The Sorting Continues

Marjan and his wife should be in Arizona now. Because of the rush, they were the recipients of the first slide show. From that show, I've learned a few things.

1. One city is enough. We only had one day, so we spent over six hours looking at slides. We even skipped most of Rome, all of Venice, and all of Germany. We also screamed through certain sections.
2. It's okay to scream through certain sections. Having a small audience was nice because it meant that if they didn't care about Notre Dame, we could just skip it. One of the main items on my to do list is to record all the transition points so future shows can instantly skip over a given museum, city, etc.
3. I need to live my life. I'd love to do a really thorough cataloging, but I think recording blurbs and transition points is the realistic plan. I finally laid all the ones I think are worth viewing end to end and it's a little over five thousand pictures. At my current rate of labeling (a couple hours and four hundred pictures a day) it will still take over a week to finish. I should put this as data entry experience on my resume. ;)

So that's where I'm at right now. London and France are close to done. Tomorrow should see Zurich and Florence brought up to date. Basically, I'm estimating one week of slides equals one city (until Berlin where I went crazy in the ethnology museum).

After that, it's just a matter of contacting you all individually and finding an evening or three to have dinner and see a major european city. :)

Day 81 - Home

The subject line says it all. (But it wouldn't be a propper blog entry if I didn't take at least a thousand words to say it. :)

I didn't really sleep much the night before the trip. I stayed up watching Men Of Honor on TV, well aware of the contrast between the title and my encounter that day. I was anxious to get home and anxious about running into the thieves again, so there was little point in trying to get to sleep early. It's unfortunate, in a way, that I was staying in a hotel. Any hostel I spent a week in, I generally made a few friendly aquaintances. The only people I know in Athens are criminals.

I woke up at seven thirty and gave up on trying to get back to sleep about eight. I ate some more fruit from the fruit store, some cheese from the mini-market, and some pound cake from the bakery. One thing I'll say for Athens, it's not hard to find good food. It's annoying to be a vegetarian in a restaurant, yes, but there are markets with good food all over the place. I was particularly impressed with the fruit. The cherries were some of the best I've ever had, and the kiwis, although not as conistent as the cherrys, were quite good too.

After stuffing myself in anticipation of 24 hours of airline food, I headed to the one supermarket I'd seen nearby. It didn't take too long to find chocolate covered raisins. I should have taken heed of the dust on top of the boxes and three price reductions, though. They weren't very good. Still, I was happy to have some comfort food for the trip. I even have an extra box, if anyone wants to try some. The raisins are so small, and the chocolate so sweet, that all I can think to do with them is pour milk on them and pretend they are Calvin's favorite cereal.

As you might be able to deduce from my rambling about raisins, the trip itself was fairly uneventful. I worked out my database schema while sitting in the Athens airport. I am downloading MySQL and Python even as I type this, so photo catagorizing should be underway by the end of the day. I can work on a proper place to sleep tomorrow. :)

Changing planes in Munich was a bit of a hassle. We had no time, but they felt a need to submit us to bonus security checks. Admittedly, the checks in Athens weren't as thorough, so I could see some small benefit. I found it funny when they announced that we had to change course coming into Munich. I knew why before they even told us. There had been thudershowers frequently when I was there, and sure enough, when the captain came on he explained that a thunder storm had rerouted us. Still, we were on time.

The United flight to Chicago was well crewed. There were plenty of movies running every two hours. I watched Coach Carter, Robots, and even the latest Bridget Jones, which had a few funny scenes, but could have been half as long or even less if you just put the funny bits together. "But Blain", you say. "Why weren't you sleeping?" For one thing, the flight went from 4PM to 2AM, Athens time, so I wasn't sleepy for most of it. For another thing, there were multiple screaming children aboard. I hope people don't think I'm a sadist, but I actually enjoy screaming children. They're too young to know better, and watching all the people get annoyed (while not offering any assistance) amuses me. Silly people.

There were a few cool things in the Chicago airport. They had a cast of a brachiosaurus skeleton and a huge moving sidewalk with neon lights over head and giant multicolored squares along the wavy walls. It looked like a painters color chart writ large. I'm sorry if I'm a tease for talking about them. I didn't take any pictures yesterday. I didn't want to mess with taking my camera out of my bag. I just wanted to be done.

