As many of you are now aware, I am now living and working in Israel. My third travelogue left off with D. and myself about to travel to Israel for a visit, so you might be wondering what happened between then and now. Hopefully this travelogue will serve to fill the gap. A lot has happened in the interim, so it's going to be a long one!
On March 16 D. and I arrived in Tel Aviv to be greeted by Yuval, the lawyer chap who had met with me in London. We travelled to the home of Yaki Dunietz, the guy behind the guy, behind the guy. Yaki lives in Savion, a very nice suburb in Tel Aviv, and D. and I stayed in a small detached flat in his backyard.
The next morning we awoke early, as they had arranged a tour for us. A van arrived, and the four of us, D., Yuval, Noah (Yuval's girlfriend) and myself, set off. We were joined by Yasmine, the company documentarist.
This requires some explanation. The venture we're embarking on over here in Israel is potentially history making, so one of the first things Yaki did was hire Yasmine to make a permanent record of what transpires. D. and I were basically followed around with a video camera for the whole trip. One of Yasmine's first tasks was to produce a documentary of the history of Artificial Intelligence, narrated by Anthony Daniels (the voice of C3PO). But I get ahead of myself.
So, there we all were, sitting in the van, anticipating a day of driving around Israel. Imagine our surprise when, after five minutes of driving, we arrived at a deserted field. Deserted, that is, apart from the bloody great helicopter. That's right, folks, we saw Israel from above! It was great flying over the West Bank, watching out for anyone who might try to shoot us down. Our first destination was Masada, a fortress built by King Herod atop a small mountain near the Dead Sea. We landed on top of it, which is apparently not something which happens very often (someone called Bill Clinton was the previous person to do so). Masada was overthrown by the Romans, who surrounded it with their encampments (you can still see the remains of these), and built a bloody great ramp up the side of the mountain. When they got in, they found everyone dead, in a cult-style forced suicide. Some people consider this heroic, some consider it just dumb.
The Romans somehow managed to build baths within the fortress. They were so utterly obsessed with hygiene that being situated on top of a mountain in the middle of the desert wasn't enough to deter them from building fountains and baths. Heaven knows where the water came from (actually, we did find out, the general principle being that anything's possible given enough slaves). The Romans managed to build baths in the most preposterous of places. I can't think of a place we visited that didn't feature a Roman Bath. It's worse than McDonald's.
After Masada we landed near the Dead Sea, and went for a swim. The water feels quite oily, and it's absolutely packed with salt, which means that floating is child's play. They also have Dead Sea Mud there, which you coat yourself with, wait until it's dry, and then chisel off in the showers afterwards. Looking like a Golem isn't wise when there's a high chance of a nearby Rabbi wanting to shove a piece of paper into your mouth. The mud has the therapeutic effect of making your skin red and itchy for the rest of the day.
It was time for lunch, so we hopped into the chopper and flew north, as you do. The pilot flew as low as possible over the shore of the Dead Sea, literally about three metres above the ground, to scare us. He pointed at the altimeter which indicated we were over a thousand feet below the ground, the Dead Sea being below the lowest point on Earth. We landed on the edge of a cliff overlooking Jordan and Jericho, where a Bedoin fellow was preparing our lunch. Sitting on a huge pile of cushions in a tent, admiring the fantastic view while eating our fill and drinking surprisingly good Israeli wine was a welcome respite after so much difficult travelling!
After lunch we flew into Jerusalem, obtaining special clearance to do a lap of honour around the Old City before landing at the Parliament. We were taken on a walking tour of the Old City, seeing such sites as the place where Christ was supposedly crucified. We visited the Western Wall and D. and myself inserted the obligatory piece of paper between the cracks. I guess it's a form of reinforcement (physical or spiritual I'm not sure). You can fax your message to God in if you want, but I did it the old fashioned way.
D. and I decided we'd like to see Bethlehem, just to round off the day, so our tour guide took us there. He was strangely nervous, which perhaps had something to do with the fact that Bethlehem is now under Palestinian control. Things went smoothly, however, and D. got to touch the spot where Christ is supposed to have been born. We returned to our chopper after five o'clock, which is bad news, because the Sabbath begins on Friday at five, and flying helicopters overhead during the Sabbath is considered rude. We did it anyway, even though the guards at the Parliament tried to stop us!
