Cape Town

We arrived in Cape Town at 5:45 in the morning, flying South Africa Airlines. We found an airport shuttle that turned out to be operated by a tour guide, and by 6:30 we had arranged a full day personal guided tour around the end of Cape Horn, with stops wherever we thought there might be something interesting to see. At 9:00 a friendly little woman showed up in a tiny Mercedes, and away we went. As it turned out, everyone's ideas about my stamina far surpassed the reality, but we did manage to get to about a dozen memorable locations before we cut the trip short and returned to the Fire and Ice Hotel by about 5:00 pm. Since at noon I had taken a dose of whatever they use in South Africa instead of gravol, the second half of the trip passed for me in a kind of strobe-like delirium, where I would blink my eyes and find that half an hour had gone by, and I was variously staring at an exhibit on species of protea, riding again in the car, standing looking at a mountain view, or sipping a cooling drink.

The Fire and Ice Hotel
But first of all, who the heck calls their hotel "Fire and Ice"? Well, the Extreme Hotel chain, of course, which is intended to attract the kind of young people who might be interested in Extreme sports. The hotel slogan is "having a little fun" and it shows in everything they do, from the five-storey climbing wall attached to the outside of the building to the matches for the candles, which include the phone number for the Pyromaniacs Help Line. Each of the elevators has an internal cage and a theme. One is a shark cage. Another is a cable car. There are also five different lobby bathrooms, each with its own theme. "Performance Anxiety," for example, has wallpaper showing a studio audience sitting there to watch you pee. I liked the Lou Rawls bathroom, which has forty single toilet paper rolls covering one of the walls and a wall-sized portrait of the musician on another. I liked it, that is, until I realized the pun on the singer's name-you have to pronounce his last name like "rolls" and realize that his first name is "Loo."

The Coughing Room
They accommodate smokers here at the Fire and Ice Hotel, but if you want to smoke, you have to sit on a couch shaped like a coffin, next to a coffee table shaped like a coffin, underneath a ceiling mural that shows people looking down at you through a hole in the dirt. There's also a tombstone etched into the glass beside the door.

Penguins
One of the highlights of our drive was that we got to see a great many South African Penguins, who are living in the wild, but at a location where the government has built an elaborate set of boardwalks. You pay an entry fee, then brave a gale force wind kicking up fine white sand into your face, until you finally reach a little cove just littered with these little guys. They are about a third the size of emperor penguins, and just about as cute as you can bloody well stick. Most of them are lying on their bellies in the sun, but a few of them are digging holes or walking around or humping another penguin.

Seals
For about five dollars a head and a thorough soaking in a spray of salt sea water, you can ride a boat over to a little island where the seals like to hang out. There they were, sitting around on the rocks, flopping clumsily in and out of the ocean, and swimming like the dickens. They could fling themselves right out of the water when they wanted to, but mostly they seemed to want to float just beneath the surface, with one flipper or maybe a tail sticking up in the air. The effect is a bit like a bed of kelp, until one of them turns over and contemplates you with his whiskers drooping down.

One Baboon
As we zipped through one of the suburbs outside Cape Town, I saw a big old baboon sitting by himself on top of someone's fence. It was a sufficiently surreal thing to see that I assumed he was some kind of lawn ornament or sculpture, but when I mentioned him to our tour guide, she said, oh yeah, this was an area where there are baboons. Then I spotted some warning signs telling people not to feed them, since it makes them too bold, like the bears in the Rockies, except smaller, more numerous, and with opposable thumbs.

Two Ostriches
I don't think we had planned to stop at the South African Ostrich Farm, but I'd been feeling a bit zwooped by the winding mountain roads, so we turned in to get a slice of bread and a few minutes off the roller coaster. While we were there, I also got to see a lot of ostriches at a distance and two of them up close. They could have reached across the fence and eaten out of my outstretched palm, as they did with the man and his little girl ahead of us, except of course I didn't have a bag of whatever it is that ostriches eat. The female of the species is quite large, with grey plumage, and the male is smaller and meaner, with the black feathers and white tail I tend to think of when I imagine an ostrich. Their eyes are incredibly huge and their lashes are Drew Barrymore long, but the unnerving thing really is their strong and supple neck, which seems to have no rational limit on where it can go or what it can do.

Country of Elmers
As some of you know, when I was a teenager, my Dad was forever trying to remove my plate before I was done eating. He wanted to take it away and wash it. So I spent many of my formative years trying to capture a last forkful of food off a rapidly retreating plate. We've subsequently memorialized this behaviour with the verb "to elmer," and I have to say I've never seen such world-class elmering as there is here in Cape Town. I have yet to actually swallow my last mouthful before I find myself sitting in front of an empty table. Different people appear to be competing for the prize, so that setting down a glass, for instance, will provide a chance to score a few points for a waiter zipping past on another errand, while looking briefly away from your side plate conjures a waitress who removes it, the remnants of your butter, and the last half of your scone. I had to summon my chi this morning to face down someone who wanted to claim half my breakfast cereal, after I took an ill-timed sip of coffee.

Table Mountain
One of the most dramatically striking features of this city is that there is a mountain in the middle of it. Table Mountain rises sufficiently high above Cape Town that the summit is often obscured by a thick white cloud, which comes rolling down the slopes, dissipating before it reaches the tallest buildings. According to our tour guide, they call this cloud the tablecloth. This strikes me as most likely something they made up for tourists, but you never know.

The Cape Doctor
Another factor to keep in mind is the prevailing wind, which blows across the city. It might be more difficult to deal with it, our cab driver said, if people here didn’t have the occasional experience of having it stop for a while. When that happens, the temperature rises, and so does the level of air pollution, which is otherwise swept out to sea. For that reason, again according to our cab driver, they call this wind the Cape Doctor. For my opinion, please see the entry above on the subject of the tablecloth on table mountain.

Band of Alcoholics
When you are waiting to get on the boat to see the seals, you can’t help but notice a weathered-looking group of middle-aged men, all dressed in shabby yellow matching costumes, with daubs of paint on their faces. They sang and danced on the wharf, while the leader held out his hat in the hopes of getting a donation from each debarking passenger. It impressed me no end that these unshaven men, shambling a little, reeking of alcohol from the night before, could still manage to assemble themselves by ten in the morning into a performing troupe, for the purposes of cajoling the tourists out of a few rand.

Eleven Official Languages
South Africa has not one, not two, but 11 official languages. How cool is that? On our city tour this evening, the guide pointed out one of the buildings that has statues representing the tribes responsible for 9 of those languages. On the radio this morning, someone was speaking one of these languages and I have no idea what it was, except that somewhere in the middle of what I think was the weather report they had to use a word with a click in it. There’s something about a morning show with a click in it that just makes it that much easier to take.

Killed by Sharks
The Designing Interactive Systems conference is one of my favourites, and this year they once again did a super job. Tonight we had a 90-minute “topless bus” tour of the city, ending in a reception outside the predator tank at the Cape Town Aquarium. There’s a great “rethink the shark” campaign going on there, with posters showing objects like chairs and toasters with one corner above the water, looking a bit like shark fins. The posters have stats like “Last year, 700 people were killed by defective toasters. 4 people were killed by sharks.” It turns out, of course, that 100 million sharks are killed each year by people. I loved the idea of a conference reception somewhere interesting. They also threw in a marimba band.

Personal Funicular
Down at the beaches off the Atlantic Ocean, there is some of the most expensive real estate in the city. Several of these properties are perched somewhat precariously on very steep slopes, and also include personal funiculars. They looked like little glass boxes, with only one or two seats inside. The tour guide pointed out that you could keep track of which ones were currently in use if you passed by several times a day, because you could see whether the car was at the top or the bottom of the slope.

Design Indaba
Concurrent with the Designing Interactive Systems conference, and held in the same convention centre, is the annual national design trade show called Design Indaba. Our conference badges gave us free entrance on Tuesday afternoon, to an event where entrance is carefully monitored. Design of all kinds in South Africa is an emerging area of excellence for the country, and we saw an amazing range of wonderful ideas and products, from wooden bookshelves built of component boxes held together by magnets, to condoms with handles for easy application. I was particularly struck by a hatstand that looks like the silhouette of an African tree, and Milena fell in love with a life-sized decorative sheep made out of wire and beads.

What We Ate
I had hoped there would be food here that I didn’t know much about, and I haven’t been disappointed. The breakfast buffet includes slices of the tiny local pineapple, yellower and more flavourful than the ones we are used to from Hawaii. There are also pitchers of fresh guava juice, thick and pink, and a huge panful of fried mushrooms that aren’t a kind of mushrooms I know, but are inkier and more delicious. Ostrich is available almost everywhere, and for lunch one day Milena had a delectable corned ostrich sandwich. A popular South African line fish is the kingclip, which has large white flakes. Tonight for dinner I ate a flank of springbok, who I understand is a bit like an antelope. His left lower quarter was very tasty, and came roasted with rosemary on the end of a bone that would have caught the interest of Fred Flintstone.

Berlin

Art Hotel Luise
Our designer friend Bernie Roessler loves Berlin, so I asked him where he stayed when he was here. His hotel of choice turned out to be an "art hotel" in the centre of the city, where a different artist has designed each of the rooms, and they get a commission when you stay in one. Apparently this is increasingly common, and there are art hotels in many cities. Our room was modeled on the idea of a cave left behind by retreating glaciers. In the centre was a floor-to-ceiling scaffold with a massive hanging sculpture made of broken panes of glass, variously printed and spray-painted and so on, along with a lot of braids of human hair and small glittery objects and other detritus. The table had a head-size rock strapped on top by twine that also suspended a second rock beneath. The walls and picture frames were adorned with found objects spray-painted gold. The ceiling was about eighteen feet high, and vaulted in the middle. If you've never worried about getting up to pee in the middle of the night and poking your eye out on the broken glass sculpture suspended over your bed, you obviously aren't a friend of Bernie Roessler's.

