taught salsa dancing

I taught salsa a couple of weeks ago. Here was the announcement:

"""Andrew will teach the basics of L.A.-style salsa. Also called line-style salsa because of how the dancers change position it has a different feel than Cuban-style salsa. Both styles are danced in Gothenburg.

The timing in salsa is a bit tricky because of the pauses on beats 4 and 8 so the lesson will start with the basic step and following the beat in the music. After that will be the underarm turn and the cross-body lead, along with advice on how the lead works and the reason why it's called "line-style" salsa.

"Cuban motion" adds an extra flare to salsa dancing by making the hips move. Andrew will introduce cuban motion through merengue, another latin dance with a simpler beat than salsa."""


It was 90 minutes of teaching Santa Fe style salsa to a mixture of new beginners and ballroom dancers. Went pretty well. (I use "Santa Fe" style to mean club style, line style, on-1 with a smooth (vs sharp) transition between moves.)

I was nervous at the first. That worked out once I started getting into the teaching. Not much different than other teaching I've done. I would have like to practice before though. When teach programming I have both a lot more experience and often notes about what I'm teaching.

I didn't have the right music. I don't have much salsa music (haven't the room to read from Darin's DVD's) and even the slowest song was too fast to teach. Luckily the club had slower music.

There were a few things I taught out of order. I should have started with an explanation of why it was line style. This was at an engineering school. That did help. I went with a more mechanical explanation of how things worked. Not often I get to say "C2 continuous" - though I know that's wrong. I meant it as a joke. (Really it's more like there's a maximum jerk -- which is the I-kid-you-not scientific term for change in acceleration.)

When I learned to dance several of my teachers talked about "energy" and "grounded" and other things which were hard to interpret. I'm a reductionist; breaking things down and build them back up again. So I tried to teach like that more mechanistic manner.

I mixed teaching styles. I tried to do a bit of the style one of the teachers in South Africa uses, but it's not for me. I mostly stayed with Santiago's style. Even with the circle of women around me. They didn't quite get it, but it was the first time for them.

I teach best as a tutor and not to large groups. What I did was teach and go round to each couple and give pointers. One of the guys was a relative beginner and wanted to do lots of fancy things without having the basics down. After the course, in the open dancing, he wanted me to show him a .. I think it was a CBL inside turn, but that's too simple. Ahh, perhaps I was showing him why he couldn't do a given lead because it was too easily confused with another move, so he wanted to do both.

There are many paths to dance. I personally emphasize the small details first. I think going for the moves makes for bad habits that are hard to break later. It's more than that, I know, and different. Too complicated to explain now.

Hardest was teaching cuban motion. That was the last 10 minutes of the course. I did it with meringue music. Being traditional and all. The thing is, I don't know quite know how to teach it. I remember taking Liz's class focusing on Cuban motion (I do like details) but it was too long ago to remember the details, and I couldn't recall enough from your and Santiago's lessons to teach it.

I also knew it would take a while no matter what so I wasn't worried. I had a lot of lessons focusing on that so instead I only wanted to get across "stepping into a bent leg, which gets straightened" and "shoulders stay still." I prefer dancing with people whose shoulders are not moving up and down.

The ballroom dancers, of course, knew ballroom style Cuban motion. They tried, but habits are habits. Just like I can't do ballroom style motion.

I taught an underarm turn as an arm raise/halo around the head, and emphasized that the lead can start early.
One of the ballroom dancers was having a problem with it because his habit is to do a tick-tock on the lead so he needs to start it later. There too I got to talk about mechanics.

Overall it went well. I got a gift card for two to go to the movies. Anyone want to join me? :)

In the free dancing I tried some waltzing. The first was pretty bad as I tried to remember lessons from earlier this year. It did help having a larger floor than the practice room in Santa Fe. The second try was much better. Still only doing basics and I don't think I attempted the full progression, but enough to fake it.

The woman I danced with is from the local ballroom dance society. She wants me to take lessons from some-teacher-or-other when I'm next here. I'm still of mixed views on ballroom dance (called "standard dance" in Swedish; sorry, "standard dans" in Swedish). It's that poofy formalism. I watched some competitive ballroom dance on the sport channel here. They cover weird sports here. Tall thin guys wearing shirts with the fronts open to the belly button. Not my style.

Plus, there really isn't much chance to dance ballroom socially. OTOH, I do want to reacquire those long missing skills cause you never know when you'll need to dance a Viennese Waltz. More importantly, I want there to be a time in my future when knowing how to a waltz becomes useful.

Though so far that hasn't been the case with my rusting fencing skills. *sigh* Maybe I should practice dancing while wearing a cutlass? Just in case pirates attack during the big ball?

Read a funny joke in Swedish which translates well to English: "Dad? How do you spell 'locomotive'?" "Just like it sounds." "Choo-choo?" See the Language Log entry for the original and details.

den här gången ... på levande svenska!

Åh, det är så roligt att förstör svenska. Jag pratar och skriver "Rinkeby" svenska, eller svengelska. Jag använder syftningar som kommer direkt fran USA. T.ex, rubriken kommer (för mig) fran "Spiderman", en TV-serie som jag tittade omkring 1980. Programmet börjarde med "in living color" däreför att när det ritades (kanske i 1960-talet), då var det nytt och spännande att ha färger.

(Ah, it's so much fun to destroy Swedish [play on words; "förstår svenska" means "to understand Swedish"]. I speak and write "Rinkeby" Swedish [Rinkeby is a part of Stockholm with a high immigrant population who mix Swedish grammar and pronounciation with their original language. I am exaggerating and even wrong as Rinkeby Swedish includes many loan words from eastern Europe and the Middle East and I've been working hard to use proper "verb second" word order .. except in dependent clauses where sentence adverbials come before the verb.] or "svengelska" ["Swenglish", the other way]. I use allusions which come direct from the US. For example, the title [this blog entry is titled "this time .. in living Swedish"] comes (for me) from "Spiderman", a TV cartoon I used to watch around 1980. The show began with "in living color" because when it was drawn (probably in the '60s) it was new and exciting to have color.)

Kursen är slut. Det är bra eftersom minnet har blivit fullt med nya ord och uttryck. Jag behöver tid för att smälta allt och använda dem i samtal. Istället för kursen jobbade jag på AZ i måndags och tisdags. Jag skulle ha jobbat hela veckan men jag har varit en lite sjuk och deprimerad under den sista ungefär 10-12 dagar. Det finns många möjliga anledningar. Det har varit svårt att knuffa mig själv att lära mig så mycket, jag bor i ett nytt land under julen men utan mina traditioner, vintermörket, mamas dyra operation (jag hjälpade med kostnad eftersom de har inte råd), jag gjörde sonder glasögon (dyra men inte än dyrt). Lyckliga tider.

(The course has finished. That's good because my memory has become full of new words and expressions. I need time to digest everything and use them in sentences. Instead of the course I worked at AZ on Monday and Tuesday. I should have worked the whole week but I've been a bit sick and depressed for the last roughly 10-12 days. There's many possible reasons. It's been hard to push myself to learn so much, I'm living in a new country during Christmas but without my traditions, the darkness of winter, Mom's operation (I helped with the cost since they can't afford it), I broke my glasses (expensive but not as expensive). Happy times.)

Inte allt var dåligt. Jag hade flera träffer med en tjej. En var på en Lucia- och julkoncert på domkyrken. Hennes syster sjöng i köret. De sjöng bl.a "Silent Night, Holy Night", som påminde mig om mänga förre jular. T.ex, när Sara, Jessica och jag gick upp och ner Canyon Road på luminariapromenaden julafton kväll för två år sedan. I alla fall, tjejen (som ska vara anonym här) och jag pratade mycket. Det var jättefint att samtala med annan som är intelligent och snygg och en nörd men vi bestämde oss att vi inte tillräckligt matchar. Ännu var de mina första svenska träffer. Bl.a lärde jag mer om skillnader mellan vanor i Sverige och USA.

(Not everything was bad. I had a few days with a woman. [The word "tjej" doesn't translate directly to English. It's the female equivalent of "guy" or "dude".] One was to a Lucia/Christmas concert at the catherdral. Her sister sang in the choir. They sang (amoung other things) "Silent Night, Holy Night", which reminded me of many previous Christmases. For example, the time a couple of years ago when Sara, Jessica and I went up and down Canyon Road (in Santa Fe) doing the luminary walk on Christmas Eve. In any case, the woman (who shall be anonymous here) and I talked. It was very nice to converse with someone who is intelligen and pretty and a nerd, but we decided that we don't match well enough. Still, they were my first Swedish dates. Amoung other things I learned more about the differences between customs in Sweden and the US.)

beachhead

I have established a beachhead on the Swedish language coastline. Starting approximately 10 days ago (24 November) I was able to have conversations about more than the topics revolving around dance and my background. Not hard conversations, and very slowly. But conversations. It's funny though in that I still hear things in English. My grasp is more at the code book level, as I translate the words and assemble the result. A few times I can construct sentences using Swedish grammar instead of English but my speaking rate drops even further.

According to Jacob my grammar isn't all that bad. I'm mostly getting the word order correct, and mostly getting my declensions to agree, and mostly getting the right pronounciation. Jag börjar förstå svenska istället för att förstöra det.

My current nemesis is partikel verb. Verbs followed by particles. English has the same thing, and I never realized it. For a simple example "I blew the horn" vs. "I blew up the horn" mean rather different things. Even better, "I blew up the pipe" could mean that I exhaled into an pipe going upwards, or making it explode. There's a slightly different pronouncation in those two.

Swedish has the same thing. "att hälsa" means "to greet" while "att hälsa på" means "to visit (somebody)". Depending on the stress "Jag hälsade på dig" means "I greeted you" or "I visited you". But then again like English there are words with different meanings, each with different prepositions and which are not particle verbs. (Particle verb have the stress on the particle.) For example, "att höra" means "to belong" and "to hear". "Det hör till ..." always means "It belongs to" because "till" is not used with hearing. Like in English, "I hear to" does not make sense.

