Europe

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So this entry is sort of a grab-bag of stories from the last two weeks. It turns out that internet access in Europe isn't quite as cheap as in other places of the world.

I am currently sitting in a cafe, using Pugner's laptop with a wireless connection. Technology is nice sometimes.

Doctor Dinner in Istanbul

So how do you freel about the whole pharamacutical industry bribing doctors with gifts and expensive dinners and what not, in hopes of the doctors perscribing more of their drugs?

Pretty sleezy, eh? Totally opposed? Me too.

Until. Always an until. The world is never as black and white as we would like.

I was offered a chance to go to one of these dinners by a Turkish doctor that befriended me in Istanbul. The food was delish. And the music was cool too! It was all in Turkish, but it had a good groove to it, ya know? The dinner was a success. I was converted, and ready to write perscriptions for whatever the drug company was.

Seriously, it was an interesting time. I met all kinds of great youngish turk doctors. We had a great chat, great food, and went out for drinks after dinner. The turks are a very cool bunch. Most spoke nearly perfect English, which is nice because my Turkish was confined to the numbers 1-10. No matter how dynamic you are, it's tough to keep the audience listening when all you do is randomly say numbers 1-10.

Oh yeah, that's a good point. But what do you think about , more pause, eyes glistening...

7.

That's right baby. 7.

But Brian, all you say is numbers. Last time it was 5. What do you MEAN?

Shutup.

2 (quitely whispering)

Ride from the Soccer Ref

Waiting at the baggage claim center in Vienna. Realizing that (once again) I have arrived in a country without knowing anything about it. I stand there looking what must have appeared rather helplessly, trying to sort out the public transport system on how to get to my hostel.

A super nice guy sees me and points out the best route. We chat for a bit, and it turns out that he is heading the same way, and offers me a lift.

Fritz. The Austrian professional Football (soccer) referee. It turns out that he is somewhat well known to the Austrians, as a new Austiran friend pointed out a few days later.

What are the odds of following up a Turkish doctor dinner with a ride home from an Austrian uber-ref? I mean this guy was the real deal - ref'ing games in front of 80,000 people.

Small world.

Sactown Rules

Speaking of small world. The girl in the bed next to me at the hostel in Vienna went to school in Bezerkely (UC Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco for the non-Californians).

AND she grew up in Sacramento. What are the odds?

We chatted about the Kings, life, and love. We spent the next couple of days wandering about Vienna together, and had a great time.

Highlights of Vienna:

- Catching a ballet at the State Opera House for $6. It was a really cool experience. Except that I didn't understand all of the ballet. I guess that is the curse of being an Engineer - my mind is too literal. I especially didn't get the 3rd (of 4) ballet performances in which 3 dancers in WACKED costumes danced in front of a giant projected movie. The movie depicted some sort of wierd religious ceremony with people cutting up animals and dumping the various animal parts on themselves while squirming about on a cross. Whoever shot the film did it in such a way that it looked like the people themselves were getting cut into pieces. Then a tank came in and ran over the animal corpses. Of course.

So in short, it was quite possibly the most disturbing thing I have ever seen. I know I was supposed to watch the dancers, but the movies just captured all of my attention.

The odd thing was that this was done at the STATE OPERA house. It wasn't some sort of fringe venue. It had grandmas there. Grandmas that dressed up nicely, and bought expensive seats.

But the rest was good!

- Just wandering about and marvelling at the exquisite architecture. Vienna has a LOT.

- The Hundertvasser gallery. He was an odd, odd man. But I like his work. And his buildings are cool.

- The food. Beer, coffee are AMAZING. Brautwersts and hotdogs galore. Artery stopping goodness.

Pugner

Prep

So I knew that Pugner and his roommates were chess fiends. Pugner and I had played chess at least twice a day on our trip, and apparently his roomies were quite good.

I knew that the eve of my arrival at Pugner's pad, I had to get my game on. Take it up a notch, ya know? So I mericilessly hounded all of the passerbys in my hostel to see who wanted to face me in battle. Fortunately there was a super nice Spaniard who finally agreed. He told me that chess was invented in Spain. I figured that this meant he was good. He was tolerant enough to not only play chess, but to politlely listen to my broken Spanish and always reply in English. He learned the replying in English bit after a long series of blank stares on my part whenever he said something that didn't involve the numbers 1-10. The chess turned out to be a series of grand matches. I think we must have played about 10 games or something. I got my fill.