We returned to Yaki's place where D. discovered that she'd lost her camera. After we returned to London, the tour guide discovered the camera under the seat of his van, and he Fed Ex'd it to us. The thing is, when we got it we found that there were no photos left on the film, although we distinctly remembered there being about six left when we lost it. After we got the film developed the mystery resolved itself. We are now the proud owners of half a dozen snapshots of Fed Ex employees posing for the camera.
At the end of the trip Yaki made me a job offer. Basically he's set up a company to achieve his life-long dream: the creation of Artificial Intelligence. I said I'd think about it. It didn't take me too long to decide to say yes, which is why I'm here right now. I'll tell you more about my job soon. In the meantime, let me tell you about what D. and I did in our remaining few months in London.
The weekend after returning from Israel, D., Cathy, Elaine and myself visited Lucy in Derbyshire. The four girls are high-school mates: you might remember from a previous travelogue that we travelled to Belgium together (I've got the beer glasses to prove it). We visited Stratford-Upon-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare, and went rowing on the Avon river in a beautiful wooden row-boat.
Oh, I just remembered something about our trip to Derby. D. had a bandage on her little finger. That's a story in itself, and worth telling. One night D. wasn't feeling very well. I could tell, because she decided to start washing the dishes with gusto. A bit too much gusto, actually, because, as she plunged her hand into a glass to make sure it was really clean, it cracked. Just a little bit. In fright, she pulled her hand out. Unfortunately, this had the effect of slicing her finger very, very deeply.
There was blood. Lots of it. Neither D. nor Cathy wanted to look. I tried my best to bandage it up, but the cut was quite serious, and I couldn't do much with a few bandaids. We had a doctor around, but he refused to stitch it on account of the fact that he said we'd sue his arse off if it turned out that a bit of glass remained inside D.'s finger. So, at midnight in the middle of the week, in the freezing cold, I took D. outside where we hailed a black cab and made our way to the nearest hospital.
Hospitals are so much fun at night, what with the druggies and alcos sprawled over the floor, and the homeless guy in line in front of you demonstrating his social skills by shitting himself. And after you've signed in, you get to sit right down for two hours before anyone even bothers to look at the wound, which has been bleeding into a tea towel all the while. You wait another hour for them to get around to x-raying the pinky, after which you return to the reception just as the police bring in a few guys who've bashed the crap out of each other, so they can sit opposite you and make you feel really comfortable. An hour passes (detect a pattern?) before you're led into the room where they do the stitching, where they make you wait (that's right, for an hour) before the student doctor on duty declares that the wound doesn't need stitches after all (no bloody wonder, it's had time to heal, hasn't it?) and he wraps a bit of sticky stuff around it before sending you home at 7am. I even got to go into work at 9am, which was nice.
Anyway, back to Stratford-Upon-Avon. After rowing around on the Avon a bit, and checking out Shakespeare's house (coming out with a sore head on account of the small doors, everyone was short in those days and slept sitting up in bed, no wonder they all went mad), we headed out to some other place. Can't remember the name, but it's tremendously popular with the Brits, and they were out in force. It was a reasonably sunny day, which meant that everyone decided to visit this quaint little town, and spend the day underground in it's famous coal mine, or inside a fish and chip shop, of which there were about a dozen along the main street. The Brits seem to enjoy carrying soggy fish and chips around in a Styrofoam container, jabbing at the chips with a plastic fork, so they can walk up and down the streets, looking into the other fish and chip shops. I guess they haven't heard of wrapping them up and taking them to a park. Probably haven't even thought of washing it down with lashings of cola beer.
The following Saturday was really nice, weather-wise, so D. and myself walked down to Waterloo station and caught a train out to Hampton Court. It's a massive palace, and, if you've ever read Three Men in a Boat, you'll know that it features a notoriously difficult hedge maze. D. and I entered the maze, walked to the centre, took a few photos to prove we'd done it, and walked out, pretty much without making a mistake. We couldn't understand how Harris had gotten himself so hopelessly lost within it. D. said that she wanted to run back in to the centre and out again, and asked that I should time her. Off she went, and I started counting the seconds.