While in Swedish you can "hear after" ("höra efter") something, meaning to inquire about something.

It takes 10 years to master a new topic. I've got more than 9 years to go. :)

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving not being a Swedish tradition, there was no holiday here. After class I was looking for a place to eat for lunch. I went to an Indian restaurant but it was crowded so I walked down Linnégatan and spied a Subway. Imagine that. I had seen plenty of McDs but had forgotten about the Subway. I went in. It smelled like a Subway. I decided to get a sub for lunch and was looking at the sandwiches when an item jumped out at me. Kalkon. Turkey. Not really that common in Sweden, it being an American bird and all.

Yes, I had a turkey sandwich for Thanksgiving. I went whole hog and got the 12"er too. To top it off, "southwest" sauce. Double-whammy!

Okay, it's not even a shadow of what I would have rather had - dinner with Rachel and Criag's - but it's what I could manage.

Swedish kicking my butt

Well Swedish has been kicking my butt these last couple of weeks. I started a Swedish course at the Folkuniversity Monday a week ago. It's level "B", which I think corresponds to after a semester of studies. It's been hard for my to judge where I am in the class. Partially because of the diversity of the students. There are 3-4 that speak Swedish quite well. These are people who, for example, have a Swedish husband or work in a Swedish company. Then there are some who are worse than I am. Most of these seem to have dropped out, putting me towards the bottom of the class.

I'm not used to being one of the worst. So I've been plugging away at my studies, mostly looking up words and grammar. (BTW, in Swedish you can say "att studera" and "att plugga", with latter meaning more like "to cram" (or "to swot" in British English). A "plugghäst" is a "study horse", and you can be a pluggis.) As such I can read Swedish passably. I'm going through Pippi Longstocking with an accompanying CD. The text of the two are identical, which helps because I'm quite poor at hearing spoken Swedish. I'm glad to say that in the 2nd 4 minutes (about 3 pages) I was able to follow along the gist of the text while reading it at the same time that Astrid Lindgren was speaking it.

Note "gist". There are still many words I don't know, and some that I won't be able to memorize this time through. For example, "tröskeln till" means "at the threshold of". Just how many times am I going to use that one? While other words are just so cool that I can find a way to use it, like "lantis" meaning "hick". "Jag kommer från en stad med bara 70.000 invånare därföre när jag besöker Göteborg känner jag som en lantis."

I was extremely frustrated the first week of class because of not following spoken Swedish well enough. It's hard to follow what the teacher and the others are saying, and of course there are many words I don't know. On top of that, a decent chunk of my Swedish seemed to have disappeared while I was out of the country. Imagine that.

My biggest problems in class are when I try to speak, especially when structured around a topic. The absolute worst is the Thursday classes when we read and article in the newspaper and summarize the results. I completely, totally and royally suck at it. I can understand the article, with a dictionary (the same holds for everyone else - and I'm starting to get to the point where I can use a pure Swedish dictionary instead of a Swedish/English dictionary) but summarizing proves to be quite hard.

I've been trying to thinking of an analogy. It's like there's a map, and the ideas are at different points in the map. Because I read the article I can follow it's paths through idea space, but to summarize I need to find different routes which still capture the same ideas as the original article. When I do this in English I don't need a map. I can set off through the woods and know I'll get there. In Swedish I survey the landscape first, check my declensions all the time, try different pathways, worry about my pronounciation, and forget where I am. I'm much better at written Swedish than spoken.

Maybe there's also something about my programming experience which affects how well I do with spoken vs. written Swedish? I've gotten decently good at following seemingly arbitrary rules and memorizing words. In that casting of things, what I need is a compiler with a good warning system, to get better feedback.

Men jag är envis och bestämd och ska lära mig det här språket.

Stone cookies

I learned a Swedish word today; "stenkakor". Translated directly, "sten" is "stone" and "kakor" is "cookies". One of the guys at tango brought in an old hand-cranked record player. I think you say grammaphone for something that old. It played something I thought was thick vinyl. I practiced Swedish with Johann, using the word "skivor" meaning "slices" or "disks". I know that by walking past record/CD stores. I think it may include CDs. Anyway, he mentioned that it actuallly played stenkakor. I had no idea of what that was and he didn't know the English word. He brought one over to me.
It was thick and heavy. Like a stone cookie.

The best guess for the name in English was a 78, but I thought 78s were only a style of old record. Came back to the House of a Thousand Wows and looked it up in the dictionary. It said "old 78 records." The "old" was perfectly apt. Of course there was a transition from old-style to vinyl and for backwards compatibility the new ones worked with the old players.

Here is a Google image search if you want to see what they looked like: http://images.google.com/images?q=stenkakor

Wikipedia (as usual) has background information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramophone_record . The disk was made of shellac and other materials (cotton fiber, carbon black, and corporate secrets) - no stone that I can tell. I has the following quote: "During and after World War II when shellac supplies were extremely limited, some 78 rpm records were pressed in vinyl instead of shellac (wax), .." The record I looked at most closely was from 1946. I wonder if it was vinyl instead of shellac.

rest of the UK trip

Writing these takes time. For these last couple of entries I've been curious about things I've seen so did research which didn't always make it into my writeups. I figure you can follow hyperlinks and do web searches as well as I can.

I stayed at B's place in Oxford for the weekend, to Cambridge for the week, then back to Oxford for the next weekend. On the 2 Friday evenings I went with Carole, one of B's roommates, to tango practice. It's held at the Quaker center. The first Friday had about 40 people, the 2nd about 25. As a rough estimate from memory. I didn't count. They dance in open embrace. On that Sunday I went with B and Carole to tango class and we chatted with the teacher after class who said, "this *is* England" when asked about the different styles. In the US some of the first lessons, for those who teach the close embrace, is to get used to being that close. It is hard, and can make for giggles while struggling with the cultural expectations of personal space with strangers.

The music was almost all traditional. Only the last few songs were alternative tango. On the second Friday I don't agree with the DJ's music choice. One of the alt. tangos had little in the way of a followable beat and another was a cover of The Beatles' "Yesterday". It didn't work.

The first Saturday night was a salsa party. I realized I hadn't danced salsa for some weeks, what with all the traveling. I had chosen tango over salsa. The event was after a salsa class and the teachers had recently decided to switch from teaching on-1 to teaching on-2. I know I should learn to do on-2, but I can't. I can start okay but when I get off the basic I switch back to on-1 timing. In Sweden and (I think) the UK they teach cha-cha (which they call cha-cha-cha) on-2. That comes from the ballroom tradition. In Santa Fe people dance cha-cha on-1, because they almost all come to cha-cha through salsa and club dancing. I had one lesson from an on-2 cha-cha dancer.

Before that night I had met perhaps 4 people who could dance on-2 and not dance on-1. I did try. The best was when I asked a very new dancer. We both equally struggled with the dance. I asked a woman, a relative beginner, to dance and mentioned I would dance on-1. She was relieved because she had been gone for a while and came back only to find the dance had changed from underneath her.

I still find something lacking when I dance salsa in the UK. That sense of playful flirting I've mentioned before. There were a couple people I enjoyed dancing with. (In addition to dancing with B, Carole and Sarah - I'm talking about strangers.) Luckily for me I asked the one I liked the best towards the end, and we finished up the night. That makes for a nice finale.

Before going out dancing B and Carole hosted a small dinner party for their salsa friends. One was Alladin, who came out from London. I pointed out how clear the sky was, as we came back from the dance. He had never seen the clear night sky nor the constellations. Not surprising for someone living in London. The Dark Skies people will need to do a lot of convincing to make it possible to see the Milky Way once again from London's center.

Carole served (among other things) stuffed peppers and baked veggies. Must remember to make sweet potatoes more often. Sliced, brushed with olive oil, bake 20 minutes. Yum!

A dance instruction observation. At least in Oxford the teachers want the students to advance together. You start with the beginning class and stay with it until everyone advances to the next class. No drop-ins.

During the week in Cambridge I worked. No dancing. Nothing much interesting to say here. I did stay in a 900 year old hotel. I don't know which part was 900 years old, though the TV did not have remote control. The guy behind the bar (pub master? host? Some UK term I don't know) sounded like he was from eastern Europe. I'm told there's been a lot of Poles who've moved to UK in the last couple years after they became part of the EU. That explains why I read that Poles were one of the largest emigrant groups to Sweden last year.

Back in Oxford for the 2nd weekend I took a walk with Carole to see more of the city. In this one we went through the parks and I got to see the bench dedicated to Tolkien, with two trees nearby planted in memory of the Ents. That was cool.

At Stanstead airport, waiting for the plane to take us to Sweden, a woman comes up to me. I met her tango dancing. We chatted for a bit, and more after getting off in Sweden. I've been struggling to remember her name. Even normal Swedish names I have problems with. They are just different enough that they don't stick. Then again, I'm only average about remembering names in the first place. It's practice-able, I know.

That brings me back, finally, to Gothenburg. I'll be here for a while. I had thoughts about going to Craig and Rachel's (and David's) for Thanksgiving but at $700 that's a bit steeper than I want to pay, and I don't want to deal with the hassle that is TSA security theater. For Christmas I think I'll go to Leipzig and visit the Visagies. Could even take the night train again. (It's about 14 hours by train from there to here.) My next trip to the US will be in February, which is when my legal ability to stay in Sweden expires. Though I could go elsewhere (South Africa? UK? Ireland? NZ? Oz?) there are a couple of conferences in the US I plan to attend and people to visit.

Outside it's raining, and dark comes early now that we've stopped saving it.

