Recently returned from a river cruise up the Danube. This is the first cruise for both Mrs. Gorodish and me. We had considered either a river or ocean cruise for quite some time. It happened at this time and place because the river cruise was combined with a watercolor workshop (Mrs. Gorodish being a watercolor artist). For the non-artistic taggers-along (like me) other activities were planned.
This post is going to be pictures, but also something of a rant about why this was probably also the last cruise for us. It was not an issue with the quality of the cruise, which except for one significant aspect was excellent. The ship was a new one, and elegantly furnished. Service was excellent and conscientious. The issues we experienced are inherent to the cruise format.
I'm aware that some people go on cruises again and again. Good for them. Those people are not like me.
Here was a typical day aboard the ship. Breakfast was served from 7 to 9, buffet style. We'll come back the quality of this, but for now I'll just say it was okay but not great. Then generally at 9:00 we would start the day's morning sightseeing. For the non-painters this was generally a walking tour. A part of the process was convening in the lounge at 8:45.
Thus every morning entailed two hours of "eating time"/"organizational time" before the actual travel activities began. By contrast, when I travel on my own, assuming I'm in a hotel with breakfast, I would generally take not more then twenty minutes over breakfast before hitting the street.
Most days the morning tour would end before noon, then we would be back on the ship for lunch. Lunch was a major affair every day, taking at least an hour, with a sequence of four courses. Then as a rule we would have an afternoon activity (not a mere repetition of the morning's activity). And then back in time for dinner which was another major production of four or five courses.
The five-course meal is a pleasant diversion when you haven't done it for a while, but it becomes rather fatiguing when it's every meal. We were spending a good three hours per day sitting at the dinner table.
Before leaving on the cruise, it seemed an appealingly efficient way to travel. Sightsee during the day, and then the boat moves while you sleep, so you magically wake up in a new place. In practice, a large part of every day was taken up with boat life.
Moreover, every time we left the boat we had an ironclad deadline for returning--which means of course we had to return a bit early to leave allowance for the unexpected. When staying in a hotel you can go out and come back sooner or later, but at least you know whatever time you return the hotel will still be there.
So the overriding reason I now realize I prefer traveling on my own to a cruise (or indeed any kind of group tour) is that with a group a lot of time is taken up with overhead activities. (This is not a problem exclusive to group travel; the main reason I dislike traveling by air is the large amount of dead time waiting for things to happen.)
We'll come back to discussing the cruise. Time now for a photo break. Yet another aspect of doing a group tour, which I realized only later, is that most of my photos are of a clump of people standing on a picturesque street.
These pictures come in no particular order. Click on any picture for a larger version.
Street scene in Salzburg. By the time we got to Salzburg we had heard several times about how Austrians are either ignorant of The Sound of Music or actively dislike it. On reflection I could get how this is. Since the story fundamentally is about escaping from Austria, the unspoken implication is that all those who stayed behind are losers (or worse). Nevertheless, Salzburg is replete with "Sound of Music" tours.
In the middle of the town of Salzburg is a massive natural pillar of stone and on the top of the pillar is a castle. I didn't look it up but possibly the castle came before the town.
One of the most impressive things on the entire trip was the view from the castle. It's impossible to capture more than a tiny piece of the vast scope in a photo. The last comparable thing I recall seeing is the view from Machu Picchu.
In Salzburg we passed this nice little graveyard in the middle of the street. Several of the graves doubled as a bed for shrubs and flowers. As a friend pointed out, this relieves you of the hassle of bringing flowers to the grave.
Architectural detail in Passau, Germany. I enjoyed this because it reminded me of the quirky architecture you see in some Escher pictures:
Passau is the endpoint for many river cruises, which means the town is swarming with tour groups. In particular we saw several groups with Viking Cruise passengers (not our cruise line). It struck me that Viking Cruises has missed a branding opportunity. How much more fun would it be if the tour groups donned horned Viking helmets and rampaged through the town, littering and shoplifting?