Twenty-seven minutes later she emerged with a hang-dog expression on her face. I had watched her dashing up and down the same section of the maze over and over again. To this day I'm not sure whether she'd ever made it to the centre.
We bought some wine and some cheese, and returned to London just in time for a cigar night at Rob, Hooi and Tsung's place. By the end of the night I'd imbibed so much cognac and cigar smoke that I felt decidedly queasy, and the next morning I only had a hazy recollection of the night before. I've found that since that night I've developed a curious predilection for blue cheese. I don't know what happened for this to be so, and I don't think I want to know.
As a morning after cure, Tsung, Rob and I went to Hyde Park and kicked a footy. People didn't seem to understand what we were doing. A small crowd of onlookers developed. Some people took photographs. They even politely applauded when I went for a mark, eyes on the ball, and ran straight into a tree, almost knocking myself out, and sporting a big red sore on my forehead as testament to my ineptitude. Whenever we lost control of the ball, people weren't sure as to how they should return it to us. Some tried kicking it off the ground like a soccer ball, others tried throwing it like an American football.
Friday night came around and D. decided that we should go to see "Singalong Sound of Music". I'd never seen the film before, and was rather proud of that fact, but she talked me into it and it wasn't half bad. Basically an old movie theatre fills up with people dressed as nuns, nazis, brown paper packages and so on. Everyone gets sloshed (they sell alcohol), and everyone's encouraged to sing along (they put sub-titles up during the songs). You have to boo the nazis, throw your arms in the air whenever Julie Andrews says "hills", and so on. Kinda kitsch but fun all the same.
We were having a run of nice weather, so on Saturday morning D. and I spontaneously decided, on the spur of the moment, to go to Wales. We caught a train out to Cardiff, the capital, where we hired a zippy little car and drove to the small town of Abergavenny, where we stayed in a pleasant little B&B for the night. The surrounding area is quite mountanous, and it was great driving around the little single-track roads.
That's right, the roads in the country are pretty much all single-track, meaning that they're about the width of an ordinary car, even though they're two-way. So you turn on your headlights and drive like you're in Rally Australia, beeping your horn on blind corners. Every now and then there'd be a car coming the other way, and one of you would have to reverse. It was fun! D. and I wanted to get to a particular lookout, but we lost our way, and asked directions at a farmhouse. The kindly lady gave us accurate directions which were really off the beaten track: we drove through people's property, past barnyards and barking dogs, people riding horses and tractors, until we made it to the lookout. It was well worth it, there was even a bit of snow up there.
Speaking of driving, I should tell you about our trip to Scotland. The whole gang of us hired a van, and left London on a Friday evening with the intention of driving to Scotland. This is something which classed us as absolutely nuts in the eyes of my workmates. It's a long, long way. We drove in shifts: Rob and Ury formed Team One, while Tsung and myself formed Team Two. How proud I am that Team Two will forever be remembered for providing the most entertaining driving experiences, much to the delight of our passengers. You should have seen the little darlings, eyes wide, trying to anticipate what we'd do next to thrill and excite them. There's nothing more satisfying than a job well done!
One of the highlights of visiting Scotland was the whiskey. There's nothing better than a good highland single malt, and, naturally, you can get it in abundance. Small local pubs display a selection to rival the best posh bars back home. I saw it as my quest to sample them all.
One of the greatest things about whiskey is the fact that the old whiskey barrels, fine aged American oak soaked with quality liquor, are recycled as the wood which is used in smokehouses. This means that the smoked fish (it turns out that freshly smoked tuna is miles better than smoked salmon) has a mild flavour of whiskey. Yum!
We spent a day on the Isle of Skye, which we got to by driving our van onto a ferry, and taking that across. This gives you a quick twenty minutes to drink pints in the bar before returning to your car. Well, everyone apart from the driver, that is. He stays in the bar and has one for the road!