UK road trip, Cornwall

Daylight, in Santa Fe, used to host a weekly, open Friday lunch. I was a regular and so was Dick Cramer of Tripos. He would occasionally mention a branch of Tripos in Cornwall, far from anywhere. That made me curious. At the pre-UK-QSAR dinner I asked about it and was told it's in Bude. In looking at the map I saw a point called "Land's End." I decided then to go to Cornwall and see those two places. I did want to see a third; Neal Stephenson's Wire amazingly good article some years back on next-gen transoceanic cable mentioned a place on Great Britain where for 100+ years the transatlantic cables have come ashore. He said there were only a few places on the western shoreline where that could happen. I wanted to see it, but I did not know where it was.

Driving about the UK is slow. The fastest routes are the motorways (M25, M10, etc). The GPS mapper in the car said to head north towards the London Orbital and take the motorway across. I declined. I wanted to take the local roads. It's pretty good going if you can manage 40 on those, making for a long trip. Then again, it's pretty good during rush hour if you can get to 40 on the Orbital.

Because of the traffic, curvy roads, close walls and trees, UK driving is pretty tense compared to cross-country US driving. They've a high population density and it's pretty uniform, meaning that even in the countryside it's a lot of small towns instead of a few big ones. The biggest exception so far was west Scotland, and to a lesser extent in Cornwall.

I drove and drove and drove and drove. I finally got to Land's End at around midnight. I wasn't sure what was there. Was it some place I could say "I've been here" and go? For example, I visited Hoover Dam at midnight. Parked the car (much easier at night), walked to the dam, looked out on the water, and that was good enough. I didn't want the dam tour nor see any museum about the making of the dam. Was Land's End the same?

I got there. It was dark. Dark enough to see some of the dust bands in the Milky Way . The skies for much of my visit were clear. I could even see a bit of the haze of the Milky Way from Oxford. I saw the lighthouses off the Cornwall coast and I could hear the surf in the distance. I started down the trail, thinking it wasn't so far. I quickly realized I was quite a ways above the sea and it was too dark to see much.

I came back in the early, early morning. Land's End itself is a small theme park. If it was open I could have bought food, seen some history, including that of ships and wrecks, and watched a sped-up movie of the trip from Land's End to John o' Groats. Those are the traditional ends of Great Britian. But I was there at sunrise, and solely to see the end of the land.

I took that trail again. Very quickly I reached the end. The coastline is an eroding granite cliff. Someday I should learn more geology — geology of Cornwall. A quite impressive place, though no whales as there were near Cape Town. Though Wales was just a ways north.

After ooh-ing and ahh-ing a bit, I drove into Penzance [pictures]. Yes, where the pirates were from. That is, the soccerfootball team. At the time of Gilbert and Sullivan it was, and still is, a quiet seaside town. Population about 30,000. I parked near the Jubilee Pool. It's called a "lido", which is a UK term for a public swimming area. Now I understand why the lido deck on the Love Boat was named that. This one is from the art deco era. It's a salt water pool filled by the sea at high tide, which is when I was there. In my various readings now the marina is dry at low tide, which wasn't the case when I was there.

I stopped for a quick breakfast snack and asked the woman behind the counter where I should go. Following her directions I walked around the main shopping area and stopped at the statue of Humphry Davy, Penzance's best known citizen.

From there I drove to Bude. Coming into town I saw a great beach so stopped at Widemouth Bay. Wide sandy beach near low tide. Mild waves. There was a surfing class going on. While the water was cold enough that they wore wet suits it wasn't cold enough to walk barefooted. I chatted a bit with a woman who was getting ready to go surfing. She was an avid beginner. I mentioned I was there because of Tripos. She knew several people who had worked there. "Had" because Tripos (as I knew) had a layoff because that facility was a big money loser.

I parked at the tourist center near the harbor. "Harbor" is the misnomer. It's a cove protected by a breakwater. The tides on the Atlantic side are very impressive, though perhaps magnified by the shallow slope of the beaches. Like in Penzance boats could float in the harbor at high tide, including old-style sailing ships, but be beached at low tide, with a decent walk to the shoreline. It has an interesting piece of Victorian era engineering. The harbor proper is a sea lock, which like the Jubilee Pool is filled during high tide. That's when ships can come in and out. They close the locks (by hand, by the way) and the sea drops away at least 10 feet. The canal was meant to bring the local lime-rich sand as fertilizer in to the farmlands and ship out local crops. The canal boats had wheels because there was one section which was too steep for locks. They put the boat onto rails, pulled it up (or let it down) and took it to the continuation of the canal. Technology. Amazing, ain't it?

I learned this by visiting the historical museum next to the canal. It had the standard set of pictures, models, memorablia that you find in this sort of small town museum. (Compare to the Hamburg museum which was huge and gave more of a historical perspective and interpretation than being a collection.) Of interest to me was a picture of the HMS Bude in dazzle camouflage. I read about that last year so it was neat to look at the picture and say "a-ha, I know why it's painted that way. Education. Amazing, isn't it?

I had a Cornish Pasty in Bude. I like South African pies a lot better. The pasty was tough and bland. Hearty is another way to say it. I first had a pasty visiting EBI some years ago and learned pasties were meant for Cornish miners to eat while deep in the mines. Hearty and able to last the trip, which a ZA one couldn't do. Wikipedia quotes "It is said that a good pasty should be strong enough to endure being dropped down a mine shaft." The EBI pasties had small dough handles on the side. A guy in line at the cafeteria said that's because deep in the mines, covered in dust, the miners would hold the pasty by the handles, eat the rest of the pasty, and throw away the contaminated dough part.

Bill Bryson, in his "The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America", which I read on Rhoda's hide-a-bed in 1992. He's an American who had lived in the UK for a long time and was taking a tour through the US. He went through the UP ("Upper Peninsula of Michigan") and was surprised to see pasties for sale there. It was at the end of the season but there was one place still open. He bought one and said it tasted exactly like a pasty should, and very un-American, meaning there wasn't enough butter/grease for US tastes. The woman selling him the pasty was happy to be told it was very authentic. He had picked up a British accent and she thought he was British.

Later in his tour Bryson visited Santa Fe. I didn't notice that in my first read. It wasn't until later when I reread the book, and well after I moved to Santa Fe, that I noticed it. He liked Santa Fe based purely on going downtown, buying a margarita at the Ore House overlooking the Plaza, and meeting his .. niece? second cousin? .. who was attending St. Johns. Not much to go on to judge a town, but then it's about what I've been doing for most of my road trips, and I've done nowhere near the background research he's done.

Leaving Bude I headed for Oxford. I had seen Cheddar on the map and I knew (because I read "Salt: A World History") that Cheddar cheese originated from the caves of the nearby Cheddar Gorge. I had hoped to visit, and it wasn't far off my path. But I was also hoping to make it to Oxford by 6:30pm or so. I decided to go anyway, even knowing I wouldn't get to Cheddar until 4:45 or so, which wouldn't give me enough time to visit the gorge or any historical institutions. It would give me enough time to say I've been to Cheddar. So I did and now I can. I bought cheese too, from The Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company, which is "the only Cheddar made in Cheddar." Call me a sucker - I went there. They had various samples available. I ended up buying a medium cheddar (I usually go for sharp but didn't like their mature well enough), a smoked (my favorite of the bunch) and an English Stilton, which is a blue cheese.

All tasty. We (I, B and Carole) feasted on cheese for a late dessert that night. It was a good thing I decided to take the detour as there was no way I would have been on time to Oxford. The motorway was backed up for some miles and after an hour I finally made it to an exit where I could take the back roads into town. It's the sort of thing were having a GPS guidance system should be helpful. It was, kind of. It knew there was stopped traffic and offered to do an alternate route. But the alternate route would be the same as the alternate for everyone going to London and looking for an alternate. I couldn't tell it to choose a different alternate. Once I started on the right road it gave up on trying to route me the other way and became helpful again.

I've heard stories about people obeying the GPS more than their own senses, like ending up along a route little more than a cow path on the edge of a cliff. That didn't happen to me. The closest was saying that a road went through to the Oxford ring road and when I tried it out found that it dead ended at a relatively recent fence. It was help for a few places where I decided "I think I'll see what's that way" or took the wrong exist, and it could take me back to where I wanted to go.

UK road trip, Hastings and Battle

I've driving across the US 4 or 5 times. It's hard to count because they weren't all direct trips. For example, summer 2005 I drove from Santa Fe to Detroit then to Florida, with stops in between. Sprint 2006 I drove from Santa Fe to California. Does that count as a cross-country trip? Probably. But I don't remember all the trips I did. I used to have a map with my cross-country road trips highlighted. The route from Urbana to Tallahassee and then to Miami was rather well marked. It was such that I was getting to get a feel for which stores were at which exits.

In Europe I've only done road trips in the UK. My first was with Karen when we went to Bath and the Cotswalds. She drive because I couldn't drive stick and the rental cars here were almost all standard. My second was after the 2004 ISMB in Glasgow, when I drove around central Scotland. I rented a bigger car because it had automatic and I could instead focus on staying on the correct side of the road.

In this most recent trip I had two days to travel. I started in Hastings. I found someone else's B&W pictures if you want to take a look, or do a Google image search for Hastings. In my posting from Hastings I mentioned the gravel on the beach. It's normal. The term is "shingle", an uncountable noun meaning "small smooth pebbles, as on a beach" It makes a nice clattering sound when the waves hit it.

In the morning I drove to downtown Hastings and walked along the beach for a short bit to the fishing boat area. They are beach-launched ships. "The largest in X" where X was variously written "England", "the UK" and "Europe". A tractor puts them into the water at high tide. They are out for 12 hours and pulled back in at the next high tide. It's a long tradition. I went to a local historical museum with various pictures and memorabilia from the last 150 years or so along with some bits about the long-term history. I went to the lifeboat station nearby. Tough-looking boat, and designed for beach launches.

October is the end of the season so things weren't all that happening. There were a few tour busses, including one full of German students. I couldn't figure out just why they were there. What's the draw? Were they all going to Battle afterwards?

