Slovenia was great, and I can’t wait to go back some day and see a lot more (I was only there about 18 hours total), but it’s nice to be in Munich with Megan now. And it was great to sleep in — haven’t done that in a long time.
The Ljubljana airport is small and convenient: it was probably 5 minutes total from when I walked in the front door until I had checked my bag and was sitting at the bar enjoying a Union beer. I didn’t bring a pistol on this trip, so I didn’t have anything to declare.
And arriving here in Munich was equally convenient. We’re staying at Kempinski Hotel, which is right at the airport — you just walk through an open courtyard and you’re at the hotel.
We’re off to do some sightseeing. Chances are you’ll be seeing plenty of it right here later in the weekend.
It’s 1:00AM but I’m too wired to sleep right away, so I’ll write up my day and then crash …
I left Ghent early this morning and caught the train to Brussels. It was only 8 euros, and I was thinking “man, this is really great what 8 euros buys on the train” but then the conductor came and told me I was sitting in 1st class and had a 2nd class ticket. But 2nd class was nice, too. 
I got off at Brussels-North, and the short taxi ride to the Microsoft office turned into a fiasco. The driver, a crazy chattering French guy, drove around a bit before getting there (I had studied the map earlier and he didn’t take the obvious short route), and then when he got to Microsoft he explained there was another Microsoft building nearby that’s the one I wanted. He then drove around for 30 minutes, going very fast around turnabouts and making me actually feel sick (lack of sleep contributed to that no doubt), then when he finally dumped me back at the place we’d been 30 minutes before, he wanted 97 euros. I expressed shock and indignation, and still wound up paying him 80 euros. Geez.
I had a meeting in Brussels about a cool Open XML project and also a meeting with a person from a Belgian governmental agency. I shouldn’t talk about the details, but here’s an actual quote from one of my meetings today: “for example, slides about operations in Afghanistan would have certain details tagged in the XML as restricted, others as classified, and so on.” (Hint: the Belgian army is definitely not in Afghanistan.)
Then I was off to the airport, and this time I got a much better driver, a very likable and talkative elderly little guy. But we were so busy bonding that he accidentally kept my Amex card when I paid him, which would have been a disaster for the rest of this long trip. Then, while I was waiting to check in inside the airport I heard behind me “Mr. Douglas!” and there he was with my Amex card. Cool.
The flight to Ljubljana on Adria Airways was delayed over an hour, so I got in around midnight. And I’ve never felt more like a VIP upon arrival in a country.
I had the first two rows to myself on the flight (12 business-class seats just for me), and I was the first person off the plane. When I walked out of baggage claim the first person I saw was a smiling driver with sharp cheekbones and a crisply lettered sign that said MR. DOUG MAHUGH. I smiled, he smiled and gave me a quick firm handshake, then grabbed my suitcase and led me to his car parked right outside the door along the curb. (Don’t you miss pre-911 airport procedures?) He drove very fast but also very smoothly through tall dark forests, with the outline of steep hills in the distance and occasional large white churches lit up near the highway. Soon we were in Ljubljana, and he pulled to the front of the hotel, I said “do you speak English?” and he said “yes, sir, I will be your driver and will pick you up at 8 in the morning, you can pay me when I return you to the airport tomorrow evening.”
The guy at the front desk was similarly brisk and pleasant, and in no time I was headed for my room on the top floor, where I stepped off the elevator and my room is straight across from the elevator, the closest possible room and on the top floor with the best possible view.
I like Slovenia, based on my extensive experience of it over the last 90 minutes. Too bad I’ll only be here about 18 hours. But it will be nice to leave, too, because my Second Life partner (we got hitched last night, that’s the secret to sharing a house) will be waiting for me in Munich tomorrow evening. Can’t wait to get a good night’s sleep!
Here’s a final photo from Ghent taken about 24 hours ago …
Hmm, speaking of Second Life, I just noticed when I posted this that Julien posted something silly over in France this evening. hi Julien! Nice to have dinner with you and Greg and Olivier last night, thanks for coming up to Belgium. Man, that sure seems like a long time ago already!