Window in the Ground
One of the nefarious activities committed by the Nazis was a bookburning in the city centre. They didn't just burn fiction, but a lot of research output too, from various fields. This bookburning has been memorialized by one of the most subtle monuments I've ever seen. As you walk past the square at night, you notice a window of light cut into the pavement at the centre. When you look down into the window, you see a completely white room lined with white bookshelves, all empty.

Field of Stones
There is a memorial here that occupies a considerable city block. It consists of grey, rectangular stone monoliths, each one slightly larger than the dimensions of a coffin. Milena reminds me that these are the standard size for a European grave, like the ones in Krakow and Cuba. They are spaced far enough apart that you can walk comfortably between them. At the edge they are flush with the pavement, then they rise to knee height, waist height and so on up as you enter the maze, until in the middle they are at least twice my height. It is impressive just to look at from a distance, but it's not until you walk inside that you really get the full oppressive effect. I am not particularly sensitive to this kind of monument, but I have to say that even I began to feel the claustrophobic weight when we'd entered far enough. Some of the effect is the result of the looming quality of the stones, which aren't all set perfectly aligned or square, but are instead just slightly off kilter. Very powerful.

Brother Can You Spare Five Euros?
The first person we spoke to outside the Berlin Tegel airport was a young woman who asked if we could accommodate her with some Euros. I thought that might set a tone, but in fact the beggars in Berlin were few and far between. There were some buskers, including a saxophonist on the U-Bahn (U for Underground, I think), and an entire brass section in Alexander Platz. Like the panhandlers in Montreal, many of the ones in Berlin seemed to have pets, usually very well behaved dogs sleeping near them on blankets. On a couple of occasions I didn't even spot the panhandler; there was just the mournful-looking dog lying there.

Remnants of the Berlin Wall
There are a few pieces left standing here and there as yet one more set of bleak freaking Berlin memorials, and there's also a discoloured strip on the ground, maybe a foot wide, that runs disturbingly off into the distance in both directions. Milena took my picture standing on one side and putting my toe across to the other. The wall was made of L-shaped pieces of concrete, and the surfaces are completely coated in graffiti. People have also entirely covered the edge in pieces of chewing gum.

Turkish Quarter
In the 1970s there was an economic boom, and hundreds of thousands of cheap labourers were imported from Turkey. They weren't well assimilated with the rest of Berlin, and now form a quarter where we went for a delicious dinner. The area was originally at the edge of West Berlin, but after the wall came down it became central, so it has become increasingly popular with the Bohemian crowd, in part because artist studios are still affordable. We stopped for a few minutes at a comic book store that seemed to go on forever into the interior, with at least three separate rooms. We admired the graphic novel version of Shakespeare's Hamlet, a Wonder Woman action figure, and the many Ugly Dolls of various sizes. There was also a stuffed toy cigarette named Smokey, whose slogan was "Your best and only friend."

Potsdammer Platz
This was where the four powers met to divide the city after the war. It was basically an open field for many years, but after reunification it became the largest construction site in the country. It is now home to a wide range of impressive buildings and shops, one of which is the Sony Centre, which has a roof like a set of sails that can be opened or closed to accommodate the weather. At night it creates a very beautiful interior, with lights at all different levels.

Alexander Platz
Formerly the centre of East Berlin, it is still home to the largest building in the city, a kind of radio tower spire complete with a revolving restaurant. We spent enough time there to see the punks, who were genuine tough hombres hanging around the central fountain. Milena of course made a beeline for them with her digital camera, and we had to rein her in and sit on her head.

Blue Man Group Berlin
I had seen the Blue Man Group on television and thought they were a US phenomenon, so imagine my surprise when Rosan walked us past the Blue Man Max, which is a theatre here with its own trio of blue men. For those of you who don't know about them, they are primarily percussionists but also a kind of performance artists, if that's the right word for someone who throws marshmallows across the stage into someone else's mouth. And by marshmallows, I mean a lot of marshmallows, until the poor guy's mouth is packed full. Then he spits them out onto a pedestal as a kind of mouth sculpture, and attaches a for-sale sign. Blue men, the philosophy goes, aren't white or black but are instead just blue, and they are primarily characterized by being co-operative. So when someone proposes something, the others go along with it until it reaches some kind of absurd extreme. For instance, they open with three of them standing behind two drums. The central blue man is drumming. When he glances right, the one on the left surreptitiously pours some paint on the drum head. Hitting that drum now produces a fountain of paint. Soon both drums are pools of paint, and before the scenario is over, they have produced a blank canvas and made a painting by positioning it above the spraying fountains. That sketch took maybe five minutes of a solid two hour show, so you can imagine some of the hijinks they got up to. By the end, the paint was coming out of spigots in the centre of their chests, and they were alternately drumming on it and eating it. We lost some of the performance because it required you to be able to speak or read German, but a lot of it translated well enough. We were seated at the back of the theatre, and when the rolls of paper started unrolling from the ceiling at the end of the show, it was so much fun that we practically became hysterical. You pass the ends of the paper along down the audience, until there's a river of white streamers, each about a foot wide, flowing down from the seats to the stage.

Havana

I hesitated to include Havana as a travel location, since I only spent one day there, on a kind of bus tour. Then I remembered that in fact I have only spent a single day at other travel locations on this blog, so there you are. I'd prefer to be consistent in listing cities rather than countries.

Dogs, chickens, donkeys and goats
The bus ride from Varadero to Havana takes you along the Atlantic coast of Cuba. The scenery is fantastic, with lots of limestone formations and the occasional jungle ravine. Seeing all the turkey vultures, who nest in little limestone caves, reminded me of the Savage Chickens, who have the following conversational exchange: “why do birds suddenly appear, every time you are near?” “Hey, those are vultures!” In addition to these very large scavengers, dogs also apparently roam free in Cuba. I saw three little pugs following each other in a row across an otherwise empty pasture, and a few minutes later there were two rottweilers together, trotting along on dog business of some sort. There were also plenty of chickens and roosters scattered about the place, scratching and eating and ruffling their feathers. Other livestock included cows of every make and model, which was unusual coming from Alberta, where the herds tend to be predominately one breed or strain, the black Aberdeen Angus that we raise to eat. There were a few donkeys and mules, and a herd or two of goats. At one place a small horse was grazing in the ditch, accompanied by a man who was just standing there looking meditative and picturesque, and holding onto his lead.

Bananas and Sisal
The big communal farms are in the interior, where there is soil. Out on the limestone coast there isn’t much farming, although occasionally there are small plots of land where some enterprising farmer has hauled in truckloads of dirt and is now growing bananas or sisal. I hadn’t seen sisal before, which is a member of the same family as the agave plant they use in Mexico to make tequila. Sisal is used primarily for rope. Our guide mentioned that there are over thirty different kinds of banana, although I don’t know if all of them are grown in Cuba.

Revolutionary Square
You stand in a giant empty parking lot of a place, which would be full of standing people at the opportune moment. There are posts in rows with lights and speaker arrays. On all sides are the buildings of government. The Ministry of the Interior behind you has the stylized face of Che Guevara, ten storeys high. The Ministry of Communication beside it has a set of satellite dishes on the roof. But the real symbolic action is up in front, where a monolith, built by Batista, but now called revolutionary, tessellates up into the sky, surrounded by what Susan tells me are Liberty Trees from the French Revolution. The idea was that you showed your support by erecting a pole in the village and putting a red Phrygian cap on top. Here there are four of them and the caps could fit elephants. In front of the monolith is a speaker’s platform where Fidel makes all his speeches. A giant marble statue of Jose Marti, the Cuban reformer who fought the Spanish, stands looking down with a watchful eye on the speaker. Curiously enough, this was also put there by Batista, but if you were speaking from that platform, it seems to me that you couldn’t help but be conscious that you are being scrutinized by the patron hero of the country. Since he equally scrutinized Batista and Fidel, it just goes to show how flexible a patron hero can be in his views. Statues of Marti litter the city of Havana.

Fidel
Our tour guide preferred to call Castro by his first name, perhaps because there are several Castros but only one Fidel, or perhaps by local convention. Not all of the family, apparently, were reconciled to the politics of young F and Che and their friends, since when they nationalized all the private property in the country, they started with the rental properties owned by the Castros. Fidel has an older brother who is devoted to research in animal husbandry, and a younger, more radical brother, Raoul, who is now running the country. This has to be making some people nervous, since it was Raoul who signed the agreement with Khrushchev that led to the Cuban missile crisis. None of Fidel’s six sons are interested in politics, which might be because they aren’t starting by organizing a revolution, which seems a lot more exciting than functional management.

Fidel’s House
Just behind the speaker’s platform, the statue of Jose Marti, and the revolutionary monolith, there is a concrete complex they call, with what I assume passes for socialist humour, the Revolutionary Palace. Fidel refused to live in the usual location, the Presidential Palace, on the basis that a lot of corrupt presidents had lived there. I don’t know if he thought it would be a corrupting environment, but that may be the case, since he also decided not to have the government take up its seat in the Capitol building, which resembles the provincial and federal capitol buildings we have in Canada. Instead, he converted the presidential palace into a museum of the revolution, and the capitol building into a college of science. The various statues of past presidents strewn about the city were torn down and the plinths left standing empty. In some cases you can still spy the occasional foot or pair of ankles.

A Piece of an American U2 Spy Plane
One of the things on display outside the museum of the revolution is a ground-to-air missile, and placed underneath it are some pieces of an American spy plane. We couldn’t help but think there had been someone in that trophy before it was shot down, but then of course he had been spying. They also had some improvised equipment from the revolution, including a shot-up delivery truck and a couple of home-made tanks.

