Grumpy for the Holidays

Well it was nice to be home this year for the holidays. I had only been home for a matter of days though before people started to come and stay at my house and I must admit I was a bit of a grump. It really had nothing to do with my family coming to stay at my house. I like a full house, even if I’m really not sure how to entertain everyone. No I was grumpy more because of the family that was not there, specifically my wife. Who is still in Russia do to some fun Gov’t requirements. Hopefully that will end soon and she will be home. However in this final stages I am feeling quite some pressure. We still have a number of fees to pay, airline tickets to buy, and other in-law obligations that are pushing our finances and more importantly our wits to the edge. So I will admit I can be moody. On top of this the roof of my 3 season porch decided to leak and I got to deal with that the weak of Christmas. Plus it is slow at work, normally I am so involved in work only the big items at home get my attention but now I have the time to dwell on what is going on and I am not sure that is a good thing.

So I feel a little bad that I wasn’t the happiest host. Of course I enjoyed having my parents and sister staying with me. I just wasn’t in a good mood in general. We did all the normal Christmas trappings. Opened presents, had a nice dinner (and left overs for the next week), watched some movies, and played some games. It was nice that they came but I think it will be easier when RG comes home and is able to help with the host thing. She is much better than I am about worrying about things around the house and taking care of guests. I just kinda say high, help with the bags, and then let guests fend for themselves. Of course normally I don’t mope around the house as much, or spend so much time on the computer chatting to Russia.

That said I should also mention that I bought a fake tree. Normally I try to buy a tree from the Boy Scouts to help send a kid to camp but this year I didn’t have time to get to the lot and Target was running such a sale I couldn’t pass it up. The fake tree cost me about the same as a real one but should last at least 5 years if not more. I was the same height as I normally get so I had enough trimmings and such to decorate it. One problem though is the Christmas star that I use to top the tree. It is too heavy for the very bendable branches of the tree. I tried everything, using several branches, folding a branch over, balancing the star, etc nothing worked. So I left the star cocked very much to one side. Oh well. Next year I think I will tape a wood dowel to the trunk to support the star.

My parents and sister head out west pretty much right after christmans – I would guess they were sick of dealing with a grumpy me – and I spent New Year’s at an old friend’s house; he threw a small party of maybe 10 people. It was actually very enjoyable. I drank a little bit of vodka and socialized with people I haven’t been able to see enough as I was out of the country. Of course this holiday was also bittersweet as I had to call internationally to wish my wife a Happy New Year and I had no one to kiss. However the promise of the New Year is that she will return to me shortly and we can get back to the business of living our life, though in all honesty the last year has been quite exciting for us to travel the world. But it will be nice to try living at a somewhat normal pace.

My apologies to anyone that had to deal with my grumpiness!

Back in the USA

Well after a 9 months of living abroad and 4 months without flying home at all I am finally back in the USA and settled in. In fact after the last 3 and ½ years of constant travel I have been home a little over 4 weeks. That is the longest time I have regularly slept in my own bed since October of 2005. At first I honestly didn’t know what to do with myself. Actually I still don’t. I go into the office most days and get involved in what I can but until I get staffed on a new project things will be a little slow. However I have been able to start working on the house again.

Surprisingly there wasn’t that much need to adjusting to being back in the states. I guess I wasn’t gone that long. Driving on the right side versus the left didn’t cause any problems and in general things are easier to do in the States so if anything I have to get used to the idea that I can accomplish a lot more on a Saturday than just going to the post office. That was always the problem in the UK the store hours were short, it took twice as long to get around, and three times as long to accomplish anything once you got there. So I do find it a little amazing that I can go to the bank, Target, Home Depot, the Grocery store, and the post office all in a couple of hours. That same list of errands would take all week of my lunch hours in the UK.

Now working on the house again is probably the best thing about being between projects. Rather than trying to cram a lot of work in on weekends I can simply do a few hours a day. You can make a lot of progress just by putting a little time in everyday (thanks for that lesson dad sorry it took so long to take!). I am hoping that once RG is home and working we can focus on the house and get a bathroom added and redo the kitchen. Currently I am working on cleaning up the hallway upstairs (hopefully completed before the wife gets home) and then I will do prep work for the new bathroom. It is also very nice to work with my hands again. Even if sometimes I have to do chores I don’t want to.

As for work, well I am luckily still employed. I worked enough billable hours in the fall to make up for the last month and then some. So while I am looking for a new project and hope to hit the road again soon in the next few weeks who knows. I only control a part of my destiny at work. So for now I will just enjoy the routine of going to the office downtown, leaving early-ish, and going home to my own house so I can sleep in my own bed. Once I get staffed again it could be another 3.5 years without a break.

Not Like in the Movies

Well while a lot of Roman was like in the movies there was certainly one part thing that I expected to see and didn’t. For some reason I like the movie Euro Trip it is about some kids that upon graduating high school go to Europe and cause a lot of trouble. It is completely pointless and ridiculous but sometimes those are the best qualities for entertainment to have. The best parts of the movie have to do with English Soccer hooligans and some ridiculous situations at the Vatican. The latter being the part of the movie I expected to see scenery from. But alas it was all staged and BS. When RG and I went to the Vatican I kept waiting to see where we could go on the same tour from the movie. Well you can’t. And many of the places they went don’t even come close to matching up with the actual layout.

In the movie they went in through a side entrance to tour the Papal Apartments - caused a lot of ruckus then ended up falling out of a window overlooking St. Peter’s Square. The only thing is the window was actually part of the basilica and is part of a completely different building. As are several other parts of the story they wove together to create a ridiculous, though very funny, set of events. So of course I was under the impression that you could actually get to these places on the tour of the Vatican. You can’t. Also as I toured the Basilica and museums I kept looking for places from the movie and let myself be a little confused. Though I do know that most movies work because of the magic of editing I didn’t realize they would take quite as much liberty as they did. But I guess how many Americans travel enough to call them on it. On top of that how many of those that do travel would watch such a ridiculous movie and care to try and match up the places in the movie with the real places… Probably not many.

That all said it of course didn’t change my enjoyment of visiting the Vatican. St. Peter’s Basilica is by far the most amazing building I have every toured. I did not expect what I found there. As for the Vatican Museums, I simply didn’t have the patience to get the full affect. The amount of historically important works there is amazing. You cannot take it all in it is that simple. We did go on a day that they were doing the Papal Audiences but we decided not to spend the whole day in that line. Maybe next time. One other funny thing about the visit were all the tour leaders trying to entice us to pay 15 Euro each for them to lead us through the facilities. The 30 Euro would be on top of all the entry fees it simply paid for them to orate our visit. There were so many of these guides trying to get us to sign up we started answering them in Russian (mostly RG did this) and that seemed to get them off our case. I wonder if this would work with pan handlers in Minneapolis or Chicago.

Anyway as I mentioned before I was a little confused by my memory of the movie scenes of the Vatican and the real place. So when I got back to the States one of the first things I did was to rewatch the movie. Only then did I realize how ridiculous it was for me to take an impression from such a movie with me when I went to see the real place.

The Romans Built some Big Stuff

Traveling throughout Europe I love to see what people have been able to build in times past. Some of the fortresses, palaces, cathedrals, castles, and the like are amazing in scope, size, shape, and details. But I was not ready to see what I did in Rome. Hundreds even thousands of years before most of the other sites were built the Romans were building on a much grander scale. It is absolutely fascinating just how big many of their structures were. Now I didn’t study much in college about construction techniques, and I never paid much attention to how things were built but I was amazed to find that the Roman buildings were mostly brick.

If you watch movies such as Gladiator or the history channel and see the digital recreations of Roman that was you see the immense granite and marble structures. What I didn’t realize is that the stone and marble was just the siding or the facade. In actuality the buildings are made of brick! I don’t know why this came as such a surprise for me when you think about it is one of the most economical ways to build. Cutting enough granite to build say the Colosseum would have been a very expensive proposition and the end result is really the same. And this isn’t the first time I was surprised by such a technique in St. Petersburg the palaces has also been built of brick and then covered in plaster to get the desired look and in England I was surprised to find out that most chapels used a concrete type mix to fill in the walls between cut stone rather than using stone through the entire structure. So it does make sense that the Romans would have used advanced techniques to build brick structures that were then adorned with more precious and luxurious materials.

However the sheer size of the buildings still leaves your jaw dragging on the ground when you walk around the most ancient structures. Again the Colosseum is amazing. While it is not quite as large as a modern stadium it is not the much smaller either. And they built it without steal or concrete! The Roman Forums tower easily 5 stories, the Roman Baths are simply immense two foot ball fields long and 3 stories tall, the Pantheon on has a dome so large I couldn’t fit it into the screen if with a wide angle lens, and so on. While there are many ancient structures that are large in Europe from the times after the Romans and before modern technology none of it is created with such immense and large open spaces. It is nothing short of astounding to see.

The other interesting thing about this construction is it also showed how the pillaged most of the empire in order to make Roman so ornate. Much of the stone and marble was quarried outside of Rome, much of the granite for instance was actually acquired in Egypt. Along with the materials Romans, like the empires to follow, took monuments, statues, and structures from the areas that they ruled. Many of these are used in the building in Roman or set up for display in the grand public squares. However it is oblivious that turnabout is fair play. Because very little of the expense stone is left in the Roman ruins. After the fall of the Roman empire the buildings eventually went into to disrepair and then were plundered themselves for building materials. I would be surprised if a single church in Rome built after the fall of the empire didn’t have marble, granite, or other expensive materials in its structure that had not once been part of one of the grand ruins left today. In fact the Roman baths were considered a quarry themselves for hundreds of years at they were tore apart to build new buildings.

