The Hague

I found myself spending a few days in the Hague for a conference and some research team meetings, and I have to say that I found it an absolutely charming city. The buildings, the canals, the sense of spaciousness in the streets coupled with the coziness of the shops and restaurants, and most of all the cheerfully helpful people, have convinced me that this is a city worth revisiting.

Everything on wheels
One thing that I did have to get used to was the close proximity of wheeled and pedestrian traffic. It is not unusual to find yourself sharing a few meters of what I would normally consider walking surface with a tram, a couple of cars, and ten women on bicycles. The cyclists in particular reminded me of their sisters in Copenhagen, each one a picture of the well-groomed professional on a sensible bike with a basket, going hell bent for leather past my elbow.

The girl with a pearl earring
The Mauritshuis art gallery, although unpronounceable by mortal tongues, does have a marvelous collection of Rembrandt, Steen, and Vermeer, including the famous girl with a pearl earring. In the gift shop, you can buy her on any number of items for around the house, including the usual postcards and coasters and keychains, but also an umbrella, a wristwatch, a box of wooden matches, and soap. Richard and I visited the place twice, applying our close scrutiny to the many details of Jan Steen’s paintings, which to my mind are in the same category as William Hogarth. We also joined Ruskin in subjecting to our critical judgment the many paintings involving water.

God of 5s
I was pleased to learn that the Hague was home to M.C. Escher (1893-1972), familiar to anyone who has ever bought a poster as the guy responsible for drawing hands, the 2D lizards who walk off the page, and an impossible set of staircases. I have a soft spot for him because I once took a senior math class in symmetry, where I painted a couple of tiled planes. I was particularly fond of one of them, which featured coelecanths and toucans, because I thought it combined one of the shiest creatures with one of the most flamboyant. It marks my only real commercial success as a painter, since my prof purchased it at the end of the term and hung it up behind the registration desk in the Math Dept. In any case, the Hague has an entire art gallery dedicated to Escher, with three floors packed full of prints of all kinds, as well as a few sketches and some sculptures. He had apparently once mentioned that some of the images should be read as small movies, so they also had digital films that people had made. On the fourth floor, there were a number of optical illusions, including a distorted room that made people look bigger and smaller than they are.

A Winter Wonderland
I woke up on my last morning here only to find that the night had brought a seriously heavy snowfall. It reminded me of Balgonie in some ways, with all the trees piled with snow and the snow on the ground up to your knees, when the night before there had been clear paving stones. I got to see a little toddler chortling with each step she took on the ice, clearly saying to her mother how interesting it was to try this out. There were also kids out sledding in the country, and ducks on the canal, standing around waiting for the water to open up again. Unfortunately, it also meant that the trains were shutting down and the flights back to Greece were being cancelled.

Hania

My introduction to Aegean Airlines involved them (one assumes) saving my hide. I’d made it as far as Athens, flying low over the various gorgeous islands, then waited a couple of hours to board to Hania. After we were all loaded, we sat and sat, waiting maybe an hour without moving, until finally they announced that we had to change planes, since there was something unresolvable wrong with the one we were sitting in. So we deplaned and road another bus back to the terminal, while they transferred our luggage to a replacement jet.

A Polite Harbour Cat
One of the first people I met here was a cat. She lives around the harbour and thought I might be interested in sharing my chicken gyros with her. Unfortunately, I had just eaten all the part that cats like. I finally spotted a scrap. It occurred to me, however, that the restaurant might have a policy, so I asked the maitre d’. “It’s okay,” he said, “I feed her something every night, from the side. She’s a very nice cat. She recently had kittens.”

The Skulking Hour
It turns out, of course, that the city is littered with cats, all of them feral. What this means in practical terms is that there are a couple of societies who take some responsibility for catching them, neutering and spaying them, giving them a little doctoring, and releasing them again. However, it is a never-ending struggle to keep the population at a reasonable level. Just up the street we have a set of garbage bins that are the stomping grounds of an entire colony of thirty or more, all of them ready to hiss at you while you are feeding them, as Susan quickly discovered, but also to bunt your leg and purr like idiots. As with cats all over the world, twilight is the skulking hour, when they spend their time in intense but silent negotiations with other cats. They wait until four or five o’clock in the morning before the negotiations turn noisy.

Staring into the water
One of the pleasant options available for the discerning traveler in Crete is to stand by the edge of the water and stare into it. You see all kinds of people doing it all over the harbour, from grizzled old ex-fishermen to round-eyed kids taking their first steps away from the strollers. Susan and I have spent a few hours now in this innocent pastime, and have seen shoals of minnows of at least ten different species, as well as a needlefish, a couple of kinds of crabs, and, on one occasion, a local brown dolphin who came up briefly for a breath of fresh air.

Scraping my knuckles on the antiquities
Here on the northwestern coast of Crete, we have a lighthouse, originally built by the Venetians in the sixteenth century, remodeled by the Egyptians in the nineteenth century, and subjected in the twenty-first century to a thorough renovation that ended in 2006. There are spotlights that shine on it every night, making for a picturesque harbour. There is also a stone pier, about a mile long, where young couples can take a walk that affords them some measure of privacy for discussion, while they remain in the full view of the entire city. Susan and I elected one day to stroll along the pier, walking at first on the second level. When we decided it was time to jump down to the lower tier, I managed to scrape, not my palms, not my nose, not even the improbable top of my head, but the back of my left hand. Luckily, the Greeks sell a very nice version of band-aids, made of paper white fabric.

Croissants with jam
Wherever you go, you need to figure out how to eat, and part of that equation involves learning what is normal or at least readily possible in each country, and what is odd or downright can’t be done. In London, for instance, there is instant custard from a packet. You can buy it at any shop and prepare it in a minute with a bowl, a fork, and a cup of hot water. Similarly with raisins and gruel. In Krakow, on the other hand, forget about custard, and watch yourself with the gruel, which may just as easily be barley as oats. In Hania, they’ve never heard of custard or gruel, but for entire shelves at the supermarket and at every corner cigarette shop, you can buy individually wrapped croissants already filled with chocolate or jam. The package for the peach version even has a glowing white halo around the sacred croissant in the middle.

A dip in the Aegean Sea
Crete is home to at least a couple of world-class beaches, but they both involve a bus ride from where we are staying. The buses at this time of year are not frequent, so it is a bit of a commitment to get there and spend a day. As an alternative, a ten minute walk along the sea wall will bring you past a sports arena, a little marina where the kids are learning to sail, a small fishing fleet, and on to a local beach populated by elderly people who are taking the sun and a dip in the Aegean as part of their health regimen. We’ve joined them now on several occasions, and the water, I must admit, does wake you up.

Milan

If you think Venice is a labyrinth, you should try driving in downtown Milan. It is Venice on wheels, right down to the approach to signage. We spent a couple of hours circling in on the railway station, which you think would be mentioned somewhere relatively prominent, but the city is large enough and we are illiterate enough that we weren’t able to figure it out. Piotr finally adopted the strategy of asking a series of random strangers, who helped us find our way, beginning with an elegant young woman whose answer was, as near as we could make it out, “it’s nowhere near here—I hope you aren’t walking.”

L’Eko Café and Cucina
Having eventually located our hotel, we decided to take a short walk to find dinner. There were some restaurants near the train station, but we hoped for something better and cheaper, so we headed away from the lights. After an hour and a half spent wandering in a desert of office buildings and closed retail outlets, we finally spotted a café. There were half a dozen people standing at the bar, and about three tables in total. We went in and said “Do you have food?” “Yes, we do!” was the enthusiastic response, so we sat ourselves down. More people kept appearing at the door, where they were greeted and introduced to the others. Eventually, the whole mob of about 25 people disappeared down the back stairs, and Piotr and I were left at our table. About half an hour had passed. “Can we order some food?” we asked. “We only have toast.” “Nothing else?” A reluctant pause. “One pasta.” “Just one?” “Yes.” “Okay,” I said. “We are interested in that.” It turned out that we had stumbled on a culinary night, where a guest chef from Rome was in town, and everyone had come for a private set meal. They kindly agreed to include us in, and since we didn’t speak Italian, we stayed upstairs at what was for all intents and purposes the chef’s table, since he was working in the open kitchen just a few feet away. We ended up staying and eating the best Italian food I could imagine for two and a half hours.

Padua

Piotr and I decided to take a few hours to explore Padua, since it is on the highway from Milan to Venice and is also home to our pals Jorge and Guille. They were unfortunately away at the time to give a talk in Edmonton, so we didn’t get a chance to visit, but we were able to enjoy the older area of the city, which features a small university where the architecture includes marble floors, ancient wooden arches, and interior surfaces of some of the entranceways and courtyards that are covered with commemorative plaques.