I did. The Battle of Hastings was not at Hastings. The Normans (and their pals the Bretons and the Flemish) landed near Hastings but the battle was a bit north, at what is now called Battle. After the Norman Conquest was complete William had an abbey built at the site. This evolved over time and was privately owned in the 1800s. Now it's a tourist site and a school. After paying the entrance fee you get an audio device for the self-guided tour. Enter the number listed on placards to have it recount the events from the various points of view as people who were there might have.

The site has changed since then. The top of the hill upon which the English were was likely leveled somewhat. It's not a large area. This was an era when a big battle had only a few thousand people. I would like to have been there with Geoff, acting as interpreter and enthusiastic travel companion. I don't know enough of the era to understand it well enough it on my own.

Even better would be there for the yearly reenactment of the battle, in traditional garb and weapons. I missed it by a week. Signs were still up for it. I suspect finding a place to stay at the last minute would have been harder. There were flowers on the plaque marking the spot where Haroldfell. Attached to the flowers were cards, in modern and old English, with various praises and benedictions to Harold, "last of the true English kings." Like I said, I wish Geoff was with me.

Knowing modern Swedish does not help reading Old English.

Someone must have written a book about an alternative world where the Vikings attacked a week earlier, or later, and not so deplete the English foces in Battle of Stamford Bridge.

Stopped afterwards to get a pastry from "Martel of Battle." Solely because I wrote a software package named Martel.

Afterwards I had to decide what to do next. It's early afternoon Thursday and I was not expected in Oxford until evening Friday.

Riding the rails

In digging through my files I came across this posting from July. I finished it in mid-July on the couchette car going from Berlin to Malmö. There was no internet access. I saved it to a file meaning to upload later. In this case, much later. A couchette car is a sleeper car with bunk beds, shared often amoung strangers. It was the overnight train to Sweden.


Sleeping became better once I put earplugs in. Couchettes aren't a bad way of traveling, nor are trains. They just take a while. They are extremely convenient because the stations are in the center of town. At least nearly always. Back in Illinois, many years ago, the city of Urbana refused (as I recall) to give certain concessions to the railroad building the line from Chicago south. Or they asked for too much. Instead the railroad created a new town originally named "West Urbana" a mile or two away. That city grew, changed its name to Champaign, became the county seat, has more businesses, and when I was there was twice as big as Urbana. Roughly 70,000 vs. 35,000.

Amtrak still goes through Champaign but that's the only passenger service. The station is two blocks from the center of town but it's not part of the city life. Something like 2/3rds of the school come from Chicagoland, and both C-U and Chicago have decent mass transit. A weekend service back and forth to Chicago should get some takers. It's 3.5 hours by car so perhaps 3 hours (or less?) by train.

Why doesn't that happen? It's several things. One is the chicken-and-egg problem where people don't take the train because there is no train because there are no people. In New Mexico Governor Richardson has been pushing a light rail project .. named the Roadrunner Express? ... between Albuquerue and Santa Fe. I think it's a top-down political decision likely to fail. Even when trains were the way to get around the US there was no good rail connection to Santa Fe because of geography. The train stops at Lamy and people going to Santa Fe finish the trip with a 15 minute car ride.

There are two competitors to trains: planes and automobiles. Planes are fast but the airports are out of town, the airlines and security demand passengers arrive early, luggage is separated from the passengers and cannot contain certain items, security screening can be humiliating, etc. Figure two hours overhead and an hour flight takes a bit over three hours of travel. That's 2.5 hours of rail time, assuming 15 minutes of overhead on each side.

Execepting the northeastern part of the US, neighboring cities are a but further apart than that by car. Urbana was 3 hours to Chicago and St. Louis and 2 hours to Indianapolis. Competitive train service must be high-speed train service. I've heard about two reasons keeping this from happening. High-speed lines must be straight. The existing tracks aren't straight enough, with bends too often and too sharp. Fixing that requires new right-of-ways, which is expensive and time-consuming. It isn't worthwhile if there are no passengers and shaky evidence that things will change. Hence a top-down political decision could overcome the barrier. If it fails (in the US) then it's more proof that the government is incompetant. If it succeeds then nay-sayer will say that it was economically worthwhile and free enterprise would have put one in no matter what the government did. Heads I win, tails you loose.

I've also heard that freight lines in the US have right-of-way over passenger lines. The rails are owned by the freight companies after all. So few people ride that they have no political power to change this. Risk management of uncertain schedules requires either a huge number of trains (just catch the next one, coming in a few minutes) or large buffer times ("good thing I had a 90 minute layover because the train was delayed by an hour"). Both make train travel less viable.

The train to Leipzig on Friday was 20 minutes late. The Germans on the train were quite annoyed. German trains run on time. There were people from Deutsch Bahn giving OJ, bottled water or candy to the passengers as an apology. Some people missed the outbound connections. For example, one of my transfers had about 12 minutes between arrival and departure and the train arrived 3 minutes late, which made me nervous. You can't be this tight with airplanes. It takes about as long to load a plane as the train is at the station.

The other train competitor is the car. When ready, hop into the car and go. No nervousness or worry about missing the train. I saw several suit-clad businessmen miss the train by mere seconds. It was still at the station but the doors were closed. They were not let on.

Hastings

I'm staying tonight in the Grand Hotel on Grand Parade, St. Leonards, Hastings, East Susses, TN38 0DD, Great Britain. That's what it says on the receipt. 35 Sterling (cash only). Includes wireless and breakfast.

Yes, I'm in the UK now. I got into Sweden last week, for 6 days. I was at the UK-QSAR meeting today on the Novartis campus in Horsham and flew out yesterday to get here. It was a comedy of errors. I thought the meeting was on Thursday, not Wednesday, and had planned to visit AZ on Monday and Tuesday. On Monday morning I check the schedule and realized my mistake. Ryan airlines is cheap and getting tickets wasn't bad, even for the day before. When I showed up I was 8 minutes late. Check-in closes 40 minutes before the flight. Had to get a new ticket. Oops! Still, a new ticket (one way) was about $100. It was cheaper flying later, but it messed up my schedule.

You see, I didn't have a place to stay. I was expecting to come into Horsham with 4-5 hours to spare and look for a room. The pre-conference dinner was at 7:30 and I arrived in Stansted at about 4:30 then had a long wait through immigration. Last year immigration control took about 1 minute. Here the line was 30-40 minutes long. Blah. I think they centralized it
so they could lower the number of people staffing the desks. Last time I think there were different immigration controls for each terminal, and coming from the EU meant there were a lot of EU people who didn't require much processing. I was one of the few non-EU people on that Ryan flight.

I got to the restaurant about 15 minutes late as it was. I was helped by a navigational computer, sometimes. GPS controled with a map of the UK. I told it where I wanted to go. It wanted to change the routing frequently - the rush hour traffic gave it the heebie-jeebies. Today I figured out how to turn it off temporarily when it gets annoying ("Luke, you switched off your targeting computer. What's wrong?"). Trouble was, it put me into a car park and said the street I wanted to go to was a special traffic area. Meaning that it was for pedestrians only. It took me a while to figure out what that meant.

After dinner I tried finding a place, with help from others at the conference. Andrew Henry (from CCG) had a mobile phone with web support so looked up a few web pages for me. It didn't help enough so I haded to Crawley, a bigger town nearby. Got there around 11pm. First place - booked up. Second place - the same. They called another place, also booked. "If they are full then there's no place in town."

Others from the conference dinner suggested that if Crawley failed me I should go up to Gatwick for an airport hotel. I did not heed their advice. Sounded too boring. Drove down to Brighton instead. It's about 15 miles away, which in the UK is further than it sounds. First place was locked up for the night. Second place was open. Checked in just before midnight. Guy behind the desk as Mohammad Ali. I kid you not. He's a British citizen from Egypt. Lived in the US for a while, specifically in New York. He was rather hopeful that I knew NYC but as I've only been on the ground there there for about 3 hours I couldn't talk about the place with him. Nonetheless we chatted a bit about other things.

Like that most of the taxi cab drives in Brighton are from the Sudan but if you ask them they say they are from Egypt. Mohammad thinks it's because they don't like telling people they come from a very poor country and would rather claim they come from Egypt. I wondered if it's easier to say "Egypt" then to explain where the Sudan is. Eg, "I'm from Miami" "Really, so am I - which part?" "Ft. Lauderdale" "But that's not Miami." "But people know where it is."

This Friday I'll visit friends in Oxford. The extra day gives me time to travel. I looked on the map and decided to head eastward today to Hastings and see what there is to see of the old 1066. Arrived just at sunset. Pulled into a car park on the boardwalk and went down to the beach. It's a gravel beach, with what looks like river gravel. It has a lot of sea barriers I think to prevent erosion, so I don't think it's the real beach. That's a lot of gravel then.

It reminded me of my high school English class where we were forced to read Elliot's "The Love Song of J. Edgar Prufrock". I hated that was a passion. It made no sense to me, I understood none of the analogies, references or allusions. The only memory I have (besides agony) is of a references to waves crashing onto a gravel beach, and something about Dover. Which is nearby. As I'm on the beach overlooking the Channel (touched the water too, to say I've done it) I wondered about the poem. Did it describe this scene.

I walked on down the promenade and espied the Grand Hotel, with wi-fi and rooms to rent. En suite for £35. The innkeeper knows his facts. He knew right away that Santa Fe was the capital of New Mexico and that it's at about 2000 meters. He didn't know the population though and guessed it at 1.5 million. He was surprised at the 70K number, which is smaller than Hastings. I mentioned Prufrock and he got T.S. Eliot right way. He mentioned some BBC report as news of some economics professor's fantcy that within 1000 years there will be two races of humans. I mentioned the Eloi and he mentioned H.G. Wells. Is that type of knowledge commonplace for British inkeepers? Has decades of experience with pub quizzes kept the mental skills of the UK public in tip-top shape? Find out more as I experience life on the road in the UK.