Like in the Movies

Rome is fabulous. That is what it boils down to really. Once you get there it is pretty obvious why it is the setting for so many movies. You cannot walk more than a couple of blocks without finding something amazing. I suppose that happens in a city that is so old. One nick name for Rome is The Eternal City, and it certainly feels that way. Walking around Rome you can feel the history and everywhere you go could be a movie set. In fact we actually passed through some narrow streets that were being set up for just that purpose. Of course most major cities are the settings for movies London, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris, and others are also the settings for many movies, but when I visit them most areas of those cities don’t look like movie sets. Everywhere you walk in Rome could be from a scene in a movie.

Of course St. Peter’s Square, the Colosseum, Palatine Hill, Many of the ruins, the fountains, the churches, Castel Sant'Angelo, and other big attractions leap to life and have a huge presence that could be a film back drop. But so does every little corner shop, pasta bar, restaurant, gelato stand, or apartment building for that matter. It is simply a fascinating place to be. Every neighborhood in most cities has its own feel, in Rome this also includes its own look and architecture. Depending on when that part of the city was built certainly is the main driver for this. By the Colosseum of course everything is still Roman, and mostly in ruins. But you still get the feel. As you travel north toward the new city center you go through the most medieval of areas. Once you get to the Vatican things are larger newer and the streets widen. So each area has its own distinct feel.

What is funny about all this is that the residents play this up. Every attraction you go to has vendors surrounding it selling souvenirs. Mostly trinkets and models of the attractions around the city, but if the site was in any famous or not so famous movie they also sell calendars, posters, photos, and other merchandise with stills from those scenes in the movie(s). For instance if you visit the Mouth Of Truth after waiting in line to get your photo and walking through the actual church you enter a small shop. In this shop are dozens of products with stills from the movie Roman Holiday. Interestingly enough a movie I never did get around to seeing. This particular movie shows up a lot throughout Rome, who knew? At any rate the city is an amazing place to visit and I’ll be watching for it on the big screen.

Organized Chaos

After completing my project in the UK I thought it would be a good idea to take a week and go and visit Rome. I could use my airline miles to get there for free from the UK and hotel points for the accommodations. So the only expenses would be site seeing and food. The first thing you notice once you get into Rome is that no one fallows any traffic rules at all. My dad used to tell me that the signs and singles in Rome were only used for insure to figure out who pays for an accident in Rome and I believe.

RG and I stayed a little bit out of the city center on the edge of Rome Central Park. It was a nice hotel and the staff was friendly but it certainly was not in the center of the action. But it did have a free shuttle that took guests from the hotel to the center of the city and back once an hour. So this is how we would get into the thick of things everyday. It was quite the ride for us though. Rome is of course and ancient city with narrow roads and while it is not as densely populated as New York or London it seems to be twice as chaotic. There are easily as many scooters on the road as cars and everyone is darting in every direction.

Most of the roads have cars parked along both sides. But a lot of the time there are also cars double parked on both sides leaving just enough room for one car to get through on a bi-directional street. While that one car is trying to maneuver about 8 million scooters will try to whip through whatever space is left. It is absolutely insane. I was certainly surprised that we didn’t see any fender benders or other such events. At one point we even thought about renting scooters ourselves for a couple hours, but I was sure we would have gotten very lost, very quickly!

The other funny think that we noticed was how small all the cars are. The Italians take it to another level past the British even. We walked down one block and counted at least 6 smart cars parked in a row. You never saw even a mid sized car. They were all Fiats, Alfa Romeos, these little Spanish cars, and Peugeots. At one point I laughed pretty hard when RG said “I never though that a Mini Cooper would ever look like a big car”! Every once in a while we saw a BMW or a Mercedes and they seemed absolutely enormous. I also found it amusing that I saw more exotic cars, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and such, in Portsmouth a small city in the UK than in Rome were many of them are made. But then again with the way people were driving I guess there is no point to own such a car in Rome.

An Easy Go Live

One of the biggest events for someone who is involved in project work is a go-live. This is when the switch is flipped and lights start flashing on the new system. It is also when the old system is generally turned off and all the hard work for the past months or years come together. Early in November I had my 3rd system go-live since I started working at my current firm. I have now been had 4 projects, 3 clients, and 3 go-lives. Each on is different. However the past few have always been extra exciting as there were a lot of last minute problems, issues, or surprises to take care of. This time that didn’t happen at all. It was the smoothest go-live I have actually ever even heard about.

In my first go-live many of the interfaces were not ready and a lot of the data had not been converted properly. We were up every night until 3am and back again in the Morning at 7am working everything out. When the system did go live we all took turns manning a phone bank to help the client’s users through problems arising from the new system. This is normal but the number of defects, unresolved issues, and work-a-rounds was quite high. We kept working on them for several months after go-live to stabilize the system. In fact instead of rolling people off the project we actually brought more in for the first few months of usage.

On my second go-live things were much better. We still had a lot of unresolved issues but for most of the team we never noticed because the client kept everyone busy upgrading the new system! It was live a week before we added functionality and upgraded one of the modules to the new version. This time though we didn’t need to man a phone bank and the users were able to use all the functionality from the beginning. We did however have to spend a lot of time working on the performance of the system. So again for several months after go-live we had more not less people on the project.

Having talked to a lot of people and watched people get staffed at various phases of projects it is amazing how often stabilization requires more resources than development. My personal view is this may be because development wasn’t completed thoroughly and cost cutting had been done at the beginning causing more costs at the end of the project. But every go-live story I hear is about the hours put in, the excitement of last minute items, and so on. So it was interesting for me to go through the go-live earlier this month.

Our project certainly didn’t skimp on resources. In fact we probably had about the right number of people (we could have used more client resources and less consultants but don’t tell my partner that). But a lot of time and energy was spent not just on the development/configuration of the system but also on the data conversions and testing of the system as well. The last two items being what really drive the quality of new system. In fact there was probably 50-100% more effort put into these areas than I have scene on any other implementation. And it worked! We went live on time and with very few issues. In fact the support team that was not actively training users was somewhat bored. Within two weeks of going live the client was discussing issue that most clients don’t worry about for a year.

Because of the smoothness of the go-live and the incredibly low number of issues we were actually able to roll people off the project quite quickly and save the client a lot of money. Hopefully in the future I have more go-live experiences like this, because even though I like a little excitement, you are much more proud of a system that works so well out of the gate.

Mmm mmm mmm

Does anyone remember that Crash Test Dummies song about a kid with white hair and all that jazz. The guy sang in a baritone that was really over the top. Just wondering, that isn’t what this entry is about I just thought I would bring it up, I mean really how can you name a song MMM MMM MMM? No this entry is about something much more exciting. The string of home cooked meals I have had over the last month and ½. More home cooking than I have received in the last decade since I moved out of my parent’s house. Truthfully I can cook, and cook well, but when I am left to my own devices I tend to stick to finger food. Sandwiches, wraps, cereals, oatmeal, and microwave meals. On occasion I might have a BBQ and on very extreme occasions I may have even cooked a whole meal. These were the exceptions well beyond the rule.

So the last month and a half has certain been a change, and a good one at that. Though it will soon be over it is nice to come home to a fresh cooked dinner. RG though she once told my parent that she “Doesn’t Do Cooking” has a natural knack for it. I think having a hundred little steps to accomplish in a tight time line in the right order actually appeals to her nature. The same things that make so good at supply chain work in large business, though this connection may be a stretch. She also likes variety and is not scared to experiment. Both things I think are necessary for a good cook. Generally when she does put a meal together it is a well rounded meal too: Rice, Fish, and vegetables, or Pasta and vegetables, or Chicken and potatoes, or other similar dishes. And even when something goes wrong she can get creative and pull it off. For instance when the lamb roast didn’t cook through she cut it up and finished the cutlets.

Whatever the meal is though – it is generally tasty. Even the stuff I normally don’t really like tastes good; I just may not be a fan of the dish. And many times I become a fan once she has cooked it. So it turns out that my wife is a fantastic cook, this of course is not why I married her, and if we were both working and living at home I assume we would trade cooking nights, but right now it is certainly a bonus. The only bummer of it is that it will soon be a thing in the past. I can probably count on one hand the number of home cooked meal left in our UK adventure as I finish my project work this week and head back to the states in two weeks. Then I be back to fending for myself for a few months. But that is ok. I will be happy to have her home whether she wants to cook or not!

Are we in San Francisco.... Are we in Rio de Janeiro?

Where in the world can you go that is on the ocean, has moderate temperatures year round – think 65 in November, has steep winding roads up and down hills, that has famous sites such as the Golden Gate Bridge or the Christ the Redeemer statue, where the people speak mostly Portuguese, where there is a public street elevator built by the same team that built the Eiffel tower, where the town is surrounded by monasteries, an ancient aqueduct straddles a modern train line, and a castle sits on top of the hill watching it all? Well I just cut to it and answer the question, you would be in Lisbon Portugal; a wonderful capital city on the Atlantic with great weather, good food, friendly people, and a relaxed atmosphere. As my tour in Europe starts to wind down to the last few weekends, and after a month where I only took 2 day off, RG and I flew to Lisbon for a nice weekend get away from our get away.

I must admit that Portugal was never on my list of places to go. RG wanted to go so we went, and I am glad we did. It was certainly an eye opening adventure. Portugal is not as rich or industrious as Brittan, France, or Germany, but they a history of world exploration that puts them in a league with any other country in Europe and above most. Portugal was easily as friendly as Dublin, as Clean as Munich (a real shocker most European cities can be a bit dirty and unkempt), and as old as any city I ever been too yet. I was glad to be back in a land where people drive on the right side of the road, and our taxis were all Mercedes. Though unlike in Munich they were all at least 10 years old and my guess is that they probably came from Germany in the second hand market. Most other cars are similar to VW Golfs but of other cheaper French and Spanish brands, and again several years old at the newest.

