life's little updates

Time: 21 April, 13:33
Location: between Amsterdam and Brussels

I'm writing from the comfort of a first-class seat on board the Thalys service between Amsterdam and Paris. When I made the reservation, the agent pointed out, in a tone that said "I don't think you ought to countenance this more-than-nominal expenditure for nothing", that I could also take an InterCity train to Brussels for free. But when am I going to get first class on a Thalys for €28 again? My answer of "true, but I want to see what the Thalys is like" seemed to satisfy the agent—she was even nice enough to point out the existence of the Thalys lounge to me. It seems frankly silly, if you have a railpass, not to explore as many of the railway amenities as you can find.

I rolled into Amsterdam Centraal bright & early on Sunday morning, off the overnight service from Stuttgart. I had booked myself into the Schlafwagen—although I've had couchettes on overnight trains before, I'd never had a proper bed and wanted to explore that sort of railway amenity too. It turns out that the bed is in fact way more comfortable than the couchette, which is basically a cushioned bench; I didn't suffer from the sore neck that had accompanied my arrival in Vienna. Unfortunately, the compartment next to mine was occupied by a rather loud snorer; fortunately, as long as the train was moving his snores were drowned out quite effectively. I also had some recompense for my linguistic incompetence in Kreuzlingen/Konstanz—I was able to understand everything the train conductor said to me, and to handle the replies, even when being asked questions 30 seconds after I'd risen to consciousness.

The trouble, of course, with practicing my German and then landing in Amsterdam is that I'm still in a foreign-language-speaking frame of mind, but it's suddenly the wrong language. I let slip at least one "Bitte" and probably an "Entschuldigung" before I managed to get it through my head that it was better to speak my own language.

The bright side of having practiced my German so much is that I was able to understand an awful lot of service-Dutch; certainly more than I ever could on previous visits. I can't follow conversations, but I can understand the sorts of questions that are asked in restaurants and hotels. I can only answer in German, which would just sound weird to them, so I answer in English instead. I can also puzzle out most things on menus and relatively long information notices, such as the explanation of use on the back of the strippenkaart I bought to get the bus to Jos & Vicky's flat.

I'd come to Amsterdam at the instigation of Jesse; since it was at his invitation that I'd come to Amsterdam the first time in 2002, and the second time in 2005, it seemed only fitting that I should come for the third time in 2008. The fact that I had a railpass meant I had no excuse not to work Amsterdam into the itinerary somehow, whether I was starting from Konstanz, Vienna, or Timbuktu. Jesse had caused a large dim sum gathering to be organized for noon, so I had just enough time to shower, check my email, and relax a little before we were on our way to a Chinese restaurant near Dam square. Dim sum was very tasty indeed, and I met a few people I hadn't known before. I'm always happy to increase the set of people I know in interesting places. After dim sum, about half of us repaired to a cafe. When I ordered my drink, the barista was in a teasing mode, and made a comment about the group upstairs being rather international. He then tried to get me to guess where he came from. Since the price of a wrong guess was having to pay double for the drink, I declined, and was glad I did, because I would certainly have never guessed that he was from Armenia! On the other hand, however he expected me to reply, it was probably not with "Barev dzez!" We exchanged a few niceties in Armenian, and I told him what I'm working on. As the group left the cafe later, we said "Tsdesout'iun" to each other.

The afternoon was rather quieter. Jesse and I both alternated playing with our computers and talking to Tanja, who had come back with us from the cafe. Jos joined us for dinner at Humphrey's, where they charge a set price for three courses and change the menu every month. I had the beef carpaccio, the salmon with sweet potato, and crème brulée for dessert. They were selling a Mosel white as a house wine, which was sweeter than I expected, but went quite nicely with the crème brulée.

Now after a night of sleeping in a very comfortable bed indeed (as opposed to an assortment of guest beds and train pallets, for which my back thanks me), I am on my way to Brussels to catch the Eurostar home. I have a booking on the last train of the evening; I hope to convince an agent in Brussels to let me have a seat on an earlier train, but if Eurostar remains uncooperative then I shall have a look around the city, since I've never been there before. Either way, tonight I will be reunited with boy, books, and cat; tomorrow I will be back to work after a tremendously nice mini-vacation.

