I'm safe. Probably works the same as alcohol: if you go slow enough, it stops being fun before it starts being stupid.

Ok, I keep unposted notes in a file here until I get internet access to post them. I also keep random notes-on-things-to-note. Let's clear that queue out a bit. First off, I actually posted the damn Vodafone TOS that I promised ages ago, and 6 people tried to look at. Check out section 6: Customer's Duties. It starts out rediculous, takes a brief trip to does-not-parse-in-English land and ends up in "using only the current standards of the TCP/IP protocol family" hell. Clearly written by a lawyer with just enough grasp of English and the technical situation to get himself into trouble. Second, I heard some commentary on CNN a while back concerning the fact that a lot of places in the EU are imposing varying smoking bans. They noted in the commentary that the Germans are hesitant to implement anti-smoking legislation because the Nazis were anti-smoking so it's culturally unpopular. Thought that was interesting. Third, also Germany-related, I went out shopping (really scoping out the competition) with my aunt and uncle when we were killing time before dinner. We got there just before closing time. The store we were in had checkout counters scattered throughout the store, and some of them had lines. At closing time, the person whose transaction was in progress got to finish up; everyone else had to leave their merchandise and come back later. Crazy. Last, I got an email from Amazon a few weeks ago. "As someone who has purchased early adopter products or travel related items, you might be interested in recent price drops on Canon's popular digital SLR, the Canon EOS 20D." I think it's more likely that the truth of the matter is "as someone who recently purchased a tripod..." Or, more cynically, "as someone who may not be aware that the 20D's being replaced at this year's PMA..."

Ok, that's it for my book, so I'm going to make a sammich and watch TV. Either BBC or Italian-dubbed _Search for Spock_. Catch you crazy cats later.

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Day Thirty - Saturday

04 March 06 - 06:16 am

Breakfast was...OK. The warming dishes held, you guessed it, pastries. Pretty good ones, I must admit, but I'd sort of gotten my hopes up. Ah well.

Weather's awesome. I headed a lousy 150mi south and it's noticeably warmer, to the point that I can get by with a thick-ish shirt. It's probably about like this in San Francisco, if you add hills. Hm, the internet would sort that out, and now I'm curious.

NERD RANT. Ignore if this doesn't amuse you. So I headed out and picked an internet point, pretty much at random since the prices are the same (and much more reasonable than in Venice). Chassis on a shelf; LCDs on the desk; keyboards below. Not much wrong with that. Of course, the keyboards are in qwerty, and the Italian layout has the punctuation all wierd, but that's what the letters are printed on the keys for. So I mumbled out my message and read PA and /. for the rest of my 15 minutes. Of course, I first scoped out the machines. They've got skype, divx, and ffdshow on them. That's pretty hardcore. But the closest thing they have to a web browser installed is IE6. Bleh. It breaks the rendering of the main TN page, but not the blogs for some reason. I didn't investigate much further than that. I did notice however that IE's beastly slow. I can watch the pages redraw and scroll, and alt-tabbing from page to page after remembering that IE doesn't do tabs takes a while. What the hell? So I check the machine specs. It's a 2.66Ghz P4 with 512MB of RAM, some of which is going to shared video. Ok, not the fastest machine in existence, but these aren't exactly webpages from hell I'm askng it to render, and in the scheme of things that's a fairly beefy machine, integrated video aside. The early P4s sure were crap, but 2.6gig puts this one in the mid range where they got the kinks and the RDRAM worked out of them. The task manager says the machine's not even bogged down with spyware or anything. Hey Michael? You used to use IE, didn't you? Is it really that nasty and slow? When Firefox on a 600Mhz P-M is beating it hands down in responsiveness, I tend to think something's wrong. Grrrrr. Shortly I'll find out if I can just steal their ether cable - that would make me a lot happier, and not just because I don't trust public terminals. Grrrr again.

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Day Twenty Eight - Thursday

04 March 06 - 06:16 am

I went to my first real museum in Venice, a combined Asian and modern art museum. It seemed to be undergoing some sort of major renovation when I was there, as there were two big staircases that went places the public's not supposed to go. One was blocked off; the other wasn't, technically. So up I went, and there were two whole floors closed off, one by a pair of doorways and locked doors, the other bricked up like a Poe story. No pictures allowed, of course.

Wow, I've been here a month already. Four weeks. Twenty eight days. It's gone by so much faster than the Spain trip did.