The local scenery was great. I enjoyed the diverse architecture. The exterior of many builds were sided in painted tile work and bright colors. Most building in Lisbon are plaster covered brick buildings that had been around for generations. The one down side as my wife will tell you is that all the sidewalks were made of pavers. But the pavers used were 4 inch by 4 inch rocks that were never uniform in shape or size. They were simply not level at all. So walking wears on your feet like nothing else. Especially if for some reason you only brought heals along. Lucky for myself I don’t own any heels. We visited great ancient churches, saw the castle in the oldest part of the city, road an elevator that takes you from the downtown to the nightlife part of town, saw a couple of dozen monuments, and 2 monasteries. One that had exquisite stone work, the other has hand painted tiles that tell fables. We also spent some time just sitting and looking out of the city a great little cafe next to the castle.

One interesting and unexpected thing to see was a national protest by school teachers. I assume it had to do with pay, or vacation, or any other typical employee grievances. But there in the main square that faces the ocean 10s of thousands of people gathered to march. And march they did 3 miles through the down town, by the Hard Rock Cafe, by the fancy street elevator, by dozens of monuments, to a large park with yet more monuments - followed the whole time by the media, blaring music, and set of union leader yelling slogans through a PA system setup at intervals. It was quite a different thing to see on a leisurely vacation. All in all I really enjoyed Portugal, I am glad we went, I am glad my wife has good ideas of places for us to visit, and I would actually be willing to go back and possibly rent a car and see what else Portugal has to offer. Who’d a thought it? And yes they do have a copy of the Golden Gate Bridge, and a copy of the Christ the Redeemer statue, but they have a lot of other things too, world class museums, sites, and culture.

Working in the UK

One of the biggest surprises of working in the UK is the work environment itself. I think everyone has worked with people that were not from the US back home but these people tend to blend into the US work culture. Once you get out of the US though it is a different ball game. So of it is great and a ton of fun, some of it seriously just leaves you wondering. The first thing you notice is people don’t work much. I mean in volume. Most people in the UK get three weeks to a month of vacation, a ton of personal days, and there are a ton of official - “bank holidays” as they call them. It is amazing and on top of that they generally work around 7 hours a day, sometimes more but not as rule. Now when called on they are more than willing to put in the extra time, and they are pretty focused when they work. Even if most processes are a little cluegy and time consuming.

What is even more insane is what is considered acceptable dialog in the UK. In a meeting with executive management it is not uncommon to hear very crude language. They have no problem letting loose with bloody of course but you will also routinely hear the f-n-himer. It is just the way everyone talks, men and women. Beyond the words they also continuously let fly with sexual innuendo that would make sailors blush. In mixed company no less. Thing that in the US would result in a sexual harassment are opening liners to team meetings. I can not make this stuff up. A simple and example of this is when the client project manager teased in a team member in a staff meeting about his fly being down along with some off comments about his man-hood. However everyone gives as good as they get, the women as much as the men and no one seems to care. It just is the way they interact. Personally I find it quite amusing and think the British are hilarious to deal with.

Similarly we have an Austrian, a Columbian, some Indians, a Mexican, some other Americans, and a bunch of Belgians on the project. The Belgians also are much different to deal with but with for other reasons. They get twice as much vacation as the British and don’t generally like to show up on Friday. This includes the other consultants, which amazes me, in consulting the rule has always been work as much as needed and show up as often as you have to. But they seem to have a general out look that is much different. They don’t like to travel for work and they expect to get the time off regardless of the project time lines. They also think nothing of wearing the same out fit 3, 4, or 5 days in a row. They aren’t unclean, I think they just bring under wear and maybe one change of close in their bags. This is quite different than people who travel in the state. I no I usually at a minimum have a different shirt for every day and normally bring a couple pairs of pants, but whatever. They also seem to get offended and take things personally much more than the British. So watching the crazy Brits tease and harass the Belgians is actually quite fun.

It has been quite fun seeing the different way people approach life and work in Europe. It is too bad the German site fellow out of scope because I could have seen yet another perspective. All I can really say is that while there is some difference between West Coast, Midwest, Southern, and Eastern workers in the States it is not even close to as dramatic as the difference between Americans and Europeans or even as the difference between Europeans and Europeans.

Dublin

Between 12 and 14 percent of the American population considers themselves to have Irish decent. So it is not surprising that many people I talk to have been, plan to, or wish to visit Ireland. It was always high on my list and a few weeks ago I got a chance to at least get a taste of the green island. RG and I took a nice little weekend and spent it in Dublin. To describe Dublin I would say to picture a generic European city with stone and brink builds standing 3 to 5 stories tall. Replace every fifth building with an Irish pub, the ones found in every US city are actually very good representatives of the real thing. Now add statues, sculptures, and other public works of art to 3 out of 5 street corners. Finally imagine that most friendly people surrounding you have fair skin with light brown hair, accept for every fifth person who has red hair, also figure every seventh person is an American visiting the city and making a small ruckus. Add a couple dozen catholic churches, some medieval structures here and there, and a nice river through the center of town then you have Dublin.

The hotel we stayed at was fabulous. The Shelbourne Dublin is one of the oldest hotels in the city and is old world opulent. Woodworking, brass, fabric covered walls, great art work, a good steak restaurant, and a couple of trendy bars make up a wonderful hotel. I would say it was the best hotel I have stayed at to date, but my wife would remind me that I say this for every 3rd hotel we have stayed at. I guess I am just lucky to reap the benefits from constantly traveling for work via free stays at great hotels. This was certainly the most elegant hotel though in the traditional sense. It was also nice because we were upgraded to a suite, unfortunately the suite had two double beds rather than a king. The beds were also a little old and sagged in the middle. So it was a little hard for two people to sleep in one of them but we made due.

I won’t go into a lot of detail about Dublin. I would suggest that everyone go there. The pubs are great places to visit and what most Americans would expect but there are many other things to see as well. Dublin has theater, museums, historic landmarks, and of course the Guinness Storehouse tour. The store house tour is nice, though you don’t actually get to see the production line but you do get to sample some fresh Guinness, so that is nice. My personal favorite sit though was Kilmainham Gaol. A prison that was used to house some of the people that fought for Irish independence in the early part of last century. A large stone structure that at one time housed thousand of prisioners the Gaol has operated for more than a hundred years. It is a very interesting tour because it reflects a turbulent time through Irish history.

The strangest site we visited had to be the Bram Stoker Museum. This museum was out of the center of town across the street from where Stoker lived. It is funny because it is housed in the same building as a Health Club and a Bar/Night Club. In fact you have to walk through the bar night club, go up some back stairs, pay in a back room that houses the pool tables, continue toward the rear of this long building, and pass the bathrooms where you find yourself at the entrance of the self paced museum. The museum is actually part museum part haunted house. The first part of it is exhibits of photos, writings, and artifacts from Stoker’s life along with some movie posters from various Dracula related movies. After that you walk through a cheese special effects hallway that transports you through space and time to the scenes from the Dracula story. These are fun and for the most part relatively accurate to the book. They are animatronics displays that move when triggered by sensors. Only a couple things jump out at you so it isn’t too scary, but it is still fun.

So basically we had a great time in Dublin. We had our share of Guinness, had some traditional Irish stew, saw some great sites, and saw some strange sites. It is certainly worth a weekend, if I had more time we certainly would have traveled more of the country and seen more. I still have on my list to someday visit the Blarney stone and find a leprechaun or two.

Riding the Hovercraft to see the Osbornes

Well it only took me nine months but I finally visited one of the closest sites to my apartment in Portsmouth. Though I guess I should say we got there. In fact I can practically see it from my apartment window on clear days. A few weeks ago on a unbelievable fall day RG and I went to the Isle of Wight to check things out, ride a hover craft, and see a fancy house. And we did all of those things. To start I should mention that I am with in walking distance from no fewer than three different ferry launches, and there are several launches from each of them an hour. So there are at least a dozen opportunities an hour to get to the island. However for the first nine months or so in Portsmouth I would spend 3, 4, 5, 6, even 10 hours in the car to get all over England to go site seeing. Well that has changed I think now I will try to do things more locally at least until I leave.

One of the best parts of the trip, and unfortunately one of the shortest, was the ride to the Island. And I say ride because that is what it was a ride. We decided to take one of the few running hovercrafts left in the world to the Island. I have been fascinated with hover crafts since I was a kid and my parents, er I mean Santa Claus, gave me a remote controlled hover craft for Christmas. I remember trying that thing on everything, concrete, sand, ice, and water the whole bit. This fun didn’t last forever I think I used it off and on for three years then driving and what not seemed more important. But I always wondered what being on a full sized one would be like. So I finally had my chance, we bought a round trip ticket including bus fare and entry to Queen Victoria’s mansion on the island at the Hover port mid morning, waited our turn to board, and strapped in.

I was pretty cool, the way the whole craft lifts up when the large fan fills the bladder with air. RG was amazed by the way the craft rotates as if falling backwards off the launch pad. I loved the way it cruised above the sand and then the surf for 10 minutes to the island. It was surprisingly smooth, and must have been well insulated because it didn’t seem loud. All in all it was a bit surreal. The hovercraft itself looks just like the one from Rumble in Bronx and the cab is completely contained. It certainly looks like it was built in the late eighties or early nineties from the plastics and colors used in the passenger area. The window are set a little too high to get a good view out of, and the ride isn’t smooth enough to stand at the main window in front, so you don’t get the best view while cruising. But this didn’t make the trip any less fun. Now in a single year I have been on a Hydrofoil and a Hovercraft. Seriously, how cool is that?