Cuba—Country of Paradoxes
“Country of paradoxes” was a favourite phrase of our tour guide in Havana. He seemed to have a mental ledger, with things like “healthy children, vaccinated, clothed, and fed” on one side, and on the other side “all the buildings are neglected.” Which was true. Havana appears to be falling apart, although a massive restoration project has started, and a part of old Havana has been declared a UNESCO world heritage site. Other items in the positive ledger include a hospital dedicated to Ukrainian children affected by Chernobyl, international teams of doctors devoted to disaster relief, and one teacher for every 42 people. For comparison, Statistics Canada reports that we have one teacher for every 33 people.

Daily Life
Although property was nationalized in 59, now about 80% of homes are privately owned. It is illegal, however, to buy or sell one, so as children grow up, many families have accommodated the change by adding a second floor built into the high ceiling. They cut a window up there and that’s where the kids have their family. There is a food ration, compulsory 2 years of military service for young men, and a chronic transportation shortage, although China just sent a fleet of new buses. University students are exempted from the second year of military service, and do the first year before they start school.

The Camels of Havana
Buses in Havana are actually semi-trailer trucks, only instead of pulling a trailer of goods, they pull a trailer of people. These vehicles are called camels because the ceiling is higher at either end. Lineups for the camels stretch down the sidewalk.

The Year of Literacy
The revolution was in 1959. In 1961, the government decided that the people should be able to read and write, so they declared a year of learning. 300,000 volunteers ran a program for people of all ages. At the end, they declared it a success, although I have no idea what measure they used. Certainly the local people we’ve seen give every sign of being educated, and my opinion is that if you can run a country with so few resources, someone has to know how to do their job.

The Tropicana
Since 1939, the Tropicana has featured leggy Cuban women wearing feathers and sequins, so we went to see them. At $75 a ticket, the price was a bit steep, but I got my money’s worth in the opening number, which featured dozens of women in high heels and g-strings with piles of fruit on their heads. The tradition of goofy hats and forgetting to wear their pants continued throughout the evening, although there was nothing that would have scandalized Bertie Wooster and his pals 70 years ago. One of my favourite numbers involved a wedding where the back was missing from the wedding dress, and the supporting cast of chandelier girls stood around with giant lampshades on their heads, many of them lit with candles.

Night Life in Havana
According to our tour guide, who seemed quite proud of the fact, there is none. Certainly the streets we travelled were very quiet at night, although we were there on a week day. He said other Caribbean islands go in for more riotous living, but Cuba had enough of it pre-1959. Now the tourist crowd, he said, consists almost entirely of couples from Canada, who come to lie in the sun and get a little peace and quiet. “Amen to that,” we all thought, gingerly holding the sunburned hands of our partners.

Columbus Cemetery
Occupying more than five square kilometers, this cemetery, also called the Necropolis de Colon, reminded me in many ways of the one we visited with Jan and his family in Krakow. The graves here are similarly arranged with large flat surfaces at knee height, with giant old trees growing among them. Here the trees are ficus, which seem to me particularly suitable for graveyards. They spread by dropping ropy bundles of creepers that will take root once they reach the ground, but in the meantime they blow in the wind and add a spooky atmosphere to the place. One of the local attractions here is the grave of Milagrosa, who has become a kind of unauthorized patron saint of young mothers. She died in childbirth in 1901 and was buried with the baby. When the tomb was later opened, she was intact. I can’t explain why they were opening the tomb, but there it is.

Folk Magic
Susan tells me that Cuba is also the home of Santeria, one of the Caribbean folk religions, a bit like voodoo. We kept a sharp eye out in the graveyard for any signs of its practice, but aside from some grain left here and there on the surfaces of tombs, we didn’t spot anything. There was some very nice eighteenth-century iconography cut into some of them, consisting of a small set of images altogether no bigger than the palm of your hand. There was a skull and crossbones, and inverted Roman-style torch, and a scythe. Susan says “They were awfully nice. They wouldn’t have made a bad Jolly Roger.”

Varadero

Cuba is an island country of 11 million souls. 2 million of them live in the capital city of Havana, which they spell here with a “b.” We arrived at 10:30 at night at the Varadero airport, slightly ahead of schedule. We flew Air Transat direct from Edmonton. By 2:30 we were done scrounging around the midnight buffet, which had been a bit slim pickings, although a very kind chef arranged to feed us an eeyore burger.

Varadero
There are 14 provinces in Cuba, and the Varadero region, on a little peninsula of Matanzas province, is almost entirely given over to the tourist industry. There are more than 50 resorts and hotels, and the complex we are in has a staff of 600 and typically hosts about 2300 tourists. Most of them, our guide tells us, are from Canada. Tourism is the second largest industry in Cuba, and it is rapidly overtaking sugar production for the number one spot.

Cuban Universities
There are a total of 58 universities in Cuba, with at least one in every province. They are spread over 169 campuses. You go for free to university, but when you finish your undergraduate degree you owe two years of service to the state, which could involve you moving anywhere and not necessarily working in a field related to your studies. This sounds a bit rough until you ask yourself what kinds of work Arts students get in Canada. If you go to grad school, you can do your two years part time while you are still in school.

Hitchhiking
People here rely on hitchhiking as a normal means of transportation. Our guide says she hitchhikes to school and work every day. License plates are colour-coded to help simplify the process, and there are 6 or 7 different colours. Tourist rentals, for instance, are red, which I take to be the universal colour of warning. Government vehicles get blue license plates, and are required by law to pick up hitchhikers. What a great idea. We should have this policy in Canada, along with the one from Sweden that says your effluent pipe into the river has to be upstream from your intake.

Dried Starfish
The ocean is beautiful, the sand is white and soft, and you have to go pretty far before the water is deeper than your waist. If you walk up the beach and pass the line made by buoys, there is a between-resorts area where you meet some local men. The first group of five or six we met were standing around an overturned can with four dry starfish and a large conch shell. We stood and smiled at each other for a while. Then we all shook hands. Someone handed me one of the dried starfish to look at. It seemed enormous to me and in very good condition. I showed it to Susan, then handed it back. “Are you interested in buying one to take home with you?” someone asked. “Oh, no,” I said, grinning idiotically. “Oh, well, happy new year,” someone else said. “Happy new year,” we said, and went further. “Can you take dried starfish back to Canada?” I asked Susan, remembering my ill-advised purchase of a bottle of snake wine on my first trip to Hong Kong. “I think you can,” she said.

Camilo on the Beach
Slightly further along were two more men, looking rather worse for wear than the starfish salesmen, with shabbier clothes, and in the case of Camilo, bloodshot eyes. They hailed us and we stopped to introduce ourselves and shake hands. They didn’t have anything to sell, although one of them—Alejandro—gave Susan a small conch shell. We had some translation difficulties, but I think they would have liked to initiate some form of gift exchange. We talked about cigars and rum, for instance, and used clothing. When I told Camilo that I was a professor from Canada, he told me that he was a construction engineer. I would have liked to give them some money, but like an ass I didn’t have any with me. Luckily on the return walk down the beach it occurred to me that they might like my t-shirt. Camilo had gone off to get into trouble with the hotel security staff, but Alejandro was still at his post, so I turned it over to him.

New Year’s Eve
The resort put it around that there’d be a bit of a feast for New Year’s Eve, and they weren’t kidding around. We had roast chicken, lamb, and suckling pig. I ate mine with candied pear, and Susan tracked down a very soft and white blue cheese for me, which I am assuming must be locally produced. In any case, they seem to have a lot of it around. For dessert there were three kinds of what I like to think of as space alien ice cream, with flavours like carob, pixie-stick peach, and Lowry’s cherry blossom.

Cello and Double Bass
The musicians who entertained us in Cuba were without exception very good musicians. Susan railed at one point against the unfairness of making a good violinist play such, I believe her word was, “crap.” New Year’s Eve, on the other hand, included a dinner performance by a man on cello and a woman on double bass. They were combining two instruments that are not generally considered the most melodic in the orchestra, and they were doing it beautifully. “Listen to the crispness of that mordant,” Susan told me, as I scarpered down my last bit of smoked salmon.

Tropical Buffets
I feel that the best way to conduct yourself at a tropical buffet is to temporarily suspend all normal gastronomic prejudices. Simple rules, of course, such as “eating that will kill me” are another story. But the variety and ingenuity of the available selection do seem to suggest a certain scope for indulgence. Tonight’s dinner, for example, consisted of fish consommé, proscuitto ham, crab legs, and fresh blue cheese, accompanied by delicious gherkin pickles, green olives with pimentos inside them, and some large capers. I followed that with a fruit course consisting of several pieces of ripe papaya, two kinds of fresh pealed grapefruit, and a bread roll. For dessert there was vanilla ice cream with cloves and four kinds of cake. There could be some trouble around the third buttonhole during the early watches of the night, but what I say about that is God Bless the makers of zantac, lactaid, and acidophilus. The invention of the artificial digestive system has been the best thing to happen to international travel since the invention of the pocket compass.

Floating in the Ocean
Some people go in for snorkeling and others like to surf, but to my way of thinking there are two ways to have fun in the ocean, depending on whether it is calm or not. When we first arrived here, the water was like a giant blue mirror, disturbed only by busy toddlers and flocks of teenagers in pursuit of the occasional fish. With this kind of water, what you do is float on your back. It is not necessary to complicate your life with a flotation device, since salt water and middle age spread are all that you require. Milena and I discovered this a few years ago when we went to some trouble to procure air mattresses and haul them around with us. One day I fell off mine and found there was no discernible difference. Just lean your head back, let your hands float free, and watch the cares of the world drift away like a cloud of squid ink. You may paddle your fingers a little, if you wish.

Knocked Over by Waves
The second way to enjoy yourself in an ocean involves waves. The wind came up on Wed, so we had some waves then, except they closed the beach altogether. However, on Saturday they opened it again, and we had some fairly large waves that were not life threatening. You walk out to where they are breaking and let them push you right off your feet. Or you can also go just past that point, then try to swim fast enough to catch them and let them drag you along. You don’t spend a lot of time worrying about how your research is going when a wave has picked you up bodily and flung you at the shore. The only downside is that you will end up with some sand inserted in various locations around your anatomy. These aren’t places where you would particularly want to keep sand. But it is a small price to pay.

