At the end of 1996 I travelled around the world with the intention of attending a conference and visiting various universities to present my research work. Of course, I used the opportunity to do a bit of sightseeing and as you will see I had several interesting experiences!
The flight across was quite uneventful. I didn't drink copious amounts of alcohol as some of my contemporaries are wont to do, and I did sleep for about eight hours. The highlight was flying over the Swiss Alps on the way to Rome. Rome was a wonderful city from a historical point of view. I visited the Colloseum, Pantheon, Roman Forum, Vatical and Sistene Chapel as well as a castle.
Everything I was told about Italian drivers was true. Crossing the road would be considered suicidal for the average tourist, but luckily my many years of experience crossing Broadway to get lunch at Mothers prepared me well. Basically, you look straight ahead and step into heavy traffic while walking at a steady pace, trusting the drivers to see you and avoid hitting you.
I stayed in a really shoddy "pensionne" for $25 a night, which is dirt cheap by Roman standards. On the first night, 7 guys slept in one tiny room, and I had to share the double bed with a guy from Brazil! Naturally, we became close friends and went to the Colloseum together.
I was quite relieved to leave Rome. The guy who ran the pensionne was an Italian Basil Fawlty, and he spoke little English. He allowed me to leave my my bag in the building for a few hours so I could walk around unimpeded. When I returned to pick it up he told me he had moved it, and he spent several nerve-wracking minutes crawling around on the floor looking under beds and tables before he found it in a cupboard.
The train journey from Rome to Geneva was a thirteen hour hell-ride. My $40 couchette entilted me to a tiny bed in a cramped room with five others. I arrived in Geneva dishevelled and in need of a shower. Fortunately the youth hostel here is really nice. I am scheduled to present a talk tomorrow (for $300, if you don't mind), but after that I am free to tour the country for a few days. I met a guy from the US in the hostel, and he has hired a car, so we plan to drive to Monte Blanc and the Swiss Alps over the weekend.
Geneva seems to attract all sorts of weird people. One of the guys staying in my room at the hostel is from Norway, and he claims that he was an officer in the Norwegian army. He quit after a while because of "bodily problems". He has the disconcerting ability to gaze at you with one eye while the other darts around looking for someone more interesting to intimidate, and he paces the halls in big army boots at odd hours of the night.
Luckily I escaped - I met a guy who had hired a little VW and he asked me whether I would like to tour the country with him. Of course, I jumped at the oppurtunity. For two days we travelled around Switzerland, ending up at Interlaken at the base of the Swiss Alps. The scenery was quite beautiful, and this contrasted with the youth hostel there.
The hostel is basically run by Americans for Americans. When I walked in, everyone was watching The Simpsons. The guys in my room were all college jocks on their vacation, doing the traditional European Tour. It was basically one huge frat party, and all I wanted to do was get some rest. If you have seen any American College movies, you can imagine what it was like. Needless to say, I didn't enjoy my stay there.
The next day we decided to walk up a mountain. In hindsight it was a pretty silly thing to do, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. It took us four hours to walk up a steep, rocky path to the summit, 2000 metres above sea level. We had basically walked 1.5km straight up. It was worth it for the views of the Alps, and at 3pm we decided to trek down again, rather than catching the train.
That was our first mistake.
We walked down for 40 minutes or so before we realised that it was getting quite dark. This was partly due to the fact that we were in thick forest, and partly because we were inside a cloud! It soon started to rain quite heavily, and we got *soaked*. We were wet and miserable when we took the first wrong turn.
It was some time before we realised our mistake, and rather than climbing back up we decided to push on. Two hours later we found ourselves in a paddock, surrounded by cows. I decided to climb over a fence, and got half way before I realised it was electrified. The electric fences send a pulse of current every few seconds, so I was shocked a few times before I made it over.
We walked through several paddocks before we came upon a road. It slowly dawned on us that we were at least a mile from the town where we had started our walk. We eventually made it back, and vowed to leave for Geneva as soon as we had got some sleep.
