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.