So naturally the plane out of Chicago was delayed. I bought a phone card and let mom know what was up. Then it was just sitting. Of course I'd already sat two hours before the announcement, so it was pretty dull. The young ladies (junior high school?) from the Sacramento Synchronized Swimming Team were coming home on the same plane as well. One of them had a temporary tatoo of a cobra on her forehead. Apparently she'd forgotten about it though, and thought I was staring at her. I find it amusing that I creeped out a woman with a snake... tatooed... on her forehead! Heheh. I later learned she had done it on a dare. Good dare.

When we finally did get on the plane, they were blowing cold air like no tomorrow. While they had been working on the mechanical problem that had delayed us (a faulty battery recharger), apparently it had gotten quite hot. But now it was freezing, and they had closed the cabin, which meant that they couldn't turn the AC off until ten minutes after take-off. I figured I'd tough it out in my shorts and t-shirt and ask for a blanket when we were underway.

It was taking a long time to get underway. But I overheard the attendant saying there were no blankets. Great. There's a flight from 11PM to 2AM Chicago time, and they have no blankets. Well. That's not true. They had blankets for all the first class passengers. So by the time we take off and it's okay to get up and get my jacket from the upper compartment my knees are already ice cubes. I get my pant sleeves as well and return my pants to full length. Still, I'm freezing, and all they've got on the flight are cold drinks. This was not my happy place. There was one more touch, for that extra special flight memory. Because of thunder storms in the US, we had to fly a good deal south before heading west, extending the flight another half an hour. Specifically, we had to fly over Kansas. Heheh. That was too perfect.

Now that I think of it, there was also a bonus snub. The one movie in the whole airline movie listing I actually wanted to see (Million Dollar Baby), would play on this flight, but I was way too exhausted to watch, much less enjoy. Eventually I got to sleep.

When we eventually touched down in Sacramento, I was very happy to have a seat near the exit. Three rows got out in front of me. But people are slow. I passed two rows walking towards the main lobby and the last row on the escalator. Even with my pack, I take stairs two at a time and very consistently fly by morons on escalators. It is not a ride!

My parents were waiting. Apparently others of you would have been, but I didn't find an internet terminal to check my mail all day. Sorry about that. I would have loved to have seen you there. My dad said he didn't think it could have been me already. The plane had only landed twenty four seconds ago. I was in a hurry.

We went home. I had some salsa (which I had been sorely missing since Prague, at least) and some ice cream and turned in. The great thing about screaming kids on the plane is that no matter when you get home, you can sleep. Yeah, I woke up at eight in the morning, but I'm sure I'll adjust to my old slacker schedule shortly. :)

In closing, thank all of you for following along, helping me with information, advice, and good wishes. They made me feel befriended even in places where I had none, and that means a lot.

My downloads have finished, so now it's time learn about MySQL and start sorting. Let's kick some S! ... QL. And feel free to drop me a line at brn@calweb.com if you want to get together, see a slide show, etc. I'll probably post at least one more post here as the sorting winds down. Ah, alive again with geekish joy. I still don't have a bed, but my own computer and DSL connection is more than enough right now. Life is good.

Day 79 - The Ten Euro Beer

Well, my tourist experience is now complete. I have been robbed.

They didn't get much, and I am none the worse for wear. In a way, I'm happier to have the story and feel justified about being as cautious as I am than I am sad to lose a little money. That said, I was a total moron to get snared like I did. So I'm leaving the Temple of Olympian Zeus. It would be the biggest ancient temple of all time, but there's just a few columns left now. Even still, it's impressive. It's funny because so many people talk about the immensity of the Parthenon. Sure. It's big, but I'm standing at the edge thinking, "Get over it people! There's a bigger temple right over there!"

Anyway, back to the robbery. It was a social engineering robbery. Nothing fancy. Just the type I'm most likely to fall for, as well. A man on a bench said hello, introducing himself as a chemical engineer back in the states, but originally from Thessaloniki. He invited me to lunch, but as I don't eat meat, he invited me to a drink. I don't really drink, but this was the first person I'd met in Greece, so I figured it was worth the time and trouble of a beer. The girls were the first tip that something wasn't right. There were a couple women in the place, so immediately I figured he had taken me to prostitutes. When we went to the furthest back bench in the place and they immediately joined us, I knew he had taken me to prostitutes. He had just been talking about how much he hated working in Saudi Arabia with no alcohol and women around, so I figured he was just a lusty greek. They are known to exist. I made it clear I was not interested, but I didn't mind having a beer. I should have asked how much it would cost.