Another Passau street scene, which now makes me think of liminal spaces.
Fairness dictates that I acknowledge some of the advantages of the cruise, or more generally the group tour. One advantage is that we did meet some interesting people, some even worth associating with in regular life.
Another is that we ended up visiting some places that I would never have considered visiting, or even some that I had never heard of. One of these is a little village of Dürnstein. Their main claim to fame seems to be wine production. Since I don't drink wine, that meant nothing to me, but the village was very picturesque nonetheless.
Fountain on the grounds of Schönbrunn palace in Vienna.
My Austrian guide was even more dismayed than I to see that apparently we are putting advertisements on cathedrals now.
Bratislava, another place which I would probably never have visited if not for this cruise. It was really nice and interesting--I suspect that one day is enough to see most of what they have for tourists. This tower is not a church but merely a city gate. It was interesting to me to see the gradual evolution in this characteristic tower shape as we went up the river, from almost-an-onion-dome to this kind of chess piece to finally a much streamlined shape in Germany.
Out Bratislava guide had an interesting anecdote for us. The town government decided to have a contest to name a new bridge. They asked everyone to submit candidates and then have a vote to choose the name. The winning name was "Bridge of Chuck Norris" but the town government refused to honor the results and named it something boring like "Liberty Bridge."
As he pointed out, this was a huge missed opportunity. They could have had Chuck Norris come to officially open the bridge, and every tourist to Bratislava would have made a point of visiting the "Bridge of Chuck Norris."
In general, visiting this region made me hungry to learn more about the history of the region. As it is, I have a vague knowledge that there was a thing called the "Austro-Hungarian Empire" but little more.
Scenes from Budapest. Budapest was another case of a place that I might have got around to visiting eventually but was not high on my list. There is much left to be seen but we found it far more interesting and romantic than I expected.
Váci Street. This name was familiar from my Hungarian course but I had no mental image until I went there. The street itself is very distinctive and a haven for tourists.
Another famous Budapest site is the large market.
The Houses of Parliament at night. Being on a boat, we were ideally situated to get a view. You may notice in this video birds circling over the building. This was quite the mystery. Are they attracted by the lights (although they stay way above them)? Or are they everywhere and only visible when hit by the lights?
The Liberty Bridge at night.
-oOo-
We now interrupt your picture-viewing program for a short rant about the sole deficient aspect of the cruise--to wit, the food. The following cartoon will help explain the issue:
Every meal had soup and every soup was like this--badly in need of another crayon. We could always see clear to the bottom of the bowl--even when the soup was something like "pea soup" or "lobster bisque." More generally, most of the food was very bland (although gorgeously presented).
I developed a theory about why this might be so. First of all I noted that the breakfast buffet was oriented toward British or Northern European guests. The giveaway was the presence of baked beans. On the other hand there was never salsa or (American) biscuits. So ok, fine, there are worse things in life than eating English cooking.
The chef on the other hand was originally from Indonesia (also ok, fine--go Indonesia!). But I hypothesize now that Indonesian cooking (which I have never had) is rather spicy and flavorful.
It had never occurred to me previously that one of the trickiest things to learn when you study a foreign style of cooking is to develop a sense of what things are supposed to taste like. And particularly when going from a spicier to a less-spicy palate. It's too easy to take the lesson "English people like their food bland" rather than "English people like their flavors subtle.
Anyway it's just a theory.
-oOo-
Ok, back to the pictures.
Not technically part of the cruise, but since getting to Budapest required a transfer in Munich, we spent a couple of nights there and made a day excursion to see the castle Neuschwanstein, built by the "mad king" Ludwig II in the nineteenth century. This castle was supposedly Walt Disney's inspiration for Cinderella's castle at DisneyWorld.
So on the excursion I learned a little more about the relevant history. It turns out that "mad king" Ludwig didn't have the cool fun kind of madness but rather the depressing kind where he sat alone in a room all day. And indeed they came and took him away to a psychiatric hospital, where he died under mysterious circumstances the very next day. And then the castle was opened as a tourist attraction just two weeks later.