Not so fresh frescoes
Another thing worth spotting in Padua are the frescoes on the faces of some of the buildings. Worn with time, these frescoes may currently consist of just a few ghostly faces, in the palest colours imaginable, but one can readily imagine when they were bright colours freshly added to the wet plaster. Since these were so indescribably beautiful even centuries later, I began to wonder why all buildings don’t include frescoes by default, until I remembered that they require specialized artists to produce them.

Italian risotto
Speaking of specialized artists, those of you familiar with the apparently simple but in fact absurdly difficult things to cook on this planet will know all about risotto, which is a species of rice with a short grain and a tendency to absorb water and release starch. The result, if you add stock to it while stirring constantly, can be deliciously creamy, while if you do anything else, it can be an inedible crunchy or in some cases gluey mess. Piotr and I stopped for lunch at a restaurant that seemed to have the right attitude, so we risked a risotto with mushrooms. One of the indications was that they wouldn’t make it as a single portion but only if two people ordered it. So we took a calculated chance that if ever a place would have a decent risotto, it would be here. Our bet paid off.

Venice

My friend Piotr and I arrived in the vicinity of Venice after nightfall by car, having navigated in pure paramecium fashion a comically arcane set of highway switchbacks and roundabouts. Feeling a bit anxious after this experience about finding our way further at night in a strange city, we ended up ignoring Jan’s sage advice to park the car on the mainland, and instead drove over the lengthy bridge into Venice, then paid an exorbitant price to take it on the half-hour ferry ride over to the Lido district, which resides on an island shaped a bit, Piotr says, like a leg bone. I can’t remember ever having taken a car on a ferry before, so this was a tonne of fun for me. We were sure that the parking rates would be punitive, but were fortunate enough instead to find rockstar parking, right on the street across from our little hotel.

Water Buses
Taxis and buses exist as usual in Venice, only of course they are all in the form of boats. We climbed aboard the waterbus from Lido to downtown Venice on Saturday morning, then elected to simply not leave for an hour and a half, until it reached the end of the line and they threw us off. By this method, we managed a tour without narration of the main thoroughfare, which weaves along between some very impressive architecture. Imagine Rome or Florence or some other awe-inspiring Italian city made of marble, then put it up to its knees in the ocean. You can watch the water lapping at wooden doors as you grind by on your bus.

Frog Strangling
We eventually overstayed our welcome on the water bus, and climbed off to find an alternate route back, circumnavigating the archipelago instead of traversing it. We arrived at noon at a stop of interest, near one of the major squares, just in time for a monumentally torrential downpour, which turned into a good, steady, heavy rain for the remainder of the day. Tourists with an ounce of sense immediately purchased and donned colourful translucent raincoats and rainboots, which fit right over their shoes. Enterprising umbrella salesmen also made the rounds, taking advantage, as Piotr put it, of the harvest season. We of course had just arrived from Poland, where people pull down their hats and pull up their collars, shaking their heads in sadness at the weak folly of their fellow mortals.

The Absence of Paperwork
We sat out the first 45 diluvian minutes by taking refuge in a restaurant run by a couple of energetic men, one of whom was a Marcel Mastrionni lookalike contest winner in a somewhat shabby white linen jacket. This wasn’t the kind of restaurant that stood on ceremony. Instead of providing a menu, the waiter came up and said: “What do you eat: pizza or pasta?” We said “pasta.” He began naming sauces until we chose one. “What to drink?” We said. “Tea, with lemon.” “Limon, certa,” he said, and in due course, things arrived. Similarly with the bill, which consisted of him naming a number and us conjuring some Euros from about our persons.

The Labyrinth
Venice, the brochures tell us, is actually a micro-archipelago, with more than 100 islands joined by something like 350 bridges. I can attest to this because I crossed most of those bridges in the course of repeatedly, some might say obdurately, violating my principle of “don’t go up that alley.” In Venice, if it isn’t a Square, or rather a Piazza, it is probably an alley, situated between stone walls that rise several storeys on either side. In many of them, two umbrellas can’t pass each other, and in some, a single umbrella is too wide. They are all streaming with people going both directions or sometimes just standing in everyone’s way and having an Italian conversation. You have the option every few metres of plunging into a canal, but usually the preferred method is to cross it on a little rounded stone bridge about as big as a minute. I had to admire a country where those aren’t just flat paths with railings, but instead there has been individual attention to their nature as bridges.

Bridges
As you sail under the larger ones, you can see that the designs are varied and impressive. There are many stone arches, of course, but also some ancient wooden ones that are simply amazing. Down by the ferry to Lido, there is a modern footbridge, made of metal and enameled white, so that it looks like the extended spinal cord of some prehistoric beast.

Signage--now you see it; now you don’t
They have quite good signage in Venice, if by good you mean a clearly legible sign with an arrow pointing some direction. If, on the other hand, you mean a series of signs of that kind, intended to get you somewhere, then maybe you want another city. As far as I was able to judge, signs in Venice are produced as individual works of art, never to be corrupted in their essential purity by subjecting them to the mundane methods of mechanical reproduction. As Piotr said, staring at yet another list of ten arrows, each pointing different directions: “Rome, Cairo, and Peru.”

San Marco Square
One of the places we had hoped to see was this historical location of Church and State, where the paintings on the marble fronts of the buildings are rivaled only by the sculptures and other carvings that flank them. They are sufficiently overwhelming that it is hard to give them the credit they are due. Perhaps it will help to say they are like the Cathedrals I’ve seen all over the world, only moreso.

Random Bell Ringing
If there is one thing that has been a consistent theme of my first sabbatical, it is the bells, bells, bells. Like the hunchback of Notre Dame, I love them but sometimes I think it may have been a case of too much of a good thing. I heard Big Ben when he wasn’t ringing in London, and only stopped hearing him in my dreams when I got to Krakow and he was replaced, not only by a different set of bells but also by the mad trumpeter--a civil servant who climbs the tower in the square every hour, 24/7, to play a song that breaks off in mid-note. He does it to commemorate the brave watchman who was shot in the throat in 1241 while warning the city of invading Mongols. In Venice, it was the churches, completely removed from this postlapsarian world, joyously ringing out the 2:37 or 7:19 or whatever it happened to be. Piotr explained that they were likely doing it in memory of the moment of someone’s death.

The Casanova Tour
Venice was Casanova’s home town, where he worked as an 18th century alchemist and quack doctor, and where many of his adventures occurred, including a dramatic escape from the Leads--a prison notorious for its solitary confinement cells up in the ceiling, where the hot sun would beat on the lead tiles and make life an intolerable oven for anyone within. Hence the nickname for the prison. Today’s Venice honours young Giacomo by offering tours in his name. We wondered how his amorous adventures fit in to the tours. “Perhaps,” Piotr dryly observed, “they contain special opportunities.”

A Domino for the Masque
Casanova enjoyed a lot of things in his long and eventful life, and one of them was dressing up and going to a ball. The labyrinth contains many places overflowing with absolutely gorgeous masks, each one calling out to the impractical, improbable heart of the Frahnkenshteens. I was particularly drawn to the ones that featured coronas consisting of about a yard of feathers. Luckily, I had Piotr there to help me keep a steady head, or I’d have been drawn in like a moth to the flame and ended up shipping bits of colourful shattered enamel to my family and friends.

The Doge’s Palace
The name of the place is a bit of 18th-century humour, since it is actually the seat of government, a bit like the parliament buildings, and not a palace at all. Venice was a republic. But the Doge apparently did sometimes reside there. Casanova’s prison is connected to it by way of a bridge called “The Bridge of Tears.” That seems somehow more romantic when you aren’t aware that every ten metres there is another bridge connecting something to somewhere.

Ants of Glass
There is evidence of glass craftsmanship everywhere, from the many shops selling glass sculptures and ornaments down to the railings in our hotel, which were metal bars with coloured glass dumbbells, or maybe they were thighbones, strapped vertically on their middles. One store had a display with thousands of tiny glass creatures, each one no bigger than the fiery end of your elegant Italian cigarette. Among them was a whole platoon of glass ants.

