Continue reading »]]> So yesterday we stopped snowboarding a bit early and, after Darien brought Joanneke back from getting her new cast (turns out her leg is broken), we went to the brand spanking new “Tauren Spa“.

Now, I’m no connoisseur of European spas, so I have no frame of reference, but I had a pretty strong suspicion that there was going to be some nakedness involved. And I was also pretty sure that Robyn was not going to be cool with that. Turns out, peer pressure works really well. And once the fateful moment passed where we had to hang our towels up on the rack and enter the sauna, wearing nothing but our birthday suits, all barriers were removed.

The sauna, like most European nude beaches, was populated mostly by old dudes, and old fat chicks, but there was a funny moment when we entered one of the dry saunas (there were like five different varieties of sauna rooms to be had) which was occupied by three naked Dutch chicks, who didn’t know that we had two Dutch speakers with us. After they left, Margreet told us they were talking about us, saying that we seemed uncomfortable and that it was probably our first time. Well, they were right about at least half of that!

In any case, walking around naked is an exercise in constant self-reinforcement, but SWIMMING naked is pretty damn fun. Especially when you go in the heated pool outside and watch the sun go down behind the snow-capped mountains.

My main gripe with the place wasn’t the enforced nudity, but that we went there to get some relaxation for our sore muscles and they did not have a hot tub. Not one jacuzzi. In the whole damn place. What the hell kind of brand new spa, whose clientele are mainly sore skiers and snowboarders, doesn’t have a hot tub!

Continue reading »]]> Well, the cast is a bit smaller because Leah missed her flight and decided not to come, and Tori, Joanda, and Robert are sitting this one out, but most of the gang is together again in Kaprun, Austria, skiing and snowboarding on a glacier that’s 9,950 feet above sea level, and playing poker in the evenings in the living room of the six room house we’re renting. Special thanks to Darien and Margreet for organizing the whole thing.

Kaprun is probably one of the only places in Europe that you could be skiing at the end of March. The glacier is fairly large, and you can get a nice run just by taking the top of it, which is wide and at a decent grade to get some speed up, but only accessible via a number of different T-bar lifts.

So far I’ve had three really good days of snowboarding. The temperature today was 50 degrees and sunny. I was sitting on the glacier at a cafe, drinking a hot chocoloate while wearing only a T-shirt today. Awesome.

We left it a bit late this time, I would recommend early March at the latest, because Zell am See is already almost over, so our options are limited (we’ve pretty much done every run on the mountain in two days), but with good weather, good company, and still good snow on the glacier, who can really complain.

I love snowboarding. Snowboarding and ultimate frisbee are my two favorite physical activities and I’d be hard pressed to choose between them if I could only do one for the rest of my life. There’s something so zen about carving down the mountain, really leaning back on your heels or leaning out over your toes on a good hard toe turn. It’s just transcendental when you’re in a good rhythm.

The one thing I will harp on is the rude manners of the Europeans in lines, and the poor line management by the mountain staff. In every American ski resort I’ve ever been in, there are clear lines that say how many people can be in them, that merge neatly into one single column of orderly skiers and snowboarders, and no one ever has to feel like they are being cheated out of their rightful place in line, or being taken advantage of by those people who are willing to just be assholes.

Oh, and today it was so warm and sunny down in the valley that Robyn laid out in her bikini.

Another awesome thing about Spring skiing.

(Sadly, no pictures are available.)

Continue reading »]]> A couple of things drive me into a mental state of complete anger and anxiety: getting lost, George W Bush, religious crazies, and losing important travel documents.

Let’s examine that last one a bit more shall we?

But first a little background.

So I’m on a business trip in Germany. I’m out with some colleagues having a nice dinner, then a few drinks, and then we go to a place called “the Cave” which is a tiny bar in what looks like a wine cellar with a cute little dance floor and a bartender/DJ with a love of the 80′s and early 90′s.

We’re all having a good time and yours truly decides to go back to his hotel at a respectable 1:00am. It’s a nice cool fall night in Heidelberg as I walk by the cathedral (a feature of most European towns that is sadly missing in most American ones). I get to the hotel, right next to the quaint “Old Bridge”, put my keycard in the door, a procedure that the owner of the hotel assured me would be sufficient to gain access to the hotel after the receptionist has left, and, of course, all it does it beep insultingly back at me instead of unlocking the freaking door.

A bit pissed, I call the hotel (their number is luckily printed on their stationery taped to the door). Naturally, there is no answer. And there is no answering machine. It just rings. And rings. And I stand there, and listen to the rings.