Seven Blue Jellyfish
The weather was cool and windy from Wednesday through Saturday. On Thursday, along with about 100 other Canadians dressed in shorts and bunny hugs, we took a stroll up and down the beach. The various bits of jetsam were endlessly fascinating, and included bright red corals, still soft and alive, a variety of sponges, and a total of seven bright blue translucent jellyfish. We were careful of their long tentacles, which we believed may contain stingers, but with some careful manipulation with a disposable plastic cup, we managed to fling two of them back into the ocean. It was interesting to see how their colours brightened up when the seawater hit them. The pink stripe at the top of the sail was particularly affected, going from a dull pink to an incandescent neon.

Black Parrots
Every country has its variations of corvidae, the crows, magpies, and ravens. In Denmark the magpies have comparatively short tails and eat fish. In Sweden, the crows wear gray shawls. In Cuba, the resident black bird has a long tail and handles itself like a magpie, except it is all black and the tail is rounded at the end. The beak is also shaped like the beak of a parrot. We ran across a family of them on our way to the beach one day. The mother was sitting up high on a post and called to her ratty youngsters, who were attempting to climb up the wire fence. She had a very pleasant chirping voice, rather than the squawk we had expected.

[I note that Susan has since informed me that these weren't corvids at all, but are in fact Anas. Related to cuckoos, they are not very good at flying, lay up to two dozen eggs at a time, and eat insects. A group of them is variously called a Silliness or an Orphanage. There is a rough-looking customer on wikipedia, although the ones we saw didn't have grey shoulders: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ani_(bird)]

Anoli
In Siena we saw little green lizards with long whip-like tails. They lived in the rose bushes on top of the stone wall on the way to the swimming pool. Here in Cuba, the lizards have much shorter tails, and rather than being the vivid Italian green, the one we saw was the colour of sand. We looked at each other for some time before he began doing pushups and extending his throat pouch, which Susan tells me are his way of telling us not to mess with him. Certainly it was true that although he was only as long as my little finger, he could do more pushups than I can.

DC

I’ve been to Washington, DC now half a dozen times, beginning in the early 90s with my ex-wife. We came in the heat of summer and toured various parts of the Smithsonian, taking periodic breaks in the centre of the mall, where we cooled our over-heated selves with fresh lime juice and sugar, combined with water on ice, from various street vendors. During another visit, I entertained a group of Japanese tourists with my pantomime explanation of what was exciting about a small sliver of grey stone mounted so you could touch it. The stone was brought back by one of the Apollo missions, from the surface of the moon. On a trip last year, Milena arranged for me to walk the length of the mall, visiting each of the presidential and war memorials in turn. Our favourites included the ghostly soldiers from Korea (www.nps.gov/kowa/), the clever quotations by George Mason, who said most of the smart things you see in the Declaration of Independence, for instance (www.nps.gov/gemm/), and the extended waterworks for FDR. He sits life-sized and ground level in his wheelchair, with his bronze cheeks rubbed shiny by kissing teenage girls, who take turns sitting on his lap while their boyfriends pretend to push the chair. That’s my idea of a nice statue.

[I am afraid that I can't find an image of this statue, although they mention it on the nps site. What they have instead is the monumental main statue, which is definitely not the same. The one I'm thinking of is apparently in the "prologue room."]

Nine Shopping Days to Christmas
On this trip, Milena and I decided to do a little conspicuous consuming. We visited Macy’s, Target, Victoria’s Secret, the Sony Store, the Apple Store, Radio Shack, Barnes and Noble, and Armani, collecting prestigious shopping bags as we went. One of the highlights of our trip was a large black man who knew everything there is to know about Hong Kong action movies. He sold me four that I’d never heard of before, entitled respectively: Dororo, The Promise, Shadowless Sword, and Legend of the Evil Lake. Actually, I think two of them are Korean and one is Japanese, and they all resemble extended-play video games. In Dororo, the hero was born with no limbs, so his father provided him with false limbs that conceal swords. He can get his limbs back, provided that he systematically kills all the demons responsible. I can hardly wait to watch them. I’ve also already begun to download online Wuxia novels to load into my new Sony E-Reader, with its innovative epaper display.

The DC Metro
One of the nicest things about this city is its underground, which is fast and clean and generally efficient. There is a sometimes alarming official American tendency to periodically warn us all that untended packages are a threat to life and limb, but in person the people seem very warm and kindly. You can stop people on the street and they take an interest in the fact that you are lost, and will help find you a map and point you in the opposite direction from the one you’ve been going. There are a gajillion lines on the DC Metro, all coded by colour, and Milena and I will occasionally find that we are riding the orange line instead of the yellow one, but fortunately they also tend to intersect at multiple points, so you don’t really have to backtrack a whole lot. Many of the exits from the underground are also at attractive locations, so you come up the escalator to find yourself facing some national monument or flashy mall full of Christmas shoppers.

University of Maryland
It’s big and sprawling, made largely of red brick buildings with monumental pillars out in front. You hike across an endless parking lot only to find that now you have to climb a hill, turn a corner, and repeat the process a couple of times. But it’s all worth it when you find a room full of some of the smartest people in the world, talking about the research project you’re all tackling together. Unfortunately, the U of M is found in the United States, which means that on at least two occasions I had to help the person selling me my coffee with her arithmetic, and the taxi drivers routinely laugh at me when I ask them if they have ever taken any classes here. “It’s too expensive,” they say. “Not like in Canada—it’s free there, right?” They are thinking, of course, of health care.

Pirates of the Caribbean III: At Wit’s End
If you have been following my adventures closely, you may recall a celebratory moment during my recent flight to Ottawa, when I mentioned that Disney had spared us the nuclear family at the end. Well, Marley gently disillusioned me the other day, since apparently all you need to do is wait until the credits are done. Milena hadn’t seen the third movie, so we watched it here, and sure enough, there’s Kiera Knightley and her 9-year-old son. Since Pirates IV is going to be about the fountain of youth, it occurred to me that the whole thing could be children as pirates before Disney is done with it.

Ottawa

Ottawa is one of my favourite Canadian cities, and I have been there half a dozen times. My last trip was in October 2006, when I gave an invited paper to the Access conference for technical librarians. I also lived here in the winter of 1986, when I was working as a co-op student with Statistics Canada. They had interviewed me for two different jobs, one as a writer/editor, and another as a database developer/programmer, and I got both the jobs. It was my first time in Ottawa, and I loved StatsCan, who rewarded my eclectic interests with a wide range of tasks. I edited a highly technical article on computer chip design. I wrote radio spots about interesting statistics (did you know that Canadians chew an average of 1 kg of chewing gum each year?). I worked on speeches for the 1986 census. I also got to write an obituary for the late chief statistician of Canada, Simon Goldberg, which meant I interviewed all the top brass at the time, including the current chief statistician of Canada, Ivan Felligi. They made me take out the part where someone once got so made at Goldberg that they tore the telephone out of the wall and threw it at him. I guess it wasn’t setting quite the right tone for an obituary.

Air Canada
I’ve been on a variety of airlines lately. I have to say that Cathay Pacific has been a clear winner for their efficiency and courtesy. Air Canada was interesting to me, because I had forgotten that you have to buy your dinner. I think it is a good way to cut down on some of the waste produced by eating on a plane, since that many fewer people do it. I was also surprised by the variety and high quality of the choices on the individual entertainment systems, which no longer communicated what I believe to be a wholly eastern Canadian belief that what I really wanted to do was watch an hour of local news before I could do anything else.

Johnny Depp
I elected to watch the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Susan had mentioned that it was surprisingly good, and it was pleasant to see that they let Johnny Depp act again. The plot was interesting, with a good mixture of the apocalyptic and supernatural. The two women leads were easier than ever before on the eyes. There’s a nice scene straight out of Evil Roy Slade, only this time it’s Keira Knightley who turns out upon inspection to be carrying an entire pile of concealed weapons. And Chow Yun Fat was in it. I enjoyed the description of his character by another pirate, the murderous traitor Captain Barbossa, who says “he’s much like myself, but absent my merciful nature and sense of fair play.” Aside from a nonsensical Disney marriage ceremony, it was as much like a real movie as you could hope for. Keira didn’t even have to have a baby to complete the nuclear family.

The Minto Suite Hotel
The name says “suite” and they mean it. Every room has both a bedroom and a living room, intended for small meetings. I asked to see the floor plans, and the largest room available has a boardroom between the bedroom and the small meeting room. Ray has us in what they call single-bedroom suites, which means I also have two bathrooms and a “Pullman kitchen” which is concealed behind what appears to be another set of lobby closet doors. I never found it on my own, and had to be alerted to its existence by Richard Cunningham. There is also a small room dedicated to ironing, located off the entrance bathroom. Even more important, at $150 a night, the price is reasonable. This is now my hotel of choice in Ottawa.

Disposable toothbrushes
Why a guy forgets his toothbrush, I’ll never know. But there I was, and the fellow at the front desk obligingly went and found me one. It suddenly explained to me the disposable toothbrushes at the Kimberley Hotel in Hong Kong, which had an unusual grey plastic handle. They were the communist factory version of the white one they give away here, by Gilchrist and Soames. Unlike the Chinese disposable toothbrush, this one appears to be reusable, since I’ve brushed my teeth half a dozen times and none of the bristles have fallen out yet. There was no tiny toothpaste included, though.