Lessons in English

I eventually met up with Pugner in Brno. Czech Republic, baby. I like the town. It is small, doesn't have any tourists (or at least tourists speaking a language that I understand). The architecture here is impressive. AND, the beer is free. Well, almost free. It is about $0.60 or so. The food is pretty darn cheap as well.

My main task for the visit was to be a "presentation in English" to his students. He teaches English, which is supposedly something that I have knowledge in. So I mustered all of my toastmaster skillz and confidently strode into his class. Prepared to dazzle them with my rhetorical abilities.

In fact, they were mostly bored. I mean, who really wants to hear some bloke talk about his travel tales for an hour? I tried to make it fun for them, but it was really like - and here is ANOTHER story about ME. And how much fun I had. But Erik thought they had a decent time. In fact, he wanted me to do it again the next day.

The next day I KNOW I bored them. I think the fact that four leaped out of the third story window to avoid any more stories was a good clue.

I should have stopped there. A reasonable person would have stopped there.

Instead, I went on until the entire class leaped out, and it was just Erik and me. "Hey - I have a good idea" I said... "How about the story about me riding the camel". That'll get um!!

No Brian. ALL of my students are dead. You must stop.

Oh. So I stopped. Friends and family beware! Ask me to tell stories at your own peril! I'll make sure that all of the windows are locked before I begin...

Lessons in Algorithms

So who remembers the definition of BIG O time for an algorithm to complete? Useless knowledge, say you?

BAH!

On the train ride to Prague, the girl sitting across from me was doing homework that looks strangely math-like.

I point and gesture at the paper. Mathematica? I say in my broken "you-can-understand-me-if-I-talk-really-slow-and-point" English.

"No. This is my algorithms homework". In broken, but passable English.

Algorithms?! That was my favorite class in school. Seriously.

She asks if I'd like to take a crack at the problem she is working on.

Would I?! I've been waiting my whole life for someone to say that!!

We work on her problem. I'll spare the details. But suffice to say, we needed to devise an insert and delete mechanism for a binary MAX heap. Both insert and delete had to occur in Big O (log N) time. If that means nothing to you - don't despair. I had to have her remind me of all the definitions. She responded in mime-English. English mixed with hand gestures. Imagine her difficulty in miming "Binary Heap". Or nope - that's Big O (log N^2).

We did it.

And 1.5 hours into the problem session, we exchanged names. Not that it mattered. We were problem solvers.

We got into Prague. She helped me figure out the subway situation.

I asked if she'd like to meet for coffee. She said no. She left.

Flushed with my recent success in conquering the algorithmic world, I missed my stop on the tram. Rather than back-track, I took a "short-cut".

3.5 hours after I arrived in Prague, I victoriously crossed the threshold of my hostel. When I left Prague, it took me 8.5 minutes to make the same journey. But who's counting?

Prague

Prague is an amazing city. Th whole place is packed with seriously unbelievable buildings. Grandest of grand, sort of thing. Highlights:

- I went to a performance of Vivaldi's 4-seasons (along with a bit of work from Mozart and a few of his pals thrown in for good measure). The venue was the staircase at the national museum. This building is just Amazing. Marble and gold and other pretty things all over the place. The acustics were perfect as well. Several times in the performance I got the chills. It was good, yo.

- Anti-highlight: My first night I stayed in an 8-person dorm. I think I am too old to do that anymore. I went to bed at a reasonable 12:30. I was grumpily awoken at 2:30, 4:00, 5:30, and 6:00 as various groups of merry-makers stumbled in from their evening's festivities.

- I was deteremined to find a better room or leave. Fortunately I found another room with a group of chill Canadians. We had the now obligatory drunken conversations about Pax Americana. This time I took a neutral stance. After the alcohol kicked in, I really wanted to play chess again. The venue was the hostel cellar bar, which was great. This time it was part chess and part absynthe avoidance. This group of Italian girls busted out the absynthe and started making everyone do shots. While I like to think that I am my own man and what not, I know that I am powerless against the wiles of super cute Italians brandishing bottles of booze. I wrangled one of the Canadians into a game, and avoided the absynthe. It's not that I was affraid or anything, I was just already drunk, and didn't really want to be all hung over the next day.