Architectural Festival 2010
Piotr was eager to see the last day of this month-long event, and he had a map to the many locations scattered around the city. We settled on one of the two main venues, the Arsenale, which is a building about a mile long, originally used I think as a dock warehouse. Despite the appeal of architectural models, I was too wet and cold to enjoy myself, so I suggested to Piotr that he go ahead while I rested and dried out a bit at the rather extensive bookstore and coffee shop. It also gave me an opportunity to dry my hat under the hand dryer, while I waited in the half-hour bathroom lineup. I saved the exhibit's 20 Euro entrance fee, but what I missed were some amazing projects, including an indoor cloud that some lunatics had engineered, a giant art installation/sprinkler system consisting of running garden hoses suspended from the ceiling, and an audio installation where they had miked each member of a choir separately, then reproduced them on individual speakers, arranged in the shape of the original choir, but manipulated so that the songs could be deconstructed into their components. What I did get to see were several displays about architecture in Hong Kong, including the history of the astonishing Walled City of Kowloon, where our pal Rosan Chow grew up. Take the apartment block in Stephen Chow’s movie Kung Fu Hustle, and imagine the same design packed wall to wall inside a single square mile.

Peggy Guggenheim
We also had dreams of getting to see the collection at the Peggy Guggenheim gallery, but alas we arrived after it had closed. So we contented ourselves with hanging for a few minutes on the elaborate metal gates, which look like tangled bramble bushes where some fist-sized chunks of glass have gotten caught. I say contented ourselves, but really we were washed up against them by a surge of umbrellas turning the tight corner of the alley.

Santa Maria della Salute
To console ourselves on the way back to the water bus, we joined the eisodus of pilgrims heading into the cathedral of Santa Maria. I saw Piotr eyeing the three-foot-long white candles that you could buy outside for the choirboys to light, but we managed to sidestep that particular rite. We also narrowly escaped the lineup to go behind the altar, but only because I baulked and Piotr realized that none of the people who went back there ever came out again. Make of that what you will. We ended up instead watching one of the many large-screen TVs. Each screen showed a live video feed of the same closeup of the face of the icon of Mary above the main altar. Piotr said they were perhaps waiting for it to do something miraculous, like weeping. The TVs were mounted above head height, apparently at random on the walls between pillars, which were draped in decorative red tapestry. We conjectured that all the festive appearance must have been put there in commemoration of whatever was signified by the random bell ringing.

Grotesques and Gargoyles
If you are a fan of making fun of The Man by carving his face in marble, whether with his cheeks blown out or with an improbably and wickedly irreverent expression on his bad face, then Venice is where you should set up shop. You can hardly light a candle without being startled by some manner of grotesque or gargoyle either leering at you or gurgling water on you.

Catwalks on the Waterfront
The water being absurdly located as it is, the locals occasionally find it expedient to produce artificially raised sidewalks, which consist of miles of gritted plywood, supported on knee-high scaffolding. They resemble nothing so much as fashion-show catwalks, only in this case they are keeping tourists a few additional inches above high tide. When we arrived, workers were just dismantling them and stowing them away.

Hotel des Bains
The hotel used for the movie Death in Venice is now closed, but it still stands, another marble monument to Italian architecture, overlooking the beach that runs the length of Lido. We were there in the off season, so the sand had been bulldozed to make a six-foot-high embankment to help protect the inhabitants from the Adriatic. There were also 530 (they were numbered) little wooden shacks facing the water, which people could presumably rent when they brought their families and friends for a day on the beach. Imagine, I said to Piotr, all of those Italians in their designer bathing suits and sunglasses. It would be something to see.

Trieste

Piotr and Monika had previously been delighted by a few hours they’d spent in Trieste, so we made a special effort to drive down to this previously thriving port city of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Built on hills that are terraced down to the sea, the city is absurdly picturesque from above, although it quickly becomes a labyrinth of narrow streets lined with 8-storey buildings and jampacked with cars that are routinely doubleparked for entire blocks. There also appear to be something like two vespas for every citizen. After the second world war, the city was equally populated by partisans of Slovenia and Italy, so Trieste remained a free city, with no national affiliation, until the 1970s, when it finally became part of Italy.

James Joyce
I don’t know how familiar this story is to people, but Joyce apparently spent 12 years in Trieste, working primarily as a teacher of English as a second language for the Berlitz company. I’m not sure how I would feel about being taught English by the author of Ulysses. Privileged, I suppose, but it could very well lead to some awkward moments in polite society when I deployed my extended vernacular. In any case, there is a very nice little bronze statue of him standing just on the edge of one of the bridges over the grand canal, with his plaque embedded in the sidewalk at his feet. I am always interested to see in these cases what part of the bronze has been rubbed shiny by people interacting with the statue. In this case, it was his shoulders, since, as Piotr explained, people would stand and put their arm around him.

Illy
Trieste is also home to the Illy corporation, so we stopped off at a coffee shop for an espresso. It turns out, of course, that we were a bit gauche to ask for espresso, since the local convention is to call it a café negre, but the decorative pair of young men behind the counter, replete with sailor tattoos, seemed to laugh it off with good grace, and the coffee was delicious.

Graz

Following three weeks of pampering by Piotr and Jan in Krakow, Susan flew off home to see her kids while Piotr and I rented a car and headed cross-country to Venice. We crossed through five countries in two days: Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovenia, and Italy.

To Confuse the Enemy
On leaving Krakow, we were anxious not to miss our exit, since we had used something of a side road to avoid construction on the main route. Fortunately, we came across a road sign that showed that we were approaching a roundabout with three exits. The only problem is that there was no text on the sign at all. “It has been removed,” Piotr joked, “in order to confuse the enemy.”

A Cup with 2 Pieces of Chalk
We stopped for dinner at a roadside chain just on the outskirts of Vienna, where they kindly arranged to feed me some pasta that combined items that were not combined on their menu. For dessert, they had a special that provided Piotr with a coffee and me with a doughnut, and as a bonus they gave us a coffee cup. What was unique about this item is that it came with couple of pieces of chalk, because the surface of the cup is a kind of slate.

Peter Cook
Our first night was spent in Austria in the delightful little city of Graz, built on the pretty Mur river. Graz is home to a fanciful art gallery, designed by Peter Cook—an architect, like several of his 60s generation, famous for buildings that were impossible to realize. He once designed, for example, a city on legs that was intended to walk slowly across country. Graz, however, actually managed to instantiate one of his designs, in the shape of a giant plexiglass loaf with a row of nipples along the roof. Each piece of the cladding is a two-inch thick slab of translucent plexi, no two alike, averaging probably five feet across, and bound to the frame with giant rivets.

Sexy Female Robots
It was in Peter Cook’s gallery that Piotr and I went to see, appropriately enough, I thought, an exhibit called “Robot Dreams.” One of the items in the display was a reconstruction of the wicked robot who impersonates the heroine in Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis. Her face is currently plastered all over the city. The exhibit featured some interesting animated constructions, including a kind of complex array of cutouts and video cameras that filled a wall of video screens with constantly changing combinations. There was even a room of little spiders, about the size of your hat, who were triggered by motion detectors to begin scurrying around.

Artificial Handshake
As we were leaving the art gallery, we were stopped by two very polite information design students, who asked if they could videotape, not us, but just our hands, in the act of handshaking. They were making a collection for their web site. We tried it a few times from a couple of different angles, and they eventually cut us loose, but we really felt that we hadn’t managed to provide a satisfactory handshake that represented our actual manner of shaking hands. What they really needed, I think, for a natural-looking greeting, was to hire some actors who knew how to simulate it properly. Only later did I realize that we had missed what might have been a once-in-a-lifetime chance to carry out one of those elaborately artificial handshakes involving slapping our fingers and bumping our fists.

Open-Faced Sandwiches for Breakfast
We had breakfast in Graz at an absolutely delightful little sandwich place called the Café-Imbiss. It is a cozy spot with a very dynamic atmosphere, where tables of people are rapidly coming and going. All of them were there to enjoy oblique slices of fresh baguette that had been artistically supplemented with equally fresh delicacies. I ate, for instance, one open-faced sandwich consisting of folded prociutto that concealed at one end a small slice of melon, and I had another with a small set of smoked salmon slices, topped at one end with a tiny rosette of cream cheese and a miniature sprig of fresh dill.

The Abandoned Tollbooths of Slovenia
After leaving Graz, we drove through Slovenia, which reminded me in many ways of the Rocky Mountain foothills. It took about three hours to drive completely across the country, but every half hour or so we had to slow down to go through a tollbooth. Technology, however, has improved, so that the practice now is not to pay for each section of the highway, but instead to buy a highway pass that lets you use all the highways in the country for several days running. By the time we got to Venice, we had three of these stickers in the window, as well as a pay-as-you-exit toll pass, which is how these things are managed in Italy. Thank God I had Piotr with me, or I would have ended up in a series of confrontations with authorities over my lack of evidence that I knew enough to pay to use the highways. The guards at the final gate in Slovenia were pulling people over with submachine guns, so I was particularly pleased at that point that we had not been delinquent.