The Scottish adventure was great. We stayed in some weird places (I still remember the grizzled old widow who cooked us a sensational breakfast before walking to church), we visited castles after dark, jumping the fence to get in, we watched out for Nessie at Loch Ness, we stalled the van numerous times (go Team Two!), we visited Perth (not a patch on the Australian version), and we had a mad dash to get back to London when we found ourselves still in Scotland at eight o'clock on a Sunday night, with work the next day. We did it, somehow, but it involved driving at insane speeds. Fortunately they advertise the presence of speed cameras, giving you time to slow down. Unfortunately Tsung never saw the sign (go Team Two). Fortunately we never got the ticket. We almost ran out of petrol (go Team Two) which meant a bit of a panic in the early hours of the morning, but, like always, things turned out fine.
The next week Nazy came over and the three of us went to Cornwall, hiring a car in Bath on the way. When we hired it, they asked us whether we would like to pay an additional five pounds per day to completely write off the thousand pound insurance excess. After a bit of deliberation ("but we won't have a crash") we decided it was a good idea. I hopped in the car, drove around the corner, and smashed into a concrete bollard, causing, in the words of the car hire lady three days later, "serious structural damage" (go Team Two). We paid nothing!
Cornwall was fantastic. We visited Padstow, a small fishing village where we ate Cornish ice-cream and visited Rick Stein's restaurant (although we couldn't eat there, it's booked out for months in advance). We visited St. Ives, which really is the worst place to drive. The streets are steep and narrow: often you have to pull off a three point turn to make it around the corner, and many streets are so steep that you can't drive down them at all. We couldn't find our B&B (The Toby Jug), and I was sick of driving around, so we parked the car and the owner of the B&B came down and gave us directions. He was a surly fellow, I didn't like the man. This is mostly due to the fact that he disparaged my navigation skills for the duration of our stay. One plus was that he used to be a cook, and the breakfast was sensational (I had smoked cod fried in butter).
We also visited Land's End, the most western part of Cornwall, and saw a sensational amphitheatre set on a cliffside overlooking the sea, where they hold plays. We got some fantastic Cornish Pasty's for lunch and sat and watched a rehearsal on David Copperfield. Tsung almost got involved in a chase scene, where the young boy adeptly avoids being captured. I wanted to shout out, "get the little mongrel, Tsung"! Oh, I should point out that Tsung was also in Cornwall at the time with a mate, and we met up for a few days before going our separate ways. On our last night we stayed on a working farm in the middle of the country. Not a bad weekend away. On our way back we visited Stonehenge (which was closed; it's near a motorway which ruins the effect anyway), and we stayed a night in Bath with friends.
If you're wondering why the place is known as Bath, you've guessed it. The damned Romans again, invading countries so that they can install quality plumbing, frigidariums and saunas. Bastards!
Cathy, D., Elaine and myself visited Lucy in Derbyshire once more. This time I was adamant that we'd go to Cadbury World: Derby is quite close to Bournemouth, which is where chocolate comes from. Before that, though, we went to Alton Towers, a theme park with a few really great rides.
Alton Towers is situated in the middle of the countryside. It's quite weird; you drive through quaint little towns and then turn the corner to find yourself in a truly massive car park, with a monorail whizzing overhead. Coincidentally, a news item played over the car radio the very moment that the theme park came into view: two people had lost their lives in two unrelated theme park tragedies! This inauspicious announcement nonetheless, we proceeded to try out various rides. It's strange, but when we hopped on The Oblivion, and were slowly being drawn twenty stories into the air, only to teeter on the edge before plunging face-first into a small black hole, Cathy repeatedly described how she was never going to do anything so stupid again. Ten seconds afterwards she had changed her tune, with cries of "let's do it again". Facing your own death and living to tell the tale is strangely attractive to some people!
We did get to Cadbury World. Oh, how we enjoyed standing behind glass and watching unhappy workers packing boxes with chocolate bars. What joy! Obviously the best part of the tour was the free choccys, and the gift shop afterwards. I got a bad of "misshapes" for my Dad, and he thought the rejected bits of chocolate were "not a patch on the Australian Cadbury's".
I finished my job at Lionhead Studios. I had really enjoyed my time there, and I would have happily stayed, but I had other plans. I'd always intended to return to Australia to resume my role as one-sixth co-director of Amristar, but the tables had turned when I accepted the Israeli offer. D. and I decided to have one more holiday before the next major change in our lives, so we flew into Geneva with three weeks to spare, and hired a car. D. said she'd rather like to see Salzburg, in Austria. Lionhead had given me a rather generous bonus when I left, and that was our budget for the three weeks.