Back in Geneva I checked in to the youth hostel. I met a guy from Perth, and a yank wearing a Guiness t-shirt. It turned out we were all dying for a Guiness, so we set out to find an English Pub. A pint (400ml over here) cost $9, but it was worth it. It's the last time I'll have a drink before getting to London, and I thought I deserved it!
The guys wanted to wander around looking for cheaper beer. We eventually stumbled across a seedy little bar in downtown Geneva where we got some Heineken's (in 200ml stubbies). I noticed that people were going in and out through an interior door, and that there were a lot of large African ladies in the place. When the largest lady approached me and raised her eyebrows, we realised that we were sitting in the entrace to a brothel! We made our excuses and ran away as fast as our legs could carry us.
I caught the bullet train from Geneva to Montpellier, and it was pretty cool. Our maximum speed was in excess of 350kph, and passing another train going in the opposite direction when your relative velocity is 700kph is quite an experience!
I arrived in Montpellier to find the youth hostel full. As it was getting late, I settled for an expensive one-star hotel. The following day I managed to squeeze into the hostel, which should offset the cost of the first night somewhat.
I have spent most of ny tine at the conference, so I haven't had much of a chance to look around (please excuse my typing by the way - I am using one of these confusing French keyboards and I keep hitting letters where I expect them to be rather than where they actually are). There is an Indian guy here who is the spitting image of Mr Bean, complete with rubbery face, haircut, style of dress and mannerisms. This kept me entertained throughout the conference.
I can say one thing - the French certainly know how to eat! At the conference banquet last night, five hours passed between apertif and cafe! I ate until I was bloated, as it was the first "proper" food I've had since leaving Australia. I also drank a little more of the local French wine than I should have, but it's difficult to refuse when they keep on putting new and interesting bottles in front of you to taste.
At the end of the night we were given two bottles to take with us - I will probably give them to the professor guy in Wales in return for letting me stay at his place.
When I was in Geneva, a bit of my shoe started to come off. This is because the bit was not stitched on as it should be, but was just glued on. They trick you, though, by putting fake embossed stitches on the bit that was now coming off. What I really needed was a "Mr Minit", and I was extremely surprised and grateful to actually find one in the Geneva train station. I had no idea that "Mr Minit" was a multinational corporation.
I survived the conference in France, and managed to make only a few enemies (basically by interjecting at some talks to tell the speaker that their work was a load of fetid dingoes kidneys). The most famous guy there looked like Barney Rubble, and another looked like Mr Bean, so I generally hung around giggling into my coffee and talking with other PhD students.
The flight into London was nice. It turned out that one of the Japanese guys from the conference was taking the same flight, so we talked about Japan and Australia, Sony Playstations, Manga and so on. His friend had attended ICNN at UWA, and had great things to say about Perth.
I arrived in London to find it extremely busy - it was 5pm on a Saturday. I caught the tube to Oxford street, where the youth hostel was supposed to be. I walked up and down the damned street half a dozen times, trying to interpret the novel street numbering system where 15-24 can be on one side while 17 and 18 are on the other. Finally I found the hostel - an anonymous black door in a wall.
I had a nice little room in the hostel with only three beds in it. My two roommates were from Hong Kong, and both of them claimed to have met Andy Simper on the Metro. That guy really made his presence felt in Europe!
The Londoners seem to be obsessed with statistics and warning signs for the terminally stupid. For example, at each major intersection they had "Look to the left!" and "Look to the right!" painted on the road in large letters for the pedestrians. Also, many staircases have a sign near them declaring that "This staircase contains 51 steps". Weird.
My stay in London was short-lived, though, and I was soon on the train to Bangor. The trip was extremely boring - the bits of the UK near train lines tend to be dirty and poor. Bangor was a bit more interesting, though. It is a nice little student town near the sea.