Once on the Isle of Wight the Hovercraft launch is basically attached tot he main bus station in town. We had to wait about 15 minutes for the double decker to show up and the ride to Victoria’s mansion was about ½ hour. What amazed me here was how populated the Island was. I thought it would be like an Island off Maine with a few people and the town had many four or five roads with a typical main street. This is not the case there are at least five descent sized towns of thousands. In fact the island seems more populated than parts of the regular coast. We saw a lot of good sized homes, a lot of shops, pubs, restaurants, and all the normal city living amenities. The Mansion was a bit in the country but not by much.

Victoria’s Mansion on the Isle of Wight is called Osborne House. I honestly don’t know why and before we went there I didn’t even know that the Queen had owned and lived there. I just never looked it up, I went because the locals in Portsmouth said it was a nice place to visit. They were certainly right about that. It is a very nice park with several sites including the large mansion to visit. I won’t go into to much detail as I am starting to feel like the descriptions of these places are running together but it was a nice country estate fit for a queen. It also had no relations to Ozzie and his family but this wasn’t a big disappointment. To finish off the trip we also took a walk through the town called Ryde and had dinner at a nice bar/restaurant were we ate something called whitebait along with some topas. All in all one of our nicer days out, though it seems like that is all we get in England.

Battle of the Dress

In the movie A Christmas Story there are a couple of battles going on with in the family. The first is the main plot of the movie Ralfie the older boy wants a Red Rider bb gun with a compass in the stock and a thingy that tells time, his mother doesn’t want him to have one. The other fight is over a lamp shaped like a woman’s leg in fishnet stockings that the father wins and displays in the front window. He believes it is a major award, while she believes it is disgusting. Eventually the mother accidentally nocks the lamp over and it breaks. Everyone can relate to these scenes because I think this is a normal part of family life. People clash over small silly things all the time. I think it is a funny cycle that everyone gets caught up in from time to time. Say a teenager wants a car, or a college student wants to move out of the dorm, possibly parent want the kids to accomplish something, whatever it all out campaigns can be waged the dominate ones personal story for entire periods.

My wife and I think take this to a high art. Her parents are always campaigning for something, she is always campaigning for something, and I am generally trying to defect these tactics as best I can. The latest one though I had to relent and give in. RG’s sister is getting married this coming winter. At some point when RG decided to move to the UK for a while she asked if I could get buy her dress for the wedding. She is going to be the maid of honor and her sister told her to buy whatever she wants. I of course said this would be no problem and we could spend probably x dollars. Well that was a mistake. Not saying that we can buy the dress, no, that wasn’t a big deal. It was assigning a possible amount. My wife’s razor sharp mind kicked right in and she committed the number to memory. I, as I usually do, promptly forgot about the whole matter.

One weekend after she had moved to the UK she said she wanted to go into the Karen Millen outlet that shares a parking lot with my apartment building. I didn’t think anything about it, it is one of the few stores she actually likes to browse in. So we went in and she started looking at dresses. So she found some she liked and said she was going to try them on. What I didn’t know is that she was looking for the above mentioned Maid of Honor dress. Not that I minded, I just didn’t expect it was so pressing as the wedding was still 6 months away. So she found two that she like and both of them were priced well under the amount we had talked about, and I had promptly forgotten some time before. So asked is she could get both, together they were still under the budget.

Of course this isn’t the way I think. I remember talking about A dress not an amount. Of course the amount seemed about what I would agree to but my silly thinking is we could just keep the difference. After a little chatting she picked one, we bought it, and we left the store.

Not a day went by before she started her campaign to get the other dress. Using lines like “don’t you think I look pretty in the dress”, “aren’t I worth another dress”, “it is still under the amount for the dress”, and any other thing she could think of. Then she started to say things like “I know what you want to do, buy me that dress” and so on. She couldn’t go a day with out bringing it up. Of course what she didn’t know was I figured it would be a good Christmas present, bought it when she was napping, and hid it. So I kept trying to get her to drop it. The problem with this is that she is almost as hard headed as I am. We have incredible tests of will on regular basis. I win some, I lose some. So I kept persisting with arguments against buying the dress. Saying the store sold the last one, or that it wouldn’t be practical for winter, and so on. Of course these efforts fell on deaf ears.

This went on for at least 3 full weeks, and would have gone on longer, except I really didn’t have a good place to hide the dress and I was getting sick of hearing about it. So on the wife’s birthday even though she already received a very nice gift early, and a dress for her sister’s wedding, I gave her the other dress. She wore it that night to dinner at a fun little Greek place down the road, and I suppose she feels she one that one. I hope she feels that way at Christmas when I wrap the dress up in a box and give it too her again!

Driving and Driving

So after being in the UK and driving all around the UK for the last 8 months I think I have a pretty good handle on the skill. I may have eluded to a my feelings about driving in some previous posts but I thought it may be fun to put together a top 10 list of things that bother me about driving in the UK.

Before I get to the list I will also say that I had quite an adjustment to driving overhear and the first 3 weeks or so I referred to as white knuckle driving. This is because I was so intensely paying attention to my driving that I gripped the wheel so tight that my knuckles lost blood flow regularly. To be honest this was also caused because I was a bit scared. In fact I would tell people that when they drove in the UK they should bring along a couple changes of shorts because you get that scared you may need to change them.

However I did get over these issues and now when I go home and drive I must admit it seems a little boring. The roads are super wide, there are no true corners in most places, and you have easy to follow signage (no matter what you think of our road signs they are better than any other country I have visited yet). One of the biggest things I did to get into driving was change the type of car I was driving. Originally I drove a large car, either a Peugeot 407 or a VW Passat. In the states these would be considered mid-sized cars. In the UK they take up way to much room and leave you less room to maneuver. Also a lot of it came to practice. Driving with your right hand and shifting with the left takes some work when you are used to doing the opposite. Also once you start to learn where to look for road signs you can start to make your way around with out the GPS.

So here is my top ten things that bother me, and probably any driver from the states, in the UK:

10.) Driving on the Opposite side of the road – I don’t care that more people in the world drive on the left, it is just weird. You have to shift with the wrong hand, the GPS tells you to go the wrong way through a round-a-bout, and your passengers get freaked out because you end up driving so close to the edge of the road. However you do get used to this and switching back and forth does become a non-issue.

9.) Signage – UK signs are not where they belong. They may dangle from over head like on the US freeways, be posted in the center of the round-a-bout, on the outside of a round-a-bout, on the pavement, on signs leading into an intersection, or who knows where. There are duplicate signs that list destinations in a different order each time you see them, and when you come into an interchange you never know where to look to determine which lane is the correct one to be in.

8.) Size of roads – They are simply, with the exception of the motorways, to small. The lanes are too small, there are not enough lanes, and they will not move fences, hedges, light poles, or stone walls to accommodate a decent road way. Even on a well traveled road you have to pull over to let on coming traffic to pass. How 19th century is that. We aren’t in horse and buggies anymore.

7.) Parking on roads – This actually is a continuation of point 8. In the middle of a decent sized city people will park, and it is legal, along a major road. This in effect cuts the road in half and backs traffic up. It also means that in many cases I only have millimeters between my car’s review mirrors and those of the cars parked along the road. This is when I normally need those new shorts.

6.) Country bi-directional roads – This point is also a continuation of a theme. When you get into the country, and it doesn’t take much 10 mile out of a town center, the roads get even smaller! There are times where the road is so narrow that the mirrors on the side of the car are trimming hedges on both sides as you drive. Now take in mind and realize that this is a two way road. So now you have to pull into a swamp every 10 minutes to let traffic pass. No take all that into mind and realize you are in Wales and driving up the side of a mountain in the fog. Come on build some decent size roads.

5.) Corners and Speed – The British can not make a straight road. I don’t know why they just can’t. In the states we may be a little crazy on making routes as straight as possible in the UK it isn’t even considered. Neither is driving at a decent speed. The national speed limit is 70 mph, on a two way road with 90 degree s-turns, and people will average 95 mph. They are simply nutz. Though, when I get on the motorway the speed seems to make more sense.

4.) Never stopping, at least in theory – The whole point of a round-a-bout is so people don’t have to stop. So why do the British then put stop lights on them? Or put them in on highways so at 70 miles an hour (or as I said 95) people have to worry about cross traffic. Then at an uncontrolled round-a-bout you still have to stop because there are a million cars coming on one exit to the left of you. Again traffic backs up. Just put in a four-way light and be done with it. Oh yeah and if a round-a-bout needs more than 4 lanes it is too big and you should use something else. I always end up going somewhere I don’t want to be cause I should have been in lane 2 not lane 9.

3.) Watch out if there is bad weather – This is simple. When there is a little fog or drizzle 3 people on the road want to go 50 mph rather than 70 or 95. Then they decide they should pass someone doing 40. Plus everyone decides to go home early so there are 3 times as many people on the road and it take 3 times as long to get anywhere. Even though the roads have fine traction and visibility is still 80% what it normally is.

2.) The fast lane is not fast – Building on number 3 the British have a bad habit of riding in the wrong lane. If there is a tractor on the road in 2 miles they get into the fast lane now. Then do 3 miles and hour faster than the tractor. Add bad weather to this, or heavy traffic and the fast lane actually can move slower than the slow lane. For no reason. The slow drivers just don’t want to move over. It is enough to make you scream (of course this happens in the US as you approach a merger or construction drives me just as nutz there).

