Solipsism Gradient

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
Just a fast post from Prague, so far the best place we’ve visited. Everything’s going well, but no time to hang around Internet Cafes… we had a wonderful time with our friends in Brno, but all reports on that will have to wait until we get back.

Tomorrow we’re off, driving back into Germany over Dresden to Berlin, where I’ll hopefully have more time to post stuff. More soon!

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
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.

Yesterday in the evening we walked about half an hour up to the castle hill – a walled-in part of the old Buda town. Several museums, churches and restaurants there, and a beautiful view of the Danube and the Pest side

In the morning we purchased day tickets for the Budapest public transport system and spent several hours on the Pest side. A guided tour of the Parliament was very impressive. Budapest is unique in that it has three Parliament buildings – after the architect’s competition in 1900 (or so) the second and third-placed architects were allowed to build their designs on the same square, one is a museum and the other a public building.

The Budapest subway is the second oldest in Europe and surprisingly well maintained and signed. On the other hand, it was disquieting for me – in all of my previous trips (a small, guided trip to Tunisia in 2001 excepted) I was able to understand at least some of the signs and of the language people spoke. But Hungarian is completely alien, and there are very few cognates. On the other hand, most people speak a little English (for the younger set) or German (for the older), so one can get by.

At one point I caught my camera strap on a bit of Velcro and dropped the camera with some force on the pavement. The battery flew out and I had the awful impression of other expensive innards strewn about, but after replacing everything it still works flawlessly. A corner is rather dented, but looking closely I may be able to undent it after removing the outer shell – after I get back, that is.

Tomorrow we’ll leave around noon and drive up towards Prague in the Czech Republic, with a stopover in Brno to visit a friend.

More later, as usual.

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
Typing this in Budapest at the free Internet facility in the Arcor Mercure Buda Hotel. There are a few people waiting in line and only a single PC, so I’ll be brief… and it’s yet another strange keyboard, and the actual layout doesn’t fit the configuration. Z and Y are interchanged, for one thing. Oops, I meant Y and Z. 😆

Well, we ended up staying another day-and-a-half in Vienna before driving to Budapest, it was worth it. And we just saw a few of the many attractions. Budapest looks to be extremely interesting too, even more beautiful buildings than in Vienna, although not well kept.

More later…

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
I’m in another small Internet Café, on our second day in Vienna, Austria. Vienna is a large, old, fascinating and expensive city. We succeeded in finding a place at a relatively inexpensive pension near the historical center, and stashed the car away in a suburban all-day parking lot, so it’s bearable… most attractions are only 10 or 20 minutes away on foot.

Tomorrow we’re off to Budapest where we’ll either just drive around the city and come back in the evening, or stay for the night. Then it’s back to Austria and into the Czech Republic, we may stay a couple of days at Prague.

In the last couple of days, we’ve visited several extremely interesting tourist attractions, among them the huge Ice Cave in the Austrian Dachstein mountains and the old salt mine at Berchtesgaden. The drive eastwards to Vienna was an attraction by itself; the land is even more beautiful than the Canadian Rockies or the North California coast.

More as soon as possible…

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
A small update from a very small Internet Café in Berchtesgaden (Germany).

Update: In München we also went to see the Körperwelten exhibition a the Olympiapark. This was extremely impressive and I’ll talk about it in detail after we get back…

In München we finally succeeded in straightening out our car rental. Despite my express specification that I would take the car into Eastern Europe, they gave me one without the necessary papers. After some discussion they decided to give me an upgrade to a larger car (a Ford Fiesta), unfortunately again without air conditioning. It seems that no rental company will allow rental VWs, BMWs or Mercedes to drive into Eastern Europe as they wouldn’t last more than a couple of days before being stolen. So only small Fords are available. Oh, well…

This took us most of the day, so we decided to visit the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial which was only 20 Km away. Although we arrived after the official closing time, we were able to walk around the camp and visit some of the buildings. Most impressive and thought-provoking. As always, I’ll post photos aftter we get back.

We slept in Rosenheim, near the Austrian border, and the next day (yesterday) drove into Salzburg. Very interesting, nice parks, Mozart-this and Mozart-that everywhere. Traffic was very confusing and badly signed, having a map helped very little. I tried to drive up to the Rainer Museum but gave up after repeatedly running into dead ends and wrong-way streets.