I have spent my time here travelling to various castles. Of note, I have seen Conwy castle, Caernarfon castle, Beaumaris castle and Penryth castle. Adrian may have heard of these. I also went to the top of Snowdon, the highest peak in the UK, but on a train this time (I remembered my experience in the Alps). At the top I found it completely overcast, so the view was non-existant. I also found out what "sleet" means, and "bitterly cold".
When they say it will be "overcast" in Wales, you have to be Welsh to know what they mean. In Australia, "overcast" generally means that there will be clouds in the sky. If a gap appears between the clouds, you can usually see the blue sky, and a bit of sun comes through and makes you happy. In Wales, when it is overcast, it means that there are layers of cloud from just above your head all the way to outer space. If a gap appears between the clouds, you just see more clouds. It can be very depressing.
The food is interesing here. Kebabs are much, much better than anything we get in Australia. You are served some Pita bread with a massive amount of meat, chilli sauce and salad. "Salad" also has a difference meaning here - you get one slice of tomato and a bit of lettuce. The fish and chips are much worse, though. You sit down inside the shop, and the guy gives you a plate of fatty, soggy chips and a brown oily mass that they call "fish".
When I was eating my fish and chips, the shop was full of elderly Welsh men doing the same thing, but enjoying it a lot more. One guy looked just like Yoda, except he wasn't green. He was one of those old guys who look as if they're wearing a mask, but they're not. The wrinkles cover their face, but stop all of a sudden so that their neck, chin and head is smooth. They were playing American songs from the 60's on the radio, and this Yoda guy was bopping to the music. It was very surrealistic, something that I would expect David Lynch to come up with. Or maybe George Lucas, if he went through a peculiar stage.
I gave a talk at the University of Wales and was overwhelmed at the turnout - three people were in the audience, two of them being the guys who had arranged the talk. Oh well. The Professor guy I was visiting let me stay at his house for a couple of nights, which was great: real food, shower and bed! He and his wife took me out for dinner, which turned out to be a traditional English Indian restaurant. Chicken curry with a pint of lager went down well.
I also stayed at the youth hostel in Bangor for a few nights. Because it's off-season, I shared a dormitory of twenty beds with one other person. I ordered a fried English breakfast there for 2 pounds, which was to be served at 8:15 sharp. I woke up at 9, and went downstairs to find the cook waiting for me. I was the *only* person who had ordered breakfast, and he cooked it for me there and then after making a few jokes at my late arrival.
Currently, I am at Oxford where I have been visiting a few people. Oxford is really nice, especially if you like English pubs and pints of ale, which I certainly do. Every person I visited has taken me out drinking, which has been really great. One of the guys, Steve Moyle, is an Aussie, and he showed me around his favourite pubs, buying me pints of local ales which don't make it to Australia. As if that wasn't enough, we went to a freshers bash at his college to drink free cocktails there (the academic year has just started this week over here).
Due to bad planning, I found that I had only one day in which to see London. I got a map of the area, and circled all of the sights that I wanted to see. The first place I visited was Buck Palace, where I found the Queens Gallery was holding an exhibition of sketches by Leonardo da Vinci. Spending two hours there certainly screwed up my plans, but I still managed to see Big Ben, Parliament, Downing Street, House Guards, Sherlock Holmes Museum, Madame Tuseuds, Planetarium, Tower Bridge and the Tower of London in a single day!
Well, I managed to get through Cambridge unscathed and with nothing interesting to report. I just visited some university boffin types there and did little sightseeing.
I am now in the States, where I was shocked to discover that people who serve you in shops really do instruct you to "Have a nice day". I though that was just a myth. I suppose it was no more shocking than finding out that the people I was visiting in Wales actually said "Gosh" when they heard something that surprised or impressed them. Now, that was *really* weird!