We chatted. They asked lots of questions. Too many, now that I know better. Then the bill came. Ten for my beer and one hundred and sixty for the champaign the "lady" was drinking. I said she could drink with me, not on me. (By that I mean on my tab. I suppose I should phrase my sentences more carefully when prostitutes are involved.) I looked at my new companions. Two fairly young women, the lusty greek, and the big greasy bartender who had handed me this bill. This was not a good scene. I don't even remember what happened next. I just remember putting one foot on the seat of the booth. Then I was out the door and running. I made it to a corner and looked back to see the bartender hoofing it after me. I took a corner, then another. I was sure he couldn't be positive of where I had gone. But then neither was I. I had a general idea of the direction I was headed in, but I also knew they knew enough about where I was staying and when I was leaving to stake me out. I stopped running. There was no safe way out.

I checked my map. I figured I could take a slightly further metro station. I might be able to avoid him that way. When I looked up from my map, he was coming around a corner. In a way, I was relieved. We were now in a public place, one on one. Greasy was breathing pretty hard. I was actually pretty impressed at the time he'd made. He seemed to know no english outside of "call police" and "pay your bill". He got his cell phone out. I challenged him to call the police, and he went back to "pay your bill." He touched me a couple times, but if he was trying to intimidate, he wasn't succeeding because I was still working by the american rule that touching a person against their will is assault, so him holding my wrist for a second just pissed me off. I'm proud to say I was not backing down. I'm also proud to say that when he said "pay your bill, ten euro" I was smart enough to realize I was getting out cheap and paid him off.

I talked to the police. They confirmed that I got off cheap. I realized later that it wasn't quite that cheap as I left my Rough Guide language book and umbrella that Mike gave me. Doh.

For other travelers, the place was called "New York Bar". But I wouldn't be surprised if they change the name frequently to keep ahead of the law and vengeful tourists. There's still a small possibility that they'll stake out the airport and try and get the 160 out of me. I'll try to be an extra hour early just to have police explaining time. I doubt they'll bother, though. In a way, I wish they would. I'd love to get a chance to beat them definitively, maybe even let them do the jail time they deserve. Who knows what would have happened if I'd been the kind of guy who actually did go out for hookers? Yay celibacy. :)

Other than that, the day was pretty uneventful. I went to the agora and keramicos, basically lots of ruins. Yawnsville compared to Rome. I snacked. I drank. I'm more glad than ever to be leaving.

Day 78 - Acropolis: Round One

Yep. Today I went to the athens acropolis. Every city around here had an acropolis at one time. It was simply a raised area with fortifications and a water supply, according to my city guide. As with many of the great monuments I've seen on my travels, much of the acropolis was entwined with scaffolding (as opposed to the Eiffel Tower, which is scaffolding, and very impressive scaffolding, at that). Regardless, it was still impressive to see the parthenon and some of the adjacent buildings. Really there were only three adjacent buildings: The gate (propylaea), the temple to Athena and Posiedon, and museum. The temple to Athena Nike just seems like part of the gate to me. I'm not even sure I took a picture of it. There was so much construction going on, and so many pieces of the ancient buildings around, I wondered if they weren't planning to rebuild some of the other buildings. My map even names some of the piles of rubble as thought there were buildings there.

As you may have heard, the view from the acropolis is stunning. Athens may be unkempt at street level, but it's still beautiful from above. The city just sprawls in every direction. It's burly. I tried to take lots of pictures and a 360 degree movie. I've still got most of two memory cards left and only two days, so I can afford the space. I'm not bothering to delete bad pictures anymore, either. Take 'em all and let mom sort 'em out. :)

Seriously, though, there will be sorting. I will have an entity relationship diagram for my simple database, along with a tentative list of picture catagories before I touch down in Sacramento. Once I have a computer, chair, and bed, and maybe a little food, it's straight to work. I will post the list of topics, and anyone who wants to see a slide show can just tell me what topics they're interested in. I can tell them how many hundreds of slides that entails, and they can tell me to never mind. :)

I did some provisioning this morning. I think my lunches and breakfasts are taken care of until departure. Outside of one other food necessity, that only leaves dinners. Last night I went to Eden, the one vegetarian restaurant in Athens, according to one web site. I went and found myself having tofu kabobs. They were well seasoned, if a little dry. Overall, I'd say not worth the price. That said, I'll probably still go there for my last night. There were a couple more dishes on the menu I wanted to try. Tonight, however, I think I'll go to a more traditional greek restaurant and try my luck. As for that other food necessity, the chocolate covered raisins are still at large.