Because of the heat we gave up on Salzburg and decided to go into the mountains, landing here in Berchtesgaden. We’ve scheduled a visit to the famous salt mines and later in the day will drive back into Austria to see the caves of the Dachstein region.

More later…

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
Well, here I am at a huge Internet Café in München, near the Hauptbahnhof (Central Station). Besides me is a sign saying “400 more PCs downstairs!” I’ve purchased nearly half an hour of credit (1 hour is Euro 1,80), so this’ll have to be a llittle briefer than I planned… and I’m just hating the German keyboard, Y and Z are interchanged and most punctuation is elsewhere. Grrh :X

The trip has been going quite smoothly, some minor glitches with the car rental excepted. More about that later. We’ve been lucky in getting excellent hotels at reasonable prices, despite the holidays, which we hadn’t previously been aware of. “Pfingsten” was last Sunday and Monday, and it seems to be followed by two weeks of school holydays, so everything’s crowded and more expensive.

Here’s a fast review of our week so far. We arrived in Frankfurt where my cousin Jürgen (the “jcwuesthoff” who posted below) met us, helped straigthen out our luggage which somehow had arrived earlier by a different airline and drove us to my aunt’s house in Ingelheim, where we spent two happy days eating and getting over the jetlag.

On Saturday, we got our rental car – a tiny Ford Ka – and drove to Stuttgart, where I looked in vain for some extra accessories for my Pentax. We then went on to the Bodensee (Lake Constance), having a very tough time finding a hotel – both because of the aforementioned holidays and because the nearby boarding school at Salemhad a biannual alumni reunion.

The hours spent driving around were worth it though, because we lucked into a very comfortable hotel in Heiligenberg. The next day we drove down to Salem, where we met our friends who live in a small castle which also is a gate into the school. More about that later.

Needless to say, I took hundreds of photos which I’ll probably be able to post only when I get back. I’m getting used to some quirks with the Pentax – the autofocusing system has a delay which isn’t suitable for action photos, so on the first days I took quite a few pictures of my feet, thinking the photo had already been taken at the beep, when in fact this meant that focusing had been done.

After two more days eating well and driving around the north bank of the Bodensee, we decided to press on to München. However, we took the opportunity to take the long way around (counterclockwise). going into Switzerland over the Rhine, driving south, then briefly into Bregenz (Austria), and back into Germany’s Allgäu province.

We slept in the nice little town of Füssen and the next day visited Neuschwanstein castle before going on to München, a bustling city of 1.5 people.

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
I’m posting this at a friend’s house in Salem. which is near the Bodensee (Lake Constance). There seem to be few Internet Cafés in the region, so I’ll hold off reporting until Wednesday or so, when we’ll be driving through Munich… but everything’s going smoothly.

The Europe trip begins in a few hours. Everything’s packed, I’ve collected a number of old and new photos to show to our relatives, and I’m loading them into the Pentax as I’m writing this.

It took some time to figure out. The camera’s SD card contains a main folder called “DCIM”, inside that there are folders called “nnnPENTX” (where nnn is a 3-digit number from 100 to 999 – I didn’t try smaller numbers). Inside each folder there may be .jpg, .avi or .wav files whose name must be “IMGPnnnn.xyz”, where nnnn is any 4-digit number and xyz the proper extension. The card is formatted in MSDOS format. JPG files can be saved as “optimized” to be played back by the camera, but “progressive” isn’t supported – oddly enough, the Finder’s preview function fails for these files! Some larger images also gave an error, so I scaled them down. I didn’t try to test compatibility for the .wav and .avi files. Files which don’t obey these conventions seem to be ignored, although once I managed to lock the camera with a “card error” message… reformatting took care of that.

We’ll leave for the airport at 16:00 local (16:00 UTC) – it’s 45km away. The plane takes off at 19:08 to São Paulo, then at 22:35 we’ll fly KLM to Amsterdam, where we’ll arrive at 14:50 local (12:50 UTC). Then the final connection to Frankfurt will leave at 17:55 and arrive at 19:10 local (17:10 UTC). My cousin Jürgen, who coincidentally works at Frankfurt Airport, will pick us up and take us to nearby Ingelheim, where we should arrive around 20:00 local (18:00). This means 26 hours from door to door !

Remarkably few of my relatives seem to have e-mail; on my last trip in 1995 very few had even heard of the Internet. Anyway, I’ll try to locate an Internet Café every few days to post updates here.Posting photos will probably be impossible until our return on July 3rd.