Bistro 115
Christian Vandendorpe recommended this restaurant for our group dinner, and as you might expect if you know Christian, it was a great choice. For an appetizer, I had half a poached pear piled high with a kind of soft whipped blue cheese, set on a pomegranate reduction with fresh pomegranate seeds thrown in, all on a delicious radicio salad. As an entrée, I ate their specialty, a confit of duck leg with a sauce made out of the grapes they grow in their courtyard out back. The duck was crispy in parts and tender in other places, and absolutely worth flying to Ottawa to eat. http://www.bistro115.com/

Hong Kong

The airport on Lantau Island has to be one of the most exciting places in the world to land. I often say that Hong Kong consists of two big islands and a strip along the coast, but in fact there are dozens of little islands, and as you fly in low over the ocean, you get to see a lot of them. In Prague the standard building was 6 storeys. In Hong Kong, I’m guessing it is closer to 60, and many are 80 or more. I saw a note somewhere that says 90 is the tallest. The effect is a cityscape that feels dynamic. It is like they leave things alone and then suddenly build a skyscraper. That may not actually be the case, but that’s the impression you get when you fly in. It helps that Lantau island is a nature preserve of sorts, so there is mostly bush and exposed rock as you drive toward the bridge, making a big contrast with the inhabited parts. It also helps that the water is packed with ships of all sizes, and that even the bridges are amazing. You can’t build suspension bridges this big, with cables thicker than my torso, but there they are, suspended all the same.

The Beijing Olympics
There are five little cartoon characters on the Beijing Olympic signs at the airport. They look like a cross between Manga and the characters in Lillo and Stitch. One has fire coming out of his head and another has leaves and a third has waves of water. I’m not sure if they represent elementals or categories of sports, or maybe cities? The text was illegible at the distance I was standing, but each one had a Chinese name under it, and the slogan seemed to be something about pulling together with Beijing. Okay, so I looked it up online and it is of course more complicated. They stand for friendship and peace and other positive attributes. Here's a quotation:

"Designed to express the playful qualities of five little children who form an intimate circle of friends, Fuwa also embody the natural characteristics of four of China's most popular animals -- the Fish, the Panda, the Tibetan Antelope, the Swallow -- and the Olympic Flame."

So they are five elements, and five animals, and in addition, their names spell out "Welcome to Beijing." There's more here:
http://en.beijing2008.cn/spirit/beijing2008/graphic/n214068254.shtml

Hong Kong Movies
On the way into town, I saw signs for two new movies. The first had a young actress I didn’t recognize. The movie was called In Love with the Dead. I'm guessing that it isn't a blockbuster, and the branding wasn’t scary, either—it was all pink and lacy. The other movie starred Tony Leung, who is in the running with Chow Yun Fat and Andy Lau to be the Gerard Depardieu of Hong Kong movies. You will remember Tony Leung from his lovable monk in one of the Chinese Ghost Story films, his lovable rogue who marries the princess in Chinese Odyssey 2000, and his lovable swordsman who has bad luck with his choice of girlfriend Maggie Cheung in Hero. We went past the billboard pretty fast, but I think the new movie is called Just Caution.

Two More Gift Shops
I never know when I get someplace if I am near a real attraction, such as people would travel far to visit, or if I am near the local thing that is not very interesting. Today I wandered over to two attractions within three blocks of my hotel: the Hong Kong Science Museum and the Hong Kong History Museum. It is Sunday, so the former was knee deep in enthusiastic youngsters, which along with the interactive display promotions told me most of what I wanted to know. The special exhibit is called Soaring Dinosaurs, but I think it might actually be primarily about Chinese Dinosaurs rather than flying ones per se. The keynote of the gift shop was a cartoon character named Ein-O, who had wild hair and a white moustache and seemed to know something about a lot of subjects, which was of course not really true about his model. Across the courtyard was the History Museum, which appeared to be empty. There were me and the staff, and a couple of American tourists wandered in eventually. The history museum had a very nice gift shop with a wide range of cultural products, none of which I purchased, although I was tempted by the many t-shirts with slogans from the Art of War, a bilingual little red book, and a green glazed clay flute.

Grocery Stores
Much as airlines have their national flavour, so do corner grocery stores. In Siena, for instance, we found at a little small-town corner store a wider variety of good meat and cheese than we would normally expect in a supermarket in Edmonton. I thought I’d gained enough weight at the cheese boards of Europe, which should be fine here since cheese is not on the menu, so I determined to get some healthy food. I passed by the seaweed-flavoured potato chips and the cans of wheat grass juice, which I understand can be taken at either end, and found instead a can of instant Quaker Oats, much like a large coffee can. When you pop the lid, there is an internal seal of aluminum. I had resourcefully bought myself a bowl for a dollar, so I was able to pour hot water over some of these oats to find that they set up much more glutinously than the ones I’m used to, but maybe that’s because they are “instant” rather than “quick.” The Tropicana orange juice seemed familiar, until I opened it to realize that it has no internal seal, but that’s okay because the lid itself has one like a water bottle. It was nice to see stacks of fresh dragon fruit and some others I didn’t recognize, a bit like small white mangoes. I got a paper cylinder of digestive biscuits which may in fact consist largely of ground-up Chinese newspaper, but they taste great.

Noisy Streets and Quiet Streets
It isn’t surprising to find streets here packed with people. When I told my bus driver at the airport that I was staying in Tsim Sha Tsui, he laughed and said, “ah yes, the shopping district.” My particular street is dedicated to wedding dresses, maternity dresses, and tailors, not necessarily in that order. A typical shop name here is the one on the corner, called "Marry Claire." I was flagged down by enough east Indian men interested in having me get a suit made that I almost began to wonder if I needed one. I don’t, of course, but they may wear me down yet. Turning the corner, however, I find myself in an empty street and am able to walk several blocks without really having to share the sidewalk with anyone. I walked far enough to see the entrance to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where the conference will start tomorrow morning. It was only a few minutes away—closer even than it looked on Google Earth, although of course it is quite a large campus.

Miramar Tower
I wandered into the Miramar Tower this evening, only to realize that it was where I had eaten the first part of an ill-fated dinner on my last trip. Two of Rosan’s pals had kindly agreed to show me their city. The first, Shum Yuk Wo, was waiting for me every day after my conference, and really treated me like a king. He jokingly told me that his name could be read as “Sum of the Five Virtues” and I would agree with that reading wholeheartedly. Rosan’s second friend, whose name I never learned, tried to take me out for a good dinner, but my jet lag hit me hard that night, and I had to go back to the hotel early and collapse. Imagine my surprise on seeing the restaurant again. At the time, I had no idea what part of the city we’d gone to.

Vivienne Westwood
One of the shops in Miramar Tower is Vivienne Westwood of London, which you will recall as the place Gwen Stefani wants to clean out when she collects all her pirate treasure. I walked three times past the various windows, inside and out, before I worked up enough courage to go in and look at the wild designs. There were three salespeople and only me in the store. The tiny young woman who drew the short straw and came over to greet me seemed very nervous as I looked through the racks. She appeared to believe there could only be the kind of cross-cultural misunderstanding that would end in tears. At one point, she got my attention to explain that I was looking at the women’s clothes, and that the men’s were over there. I reassured her that I just wanted to see some of the clothes. I also looked at the prices, which were extravagant but not insane. You could get a sweater for $3500 HK, which is $320 or so Canadian. There was a very nice sleaveless summer dress, the kind you can crinkle up in your backpack, for HK$7500.

Books and Films
It has occurred to me that what a person looks to buy when traveling can be a significant indicator of personality. Tonight I found myself, as I often do, at a bookstore that also sold movies. I bought a Tsui Hark “Classic” edition DVD, which I believe to be his remake of The Seven Samurai, set in rural China. The English title is Seven Swords. I’ve always liked Tsui Hark movies, and The Seven Samurai too, so how could this be wrong? Well, in fact it is an adaptation of another book, called Seven Swordsmen from Mountain Tian. So I guess we’ll see how that works out. I also bought Italo Calvino’s short story collection, Difficult Loves. I haven’t read it before, and for some reason I always want to buy something by Italo Calvino when I am overseas. I first read If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller during my English undergrad degree, so maybe that has something to do with this impulse. I am regressing to a time that was characterized by the strange combination of uncertainty and confidence.

Seven Swords
Okay, so say that the bandits aren’t after food, but are instead a face-painted bounty-hunting army collecting the heads of martial artists, since a government decree has made martial arts illegal. Actually they collect everyone heads, then say they were martial artists. The seven samurai are supernatural swordsmen who’ve been on a spiritual retreat in the mountains, because their general under the previous regime, Fu, gave up torturing and killing. And the villagers aren’t helpless sufferers, but are instead members of the Heaven and Earth society, and residents of Martial Village. They are still no match, however, for the variously inventive eye-gouging, limb-removing, head-cutting-off weapons of the mercenaries. The decapitating umbrella is a good example--the blades are on the outside and he inverts it over your head, then spins it. The villagers are rescued and led into the mountains, where all the adults are eventually slaughtered by a traitor in their midst. Otherwise, the plot is the same. Well, except that one of the seven swordsmen is a woman, and the one raised by wolves never goes anywhere without an aerial somersault. He is played by an actor from the Beijing Opera. When the seven swords attack the mercenary fortress, they begin while Fu is negotiating outside the walls with the mercenary leader. They use the fortress’s own flags as torches to burn the place down, smash all the wine, and feed a laxative to the horses. When the mercenary leader gets the report, he says, “They weren’t attacking—they were slowing down my attack.” Pure Tsui Hark fun from start to finish. Did I mention Andy Lau is in it?

