Solipsism Gradient

All told, we drove about 4000 Km in three weeks, in Germany, Switzerland (just for a couple of hours), Austria, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The latter three countries require a “vignette”, or special sticker, for vehicles that wish to use the highways.

Here they are; Czech, Hungarian and Austrian stickers (from the left). They’re available for different periods from a few days to a year; the short-term ones we bought cost between 6 and 9 Euros each. Fines are supposed to be stiff, and they’re available at every border location, and most gas stations near the borders, so there’s no excuse not to have one.

Fuel prices were a surprise. In Germany we found prices ranging from 1.02 to 1.08 Euros/liter (around US$4/gallon at the current exchange rates)! Here in Brazil I’m paying around R$1.90/liter, which works out to about US$2.30 per gallon. In contrast, Austrian gasoline was a little less expensive at 0.85 Euros/liter (US$3.35/gallon); as we drove quite a bit in Austria and along the Austrian border, I made sure to never leave Austria with less than a full tank. Czech gasoline was slightly less expensive than in Austria; I didn’t need to fill up in Hungary, but seem to remember prices as being around the Austrian level.

Anyway, the fuel was of much higher quality than we get here – Brazilian gasoline has 10 to 20% of ethanol mixed in to keep the price down, but you get worse mileage. Both cars we drove averaged about 6.5 liters/100 Km – this works out to 15.4 Km/liter or 34.8 miles/gallon, so fuel costs were lower than I had expected. Nevertheless, it usually pays to ask the rental company for a diesel car; they get even better mileage, and diesel costs less than gasoline in most countries (Germany is an exception here). Not all brands offer diesel models, though.

To drive into Eastern Europe, you’ll need some extra equipment not usually necessary in Germany: a red warning triangle and a first-aid kit. Some countries also require a fire extinguisher and a set of replacement bulbs. So if you rent a car in Germany, be sure to ask for those items.

Usually, on a trip to the US or Canada, I prefer to choose a rental company and car right at the airport counter. The sole exception, a couple of years ago, resulted in quite a hassle. When we rented a car from Hertz Canada with a prepaid voucher, at the end it turned out that, contrary to all reassurances from our travel agency, taxes were not covered by the voucher. Had I known that previously, I would have chosen another company. To compound the problem, after my complaints, Hertz decided to charge my credit card with the complete amount – again! – completely disregarding the voucher! It took half a year of calls and e-mails to get a refund, and we ended up losing about US$50 because of credit card fees and fluctuation exchange rates.

This time we checked all major rental companies both from their German websites and through their local representatives, and it turned out that Hertz Deutschland had an unbeatable promotion for foreign renters; all things considered, it was less than half the price I would have paid at the airport counter. And taxes were included, so I closed the deal (with the precaution of getting a letter from Hertz Brasil stating that I had prepaid the full price).

There were a couple of minor snags, though. As we intended to drive into Eastern Europe, only small Ford and Opel (GM) cars were available; other brands supposedly run a high risk of being stolen. And none of these had air conditioning, something it turned out we should have had, as it was Europe’s hottest summer in a decade.

In Germany, you pay a 17% surcharge over the full rental price if you pick up or return the car at an airport or train station, so I carefully chose in-city locations for both. It turns out that such locations have a very small selection of cars to choose from; as I also had to pick the car up on a Saturday (and they close at noon!), there was only a single car available with my requirements: the brown Ford Ka shown below, on the right.

However, the previous owner had neglected to turn in the car’s registration papers – and as I said, no other cars were available. We had to drive by another Hertz location later in the week and tell the whole story; with some persuasion, they gave us an upgrade to the next larger car (the black Ford Fiesta shown above, on the left).

My advice, nevertheless, is to avoid Saturdays and pick up the car early in the morning, so you’ll have more options in case something goes wrong.

Well, it’s taken longer than I expected, but I’m slowly coming to the end of my piled-up e-mail. (Excepting the developer mailing lists, of course.) So if you e-mailed me sometime over the last 40 days and I promised to reply “later”, you may get a response “real soon now” .

I’m also catching up with news and weblogs, NetNewsWire 1.0.3 now has a combined view that shows all news from a source at a glance. And CPU and and memory usage seem to be getting progressively lighter, too. Thanks, Brent!

Regarding the recent Europe trip, I’m still grappling with the 933 photos I brought back. It turned out that importing everything into iPhoto caused it to slow down much more, so it’s become quite useless for organizing stuff; I’m still investigating what I should do to speed it up.

The photos themselves could be better. It turns out that hand-holding such a small, light camera (it’s a 110g Pentax Optio S) isn’t easy; also it’s too easy to mistake the focusing system’s “ready” beep for a sign that the photo was taken, so we missed quite a number of photos. I’ll take a number of practice shots every day until I get used to it – the problem during the trip was that I couldn’t check them out on-screen. Viewing them on TV usually isn’t satisfactory, resolution-wise.