The Royal Lippizan Stallions
Who knew that Slovenia is the home of the traveling trick horses of my youth? I remember as a child that these magnificent white horses and their deft riders would make an annual appearance for three shows only in the city of Regina. Piotr tells me that they are considered somewhat of a national treasure by the people of Slovenia.

Arnold
Kim Hoyer tells me that the current governor of California (and former killer robot from the future) was born and bred in Graz, and sure enough, when I checked it out online, there he was, just as bold as brass. He actually came from a small town outside the city, although for some time he was apparently a carrier of the Honorary Ring of Graz, a gold signet given since 1954 to its most prestigious citizens. He returned it in 2005 for reasons unspecified, but one would assume political.

Ludlow

Having learned our lesson about train travel in the English countryside, we gave ourselves plenty of time for the next leg of our trip, and of course everything worked out beautifully. Our excellent fun on the trains ended in the most picturesque English countryside imaginable, replete with cascading river, quacking ducks, giant oak trees, and, in the near distance in the morning as you stand on your balcony, lowing sheep.

Loveliest of Trees
Those of you who are familiar with the work of the poet A.E. Housman may recall his famous poem about the cherry tree, and how since life passes quickly, it is good to spend time admiring it not just in the spring, but also in the winter. Taking this lesson to heart, the good people of Ludlow have planted a cherry tree in Housman’s memory in one of the local churchyards. We managed through trial and error to find this tree and its plaque. We were a bit troubled to see that it was quite a young tree, until we spotted, on the opposite side of the churchyard, another cherry tree, at least hoary with age, and although it did seem to have recently sported a leaf or two, perhaps actually dead. So we admired them both.

Ludlow Fair
Describing the tendency of rural people to have a drink or two when visiting the metropolis, Housman wrote: “I have been to Ludlow Fair, and left my necktie God knows where.” The fair itself is everything you could wish it to be, with tables full of local produce and small household items, but Susan couldn’t rest until we had found a shop facing the square where the Fair is held, and she bought me a neck tie. I’m not sure what people felt as I posed in front of the stalls to prove that I still had it before I left for home, but certainly I felt that I’d entered into the spirit of the thing. We also tried to pitch the local museum’s gift shop on the idea of producing ties for that very purpose, but we met with some resistance from the woman behind the counter. She didn’t say anything of course, but the words “loopy colonials” were written for a moment in the thought balloon above her head.

Birmingham

Susan and I spent August this year going to cultural institutions around London. Then in September, we decided that we’d make a pilgrimage or two. Our first adventure involved going to Shropshire to see the home town of one of our favourite English poets, A.E. Housman. Unfortunately, this effort also gave us a good taste of British rail travel, which consisted in this case of taking three and a half hours for a 45-minute trip to Birmingham, so we decided to stop the night and spend part of the next day exploring the town.

The Bull Ring
I had first visited Birmingham with Susan in 2004, when David Sless had a bunch of us to Coventry to talk about health information design. We had a few hours to spare when all the dust had settled, so we tootled over to Birmingham to take a look. She snapped a photo of me in front of a giant bronze bull that gives its name to the central shopping complex. I did my best to look as though I had no idea I was standing in front of this giant, charging animal, but I’m afraid the photo itself doesn’t quite manage to convey my fecklessness, since it is, after all, a statue of a rampaging bull, and not the real thing.

Pre-Raphaelites Galore
If there is one thing you can say about Birmingham, it is that they have an art gallery that is worth the trip. It is quite large and impressive, with a very good bronze statue of Satan in the lobby, and enough work by the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood to make your head spin. If you’ve seen it in a book about the pre-Raphaelites, odds are good that the original is in the museum at Birmingham. Or rather, since many of the pre-Raphaelites had no compunction about painting the same picture more than once, it might be more accurate to say that one of the versions will be there. Perhaps, for instance, the Rossetti Prosperine where Jane Morris has red hair.

San Diego

I flew in yesterday after a lovely flight in an Embraer, which has become one of my favourite kinds of jets. They feature roomy seats with a headrest high enough for my head, and every seat includes an individual television set. I watched Bruce Willis in *Surrogates*, which was a movie that I believe confused its own PR people. I also got a look at a couple of episodes of *Better off Ted*, which Milena had recommended to me. It’s a sitcom about a team of people who invent things for a living. I particularly love the commercial they include, which is based on the theme of each episode. For example, they explain how the company is one big family, which is why they keep everyone together on evenings, weekends, and holidays.

Just say no to $100 worth of sea salt
Those of you who have followed my adventures for a while, and, I suppose, anyone who has met me or seen me in a store, will recall that I am a sucker. This is especially true while traveling, when I get into the frame of mind of going with what’s going, and end up wondering if a bottle of wine with three snakes in it will really clear customs, or if they would prefer to display it prominently in their glass case of absurdly ridiculous, in fact bordering on criminal, foreign purchases. Today, however, you will be proud to learn that while stopping by the Fashion Street Shopping Mall, I not only experienced an entire demo of how my hands could benefit from exfoliation using salt from the dead sea, but I also managed to thank everyone and get out without buying an unreasonable quantity of these viscous liquids, by which I mean more than I could possibly carry in my luggage. I even held my ground when they offered to ship it to me. Thank God the woman wasn’t somebody’s Chinese grandmother, or I’d’ve been toast.

San Diego Zoo
World famous for its decent treatment of animals, the zoo here is huge. It takes 45 minutes just to ride around it in a bus, which I did today while getting glimpses of a wide variety of earth’s endangered and critically endangered species. Then, once you have your bearings, you can get off and walk around to look at everybody in more detail. I saw, for instance, lions and tigers and bears. There was a herd of what the man beside me described to his child as “the Pumbas,” which were surprisingly cute. I also found myself at one point in a hummingbird garden, where I was soon nose-to-beak with one of the little flying jewels, and I stopped by a couple of gorgeous parrots wearing, respectively, red and blue, with tails down to here. One of the main attractions for me, however, was the flora, which is sufficiently diverse that the zoo is also classified as a horticultural gardens.

Outdoor Whirlpooling
Say what you like about the cold weather (two degrees above freezing last night), strong winds (up to 75 mph yesterday), and rain (I believe the adjective is “torrential”), you still can’t beat eating some fresh papaya for breakfast, then going and sitting in the outdoor hot tub until you begin to wonder how seriously they meant the signs that say there are limits on how long a person ought to soak in there. I stayed long enough today that a buzzard begin circling the back yard of the hotel, although after a while I must have sufficiently waved a languid foot or something, because he gave up on me. A couple of hummingbirds also zipped by, busy in what passes for a conversation among their kind.

P.S. I noticed the next morning that the buzzard was back, so I’m guessing it was nothing personal. The hotel is apparently just part of his regular rounds.

Addictions While Traveling
I’m not sure what it is about being alone on the road, but it tends to bring out the obsessive and repetitive aspects of my nature. Perhaps that’s enough said, but I’ll go on. For this trip, I started by leaving home in the middle of an addiction to the TV series JPod. One of my brilliant graduate students recommended it to me a while ago, and sure enough, I started to watch all the episodes in rapid succession. Since they weren’t available here on my not very good wireless connection, I switched to all of the first season of Better Off Ted. Now that I’ve seen them two or three times each, I logged in (again on the suggestion of one of our genius grad students) to www.hunch.com, and I find myself answering dozens of random questions in the hopes that the system will tell me about new things I can get addicted to. Is this any way to live? I think of the line from the standup comedian Marc Maron: “I feel sorry for anyone who has never been addicted to something. Imagine wanting something really bad, then getting it, again and again.”

Four Brothers (Spoiler Alert)
I watched the other night a Mark Wahlberg movie that is essentially The Return to the Shire, except it is set in Detroit. Four brothers revenge the murder of their saintly adoptive mother, succeeding through a combination of direct action and shrewd knowledge of the people in the neighbourhood. I particularly liked the red herring where three of the brothers begin to suspect the fourth, since he received a large insurance claim when his business is going broke, and they subsequently watch him handing money to an underworld character. It turns out that of course he had paid for his mother’s insurance—he paid all her bills. The insurance is for the next generation of kids she’d adopted, and the money to the underworld figure is a bribe—you can’t do business in their neighborhood without paying off the corrupt people in the system. In the end, they defeat the villain, or Saruman, by giving money to all his henchmen instead of bribing him; the successful brother had made his early successes in union organizing.