We started by driving west to east across Switzerland, including stays in Laussane (on the shores of Lake Geneva, where we saw a bike race go through). We spent several days in Interlaken, nestled in the Swiss Alps. Somehow we managed to get an apartment there, and we lived in style, with a kitchen, lounge room, bathroom and three bedrooms, all for the cost of a single room in a hostel! We were travelling a few weeks before the start of the season, and that's the only way to go.
In Interlaken we decided to go paragliding. You take a van up to the top of one of the mountains, put on a harness, run down a grassy hill, and gently lift off into the air. The view is fantastic, and it's so peaceful gently sailing down to ground level, with dozens of people around you and below you doing the same thing.
We travelled through Zurich, where we stayed in a rather trendy hotel which you got to by walking through a cocktail bar. The Lindt factory is based in Zurich, and I was disappointed to find it closed. Doesn't matter, it's "not a patch on Cadbury's" according to my dad.
After Zurich we entered Austria and stayed a while in Innsbruck. It was here that we discovered one previously unknown gastronomic delight: ghoulash soup. Innsbruck is a lovely place. D. and I had bought ourselves a picnic basket in Switzerland, along with all the things you need to go inside it (glasses, plates, cutlery and so on), with the idea of having picnic lunches to break up the driving. We attempted a picnic in Switzerland, but, for the first and last time during the three weeks, it decided to rain. We ate our olives, cheese, break, meat and fruit in the car. In Innsbruck, however, the weather was fine, so we headed off to a local park.
We set everything out and got ready to enjoy our lunch when we were approached by a man whom I shall refer to as the "Grass Nazi". He kindly informed us that you're not allowed to sit on the grass in the park, it's for looking at only, if you really have to sit down then benches are provided. Rather than attempt to have our picnic on a bench, we hopped in the car and drove a good fifteen minutes to a nearby castle, where we ate our lunch in the grounds. It was quite empty when we arrived, but more and more people decided to join us after a while, our presence seemingly providing a confidence boost. A couple of girls even decided to strip down to their underwear to sunbake. It was really quite pleasant, and I enjoyed myself immensely. The grounds stretched off far into the distance: it was a great view.
All of a sudden I noticed a small speck in the distance making a bee-line for us. As it grew larger... no, it couldn't be... the Grass Nazi? Unbelievably he had trudged about ten kilometres in blazing heat to tell us we couldn't have a picnic on the grass. Luckily for us, we had already partaken of our meal.
Our next destination was Salzburg, famous for Mozart and the Sound of Music. Naturally we went on a Sound of Music tour, and this turned out to be a bit of a let down after my boisterous introduction to the movie. The Mozart experience was a whole lot better. We dined in a large hall which has existed since Mozart's day, the food was as authentic to the period as possible, and between each course a string quintet played a few Mozart numbers, with the occasional opera singer entering the room to belt out a tune.
I've found that I quite enjoy opera. Well, Pucini and Mozart at least. Watching Madame Butterfly at Albert Hall made a lasting impression on me. I've never liked musicals however, much to the displeasure of D. who is a big fan of Les Miserables. Starlight Express was entertaining just because it was so bizarre, but the music is uninspiring. D. and I saw Chicago a few months prior to the European trip, however, and I thought it was sensational. So now I find myself being talked into these things more easily, and I'm looking forward to seeing the Lion King when I return to London in a month or two.
We'd done Switzerland and Austria, so the next step was to drive south to the Italian Riviera, passing through Verona on the way. Juliet's house, complete with balcony, may have been a bit more romantic if there hadn't been a hundred tourists milling around, and if a million people hadn't already written messages of undying love on the walls. I thought the bronze statue of Juliet was funny. She's bare-breasted, which was the style at the time, but one breast is brightly polished, the other dull and uninteresting. This is due to the tradition of rubbing her left breast for luck: a little bit saucier than Alladin's lamp.