I briefly consider plowing into the door with my shoulder or scaling it like Spider-Man, but discard both options as too likely to either get me in trouble or make me die.

What to do? Know anyone I can call in Heidelberg at 1am to crash at their place?

Yes actually, two people. Both cell phones straight to voicemail.

What next?

Think damn you! You have two college degrees for God’s sake!

I stand there getting cold for a bit, then head back to the Cave. I explain my dilemma to Olaf, my boss. Olaf, saint that he is, says “No problem, you stay with me.” Really? Awesome. Thanks Olaf. What a cool boss. So then we dance for another hour and all go home. I get to bed late, get up early, and get a ride back to my hotel. A quick shower, throw my stuff in my suitcase, and I’m out the door to get to the train station for my train to Frankfurt for the Book Fair.

Fast forward three days.

It’s my last day of the book fair. I am packing all my stuff up because (as usual) I’m running late and need to check out and get to the booth. Where’s my passport? I look everywhere. It’s nowhere. What? WTF? I always keep it in the same place, it should be there. Only it’s not.

I take everything out of my suitcase and go through it. It’s not there. Then my computer bag. Same thing. Okay, now I’m starting to get a little nervous. I’m supposed to be on a plane at 5pm, that’s nine hours away. What the hell am I going to do?

Calls to the hotel in Heidelberg (who so graciously happen to be working at this time of day, fuckers) reveal that I didn’t leave it there. I might have left it at Olaf’s, but there’s no one home for a few more days, so I can’t check. Damn. I really need to be more organized.

What next? I could ditch the book fair, train it back to Heidelberg, taxi to Olaf’s check if it’s there, then somehow get back to Frankfurt, give Olaf back his keys, and get to the airport. Hmm. With all my stuff? And what if it’s not there? Bad plan.

Next plan. I show up without a passport but with a really good story about how the small family-run German hotels are pieces of crap and lie to you about your key opening the door late at night. Hmm. Probably won’t get the sympathy vote. Bad plan.

Next plan. Obviously, I need a new passport. Where would one get a new passport? American embassy. Where’s that? Usually they’re in the capitals. Damn, that’s Berlin. But Frankfurt’s a big city, they might have a consulate or something. Damn, why is it so damn hard to pull up web pages on a BlackBerry? And why do all Government web sites look the same and never have the info you want– ah there it is.

There is a consulate in Frankfurt. Yay! But it’s out in the suburbs? WTF? Grrrr. The consulate does have an emergency passport replacement capability. Yay! But you have to get there before 11:30am. Grrrrr.

Well, at least I have a plan of action.

I get to the Fair with all my stuff. Drop it all off. I have one meeting at 9:30am with some members of an Italian consortium. I consider ditching it, but it’s my only meeting all day and I don’t want word to get to my boss that I didn’t do my part to help the Sales people. I go to the meeting. I wait. The Italians are late. A guy from our company comes in and says, “They are going to be another hour at least, they just got to the main train station.”

See ya.

I’m running through the halls of the Frankfurt Book Fair trying to get to a cab. Damn. Why are these halls never ending and filled with people just strolling along picking free shit up from every stand. What do they think this is!?

Okay, taxi acquired. Feel better. Just have to get to the embassy. I look at my watch the whole way. I get there at 10:49. Sweet. This is going to work.

The fucker behind the three feet of bomb-proof glass tells me I can’t bring my laptop in the embassy. He also tells me that there is no place for me to leave my bag. What!? I have to run down the street about half a mile and there’s a convenience store whre they have lockers.

WHAT!?

*&Q#Efuck%$&*fuck^@#fuck%)(“locker.please.thankyou”)*&Qrun#*&(run($(*&#@$run

I’m back. Soaked in sweat. The security guards, who are all Americans enjoying the sweet life of a Government employee overseas, take their sweet time getting me through the ridiculously tight security (actually, it’s not ridiculous but probably necessary considering how hated we are, which is a shame. Thank you George W. Bush, you fucker).

I FINALLY get to the building where I get my number to see a representative of the US State Department who (after waiting a half hour) I tell my story to: “Lost passport. Flying out tonight. Need replacement.”

It’s surprisingly easy to get a replacement passport, you just fill out two forms and say “I swear” when he asks you if you’re telling the truth. The only tense part was when he looks at his watch and says, “Oh, you better get to Desk 14 to do your payment before they close.” Because, apparently, Desk 14 is the only desk in this whole damn place who can process payments and apparently it’s too much fucking work to do it past 12:30pm. I walk up to Desk 14 and it’s empty.