You may recall that I dropped the camera half-way through the trip. Yesterday I took off the dented front cover and, while I didn’t manage to remove the corner dent, I bent the front face back into complete flatness. This seems to have fixed it; the battery now holds its charge overnight and it hasn’t turned itself off anymore.

I had originally planned to open a separate weblog topic and write down a day-by-day trip report, with the appropriate photos. However, it seems that it’ll be more effective to publish short notes about specific aspects of the trip, together with a few selected pictures. So I’ll start later today…

By the way, one of my favorite cartoonists, Bill Holbrook of Kevin & Kell fame, has a very appropriate cartoon out for digital camera enthusiasts. I really need to get used to the idea that I can take several pictures of the same subject and later select the best one.

We’re back! Safe and sound. That is, part of our luggage (the one containing 99% clothing) may arrive tomorrow. Gotta run – zillions of things to do. Film at eleven.

OK. So our luggage made it; it arrived this morning. It seems that over a dozen people had missing luggage on our flight from Amsterdam to São Paulo; between that, and standing in line for over an hour at immigration, we missed our connection. KLM put us up at the Mercure Hotel in Guarulhos, near the airport, paid for dinner and breakfast, and we took one of the mid-morning flights, arriving home at exactly noon.

(Side note#1: I’d actually thought of changing our reservations to stay overnight in São Paulo, in order to get more and earlier rest, so we didn’t really mind… and the hotel was great.)

(Side note#2: there were only 2 customs/immigration agents to process over 200 foreigners from our flight, and neither of them spoke any foreign language. It seems that they’re striking for better salaries, and their normal strike modus operandi is to either have as few people as possible actually working, and/or really work as they’re supposed to, but even more; search every piece of luggage with great care.)

Going back in time a few days, the family meeting was a huge success, and I’m going to be setting up a reserved forum for family members to post pictures and gossip, and to start thinking about the next meeting. So if you’re a Brockerhoff (or related to one), watch this space for the announcement in a few days.

Special thanks go to my cousin Ferdi and his wife Elisabeth, and their son Reiner Brockerhoff, for putting us up for a couple of days and for showing us Frankfurt, complete with the traditional Äbblewoi (Apple wine).

During the flight home I tried to take a photo out of the plane window and promptly bumped the camera lens, not really hard, against the window – I usually do that with my forehead, come to think of it. However, the camera took the opportunity to shut down completely. I managed to revive it at home by removing and recharging the battery, but after a few hours it went dead again. My hunch is that there’s a short somewhere, and as soon as I find the time I’ll take the covers off (which looks straightforward) and see if I find something obvious.

Nevertheless, the pictures weren’t affected, and as I write this I’m importing them into iPhoto. Apparently this will take about 45 minutes. In the evening I’ll try to do some sorting and correcting, and you can expect to see some selected pictures over the weekend.

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
This is the last message before we return to Brazil. I’m typing this at a cousin’s company near Frankfurt.

The trip from Berlin to Düsseldorf was long but uneventful. We stayed overnight with a friend near Siegen and then 3 days with another friend in Düsseldorf. The big family meeting was a huge success and I’m looking forward to posting selected pictures (I took over 1100!) and typing up my notes and comments on the whole trip.

So, look for normal updates to resume around July 3 or 4! Thanks to all of you…

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
News from Königs-Wusterhausen, a small suburb of Berlin. We decided to stay here at very comfortable and not-too-pricey hotel, and commute into Berlin by rail – it takes about 50 minutes. A whole-day ticket covers both the commute and any metro, rail or bus travel within Berlin itself. There’s even a network company that offers Internet access, though they open late and close early – at least from our point of view. In terms of friendliness to tourists, the Berliners take the prize so far – and of course I can understand what they’re saying, which is a big plus. 😉

Turns out this was a good choice. Berlin is huge and the largest city we’ve seen so far in terms of attractions, too. It would take two weeks to see less than half of what’s in the guidebook, so we’re just taking some samples. Yesterday we went to see Checkpoint Charlie, the Jewish Museum (which turned out to be so huge that we stayed for 5 hours!), the Brandenburger Gate, and some adjacent parks and shops. We also saw a couple of iMax films which turned out to be excellent – one about Australia and one about underwater reefs.

Today we’re supposed to see the Berlin Wall Memorial, the Berliner Dom and the area around the Kurfürstendamm, including the Memorial Church. Whew. Sorry, no time to chase up links for any of these… then the next day we’ll drive off to Düsseldorf for the big family meet. On our way out we may drive through some of the outlying parks. Stay tuned!

Posted by BlogalVillager (cbrayton):

Rainer Brockerhoff (away) wrote:

A few more quick notes from Budapest. I finally hit upon the trick of selecting the US keyboard layout and not looking at the keys… works well for English, less so for e-mail in German and Portuguese.

I have the same trouble with my machine at home: I have alternate keyboards set up for all that foofaraw you have to type in French and Portuguese, but just try to find a readily accessible keyboard map in Windows. It’s not friendly to the multiorthographic!

This trip sounds like loads of fun! Enjoy. I hope to be back in Brazil sometime after your return there.