After a rush-hour cab ride through Prague to the airport, I’m about to board a flight to Brussels, for meetings and presentations in Ghent and Brussels tomorrow and Thursday. They have free Pilsner Urquell in cans here at the Czech Airlines’s Crystal Lounge, and the T-Mobile wireless is rock solid, so I managed to upload 40 photos even though I only had 15 minutes here. Life’s good.
Have to run for now, but here are the rest of the Prague photos.
“The longer we have been there, the worse it’s gotten. We’ve now reached the point where, with Americans “protecting” Iraqis from themselves, nearly one in five of them have nonetheless either fled their country, been forced into internal exile, or died in the mayhem. If you were projecting into the future, it would be far more logical to assume that, with us present, this situation would only worsen.”
- Tom Dispatch
I’ve been really busy lately. Other than nephew Phil’s visit and a few hours of Second Life fun over the last week (mostly slipped in between work marathons), all I’ve been doing is work, sleep, and supporting activities for the last month.
So the latest Tom Dispath article is something that felt a bit personal to me. I’m one of the millions he’s talking about, those who went to great lengths to protest the invasion of Iraq before it started (in person, in writing, in many many ways), but haven’t done much lately other than roll my eyes and sarcastically say “gee, who ever saw this coming?”
Sure, I’ve read the Blackwater book and a few others, but that just confirms what we knew many years ago: it’s not about security or safety or terrorism, this war is about other things. Hell, there is nobody alive who even claims that a suicide bombing ever happened even once in Iraq before the Americans showed up, and now that happens several times most days. There is no incident of international terrorism before this war that ever involved an Iraqi (unless you believe wild-eyed unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, and even then the most anyone claims is that an Iraqi or two may have known of something somebody else pulled off), but now Iraq is truly the world’s training ground for terrorists, and it’s only a matter of time until a bunch of American families are sobbing over something an Iraqi has done.
Well, I guess that’s happening right now, but since we don’t have a draft those families are nicely contained and hidden from our view: poor families in small towns far from big-city newspapers, and the families of “civilian contractors” who run around Iraq with automatic weapons in their hands, beating up local men and literally getting away with murder. (For those who have forgotten, those people were called “mercenaries” in Roman times.)
And now, as Tom Dispatch so clearly points out, we’ve even outsource the protesting of the war. How pathetic, and I’m as guilty as anyone.
So in the midst of a busy day on the road, I thought I’d at least post a link to Tom Dispatch. It’s truly the least I can do.
I got together with Megan about 1:00AM this evening, over in Second Life. I still can’t figure out how to set our home to my home location, since she bought the land, but it was fun to hang out, dance together in the living, kiss her goodbye, the usual stuff. The nice thing about spontaneously going out dancing in SL is that you don’t have to even get dressed or go anywhere — a few clicks and you’re there.
I’m going to have to pester SL support to figure out how two people can share a home. She created a group and deeded the land to it, and I joined the group, but I still can’t set my home location to our house. So each time I log in to Second Life I show up in some random place I was last week. Based on what I’ve seen so far, though, there are some bugs in the SL server software — I’ve had a few things not work and then suddenly start working, and in one case the SL knowledge base said it was a known bug. Frankly, I’m amazed how well it does work, given all that’s going on there.
This morning I spent almost six hours at Schiphol, Amsterdam’s huge airport. The sunrise was spectacular right when I arrived at 7:30, and the airport was already packed. Northwest has two business-class lounges there, and one was so full they weren’t letting anyone else in, and the other was crowded too.
And the departure gate for the KLM Cityhopper flight to Prague was a zoo — the escalator went down into an area that was already packed shoulder-to-shoulder with dozens of passengers waiting for the security check, so people had to barge into the crowd in order to get off the escalator and out of the way for those immediately behind. Everyone was laughing and taking it well except for a group of muscular young German guys who seemed to think it was everyone else’s fault that the line was moving so slowly; they showed us who’s boss by pushing through the crowd with no regard for who had been there before them. Very sweet.