I am about to become a human nuclear bomb in the middle of my own consulate… when the guy walks in.

“You just caught me.”

Actually, you just narrowly escaped being fried to death in an explosion of a human nuclear bomb and you owe me your life… but whatever.

Pay. Wait. Half an hour later. New passport.

My new passport is really thin. It’s like five pages. “It’s just temporary, you have to get a full replacement back in the states,” the representative of the US State Department tells me.

Whatever. As long as they let me on the plane.

My new passport, besides being ridiculously thin, is also ridiculously new and shiny. My old passport was broken in and beat up and even had extra pages put in it because I ran out of pages to put stamps.

Anyway, the taxi ride back to the Book Fair is considerably less stressful. I walk back to Springer’s ridiculously large booth (spanning three aisles – most booths are half of one aisle). Heather asks me, “So did you get a new passport?”

I look at her nonchalantly.

“Yeah.”

Continue reading »]]> So, as you all know from reading my blog about my time spent living in the Netherlands… they are a bit weird. They’re alien-like tall and thin (for the most part), they have funny attitudes about being tolerant, but extremely rude at the same time, they drink milk for lunch, their language sounds like Klingon, the list goes on.

One of their weird European habits has to do with registering and de-registering where you live with the city’s Town Hall. I think this arcane practice dates back to the time of walled cities, when moving from one town to another was a risky and dangerous process for both the person moving and the town receiving them. When you move to a new town, you have to take a copy of your rental contract or your mortgage to the town hall, along with numerous pieces of identification, and register yourself as a resident in the town.

Now, there’s all sorts of benefits (to the city bureaucracy) of having every single family/household registered (for example, it makes it easy to collect taxes and turn off your water and charge your for shit that you don’t know what it is because you can’t read freaking Dutch)… but for the most part, this is a ridiculous practice that should have been phased out in the 1800′s.

The problem for me was, I REGISTERED just fine, but when I left I was, oh shall we say, slightly absent-minded about all the shit I needed to turn off, cancel, unsubscribe, and, yes, you guessed it… de-register.

So, after being back in the US for eight months and STILL getting charged 90 Euros ($7,000 USD) a month from my old insurance company I got fed up. I called the bank. I spoke to a customer service rep (which is a term you use loosely in Europe) and demanded that they stop letting this insurance company take money out of my account since I haven’t been a resident in 8 months.

“Oh,” she says, “Then you didn’t want the car, apartment, and other insurances that we charged you 450 Euros for a month ago either then?”

I DON’T FREAKING LIVE THERE. WHY WOULD I WANT APARTMENT INSURANCE!?

“That’s right. I don’t.” I say. My face turning crimson and contorting as I master my anger.

“Oh, well, we can’t stop your insurance because you’re not de-registered from the Hague.”

And cue exploding head.

More phone calls. More customer service (loosely used) reps. Letters written and mailed (yes, MAILED, as in actual pieces of paper that are transported from one location to another, as in what they did in the Stone Ages). More waiting. Actually, I have to be fair, not too much waiting. Two weeks later I was emailed (my god!) a PDF copy of my de-registration letter from the Town Hall.

I forwarded that on to ABN AMRO (my bank) and have been waiting for my money back, but the one thing that counts is that those fuckers from Groene Land Achmea (the health insurance company) won’t be getting any more money from this American.

Still, it was a sad day. I have now officially severed all ties with my former life. I am poorer as a result, and I don’t just mean financially.

Actually, that’s not true. I have something that looks suspiciously like a letter from the Tax Department sitting unopened on my sofa which will probably make my head explode again (after I get it translated).

But we’ll save that for another time.

Continue reading »]]> Wow, the last post I wrote on here was the first day of the year. That’s some serious neglect.

Seriously, I have been doing a lot of travelling, and giving a lot of thought to the whole concept of travel lately. I travel for my new job more than any other job I’ve had, and I’ve had three trips for pleasure so far in 2008.

So far, after less than two months spent in 2008 I have made the following trips:

• January, London, business
• January, San Francisco, business
• January, Lake Tahoe, snowboarding
• January, Bellayre (New York), snowboarding
• February, Aruba, vacation
• February, New York, conference
• February, Heidelberg, business
• February, London, pleasure (and how)

As I write this I’m cozy in Lynn’s bed in Godalming, a town about an hour southwest of London. I’m in the middle of a two and a half week business trip, interspersed with some personal visits. By the time I get back to New York it will be March and I will have spent three nights sleeping in my bed in New York.