Time: 19 April, 21:35
Location: en route to Stuttgart

Having friends all over Europe is really the way to travel. I had a wonderful time in Vienna hanging out with pepl and the other members of Vienna.pm; now I am rolling away from a fantastic couple of days in Kreuzlingen, where I was visiting Tim. Kreuzlingen is basically the half of Konstanz that is across the border in Switzerland. Tim (who is German) is therefore just about the only expat I know who can walk back to his home country within ten or fifteen minutes, any time he likes.

I had only vaguely heard of Konstanz before I arrived, so I hadn't realized that it is a reasonably large city. Its buildings generally survived the twentieth century unscathed, and it hadn't occurred to me before how little I've seen of older German urban architecture, since so much of it was destroyed. Many of the houses have rather elaborate paintings (frescoes? I'm not sure if they technically are), and most of the houses are painted pretty and interesting colors; this produces a very picturesque city. Tim took me walking all around the old city, across the Rhine and back, through a park near the harbor back into Kreuzlingen, and around some of the more picturesque neighborhoods on the Swiss side. Although Austria was well outside walking distance, it was easily visible across the Bodensee (a.k.a. Lake Konstanz.)

I arrived on Thursday evening. One of the many reasons I like visiting Tim is that he is an excellent cook. (Another one is that he knows his wine, and knows how much I like port.) I kept him awake and chatting until an hour that was rather late for both of us, and then I repaired to my bed intending to sleep for a very long time.

Tim had to work on Friday, so I napped until late morning and then ventured into town in order to run a couple of errands. It wasn't until I was at the window of the post office and the clerk had affixed stamps to my postcards that it suddenly dawned on me that I had no Swiss francs about my person, and that although the Eurozone was very close indeed, I was not actually standing in it. I had to dash out to the nearest ATM and correct this oversight, amid much embarrassment.

My other errand was at the train station, where I needed a reservation on the night train to Amsterdam for the following evening. I am ashamed to say that I did not manage this entire transaction in German. I was doing okay up until he needed to tell me something complicated (that the single sleeping compartments were all booked from Zürich, and that if I wanted a double I'd have to pay for both beds), at which point I was forced to give up the game. "Entschuldigung, sprechen Sie Englisch?" Since Swiss railway agents are, by and large, infinitely more helpful than Parisian ones, he pointed out that there were other night trains to Amsterdam, e.g. the one from München via Stuttgart, and if I didn't need to leave from Zürich then maybe we should check that one? A few minutes later, I had my reservation.

The only low point of the trip accosted me on the way out of the train station. I heard a "hello, excuse me" from behind, and turned around to find a man grinning at me. He just continued to grin in this creepy fashion and said "hello" again, and then informed me that he'd followed me from the train station. Wonderful. My stare became increasingly hostile, but naturally the hint was not taken, and he then tried to get me to go for a coffee with him. The world of men should please take note that, if you are trying to get a girl, the pickup line to use is certainly not "I followed you from the train station." I had to say "no" very forcefully several times, but he finally gave up and I was immensely relieved that he didn't cross the street after me. Unfortunately, this completely destroyed any desire I had to wander by myself around Kreuzlingen—not because I feared more men making unwanted advances (the one who did was certainly not Swiss, after all), but because I feared this particular perpetrator of unwanted advances would loiter around the area to see if I'd turn up again. I went back to Tim's flat, made myself a few cups of tea, and got some work done on my Armenian texts.

We'd agreed that I'd take Tim out to dinner that evening, as long as he picked the restaurant. He picked one in Konstanz, and gave me a short tour of the city sights by evening light. The restaurant itself had good food, a nice atmosphere, and a very tasty dry Riesling spätlese. The waiter (as waiters often do) spoke very fast, so I was only semi-successful at pretending I speak German. I probably only got as far as I did because he spoke even less English. There was one priceless moment during which he and Tim ganged up to tease me because I had forgotten how to ask for the bill. I suppose, at least, I'll now remember the word "Rechnung."

This afternoon was my opportunity to see Konstanz by day, and to have a camera along. I am without an SLR until next month, so I borrowed Tim's 400D, and that is what produced the photos I took. I am very glad I did. I'd lost my enthusiasm for taking pictures in recent months, and it felt really nice to have a small, light SLR back in my hand. I also took the opportunity to experiment with his 28mm fixed lens. I have never owned a fixed lens, and have only taken the occasional picture with someone else's. The focal length does add an extra challenge—yes, I could always crop from a bigger photo, but it reduces the potential for printing, and there is the risk that I'll forget, later, what it was I wanted to save from an otherwise mediocre picture.