New York City wasn't so bad. The closest I got to gangland was a bus ride through Queens - after that it appeared to be a disturbingly safe place to live! The countless homeless people are a bit crazy, and you do pass people talking to themselves or dancing as they walk across the street, but it's all part of the big city atmosphere. Still, four cops were *shot* during the four days I was there, so I guess I just saw the nice side of the city.
The view from the Empire State Building is impressive, when the smog clears enough so that you can actually see something. I also liked the steam rushing out of the manholes - I though they just did that for the movies! It appears that New York has an underground steam system for heating, or something.
Everything happens in New York. Which I was there, an underground fire in the sewage system caused manholes to explode, sending their covers flying into the air, there was a plane crash at the airport, we had a cyclone, police were shot, the world series baseball was on, etc etc. I though Central Park was really nice. I was stupid enough to walk alone through the more secluded areas, but I wasn't mugged so that was OK. I passed a movie set where Al Pacino was filming some Shakespeare story or something. I visited the standard tourist destinations in midtown Manhattan, and I took a bus ride through the other parts of the island, including Harlem. Still, I wasn't feeling brave enough to catch the subway or walk alone through the less affluent areas. I visited the toy store where the movie "Big" was filmed, they had a huge Star Wars section (in readiness for the remastered films coming out soon), which included a $15,000 Darth Vader costume. The Nintendo Ultra 64 was on display, and I can tell you that it looks damned impressive. The graphics are very smooth, and the texture mapping is better than Playstation (the interpolation, which smooths the textures instead of letting them become chunky, certainly helps). Still, I did get to see all the new Playstation stuff at the Sony building. Nothing special here, mostly just new games that won't make it to Australia for a while. I suppose you have already seen the F1 game, and that was the one which impressed me the most, so nothing much I guess. What was nice was the new Sony PC - very impressive.
In New York I stayed in a dilapidated little brownstown which was run by a Seinfeld-esque Jewish man called Art. That guy could talk the ear off something which has really big ears. It seemed that I was the only person staying there, but that suited me just fine. For $25 a night I got my own room with a TV, in midtown Manhattan where rent is expensive. I'm sure that the building wouldn't satisfy even the most lenient of building standards - staircases aren't supposed to be at funny angles, the floor shouldn't move when you walk on it, and there shouldn't be gaping holes in the walls and ceilings, hidden behind pieces of cloth taped there.
Well, now I'm in Providence. The flight here was pretty cool, a 16 passenger prop-driven aircraft took 50 minutes to fly here, after waiting at La Guardia for hours to get checked in. There were thousands of irate passengers there rebooking their flights after delays caused by the plane crash. I left NYC at 5:30am. Walking to the bus through the dark streets was an interesting experience.
Providence is just a University town - it's quite small and has it's fair share of homeless and crazies. Like the rest of the east coast, the doughnuts and bagels are great but the coffee sucks.
San Diego was really nice - it's so much like Perth that I thought I had taken a wrong turn somewhere. Some American guy decided that Eucalyptus wood was ideal for railroad sleepers, so he introduced the trees from Australia. Of course, the wood was way too soft, and the trees grew like crazy and now they're everywhere!
In San Diego I took a visit to the zoo. I went to the Bengal Tiger area, where they have a nice natural exhibit. It's basically a bit of jungle, with a river and waterfall and everything. Instead of a cage, they have a soundproofed one-way mirror. When I got there, there was a huge crowd. I pushed my way to the front, with my trusty video camera, and saw this huge mother of a tiger right near the glass, drinking from a pool of water.
Now, tigers are territorial, and they mark their home with scent. They usually do this after eating or drinking. When the great beast stood up, all the tourists started screaming. One lady pressed up against the glass, and yelled at her husband that the tiger was right in front of her! Of course, the obvious happened. She would have been hit full-on in the face by a spray of scent if the glass wasn't there to stop it.
