From kragen@pobox.com Fri Dec 27 08:10:04 2002 From: kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker) Date: Fri, 27 Dec 2002 03:10:04 -0500 (EST) Subject: London trip, part 1 Message-ID: <20021227081004.3AA4E3F54B@panacea.canonical.org> Beatrice and I flew to London on 2002-12-21. We'd had a busy week just beforehand. I just bought another laptop on eBay for US$330 --- the old one didn't seem to have much physical wear left --- and the new one included an extra motherboard, an extra keyboard, and two batteries, along with the standard power supply. I bought a Tecra 8000 again, the same model I bought in February, because the old one held up quite well under heavy use. I hoped I could exchange parts and avoid having to reconfigure drivers and stuff --- just move the old hard disk over. It turned out to work better than I'd expected. My old power supply had died three or four months ago, and I'd replaced it with a Radio Shack universal power supply. A week or so later, the first time I let the battery fully discharge, I discovered that the Radio Shack power supply couldn't charge it; the laptop drew too much power when charging the battery from zero, so the power supply would shut itself off to avoid overheating. Well, the 45W power supply that came with the new laptop could charge the old battery, so to my delight, I now had three working laptop batteries. Better, my work had a couple of dead Tecra 8100s in the storeroom; they use power supplies compatible with my laptop, but capable of supplying 60 watts. I took one with me on this trip in case the power supply from the new laptop gave up the ghost. On the 21st, I read and wrote email on the plane, all the way from the Bay Area to London. The Virgin flight we took had a TV screen at each seat, which played annoying, distracting music videos until we took off. I carefully covered the screen with the scrap of papery cloth I found behind my head; presumably the staff intended it to keep my hair oil off the seat cloth. We left around 17:00, then arrived in London around 11:15 on the 22nd. In the airport, I discovered that the train ticket machine wouldn't accept the 20-pound note I'd acquired from a foreign-exchange parlor before leaving San Francisco. Frustrated, I pushed the cart full of our luggage up the ramp back into Heathrow, converted some more US bills to English notes, and returned downstairs to take the train. Neither Beatrice nor I had slept during the flight, so we began to feel tired and cranky by this time; but we each empathized enough with the other to avoid taking the other's crankiness too personally. We took a taxicab in the rain from the train station to the house of some friends of Beatrice's family in London. They planned to spend the Christmas holiday out of the country, so we'd volunteered to feed their cat and watch their flat, in exchange for lodging there. They hail from France, originally, so we each had our chance to practice our French a fair bit. Mine came slowly enough that our hosts kept switching back to English to make it easier for me, but Beatrice conversed fluently. Despite our exhaustion, we visited Beatrice's family in Paris later that day, taking a short nap while there. Her parents and her brother had already arrived. Her mother has visited England for several years now, taking care of Beatrice's dying grandmother, who recently moved into an old-people home with a nursing staff near her house. On the 23rd, we went Christmas shopping in Camden Town. On the 24th, we took the tube to Waterloo station, met Beatrice's brother, and took a train down to a small town about an hour away where Beatrice's grandmother lives. We visited her for a few hours, tasting a traditional English large hot lunch cooked by the staff, after which I understood why French people prefer their own cuisine to that of the English. The lunch contained boiled, chopped kale, boiled, chopped, skinned oversized turnips called swedes, boiled, skinned potatoes, boiled, chopped, skinned chicken topped with a truly horrifying sauce, consisting mostly of boiled, chopped mushrooms and wine. The boiled, chopped broccoli and the boiled, chopped cauliflower, at least, weren't skinned. The cooks eschewed the use of spices, perhaps because they might have given some flavor to the food. The lunchtime conversation, however, made it all worthwhile; I had the chance to spend some time with some new parts of my family, including my future grandmother-in-law. She may die soon, so I may never see her again. Beatrice's sister Connie had planned to arrive around the time we did, on Saturday the 21st, but didn't arrive until the middle of this lunchtime gathering. We welcomed her enthusiastically. After lunch, I fell asleep, we saw Bea's old house and old primary school, we came back. Beatrice's brother Walter went to pass some water at the loo in Waterloo, but fell and broke his ankle on the steps. We went to St. Paul's