The weather was not looking very nice when we set out, but by midafternoon the clouds had broken, the sun had come out, and it was suddenly a glorious spring Saturday. The visibility was good enough to get a great view of the Tyrolean Alps across the lake, which Tim assures me is not that common. Since I'd brought cold rainy weather with me to Austria, it was good to be the bearer of sunshine and springtime for once. My legs were rather sore from all that walking after a few hours, so we repaired back to his house for coffee, and then took a drive farther into Switzerland so I could see some of the nearby mountains. They were beautiful, on such a clear day.

I had just enough time for another tasty dinner chez Tim before we had to leave for the train statin. This one began with the mushroom cream soup that he taught me many years ago, with a couple of embellishments that I shall have to adopt. The main course was a local recipe—fish from the lake wrapped in Swiss chard, accompaned by a honey/tomato/onion/garlic sauce, and served with spätzle. (Just as he knows I like port, Tim also knows that I like spätzle to a slightly unreasonable degree.)

Now I am on my way to Amsterdam, where I will meet another set of friends and have another good time in another picturesque city. This really is the way to travel.

Time: 17 April, 13:23
Location: leaving München

Frustration is...
being on a super-shiny ICE train that has wifi on board, but having your seat reservation in the segment of the train that doesn't. So much for the internet.

I didn't get very far on the last journal entry. I did get a couchette from Strasbourg on Monday night after all—the conductors were very happy to take my cash once on board, and they even gave me a cabin to myself, which meant I didn't have to sleep in my jeans. But although couchettes are vastly preferable to seats, they are still not the same as beds. Although I slept fairly well on the train from Strasbourg, my neck was painfully stiff for the rest of the day. By the afternoon, I sorely needed the two-hour nap that clobbered me before I could write any more of the previous entry. Not even the sound of conference calls from the next room (my host was working from home) could rouse me.

Miraculously, though, I was reasonably alert when the train arrived at Wien Westbahnhof at 8:30 on Tuesday. I stowed my suitcase, made a beeline for the Starbucks on Mariahilfer Strasse, and used the wifi therein to make contact with all the people who would need to know I'd arrived. Finally I took myself off to the Mekhitarist monastery. I had first been here in August, when I was in town for YAPC::EU. I'd called ahead to ask if I might come look at some manuscripts, and was told yes, I should just show up; when I arrived, I was told no, all the fathers were away, and maybe I should try again the following day. Of course I had no time in the end, since I was attending the conference instead. I was last here in October; after my supervisor had phoned on my behalf and been somewhat more forceful, and had received assurances that I could come, I'd arrived to find out that the fathers had neglected to inform us that the library was undergoing renovation after water damage, the manuscripts were all out of their places, and it would be impossible for them to find the ones I was after in the stacks of displaced books. Third time's the charm, right?

In preparation for this trip, my supervisor had sent a letter to formally request that I be granted access to the manuscripts; I followed this up with a phone call to the addressee, Father Simon, who was the monk to whom I'd spoken in October. Naturally, he hadn't received the letter. After several phone calls and some negotiation, we arranged an appointment for Tuesday morning at 10am (which is why I was hell-bent on getting on the train from Strasbourg, even if I did have to sleep in a seat), and I was to bring a copy of the missing letter. The lesson here (and one we'd learned in Venice) is that having things written down is very important to Mekhitarist monks.

I rang the buzzer, stated my mission to Smpad the caretaker, and was shown into the familiar waiting room while he called Father Simon. Much to my astonishment, the father himself came into the room about ten minutes later, bearing three manuscripts. He was very kind, though I did have to demonstrate to him that I can in fact read Armenian. (Of course, I was cheating slightly—the first line of the text I'm working on is burned into my memory, so it's not like I had to decipher any wiggly Armenian characters in order to "read" it.) After that, he tried somewhat teasingly to get me to speak modern Armenian instead of German or English. I made the attempt, but it was fairly laughable.