Value for Money
The Canadian dollar is currently strong, which means you can get almost eight Hong Kong dollars for one of ours. When I was here in 2000, it was closer to five. Given these arithmetical facts, I decided that since I needed some shirts, I might as well get dress shirts. So, turning down offers from east Indian tailors to the right of me and to the left, I wandered along until I found Shopper’s Boulevard. It is one of the places Shum Yuk Wo considered too expensive for me to bother about on my last trip, although he walked me along it so I could see the stores. They are arranged like a strip mall, except the weather is nice enough that the fronts are all open, and there is a very wide sidewalk out in front, wider than many streets, with millions of tiny red and white lights suspended above it. It goes for blocks and blocks--I never reached the end of it. None of these small stores spill out into the sidewalk like you might expect. They are too classy for that, or perhaps there’s some local regulation against it. In any case, I stopped at a likely store and tried on a nice-looking shirt, which they said was the largest they had. It fit okay across my shoulders, but the sleeves were on the edge of being too short. Strolling further, I stopped at a place that seemed to have the right attitude, with brands named Alexander the Great and Caesar. I tried on another shirt that was too small in the sleeve, but the saleswoman swore that she had something bigger. After a bit of digging around, discussion, and giggling, she and her colleagues came up with three shirts that fit perfectly, so I bought them all. As I was leaving, I mentioned that I had despaired of finding a shirt big enough, and was happy that they’d had some. They broke out laughing again, then decided to let me in on the joke. “You are size triple-X,” they explained.

Hong Kong Signs
The signs here are a strange mixture of the UK and the vernacular, which in some cases is just a transliteration of the Chinese and in others is something else. I am in the Kimberley hotel, for example, on Kimberley Road, which is very convenient, except that there is also a Kimberley Street. Nearby are Nathan, Granville, and Chatham Roads, as well as Haiphong, Tak Shing, and Mody. I saw a herbalist whose shop included the word “Swallowingness,” which seems to me something I would like to have from a herbal medicine. The red-bordered yield signs say “Give Way,” as they do in London, and there’s the familiar writing on the street telling you which way to look. One of my favourites is a cartoon sign used by the construction workers, which shows a man in a hardhat covering his ears. For the conference, Sharon has arranged a number of very large format signs, printed on canvas and hung on ropes spiralling through the many gromets. Some of these signs are posted in permanent frames, and at night the staff at the university protect them with pre-fitted cloth covers. The regal staircase leading into the university has the IASDR identity secured to the risers, so as you walk toward it, the effect is of a giant poster welcoming you. I complimented her on it the first time we ran into each other. “It’s very grand, isn’t it?” she said, a bit apologetically.

Disposable Toothbrushes
One of the conveniences here at the Kimberley hotel is the disposable toothbrushes. The cleaning staff leave two in boxes every day in the bathroom. They are the size of a regular toothbrush, although they make me think there must be a 50s mainland factory involved somewhere. The handles are ribbed cylinders, made of industrial gray plastic. I left a used one in a glass my first day, and came back to find it had been thrown out and a new box left in its place. This just seemed extravagant to me, so the next day I tucked one away for reuse. However, after I brushed my teeth the next morning, I had to spit out toothbrush bristles. They really are good for just one or two uses. The toothpaste tube is also unbelievably tiny, as though it were from a doll’s house--perhaps a 50s dollhouse somewhere on the mainland.

Mr. Brown Cappuccino Coffee
Well, who could resist it, really. It’s sold at the grocery store in a short soda-style can. Their logotype is a loose reference to Second Cup, only inside the circle of the name there’s an insane bearded man in a white suit winking at you and giving a thumbs up. The instructions state that you shouldn’t heat the contents for longer than three days, and that if you spot any milk flakes, that’s normal: “Tiny milk flakes may be occasionally found in the coffee and this is a natural condition with no effect on the product quality at all.” I think it is the “at all” at the end that I really like. It leaves you with the sense of “methinks they protest too much.” I just wish they’d put a full stop before it: “… no effect on the product quality. At all.” I am tempted to make this into a standard disclaimer about myself, for use maybe on course handouts. “Dr Ruecker will occasionally appear to be speaking gibberish, but this is a natural condition with no effect on the product quality. At all.” Mr. Brown’s coffee naturally bears no real resemblance to coffee, but it is sweet rather than bitter, so it is definitely a good breakfast beverage. And I didn’t notice any milk flakes. At all.

What to Buy
Shopping in Hong Kong is an exercise in absurdity, since the range and complexity of the choices is overwhelming. On my visit here in 2000, I found myself wondering at the end of the trip if it might prove difficult to bring my expensive bottle of alcohol full of pickled snakes through Canadian customs. So on this trip, I tried to set myself a few simple ground rules that might be suitable for a beginner, such as “don’t buy any clothes made out of dried banana leaves,” and “stay out of that alley.” Prepared in this manner, I went out today with about HK$1500 in my pocket, and it took less than an hour for the local salespeople to strip me down to a few coins. One thing to remember is that no clothing items are to be bought for the prices indicated. I got my three triple-X shirts the other day for less than half the advertised price, really with no effort on my part. My lucky strategy was to stand in the middle of the store and look confused. By the time I gathered my wits, I found I had been awarded a 60% discount on everything I wanted. If I had blinked a couple of more times, and perhaps glanced again at my watch, I’m sure I’d have saved another twenty dollars. Today I was trying to be efficient, with the result that at the first store I confused and upset the young salesman, who began offering me discounts after I’d already agreed to buy. As I left the store, I could see that he was clearly still rattled by the experience. It seemed to touch on his conscience a little. A while later I found myself in the basement of an office supply store, wondering if I needed a metal sign for my office that said in both Chinese and English: “Please do not spit.” I decided enough was enough, and, gathering my collection of bulldog clips in colours and sizes I’ve never seen before, I headed back to the hotel.

The Kimberley Hotel
I am staying in a place that has been a wonderful base of operations. It is surrounded by enthusiastic East Indian tailors, for one thing, and the sidewalk is littered with elegant young brides-to-be, looking like they might shake out a water sleeve at any moment and begin singing about their childhoods in the Imperial Court. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the crowd, some of whom would scorn to read a sign that says “Please do not spit,” no matter how many languages it were written in. My room has a bilingual control panel beside the bed that controls all the lights, alarms, air conditioning, and notifications to the staff. I push a button that says “Do not disturb,” and no one does, because there is a light outside the door that I’ve activated. I push the other button that says “Make up room,” and I’ve barely walked down the street to buy a classic Wong Kar Wai film when I return home to find the room has in fact been made up during my brief absence. I just stopped off at the desk downstairs to ask for a few extra hours on my room, and everyone was happy to oblige. A manager directed me to one of the counter people, but just as I stepped up, a large and florid Australian man, recently arrived from the airport and clearly Overcome By Events, lurched in front of me. The manager returned and led me by the elbow to another of his staff. “I’m so sorry,” he said, apologetically indicating the person attempting to deal with the Australian. “She is busy.”

An Evening Stroll
If you thought shopping at four in the afternoon was chaos, you should try it in the evening. I sauntered out at seven o’clock on my never-ending search for a nice shot glass, only to find that there are an order of magnitude more people on the busy streets than were there during work hours, and a far lower percentage were tourists. After a few blocks of dizzying activity, I decided maybe I could just watch a movie tonight, and try looking for shot glasses in the morning. With my unerring sense of direction, I headed home and found myself outside the hotel where I’d stayed ten years ago. I tried again and managed to make a giant loop, which at least gave me the reassuring sense that the things I was seeing were familiar to me. At one point, I even broke one of my own beginner’s rules (“don’t go down that alley”) and I joined a steady stream of people walking a dark, narrow path past discount electronics and street vendors. It doesn’t help that the controlled intersections are all arranged as what in Saskatoon they used to call “scramble corners,” so that all vehicular traffic stops while foot traffic can cross in every direction at once. These crosswalks have lights, but they also have a very useful beeping signal that speeds up when you are allowed to go, then chirps in bursts during warning mode. At last I found myself on my route home from campus, and before I knew it I was tripping over nervous young gazelles and shaking hands with East Indian tailors.

Heathrow

Heathrow Airport is so large and I spend enough time connecting there that I am tempted to treat it as its own travel location. Certainly on this trip, when I had seven hours there, I felt myself inclined to buy postcards and send them out. Only the unexpected appearance of an available power plug for the laptop held me back.

British Airways
I have to say that for in-flight magazines, it is hard to beat the British Airways one, called High Life. BA.com is their site, which I hope contains half the interesting articles and useful advice I found in their print version. I was particularly struck by the travel tips, which included suggested itineraries for a two or three day trip, as well as details of good places to stay and eat in various cities, including the kinds of prices you could expect to pay at the places they recommended. They had articles on Paris (Hotel des Grandes Ecoles at 100 Euros/night), St Petersburg (one of the mini-hotels: Sonata, Nevsky Inn, Kristoff, Pyaty Ugol, the Rakhmaninov, for 50-100 Euros), and New York (Hotel Belleclaire at $130 US). I almost feel now like I could stand to go to St Petersburg, despite my earlier reservations about needing three weeks to get a visa. Oh--and I almost forgot, Tobago (the Blue Haven hotel).

Radio Interference
Pilots and flight attendants and people like that are forever asking everyone to turn off their cell phones during flights. I’ve always felt a bit like Toby Ziegler in the pilot episode of West Wing, when he expresses incredulity that a $30 purchase from Radio Shack could compromise the electronics on a brand new aircraft worth millions of dollars. But our British Airways pilot came on the intercom as we lifted off from Prague, to say that someone was using a cell phone onboard and it was screwing up the transmissions from Air Traffic Control. Luckily it wasn’t me. I have no idea if Aaron Sorkin was on board.

Fire for Lunch
My one regret about BA is that they allowed Lister from Red Dwarf to choose the sandwiches. You will recall that he subsisted, unlike the Cat, on a diet of chicken vindaloo. I thought I was lucky when it turned out that only half my sandwich was curry-based, but then I ate the other half, which was canned tuna infused with what I now believe to be essence of hell. Maybe I shouldn’t have made so much fun of those 12th century Benedictine monks.