1.) 1.) Traffic incidents – Finally the way they handle traffic accidents is crazy. They completely shut the road down until the forensics work is done. And if it is a weekend that could be ½ a day, forget a bout it. Seriously on our drive back from Scotland there was an accident on the M40 that occurred around 2 in the afternoon and we were stuck in the back up when we arrived at interchange around 6 in the evening. It was closer to 7 when they finally opened the road and it started to flow again! The best part, no detour signs, if you are smart enough to get off in time you have no clue where to go.

All that said, I do have to say that the British are much more courteous drivers. They signal, let you in when you signal, and in general leave gaps for people. If there is no one in front of them they will get over for you to pass, assuming traffic is light. And you aren’t allowed to honk unless there is an emergency so it is nice not to hear all the honking (if you have been to New York or Chicago you know what I am talking about). Though side by side. I will be glad to be back in the states, it is just a lot easier to get around from place to place.

Mary King’s Close

One of the things I have been trying to do while I travel is to find some out of the ordinary places to visit. Otherwise you end up with a pretty routine way to look at a city in Europe. Tour the palace/castle/manor house, tour the church/Cathedral/Abby, go to the town square, check out the local statues, maybe see some roman ruins, and so on. Most towns and cities have the same main elements. Larger cities also have museums, and very large cities have more unique sites such as the BA Eye in London, or the Eiffel tower in Paris. But in most medium and small cities this isn’t the case, but a lot of times you can find something unique to an area. One such place in Edinburgh was Mary King’s Close. An underground tour of what were in effect Scottish tenements. These though had been paved over to build a modern city.

A Close is essential a street that is between 7 or so story tall buildings on both sides where thousands of people live basically in Squalor. At least most the people in a close did, some like Mary King had some money and lived in the middle levels, while people with more money lived in the top levels. Most people however lived in the first few levels with more than 10 people crammed into a single 10x10 or smaller room. No furniture, no beds, no windows, a bucket to collect waste (all waste) and a fireplace. Not the nicest of conditions according to the tour. There were two plagues going around and generally unsanitary conditions everywhere. In fact people emptied their waste buckets straight into the street, even people on the upper levels, so you had to watch where you stepped or for surprises from above.

These closes all ran from the Royal mile in the center of Edinburgh down a hill for about a mile down to a lake that no longer exists. It was said that the lake was covered in a foot thick film of filth until it was eventually filled in and a park built in its location. Eventually the government closed out the closes one by one forcing people to move and cut most of the buildings in half and built a new city on top of them! You can actually see the underside of the roads when looking up while touring one of these closes. The tour is quite interesting, including live tour guides dressed in period garb. They tell ghost stories, along with some other stories of murder, plague, along with others and they show a house that was featured on some shows about the most haunted places. You go through several “houses” and rooms and see some mock ups of how people lived. It was quite interesting and a lot of fun. I was certainly glad that we stopped into see. I am also very glad that I live in the twenty-first century and have much nicer living options available to me!

Royal Mile

Ok well I can say that being in the UK is exciting, at least on the weekends. During the week of course it wouldn’t matter where I am really. New York, Chicago, Dayton OH, Milwaukee WI, Minneapolis MN, or Petersfield UK in all of these places I get up shower get dressed, put in 9-12 hours and come back to the hotel. I try to get a little work out in, maybe read a bit of a book, answer personal emails, or watch some TV. But being in an exotic location does allow for me to do some fun things on the weekends. So the week after RG and I went to Northern England and through Whales we headed up to Scotland. However this time my Parents were in town, so in a slight role reversal I planned a weekend trip and drove the four of us in my small Peugeot 308 four door to Edinburgh. We stayed at a nice little inn about 8 miles from the city center and had an easy commute to sight see.

We drove up Friday afternoon and got in rather late, though we did have time to stop for a nice dinner at a pub on the way. The next morning we didn’t get up ridiculously early but since most sites are only open a few hours a day in Europe you always need to get going if you want to see more than one thing. So on the way into town we stopped at the Roslyn Chapel the same one from the book and movie the Da Vinci Code. It was undergoing some repairs and the building was covered by a tin roof, so from a distance it looked like a farm shed, but once you got closer you could see this was no ordinary church. It was supposedly built by members of the Knights Templar that had visited the Americas long before Columbus and was filled with strange carvings for a church. It was a very strange place really. I was a little surprised though that were not more visitors there. I guess it is just too out of the way to get as much attention as the Churches in London and Paris that were also featured in the story.

Then we headed into town. The plan was to see as many sights as we could along what is know as the Royal Mile; a stretch of cobblestone road leading from the Royal palace at the base of a hill to Edinburgh Castle at the top of the same hill in the center of the city. Most of the places to see are along this stretch and we packed a lot in. Though I have to say I could have been a little more relaxed as I got somewhat frustrated by the whole parking situation, but that is what it is. The area is picturesque to say the least, full of 4-6 story stone buildings that house fancy wool shops, armories, a few cafés, some hotels, and a lot of specialty tourist shops. Each byway is a scene out of another medieval time. It is said the progressions of Royals would go from the palace to the castle on a regular basis and may time this was similar to a parade like atmosphere. But on the overcast day we were there we did not see any Royals.

We did however see Willem Wallace. Or for movie fans out there, Braveheart. Dressed in a Kilt, face painted blue, and carrying that four foot log broad sword. Try as I might I could not get my dad to take his photo with the guy. That would have certainly been a highlight – probably for RG and me than for my dad, but the way he talks about that movie you would think he would have jumped at the opportunity. So we toured the Castle, an old church, walked by the Scottish Parliament, walked by the royal palace, took a tour of an underground abandoned close (more on this in a future post), and RG and I took a Scotch Whiskey tour while my parents walked the shopping district a few blocks away. The Scotch tour was very interesting though, and we got to do a little sampling. As for the next day we headed back south and saw some Roman ruins, which I and my dad found fascinating, I don’t RG was as impressed though.

I don’t think it is going to happen but I would love to go up to Scotland again and tour further north. I saw adds for a Highland tour that includes the Locke Ness and there are also a few other sights of famous battles and Scottish rebellion that would be fun to visit. But it is a LONG drive to get there so I doubt it will happen while I am working over here. Maybe I will take two weeks to do a longer tour of Ireland and Scotland in a couple of years.

The Beatle’s Story

On our trip to Manchester, Wales, and Liverpool there was one thing I could not pass up, that was doing something Beatles related. Even thought they were together really for a short period of time they created a lot of music that is some of the most recognized in the world. I bet it would be hard to go a week with out hearing a Beatles track. That said, I am not the most dedicated fan. I own a couple of CDs but not all of them. I didn’t know a ton of Beatles trivia and I am no great student of music either. But when you are in the hometown of a group of individuals with such fame I figure you should embrace that culture and see what it has to offer. If I was in Memphis I would stop at Graceland, so when I was in Liverpool I went to The Beatles Story.

There were a ton of options. We could have taken self tours through John and Paul’s boyhood homes. We could have taken the walking tour, the magical bus tour, or several other “Beatles” tours. But I decided we should go to the museum that was run by the Beatles own company Apple. Not the computer company, the music label that is at least 15 years older and has won a number of lawsuits against Mr. Jobs. The Beatles Tour is fantastic. I was a little leery paying what I thought was a larger than required fee but it was completely worth it. Though I am still not sure if the wife agrees with me, but being a good sport she went along for the ride as usual.

The museum is located along the docs that once made the town such an industrial place to live. It is in the basement of a newly restored freight house that also houses posh and flashy shops along with a hotel, art gallery, and some fine eating establishments. The building is probably well over a hundred if not two hundred years old and made out of very appealing yellow brick. The old hand pulley-swivel cranes originally used to move freight from the ground to windows and doors in the upper levels of the building dot the side of that building and are painted a striking red. The basement is a series of building supports that hold up arches that in general reach 10 feet before the next one starts. As is common in Europe you are give an audio guide that you operate by entering a number that corresponds to the exhibit you are looking at.

There were a mix of glass displays, wax figures, recreations of entire clubs, streets, and even areas of foreign cities. The museum was set up as if you were in a documentary. Literally starting out with material on the school children that would grow to be the famous musicians, and then walking through their careers. Many of the places that have been recreated no longer exist or have changed dramatically in the last 30-40 years. There were at least a dozen and a half rooms each containing a different chapter of the bands history. Each different chapter was a mix of artifacts, recreations, narrations, and recording of interviews of the Beatles and those people involved with them. It was a lot of fun. And I learned more about the Beatles than I think I would have watching a documentary or reading books. We spent easily two and a half hours on this adventure and I was not disappointed at all. At the end of the museum there were also little pods dedicated to each Beatle that told their personal pos band story, and the last room was a dedication to John Lennon done all in white, with a side room containing photos of John and Yoko. However one of the things I thought really made the tour was learning the little facts. For instance the band would sit at a certain table every night before playing, because it was by the girl’s bathroom. When the door swung open and closed they could see the girls in various stages of dress as the girls would change from their school clothes to there going out clothes there!

After the tour we got a bus tour of the city which led us to continue our trip into Beatles lore as we did get off the at the Mathew’s Street stop. This is the street where it all really got cooking. This is where the band originally played and got the first fan base. There were statues of each band member as long as a couple of other musicians from the era. Again it has become a place for the night crowd but I am sure it is a lot more polished than it was in the 50s and 60s.

