Solipsism Gradient

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
Again at a public library, this time at Linlithgow (Scotland), near Edinburgh.

Contrary to my expectations, the ship sailed from Copenhagen early in the morning, so there was no practical way to get into town again. We spent two nice days at sea, getting rested from all the shore excursions, and left ship at Dover at 9 AM on June 6th (my birthday!).

At Dover we started using our BritRail Pass… very handy and easy to use after one learns all the little English railroad peculiarities. We went directly to London, changed stations via a little subway trip, changed trains at York and in the late afternoon ended up in the lovely village of Thirsk in Yorkshire.

Thirsk is famous as the home where veterinary Alf Wight, internationally known as James Herriot, worked and wrote his famous books. We visited his home which is now a museum, very interesting. The village itself is also nice to visit, and we stayed at the Old Red House, a comfortable hotel next to the train station. Highly recommended.

Then the next afternoon we were off again, this time to Edinburgh (Scotland). The trip to Edinburgh skirted the sea several times and the landscape was very pleasing. At the Edinburgh station we tried to sound out some place to stay but, as usual, the lady at the tourist information desk said it most hotels and B&Bs were booked up… so we went on another 20 minutes to the small historical town of Linlithgow, where we promptly found another good hotel right next to the station. I hope our luck in this regard will continue.

Anyway, we’ll go see the sights in Edinburgh and stay again at the same place, then tomorrow off we’ll go northwards, towards the Orkneys. More news anon…

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
I’m at a public library in Copenhagen (Denmark). Access is free but several people are waiting, so I’ll be brief.

St. Petersburg (Russia) was very interesting, though somewhat depressing. The city of nearly 5 million people is still very poor. We toured several subway stations; the stations themselves were luxurious, golden chandeliers and crystal columns, but the trains themselves were old and creaky. We visited an market with had expensive (imported) fruit and other items, but outside old women were selling spoiled or partially eaten fruit for much less.

Copenhagen in contrast is very nice, we’ll have a full day here tomorrow and I’ll try to post again.

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
I’m at an Internet in Helsinki (Finland). Rates are 6 Euros/hour, but I booked for only 15 minutes, so this will be brief.

Yesterday we were in Stockholm (Sweden), a very beautiful city with lots of interesting sights. We spent a few hours inside the Vasa Museum, where a huge ship, which was to become the flagship of the Swedish Navy, sank a few hundred meters into its maiden voyage in 1628.

Today we’ve already walked around a few hours inside Helsinki, also an interesting city, although nearly all buildings are comparatively recent, having been rebuilt after a citywide fire in the 19th century.

Tomorrow and the day after that we’ll be two days in St. Petersburg, where we booked two tours. Then comes a day at sea and two days in CopenHagen (Denmark), where hopefully I’ll be able to post again.

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
I’m at a public library in Rostock (Germany), on a shore trip. Internet access is free here, unlike at London public libraries, where it costs about 4 GBP/hour – four times the usual Internet Café rate!

So far the cruise has been marvelous. We were upgraded to an external cabin and it’s very comfortable. The Norwegian Dream’s amenities and restaurants are excellent, and we’ve been busy exploring the ship and chatting to people. Due to a problem with the ship’s motors, the stopover at Tallinn (Estonia) has been canceled and we’ve received a $100 refund for that, which we’ll put to good use by getting on a better shore excursion at St. Petersburg later on.

Shore excursions, as usual, are much more expensive than you can get ashore. An extreme example is the bus trip back to London from Dover, which costs $75 when booked at the ship, and only 10 GBP ($18 ) at the coach station! So we plan to do our own excursions, except for St. Petersburg, where visa restrictions apparently make travelling with a tour guide mandatory.

Tomorrow we’ll be at sea, Saturday at Stockholm (Sweden) and Sunday at Helsinki (Finland). More later…

Posted by Rainer Brockerhoff (away):
Well, here we are in London on the first leg of our Europe trip. Time pressures have precluded an update until now; I’m posting this from a 1 GBP/hour Internet Cafe’ near our hotel.

We flew in over Heathrow, a tiring but uneventful flight with a stop in Amsterdam. It was my first time on the new Boeing 777-SR200. The chairs and bathrooms are incrementally more comfortable and the big novelty is video/audio by demand on all seats. There are perhaps a hundred movies available. Since I’m unable to sleep on a plane anyway, I seized the occasion to see all 3 Matrix movies consecutively (I’d only seen the first one previously). I fast-forwarded over some slow scenes and found the special effects well-done but the rationale behind the whole thing remained completely obscure.

London is a large, confusing, and fascinating city. Today was our fourth day and we’ve managed to see lots of sights and museums but I suspect several months would be needed to really see all that’s worthwhile. As usual, we concentrated mostly on free stuff like the Science Museum and the Albert&Victoria Museum. We also managed to find the small Freud museum, where Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life, and where his daughter Anna lived for 44 years; very interesting.

London beat out Vienna in being perhaps the most expensive city we’ve ever visited. The pound (GBP) is currently valued at around R$5.40, but prices do not scale proportionally. Food is extremely expensive, and the modest Mowbray Court Hotel, where we’ve stayed the last 3 days, also charges the most we’ve ever paid for a double room with bath anywhere in the world: 60 GBP, somewhat over US$110.