The Mekhitarists are much more casual with their four-hundred-year-old texts than, say, the British Library or the Matenadaran. I suspected after my visit on Tuesday that I would probably be allowed to take photos of the pages I needed from the oldest manuscript, and indeed I was. Smpad the caretaker even pitched in when I was halfway through. (There's a lesson in teamwork—the first half of my photos are not very crisp, because I was working with the light I had on a table near the window; for the second half, when Smbat held the manuscript for me in the light right next to the window, the exposure times were quartered and the pictures are much better. My hands were also a lot less tired, not having to wrangle both manuscript and camera like I'd been doing.) I was finished in the monastery by noon, and got to spend the rest of the day writing an absurdly fully-featured utility script in perl; this in turn put me in just the right frame of mind for the Vienna.pm emergency social yesterday evening. Margaritas, silliness, and good times all round.

I left Vienna at 8:22 this morning, en route to Kreuzlingen via München and Ulm. This meant waking up after a scant six hours' sleep in order to finish packing, get myself out the door, and say goodbye to my gracious host (who even sat and made conversation while I drank my tea, despite having only just woken up. I was impressed.)

I had a ten-minute connection in München, so naturally the train was twenty minutes late. On the bright side, this means I am now travelling to Ulm via ICE; on the downside, when I exchanged my reservation, I got demoted to 2nd class. I didn't actually notice this until I found the car in which my seat was reserved. Bah. However, I am very smug about the fact that I conducted the entire reservation-swapping transaction in German, not least because I chickened out of doing the same thing yesterday when making the original reservation.

So my work for this trip is done. I have "phylogenetic" data for six more manuscripts (three in Paris and three in Vienna); I have a full copy of the two most important ones; I have everything I need from the Mekhitarist monasteries of Europe. It's a little anti-climactic. I'm going to have to come up with another excuse now to keep coming back to Vienna.

Time: 15 April, 15:13
Location: Wien

Couchettes are, all things considered, vastly preferable to seats when one is on an overnight train (especially on evenings of days when one woke up at 4am.)

Time: 14 April, 21:11
Location: Strasbourg

This train I want to catch continues to be a mystery, but according to the schedule listing, reservations are not compulsory. This is good news—it means that even if I have to fall asleep sitting on my suitcase, I should be in Vienna in the morning. (Just call me Intrepid Traveller.) I am of course hoping that there will be an unoccupied berth, and that I will be able to pay a small fee to be allowed to sleep in it, once I am on board. The ticket machines keep saying that only 2nd class is available, but then the ticket machines keep saying that they can't sell me any sort of ticket due to a technical error. The RailEurope agent last week said it's run by a separate company; the agents here in France (and the rail schedule itself) claims no such thing, but the train has been mysteriously unbookable via any SNCF means. Of course, all I really want is to make my appointment with the monastery tomorrow morning.

Both Paris-Est and Strasbourg stations have Wifi, but the link for "Buy minutes online" returns a 404 error. Quelle surprise. I may have to resort to being reamed by data roaming charges.

Time: 14 April, 20:35
Location: en route to Strasbourg

The good news is that the adventure has begun. The bad news is that it is still an adventure.

I woke up at 4am in order to get my 5:25 Eurostar departure, which was nowhere near full. The copious empty seats and the trouble I'd had reserving a train seat beyond Strasbourg began to plant a suspicion in my mind that SNCF makes it a point of policy to be as un-accommodating as possible to holders of Interrail passes.

The Eurostar was about 15 minutes late getting into London. While everyone else rushed off to whatever appointment they had, I stopped at the ticket counter in the Gare du Nord to try my luck reserving a place on a train to Vienna. I didn't really expect to succeed, since the ticket agents in the Gare du Nord (and, in fact, pretty much everywhere in France) work off the same database as the agents in the RailEurope office. The agent in Paris gave me another fine example of Parisian snootiness, seemed to begrudge me the reservation I had, and was generally unhelpful. Everything was "full", I was told.

Sod it, I thought. I resolved to return to Plan A, which was to get as far as Strasbourg and see if an agent there could help me. In the meantime, I had a library appointment. I stowed my suitcase in the Gare du Nord and made my way to the Rue de Richelieu, where the Bibliothèque Nationale would check my documentation, and hopefully sell me a reader's pass good for use in the salle des manuscrits orientales. I arrived to find that the computer systems were down, and I'd have to come back in the afternoon in order to register. In the meantime, though, if I showed my ID (that is, my passport), I could be granted a free one-day pass to whichever reading room I needed.