Cathedral for midnight Mass. On the 25th, we went over to Beatrice's parents' house by a taxi (cost 30 pounds, about US$40), ate a big Christmas dinner, opened Christmas presents, and watched the Queen speak on TV. That night, I read _Uncle Tungsten_, a book by Oliver Sacks about his childhood; Beatrice's father Walter had given it to me as a Christmas present. On the 26th, we'd hoped to see BodyWorlds, but found it wouldn't reopen until the next day. Beatrice did, however, figure out how I could connect my laptop to the Internet (by configuring her iBook as a wireless access point, aka "base station", with NAT built in), so I sent the 60 messages I'd written and downloaded the 263 more that had arrived in the mean time. Later that day, we went to see Beatrice's childhood friend, Shaheen Bilgrani, who works on children's books. We chatted with her and her mother for hours on various topics. They seemed surprised to hear that not everyone in the US supports the impending war with Iraq; of course, the international news media don't carry much news of the massive American antiwar protests. Beatrice twisted her ankle on the way back to the flat. She experienced a lot of pain, but the sprain seems superficial. I hope she feels better in the morning. I've seen enough of London to get used to the superficial differences from any place in the US, which I will try to list here. I think I'd need a couple more weeks here to start to understand the important differences, but sadly, we return quite soon. I doubt the following list will give any experienced world traveler insight into London, but perhaps it will give them insight into me. The electrical plugs have a quite different design; the receptacles occupy about three to six times as much wall area as the American receptacles, and the plugs correspondingly take up more space, and it's 240 volts, not 120. This has many minor, but far-reaching, consequences. Large household appliances like electric stoves and dryers need no special plugs. The plugs all lie flat against the wall, with the wire coming out the edge, so you can push chairs and other appliances up against them without straining the wire. Power strips here contain three or four receptacles, not six to eight, and they take up more space. Fuses have finer gradations of current; I've seen three-amp and thirteen-amp fuses in appliances. Each wall receptacle has its own individual power switch, for safety, I suppose. Refrigerators here hide in kitchen cabinets, specially designed to provide airflow over the cooling coils. Drivers drive on the left side of the street; this surprises me every time I ride in a car or walk across a street, and my surprise surprises me, too. I thought I'd adapt more quickly. The taxicabs' shape revolts me; they resemble some of the uglier cars designed before World War II. However, they have plenty of floor space for luggage. Prepaid GSM mobile phones bring great convenience. Bea and I have been using a leftover mobile phone from another family member; it had about two pounds left on its prepaid balance, so I bought a 10-pound "top-up card" at a phone store, and two minutes later, it had twelve. I see them in use at bus stops everywhere here, often texting; and I see ads for cellphone-only services like yell.com. Surveillance cameras dot the landscape. The flat we borrow has a camera at the front door, attached to a little black-and-white LCD screen in each apartment, so we can see the person ringing the doorbell. In the subways, I could often see five or six surveillance cameras at a time. Overhead power lines seem rarer here than in the States. The subway allows dogs, as long as you carry them, and the trains also allow dogs. This pleases me. London smells of mold, of rotting leaves, of moss, of algae, and of decay. I don't know much about London's overall environmental impact; often invisible factors like smokestack scrubbers and thermal insulation play large parts in determining environmental impact, as well as factors like car use. Public transit here goes everywhere, fast and reliably, and "petrol" costs 75 pence a liter, or about US$4.80 per gallon; California's unusually high gasoline prices hover around US$1.50 to US$1.90 per gallon. The streets seem full here, but not nearly as full as in San Francisco. However, in a variety of ways, the Londinians do not practice visible means of environmental conservation mandatory in California. Low-flow toilets, faucets, and showerheads seem unknown; grossly polluting cars belching visible clouds of black or white smoke continue to operate. Consumer packaging uses as much plastic as in the US, but the city has no plastics recycling program. I have seen no compact fluorescent lightbulbs in people's houses, although I have visited only three houses so far. I have not seen the notorious London fog, only London rainclouds, which rain a little every day. Microfiber polyester vests and