Mountains and Flooded Caves

Danger is my middle name. Well not really it is nothing like it actually. But it is a fun thing to say. But while my middle name isn’t anything out of the ordinary I do like to go on the occasional adventure. In fact I am a bit of an explorer of sorts, I always want to see what is around the next corner, down the next block, in the cave, behind a door, etc. It really doesn’t even matter what I find, as long as I get to find it. My lovely wife is also an adventurer and explorer. She just gets a bored and tired before I usually do, but even then she tends to be a good sport about things. Recently this even meant hair raising racing through treacherous mountain roads and fording a cold, wet, underground river recently. And for a change I am not even exaggerating about that.

It happened in Wales. One of our recent road trips was to Manchester, Liverpool, through Snowdonia to Swansea, and then back to home sweet home away from home Portsmouth. But I am starting at the end so should work the right way through. We started our day in a nice Country Club Hotel outside of Manchester run by Marriott (gotta love the points). We drove through northern Wales stopping at a site or two and seeing some incredibly beautiful scenery. Halfway through the day we stopped in a little town and walked across a cool old suspension bridge, visited a modern armory, and walked along an old town wall. After this we stopped at a mansion that was built around in the early to mid 1800’s that was made to look like a Norse castle. It was pretty cool and as usual I got yelled at for trying to sneak some photos from inside. Then it was time to head through the Mountains towards the south and our next hotel.

The Mountains in Snowdonia aren’t that tall. The highest peek in the region is Snowdon at 3600 ft. But the mountains are certainly different looking. They are mostly covered in yellow green grass, except where they open to show great displays of grey brown rock. We could not see the tops of the mountains do to the weather and mist that surrounded everything. The trees are not all pines as you see in the Alps or Rockies, but also include maples, oaks, and birches. We passed many a lake and stream and much of the road we traveled was a lot like a tunnel. Where trees on both sides of the road had grown together to block out a lot of the sun. Most of the roads were barely big enough for a single car, yet we had bidirectional traffic. I have dealt with this before but in flat or only semi hilly farm fields. This added another dimension of fun as many of the roads had a very noticeable decline or incline. In fact at some points it felt like we were driving into the mist, through a tunnel of trees, with trucks coming at us, strait up a mountain. Yes, driving in the US is going to super easy when I get home, the British are nutz. Or in this case Welsh I guess.

The hairy drive through the mountains was actually the least of our adventure though. After a night in a hotel in Swansea we decided to go to coast for a little hike. We got to the coast, but the 50 mile an hour winds and rain made us change our plans to have lunch and look out the windows at the coast instead. So then we went to a place that I thought would be more indoors the National Cave Center. This place has 3 caves, a petting zoo, some ancient stone circles, a replica of an Iron Age farm, and a bunch of plaster dinosaurs. This place would make any 1950s US road side attraction, AKA Tourist Trap, owner proud. It was actually pretty fun, we walked through several caves, looked at the farm and dinosaurs, and checked of 2/3s of the attractions. The funniest thing about the cave is in true British fashion they had loud speakers playing a track making you feel like you were there when the caves were first explored along with a few fake people hanging around in scenes to show the way it was. Pretty cheesey stuff. Not really the stuff most adventures are made from.

That is until we went into the last cave, a very large and long cave that contains a waterfall. It is called the wedding cave, as the rent it out for weddings. When we first walked into the cave there was ½ of inch of water across the foot path. The water was coming from a small stream to the left of the path and was draining on the other side of the path. In fact it looks like the path was built over the stream and its level had just rose a bit. Undeterred we continued along. We noticed that the waterfall that supplied the river was quite larger than we thought and we had to use our umbrellas to continue along the path that when by it. After several minutes we made it to the back of the cave, which was full of the strange combined melody of a wedding march and rushing waterfall. I could see how it might be cool to have a ceremony there, but it would be impossible to stay clean and dry. We looked around for a bit then headed out. When we reached the exit of the cave, that same river had actually come up a foot or more and created a lake. We couldn’t even figure out where the path had been.

After a couple of minutes of thing we may be able to go along the wall or find the edge of the path we gave up. Figuring it was only going to get worse before it got better we forded the weather. This soaked up in COLD mountain water up to our knees. It was not pleasant. And being that we were 4-5 hours from home it was not the happy situation. It was kind of funny though poking my umbrella in the water to find my way through the mini lake in the cave. When we did get out we saw drain next to the cave. It was flowing so little when we went in we didn’t notice it. Now it was a raging torrent. All was not lost however. Luckily we both had extra shoes and clothes in the car. So we were able to get somewhat dry before completing our long drive back to the apartment.

Bus Tours

I must admit that very often I am prejudice against things. I make up my mind on something and being slightly stubborn I simple don’t change it with out being pushed a bit. A lot of this is based on the fact that I don’t like to pay for things. I really don’t like to spend money if I don’t have to. So I am always looking for deals and seeing if I can substitute a little elbow grease to save a buck. Of course I still do this a little but as I actually make a little money now I have been hard pressed to change my ways and take things easy. I still avoid guided tours for the most part and most add on. So for example when we went to London for New Years we got Subway passes and tried to pre-book attractions when ever possible and ran our own routine.

However talking to a lot of my friends that have traveled to London and they have had a lot of success buying city bus tours that allow you to get on and off at different places and take you all over town. So on a trip to Wales I let a friend talk me into a 5 pound bus tour of Cardiff. It turned out to be a really nice way to get a feel for the whole city and not just a few sites. Riding on the top of a double-decker bus is fun to boot. So that was the being of my new embracing of some organized tours. Also in May for our anniversary we took and organized tour that included dinner, a cruise, and a show. It was a little pricey but the things we did I never would have picked and enjoyed it a lot so once or twice a year I think we could do these kind of tours while traveling. Though I am still not sold on complete tour packages to tour a country, but I did see a cool High-Lands tour in Edinburgh I would have liked to do.

So now if we have limited time to see an area I look for a city-tour bus. As long as it doesn’t cost too much that is. The one in London is actually 15 pounds so that may be a little much as we could get around town for 3 days on that money, but in Cardiff, Liverpool, and Manchester they run 6.50 or less. The other nice thing about these tours is that they take you to places you may not normally think to go. So you get a more complete picture of an area, and they are normally good for 24 hours so if you wanted you could use the tickets to see a lot of sites with out worrying about how to get there, parking the car, etc. So now I too have to say, at least in the UK, if you have a day to kill I would recommend grabbing the city-tour bus in whatever city you are in.

I know why that lady attacked the phone company with a hammer

Last October I read a hilarious account of a frustrated Comcast customer that go revenge using a hammer. The best part of it was that she was 75 and did what the office space guys did to a printer to a phone company computer. It was great. But I never understood what would make you want to go that far. I have a temper, I will admit this. In fact my wife has no problem telling me that when I get frustrated I start to act like a four year old kid. That is true. But normally it passes quickly. But a few months ago I did have a passing idea to repeat the performance written in the article about the Comcast customer.

My gripe though was/is with Avis. Apparently Avis is not a truly global company. You can call Avis or use their dot com website to book a car in the UK. However all that does is transfer it to Avis in the UK who enter this into a completely different system. They also do their own billing, have separate customer support, and as far as I can tell from the outside are a completely different company. Though I do get free rentals in the US for my long contracts over in the UK – which would be nice if I was there to use them!

So I have what is called a mini-lease. I keep the car and I am billed monthly. However when the car needs servicing I take it in and they swap it out. When I did this a few months ago they billed me for the car monthly and for a few weeks separately though I only had one car. In addition to this they did not send me any invoices, which of course I need to do expenses. First I tried calling customer service when I was in the states and they told me I had to call the UK customer service. So I tried calling them, after being on hold for over 3 hours two separate times I gave up. Then I tried calling where I had picked up the car and they referred me back to the customer service line, if you can call it that. So I finally settled to send an email.

In the nicest manner I explained the whole screw up and asked that they rectify it. There own site said it the mail would be answered in 15 days. So I waited 3 business weeks. No answer. Finally a week and a ½ late they sent an apology and credited my account. They also sent me the invoices I needed. However they didn’t credit the proper amount so I was a little beside myself. Now I am deciding how much it is worth to follow this up, whether I should be happy with what I got, or maybe – just maybe – I too should head into the office with a hammer.

I will probably let it drop as the remainder isn’t that much. But I doubt if I come back and need a car that I will use Avis in the UK again. I also certainly understand why the old lady went to hammer diplomacy too.

Russian Literature

So while in St. Petersburg I got a little bored in the evenings when RG would talk to her aunt in Russian. So during the second ½ of the week there we passed by a book store that had some English titles. So I looked through the books and nothing contemporary caught my eye so I looked at some of the older titles in reprint. The one that caught my eye was The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky the writer of Crime and Punishment and a dozen other titles. It is a relatively heavy book and it is dived strangly into different parts, which seem to work as the scene does in a play. Each part has its own plot with a all the expect elements of a full story and ends with a kind of cliff hanger. Then the whole of the book (I am only 2/3 of the way through) has an over all plot and story line. It is a quite interesting way of writing and it certainly different than most modern novels.

The first thing I must say about Russian authors, and from other people I have confirmed this, they write in what I can only say is excruciating detail. If they describe a room they do it down to the dust bunnies on the floor and the nails sticking out of the woodwork. There are times I skim a whole page to get back to the story. Though when you are in the mood to really get into the setting there is certainly an abundance of information for your imagination to work with. Along with the detail the story doesn’t really exclude any activity besides body functions. There are entire sub plots that happen and do not carry the story forward at all; they don’t even seem to add to character development in my mind. The characters just take a right turn for no reason, have a sub adventure, then return to the main plot of the part and book. Again this can be amusing at times and certainly is allows you get yourself more engrossed in the setting but if you are hungry for the next part of the plot to develop it can be a bit frustrating.

