Ho hum, another birthday come and gone.
Pretty low key day. Alice is still recovering strength.
We went up to Lumber Liquidators and ordered wood for the office floor. At the moment I'm planning to do the install myself. We're looking at tile and carpet for the rest of the upstairs.
Dinner for two at Killen's, the local steakhouse. Terrific food there. One of the few places in Pearland, possibly the only place in Pearland, that attracts customers from outside the suburb.
Aryn came through with the number one gadget on my wishlist this year, the Slim Devices Squeezebox.
This is a sweet little gadget that plugs in to the sound system, in my case the A/V receiver in the living room. It communicates via the house Wi-Fi network back to one of the computers up in the office. That computer has all of the 10,000 music tracks I've accumulated over the last few years.
So now, with the touch of a couple of buttons, we can pull up any music we've got. Right now it's working through all the jazz on the system.
As an added bonus, the device can connect out to external sources such as Internet radio stations. One of the servers that Slim Devices run is the SqueezeNetwork. I've marked the Ocean Surf track there as a favorite. Like having a beach house without the sand. :)
Alice is now short a gall bladder. They took it out laproscopically so she has only three small incisions. She came home about 4 or 5 hours after the operation started.
Plan for the party is to have her sit in a comfy chair and be waited on hand and foot. I'm sure she'll be loving that!
House is almost clean, our son-in-law is picking up the food. Daughter or son-in-law picking up booze. I've got one or two errands to deal with.
Well, Alice had her pre-op check today. Tomorrow, Friday, the gall bladder comes out.
The anniversary party on Saturday has grown to between 50 and 60 people.
And I finally came up with a couple of good, but expensive, Christmas gift ideas for Alice.
Oh, and I got the new car yesterday (Wednesday). Love it. The dogs fit much better than in the other vehicles.
This week is kind of nuts.
This Saturday we're having 30 to 40 friends over to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary.
I've been chasing details for buying the new car.
Alice is fighting thru some medical problems. I've been ferrying her to doctor visits. She's been ill in some form since the week before Thanksgiving when I was in Brazil. At first it was just a garden variety cold or sinus infection. But that developed into bronchitis. After whacking that out with a round of antibiotics, steroids, and decongestants, she started having pretty bad stomach trouble. She's had dang little solid food for the last two to three weeks and is surviving on gatoraid and jello.
Today she got 'scoped (both ends). I told her that she promised me all sorts of things while she was still under the effects of the anesthesia (insert goofy grin here). And a CT scan has showed up gall stones.
All in all, not a very happy holiday so far for the love of my life.
Well, the new car is all but a done deal. Went out yesterday and fought the good fight with the salesman. I had the Consumer Reports dealer cost info. Got a price a bit below "invoice", so the dealer made some money but not a lot. They didn't have the color (Barcelona Red) and model (RAV4 Sport V6) that I wanted on the lot but another dealer in the area did. The salesman called me back today to tell me they had the car on the way and I could come do the deal tomorrow.
Finally found some time to go for a quick look at a couple of cars.
Since we want space for the dogs but also decent gas mileage, we looked at the Honda CR-X and the Toyota RAV4. Both are small SUVs. Room for the dogs if the back seats are folded down.
Hated the Honda. Liked the RAV4 quite a lot. The interior of the Honda looked cheap. Just didn't care for it. And the 4-cylinder motor isn't enough for it.
We test drove the RAV4 Sport with the V6. Lots more reasonable. It's not going to win any races but at least I won't feel like merging onto the freeway is taking my life in my hands.
Going to call the credit union for car rates on Monday and go do a bit of negotiating.
After my laptop died, more on that further down, I decided to bring home a Windows computer from work. Which meant that I had more computers than monitors. My monitor at the home office is a 19-inch wide screen combo TV/Monitor.
So I invested in a good KVM switch. The monitor is DVI and the keyboard and trackball I use are USB so that put me into the expensive KVM switches. I got an IO Gear GCS1764 switch. It will handle up to four computers.
It can also independently switch the "console (video and mouse/keyboard USB ports), audio (speakers and mike ports), and USB hub (two more USB ports). Which turns out to be pretty sweet. I can flip the keyboard and monitor over to the work Windows computer to do email etc while leaving the audio on the Linux computer running Amarok and playing music.
The computer I brought home is reasonably powerful but not a killer. Dual core 2.8GHz with 4GB of memory and a 250GB drive. Just right for running a handful of virtual machines.
My laptop did finally get replaced. The company is into serious penny pinching just now so I ended up with a cast-off Dell D-610, slightly more powerful than the antique D-600 that died. But at least I'm prepared if I need to travel. With the fast computer at home now, I'm considering not bothering to haul the laptop back and forth. Might just leave it in the docking station at work except when on the road.
Not a whole lot going on here since I returned from the last trip. No travel planned for the remainder of 2007. Not sure what 2008 will bring but unlikely to be as much travel as this year.
Tucker has settled in to home life very quickly. Since he showed no interest in the cat, we went ahead and taught him to negotiate the stairs. Less difficult with him than it was with Gert. At first Gert wanted to leap down from the landing, he didn't show any signs of that. We crated him at night the first week or so and crated him when we left the house until just a couple of days ago. We're still being more careful to get him enough potty breaks to the back yard than we have to with Gert. We've had a couple of "accidents" but nothing tragic and no repeats in the last 10 days or so.
Not much conflict between the two of them. They sleep at night on beds in our bedroom. There was a bit of a skirmish over that. Gert has been sleeping on a smaller bed for the last year. When I went to get one like it for Tucker they didn't have anything the same size. Since he's a big dog, I ended up getting this huge round bed (5-feet across). Gert immediately glommed onto that as hers. She barked at Tucker once and growled at him if he got too close to it. Tucker, for his part, wouldn't use and didn't really fit in Gert's old bed. So I went ahead and bought a second bed identical to the new one. Good thing we have a huge master bedroom!