- The next day I was able to find a newstand that sold the Economist. I had been searching for the Econmist for a super long time. It turns out that Porn of every variety is accessible by anyone, but the Economist is quite tough to find.

Conversations in many languages

The ride back to Brno was interesting. First off - I didn't know where I was going. The same train went to Brno, Bratislava (the capital of Slovika) and Budapest. All three sounded good.

I texted Pugner, asking if I could crash at his pad. If that happened, I'd go to Brno. Otherwise, I was thinking Budapest.

I got all the way up to the ticket counter, and the guy was issuing my ticket to Budapest when I got Pugner's response. Backoff Budapest. Brno bound I now was.

I met an interesting lady on the train. Ellen. From Slovikia. She didn't speak english, but spoke a fair bit of German, and a tiny bit of Spanish. Fortunately, her tiny bit of Spanish overlapped with my tiny bit. And my miniscule German overlapped with hers.

We were able to carry on a surprisingly detailed conversation. We discussed her jobless condition; my pseudo jobless condition; her children; her grandchildren; her sisters and where they live; where she lives; and the life of the pope. I say it was interesting because her Spanish was interspersed with bits of German, Czech, Slovikan, and sometimes English. I felt quite European becuase I was effortlessly transitioning in and out of the various languages. With the 5 words that I know in each.

Anyway, it was fun.

Day trip to another country

So I took a day trip to Bratislava from Brno. Just cause I could. It is actually a very nice city. The Danube river flows through it, and it has an impressive looking castle at the top of a big hill. I had a pleasant afternoon reading on the bank of the river, and watching sticks float by at very impressive speeds.

Apparently GW Bush stopped by here a couple of months ago. I heard about this from Ellen. Apparently it was a big deal.

Speaking of GW... An anti-highlight: I happened across the American Embassy in Bratislava. It is barricaded off like you wouldn't believe. Big fences, concrete blocks, guys with scary looking guns. The whole block around the place looks like a max-security prison. I know that we have to take extra security precautions and what not, but we're supposed to be the country that welcomes the world with open arms, right? Not scary looking machine guns. Besides, NO other embassy had ANYTHING that looked like the security of ours. What does that say? Come to think of it, the US embassy in Prague was sort of the same deal. Welcome to the land of the free.

Oddly enough, I was reading an Economist article that described GW chatting it up with Vladimir Putin in Bratislava. It was odd because I read the article in an outdoor cafe, seated in Bratislava. To be honest, I am a full-on American in the sense that I had never even HEARD of Bratislava before getting to this region of the world.

I got back to Brno and faced Pugner's roomie - Marvin in a game of chess. Apparently chess was invented by an Englishman. Or so Marvin tells me.

Anyway - enough for now. I am heading back to Thailand for a bit. Tomorrow I go to Vienna. Then I fly to Istanbul, and have a 6-hour layover. Then on to Qatar for a night. Then on to Bangkok.

The adventure continues...

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Photos

Castles and Churches
Taken from a tower in Prague. You get a sense of how riduculous Prague is. Everywhere you look is a post-card waiting to happen

Shinny Cross
Church's golden cross that just happened to catch the sun as I walked by.

Atlas holding up the world
This was actually taken in Vienna. You see stuff like this all over the place there. I didn't take that many pictures in Vienna, so I lumped the journal entry in with Prague.

Women holding up the building
You see these kinds of guys holding stuff up all over the place as well (in Vienna, and a bit in the Czech Republic - this one is in Vienna). The interesting thing is that the guy statues always look like they are really givcing it their all - really stuggling. The women seem to care more about their dresses. The building seems to be no real effort for them at all...

Prague castle
You can see this sucker from all over the city. Impressive looking to say the least.

No Smoking?
I think this is meant to either encourage you to not smoke on the Vienna subway, or to smoke everything that you have in one go, and fall over dead.

Brian all short and fat
Couldn't resist the urge to take a photo in the house of mirrors. This is the only one that remotely came out. It turns out that the auto-focus feature on my camera can't deal with complex concave and convex mirrors. Who would have knew?

Comments

[anonymous]

Budapest
Hey Brian, if you have time, go to Budapest. I loved Budapest. - Caryn

[Lesley]

Who is this Pugner person? First name?