Verona boasts a huge open-air theatre where operas are frequently performed. Unfortunately none was playing during our stay there. This is the price you pay when you embark on an unplanned holiday: we really only decided where we were going next on the spur of the moment, and often changed plans on the fly. For example, we planned to stay a night in Bologna, but found it so busy and noisy and hot that we had lunch and kept going. Verona, where we were a few days earlier, was altogether more pleasant, and its restaurants offered lobster pasta as a speciality. This dish consisted of two whole lobsters on a bed of spaghetti. D. and I were in heaven!
We next drove to the Italian Riviera, spending a few days in a horrible seaside resort called Viagra or something. Imagine huge hotels built on the sea front, with all the beaches run by the hotels, so you have to pay for the opportunity to lie on a deckchair or swim in the dirty water. Yuck. We visited Puccini's home, which was nearby. He's entombed within the wall of his house, directly adjoining his music room, where his piano still stands. D. and I had had enough of Viagra, and looked for somewhere nicer. We found it in Sinque Terre.
Sinque Terre consists of five small villages built where the steep hillside meets the sea. To get there we drove through some very isolated regions, passing small farms and villages. You can only drive into the largest of the five villages, and that's where we chose to stay. To get to the other four, you need to hike, or take a boat ride. We hiked to the first, along the steep hillside, past improbably situated vineyards. After an hour we entered the village and got distracted by a great lunch, which meant we saw the other three from the comfort of a boat.
After Italy we passed into France via Monaco. The Grand Prix was to be held in a week, which meant that the course was set up already, complete with pit lane and grandstands. As it's a street circuit, the streets were still open, so I found myself driving around a track which I was familiar with after years of playing computer simulations of the great race. Fun! We walked from our hotel to the Monte Carlo casino one night, dressed to the nines, passing expensive cars and glamorous people to get in. The building itself is opulance defined, but inside it's just your standard run of the mill casino with video poker machines and all the standard stuff. Well, at least we can say we did it!
We finished our three week venture in France, staying in Chateau's wherever possible. A Chateau is basically an up-market B&B: each of them only has room for a small number of guests. It's often like staying in a museum, with beautifully renovated rooms. Our last night was spent in Annecy, a small village on the shore of a beautiful lake, reputably the cleanest in Europe. We took a boat out on the lake, and finished our holiday with a classy meal at the best French restaurant in the area. What a way to end a holiday!
I was due to return to Australia a few weeks after the end of our European Adventure, and to the London gang decided to celebrate the fact with a night out. We spontaneously decided to drink shooters at a small bar. Cathy demonstrated her skilfullness by spilling a flaming shooter over the table, setting it alight. What fun! Afterwards we decided to walk home when a bunch of kids in a passing limo offered us a ride. We were all too drunk to think logically, so we hopped in. Turns out one of the guys is some up and coming soccer star, and he was being treated to a night out by the club. I'll bet he didn't bank on having Cathy fall asleep in the limo!
I returned to Australia for a month and managed to catch up with a lot of friends and family while organising my big move to Israel. D. returned not long after me, and so did Elaine! D. and I managed to get down to Denmark and Albany for a few days. We were still living the London lifestyle, doing things on the spur of the moment, and not bothering about whether it's the middle of the week or the weekend. Trouble is, in Perth things tend to be closed in the middle of the week.
It wasn't long until I returned to London once more. Wimbledon was on at the time, but I didn't manage to go, although the rest of the London gang did. It seemed they were celebrity spotting in a big way, sitting near Tony Bennett at the tennis, eating at a restaurant with Elle MacPherson at the next table. I reflected on the fact that I hadn't seen anyone famous. Well, unless you count my boss at Lionhead, but he's only famous if you're into computer games. I'm talking about real fame; fame that only comes to you if you are born with the right genes. Working hard just doesn't cut the mustard. My fame quota would soon change, as you'll discover in a few paragraphs.
We decided to have another night out. This time we had the rather weird idea of a Monopoly pub crawl. This basically entailed running around the streets you'll find on a Monopoly board, trying to obtain evidence that you'd actually been down the street. A street sign, for instance, constitutes a pretty good piece of evidence. Fun and bizarre, what can I say?
Before beginning my work in Israel, I attended a conference in Italy. The conference was on Human-Computer Conversation, something which I'm regarded as a but of an expert in, so the conference organisers invited me to make a presentation, and paid for my flights and my stay at a very plush hotel, the Grand Villa Serboloni on the shore of Lake Como.