It remains to be seen who is holding them. It could be the nun cops. But it could be someone else. There was a detail I neglected to mention in my story of my travels from Budapest to Belgrade. You may remember how I just barely had enough hungarian money (4750 forints) to buy the ticket (4743 forints). And that was only thanks to the lucky find of a fifty cent piece on the floor. Well, what I couldn't reveal until now is that it probably wasn't luck at all. After I bought my ticket, I took a close look at my remaining forints. Three ones, forming the all seeing pyramid. Two twos, forming the foci of the copernian elipse. Five coins in all. Yes, my friends, I can now say with some certainty that I was safely ferried across eastern europe under the watchful eye of the Illuminati. Perhaps simply because I took the time to visit Zurich, or perhaps for some darker purpose. I may turn out to be a pawn (or even patsy) in some international conspiracy. I think the raisins are the key somehow. Raisin... Reason... If only I could figure it out.

Time will tell.

Day 77 - My Second Favorite MC

My favorite MC, as most of you know, is MC Frontalot. My second favorite is playing here in Athens, so I went to see him today. I'm referring to MC Escher. No, not the musical MC that stole his name, the travelling Escher art show that's now in Athens. It was thoroughly mind bending, and very fun. I got to learn a little bit about the different processes he used to make his artwork. Wood carving, lithography, and another one involving rough metal that I don't remember the name of. As usual, picture are not allowed, but there's so much Escher online and in popular culture, it probably isn't necessary. The most interesting thing to me was how Escher learned about symmetry and patterns by reading books on rock crystal formation that his geologist brother turned him onto. It'd be bizarre if I could learn something about designing tile art for games through the same means.

I also took my airport excursion today. I know how long it takes to get there, where to go, and how early to be. I also confirmed all my flights. "Measure twice. Cut once." Heh. I should have plenty of time to roll out of bed, eat, and get underway. My only question remaining is where to find the chocolate covered raisins. I took a bunch left over from our last movie day when I went to South America. I bought a bag for the flight over (which I finished on the way to Paris, as I recall). I should definitely have some for the flight back.

But I still have two days and change to spend here in Athens. I'm finally ready to tackle the acropolis tomorrow. I've kind of been putting it off as I expect it will be one of the highlights of the trip. I've gotten some glimpses as I've been seeing other things, whetting my appetite. I'm ready.

Day 76 - A Little Wander

It's been a pretty lazy day today. I went to the Museum of Cycladic Art. Basically it's really early art from the islands off the coast of Greece. Those totally nondescript figurines with the big heads. No, not Easter Island. Wrong ocean. The big flat heads. Oh, nevermind. They'll be in the slide show. There was also some early greek clay art that lends credence to my hypothesis that all really ancient art is a hoax and is actually just clay sculptures made by third graders in Kansas who have a lot of extra time on their hands because they don't have to learn about evolution. :)

About the slide show, my current plan is to get all the photos unique ID numbers and put together a little MySQL database to store data on them: timestamp, country, description, categories. That way, if someone wants to see only the funny slides. (There's one of a pigeon in Prague that makes me smile every time I think about it.) We can do that slide show. If someone just wants to see slides from certain countries (or cities), that should be doable too. I'll probably have a very short slide show entitled "Actually Good Photos" as well. :) Most of my photos are meant as memories, not gallery pieces, although I have gotten a bit more artistic with framing as time has worn on.

Anyway, back to Athens. Siesta is just about over. I'll probably hit the supermarket for some food. I had a wonderful (and expensive) risotto for lunch, so I'll probably eat in tonight. Then again, maybe not. Sometimes it's hard to know which will make me feel better, economizing or splurging. But lunch was really expensive (like $30), so I'm going with economizing. There's a great deal of honking going on outside. I wonder if it's a Turkish wedding or traffic as usual in Athens.

The city planners here should have been shot. The back streets are full of parked cars. You often can't cross at the corner because there's a car parked on the sidewalk there. Heck, there are cars parked on the sidewalk everywhere. It's not like these are cobblestone streets from ancient times, designed for the width of a horse's ass. They're modern asphalt. What were they thinking? Munich is looking like the best city ever designed, right now. Bikes, people, and cars seemed to coexist really well there. Pedestrian underpasses really helped. But maybe there's too much history here for that. I heard they had to delay construction when they were expanding the metro for the Olympics because they kept hitting archaeological finds. "Held prisoner by the glories of the past." It sounds like something right out of the brochure. :
[record scratching sound] Dinner last night was good (if also too expensive). That's what I get for trying a place from the brochure. There look like lots of cheap places around, but I'm really and truly sick of trying to explain being a vegetarian in countries where I don't speak the language and vegetarians are considered only slightly less weird than extra terrestrials.

