Solipsism Gradient

Preparations for our trip are in progress. Dorinha has gotten the (relatively expensive) Czech visa, which is the only one she’ll need; as a German citizen, I don’t need any. Passports are in order, and plane tickets also. It turned out that our agent (Fátima at Portal Viagens) managed to squeeze the flights between Belo Horizonte and São Paulo into the KLM ticket at practically no extra cost! Kudos to Fátima and KLM.

After some initial difficulties in contacting other members of the far-flung Brockerhoff clan, it seems that a general family meeting is scheduled in Düsseldorf for Saturday, June 28th. I’ll post the exact time and address soon…

Because of the meeting, it looks like we’ll drive counter-clockwise instead of clockwise, so the probable sequence is now: Frankfurt, Ingelheim, probably Konstanz, Vienna, Budapest, Brno, Prague, Dresden, Berlin and Düsseldorf, then back to Frankfurt.

I’m not taking my iBook, so I’ll depend on Internet cafés to keep up-to-date. My new digital camera is supposed to arrive this week, so hopefully I’ll be able to post photos as soon as I come back.

We’ve just booked our trip to Europe (June 4th), and preparations are already taking some of our time. Expect spotty updates until we get back on July 3th. I’ll try to visit cybercafés whenever possible. There seem to be some cybercafé search engines available – here’s one – and I’m going to print out a list of addresses along our itinerary.

We’ll fly into Frankfurt and my cousin who works at the Frankfurt Airport will pick us up; another cousin lives nearby. After visits, we’ll probably rent a car and drive north along the Rhine up to Düsseldorf, where I’ve got a bunch of friends and relatives to visit. Along the way, we’ll probably do the boatride between Rüdesheim and Koblenz – I did that in 1972 and it’s very enjoyable.

From Düsseldorf we’ll drive to Berlin with a stopover just before Hannover (more relatives). We’ve never been to Berlin, so a couple of days there may be worthwhile. From there, we’ll drive into Eastern Europe. Not sure if we’ll be able to visit Poland, as Warszaw is a little out of the way. Prague, Vienna and Budapest are easier to visit, although I’m not sure in which order. In Austria there’re lots of interesting places to visit on the way back – Linz and Salzburg come to mind. Then we’ll drive back to Frankfurt over Munich, with a possible stopover at Konstanz where we also have friends.

Back from São Paulo. The trip’s highlight was a visit to the Chinese exhibition, which included a dozen members of the Xi’an Terracotta Army in individual display cases, the largest number so far shown outside China. This alone was worth the trip.

Besides several other interesting museum visits we managed to see Deborah Colker‘s new dance, 4×4. We’d seen her previously in the wildly innovative MIX. Highly recommended.

In between, I visited Macmania Magazine‘s offices, to play with a 12″ PowerBook G4 they’d just gotten for review. I found it noticeably faster than the iBook/600 I’m posting this on, and the left handrest isn’t all that much hotter. If I find someone to buy my old one, I’ll switch in a minute.

Tomorrow I’ll be off to São Paulo for a short trip; updates until Sunday (March 23) will be few or even nonexistent.

The photos from Milho Verde, where we spent a week over the New Year, are up. Enjoy.

(Photo pages may take some time to load!)

This is a very common tree in Brazil.

Just besides the waterfall shown earlier, this lady was washing clothes the old-fashioned way: by pounding them on a stone and drying on the grass.

This street had several similar houses in a long row…