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Day Twenty Nine - Friday

04 March 06 - 06:14 am

I really wanted to head down to Sicily, but looking at the departure board, there were no trains to any Sicilian cities that I recognized (Palermo or Messina), so I opted to go to Rome instead. It sucks, but as a second choice, I guess Rome will do. Finally I'll be south of Madison. No first class tickets available. Hm. Usually I compare the prices of first class and second class, and decide the extra money's worth it to have three seats across the car rather than 4, but I suppose now I'll have a chance to see how much of an issue that really is. The car got into the station quite early, so I've been sitting on the train now for almost 20 minutes, and we're just heading out. The car's nearly empty, so there won't be a real comparison after all - having two seats to myself is sure to cloud my judgement. Also, there's power in the car so I can cheerfully sit back and listen to music. My music, not whatever's coming out of the arm rests, which will probably crackle and pop from the nasty electrical environment created by high-voltage sparks on the overhead pickups. Even my headphones are picking up all the EMF.

I was playing with the mapping software that came with the GPS receiver a few days ago. Spain was so much warmer than Wisconsin that I'd sort of gotten it into my head that Europe was more southerly than it really is. Also, Spain's farther south of the rest of Europe than I'd really realized. In any event, I was playing with the rulers, and the software said that Milan is 4600mi from Madison, at a bearing of 50 degrees (NE), despite Milan being only 2 degrees farther north than Madison. By my reckoning, that puts me at a bearing of rather closer to 90 degrees (due E). I'm curious to discover how the software calculates these things.

Aaah, here we go. The other Venice train station is a lot more popular, and the car's filling up. Drat. I was getting used to maybe having two seats. It looks like I've lucked out on this station, but I'm afraid it can't last. We'll see though. A pair of soldiers just came by, made annoyed noises and pointed to my backpack and coat in the adjacent seat. I thought one of them had that seat, so I started packing it all up, but they wandered off. Wonder what that was all about. [later] Turns out he did have that seat; he just wasn't very fond of it, preferring to spend his time tying up a lavatory, smoking. Speaking of the lavatories, they're of the airplane variety, down to the scary vacuum toilets, with their only concession to not being seven miles high being a slightly larger footprint. The toilet has a sign behind it that says not to put foreign items in the toilet. It says this in several languages, as well as with pictograms. The pictogram apparently believes that one of the things you may want to flush is a book. Either that or a cereal box, but it looked more like a book to me.

At one of the intermediate stations, the pre-departure messages were repeated in English. Probably that means there's a big international convention going on there, wherever it was. The same was true in Germany - the Frankfurt Messe stop had its message in German and English too. Usually I don't pay much attention to the messages, but between songs I heard part of the message: "All non-passengers are invited to leave the train... doors close automatically."

Hello Rome! There didn't seem to be a tourism office (I'm sure it's there somewhere - the train station is quite large), so I marked the station and headed out, hoping to find a quieter, smaller, cheaper hotel a few blocks from the station. So far it's quiet. I'm on the fourth floor so I'd guess it's not actually that small, and wasn't cheap either. Hmph. I'm promised a good breakfast though, and given how full the hotel was (mine's the last room available) I wasn't terribly inclined to go out searching for alternatives, though I'll certainly do that tomorrow on my wander.

We'll see about the breakfast tomorrow morning (only until 9:30 - eep, I'll have to get up early!), but initial signs are promising. While scouring the hotel for useful WAPs, I found the dining room, which isn't even remotely closed, let alone locked, so I walked in and checked the place out. Like I say, tomorrow will be the big test, but the presence of little glass jars of jams and large chafing dishes bodes well. I could use a breakfast more in the German mold than the Italian one. I could also use an open WAP, or a certain someone back home (she knows who she is) will start to freak out. There's a fancy-pants TV here with internet access and whatnot, encouragingly provided by an ethernet cable plugged into the back but as I suspected, plugging it into my laptop instead wasn't so much useful. Oh well.

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Day Twenty Seven - Wednesday

04 March 06 - 06:12 am

I didn't do much of anything today, and it was everything I'd hoped it would be. I slept late, grabbed a bite to eat from a local bakery and spent some time sitting in the sun reading, even though it's not really warm enough for that. I wandered around a bit and had lunch before coming back to the hotel to finish my book and stash it in the room where some future guest will find it. I decided I couldn't stand eating by myself in a restaurant again, and besides I wanted some non-Kleenex-brand facial tissues (so there), so I hit up a nearby grocery store. This has two main benefits. First of all, I can listen to audiobooks while I eat because I'm not buffetted by a dozen conversations and a commercial kitchen. Second of all, I can get fixings for an enormous sandwich followed by half a bag of cookies and a truly obscene quantity of Sprite, not to mention a bag of overpriced pastachios, for half what it'd cost to eat out. My virtuous thriftiness cancels out my gluttonous meal.