Charlotte and Rock Hill

Georgia Rolls
When I got into Charlotte, it was time for dinner, so Karen and Gerry and I went out to a local sushi restaurant. My usual approach to sushi consists of a plate of raw salmon and a bowl of rice on the side, but these guys had the most elaborate menu I’ve ever seen, and it was impossible to resist. Gerry ate a pile of shrimp tempura decoratively arranged on top of a pile of spinach in order to resemble one of the explosions at Pearl Harbour. I had some California rolls made out of smoked Georgian catfish. They had been rolled in corn flakes and lightly fried on the circumference. It was, I must say, surprisingly good.

Rapid Prototyping Jewelry
One of Gerry’s colleagues is well known for his sophisticated uses of rapid prototyping technology, where a laser is used to set resin in consecutive passes that build up complex objects. The objects are sufficiently complex that they can be made with moving parts in a single printing, provided the 3D models have been constructed carefully enough in their details. We looked today at an exhibit of resin jewelry, including pieces that had ball and socket joints, various elaborate insertions, and metal plating. Most surprising to me were a set of four-inch-square broaches, or perhaps more accurately nipple plates, designed to be pinned on top of the breast.

1960s Lunch Counter Protests
McCory’s lunch counter was the site of a series of protests by a group of African American men in the 1960s, resulting, according to the sign out front, in the first people who spent time in jail rather than paying fines. This strategy was subsequently adopted throughout the South. Gerry and I went there for brunch today: they still have the original lunch counter and the seats, recovered when the store shut down and the restaurant opened.
http://visityorkcounty.com/partner/92686/3123/friendship-nine-lunch-counter-at-old-town-bistro/

Rust Red Bird
I spent some time this afternoon sitting out on Gerry and Karen’s lovely new screened-in deck, listening to birds singing and cicadas shrilling, and watching a busy red squirrel. Whether or not all this activity contributed to the quality of the documents I was working on is another question, but someone who stopped by was a bird I’d never seen before, slightly longer than a robin but rust coloured all over, with a long tail and a long beak. I tried to find his image on the interweb but to no avail. He sang a couple of times, and it sounded just like the scream of a diminutive gull. Perhaps it was after all a white bird that had been rolling in the local red dirt—Gerry has a pile of it beside his driveway, brought in straight, I would opine, from the surface of Mars.

Bethesda

I am at the University of Maryland to attend the annual Digital Humanities conference, but before we begin, I had a chance to spend a few hours today with Poshen and Ritchie and their daughter Michelle, who just turned six in May. Poshen and I went to grad school together in the late 1990s when we were both doing our MDes degrees, but after she and Richie got married and moved to the States, we’ve stayed in only intermittent contact. Now she is working as a designer at Johns Hopkins, and he is a senior epidemiologist for a consulting company in Rockville. They came to pick me up for lunch and we drove to an attractive area of Bethesda known as Bethesda Row, which is one of the “walkable town-like neighborhoods.”

Penang Restaurant
We went for Malaysian food, and I have to say everything was delicious. I tried to locate something intelligent online about the restaurant, but their site was down and I found the variety of reviews intimidating. Someone didn’t seem to like that they had food from all over the place, but I do enjoy a little transparently thin Nan bread followed by curried seafood and a delicious lamb stew. For dessert, something I’d never even heard of—a rice pudding made with black rice. Poshen tells me that black rice is a staple in Taiwan and is considered very healthy.

Bethesda
Wikipedia says that the city (about 55,000 souls) is a bit unusual in that it isn’t incorporated, so it has no official boundaries. Home of the National Institute for Health and a lot of institutions related to the American navy, it is also listed as one of the best-educated cities in the U.S. We spent some time at the bookstore, where Michelle read some books with her Mom and then one with me: Goodnight Moon. On the ride home, she also printed all our names and provided some very good drawings of many hearts, a lollipop, a flower, a bag with a heart on it, a chicken wearing a jacket, a face of a bear, and me.

Tucson

It was a bit of an adventure getting here. I got up at 7 am to finish packing for an ostensibly noon flight that actually left at 4 in the afternoon. That flight got me as far as Denver but then I had to wait for a plane to Tucson. I finally go to the Doubletree hotel at about 1:00 in the morning. Did I mention it is beautiful here, with actual sunlight that seems to have a warming function?

Planes from Brazil
One of the women at the airline desk gave me her theory as to why United is always so fraught with delays, which in this case required an engine part. She said, “well, these are Embraer planes. They’re built in Brazil. They don’t do well in the cold.” That sounded reasonable to me, but when I suggested it to my colleague Mo, she said “It’s always cold at 40,000 feet.” Fair enough.

Orange Trees
So it’s one o’clock in the morning and I look out my second story window and there is an orange tree there full of ripe oranges. This morning, I see it is one of a row of hundreds of trees that line the compound. I once heard from a colleague who’d moved to California that expat Canadians are always crazy for oranges, until they’ve spent a few years shoveling up the fruit and throwing it out. Nonetheless, I am crazy for oranges. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that the orange juice at breakfast was ghastly—thin with no flavour.

How Many Cactuses?
I guess that should be cacti. In any case, I took a few minutes at lunch today to stroll around the hotel, which is designed on the rambling model, something like a dozen two-storey motels strung together. In the course of circumambulating the building, I saw no fewer than 5 different species of cactus.

I picked a grapefruit
Stop the presses. I reached up and picked a grapefruit off one of the trees on the path between the meeting room and the swimming pool. It isn’t quite ripe, but I set it on the desk in my room when I went out for dinner, and when I got back, the whole room smelled deliciously of grapefruit. Who knew these things were so aromatic?

Ansel Adams
He lived from 1902-1984 and when he was in his seventies, he helped set up The Centre for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. We went to tour it last night and were reminded that a lot of the creative part of creative photography takes place in the dark room. So now I am left wondering how many of his amazing effects of shadow and light were actually burning and dodging. http://www.creativephotography.org/

Arizona – home of turquoise mining
Who knew? Maybe everybody except me, but the Navajo in Arizona and a lot of other people too have mined turquoise here. You strip mine it, apparently. Many of the historic mines are closed now, but a few are still running, producing 20% of the world’s supply of turquoise. Much of the rest comes, who knew? From China.

Guelph

I flew into Pearson Airport in Toronto, then took a Red Car van to Guelph. My flight was enlivened by a party of about a dozen school teachers from Spain, who were returning after a month of teacher education in Edmonton, at some teaching institute I don’t know about. They were full of fun, chanting a countdown to takeoff and singing little songs together, one of which they’d made up about how great Canada was, then at the end riotously celebrating our successful landing. I got the impression that life in Spain must be full of enthusiasm. I was seated next to a couple of lovebirds who spent the whole flight facing each other, murmuring endearments in Spanish.

Fool’s Gold
As a child, I always enjoyed the inability of Goldie Hawn to make it through an entire joke on Laugh In, so I have followed the career of her daughter Kate Hudson with interest. This movie was primarily about how even a college graduate can’t resist Matthew McConaughey’s naked torso, accompanied with a slapstick checklist of how many ways he could get hit in the head. This says two things to me about the women who enjoy chickflicks that I would probably have been better off not knowing. Donald Sutherland reprised his role as Kate Bush’s father in the music video for Cloudbusting, and we all felt better when the smart girl, played by Kate Hudson, finally told Paris Hilton, played by Alexis Dziena, that we’d like her to act smarter than she does.

Aberfoyle Puppet Idol
I’m not sure I can clearly express the sense of fun I experienced on seeing this sign. I don’t much care for the various idols that have been foisted upon a dissolute public, but a puppet idol might be just the kind of idol I would enjoy going to see. This part of Ontario, also known as “move here to raise your kids dot com” seems to feature all kinds of rural delights, from spreading views to the company’s own water. It seems to me a quiet place, with homey pleasures. The Red Car stopped in a cul-de-sac last night to drop someone off, and we’d gathered a little crowd of onlookers by the time we left.

Canadian Design
I’ve occasionally waxed lyrical on the subject of the design of Finnish, for example, hotel rooms, so I thought it might be interesting to hear about where things could stand a bit of improvement. I’m staying at a very nice hotel chain in a beautiful room. However, the roll of toilet paper is fastened in such a way that a vertical line dropped from its edge would land on the toilet seat. So it actually rests against your ribs when you sit down. There is an elaborate light system with a master switch at the door, but no way to control the lights from anywhere near the bed, meaning you’d better plan ahead, or else you’ll be making a little nervous excursion in a strange room in the dark. The air conditioner has a large vent, the direction of which can’t be changed, and it aims directly at the only chair in front of the only desk with the only internet connection. Fortunately, one of the decorative blankets doubles as a shawl.