My presentation went really well, and I enjoyed my time at the conference. I discovered that breakfast, which was included as part of the deal, could be delivered to my room, so I indulged myself every morning. What a way to start the day!
I met a lot of interesting people at the conference. In particular a guy named Walter Rolandi, a libertarian from South Carolina. He spoke Italian, so we did a bit of sightseeing together. He's quite mad, and would happily spend the night in a seedy bar drinking cheap vodka and speaking to militant revolutionaries.
The rockmelon season was in full swing, and the Italians have a great antipasti which consists of melon and Parma ham. Parma is the town where parmasan cheese is made, and Parma ham is what you get when you feed the pigs the bye-products of the cheese making process. It's supposed to be the best ham you can get. We know it as proscuitto, I think. Anyway, you wrap thinly sliced pieces of the salty meat around the sweet, juicy melon. I ate it with every meal I had. Delicious!
After the conference I returned to London for a few days. Elaine and I were walking to meet Cathy for lunch one day, and we passed Westminster Abbey to find a crowd of people milling outside. There were television cameras, Australian reporters (we're talking Geoff Parry from Seven Nightly News, what a star) and a contingent of Aussie diggers in uniform, standing very still. We waited to see what the fuss was about. All of a sudden, in quick succession, Bob Hawke, Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, John Howard and the Queen walked out. So, like I said earlier, my fame quota went off the scale.
As I said at the beginning of this bohemouth letter, I am now living and working in Israel. I am chief scientist at a private company called Artificial Intelligence, and our purpose is to create a "baby machine" which can learn language in much the same way as a human infant does. The science fiction upshot of all this is that we reckon, in about a decade's time, we'll have come up with a computer program which you can talk to, and which can talk back to you.
I live in a large mansion in Tel Aviv, in a nice suburb called Savion. The mansion was previously owned by smoked salmon millionaires, so there is a rather gaudy fish motif throughout (salmon coloured silk wallpaper... erk). They are renovating the whole place, however, so it looks better and better as time passes. I have a nice bedroom upstairs, and the offices are in the basement. The atomic bomb shelter has been converted to a movie theatre with a projection system, DVD, surround sound and sofas. Everyone has a mobile phone and a laptop which is connected to a wireless network, so you aren't chained to your desk. The grounds are extensive, with tennis and basketball courts, a large swimming pool, and a lot of fruit trees. The previous owners were devout Jews, so the kitchen is laid out for the preparation of kosher meals. You can't mix meat with dairy products, so there's two fridges, two sinks, two dishwashers, two ovens, two cooktops and so on, but strangely only one microwave. I quite enjoy cooking, and this is a cook's kitchen.
I don't have to cook, although I do, because we have a Thai housekeeper named Chong Rak. He prepares lunches for us all during the week, and generally takes care of the house and gardens. He finds it a bit strange that I insist on doing my own cooking and cleaning, so he occasionally surprises me by preparing me meals unannounced, or bringing a glass of beer up to my room after a busy day! The currency over here is the NIS: the New Israeli Shekhel, but Chong Rak pronounces them as "chickens". He tells me about things he's bought, saying that they were expensive and cost "a lot of chicken". He also cooks chicken quite often, which adds to the general confusion.
As chief scientist my work involves a lot of thinking, and I've found that I can think while lying in bed, taking a bath, sunbathing on my balcony or swimming in the pool. The working conditions are, as you can see, pretty darned good.
D. returned from Australia not long ago, and stayed with me over here for a month before returning to London. She's since been to Prague and Stockholm, Elaine's been to Iceland and Cathy to Seattle. As you can see, I'm missing out on the travelling a bit. No matter, I'm off in a few days to a conference in Portugal, and Cathy, Tsung and D. are flying over from London to join me afterwards. I'll tell you about it in the next travelogue.
I think I'd better draw a line right here and send this letter off to you all. If I don't stop now, I may never stop, as there's always something new happening, and I've missed out so many details of our adventures already. I hope this finds you well. I miss you all, and look forward to catching up in the near future. My rock superstar brother Brendan will hopefully print this out for mum to distribute. Thanks bro, I hope you guys pick up a WAMI, you deserve it. Stay in touch, everyone! Until next time, shalom!