In San Diego, I also took a tour of a warship that was in dock. It was the first ship to launch a Tomahawk missile during the Gulf war, and the crew was rather proud of that fact. In my tour group was an elderly war veteran, and I was apalled at his attitude towards war, and that of the crew. Our guide stated that the USA doesn't have problems with any countries, rather they have problems with the USA, and their job is to destroy cities with their missiles to let them know they have the power to do that.
After San Diego, I flew up to San Francisco (unfortunately, I don't have the time to travel up the coast slowly). Here I have checked out Alcatraz, and was rather saddened to find that most of "The Rock" was filmed on sets that bear little similarity with the real place. Oh well. I plan to check out the other sights before returning home on Monday.
One thing about the States is the large amount of homeless. They are so good at asking for money. I have only given money on two occasions, once to the first homeless person I met, and once to a guy who was so clever that he made me feel genuine guilt and sympathy (ergh). If I gave a quarter to everyone who asked for it, I would be down several hundred dollars by now! I went past one guy with a sign that said "Please give me money. I want a beer. At least I'm honest!". The guy who swindled me out of my small change did so by coming up to me, and introducing himself quite politely. We shook hands. He told me that his name was Demitrius, and when I told him my name he expressed delight that we both had Greek names (he started telling me about Jason and the Argonauts). We talked for a good ten minutes, about Australia and New York, where he had come from. He was quite knowledgeable, and I was beginning to suspect that he was just a friendly guy when he told me that he had recently been divorced, and had subsequently lost his job. When he showed me his meagre possessions, and asked with a tear in his eye if I could possibly spare a quarter so that he could get a burger for dinner, I felt as if it was my personal quest to help this poor man. I tell you, he was *good* - he must have rehearsed that many times before.
It is Halloween here tomorrow, and the ironic thing is that the people walking around the streets would be a lot *less* scary if they dressed up as ghouls and demons.
At the hostel I met a couple of Swedish girls. Now, I know what the stereotypical Swedish girl looks like, and I was rather pleased to discover that one of the girls had typecast herself. Most of the guys in the hostel were trying to crack on to her, but not me! As a result, the girls tended to hang around with me a lot. Well, I can't complain!
Anyway, I am a sucker for punishment so I decided that the best way to see San Francisco would be to hire a bike and ride around - the Swedish girls were foolish enough to join me. I came screaming down one of those hilly streets at an insane speed, and I consider myself lucky that I didn't stack the bike (when you are going down a 40 degree slope, it doesn't take much to tip you over). We did get to ride across the Golden Gate Bridge, and through Golden Gate Park, so it turned out OK.
That evening everyone in the hostel went to the Halloween street party. I refused to wear fancy dress, as the box of costumes contained mostly ball gowns, wigs and jewelry. Well, it was San Francisco after all, not that there's anything wrong with that. The street party was wild. They basically fenced off a huge section of town, and charged you $4 to get in (well, $2 if you were in fancy dress). You had to go through a metal detector and weapon search first, of course. The party consisted of a lot of spaced out crazy people, food stalls, abundant alcohol, and live music. The official estimate of crowd numbers was 250,000. That's right - a quarter of a million people. It's the hugest thing I've ever been to.
I spent quite a while talking to a tall, slim, beautiful blonde girl from UCLA. She was in fancy dress - as an S&M boyscout leader, with miniskirt, fishnet stockings, high heels, handcuffs and a whip. Well, she probably doesn't get out much. I left the party when she started whipping me on the bottom.
After Halloween I just lazed around with nothing much to do. I bought a few "cultural artifacts" to take home - Junior Mints, Jujy Fruit and Big Red Gum of course! On my last day I went to see a restored version of Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" at a huge old-fashioned movie house with a couple of British lasses. It was a step back in time - the cinema was packed and the audience really got into the film. The movie was set in San Francisco, and it was interesting seeing the sites as they were 40 years ago.
I am just recovering from the jetlag, and working hard editing 7 hours of raw video footage down into something that might be mildly interesting for others to watch. I will catch up with everyone soon.