Then there are characters, and that are all just that characters, and there are a lot of them. Each person in the story gets a lot of development and is very interesting in their own right. Many character introductions literally take pages and they do the strangest things on a regular basis. I know that Russian upper society in the mid 1800s is quite a bit different than the world I live in but some of the interactions, even form those I have witnessed in modern Russians, are just plain strange - though this in itself is very entertaining. The volume of characters is quite large and since they have very long names it does become hard from time to time to distinguish them. Which I find interesting because the names are so different from each other, I just can’t remember who is who though because the names are so long and unfamiliar.

Finally the dialogue is a riot to read. I have not been so entertained in a long time. It has its own strange tempo that keeps things moving and a back and forth between the characters that actually reminds me of a sitcom or movie from the 20s/30s. And the characters are always playing games and speaking in riddles so it is quite fun. This helps create a much greater emotional range in responses that the characters have. In fact I think there is more emotion in the first 100 pages than in the last two or three modern fiction books I have read. So while this is certainly not a review of the book I will say that for entertainment value alone the book is worth the read – though I would also say that it is worth the read to experience the different writing style, get engrossed in Russian society of a bygone era, or just because it is an interesting story (look it up on Wikipedia I’m not going to spoil the plot).

Moving

Well life has been interesting and I believe it will continue to become so probably for the next six months. So the ole ball and chain is working to make the chain a few thousand miles shorter for a time. She is going to be moving into to the apartment with me in England for the duration of my current project. Though please don’t tell anyone because then I would have to pay some pretty high taxes for her staying in the city. The UK is nutz about there taxes. I pay 130+ GDP a month in what they call council taxes. That is more than $260! RG was approved with a work permit through March of next year so she can come and go from the UK as she pleases. She was also approved for her I-130. This is the first step towards getting her back in the country. So the best case scenario is that she would be getting her immigration Visa before I move back to the states.

I am not too optimistic about the best case scenario though. After searching the internet high and low the only mention of a time frame was on the US Consultant’s website for Frankfurt Germany which stated that you should allow 5 months. That would be the second week of January. So we shall see. It has already been three weeks and we have not received any of the paperwork yet. So who knows what is going on inside the State Department. I do know that it was received at the State Department on August 14, 3 days after approval at the CIS. But the automated message just says to allow 6-8 weeks for the next step! Jeeze what is this a mail order, send it 10 cereal box tops, decoder ring or Bart Simpson Spy camera, no it is my wife. What a pain.

However if things go smoothly with a little help from online payments and Fed-Ex priority air we may get things moved on a little faster. Who knows.

Should we not get things moved faster then we will have new issues to deal with: RG having left her job and apartment in Russia and me going back to the states for my next work assignment. In that case we have only a few options. RG goes and lives with her parents in Taganrog (I think she would go crazy with in 3 weeks), possibly she could stay in England (though I know not were or how), I could get a new job in the UK (again not very likely as I would need to switch firms as my career would be stalled for not working in the states), or she may go live with her sister in Germany. I think the last option is the most likely. It should only be for a few weeks so hopefully the sister in law’s fiancée won’t mind so much. At any rate things are moving, hopefully a long and at a good clip and we will be having an even more interesting end to an interesting year.

Part 3

Ok so as begin this latest installment about Saint Petersburg I hope it is the last. Really this article is about the boats in Saint Petersburg. As it is a city with access to the sea, spans a coupe of large rivers, and is full of canals so there are a lot of boats in the city. We took two both rides. I greatly enjoyed both, funny enough the boat rides were basically (besides riding the subway) the first and last thing we did once we started sight seeing. While it is not a requirement to take a boat anywhere it is the fastest way to get to some attractions. The first boat that we took went to Peterhof one of the palaces I wrote about before. The trip takes about ½ hour each way by boat. Rather than an hour and ½ by stinky bus (actually the one bus I rode in Saint Petersburg was very nice, but I hold a grudge to Russian buses do to riding one in Moscow).

The best part of taking a boat to Peterhof, is the boat itself. The Russians have been using Hydrofoils for transport in this area for decades (according to some random blog I found). The only time I had seen a hydrofoil in the past was on the history channel when they talked about a really fast PT boat the Navy had developed but never produced. Basically a hydrofoil is a wing used in the water. Just like an airplane the submerged wing creates lift. This bring most of the hull of the boat out of water decreasing resistance and increasing speeds. I never thought anyone would use it for moving tourist around. The boats used to get to Saint Petersburg are maybe 20-25 feet wide and 125-140 feet long. When in full motion I would say 70-80% of the boat actually lifts out of the water. Leaving just the stern slightly submerged so the jet can create forward movement. It was pretty fast moving maybe 60 miles per hour and surprisingly smooth. I have to admit, while RG stayed nice and warm in the cabin, like an excited little kid on his first boat ride I had to go out on the small viewing deck for 90% of the ride to watch the other hydroplanes go by. It was totally worth it.

The other end of our trip, after walking so much we could walk so more we decided to take a canal cruise. They aren’t hard to find. Some lady with an electronic blow horn is soliciting riders for one company or anther at every bridge. So we just picked one that looked good. The boats typically are about 40 feet long have a closed section and an open deck with chairs. They are much smaller than those in Amsterdam and completely different than anything used in Chicago. The tours I assume offer a wonderful monolog on the history, architecture, and other fun facts about Saint Petersburg. But the were in Russian, so I understood only a few words. My wife translated the most important things as usual. Like the safety stuff. Apparently there is an issue with people standing at the wrong times and hitting their head on a bridge! No kidding. But the tour was nice and relaxing, though a bit chilly, and we enjoyed looking at even more of the amazing buildings and bridges in Saint Petersburg. Had we had the motivation there is also a tour that shows all the draw bridges at night when the are open. RG, and I agreed with her on this pointed, wanted to sleep instead – the tour starts at around 2 am.

So my final word on Saint Petersburg is this, put it on your bucket list, giver yourself a lot of time to see stuff, ride the boats, see the palaces, see the museums, see the churches, go to the restaurants, you could try a club or too we didn’t, see the attractions, see the monuments, and don’t discount what this city has to offer. It is second to no other destination in Europe.

St. Pete’s Part 2

Palaces of course aren’t the only thing to see in Saint Petersburg. In fact they are only a part of it. For starters there are a lot of very interesting churches in the city that are as different as those found in Europe as they are from most churches found in the rest of Russia. There is also a lot of water, Saint Petersburg sits on the Neva River and the delta to the North Sea, and it is also full of canals and waterways that crisscross the old part of the city. Beyond this there are also a host of memorials, statues, squares, forts, and other attractions that could keep a visitor busy for weeks - though as usual we crammed a lot into just a few days. A fact that the wife brings up time and time again when she tells anyone about our trips they always end with how tired she was by the end. But I think she loves it, she just likes to have something to complain about.

The church that is most recognizable is Church of the Savior on Blood. This church is an Orthodox church with domed towers. It was almost destroyed by the Soviets because it was considered just a poor replica of St. Basil’s in red square. Having been to both I have to say this is not the case. Church of the Savior on Blood is much newer than St. Basil’s and while it shares similar domes they are very different. St. Basil’s has much smaller chambers in the interior and is decorated mostly with painted walls and a few would carvings. Church of the Savior on Blood is decorated with much more grandeur; it has tall ceilings, much more intricate paintings, many gold adornments, many stone carvings, tile murals, and an inlaid stone floor. It is a completely different experience to visit than St. Basil’s for sure. We also visited a couple of neighbor hood churches that were interesting and walked by Kazan Cathedral. However Kazan is being restored and from what I read is more interesting on the exterior than the interior. It is located on a main street though and you would hard pressed not to walk by it a dozen times. But I would have to say one of the best visits was to Saint-Isaac's Cathedral.

Saint Isaac’s is more typical European in the style being build of stone. It is shaped as like a cross, each side’s has tremendous columns supporting a stone roof with spectacular bronze relief inserts. When you enter there are extremely tall ceilings, amazing paintings on all the walls, ceilings, and arches, the bronze doors to the building are 20+ feet tall (with smaller doors cut in them) with intricate carvings, there is a lot of gold everywhere, and the shrines, chapels, and sanctuary are all works of amazing craftsmanship. However we had to buy two tickets each when we visited Saint Isaac’s. This is because you can also climb up to the dome and get a great view of the city. It is about 140 steps to the top and well worth the work. There is a 360 degree view that is very impressive as the Cathedral is the tallest building for blocks around. It was so busy at the top though it was hard to get a photo of one of us with a view in the back ground.

Of course what city in Russia would be with out its WWII memorial and Saint Petersburg does not disappoint in the respect either. There is an eternal flame in one park, statues in other, but as you head into town from the airport there is a very large dedicated memorial. Saint Petersburg was under siege for 3 years by the Nazi’s and more Russian civilians died than all the American troops in the whole war. This memorial is only a block or so from where we stayed. It is a set of more than a dozen 10 foot tall bronze statues of Russian defenders, a tall monolith like tower, and another eternal flame in the center of a large 15 foot tall stone ring. It is pretty impressive.

Saint Petersburg was a long time ago a Swedish settlement. After several battles the Russian’s took the outpost. Because it was a contested area for so long the first structures to be built in the city were of course forts. The most famous of these is Peter and Paul’s. This was really the only day we had bad weather and it rained a bit. However when were at the fort it was just drizzly. The fort was built in the early 1700s and the city originally grew around it. Later grand plans for the city were released and the main part of the city was built across the river from the fort. The fort itself has several attractions within its wall. A wax museum, a church with many emperors and other royals entombed, a large parade court, a panoramic view of the city from a walk way on top of the main walls, a museum, a strange bronze statue of Peter the Great, a museum of images from space, a museum of torture, a historical museum about life in Saint Petersburg though out the years, and of course some military displays. Like most places in the area it is also undergoing some major reconstruction work. The day we were there we got lucky and there was a display of marching, gun twirling, and other such parade work by the local cadets. It was quite fun to watch. Little did I know at the time their comrades were marching into Georgia.