A Decent Cappuccino
Terminal 1 at Heathrow, on the other hand, has been undergoing a facelift. I had heard rumours, but hadn’t gotten the ocular proof until this afternoon. There are a number of very good stores, and the quality of the food is much improved since my last visit. I stopped and got a respectable club sandwich and a decent cappuccino at Pret a Manger, who you will remember has the slogan “Eat with your head.” Susan and I lived on their food a few years ago when we took an apartment for ten days in Soho. The coffee alone has enough moral fibre for three travelers, since it is not only free trade, but also a couple of other commendable things that I forget now but appreciated at the time. Having just watched Babel with Stefan, Milena, and Piotr, I am particularly conscious of the many opportunities for international miscommunication. Give your rifle as a gift to your fine native guide, and next thing you know Cate Blanchett is bleeding all over the handwoven carpets.

Dorling Kindersley
The Eyewitness Travel guides were first recommended to me by Susan Hockey, whose advice I have tended to take. They not only describe everything you want described, but they also have instructions on how to get there, and cutaways of the buildings once you do. We kept saying we’d look for them in Cracow and Prague, but we never did. Here in Heathrow they have both, and they are lovely. They don’t, unfortunately, have one in stock for Hong Kong, although I did finally, for the first time in my life, buy a Berlitz phrase book. I saw how Milena used hers in Peru, which is a method I think I can manage. It consisted of finding a relevant phrase, and rather than stammering it out in amusing tourist gibberish, simply pointing at the text for the local person to read. I also noticed that they have an Eyewitness Guide to Canada, and couldn’t resist seeing what it said. All of western Canada, which they called central Canada, filled 20 pages in the middle of a 340 page book. The cities where I’ve spent most of my life were each accorded two columns on a three-column page. I’m seriously thinking of moving to Cracow.

Prague

Prague, or Praha as it is known locally, is another of the cultural capitals of Europe. I found out from Piotr today that this designation is more than an idle fancy. In fact, there is a program that identifies them and they hold the designation for a while, perhaps a year, before passing it to the next. Krakow and Prague have both been cultural capitals, and Budapest is another on the list. Piotr also recommends visiting a city called Cluj, in Transylvania. I don't know if it is a cultural capital though. We have a similar program in Canada. This year Edmonton is the cultural capital.

Czech Air
Just as LOT airlines has its idiosyncrasies, so does Czech Air. One of them was in the design of the little tables that let down from the back of the chair in front of you. On this plane, there was a cupholder built into the back of the little table, so that if all you had were a cup, you didn't have to use the entire table. A less useful innovation is the advertising on the back of the disposable cloths covering the headrests. Ours held ads for a new model of the Skoda, which was originally a Czech car company, now owned by Volkswagen. This model features a light that shines sideways to help you see around upcoming corners. The text on the baggage tag was also interesting. Here's what it wanted to tell me: "This is not the luggage ticket described by Article 4 of the Warsaw Convention as amended by the Hague Protocol, 1955." "Okay," I thought. "Thanks for the heads-up on that." Another oddity on Czech Air was the in-flight magazine; the cover story was about Miss World, in the back there was a short story about adultery, and in the middle somewhere there was a separate set of tasteful nude photos.

Student Housing
We took a taxi from the airport, which was driven by an elderly Harpo Marx. Despite a somewhat irreverent approach to traffic signage, he managed to deliver us in one piece to a student dormitory. It is a huge complex with six storeys, and many of the balconies have gardens with hanging plants. The central space in front has a giant pole with klieg lights on it, and Milena swears there are air raid sirens up there too. The dorm rooms are quite large with a kitchen and a built-in bathtub that is actually long enough for me, which is something I haven't seen since I lived at Mary Noonan's B&B in Saskatoon. The bathroom sink is man-sized, and there is plenty of water pressure. Unfortunately, as in Krakow, the beds are more along the lines of cots. We are just a short walk from the subway, which is very good. In three fast stops it took us to the local shopping mall, and in five stops with a transfer will drop us in the heart of Prague, at the spot called Muzeum.

Secure Student Housing
Unfortunately, there are also guards on the main floor, who keep your keys when you leave the facility. When we checked in, they filled out a two-page ledger with information about each of us. There was a small moment of excitement when they realized that I was born in the Queen City, Regina. I didn't explain that it was in Saskatchewan, and if the Queen ever visited, it wasn't for long. The other noticeable thing is that there are plenty of locks. The door to the dorm room locks. There is an internal door that also locks, with an old-fashioned skeleton key. Between locking the outside door and unlocking the inside one, you are trapped in a small entranceway between two locked doors. There are four rooms to a hallway, and the door to that hallway also locks, and has a big sign on both sides to remind you to lock it. "I don't think that Canadian fire inspectors would approve of this," Milena says, as we turn the key to lock ourselves into the third layer of security, not counting the men at the front desk. Certainly leaving in a hurry would be impossible, but I guess there's always the balcony.

Too Cool for Cats
If you've ever wondered where all the cool kids went, they are in Prague. All ages, all sizes, many styles of them, but here they are, riding the subway, lounging against walls, talking energetically in pubs. Marley and her friends could walk in here, no questions asked. Here's a skinny blonde woman in her twenties, wearing a torn jacket and shit-kicking boots, standing with her feet absently turned out in fifth position. There's a middle aged guy in skinny plaid pants with bright yellow socks and a pair of what look to me like vintage Converse sneakers. On the corner are a couple of eighties rockers, perhaps Billy Idol and his younger brother, now working in industry and feeling the weather change in their bones. Nobody seems to look much at anybody else, but as you walk down the street you can't help but notice how cool everybody is, partly because there are so many cool people to look at and nobody compromises themselves by looking. Milena tells me that Vin Diesel's action movie TripleX is set in Prague. Piotr says the national passion is for conversation, usually over beer, and the pubs are like salons, with regulars who meet in a favorite location over well-established topics. The per capita consumption of beer in Prague is apparently one of the highest in the world.

City of Men
Based on the in-flight Men's magazine and the good plumbing, combined with the Spartan domestic interiors and the lack of a shower curtain, not to mention our time downtown with the many pubs, I am beginning to think that Prague is a man's city in the same way that Sweden is a country of women. Without the mitigating influence of the other gender, a number of creepy peculiarities can emerge. I think of those domestic interiors full of chintz curtains, lace doilies, and small porcelain objects, clearly designed to forestall abrupt movements by large creatures. Once we started looking for evidence to support this theory, there is of course plenty. Not that you can prove much using this method. But one of the pieces of evidence is in the quantities of things. Milena ordered a cup of tea one morning, and was delivered hot water in a glass large enough to hold an entire beer, with two large tea bags and three-quarters of a lemon to go with it.

A Murder of Goths
Well, maybe it was a gaggle. In any case, as we were walking along the street today, we came across a crowd of maybe 35 or 40 people, all Goths of various shapes and sizes, just standing together or sitting on the sidewalk. Other people were sort of wending a path through them, so we did the same. Afterward, I asked Milena and Piotr what they thought the Goths were waiting for. "It's a sale," Milena said. "Of black," Piotr added.

Escalators in Prague
The escalators here run at twice the speed of escalators everywhere else, and many of them are also twice as long. The people appear to be leaning forward on the uphill ones, as if they were leaning into a strong wind, which is sometimes the case if the escalator happens to be one coming out of the underground. Another peculiarity is that the handrail moves slightly faster than the escalator, so if you actually hold onto it, you end up slowly leaning over further and further. This isn't something anyone here actually notices, however, since they are too cool to use the handrails. Another thing they are too cool to do is leave each other alone while escalating. It is not uncommon to see couples pressed together with their tongues in each other's mouths.

The View from the Castle
Prague really does have some remarkable views. We rode the funicular today up the hill to the monastery, then walked the seventy-five miles or so over to the castle grounds. I insisted on stopping every two hours for ice cream. After the third stop, Piotr suggested maybe we should eat something more substantial than ice cream and we'd be able to last longer. That just sounds like crazy talk to me, since the ice cream here is very good, and they also seem to have a good attitude toward whipping cream. In any case, we finally ended up outside Prague castle, where you can see for miles out over the red tile roofs of the city. There is a stone railing lined with photographers and couples manhandling each other. The descent has dozens of equally attractive vistas, where the various cross-streets converge to give a series of unexpected views of the buildings.

Salvador Dali - more than just melted clocks
Who knew? Probably everyone but me. When Mike was young, he had the photo on his wall of Salvador Dali and all his things being thrown through the air. So we went today to an exhibition of Salvador Dali, and his famous surrealist work was not only the least interesting, it was also not the bulk of the exhibit. He did a whole series of ceramic tiles with colourful prints of horses-Don Quixote, St. George, Lady Godiva, and so on. They were just brilliant. There was a small statue of Durer's Rhinoceros. There were some gold plates, enameled with dark blue, then scratched to let the gold through. They had images of women, mostly, and one with a horse that reminded me of the handwriting exercises we used to do on the blackboard in Grade Four. He also had a whole room full of watercolour illustrations for Dante's Inferno. Many of these seemed to me not as interesting, but some of them were very fine.

Alfons Mucha - more than just calendar girls
Paired with the Dali exhibit was one for the Bohemian artist Mucha, who I knew primarily through his colour lithographs of seasonal ladies in filmy clothes. But he actually had a massive body of work, including designs for currency and stamps, and a set of images intended to be used for doing frescoes in the city hall, based on allegorical attributes like diligence, courage, industry, and so on. There were also plenty of lithographs of ladies in filmy clothing, including my personal favourite: a life-size poster of Sarah Bernhardt as Medea. She looks as mad as a hatter. Mucha's life wasn't without its own tribulations too, apparently, with various periods of what the flier describes as "horrible deprivation." Born in 1860, he died in 1939, "shortly after being interrogated by the Gestapo."