So was it a plot by the tour guides to depose the king?
Also nearby, also belonging to King Ludwig: Hohenschwangau Castle. And that's all I have to say about that.
Since our flight from Munich to Budapest was to leave rather early in the morning, we elected to stay in the Munich airport Hilton. It turned out to be surprisingly whimsical, in the form of a giant greenhouse with fake palm trees inside.
The Munich airport is also a train station--not much surprising about that. There is also a small collection of shops and restaurants. By comparison, Dulles airport has the train station but nothing to help you pass the time. An appreciated feature was this canopy over the open area which I estimate is some 100 feet high (very handy when it rains). It's hard to picture any American structure having the boldness to include something like this (except maybe in a theme park). I wonder why that is?
Downside of the season: cold and rainy. Upside of the season: cherry blossoms!
Tokyo doesn't offer much in the way of antiquities but the Meiji shrine and its surrounding park are a green oasis of tranquility surrounded by city.
Tokyo has lots of tall buildings but I particularly appreciate the NTT Docomo building for its 1930 New York vibe. I converted the image to grayscale but on another cold rainy day there wasn't much hue in the picture anyway.
A group of young ladies in Asakusa. Before you get too excited, I'm pretty sure they're all tourists.
Asakusa at night.
Doesn't look very Japanese? Actually this is the interior of Magellan's restaurant in the Tokyo DisneySea park, themed to Portuguese exploration. This was my first visit to this park---Disneylands exist around the world but DisneySea exists only in Tokyo. I must say I was really impressed with the design and execution of the park. For example, most theme parks have fake mountains and fake caves with fake rocks but Tokyo DisneySea has the most realistic fake rocks and grandest fake caves I have ever seen. Most visitors probably won't notice it consciously but it really aids the suspension of disbelief. I also learned later from Google Maps that a road cuts straight across the middle of the park but it is camouflaged so smoothly that one never suspects it is there.
Change of location---ocean scenery near Nagasaki.
View from our hotel window in Nagasaki.
Exterior shot of Haneda airport.
Japanese commuter train on the Sobu Line with cherry blossoms. Commuter trains never looked this good.
Creepy autonomous chair at Haneda airport. I, for one, welcome our new chair overlords and would like to point out I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground slipcover factories.
This is outside my normal range of topics for this blog, but I just spent roughly an hour figuring this out and on-line resources were weirdly unhelpful. At the end of the post I'll say more about this, but first the how-to:
The assumption is that your computer has both a built-in CD drive and an external CD drive attached. Windows Media Player (WMP) wants to use the internal drive for burning CDs but for whatever reason you want to use the external drive. How do you make WMP do this?
(Note this discussion is for burning CDs, not ripping or something else. I'm using Windows 10 but maybe it will work in some other versions.)
1. Plug the external drive in and put in a blank CD.
2. If a window pops up saying "What do you want to do with this CD", click the little X in the corner to close it without responding.
3. Open Windows Explorer and right-click on the external CD drive. (If Windows Explorer fails to recognize the external drive, then you have yet another issue that I don't know about, sorry.)
4. Choose "Properties" from the drop-down list.
5. Choose the "Recording" tab.
6. If your computer is like mine, you will see "Disc burning" and then "Select the disc-burning drive that Windows will use by default." Under this select your external CD drive.
7. Close this little window.
8. Open Windows Media Player and select the "Burn" tab on the top right-hand side.
9. If your computer is like mine, it will still show the internal drive as the burning destination. However, under that the words "Next drive" have appeared. Click on that until your external CD drive is the one shown above (probably just one click).
10. Drag music files into the list below the tab as normally.
11. Click the "Start burn" button at the top of the list as normally.
I tried this and it worked for me. I'm listening to the disc now (Pat Metheny "Bright Size Life").
Good luck!