sweaters have kept me warm enough so far; my long wool coat has remained unused, unnecessary. London contains a great diversity of peoples; I hear as many languages here as in San Francisco, I see many different colors of skin and modes of dress, and I hear many different accents. -- Kragen Sitaker Edsger Wybe Dijkstra died in August of 2002. The world has lost a great man. See http://advogato.org/person/raph/diary.html?start=252 and http://www.kode-fu.com/geek/2002_08_04_archive.shtml for details. From kragen@pobox.com Sun Dec 29 18:52:49 2002 From: kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker) Date: Sun, 29 Dec 2002 13:52:49 -0500 (EST) Subject: London trip, part 2 Message-ID: <20021229185249.6D0B03F54C@panacea.canonical.org> On December 27, we went from London to Paris. Beatrice wanted to walk to the Tube, then take the Tube to Waterloo station to catch the Eurostar to Paris, but after walking a couple of blocks on her sprained ankle, she finally accepted my suggestion to hail a taxicab. I noticed that the taxicabs in London have several design features in common with American police cars: the back windows lock (although under passenger control), the back doors lock under the control of the driver, and a transparent partition separates the driver's seat from the back seat. I don't think I mentioned this in my last note, but I enjoy this trip very much, and I like London, despite my griping about its inconveniences. I began this email from the TGV, speeding through the French countryside at hundreds of miles per hour. I hadn't ridden a fast train since I visited Japan at 15. The experience impressed me less than I'd hoped; it looks much like traveling through a smaller countryside on a normal-speed train. I only noticed differences when we passed another train going the other way or when we passed cars on a highway. After we zipped over from the TGV station (Gare du Nord) to our hotel via Metro, we went to bed immediately (around 16:00) and slept nearly until the next morning. Beatrice got up briefly and bought some food: four hot potstickers with shrimp, some pitas, some delicious, fresh oranges and pears, some ham, and some Babybel cheese. We dined briefly, then slept more. On December 28, we visited the Musee d'Orsay on the Seine in central Paris. I saw many beautiful works of art; I stood for a while and chatted with Rodin's bust of Victor Hugo, but he didn't say much. Young people with backpacks and bedrolls filled the Metro on the 27th and the morning of the 28th. Apparently some 80 000 people came to a small town near Paris for a gathering of some Christian sect, whose name, unfortunately, I didn't understand. The Metro had signs warning us of the crowds. On the 28th, we changed hotels; our new hotel has hybrid French/American electrical plugs and a bidet, but the phone doesn't work. I have this idea that the British BT Cellnet phone we brought from England should work here, and it does seem to know the names of the local cellular providers, and one of them sent me a "Welcome to France" message when I got off the train, and it even lets me hear their helpful French-then-English error messages, but I haven't figured out how to get it to call any people I know, in any country, including France. Even the instructions in the SMS I got from SFR when I got off the TGV don't help; they suggest dialing 100 for "home customer care", but dialing 100 gives me a voice message explaining, in French and English, that the cellular phone I have dialed does not respond, and perhaps I should try again later. Paris bursts with music. I haven't heard such beautiful street music since an incident in Union Square in San Francisco in 1996; the sirens I hear at night consist of two alternating assonant tones; the Metro doors warn you that they will imminently crush your hand by playing a tune; the SFR cellphone network error messages have such loud music in the background that I have difficulty making out the words. At the Musee d'Orsay, we passed a mime outside who simulated one of the statues inside, an unfinished marble statue of Camille Claudel, whose name I unfortunately forgot. We ate at the restaurant in the Musee, which had excellent food. Beatrice had a cup of coffee, and declared that the coffee alone justified moving to France. Beatrice photographed many of the paintings and sculptures at the Musee. Signs everywhere forbade flash photography, presumably because the pastels in the darkened rooms suffered from its intense light. On the way to our new hotel, we passed some street musicians playing in the Metro station. I bought a CD, which, as I write, my computer encodes with Ogg Vorbis so I can listen to it without carrying the CD around. -- Kragen Sitaker Edsger Wybe Dijkstra died in August of 2002. The world has lost a great man. See http://advogato.org/person/raph/diary.html?start=252 and http://www.kode-fu.com/geek/2002_08_04_archive.shtml for details.