The walk to dinner confirmed what I'd read about greek sleeping habits. It was nine PM as I walked to the restaurant. The streets were just as full as they were at noon. Victoria Square had children playing. Nobody was at the restaurant when I showed up. Well, there were three other people, I think. The place was almost full when I left at ten. The park wasn't quite so full. I guess the children clear out about ten (although there was a family with two kids still at the restaurant when I left). Part of that is because we're another hour ahead here, so it's not completely dark by nine. Heh. If I could just get two more timezones I'd officially be half a world away. But I just want to get closer to home now, not further.

To that end, I'm planning a test trip to the airport tomorrow. I don't know how the ticket system or transit system work, so I'm hoping to get my ticket and the train schedule all sorted beforehand. The paperwork I got from the travel agent said to reconfirm 72 hours before the flight. Can you tell I'm looking forward to getting home?

Anyway, I should get to the store. I'd like some more paper to do game design on. The little graph paper notebook I bought in Versailles is almost full of game design and travel notes.

Day 75 - Decompression

Warning: This post is excessively random.

Having arrived in Athens after over 24 hours of train travel, I decided to take it easy today. I walked around a little bit, mostly just to forage. When they say Athens is dirty, they ain't lyin'. There are broken mopeds and mattresses just lying about. Stray animals are common. So are walls with huge chunks of plaster missing. This is not Kansas. But then, neither is Kansas, I expect.

The stray chunks of missing wall remind me of war damaged Berlin, and I think, "Maybe calling it a war on poverty makes a certain sense." Of course, the US only loses figurative wars. I think about all the drug money that goes to foriegn criminals and can't help but wonder if we're making the wrong call. I mean, the US could be the biggest drug producing country in the world if companies like Phillip Morris were only allowed to assign high tech research labs to woefully backwards fields like meth lab construction. Heh.

Anyway, back to Athens. I've been very much enjoying the lazy hotel life, showering at my leisure, watching TV, and washing a few delicates in the sink. I'm afraid I may just have to burn my socks, as yesterdays washing provided only negligible improvement in their olfactory qualities. It must be International Big Word Day. Of course, calling it Big Word Day really isn't in the spirit, is it?

Anyway, back to Athens. TV is actually pretty watchable here. A couple channels show movies in english with greek subtitles. I watched Finding Nemo and The Wedding Singer, classics both.

Anyway, back to food. It's nice having a fridge. It's funny at the same time, because many hostels have kitchens with no fridge, and now I have the reverse. It's mostly full of hotel crap, but there's enough room for yogurt, juice, and maybe some ice cream for later. Breakfast is free here. I didn't get up early enough to enjoy it this morning, but I should make it tomorrow.

I only say should because Athens keeps hours like Buenos Aires. There's a siesta from two to five, and most restaurants are open to midnight or later. Tonight I'm planning an excursion to a nice Italian place. There's a nice Greek one further on, but I don't think I'm feeling it tonight. Today is all about ease. Of course, that's a relative term in Athens.

Athens has to be the least pedestrian friendly city I've ever seen. Rome was crazy, but pedestrians with their wits about them could get around. In Greece, the crosswalk signal may be green, but the people turning won't yield. If I end up jumping on the hood of a car turning right to get across a street before I leave, I won't be the least bit surprised. And if that wasn't bad enough, the scooters here are worse than Rome's as well, cutting in and out of traffic without giving pedestrians a second thought. It'd almost be worth it to buy a scooter just so I don't spend two hours a day waiting to cross streets.

Hmmm. Bringing up Rome reminds me of something I read in the "Athens Guide" available at the hotel. They talked about some of the ruins in Greece as being "from the Roman occupation." I guess Greece is still near enough to the Balkans that people here know how to hold a grudge. There were some other strangely prideful statements in the guide. The orthodox church is very big here, and the guide made sure to mention that greeks were the first christians. I suppose that's true, considering the first apostles after Christ probably did their converting here, but it seems an odd thing to boast about. Were the apostles greek?

Because, ironically, randomness is the unifying theme of this entry, I should take a moment to mention a brass band was playing in a building across the street as I was writing this. I think I recognized the english nathional anthem and 1812 overture. Bizarre.