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Day Twenty Six - Tuesday

04 March 06 - 06:11 am

Shit! Looks like way back in Berlin I got something on the camera lens. It looks suspiciously like a fingerprint. And I just noticed. Looking at the lens, I can't even see it, but it started showing up after the first few pictures in the last Berlin batch, only I didn't see it when looking through the photos then, nor when I was looking through the Milan photos. Most of them were busy enough that it's hard to tell, but it does show up in a few. And it shows up in most of the ones from today. At first I thought it was a wierd puff of cloud because it moved around in the first couple photos which happened to be of the same thing, but it turns out that's due to differing zoom levels. Great. Now I have over 100 shots branded with "I 'R' AN AMATEUR" which, however accurate, is damned annoying. Sigh. It could be worse I guess - the smudge is pretty near the edge of the frame...

Today's the last day of Carnevale so there are a ton of people milling about, about half with some sort of costume / mask / bag of confetti. Lots of street musicians, singers, folks just banging away at a cafe. This afternoon I wandered past a quartet doing Don McLean's _American Pie_, which loses something with the Italian accent. It's a good thing I don't have a big box and crinkled newspaper or I'd be forced to buy a bunch of half-off masks for you all and ship them home.

I'm hoping the weather holds tomorrow so I can keep exploring.

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Day Twenty Five - Monday

04 March 06 - 05:54 am

I got up early, hoping to get laundry going at the conveniently-nearby laundromat, return for breakfast at the hotel, move my laundry to the dryers, take it all back to the hotel, pack up, and squeeze a shower in there somewhere, all in time for noon checkout. Bzzzzt. They lose. Sorry, but I refuse to pay per sock for laundry that's done per load. Especially when we're talking $3+ per shirt. I will, grudgingly, pay the rough equivalent of the per-article price if it's quoted per load (reminded of my EUR20 laundry experience in Spain), but I have a moral objection to paying someone per article to throw my laundry into a machine for me. On the plus side, that meant I could lounge about this morning. On the minus side, it means I'll get into Venice with a suitcase full of dirty laundry right as businesses are closing.

The train's just going past some sort of recycling center. Yay for glittery piles of crushed glass. The huge pile actually wasn't that interesting, but the smaller pile of sorted green glass was pretty.

Venice station, bought a map for EUR2.50, which I thought a bit steep since most tourist offices give maps away, and the most I'd previously paid for one was 50 cents, but this is quite a map, and comes with a companion attractions guide, all in a vinyl case. I could do without the plastic, but the map is good. Around the corner, I was about to head into the hotel reservations booth when a man asked if I were interested in a hotel. I made a noncommital but vaguely assenting noise, and he produced some options. Wary of some sort of scam but willing to spend some time on the conversation since the hotel booth was quite busy, I indicated that one of his options sounded good. "Follow me", he said, and darted toward the exit. A bit unsure of myself ("Is he going to take me to a hotel and then ask some rediculous commission?"), I followed on the theory that at worst I'd end up going out and wandering a bit anyway. We chatted a bit on the brief walk there. He works for a couple hotels and they figure the extra business over what the hotel booth would send their way justifies his employment. Fair enough. The room's small but suitable, and nice and warm.

I headed out to catch the last dim glow of dusk, as well as dinner. Got my bearings just outside the hotel on one of the bridges that liberally dot the cityscape. There were 8 strong GPS signals coming in for pinpoint precision, the most I'd ever seen before (the previous record was 7, one fairly weak). Venice is a very bad place to go with money. I saw hundreds, if not thousands of masks in my brief foray, ranging in price from the roughly $10-50 masks found in semipermanent vendor stalls to the $100-500 masks that bring in enough revenue to finance a real storefront. Also various touristy baubles, beautiful glasswork, etc. And this all within about 300m of the hotel.

Had overcooked tuna with a tasty salad for dinner, and then scurried back to the warm hotel room because although it's probably no colder here than in Milan (Venice is 250km due east of Milan), there's not much to block the wind. I'm hoping it'll be sunny tomorrow so I can wander around a bit more comfortably.

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update

04 March 06 - 04:19 am

Still alive. At an internet point for this brief update. Looks like I can maybe bring my laptop and just pay for their ether cable. I will try that later. Meantime, book shopping.

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