Victoria

I’ve been to Victoria now a dozen times, almost entirely thanks to Ray S, who has arranged all kinds of enjoyable and productive activities for me, ranging from guest lectures to summer courses. I have the impression I may even be an Adjunct Professor here at the University of Victoria, which he arranged to make some of the paperwork easier. This time I’m in town for a week-long grantwriting session, and am staying in a dorm room on campus. I love the campus, in large part because it is littered with bunnies. There are often dozens in sight at any given time, and if you are interested, you can feed them, although it takes quite a bit of relationship-building before any of them will let you touch them. I saw Chris S. and Susan L. both manage it last summer when we were here for a thesisfest, and it was quite amazing. Under their influence, I even managed to pet an old veteran myself, which I would have given odds against any other time.

Hummingbirds and Deer
Feral bunnies aren’t the only neighbours you have when you are living in Victoria, and last night we were visited in Ray’s back yard by a hummingbird, who came and went throughout dinner. It was quite a large one, but as mobile as a shot, hovering for minutes at a time, then abruptly hovering somewhere twenty feet in another direction. I even got to see it perched for a while on a wire. Lynn says it is a regular there. Several years ago I was also pleased to meet some deer grazing early one morning on campus, and last night there was a big doe standing beside the road as we drove up. I like the idea that this environment supports all these creatures. As Susan says, the rabbits make it clear that there is a low bar for survival here, which should mean it is easier for us to survive too.

My Blueberry Nights
After I ate my dinner in the student pub, where the excitement included a very good soundtrack and a very dull array of television sets, nearly all of them dedicated to, of all things, watching other people playing cards, I decided to stop by the campus theatre and see if they’d sell me some popcorn. As luck would have it, they were just 15 minutes away from also showing a film I’ve wanted to see—the new one by Wang Kar Wai. So despite the fact that I was still wearing my sunglasses, I managed to round up a very bad latte and a very big bag of popcorn, then found myself a seat near the centre and about two-thirds of the way toward the back. The reviews of this film have more or less stated outright that it is gawdawful, but I wondered if maybe they just didn’t properly appreciate Wang Kar Wai, who does tend to put shit between the camera and whatever it is he’s filming, and he likes the occasional motion blur, and then there was that sequence involving Brigit Lin and all those East Indian guys. Nonetheless, he’d collected a lot of eye candy here, with Nora Jones and Rachel Weisz pretending to be most of the girls I grew up with, and Natalie Portman reprising a poker-playing version of my Aunt Lil. Unfortunately, Jones and Jude Law did contribute a lot of dialogue trouble near the beginning, but if they would only stop talking, I thought, this might be all right. Then they did stop talking, for a reasonable portion of the movie, with Jones just providing the soundtrack instead, and really it was quite good. There were all the broken hearts and homicidal, suicidal off-duty police officers you could hope for, and plenty of waitressing, all wrapped in at best a kind of bildungsroman and at worst a picaresque. I did think not understanding what they were saying would have improved the thing a great deal, but I’ve suspected that for some time now about Wang Kar Wai movies, and really this is the first one where I’ve had to face that fact head on. And, frankly, I do like seeing an actress wearing vintage clothing being poorly reflected in a wet dilapidated wall, and there was plenty of that kind of entertainment to be had. I’d give it three bad lattes and half a bag of leftover popcorn out of five.

What Rabbits Don’t Like
Well, I think they are a bit nervous about a guy wearing sunglasses after dark, which is something you could truthfully say about a lot of people, and fair enough. On the other hand, when I finally did coax somebody over, he couldn’t seem to believe that what I was actually offering him was a delicious piece of salty, buttered popcorn. It was as though I had decided to offer up a rabbit dropping. “If this is how you’re going to act,” he said, “you’re right to be wearing those sunglasses, matey. You wouldn’t want people to recognize you.” And off he went, muttering maledictions under his breath all the way.

Aberdeen

We flew British Airways to Aberdeen, and I have to say it was the hardest landing I’ve ever experienced on a commercial flight. When I took my flying lessons 25 years ago, they told me that the idea on landing a plane is to fly it just slightly above the runway and slow down until the plane settles gently to the surface. In this case, the pilot seemed more inclined to just fly the thing into the ground and trust the tires not to burst. Perhaps they have short runways.

One door, two doorways
The bathroom in our hotel room here in downtown Aberdeen has a feature I’ve never seen before. The room has a somewhat irregular shape, with the sink, toilet, and shower in three separate areas. They are configured in such a way that the door leading into the bathroom swings inward to become the door that closes off the part of the room with the toilet in it. There are two doorjambs, each with a proper strike plate for the latch, but only one door.

The Granite City
Apparently that’s what they call it, and they aren’t kidding. In the same way that Bath is made of pale yellow stone, Aberdeen is constructed almost entirely of pale grey stone. They claim it will glitter in the sunlight, but I haven’t noticed any particular gleaming. Maybe the sun has to be at the right angle. What I have noticed, though, is a hell of a lot of roses. Some of the sidewalks are lined with beds of them, stretching off as far as my eye can see, which admittedly is not that far, but its impressive nonetheless. They also have many different kinds, so that in a single block you might have a dozen colours and smells. To get this kind of intensive rose action in Canada, you need to go someplace like the Bouchard Gardens, not down the street to the chemist.

Bricks and Mortar
I asked one of our cab drivers about housing in Aberdeen. He said there are very few vacancies because of the oil industry. There is also virtually no board construction, but there are cheaper places that are made of grey brick, then covered with a kind of surface he called “herle” or maybe “herel.” You basically plaster the surface of the brick, which is in itself considered too unattractive, then spray pebbles into the plaster. I was also surprised to hear that there is no longer a local supply of granite, since the quarry shut down ten years ago. New buildings either use granite recovered from old buildings, or else they ship it in from places like China. Or maybe he was pulling my leg.

Oystercatchers
These are quite an attractive little bird, about the size of a magpie, with a bright red or orange beak and a loud shrieking cry. They next in the rooftops around the University of Aberdeen, which is something they apparently don’t normally do. We saw one of them roughhousing with a gull, of which there are many in Aberdeen, their voices echoing into the bedroom all night long. Susan also noticed one of the oystercatchers landing in an unusual way, luffing its wings as it got close to the ground, if luffing is the verb I’m after, in order to shed the lift.

London

I flew in from Oulu and spent a night at the cheapest hotel near the airport, a Comfort Inn, for the low discount price of $250. Then I went back to Heathrow in time to meet Susan, Michael, and Marley as they came out from the arrivals gate in Terminal 4. In the meantime, I’d also stopped briefly at Terminal 5, where they have a fountain I liked. It is a 5x10 grid of water spouts that shoot out from nozzles that are flush with the tiles. Each spout is about my height. The system stops them abruptly, so the water all falls to the ground at once with a loud snap. I only wished I could run around in there in my swimming trunks.

The British Museum
I made my maiden voyage to Europe in the year 2000. Since then, I have been to London more times than I can count, but there are still plenty of things I haven’t seen. Most of the British Museum goes on that list, although I try to get there for a few hours on every trip. As you know, it contains a good representative sample of the loot of an empire, so it is really more like conveniently visiting the cultural repositories of a dozen countries than seeing the culture of England itself. We scampered past the Elgin marbles, various winged Assyrian centaurs, a few Egyptian mummies and their cat statues, swords and bits of armour of every conceivable material and state of preservation (I liked the bronze ones best), and even a few dakinis and bodhisattvas. You often have to wonder, however, about the labels. A lot of supernatural Buddhist creatures, for instance, are depicted overcoming their own mental afflictions by trampling on them. The label in the BM says “Dakinis are usually shown standing on corpses.”

The Natural History Museum
This is another of my favourite museums, in part I think because it embodies the Victorian cultural obsession with nature. The arches on the entrances soar up fifty feet or more, and each arch has carvings of some living creature — birds on one, snakes on another — climbing up and over the top and down the other side. There is even one with monkeys. They also have huge ballrooms filled with, for instance, their rock collection, which is admittedly very fine. There's a vault room with some of their favourites, including a meteorite that they know came from Mars, because it had some small pockets of Martian air in it. There’s a huge diamond necklace from South Africa. They also have a fossil coelacanth, which is the only one I’ve ever seen. And in the dinosaur room they have a robot T-Rex. I watched a toddler lurch in, see the thing, and begin to wail. It seemed clear that this was just the sort of betrayal he had been expecting from his parents, who quickly picked him up and reassured him to the contrary.