One site I was bummed that was closed is called the Marble Palace. And the building is made out of marble and is famed to have a hall that consists of 32 different shades of marble. But it of course was closed for restoration. We also walked through many parks, it seems around every corner there is another park and Saint Petersburg is a very nice green space. We also went to several fun restaurants. One was a Russian style beer hall that had old soviet propaganda on the walls and a traditional Russian menu. The day we visited the Fort we also stopped an interesting Russian potatoes bar, where you order a baked potato with various toppings. However the toppings do not consist of bacon, cheese, sour cream and the like. No instead they consist of various Russian concoctions I couldn’t even begin to tell you what was in them. It was pretty tasty stuff though. Of course as RG has been out of the US for so long we also went to a Pizza Hut one night and got Italian another but we still avoided McDonalds like the plague. I also found out while dining at her aunts that I don’t hate eggplant, so I will have to explore that a little more. So all in all I had a great time.

Again I haven’t been able to cover everything I wanted to about the trip so I think there will be one more post. I should have dived topics a little better I think.

St. Pete’s

Saint Petersburg is certainly one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It has been called the Venice of the north, and while I have not been to Venice in my adult life I have been to Paris, and Saint Petersburg is certainly in a similar category. At least as far as beauty goes. The city I am speaking of is of course in Russia and not in Florida, and was founded by Peter the Great as a new “Modern” city from which to rule his empire. I have to say that if you keep a bucket list this city should be on it. We of course were able to stay with some relatives of RG her second cousin by American Genealogy or Aunt according to Russian accounting. Her Aunt/Cousin was very hospitable and her apartment is one of the nicest places we have had to stay in Russia. In an old concrete building housing several hundred apartments you would not have expected much. However the 2 bedroom apartment had nice woodworking, a modern kitchen, new furniture, nice floors, was clean, and very comfortable. It still amazes me that the building can be falling apart on the outside, the elevators can make strange loud clicking noises, halls can be filthy, and then you walk into a very nice apartment. I guess this is due to the lack of ownership, administration, and community group to maintain the building like in the states.

The first think you notice about Saint Petersburg is the attitude. Unlike Moscow where most people seem to be glum and concerned about only there own concerns, people in Saint Petersburg are much more friendly and polite. This is most notable on the metro systems. In Moscow an open seat can cause fights when 5 people rush to fill it. In Saint Petersburg three people would stand around the same seat and wait for the others to take it. Saint Petersburg is also much better maintained in general. The streets are cleaner (at least in the area with the most tourists), old buildings are restored rather than replaced, and the whole city seems to be getting repainted while we were there. It is also much less crowed even though officially it has almost ½ (4.6 million density of 7600/SqKm) the population of Moscow (10 million 9600/SqKM). Though I think Moscow has twice as many people as the OFFICAL numbers.

The buildings in Saint Petersburg are much different than those in most major European cities. For one they generally are not built out of stone. Instead they are built out of brick and covered in plaster. Because of this building style the buildings are much larger, and because of the plaster they have fantastic facades. The buildings are painted bright colors for Europe, mostly green, blue, and yellows, but there are still some brick, brown, and grey buildings from time to time. Also many of the buildings have copper or gold roofs or iron adornments giving each building its own unique character. My favorite was a green building with some rounded glass corners and large greened-iron wire globe. Of course the big attractions in and around the city are the Palaces and Castles of which there are over 25! I don’t know if there is another area in the world with so many places in the world. Most of these now house museums, galleries, or are open as public attractions.

We went to only 3 palaces and 1 castle, though we saw many others. The first palace called Peterhof is a large estate on an Island outside of the city has one of the grandest approaches I ever scene. With dozens of fountains, statues, and a cascading fountain surrounded by grad stairways visitors are led to back entrance from a doc. The main courtyard in the front is also impressive though in true Russian fashion we would have had to pay a second fee to walk around in it, so we settled for the main grounds and the tour of the palace. The second, Catherine’s palace is also outside of the city but this time more of a country estate. It had smaller grounds with more subtle features. A nice like with a small guest house on it, a building for displaying flowers, an interesting brick bridge, some smaller reflecting pools, hedges, a selection of statues, and small fountains were contained on about ½ the area of Peterhof. Interestingly, both palaces had been taken over by the Nazis in WWII and both had been burned to the ground. It took over 30 years to restore them to their glory and attention was paid to every detail.

They were both full of grand halls, amazing wood inlaid floors nicer than even expensive furniture from the time, gold adorned most rooms, and of course there were unique pieces of art work. The wood work in the floors is so good in fact that they make you put soft baggies over your shoes to protect them as you walk around! In some rooms you could find art from the Far East, it seems the Russian Tsars were just as intrigued by that part of the world as the west was. Much of the restoration was done from the original plans and photos were used to try to get things right. We were informed that the hardest part was finding furniture to replace the custom made pieces that had been stolen or burned. My favorite room was a recreation of the famed Amber room, a room aptly named where every square inch was covered by amber. Even doorways, picture frames, fixture, really everything was covered or made from amber. It was amazing. The original room of course was famously stolen during WWII from the Nazis and has yet to be found or accounted for.

The final palace we went to was the Hermitage museum in the Winter Palace. The main building faces both the Neva River on one side and the main square on the other. It is a large green building with statues lining the roof and white trim. This is actually several palaces attached to one another turned into a very large art gallery. It contains several receiving halls, an amazing stairway, and a couple of throne rooms (one that was never used), a large golden bird cage containing a gold statue of a bird, rooms of carved marble, along with a hall of Russian heroes. We did not get a chance to see it all as our feet literally hurt too much to go on from walking around looking at everything. The Palace itself was always used for receptions and state business and never had any royals living in it. An attached smaller palace was instead used as a residence by Anne of Russia.

The palaces in the city are simply astounding. So much so that I will have to finish writing about St. Petersburg in another entry as this post is already to long I think.

Taganrog

Taganrog is a very famous town in Russia. It is a small industrial sea port with a larger set of factories that today only operate at about ½ capacity at best. At one time the city was flush with capital as traders and merchants took up residence and moved mass quantity of goods through the region using Taganrog’s ports. Of course this was from the 16 to mid 18 hundreds, during the Soviet reign the city was turned in to an industrial center with many large factories. I think today the town has scene better days. But why is it so famous? For it is the birth place of at least incredibly famous and important Russians. The biggest name would be the writer Chekhov (the writer not the Star Trek character), there is also a romantic poet whose name escapes me but of whom statues litter the city, and finally the most important my wife RG. This is where she grew up, went to school, and where her parents reside to this day. In fact her mother’s 50 birthday is what brought us to the town for three days over my vacation last week.

Her parents live in a modest 2 bedroom house. It faces into a court yard with similar styled house. To enter the quart yard you must first pass through a large, green, metal gate. This is a common set up in the town and I saw very few single family homes that faced the road directly. The houses are generally brick with metal roofs and many have been around for a couple hundred years. I think the in-laws though is a quarter that old. The neighbor hood seemed to me to be not on the out skirts of town but not in the center or main area either. The roads were not paved and to be honest probably haven’t been graded in a decade. Other than that the though their house has all the creature comforts air conditioning, indoor plumbing, and so on. It has a surprise underneath it also, as it was build on top of a rich man’s cellar. So using a trap door in the kitchen you can get under the house into a large arched brick cavern. This was certainly a surprise for me, I love to find secret areas like this.

The main park of the city is quite nice and includes a small amusement park, a zoo, several cafes, an amphitheater, and lots gardens and green spaces. Though it is pretty dry it reminded me of the being out west in California. What was very amusing was to find out that even before the iron curtain fell the Russians knew of our love of roller coasters and the US was famous for having such rides. Because of this the small amusement park had what they called the American Coaster or some similar name. My Wife informed me that when she was a kid it scared her very much and she would not ride it. When I saw the ride it was obvious that A) it was not a roller coaster but a simple carnical ride that had cars the simply went in a circle, and II) RG must have been pretty small when she was scared of the ride because I couldn’t imagine the ride scaring anyone older than 8 or 9.

The sea coast could be a great tourist area if it was not dominated by large factories and cranes, not to mention the dirty water and litter everywhere. It really was the saddest part of the town. We took a brief trip to the market which I thought was quite fun. There was fresh fish, meats, vegetables, fruits, and the like. It was similar to the farmers marker but on roids. However at the sea I was finally able to try a drink the Russians have called Kavas. It was horrible. Imagine unfermented beer and coke mixed. People over there love it but I do not know why. Maybe it is an acquired tasted, and while I do try to eat what is offered to me when in Russia, I don’t think I am going to develop a taste for Kavas. Also while in town I was able to meet RG’s old school friends. Her two best girl firends actually. They were both very nice, but it was amazing to see how different each girls life is now. RG married to an American the only one of the three with a college degree and professional job, both of them had small children, one was a single mom, the other married to someone I expect to be an important man some day as he is currently a police inspector. It was nice to visit and meet with them.

The best part of our brief trip to Taganrog was watching my wife put a police officer in his place. When we went tot he Black Sea last year I had trouble getting through passport control because the police officer was basically trying to get a bribe. This year however RG was well read on the subject and put up a good fight. He and his counter part quickly backed off and we were through with time to spare to catch the flight. The fact that this happens actually discourages me from flying to these smaller towns in Russia, but it was fun to watch this big police start to eat crow when my wife read him the riot act.