-oOo-
Okay now for the rant. I started this journey by searching "windows media player change burn drive" on Google, and the following results show up at the top of the list:
As you can see the first highlighted search result shows part of the response and it appears to be actually relevant although also rather intense. However when you click on the result the page that comes up is different:
So we see that the respondent has avoided answering the question asked and instead tried to change the subject. I don't get it. If that answer is "sorry can't do this" then just say so. But what really peeves me is the bait-and-switch on the part of Google. I spent maybe an hour following other search results and always the same result. Don't answer the question, change the subject.
As a tail-end baby boomer, a reliable source of entertainment here in 2023 is listening to 30-something (or even 20-something) experts explain to me what life was like in the 60's. Among other things, this comes up in the context of Critical Race Theory (CRT). I don't intend to opine on CRT as such in this post, partly because so far any explanation I hear suffers from such obvious fallacies that I think I must be hearing wrong. (Feel free to try explaining it in the comments, anyone who can refrain from ad-hominem attacks.)
However, part of the background to the CRT discussion is the assertion that hitherto history education in the U.S. has glossed over slavery and racism. This is just wrong. As someone who grew up in the south in the 60's, who went to lily-white schools with some of the most smugly racist people you could want to meet, I can assure you that we did learn about slavery, we did learn about Jim Crow. And the message was clear that racism was bad, Jim Crow was bad.
That was in history class. We were also required to read and discuss Huckleberry Finn in English class. In this respect I think our education on racism might have run considerably deeper in the 1960's than now in the 2020's---I'm not sure that students today still have this requirement. This may have less to do with glossing over racism than protecting tender young minds from the burden of reading an actual book.
Now this is all according to my recollection. Recently, however, I realized we have proof in plain sight that in the 60's people were quite aware of the role of racism in U.S. history and took it seriously.
That is the movie 1776, released in 1972. Actually it was based on a stage musical that opened in 1969, which is why we can consider it as a data point from the 60's. The movie is rather like an earlier version of Hamilton, although 1776 aims for historical accuracy rather than race-swapping and employing hip-hop idiom. Most of the story takes place within the meeting room of the Continental Congress (which you can visit, looking more or less exactly as in the film, if you visit Philadelphia). It describes the surprisingly difficult process of coming to a consensus among the American colonies on declaring independence from England.
I like the movie. It's both fun and educational.
When I was in college, I found in the library a copy of the libretto for this show--a small book which listed all the dialogue. At the end was an appendix--an excellent idea--which noted the historical accuracies and inaccuracies of the story: this really happened, this we made up, this we surmised etc. One particular point I still recall; I'll come back to this later.
So, interesting fact which you can learn from this movie: the original draft of the Declaration of Independence included a paragraph on the evils of slavery. You don't see it now because the southern states, enthusiastic slave-holders that they were, insisted it be removed as the price of their support for independence. This is a huge plot point, the major crisis of the story. There's even a dark dramatic musical number, pointing up the hypocrisy of northerners who were also profiting from the slave trade.
This was in 1969.
Now what I learned from the appendix to the libretto: The main characters of the film are John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson; and John Adams is the first among these. The writers took the license of merging the character of John Adams with his brother Samuel Adams.
During the forementioned crisis our three protagonists are arguing over whether to strike the slavery paragraph from the Declaration of Independence. John Adams says: "If we give in on this issue posterity will never forgive us." This is an actual quote, from a letter of Sam Adams--almost an exact quote.
Actually what Sam Adams really said was: "If we give in on this issue, there will be trouble a hundred years hence; posterity will never forgive us." (italics mine) And the authors explain that they had to take out this prescient phrase, which was just waaay too on the nose.
Anyway, don't trust anyone who tells you that the role of slavery and racism in U.S. history was somehow covered up until just recently. It wasn't.
...as in how to trigger and improve your reminiscence of a pleasant experience. (You could do the same for an unpleasant experience, but why?)