I looked up Prufrock on the web. There is no mention of waves on gravel. The closest is

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

for my memory of the waves is tied with crabs or lobsters. The sound of claw clattering like gravel rattling? I don't know why I thought of it. Perhaps my teacher had gone to England and recounted being here? I checked "The Waste Land" in case I got the reference wrong but again found no reference. The closest there was "If there were only water amongst the rock".

Freeman Dyson, who is close to being a personal hero, wrote an autobiography titled "Disturbing the Universe". Profrock contains the line "Disturb the universe?". Perhaps I should try again to understand that poem. Dyson is wicked literate. And there's my early 90s slang again.

Whales

Last month I went to Mariana's to see the whales. There were a couple but they weren't doing much.

On Sunday most recently I went again. There were many more whales out there. Some were just lazying around, flapping flippers and rolling about. A few were doing tail lifts. It's a sight to be walking, talking, then look up and see the huge tail off in the distance of an otherwise flat sea.

It wasn't flat, flat. Not like the time Cindy, Sharon and I went to SGI and the sea was so flat it was reflecting the clouds making the offshore islands appear to float. It was the flat of frustrated waves finally getting around the cape peninsula, bouncing around False Bay to say hello.

I went there from and back to Hout Bay using the Chapman's Peak road. It's R23 each way (about $3, but in local purchasing power more like $6-$8). It's an expensive road to maintain, being effectively on the cliff face, with large steel fences to keep some of the boulders away from the road and the paying customers. Part even has an artificial overhang where the cliff is the steepest.

On the way back I stopped a few times to watch the waves come in from the deep Atlantic. The wind was behind it pushing the swells and raising the spray. At one spot there's a short footpath leading to an almost bow-like ending with a long drop down and not much else. I was enjoying the power and the glory and noticed, way down below, was another whale doing tail lifts. I thought it was rare to have whales on that side of the mountain, but there it was. It gave a great sense of scale too because that fin seems more small than distance suggested. I'll need to recalibrate my eyeballs.

Just Nuisance

Here's a story which has not yet made it into the collections of truths, stories, lies and tales that is Wikipedia.

Atop the mountain overlooking Simonstown is the grave of Able Seaman Just Nuisance, R.N. Unlike most seamen he is, or was, a dog. A Great Dane. He would enjoy laying on the gangplanks of the naval vessels at the yard there. Great Danes are, well, huge, and it was hard to get past him. Sailors said he was just a nuisance, from which came his name. The sailors took a liking to him, and him to them. He would follow them at times onto the train taking them into town for a bit of leave. The conductors didn't like the pooch getting a free ride and would kick him off. They wanted the owner to pay for a season ticket. The Navy figured a way around that. The induced Just Nuisance into the Royal Navy, first as Ordinary Seaman and then promoted to Able Seaman. As a volunteer during the War such he had a free pass to the trains. When he died at age 7, for Great Danes don't live long, he was laid to rest atop the mountain overlooking Simonstown.

You can drive to the top up a winding road, or take a steep road from down about 1/2 of the way up. From there take the stairs up and up and up. It's perhaps 15 minutes but we stopped several times so I could look at the frigates and the submarines and the sight of the military harbor and sailing club.

Thanks to Mariana for telling me the story and taking me there. See http://www.simonstown.com/tourism/nuisance/nuisance.htm for more details.

driving in South Africa

The big highways are the national highways, with country-wide names like N1, N2 and N7. Mostly these are two lanes, though none so far quite like "Bloody" US 27 in the Everglades. In some places near the cities they can be four line divided highways. While I say "two lanes" it's only in the legal sense. The can be 3 or even 4 lanes, depending on who is driving. There is a yellow line seperating the driving lanes from the break down lane / shoulder. Here it's often called "the yellow lane." Trucks will have signs on the back saying "this truck does not drive in the yellow lane" and "max speed 100" (that's kph). Don't believe either one.

Like elsewhere I've been you're not supposed to drive in the yellow lane. It's for breakdowns and doesn't have enough space for continuous safe driving. But here if someone comes up behind you and wants to pass you're supposed to slide over to the side - still going a highway speed - and let him by. Good manners require him to put his hazards on for a couple of blinks, to which you may respond with a flash of the head lights. It's a bit stressful trying to handle all this on a crowded highway at night in the mountains in near stop-and-go traffic while driving a left-handed stick. At least for me. I can't manage a conversation while doing all that.

It's also unnerving when there's traffic the other way, so cars might be lined up with two going one and one the other. There is enough space for two cars in the lane+yellow lane but with little room for error. In most cases the car going the other way goes partially into the other side's yellow lane to make things more comfortable.

Like Bloody 27 there is a high accident rate. On the drive to/from Durbin there were 3 or 4 accidents. One was with a minibus, another with a truck and a third with a car. There may have been another I don't recall. There were also a few broken down cars on the side of the road. Many people here regard the minibus taxis as very dangerous. Many people die in minibus collisions. They are independent contractors mostly going between a region of town with work and one of the poor residential areas. They speed and swerve and try to go as fast as they can, since they want to make a profit. There's usually one guy manning the door, using big gestures to tell other cars to make way, and call out after new riders.

The brother of Joyce, Heikki's and Minna's cleaning woman, died the weekend before last in a hit-and-run taxi accident.

There's a push to have higher safety standards on the taxis. There's pushback from the drivers who will protest if that happens.

Two very busy weeks

The last two week were rather busy. I arrived Jo'burg airport at about 5pm which was perfect timing for the infamous rush hour commute to Pretoria. I was prepared for it though, having kept the sandwich from the plane and a bottle of water. I noticed several people in the stop and occasionally go traffic on the freeway pull over to use a handy roadside bush, it was that long. A few pulled a U-ey to go back the other way. I wonder if they were low on gas. Sorry, "petrol."

Arrived at the guest house shortly after dark. Followed Fourie's directions with only a few mishaps. Hadn't remember the name but it's the only one here. Got shown the room, unpacked, etc. and did a bit of work. Still working on Martel2. I had stayed up late the previous night and crashed early.

Pieter picked me up at 8am for the braai (sorry, "BBQ") at a not-so-nearby reservoir. It was a group event and most of Fourie's students and staffed showed up. I left the guest house too early and the shop at the lake served only junk food, which tied me over until the meat was ready at 1ish.

Fourie has a small catamaran stored at the lake. We helped him get it ready. I volunteered to go on the first run. It had been many years - since 1987? - since I was last on a sailboat, and '86 since I was last on a cat. My uncle Larry and cousin Rob took me out on Biscayne Bay. This was Fourie's 2nd or 3rd time out and we ended up in irons a few times, pushed into the reeds at the edge of the lake. Reminded me of "African Queen" as Pieter jumped out to turn us around. It felt like the cat doesn't have enough momentum to tack about so Fourie switched to jibing.

The water was chilly. It is spring here and the lake water still has the winter in it. Wait a month or two and it'll be great, like Lake Vermillion for Dylan's wedding. Then again it would be full of powerboats and other craft, with people all along the water's edge.

After lunch we had a pickup game of volleyball. Hard ball too. Painful. It was fun though. Talked with Hamilton for a while. He's a YEC. I don't know how you can be in bioinformatics and believe the world is <10K years old. There's simply not enough time to explain the Messian event, ice sheets in Greenland, or the formation of Carlsbad Caverns. All of which I mentioned to him.

Took a walk about on Sunday, but this neighborhood is pretty boring. Many would say that Pretoria is pretty boring. This area is dense with embassies. The Italian one is down the street and the Mexican one effectively in what we called "campus town" at UIUC.

I finished of Jerod Diamond's "Collapse." Good book. Well told history. I should follow up on some of the recommended readings. If only my own back list weren't so backed up.

Walked in to the Universiteit van Pretoria on Monday morning. Though this area is in the process of migrating to the name "Tshwane" and the local paper is titled "Pretoria News" with the slogan "The paper for the people of Tshwane." Read the wikipedia for details.

The university is 1.5 blocks away. More like 1.1 as the guest house is on the corner. Like other schools it has guards checking people coming in and security gets with key cards to get it. I didn't have a key card so I followed the lead of about 10% of the students and stepped over the gate. Real safe there. With a hint from Pieter I remembered how to get there from my visit in January. Stopped at a small tuck shop (snack shop) to grab a cooldrink (soda) and bumped into Ayton, who let me in.

The group there has an ambitious project to develop a LIMS system for about 200 users in this area. It's mostly data management, with a lot of different data types. Sequence, genomic, genomic annotations, structure, small-molecules, assays, user comments -- the works. Very ambitious. They planned to do it in Java but that's proved too complex for them. When I visited last summer I showed them the TurboGears 20 minute wiki video, and with the help of Laura in Sweden managed to get Fourie to EuroPython to give a talk and see more about the state of Python web development.

I taught Python at the NBN a couple of times and in July spent two weeks training people on using Python, specifically TurboGears, to develop bioinformatics web applications. Fourie asked that I come up here and work with them for a couple of weeks to get them up to speed and along the right path. They've seen the Pythonic light. It slithers so luminously.

Most of the people here were my students last winter, so I knew a bit about them already, and they of me. They had even been in my usability course, which helped a bit. I could remind them of things like paper prototypes and scenarios. My frequent comment was "so when would someone actually use this" and "have you talked with a user?"

I came across Guy Kawasaki's blog, or perhaps recame across it. He mentioned the feeling of what I'll translate as booyah-ism in answering questions on the fly. You know, you're asked an esoteric question and answer it, correctly and quickly, showing just how smart you are. Make you want to exclaim "booyah". According to the UrbanDictionary.com that's an early 1990s slang. So sue me.

The consulting I sometimes do is like that. I have to figure out what's going on, why it got there, how to help out (if I can) and be outgoing, helpful, friendly, etc. I never got formal training in this, though I've read some on it and had some practice now. What training is there? It's very exhausting.