Not that this is too much of a hardship, as nearly all the beds I will have slept in will be nicer than my closet-sized bedroom in Manhattan.

All of this, plus the fact that I just finished reading Ken Follet’s new book (World Without End, very good read), has gotten me thinking on the subject. The book is set in medieval England, a time when most people lived as peasants working the land of some lord, or villagers in some town earning a living through some trade like blacksmithing or carpentry or some such. That, plus the economics of traveling via such slow means (and with such a high risk premium) meant that most people stayed within a relatively small radius of towns near their hometown.

Okay, that was seven hundred years ago. But what struck me was when I thought about the pace of progress since then. There has been sailing since before recorded history, mostly restricted to small vessels staying close to land. Apart from a few innovations in ship production, there wasn’t much difference between the fleet of Greeks sailing across the Agean to invade Troy and the Spanish armada of the 16th century.

So for more than two and a half thousand years naval travel is a risky business of wood ships and wind power. It’s not until 1802 that steam power really arrives on the scene, and it takes thirty years for the technology to overtake sail power’s prominence.

But then things move quickly. Here’s a brief summary that sums up the point:

• ~3,000 BC: sail
• 1802: steam
• 1914: gas turbine
• 1955: nuclear

There’s a fantastic animated chart that shows the expansion of European colonialism on Wikipedia and you can see the effect that both the advent of steam power (1800′s) and WWI had on the movement of European peoples all over the globe.

What interests me is the gaps between jumps in propulsion technologies: 5,000 years, then a little over 100 years, then 40 years. So why the delay in the next jump? It’s been over fifty years since the last naval propulsion technology was invented.

My uneducated guess is that naval propulsion is exactly as developed as it needs to be. The only things going by boat these days are oil, cargo goods, and tourists. For these applications, the speed of the gas turbine is sufficient and economic and there is no benefit that can be gained from radical new technology that increases speed. Speed is not an important metric to these applications. Or, I should say, the current speed is sufficient for the demand of the current applications.

What has happened is that the major market where speed IS important, namely the transportation of people, has never slackened its demand, and therefore an altogether new invention was required: the airplane.

I guess today’s business school professors would say that the airplane was a disruptive innovation to trans-Atlantic transport. When it came out, it was insufficient to meet the economic and safety requirements of most travelers. But, as always, technology improves, costs go down, performance increases, and suddenly everyone in the world who wants to cross an ocean hops on a Boeing or Airbus product and is at their destination city, without having to switch from a ship to a train, in just a few hours.

What amazes me is that it happened in my lifetime. My father tells a story about one of the first times he travelled to Asia on business, in the 70′s, when air travel was still maturing, with his friend Don Coker. They are sitting together on a plane flying out from Japan, and my Dad says, “Coker, you know we’re probably the only two Southern boys on the planet that are staring down at the South China Sea at this moment.”

Today there would probably be at least a hundred in the air at any given moment.

There’s a great chart on Encarta that shows the growth in air travel from 1958. Notice it says that air travel overtook sea travel for trans-Atlantic passengers in 1958, about twelve years after the advent of modern air travel.

By the time my February is over, I will have taken ten flights. Compare that to my Dad’s situation in the 70′s, and that’s pretty cool. Progress baby.

I love travelling. I grew up with it. By the time my Dad retired and we moved back to Princeton and I started going to high school in the US, I had lived more of my life outside the US than in it. Since graduating college I have lived in three European cities, and I hope to continue doing so in the future. I think travel opens the mind like nothing else. You cannot deny or disregard the humanity of any culture that you spend any significant amount of time actually experiencing first hand. Sure, you may still believe yours to be “the best”, but you will always know the truth of the universal human experience once you step outside the borders of your own country and your own culture.

The world is smaller now than it used to be, but it is still as incredibly diverse and I for one am proud to have seen so much of it. I think it is one of the great accomplishments of a life is to understand how things work, and in today’s world events thousands of miles away can have serious consequences and impacts on you no matter who or where you are.

Human history is nothing more than the result of thousands of events driven by individual people, so therefore the future of humanity is also dependent on the actions of humans all over the globe. By experiencing what life is like for different types of people all over the world, you increase your ability to make decisions and take actions with a greater understanding of their global effect.

It’s only a plane ticket and a hotel reservation away.