Certain stimuli are known to trigger reminiscence. The most well-known is scent. Decades ago, my first job was at a fence company. I spend hours in the shed out back, putting pointed tops on picket boards, using a specially-designed power tool as scary as any chainsaw used in a massacre. To this day, when I smell freshly-cut lumber, it instantly takes me back to that shed.
Then again, one of my first posts here noted how the scent of wood pervaded with incense smoke takes me to a Japanese temple.
Theoretically you can stimulate a reminscence by (1) identifying a relevant scent to the experience and then (2) deliberately exposing yourself to the scent later. The problem with this is that if you leave step (1) to chance, step (2) is likely to be hard to pull off. My suggestion is to artificially associate an unusual but easily obtainable scent with the initial experience, so that you can later expose yourself to the scent at will.
What kind of scent? Perhaps an herbal oil. These come in small convenient vials. But choose a scent you are not already overly familiar with.
I haven't tried this yet.
A second trigger for reminiscence, as everybody knows, is music. Everyone has songs that trigger memories of a certain time and place, or even a particular experience. Often the experience itself provides the musical trigger. Visit Disneyland, and when you come back you can find the ambient music loops on YouTube. Sometimes the connection is more complicated---I recently wrote about how a certain Quincy Jones song reminds me of walking in Tokyo at night.
But here again you can forge an artificial connection. On my trip to Myanmar some years ago (incredible bit of fortuitous timing), I made a point of listening to the Double song Rangoon Moon repeatedly. And now listening to it takes me back to that trip.
So next time you are planning a happy experience, design a soundtrack for it ahead of time. Then use your music player while the experience is happening, or on the way there and back.
This post is primarily a prediction, and secondarily a rant.
When I was a kid growing up in the 60's and 70's, the future looked awesome. Flying cars, moving sidewalks, cities on the Moon.... Now of course we have none of that. The technology of real 2022 is no match for what was envisioned.
This however is not what I choose to rant about today. No, my complaint is that the technology of 2022 is bland compared to what we had already in the 70's.
Hollywood knows this already, which is why the John Wick series, The Mechanic, the Loki series, etc. use retro technology.
Technology has become more capable but less beautiful, and frankly less cognizant of human needs.
The Studebaker interior is carefully designed. Every element has a specific purpose and a specific stable and predictable haptic design. One can reach and manipulate any control without taking eyes off the road.
The Tesla has a cheap tablet glued to the dashboard.
Some call the Tesla design elegant. No it isn't. No design is elegant which functions poorly. Make no mistake, the driving factor in this design choice was cheapness. But I don't need to dive deeper into the particular case of Tesla, which has been and continues to be well commented on elsewhere.
So I call your attention to this strange discrepancy---it doesn't mean I'm the first to catch on to it. As noted above, Hollywood is wise to it. One more example: in the James Bond movie Spectre:
When Bond gifts Moneypenny with an "untraceable" phone, it's not another featureless rectangle but actually has physical, touchable buttons. This was an older Samsung model that was already obsolete when the movies came out. But a contemporary phone would have been just too bland.
You've heard of "steampunk" I hope? Appreciating the beauty and elegance or steam-era technology. The best example I know is Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
although I'm pretty sure the term "steampunk" didn't exist when this movie was made. Perhaps less well known is "dieselpunk"
which celebrates the aesthetic of World War II-era technology. Note that both of these are rather fuzzy terms, and the elements "steam" and "diesel" refer more to an era than a literal energy source.
And so it would seem to be time to coin a new term Transistorpunk. Celebrating the aesthetic of technology from the 60's and 70's more or less. Not limited to transistors, but including vacuum tubes, nixie tubes, definitely tactile push buttons.
Recently returned from a river cruise up the Danube. This is the first cruise for both Mrs. Gorodish and me. We had considered either a river or ocean cruise for quite some time. It happened at this time and place because the river cruise was combined with a watercolor workshop (Mrs. Gorodish being a watercolor artist). For the non-artistic taggers-along (like me) other activities were planned.
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