I spent the first couple of days working with each student, asking questions about the projects, suggesting various approaches. I then started working with Ayton and Charles on implementation, and stayed with them the rest of that week and all the next week. We got a prototype system going with two external databases (one using MySQL, the other Sleepcat's DbXml) connected via XML-RPC, a central system which knows how to search and fetch from the other databases, and a schema for handling per-record annotations, including links between records. We used a wikipedia-style [[link notation]] to refer to other records.

We then rewrote it using the dispatch module, for more generic functions, and various bits of cleanup. Oh, and AJAX. Of course. The last feature we added was a trashcan, from which deleted elements could be restored. It was a *lot* of work in under two weeks. Charles and Ayton are good. They have a lot to learn, but they are quite capable.

The biggest problem is the sheer number of languages you need to know to do database-backed web applications development. Python, HTML, the kid templating language on top of HTML, Javascript, CSS, and SQL - for starters!

Last weekend I went with Hamilton to his home turf of Durban. That's "the Miami of South Africa." Coastal city, warm beaches, holiday place. It was a long trip. We left at 5:30 Saturday morning. He sped and we got there at about 11. On the return we left at 3:30pm Monday and we got in at 10:30. Which means we really sped. Though night-time driving was slower. If I get a ticket he's paying! I told him that about 1 minute before we saw the cop on the road with the radar gun.

We stayed with his parents. They were very good hosts and made me feel like I was at home. It was very much like visiting my Mom's family in Michigan. The only thing really missing was a piano in the living room. They are an Indian home, and it's the first time I've been to one here. A major plus side to that was the food. I've been complaining about how South African foods aren't that spicy. Meaning neither flavorful nor hot. People responded saying "for spicy foods you need to go to Durban." They were right.

Hamilton quizzed me on what I meant by hot. He asks his Mom to make the food extra hot when he comes home. I said it wouldn't be a problem, and mentioned the whole "red or green?" New Mexico State Question, and its context. But to prove it to him we went to Nando's the Friday before heading down. I ordered the hot/spicy chicken. The South African hot chile is peri-peri. I've tried things before with that spice and (again) complained that it was tingly and that's it. It's a single note of hotness, without texture, without diversity. Well, Nando's chicken was indeed tingly, but it really needed green chile sauce.

Hamilton was surprised. So it seems was his family. Hot Indian food was wonderful. 8 years living in New Mexico does wonders for one's chile tolerance, and the extra Indian spices rounded out the flavors nicely. Excepting the first meal I used my fingers like everyone else. The first was hard because it's rice and getting the texture of the rice just right to eat without bits falling off takes more practice than my 1/2 dozen time in Indian and Ethiopian restaurants. (I've been in more Indian places than that, but only once tried utensil-free.)

My 9th-grade world history teacher was quite good. So were my 11th grade American history and my 12th grade European teachers. She taught us about only eating with our right hands, and the caste system in India, and well, a whole bunch of things. Turns out that "Indian" in South African is it's own universe of complications. Hindu Indian? Muslim Indian? Christian? And a few others. Hamilton's family is Christian Indian, ethnically Tamil. The caste system didn't make it over. Neither did the right-hand-only thing. (The left is for cleaning.)

In passing Diamond mentioned the caste system, and suggested it evolved out of an environmental stability system. If you know you will only do X and your children will also do X ad infinitum then you'll do your best to make sure X stays around. One example of X was "in-shore fishing." That's makes for a very conservative culture. And stable, if the balance starts off close enough to the attractor in phase space.

Hamilton was happy to visit in part to see his girlfriend. We went shopping on Saturday looking for clothes for me. My jeans and slacks were on their last legs and I wanted a couple of new shirts. I didn't find any of the former in the mall we went, though I did pick up underwear and socks.

I am a small-town hick. I admit it. Santa Fe only has 65K people. The mall we went to has one of the highest climbing walls in the world, a mega-theater-plex *and* an IMAX theater, and a surfing ride. The last uses pumps to generate standing waves along a pre-formed tube. I had the same feeling when I visited Hamburg last December. "Look at how much shopping there is here!" At least I'm a well-traveled hick and don't think that the customs of my tribe and land are the laws of nature.

On Sunday we went to downtown Durban so I could have bunny chow. Mmmm, tasty. I was the only white guy in the restaurant and was given silverware. Used my fingers though. Looking it up now, only 4.4% of the city is white. Took a walk in the flea market outside the restaurant. Towards the end was the used books. The smell of incense and the sight of used books will always remind me of the bookseller at the student center at FSU. I picked up a lot of great books there. The seller had a good feel for what students would buy. While the books at this flea market - not so good. Then again, different target audience.

We headed off to Venture Golf at another mall. That's fancy putt-putt course, and all of the courses had split levels, slopes, and various nasties to them. It was the hardest putt-putt course I think I've ever played. Hamilton was about 2x better than we were, score-wise, and Sharon and I quickly switched over to play-for-fun mode, and finally convinced him too.

On the way there I finally found a store selling shirt and slacks I liked. Happy-happy-joy-joy (also early 1990s slang).

On Monday we went to the beach for a bit. More specifically Umhlanga Rocks. Which is *also* in the wikipedia. It knows all. Though it doesn't have a pronunciation guide. It's not a swimming beach as the waves mostly break on rocks. It is a nice beach, and I went waist deep into the water. That makes 3 oceans I've been in. North and South Atlantic. North and South Pacific. Indian. Need to visit Longyearbyen for the Arctic. And the Mediterranian for historical significance.

After that Hamilton and I joined his family at a park were people from their church were having a braai. I chatted with people there for a while, ate, etc. and most definitely stayed away from the soccer ball. I don't have anywhere near the training or practice of anyone from a country outside the US. Now if it had been a Frisbee-like object. From there we headed back to Pretoria.

There were still many things left undone in Durban. Guess I'll need to go back there. Fourie and the others would like me to visit, but I've much to do on other projects. Perhaps May or June of next year. I have got to improve my timing. I'm supposed to follow summer from hemisphere to hemisphere and not winter.

familiar strangers

My stay here in Fresnaye is coming to an end. Tomorrow I head up to Pretoria for a couple of weeks of teaching, training, helping out, and having fun. This Saturday the Pretoria group is going to a lake for some fun on the water. I'll be back at altitude - they're at 5,000 ft or so, I think.

I read once the term "familiar strangers." Though the power of Google I see it's originates from Stanley Milgram in 1972 and that my understanding of it was wrong. Quoting one page: "By definition a Familiar Stranger (1) must be observed, (2) repeatedly, and (3) without any interaction." I've been in this area for about 6 weeks. Main Road is a few blocks away, with many stores, shops and restaurants. It's reminds me of television shows I saw growing up, most specifically reruns of "The Streets of San Francisco." Cape Town and San Francisco have much in common. Despite the beach it doesn't have a Miami feel; more sepia than pastel.

This is part of the city proper, constrained by geography between Lion's Head and the Atlantic. People build up not out, with many 3, 4 and 5 story buildings. Short enough to not need elevators, tall enough to get density to support 3 grocery stores within easy walking distance, 4 laundry places, 4-5 internet cafes, tool rental, mobile phone service, seamstresses and tailors, clothing shops, a toy store, a pasta place - which is not a restaurant, and more.

The streets are made for people. The main street is mixed use zoning with housing above shops, though off main it's almost all residential. It's a street supporting providing services to the people who live here. There's some street parking but not much. This is still spring and the summer crowds will certainly change that. Go out into the suburbs and of course that changes, with large stores and malls surrounded by free parking. Here you pay. Every block has a parking attendent, employed by the city I think, to take your money and give you a receipt. More formal than the parking guys more often present in the evenings and nights. I hate parallel parking on the left with a right-hand drive car and so totally appreciate their help.

I go to Que Pasa on Thursdays. It's always the same parking guy there. He recognizes me and I him. I walk down the street here and see the woman who works at Lolly's, a nearby cafe, or the woman at the laundry, the man behind the counter at the internet cafe. I assumed these were familiar strangers because I know little about them. I don't know their names, or anything else other than the limited role from their jobs.

But it seems they are not strangers enough as I've interacted with them, while Milgram (according to secondary sources) uses that term for a "relationship in which both parties agree to mutually ignore each other, without any implications of hostility." I have not ignored these people.

There are others who are true familar strangers. There's a guy who lives across the street. On the street. He used to sleep in the bus stop shelter but a few weeks ago it disappeared. It was there one day and gone the next. He slept on the slab for a while but not he sleeps in the green space off the sidewalk. During the day he mostly talks loudly to himself. Like I said, many things here remind me of San Francisco. He and I have never interacted but I would be (slightly) concerned if I didn't see him around.

The "implications of hostility" reminds me of an account in Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" where in Papua New Guinea when stranger met they would work how how they were related, even if distantly. Elsewise there would be the cultural obligation to fight. Given the world's long history of distrusting strangers, I am amazed that people can now travel widely and not fear, say, being stoned for not being one of The People.

On Tuesday evening I went to dinner with Åsa, whom I know from salsa. She's Swedish (in case you couldn't tell) and I practiced some with her. It reminded me of just how much more I have to go. I know enough to make people think I know the language when I'm really just doing a lot of inferencing. A friend of her's - phonetically "Lynn" - came at the end before heading over to salsa. Her friend has been here for 8 years and has the South African accent down pat. Not just language use like "hey?" for "sorry?" (as in "sorry; could you say that again?") but really all throughout the accent. Quite impressive. Åsa said she first thought my Swedish pronounciation had a Norwegian accent and that she doesn't hear (much?) of an American one.

Wednesday was dinner with Sylvia from tango. She's one of my favorite dance partners here because with her I can be extemporaneous and let everything just flow. With some others I have to think harder about what I'm doing. For example, with beginning dancers I try to be very clear and not do fancy things. Even with more advanced dancers some just don't like leans and dips and the other salsa-influenced things I can add.