Ticket in hand, I went to investigate the oriental manuscripts. The librarians were helpful, spoke enough English to get me by, and have quite informal processes. To my mild surprise, I had all three manuscripts (well, two manuscripts and a microfilm) within half an hour, without having paid a euro-cent for the privilege. I stayed in the reading room straight through until 3pm milking the manuscripts for the preliminary data I needed, and never did go back to get properly registered. I presume they'll have my data on file should I need to come back. I still have the Attestation that I faithfully had Theo fill out back in December, attesting that I'm a genuine Ph.D. student, and required for the grant of a reader's card. I'd been kind of worried that they wouldn't accept a four-month-old one, but I didn't even have to test it out.

I had also hoped to stop by an Armenian bookshop while in Paris, but I found out yesterday that they are closed on Sundays and Mondays. Alas. Since I had some time to kill before my train, I went and found the bookshop anyway. It was in fact closed, but there was a serendipitous (I thought) Starbucks en route. Aha, I thought, here is an opportunity to hop on the Internet. Naturally, as soon as I had my drink and found a place to open the laptop, I discovered that their AP was giving out IP addresses, but redirecting all the web requests to a page that simply stated "Wifi n'est pas disponible". Thanks.

I retrieved my bag and walked over to the Gare de l'Est in plenty of time for my train to Strasbourg, but I chickened out of standing in another SNCF line and trying to find a train to Vienna. The train platforms are supposed to be announced 20m before departure. In our case, the announcement 20m before departure was a 15m delay. This crept up to 25m, and then 30m, and then there was still no platform announcement as the next train to Strasbourg was leaving, scheduled for 30m after our original departure. Finally, a couple of minutes later, we had a platform announcement, and were shortly on our way.

We are now pulling into Strasbourg, where I will find out if there is in fact a seat on the train to Vienna that leaves in an hour and a half, and if I will be blackmailed into paying full price for it. Fingers crossed.

I'm writing from the middle of another research-trip adventure. The text I'm working on exists in several manuscript copies, and these manuscripts are scattered throughout libraries and monasteries in Europe. For this particular trip, my goal has been to see the manuscripts in Paris and Vienna.

What follows is a series of posts that I've written en route; unfortunately, I couldn't post them in real time because the Internet is not yet everywhere. (Well, okay, it is everywhere, but I'm not willing to pay today's rates—£6/MB—for the privilege.)

Bedroom: before
Originally uploaded by tla.

Bedroom: after
Originally uploaded by tla.

Next Wednesday will mark a year in the new house for Mike and me. I had this in mind when I suggested that he take this week off from work, so that we could do some more work around the house (and ride our bikes a bit, of course.)

The only upstairs room that remained ugly as sin was the bedroom. The carpet wasn't actually disintegrating, like the carpet in my study had been; the room was in use, which meant that fixing it would be a more difficult project than fixing Mike's study, which we had intentionally kept clear of furniture. That's why it took us until this week to get around to tackling it.

The rug that is now in there is the same one that Mike had in his flat in Surbiton. I had settled on a different color for the walls a few days ago when he said "You know, it would be nice to be able to use that rug of mine somewhere." And then I thought, why not the bedroom? I played around with online color pickers, looking for a color that wasn't too dark but would work with deep red, and finally found this violet. As an added bonus, since it wasn't one of Dulux's pre-mixed colors, I got to make the guy at Homebase use the paint mixing machine. Yay!

And hey, now i have a porphyra of my very own.

Ert'evek orinakuk' -- traffic patterns

For the visitor from the West, the traffic patterns are initially harder to understand because all the trappings that we would expect are there. Here are the traffic lights, with the familiar red/yellow/green lights; here is the walk signal with the little green man (or not.) After a few bewildering attempts to cross the road, and a brush or two with death, the visitor eventually learns the first important rule.

Rule #1: Ignore the green man. Your life depends on this.

Now I know that some of my readers, e.g. anyone who lives in Boston, already scoff at the idea of patiently waiting until the walk signal comes on before crossing. "Whatever," you think, "we are all old pros at crossing whenever we have the opportunity." But that's not what I mean. I mean that if you cross the street while the green man is lit, and aren't paying actual attention to the actual cars, you will eventually get hit when a car zooms across the crosswalk.