Nevertheless we’re upbeat. After a cold and blustery first day, the last few days have been sunny and not too cold. The people are friendly, if often unintelligible. A favorite game has been guessing, on buses and underground trains, what language the people next to us are speaking. So far we’ve been stumped by several Asiatic families, by people speaking Slav languages such as Serbian and Croatian, and yesterday by a couple from Uzbekistan.

Early tomorrow we’re off by bus (or coach, as they call it here) to Dover, where we’ll board the Norwegian Dream cruise ship for the 12-day cruise to St. Petersburg and the Scandinavian capitals. I’ll probably be unwilling to spring for the extremely expensive on-board Internet service, so any further updates will have to wait for after June 6th (my birthday!), when we’ll be back in England. Or perhaps I’ll find a convenient place during a shore excursion, but don’t count on it.

On our first day we conveniently stumbled into a Scotland tourism bureau, where we loaded up on brochures about Scotland; they’ve been so convincing that we’ll probably go by rail straight up to Scotland, pehaps only pausing for a quick visit to Stonehenge and Salisbury, and the Yorkshire region. Our BritRail ticket doesn’t extend to the Hebride Islands but we’ll try to find if there’s some local package when we get to Skye.

On our downward trip we plan to swing by Glasgow around June 15th or a little later. Matt Gemmell the Irate Scotsman will hopefully be available for a quick meeting; we’ve iChatted quite a lot recently. It’s always nice to meet Internet friends in the flesh… Matt, e-mail me if you’re reading this 😉

Speaking of e-mail, if you feel the need to e-mail me before June 24th or so, please try to have a clear, non-spam-looking subject line; searching through all the spam over web mail is tedious and error-prone. I may not be able to reply until I get back. My apologies.

More as soon as possible…

Wow, this must be some record: an entire week without posting…

Thing is, last Wednesday I had an emergency operation for an ailment that will remain mercifully unnamed here (hint: this stuff will be a sine-qua-non component of my diet henceforth). Anyway, being sick really sucks. The doctor who operated on me strongly urged me to cancel the Europe trip, which would begin exactly a week from that day. He followed up during my hospital stay with dire warnings about extreme pain and post-op complications.

As it turned out, most of the warnings were groundless – at least in my specific case. I needed no painkillers at all except during the operation itself, of course. I managed to cut my post-op hospital stay to 36 hours instead of the recommended 72 and everything is fine, under the circumstances. So, the trip is still on, and we’re leaving on the afternoon of May 19th. In all fairness to the doc, I talked to some acquaintances who have had similar operations in the past, and they all recounted daunting tales of week-long hospital stays, month-long convalescences, morphium drips and infections… it was as well that I hadn’t heard of that before the operation! 😉

To prevent a relapse, I’ve been looking at software to interrupt my tendency of doing extremely long sessions at the keyboard. So far I’m testing Dejal Software‘s Time Out! and it works quite well… I may write something like that myself, later on, to my exact requirements.

So here’s our proposed itinerary. We arrive at London (via São Paulo and Amsterdam) sometime on the afternoon of May 20th. We plan to find a quiet little hotel somewhere and take it easy, with some short trips around London, until our cruise ship leaves on May 25th from Dover. Ports of call will be:

May 26: Kiel (Germany)

May 27: Warnemünde (Germany)

May 29: Tallinn (Estonia)

May 30-31: St. Petersburg (Russia)

June 1: Helsinki (Finland)

June 2: Stockholm (Sweden)

June 3-4: Copenhagen (Denmark)

June 6: Dover (England).

No Oslo (Norway) unfortunately… well, one can’t have everything…

There will be Internet access on the ship, but prices are outrageous: US$0.40/minute and up! Bah. On the MacMania 2001 cruise to Alaska I paid US$100 for unlimited access, and found even that a little steep. Charging US$100 for a little over 3 hours can’t possibly be technically justified.

After that, our plan is to take advantage of our BritRail passes and go all the way to the northern tip of Scotland and back. We’ll take the return flight from London early on June 22nd and will be safe at home sometime on June 24th – schedules aren’t favorable, unfortunately.

Should you, gentle reader, be interested in a meeting somewhere along the way, e-mail me with details as soon as possible; I’ll check in periodically at an Internet café. Suggestions for side trips and places to stay in Northern England and Scotland are also very welcome.

More as it develops…

Just noticed my blogroll (the list of links to your left) was somewhat out of date; now it isn’t.

These are most of the links I look at daily… now that I resolved to do this only once per day, I find I spend less time each day in the NetNewsWire time sink.

The J-Walk Blog points (among the usual cornucopia) at one of the articles at Sentient Development, namely the one about Fundamentalism:

Imagine that you’re a psychiatrist. A new patient comes to see you and says that he regularly talks to an invisible being who never responds, that he reads excerpts from one ancient book and that he believes wholeheartedly that its contents must be accepted implicitly, if not taken literally.

The patient goes on to say that that the world is only 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs never existed. He brazenly rejects modern science’s observations and conclusions, and subscribes to the notion that after death he will live in eternal bliss in some alternate dimension. And throughout your meeting, he keeps handing you his book and urging you to join him, lest you end up after death in a far less desirable alternate dimension than him…

This ties in with some other things I’ve noticed recently; Italian scientists are acting against an attempt to ban teaching of evolution in schools, and believe it or not, there’s a creationist theme park in Florida…

On another topic, Dave Pollard has again written some impressive stuff, if you’re not familiar with his weblog I recommend the recent Avoiding the Landmines in Entrepreneurial Business and The Stock Market as Ponzi Scheme, to cite just a couple. Highly recommended.