Prague's Jewish Community
Lucie Dolezalova, who arranged the workshop here in Prague, also arranged an afternoon tour of several important Jewish sites in Prague. So I put on my paper yarmulke and followed our guide, who was basically Meryl Streep's younger, cuter sister, into the Old-New Synagogue, which is the oldest synagogue still operating in the city. It has several peculiar features. For example, medieval law dictated that the Synagogue had to be a shorter building than the lowest Christian church in the city, so to make the interior still seem impressive, they dug the floor lower. Then the Gothic arches were a problem, since they form crosses, so they modified them so that they wouldn't. The place where the cantor stood has an interesting medieval convention-it has a half-step cut lower into the floor, so that the singer could step down into it when he sang the part about calling to God from out of the depths. Another interesting fact is that this is the Synagogue where the Rabbi Low created the Golem as a protector of the people. They say the Golem is still here, waiting in the attic, although I missed whether it was the attic of the Synagogue, which seems unlikely to me, or the palace. Our guide also pointed out a variety of numerological points around the building. For example, the columns were octagonal and there were two of them, totaling 18, which is a number that sounds like the word for "life." I got the impression that this kind of symbolism in the architecture isn't unusual, though.

Our next stop was the Jewish Museum, which had been a Synagogue at one time. After the Nazis transported and killed two out of every three Jewish people in the area, it wasn't needed any more. But at one point the Communist authorities agreed it could be used for commemorative purposes, so someone retrieved the Nazi records, and they wrote on the walls inside the building the names and demographic information about all the 80,000 people who'd been transported and killed. Then the Communists changed their minds, and whitewashed out the names. After they left, the people went back again and rewrote all the 80,000 names. It is one amazing interior.

Upstairs in the Jewish Museum is a selection from thousands of children's drawings made at Terezin, which was a "show camp" arranged outside Prague for the Red Cross to visit. They had music pavilions and artists, and children and old people, and coffee shops. There was even a local currency that showed Pharaoh holding Moses. The Red Cross visited in June 1944 and made a short documentary film. In October, the Nazis shipped everyone off to the ovens. But 45 suitcases packed with children's drawings remain.

After the harrowing experience of the children's drawings and the walls with the names, we went next to a Jewish cemetery, begun in the fifteenth century and closed in the 1780s. It is a relatively small plot of ground, but has 12 levels piled one on top of the other, so it is currently at the second storey of the nearby buildings. As they added each new layer, they tried to lift the tombstones up, with the result being a field of clusters of stones of various ages and degrees of dilapidation. When they buried someone, one tradition was to put a piece of broken glass on each of the eyes. Another was to write something complimentary on the gravestone. However, one of the stones in this cemetery apparently says "Here is buried a liar."

Finally, we stopped off at the Spanish Synagogue, which has a very unusual Moorish interior, a pipe organ, and a number of display cases with various objects. Even this beautiful building, however, has a horrific story associated with it. Rumour has it that the Spanish Synagogue was intended by the Nazis as a museum to a vanished race, since it was preserved intact during the war, packed as a warehouse with museum pieces. It is now a working Synagogue again.

Street people
The people who would like to ask if brother you can spare a dime differ from country to country. Although I never saw it, in Poland, apparently, they are often quite aggressive. Based on Piotr's description, I wouldn't have been surprised for the man with the belt to turn around afterward and demand a donation to his cause. In Prague, however, and in one spot in Cracow, the procedure appears to involve a degree of supplication that startled and alarmed both me and Milena. The person kneels in the street, not necessarily in a warm cozy spot, but perhaps where there is some refuse or mud. They have a container in front of them, and bend over with outstretched hands on either side of the hat or whatever it is. They don't look up, either. It was a singularly effective approach, at least for those of us who weren't used to it, but I think I rather prefer the chatty, sometimes even sociable, interactions we're used to on Whyte.

Piotr Michura - prince among men
It occurred to me just today that for almost three weeks now, Piotr has been kindly and quietly arranging my daily life. I've gotten used to saying "Piotr?" whenever I feel lost, and he pulls out a map. If I need to enter a building, I look again and there's the door, being held open by Piotr. Milena finally broke under the strain of this unremitting courtesy, and asked why he insisted on us going first. At that moment, we were about to descend a staircase into a restaurant. "You never know what's down there," Piotr said. I'm going to miss him in Hong Kong.

Museum Gift Shops
It is with the best of intentions, really it is, that we set out on our various treks to try to appreciate the art and culture of a place. But it sometimes happens, occasionally, that we arrive tired at the national Czech industrial crafts display, or that we realize too late that the Franz Kafka Museum is likely to be a bit depressing. On these occasions, we've developed the strategy of visiting just the gift shop. "You can get a lot," Milena says, "from a Museum Gift Shop. All the good stuff is reproduced in postcards and t-shirts and calendars. And you can take it home."

Amadeus
We had dinner on our last night in Prague at a nice little restaurant called Tri Stoleti, on Misenska Street. They had one of the freshest cheese boards we've eaten here, and we've eaten a lot of cheese boards. They also had a chocolate-based pasta sauce that Stefan and Milena seemed to find surprisingly good. You will recall this particular street because it was a location for the movie Amadeus. When Mozart's Requiem is playing, carriages are clattering over the cobblestones, and the buildings are looming on each side in a particularly medieval way, that's where I ate my dinner.

One Big Medieval Book
Lucie also kindly arranged a visit to a display of the world's largest illuminated manuscript. It was compiled, if that's the right word, in a 12th-century Benedictine monastery called Podlazic. The Codex Gigas contains a variety of texts, including a Bible and some spells. Most famous is probably a full-page illustration of the devil, who has two tongues and a green face. This image is one reason for the vernacular name of this book, which is The Devil's Bible. A single monk wrote the Codex Gigas by hand, and also illustrated, and illuminated it, then bound it in a massive binding. The project probably took ten years or more. The whole book is a metre tall and half a metre wide, and weighs 75 kg. It has more than five hundred pages, made from about 150 donkeys and calves. One of the photos on display included a section of parchment that had been repaired with stitching that looked like the sewing on a baseball.

The Company We Keep
The Codex Gigas display consisted of two floors of glass cases with archaeological materials and other medieval books, along with informational posters. On the second floor there was also a video, which was playing in Czech when I looked at it, and a series of photos of some of the pages. Luckily, we had a room full of medievalists from the workshop with us, and they were very informative on some of the details. "No, that's not a part that's been blacked out by censors-it's a dark background for gold lettering, which has since disappeared, or perhaps didn't register very well on the photo." "No, that's not a page they forgot to write-it's a list of the people who died at the monastery, and there were only enough of them to fill up the first quarter of the first column." Monique walked up at that point, glanced at the poster, and said something to our Hungarian colleague in medieval Latin by way of politely confirming her first impression. She was, of course, correct.

The Vault Room
The two long corridors of information were all very well and good, but the heart of the display was a locked and climate-controlled vault room, which contained a glass case with the actual manuscript in it. We got time-stamped tickets and were admitted at half-hour intervals. Behind the first doors was another empty room, where we promised that we had no hidden cameras or cell phones. Then the guide took us into the sanctum sanctorum, where an informational tape was playing in Czech, and the Codex Gigas was on display to the public, open to the famous spread with the devil on one hand and the kingdom of heaven on the other. I thought that the Kingdom of Heaven bore an uncanny resemblance to a game of Snakes and Ladders, but maybe that was just me.

Scholarly Privileges
I also sensed a certain level of academic frustration in the vault room. Here were a group of international scholars, well used to donning the cotton gloves and delicately handling the most precious documents on Earth, and they were being treated like tourists, restrained from this tasty stack of donkey hides by a glass case and an indifferent Czech official. One of our Romanian colleagues, an expert in eighteenth-century Moldavian missionary geography, actually went so far as to ask if there were any way to request that someone turn a page, but he was coldly rebuffed. So we never actually got to see any text in this giant codex-just the pictures of the fork-tongued devil and the Snakes and Ladders game. I didn't feel the sting quite so much as the others, partly because my command of medieval Czech could do with a bit of polishing.

Rough Talk about Podlazic
One of the informational posters describing the Benedictine monastery responsible for the Devil's Bible mentioned that a visiting Bishop once wrote a damning letter about the place. Whereas in earlier and happier times, he said, there were 40 monks busily acting like monks, now in this degenerate age the Abbot spends his whole time playing poker and they only do the masses twice a day. The poster went on to say that of course this was an exaggeration-it was very unlikely that there were ever as many as 40 monks at Podlazic.

The Library of the Queen of Sweden
The last thing I want to tell everyone about the Codex Gigas is the first thing I ever heard about it, namely that it was stolen by the Swedes when they raided the monastery four hundred years ago. It has been stored since then in the library of the Queen of Sweden. They haven't actually given it back, either, but instead it is on loan for the exhibit. "Four hundred years is too long," one of our colleagues said regretfully. "At that point, it's finder's keepers."

Central European Tour Guides
One of the ways to make a buck here in Prague is to set up as a tour guide. I noticed that Meryl Streep's sister was wearing a plastic identity card clipped to her jacket, that identified her as a registered guide, and at several places where we needed otherwise to buy tickets, because we were in her group they just waved us through. However, there also appear to be freelancers in this business, who stand in the central squares and hold up handwritten signs that indicate, usually in broken English, that they are top guides and can be trusted. Monique, our colleague from Paris, was amused by the crowds following these people, in part because the guides invariably held some kind of unique object in the air so that everyone would know where they were in the larger crowd. "If you ever get lonely here," Monique quipped, "you just have to hold up an umbrella and gather some followers."

Noon Clock Vigil
The central cathedral in the central square has a very fancy central clock on it. People gather from all over the world, idlers mostly who can't find regular employment, and stand around waiting for noon. We happened to be there one day, having gotten out of bed early to meet Stefan, and so we got to witness the procession of the saints. On the stroke of noon, doors open on either side of the clock, and the twelve apostles or somebody walks past the open doors, still inside the clock, but clearly moving. "That's it?" Milena asked. "Ah, those were heady times, in the Middle Ages," I told her. Then the crowd rapidly dispersed, each following their own umbrella-wielding leader.