I got in a nice catnap on the flight to Prague, which was much needed after not sleeping on the flight to Amsterdam because some guy behind me had a digital alarm that went off every hour and he couldn’t figure out how to stop it and I didn’t actually take it away and smash it to pieces, although I lay there with my eyes closed for a couple of hours fantasizing about doing so. Anyway, on this Prague flight I woke up just in time to see a Soviet-built nuclear reactor near Prague spewing steam into the cold sunny afternoon sky, but by the time I got my camera out the clouds had covered it up. Damn, it looked cool.
The contrast between Prague’s airport and Schiphol was striking. I don’t think I’ve ever been in such a deserted airport, not even in the middle of the night, and this was 3:00 in the afternoon. I have no idea whether that’s a typical Sunday or what, but I was the first person off the plane and walked alone through most of the airport, only seeing an occasional security guard and not one other passenger until I got to baggage claim. Here’s the crowd at baggage claim:
I walked out front to a deserted sidewalk with a long line of cabs waiting, and hopped in a taxi for the drive to my hotel. The taxi driver was very friendly and turned on a country music station, seemingly for me. It was nice to listen to happy Czech people singing “Kiss an Angel Good Morning,” “Please Release Me,” “Oh Suzannah” and other Yankee favorites while driving across the high plain west of Prague and then down into the Vltava river valley.
We passed many parks, all full of bare deciduous trees, old folks on benches, and lots of roller-bladers and kite-flyers. Lots of graffiti, too, including a few words I recognized (TRICK, SPORT, FUCK EMI) and lots of strings of consonants without enough syllables. Then we crossed the river and drove along it for a while, where the crowd was younger: jeans, leather jackets, tattoos, and more rollerblades. Some cities have bicycles everywhere, and it looks like Prague is all about rollerblades instead.
Jiri the bellman here at the hotel told me all about how to catch the subway from across the street into downtown, but that’s not going to happen on this trip. Right now would be my best chance, but my throat’s a bit sore and I need to catch up on sleep — this will be a long trip, and I’ll be doing most of the talking. So I’ve spent 20 minutes writing this up instead of taking a couple hours to go downtown and back for some pictures.
Here’s the view from my room on the 15th floor of Corinthia Towers:
Nap time … zzzz.
That’s right, I’m fleeing Redmond again. Frankly, after the kind of hours I’ve put in the last few days, anywhere else sounds like a break.
I’ve pre-posted these maps from Kazakhstan in January and Fiji in February, now it’s March and I’m enjoying springtime 35,000 feet above Greenland.
I’m on the way to Prague to deliver an Open XML workshop. After two days in Prague I’ll be in Belgium for a couple of days, and then on to Slovenia. So I have a week to learn how to pronounce Ljubljana (the capital of Slovenia, where I’ll be doing a workshop Friday) … wish me luck.
Well, we’ve taken the plunge: we bought a house in Second Life. Nothing fancy, and Megan has prettied it up a bit since we were snuggling in the beanbag chair above. But we have a home base to operate from. And I’m going to spend some time next week learning how to make clothing, so that I can pass out a bunch of orange Open XML t-shirts to all those people on the nude beaches who can’t seem to afford quality clothing. I want to help, in whatever way I can — Second Life is like that, it makes you want to reach out to strangers.
We played Word of Warcraft a bit over the weekend, but it requires a ton of disk space to install the client software, and my laptop is full of other stuff so I had to delete it. Besides, we just weren’t as cute in that world as we are in SL:
More on our SL adventures soon …
Sort of like staring into a fire that’s burning up hard copies of IM messages people send to each other …
http://twittermap.com/twittervision
Ha! As soon as I posted that, they were down:
I heard of this site through a long discussion on a Microsoft internal distribution list, so I’m wondering if maybe there were so many Redmond viewers that it crashed the site. We have a new slogan around here: “Web 2.0 — if you can’t beat it, crash it!”