Wednesday day I went over to NBN central and to SANBI. I got reimbursed for the flight down here. It's much more of a hassle for them to wire money to a foreign bank account to pay for a plane ticket. I would have to wait until I leave so they have proof that I used the full ticket, or something like that. They don't need that if I'm paid in cash. Now the largest common bill here is R100 (about $15) and the flight was about US$1,600. That's a stack of money. Guess I'll but some new clothes before going back to Sweden, though perhaps not as they don't really do winter clothes here. New glasses perhaps? Shoes? But I have a rather small luggage allowance at 22kg so I can't buy much.

I spent some of the last couple of days working on "Martel v2". Martel was a parser generator I wrote some years back for the Biopython project. It was supposed to simplify parsing the types of file formats often found in bioinformatics. In that respect it failed. I as the Martel author still found it easier to write parsers by hand than use Martel. It did work, but it was hard to use and debug. Martel 2 uses several different approachs to address and hopefully fix some of the problems in Martel 1. It's getting there but there's probably another week of development time before it's usable by anyone else.

When I dropped by central I talked with Paul some about my new approaches. He's the Python lecturer for this year, which is what I was last year. He's here for all 2+ months of the class, which is quite impressive. I got rather burned out after 5 weeks, though I did also teach usability and chemical informatics, and offered some help with basic probablities. As an interesting one, one of the students is Moslem and she didn't know the details of a deck of cards. My mother's family was pretty strict and they also didn't play cards nor were allowed to go to the movies. My dad's parents had a Rook set, which I've since learned was more common in religious households because it's different from a normal regular deck. Though I think you could still use a Rook deck to play poker, with a bit of mental renaming.

I then went upstairs to the NBN to talk with Heikki about DAS2. I'm a bit stymied with DAS2 development because I don't have good domain expertise. I have some GFF3 data sets which I can convert to DAS2 but there are fields I don't know how to convert properly. I also want some more complex data sets. The DAS2 feature model is more complex than GFF3 and I want something which can stress various parts of the spec. Vlad has a regulatory dataset which might be appropriate, and Heikki filled me in a bit about some of the nuances of SNP and haplotype data sets.

In explaining DAS to him I found I need to rethink how I explain DAS2 to others. It's really several parts. There's the reference sequence, which is pretty well understood. There's the types document, which I had to stress is not a type system. And there are the features, which are hierchical components located on subranges of the features. Those together are the core of the DAS data model.

The expected default visualization for this is a set of tracks, one data type (or ontology type) per track, with the regions denoted. This is an implicit part of the DAS spec but should be mentioned explicitly.

The last is the search interfaces. It's a simple filter-style interface with a required set of filters and some extensibility built-in. For more complex queries there's yet another way to extend the system.

Too configurable means that no one supports everything and interoperability suffers. I think we're pretty close to the right balance, but I want to test it out, and come up with a set of recommended use-practices for those converting from other data sets into DAS.

There's a lot of work left to do, especially given the other projects I've been working on and the 3 weeks of teaching I'll be doing over the next month.

good hamburger

It's been hard to find a good hamburger here. Lots of places serve "100% beef burger"s which makes me suspicious now of places which don't have "100%" in the name. Well, some sell chicken burgers too. I wonder if it's partially a halal thing, or simple the extra boost by saying "pure". And Ivory's 99 44/100ths was all marketing.

The taste of the beef is a bit different than a US burger and the meat is thinner and .. wetter. Not quite the same as "jucier" and I don't know why. Perhaps it has a bit of a marinade. "Mrs Ball's Original Recipe Chutney" is very popular her and is put on meat about as often as ketchup in the US. Ketchup here is called tomato sauce. I haven't figured out what's put on pizza - it's a tomato sauce but not the same as in ketchup.

I've wondered what the longest chain of alternate words is between English (Commonwealth) and English (American). Ketchup -> tomato sauce -> pizza sauce, for example. Or cookie -> biscuit -> scone. Or hood -> bonnet -> hat. Starting from Commonwealth; yob -> punk -> rock music, perhaps?

I've been trying the nearby restaurants, working my way along the street (Main Rd). There's a region with few restaurants and today was the first time I went beyond the no food gap. I saw a burger joint - Saul's Saloon and Grill - with faded American flags on the sign and boasting "largest burgers in town." It's a 1.2kg one, free if eaten in < 15 minutes but give them 45 minutes to prepare it. I decided to give it a go. The joint that is, not the mega burger.

And it was good. The best burger I've had here. It helped a lot that it had a thicker, denser bun. Most South African breads are light and fluffy while I prefer something medium weight. Not German dense bread, but in that direction. Saul's served normal buns and not fluffy mushable bread. Great fries (-> chips -> potato chips -> crisps) too.

Now if I can only convince people to put more than a token tomato slice and lettuce leaf on the meat. Though as Johann says "there's nothing wrong with eating vegetables; some of my favorite foods are vegetarian." To me there's something intrinsically good about adding the crisp of lettuce and juicyness of tomato to a burger.

There was an early indicator that I might be in a more American-style burger place. In addition to the American flags and (perhaps) the word "saloon" (indicating the American West the way 'dacha' indicates a Russian summer house?). The waiter asked how I wanted it cooked. Normally everything is "well done" and no one asks. I prefer medium rare. What I got wasn't medium rare - more like medium - but I'm not complaining.

This is a big meat culture. The national past-time is the braai the way a BBQ is to some parts of the US. I've been to a few braais. Usually there's beef and chicken and boerewors. Always well done. There are also fish braais and no doubt veggie ones too. I went to Heikki's for a fish braai a few weeks ago. He used some high quality Namibian charcoal. And yes, I'm still a bit giddy with the knowledge that "we're using Namibian charcoal - we can do that because after all we're close to Namibia. I could drive there if I wanted to. In a (long) day."

Afterwards I walked along the sea front. It's a popular place around sunset, walking dogs and children, chatting, jogging, watching the sun set across the Atlantic. The sea's been quiet the last couple of days, though at 12.5C / 55F it's frigid.
In the last stretch back to the apartment (->flat->tire->become exhausted) a guy I know from tango stopped his car and said hello. He and his wife, whom I enjoy dancing tango with, live about 2 blocks from here. He invited me in, I met their young son and bulldog, and us old people talked for a bit.

I left, got back to the flat, changed, and headed off to salsa classes at Que Pasa. I missed the intermediate lesson but didn't mind as I rather enjoyed the conversation I had. Sadly though only 2 women showed up to the advanced class so John canceled it.

Head in the Computer

I have spent most of the last two or three weeks in an introspective mode. Not quite that. I was evaluating a lot of technology as part of a feasibility study and in part to catch up with the state of the art in Python and web development. Two weeks ago I worked on a DAS2 sprint. It started at 6pm local time with a phone conference call and I would work on it until late, because the sprint proper took place in California.

In addition to the spec proper I looked at two technologies which may affect DAS2 system. The first is content negotation, sometimes written conneg for short. I like the idea that clients can include an ordered list of formats, languages and encodings in the request. My Safari browser knows that I can read English and some Spanish and Swedish so when it includes that in the request, in the extremely rare chance that 1) the server understands the Accept-Language header and 2) a document isn't available in English but is in Swedish. Which is effectively never. The other things I looked at was Sleepycat's XML database.

But my technical writings page is at http://www.dalkescientific.com/writings/diary/ and I won't go into details here, much as I would like. I've made several updates there over the last week as I look into various Python technologies. I had heard of most of them before and had a general feel for how they were supposed to work. What I was mostly doing was getting a hands-on feel for how to use them and if they were worthwhile for the way that I develop software.

I like to think I'm quite good at that. It took a lot of intense single-minded effort though and there were a few times where I looked up to realize it was 5am. That's been going on for a few weeks and includes today when I did some work from 11:30am and seemingly a few minutes later it was 5pm and I needed to get ready for James' birthday parties.

I haven't been a complete homebody. I went to the Lehvaslaiho's last weekend. I write that with a smile on my face because I always say Heikki's (or Heikki's and Minna's) place as while I've heard that Finnish pronounciation is very phonetic using Swedish phonology, even if I the surname correctly no one would know who I'm talking about.

Today was James's birthday party. It was at an all-you-can-eat sushi place in Panorama. (Which, yes, does have a good view of the city and Table Mountain.) I wasn't much impressed with the fish or the service. Being in a highly introspective mode I talked shop. James is one of the students I taught last year at the NBN. He's at Stellenbosch now. He and his girlfriend (also one of my students) moved here from Durban so they mostly know bioinformatics students. Hence people I could talk shop with.

After that was salsa dancing at a bar near Cavendish mall, in Claremont. Not a big crowd so an open floor. It was Kim's birthday celebration, at least for her dancer friends. Her birthday is Monday. Lara and Lenine showed up. Of the people I dance with here they top the list.

Question for my dancing friends who read this: how well does a person's dance style reflect one's personality? What would be a good test for this?

My birthday was 1.5 weeks ago. I celebrated by ordering dessert after lunch and that evening I went to Rouge for tango dancing. Turned out to be a great night. Birthday circle and everything. The next night was more of a party for me. The students have a weekly social as part of the course, on Wednesday. It was Riaan's birthday that day as well so it was turned into a birthday party for him, and I crashed it. With warning so it was more like a bump than a crash. Good party.

Then that weekend was a party at Nicole's place in Kennelworth. (That's close to Claremont, in the Southern suburbs, in case you wanted to learn some about Cape Town geography.) I went there directly from Heikki's. Turns out the invitation didn't contain a map but with some mapping service help through Minna I got there.