The Phantom of the Opera
I’ve never been to a theatre in London, but on this trip we decided to find one, and I must say it was a lot of fun. The place was packed, although the Phantom has been haunting it nightly for 21 years now. They sell ice cream at the intermission, and the many stage tricks were just the kind of thing I like. The descent beneath the theatre was managed by having a catwalk lowered one end at a time while the actors walked on it. The Phantom had a stick that threw small balls of fire. The boat was exceedingly boatlike as it sailed back and forth on the stage. There was also singing and a plot of some kind.

Stonehenge, Salisbury, and Bath

We took a day trip on a bus to see some sights out in the country, and we loved them all. There isn’t a lot you can see in a day, and we spent most of it on a bus, but we got to see quite a bit of the countryside, which we’d never seen before, and there was an hour or two at each stop. It was interesting to see how narrow the roads were, and in some cases how close the farm buildings were to the road: right up to it, more or less, with just a couple of tufts of grass separating a stone barn from a two-lane highway.

Stonehenge
On the way to walk around Stonehenge, you pass a picket line of ancient people wearing the original hippie regalia. Our guide called them “a congregation of all the crusties of England.” They are standing with hand-painted banners that object to the site being treated as a tourist destination for other people who lack proper reverence. I admired their gameness in the face of absurdity, and they certainly looked like they could use a little help. They seemed to me a kind of grimy rearguard action from the few surviving souls of the original boomer flowering. It was hard not be reverent, though, because as Susan says, you stand in this vast empty plain and suddenly there’s a Neolithic monument, then more vast empty plain. The plain itself is attractive enough to a boy from Balgonie, but of course something made out of very large stones is even nicer. I wonder how they’ve managed to keep it from being completely soaked in colourful graffiti. The area is roped off, but only for the past ten years, when it became a real problem that people were chipping off souvenirs. So you walk the perimeter and take photos from every side, and you wonder about the ditches and try to guess what useful kind of shadows the heal stone could possible cast, then someone sold me a very good ice cream cone on the way out.

Salisbury
Salisbury struck me as a charming little city. It is inhabited, we were told, by 100,000 souls, quite small for a city, but they get the designation unequivocally because they are periodically host to a circuit judge. Now that I type that out it sounds unlikely, but that’s what I heard. One of the things they are famous for is a beautiful Gothic cathedral, which was quite a sight to see. Ruskin, I am told, once described Gothic cathedrals as “stone in bloom” and I could see his point. The place was littered with small surface features that seemed very organic against the square mass of the building itself. Inside said cathedral are many wonderful things, including various arches and sculptures and tombstones that you walk on, which made me a bit twitchy, truth be told, and also one of the copies of the Magna Carta. I’d expected something illuminated, God knows why, but in fact it was just a big sheet of vellum almost completely covered in lines of small black text. It was quite clearly a working document, a contract, rather than a display piece. Unfortunately, on the day we were in Salisbury, it was raining like the Dickens, and no ice cream anywhere.

Bath
In the 18th and 19th centuries, this was where you went to stand around in pools with your fashionable pals, and drink bad water to encourage your bowels. They built these amazing streets lined with houses made of pale yellow stone, and at some point one of them fell in and they realized the Romans had bathed here, too. Now you can tour the Roman baths and get some sense of the complexity of what they built, which involved lots of water and heated floors and so on. Apparently you also came here to ask Minerva to curse people for you, mostly for having stolen your stuff and gotten away with it. The curses they had selected for posting usually required a blood sacrifice to offset them, and it had to be your own blood.

St. Albans

We are staying in a private hotel about a half hour by train out of London, in the large town, or perhaps small city, called St. Albans. They have a very good cook here, so we are eating things like fresh tartar sauce on our fish and chips, which is apparently about as hard to make as fresh Hollandaise sauce, so kudos to the chef. Our first day here was spent wandering around literally smelling the roses, which included a big bank of my favourite orange ones. I have only ever seen them before in the form of one or two bushes in the grounds of the Empress Hotel in Victoria. I also managed to find someone to sell me a soft ice cream cone. Susan’s crazy for Victorian homes, which means she’s in seventh heaven. We thought we might venture into the city at the end of the day, only to find there’d been some kind of mishap and the trains weren’t running.

Oulu

I first came to Finland in 2004 with Susan and Rosan, for a design conference in Helsinki. We loved Helsinki and still talk about it as a place we’d like to live someday. The Finns seem sufficiently melancholic and subliminally aware of everything around them that I think of them as a nation of telepaths. Where normally you might expect one person out of a hundred to take a good long look at you and get a mental impression, in Helsinki this is maybe one person out of ten. In Helsinki airport, for instance, I arrived in time to change to an earlier flight, so I spoke with a Finnish woman at the desk. She had to be eight month’s pregnant, and she came over to where I stood to one side, smiling at me sympathetically despite the hordes crowded around the front of her desk (you don’t get a seat assignment in a flight to Oulu). The cost turned out to be prohibitive for me ($75 to save 2 hours). “You have time then,” she said, “to go and get a decent meal.” I’m not sure if she actually said “last decent meal before flying into the remote North,” but that was how I understood her, so I went and did just that, eating a pizza made from reindeer, blue cheese, and a long, thick mushroom I didn’t recognize. The pizza was in the original Sicilian style, by which I mean uncut with a paper-thin crust, and the diced pieces of reindeer were very red, tasting a bit like bacon. It was delicious.

Breakfast in Oulu
Thank goodness I misunderstood about the food. The breakfast buffet here was included in the price of the room, and was good as any breakfast I’ve eaten in Scandinavia, which is saying a lot. There were four kinds of yogurt, for example, ten kinds of bread, and fruit compote involving fruits I don’t know anything about, one of which seemed to involve pine trees. I also had the pleasure of eating my first breakfast in Oulu with Susan H. and her husband Martin, who have been systematically traversing Earth now for several years, most recently north of here, where you can drive up to the Northernmost point in Europe that can be reached by car. They got there via the Norwegian fjords, which they say are definitely worth taking the ferry to float past.

Midnight Sun
Oulu is much closer to the Arctic circle than I’ve ever been before. I arrived at my hotel about 10:30 and it might have been late afternoon as far as the sun was concerned. I got up this morning at 7:30 and in terms of the sun, nothing has changed. They tell me that I can only expect a couple of hours of dusk in the middle of the night. It’s been heavily overcast though.

Finnish Design in my Room
Design in Finland is of course world-class, and my hotel room has several nice features. There’s a reclining couch by the large windows, several lights by the bed, including a red strip overhead and two reading halogens on flexible stalks. The closet in the entranceway also has a neon light strip, built right into the bar where you hang up the clothes.

Bunch of Cowboys
In the movie Armageddon, that’s how the Russian astronaut describes the American astronauts as they inadvertently go about destroying his space station. The phrase came to mind because of my bathtub, which is that kind I now think of as central European, because of my bathing adventures last fall in Krakow and Prague. These tubs remind me of the ones in old Westerns, where Jimmy Stewart is hanging out both ends with a bit of water in the middle. Whenever I wash, I feel that I am missing a cowboy hat. There is also the modern addition of a removable shower head on a cord, which inevitably adds that slapstick element.

What is it with the USSR?
While I’m on the Russian theme, Oulu does remind me in several ways of Poland, which I suppose has something to do with the history of the various regions. The highway signs, for instance, are similar, with silhouettes of towns turned off and on to mark the need for reduced speed on the highways, and my queen-sized bed is actually two single beds pushed together. The view from my window, in what I believe is the nicest hotel in town, includes a huge factory, belching steam from three smokestacks. Someone has a photo here, although from where I am I can’t see the water (http://www.panoramio.com/photo/5764906). I also have a government form to fill out, although when I mentioned I’d been traveling for more than 24 hours, the Finnish woman at the desk kindly suggested that I can do it at my leisure and drop it off sometime this morning. On a more positive note, I should also mention that there are little canals or rivers or something all over the place, with low stone arches over them, and right beside the hotel is a beautiful park, that you can reach by walking past the restaurant patio that overlooks the bay. Susan S. also tells me that the entire city is wireless.