I say "eventually" because it is more likely that the driver will just screech to a halt and honk madly. This brings me to the next observation.

Rule #2: Most of the time, nobody has priority.

Armenian drivers are pretty good at avoiding obstacles, whether the obstacles be potholes, pedestrians, or anything else. The lane markings are occasionally a guide to where the cars might best fit, but are otherwise decorative. At the same time, pedestrians in Armenia have the same responsibility of observation and avoidance. If a driver sees you in the middle of the road, he will swerve to avoid you, if there is room. This means that, if the road is wide enough, you can stand merrily in the middle of a lane. There is a flip side to this freedom, though. If you see a car coming, your job is to make sure there is room for the driver to get by you. He doesn't mind veering a little, but will be unhappy if he has to brake, and very unhappy if he is taken by surprise.

Once it is understood, Armenian traffic is actually an elegant little system in co-operation and mutual accommodation. Naturally, there are a lot of people who will push the limits, and try to muscle through when maybe they should have stopped; when a traffic light turns red, there is usually a car whose driver will accelerate, leaning on the horn as he approaches the intersection in order to announce that he is coming through, light be damned. On the other hand, he will never, ever go through without honking his intention.

I took the camera out for a spin today, and one of the pictures I wanted was best obtained while standing in the middle of Mesrop Mashtots Avenue, which is a six-lane thoroughfare. I'd have gotten away with doing this in Boston or in London, but would have caused undue stress to the drivers, and would have to take a rushed picture while in fear of my life. Here, I blithely took up my position in the middle of the road knowing that the Armenian drivers would simply accept my presence.

I hope I remember, when I'm back in the UK, how to cross the street like a Westerner.

Tesarzhan vayreri ditoum -- seeing the sights

All that said, I have not completely neglected the available sights. The apartment rental agency runs a set of daily tours; just show up at their office at 10:00, pay the appropriate fee, and get on the minibus. Last Monday, I decided that it was a good day to get out of the filthy city air, and went along on the tour to Garni temple and Geghard monastery.

Garni is the only example of Greco-Roman architecture in Armenia. The tour guides will tell you that it was a temple to Mithras -- like their Persian neighbors and sometimes-overlords, pre-Christian Armenians were fire-worshippers -- but a current theory is that Garni wasn't a temple at all; it was a tomb. Either way, the site was certainly a royal residence, even if the building itself wasn't. The foundations of a church may be seen right next to the temple, and the foundations of a palace, probably constructed at the same time, are a few tens of meters away.

On the far side of the palace are the remains of a bath house, which has been partially reconstructed so that tourists can see roughly how it functioned. The floor of the bath house carries a mosaic with the inscription "We worked but got nothing." Odd sentiment for a royal establishment, and I am relieved to say that it doesn't apply to my own time in Armenia.

The "temple" itself was destroyed in an earthquake in 1679, but was reconstructed in the 1960s according to a contemporary understanding of what the building had looked like. There are still many stones on the ground around the building; these were the stones whose purpose in the structure couldn't be worked out. The reconstruction gives Garni a curiously patchy appearance -- about half the stone is original, colored with age, and the other half is under 50 years old.

Our next stop was Geghard, which is a monastic complex that is half-built, half-dug out of the side of a mountain. The current buildings date from the 12th or 13th century, and include three chapels, a walled courtyard, and two family tomb. The entire site is utterly gorgeous, but posting of pictures will have to wait until I have a much faster Internet connection.

At both Garni and Geghard, the locals sell bread, sweets, and souvenirs from small stands in the parking lots, right next to the tour buses. They are every bit as insistent that you try their goods as one might expect for this part of the world. My attempt to buy a sheet of apricot lavash ("lavash" is Armenian flatbread; this was not real lavash, but Armenian flat-fruit, like a fruit roll-up, only healthier) gained me two large sheets of apricot, one sheet of plum, and a narrow escape from some nut-filled candy that I genuinely didn't want. I am a bit worried that if I'd spent much longer in the parking lot, I might have had the entire contents of the stand pressed upon me.

Overall, it was a very good tour. There were nine of us with the tour guide; we were never rushed, and we were never left with an hour to kill after having exhausted the available sights. If I finish my current library task with time to spare, I may well go on another one.