Most of the intense work was this week. I worked on a parser generator, three different asynchronous toolkits, Javascript libraries, and some thoughts about using Amazon's S3 and EC2. A few years ago in my technical writings page I proposed EBI open up their systems so remote users can install software on local machines, to reduces the bandwidth and update problems. I didn't think it would happen as it's rather outside the EBI/Sanger mandate. Looking at the costs for those services through it should only be $1,000/year to maintain such a system. I'll be cautious and say $5,000/yr. That's still in the range of a hobbiest. Amazing.

Grr, see, I told you that my mind's still thinking too much about work. When I do these sorts of evaluations I'm not only concentrating hard but I'm thinking about the different ways to use a project, how it might improve things, does it fix something that I didn't know was broken, how it can fail, is it maintainable, etc. Like a blind person figuring out the elephant. To that I'll add "and what do I need to do to prove that I understand correctly." That for me requires embracing self-doubt, which can take a toll. I went a tango class and practica on Wednesday and ended up doing very poorly in part because my head was elsewhere and in part because an aspect of being a good lead is the certainty which comes from confidence.

I've planned out my schedule for the rest of my stay here. Looks like I'll go up to Pretoria for a couple of weeks then back here to be in Stellenbosch for a week. In clear traffic it's less than an hour from there into Cape Town, so like Santa Fe to Albuquerque.

One final thing - yesterday (Thursday) I went by SANBI to give a talk about what I've been doing. I turned it into more of a "how better technology and understanding may affect the way bioinformatics software is developed."

week of work

This last week was pretty uneventful. I worked. There was a DAS sprint last week and while I wasn't in California for it I did participate from here. It started in the evening with a 6pm phone conference call. For the first few days I went to a cyber cafe nearby. I figured I would talk and use their bandwidth instead of the DSL here. There's usually a 3GB/month cap and I have no idea how much of it I've used. I've been putting off downloading movies and large images, cvs updates, things like that. The noise was too loud though, being on Main street. For the last couple of days I did the call from here. Last January when I did a conference call I used a phone card but there's no land line in this apartment so VOIP for me.

For the sprint I updated the spec and implemented a reference server. I've used the latter as a practice piece for learning more about TurboGears, SQLObject, SQLAlchemy, and other bits of techonology. I understand a bit better why people have raved about SQLAlchemy. There's a few bits I'm still shaky about.

Usually I would work on the sprint until about 3 or 4 am, with breaks. I'm usually a go-to-bed 2am person. I've found that without an alarm I sleep about 8 hours. Waking up at noon seems like a waste of the day. When I've pushed my schedule that late I end up being groggy for the first few hours. And then it's time for another phone call.

The last day's (evening's) call was the strangest. Everyone else (US sprint; the UK people didn't participate in this one) wants a change to the basic feature data structure. It's strange because it makes no sense to me while to everyone else it's obvious. I'm the spec author so I'm the one that needs to be convinced. I also need to resolve this. My approach Friday evening (after the call) was to figure out a difference between the two.

I'm a protein guy by training. The examples bought up in the conference call to justify the reasonableness of the change were all DNA oriented. (The short version is: if a child feature has a location then the parent feature must have a single location on that segment and it must cover all the locations in the children.) My counter examples were all protein so I worked some trying to find DNA-based counter examples. I came up with a couple, but I know so little about DNA. I have to stretch back to '93 when I learned some of the basics of regulatory factors.

I think the reason for the difference in viewpoint is because DNA as a physical thing is very boring. And I say that with the highest respect; proteins get all the action while DNA mostly sits there. Only a small bit of the human genome even gets transcribed. Some into protein, hence the annotations are pretty indirect. Some proteins bind to DNA to promot or inhibit expression of certain genes so these are a bit exciting, but the binding sites are all small, contiguous regions. BLAST results have gaps but the region in the gaps is relevant so even there having a single covering location for the parent makes sense.

Compare that to a protein annotation like "catalytic triad" where a location for the parent element for the three features (assuming a feature per residue) makes no sense. Digging around I did find some annotation types where having a parent with a single location covering all of its children didn't make sense: D-loop in mitochondria, promotor groups (multiple promotor sites for a given gene), and RNA/ssDNA structure and catalytic function.

Today I tried another approach. Assuming the data structure is changed what are the consequences to the spec and does the result make sense. My conjecture is it's needed to make the "inside" search work correctly, but I think the solution doesn't interact well with the other query types. I also think the "inside" search isn't needed and a better solution to the use-case is a "but_not_overlaps". We'll work this out over the next couple of weeks.

Saturday afternoon I went to the salsa clinic. That's the monthly event at Que Pasa where John reviews the previous month's lessons over 90 minutes. I learned a few nice additions but if I don't practice them I'll forget them. Towards the end I danced some with .. I don't remember her name. She was quite good and fun to dance with. QP has more space than Buena Vista which means I can do things which take up space. At BV I often feel constrained in what I can do because it's so packed.

James and Amanda's house^H^H^H^H^Hflat warming party was last Friday evening. I snuck out for a few hours for that. I brought a couple of cans of Swedish cider as house warming gifts, which they enjoyed. Cider here is like British cider; dry and a bit. Bit. I don't know the right word. "flat", "muddy", "wooden" come mind. So does "slightly sour." Swedish cider is sweet and carbonated. Jim (Cooper) called it R-rated Kool-Aid.

Two Oceans Aquarium

I forgot to mention that handshakes are different here. Depending on who you meet it's the standard clasp, a quick triple from standard to inverted (like when arm wrestling) back to standard, or a triple plus a snap at the end. I like the triple but I can't get the snap down.

I asked one of the guys at salsa about kissing customs and his answer was "no one knows." Helpful.

Today I went with Nicole (not SANBI Nicki - must get ahold of her too) to the Two Oceans Aquarium. I was a few minutes late as I didn't plan on enough time for getting gas and money. Gas here is expensive. Filling the little car took 200 bucks or USD 30. It really can be called bucks here because there's a springbok on the 1 rand coin. Still, $30 isn't much more than in the US now, and much less than the UK or Sweden. Gas stations are all full service so I rushed in to the ATM to get money while the guy filled up the car and washed the windows.

It's a decent aquarium. The "Two Oceans" name refers to the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans. That's cold kelp waters and warm tropical, making for some diversity. My three favorite individual species were the seals, the penguins, and the deep sea spider crabs. Seals and otters always look and act so happy. The penguins acted more like dog in how they paddle when the head is out of the water and one in how it scratched it's belly. The spider crabs were just cool. I wasn't so much interested in the other crabs and lobsters through, except to see more of the dynamics of an exoskeleton close up. I had read something about that recently poining out how the legs are joined via a sort of pin snap.

The layout was similar to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in that there's a natural path through the site which takes you by everything without backtracking. Unlike the World of Birds where it's easy to get lost. (They have more exhibits and each is smaller so the dynamics are different.) Also like MB you see the big aquarium and go "oooh", watching the fish for a while. In this case it was the kelp forest. After that is the really big aquarium, with the sharks and rays and other big fish. (In MB you then go to the "someone misplaced an ocean" sized aquarium. With the half-ton tuna fish. But no fair comparing TO to one of the top aquariums in the world.)

I've decided I don't like starfish. Something about them gives me the shivers. Probably stories about how they destroy sea beds, attacking and eating anything.

pirates and kissing

I went to Pirates of the Caribbean, Dead Man's Chest today. Only R20 = US$3 for the 6:15 showing. That's what, a liter of gas or so? I don't actually know the price because none of the stations list the price of fuel. I imagine it's visible on the machines but every place is full service so I've never looked. I could check my receipt but that would mean rooting around for it and the last time I may have just paid, said "keep the change" and left without getting a receipt.

I met James&Amanda there and two of their friends. I thought it was an amusing diversion. I enjoyed the Davy Jones character. The movie had the feel of 1950s B movie filtered through the memories that make the things of youth so much better than the present. "The 3D graphics in Zaxxon were so realistic." The movie had elements from Zorro, 20000 Leagues under the Sea, and even a bit of Apocalypse Now. J&A didn't like it. It did make me feel like watching a movie by Salieri, technically well done but without the something extra Mozart would do. Assuming Amadeus had any reflection of reality. Amanda especially didn't like the sound quality in the theater.

Afterwards I went to tango. PotC2, btw, is a long film. If this is Tuesday then I must have gone to Rouge. It was a decent night but nothing really grabbed me about the music or dancing as it can on the best nights. At the end I said goodbye to one of the women and got a kiss.

I need to explain that. This is a kissing culture. Often on hellos and goodbyes there's a single kiss on the right cheek. Sometimes also on the left but that's rare. I still haven't figured out the full dynamics of it: is it a direct kiss (lips flat on surface) or an angled one? (More the latter. The one guy I know who does the full flat kiss does it in such a way that it's obvious he's doing it in part for show.) Does a "oops I forgot about the kiss and ended up with an air-kiss" count as a faux pas? Probably not.

Kissing on the cheek is not unusual. There's even a FAQ somewhere on how to do it, with comments about the different styles in different places. (left and right cheeks, or L&R&L for some cases). What I've not seen elsewhere is kissing on the lips. Chastely, just like kissing on the cheek is a friendly gesture and no more. It happened once with salsa and tonight it happened with tango. The contexts were different though: in salsa it was someone I danced with several times before, we dance well together in general, and we had just finished off a great set. While here it was someone I've danced with on two nights and that's it.

Niven in his Known Space stories postulated that the STL-spread human colonies would diverge enough that unrealized non-verbal communication could accidentally break a relationship. That's no great stretch of a prediction. There was an ad years back for some international business consulting company. It showed a western backpacker in southeast asia. He relaxes and puts his feet up on a chair. Various people laugh and look at him funny. Showing the bottoms of the feet was considered rude there, explained the voiceover. That's why when you enter the world market you should hire them and their international experience.

After my last visit here I brought some of the cheek kissing tradition back to Santa Fe. It's a different context, different milleau and I would only do it with a few people I knew well from dance. It didn't catch on. I wasn't surprised.