Ducks in a Row
Kirsten U. and I took a walk in the park one day, taking the opportunity to talk at some length about land cartels, and the grounds were as lovely as advertised, with trees and shrubbery and flowers and little streams everywhere with charming footbridges built over them. The place also featured playgrounds for kids, as well as some greenhouses tucked away here and there. It seemed to be a favourite too with the wildfowl, and we saw a wide variety of the kinds of birds who swim. At one point, we watched half a dozen or more mature ducks climb one at a time out of the water and onto the grass. They were greenheads mostly, although there were a couple of hens mixed in. Once they emerged from the water, they did something I’d never seen in my life; they lined up single file and marched away over the lawn. It seemed so natural and spontaneous to me that I wondered if the expression for difficulty shouldn’t be the converse: “keeping your ducks from lining up.”

The Fat Man
When I announced that I was going to Oulu, Tom N. mentioned that there was a fat little policeman standing near the harbour, and sure enough, he turned out to be iconic for the city. He’s about eight feet tall and six feet across, and is there to honour the market police, who we saw in quiet action at midnight one night, when we were there to photograph a bunch of our colleagues clowning around the statue. Some of the local boys, beer in hand, came to join us, and so we took their pictures too. Nobody bothered about that, but a police van did pull up and the officers called a few people over for a chat. Everyone stands around in the street with alcohol in their hands, so apparently there’s no equivalent to the Canadian idea of an outdoor patio needing to be enclosed. The statue was commissioned in 1986 for the city from a gallery owner who’d previously made a smaller version. The sculptor’s name is Kaarlo Mikkonen, and this was his only public statue. Someone has a polite photo here, somewhat unlike the ones we were taking:
http://johnmartintaylor.com/images/dcp_3109h1.jpg

Vancouver

Susan and I were in town for a week to attend a couple of conferences. The Congress met last year in Saskatoon and was here at UBC this year. It is a ragtag collection of about 65 learned societies, whose members all get together once a year for a couple of weeks in the same spot. These are societies from the arts side of campus. The Congress this year was the biggest ever, with over 9500 delegates. My research teams gave papers at the Society for Digital Humanities, and Susan had a paper at the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science. We had a simply wonderful time at these conferences, then spent our leisure hours wandering around this corner of the city, meeting some of the local flora and fauna.

A couple of raccoons
We went walking in the rain in Stanley Park, and were standing around under the cedar trees at one point, admiring their age and size, when who should stick her head out from around a tree trunk but a ratty wet raccoon. She stood on all fours and looked at us for a while, then stood up a little and showed us her empty hands. It finally occurred to Susan that she might be interested in a little dried fruit strip. While Susan was fetching that out, along came another, older raccoon, much less wet, and Susan fed the two of them the whole bar, tossing the pieces onto the ground in front of them. The older one rubbed the piece of fruit between her hands before eating it. After we finished and were walking away, I looked back to see them walking up the side of a cedar tree, like a couple of giant squirrels.

Water birds
The geese have their goslings and the ducks their ducklings, and you can walk right up to where they are. The family units mostly stick together, but there always seems to be one of the crowd who is not clear on the concept and ends up wandering around and dithering a little. We also had a chance to see several great blue herons, always individually. One was flying by with a stick in his beak, and a couple of them were standing at the water’s edge with the wind blowing their beards. One tonight was perched on the top of a sign down at the beach, looking from the back, Susan said, like an undertaker. Apparently Stanley Park has one of the largest urban colonies in the world; in 2004, eighty of them showed up and started nesting here.

Harbour seal
We walked the sea wall several times with our friends, and saw in the distance some swimming animals, but we never got close enough to decide whether they were otters or seals. Tonight one of them swam close enough to the wall where we were standing that we could have dived down and touched her, and she was clearly a seal. She was larger than the ones I saw in Cape Town, and spotted rather than the uniform colour I saw there. She was floating gently on the surface and took a good long time, even swimming closer at one point while looking right at us. It was clear though that she could swim like the dickens, and when she was underwater you could see her white belly as she swooped around catching minnows.

That’s a Triathlete
One of the other harbour sightings I made tonight was of an ungainly looking creature flopping about a little. I wondered if it was something injured. It turned out, of course, to be a human swimmer. The triathletes are in town, having arrived from all over the world, wearing their spiderman costumes in all weather and making the rest of us look just that little bit more tired and fat. We saw a sign in the lobby today mentioning that the kitchen was going to open early for them, since they want to breakfast between 4 and 5 a.m. rather than at the more conventional 7:00. God love them.

Frankfurt

I have to say we are three for three on hotels this trip. The Concorde Hotel in Frankfurt turns out to be a four-star designer extravaganza, all dark wood and white cloth. The furniture in the lobby all has names, and there’s a bowl of granny smith apples next to the bowl of Werther’s. In the room, you can choose among four colours of lights available at the base of the white drapes. The ceiling is easily twelve feet high, and the leather couch has a matching leather coffee table with a wooden panel. There’s also a matching leather footstool. On the down side, we are about three blocks away from the hotel where I last stayed in Frankfurt, which is just a short walk from the train station. It also means we are about two blocks away from the red light district. I walked today past a neon sign that actually said “girls, girls, girls.”

Crazy Ass Trees
Along the Main river, there’s some kind of public park that has clearly been given over to exotic plants, including all kinds of wonderful trees. There are yew trees and oak trees and the ones I disbelievingly painted in paint-by-number pictures as a child, that seem themselves to have been painted by numbers up their trunks. There is a monkey paw that I’ve only ever seen before in Victoria, some kind of symmetric giant that has two parallel trunks, and a whole corridor of these things that look like nothing on earth, with no foliage at this time of year, but some kind of bulbous growths at the ends of large twisted branches. They all stop at exactly the same height.

Derelicts
Frankfurt seems to have more people living rough than I’ve seen in most European cities. Around the main shopping centre they are lying on the ground in groups, or sitting together on the benches, or lurching from place to place, talking to themselves about their troubles. In the grocery store on the corner there was a man running from place to place, brushing people aside as he collected his packages of pistachios and raced to the cashier. Up closer than we wanted to be to him in the checkout line, we could see he was quite young, in his early thirties maybe, although he looked at first glance twenty years older than that. His skin was covered in sores. He seemed to be on companionable terms with the skinny man with green hair who was waiting by the door. He was having his own problems, and appeared unclear about whether he had actually bought a chocolate bar or not, and if he had, whether or not it could be opened.

Pork Knuckles
Before we came to Frankfurt, our colleagues suggested that we sample the local cuisine, so we made an effort to find it, dining tonight to one side of a medieval square. One of the signature items is a very large roasted chunk of pork, served on a bed of sauerkraut with mustard on the side. It was actually quite delicious, once you got over the emotional realization that you were about to take several years off the life of your cardiovascular system.

Argentinian Beef
I don’t think we get a lot of beef from Argentina imported to Alberta, but I’ve heard good things about a steak from the Argentine. Sure enough, they have them here in Frankfurt, and I have to say they have been amazing. I’ve had an Argentinian fillet twice now, and both times I was more than pleasantly surprised at just how amazingly good a three-inch block of cow can taste.

Frankfurt: city of bankers
There is a giant Euro in the centre of the city, and I think it explains a lot about this place. The city seems to put things together that wouldn’t normally go together, and does it without blinking. In another city, it might seem like cheek, but here it is just the order of the day. Frankfurt has postmodern skyscrapers next to medieval squares, and around the corner is a giant statue of what appears to be a stylized Gumby. There are trains, river barges, girls girls girls, and an eight-storey shopping mall that is essential one big elevator shaft. M.C. Escher may very well have got the inspiration for his famous interior by standing at the top of this mall, which turns out to be chock a block with stores for teenagers. Yesterday we looked, just to take a few examples, at Kurt Cobain dolls that talk when you pull their string, giant vinyl stickers that put shadows of plants on the livingroom wall, and a toaster that scorches the bread with a skull and crossbones.

Four Suffering Impressionists
We went to see an art exhibit that featured four women impressionists who it appears are often mentioned together: Mary Cassatt, Marie Bracquemond, Berthe Morisot, and Eva Gonzales. They were trying to be professional painters in the late Victorian period, when a respectable woman couldn’t leave home unaccompanied. The Louvre, it turns out, was particularly useful because you could meet other artists there without compromising your reputation. What we saw was room after room of pictures, the subjects of which were the sources of the oppression of these women: domestic settings, children, other women, many of whom were fooling around with a stocking or a shoe. It was ghastly in the extreme, although I have to say there was a particularly melancholy winter landscape by Marie Bracquemond that I liked very much. The colours are all muted browns and the entire thing is overlayed with swatches of white, conveying perfectly to my mind a particular kind of winter scene that I’ve known well.

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.