I finally got to see Gert really open up and run flat out! She's fast!! There's a new dog park near us so we try to get them over there regularly for some socializing and exercise beyond their daily walks. A couple of days ago I was there with them when a guy with a pair of boxers showed up. Gert and the male boxer had great fun running and chasing. Then Gert decided to really run. She kind of hunkered down and launched herself off into a top speed lap around the park. The boxer just stood and watched, no way he could even come close to keeping up.
All the dogs that show up at the dog park are Gert's friends. Tucker is still a little overwhelmed by it. Since greyhounds spend their whole racing life only around other greyhounds, we're not sure if he has figured out what kind of creatures the other dogs are. He trots about a little bit, sort of tagging after Gert.
Oh, and he's also showing signs of having been mistreated. He is very wary of men and startles away when anything is thrown. There have been a couple of times where other dog owners were throwing frisbees. Gert would happily run after the frisbee or after the other dogs chasing the frisbee. But Tucker would bolt off in a different direction at each throw. One of our previous dogs, Zoe, had a similar fear. It took a couple of years before she got over it. Sigh...
Tucker seems to be settling in just fine.
Did some googling on his racing name. His isn't as unique as Gertie's but I did turn up one racing program where both of them raced at Gulf Greyhound Park on the same day, but not against each other. Gert was third place in her race and Tucker was second in his. Alice said she turned up some info that showed Gert was racing in a higher classification than Tucker and that Gert won more. Also turned up some results from when Tucker was racing in Ireland where he was born.
The first afternoon and evening home, you could tell he was on sensory overload. A house full of stuff is just a lot more visually rich than a kennel and the track. He did a lot of pacing around looking at everything. He didn't poke or climb or jump, just had to walk around and eyeball the whole place.
As it was with Gertie when she first came home, the stairs are a mystery. When we go up them it must seem like a magical disappearing act to him. I did take him by the collar and walk him upstairs for a bath on Monday afternoon. He took this first trip up better than Gertie did her first one but he hasn't shown any sign of wanting to repeat the experience on his own.
Tucker also seems less interested in the cat than Gertie was at first. Hopefully it will stay that way. With Gert we had a good month of high tension when the two were in the same room.
Everything else is going fine, just more of a "production" than before. Mealtimes, walks, etc., all just a bit more complex.
Took the two of them to the vet on Tuesday morning. Plan was for Gert to get some needed annual stuff done and leave her for a teeth cleaning. Combined with a first checkup for Tucker. Turns out Gert was a bit off on some tests, kidney and pancreas showing some high readings and blood pressure high. Rather than throw in anesthesia to complicate things she ended up coming home.
I discovered from this trip that we're going to seriously have to think about a vehicle with more interior room. Two big leggy greyhounds just don't fit well in the jumpseat space of the pickup. And they don't fit a whole lot better in the back seat of the four-door Accord. I've been thinking about a small SUV anyway, Honda Pilot or Ford Escape sort of sized. Something where I'm still sitting up a bit, not looking at bumpers when in traffic. But something that gets better than the 15 mpg I get in my F-150 pickup. And now, something that will hold the dog pack.
I've taken this week off, Thursday and Friday are holidays so I'm using three vacation days.
I spent most of the day Monday with a couple of hours yesterday and today to partially rework the master bedroom closet. The closet is big but it isn't rectangular, it's kind of "z" shaped. Rectangular box but with two big corners boxed out. Wire shelves, which are fine, were installed by the builder. Like they always seem to do, the shelves were run around the corners. Corners like that end up wasting space since the corner really isn't usable.
I took out the shelves that ran down one side and around an inside corner. The originals were poorly installed so that the shelf they form tilted in a way that things stored on it tended to slide off. I replaced the original single set with a double set, upper and lower rods for hanging stuff. I installed some 1x3 to form a back plate so the shelves could be better anchored. And used the 16-inch deep shelf type for better storage space. Not to mention hanging them so that they're level or a bit tilted back so storage boxes won't be jumping off any more.
It was a good little project. Right around $150 in material and what was about 7 feet of usable closet rod is now replaced with 16 feet.
Greyhounds are like potato chips, can't have just one.
Alice has wanted a second greyhound almost since the day we brought Gertie home. I finally relented Saturday afternoon. And once my mind was set, I was ready to get on with it. So Sunday afternoon we got a call from the adoption agency at the track and bundled Gertie to find her a friend.
We came home with Tucker (racing name Dark Ocean). Tucker is a 72 pound male. Black and white in a "tuxedo" pattern.
After only a couple of days, all seems to be going well. Tucker is still a bit on sensory overload with everything but despite that is pretty calm. Pictures later.
The Sao Paulo experience was pretty much miserable. As I told one of my coworkers via email, sometimes it's just work no matter what continent you're on. The picture is the view out my hotel window, obviously, that's my hotel reflected in the building across the street. Lovely day... no, not really.
The dead laptop caused me several problems through the week, files I should have had with me were all back on my backup in Houston. Accessible via the network but slow. And setup of the student machines that should have been done before I arrived had not been done.
With one exception the students in my class were all locals. So when the class day was done, they hit the trains and cars and headed for their normal lives. And, as usual, the office wasn't in a district that was very interesting after hours and the hotel where I stayed was picked to be convenient to the office. And the weather was unseasonably miserable, 50s and raining in the evening. And Sao Paulo isn't the safest place to walk around by yourself in the evening.
That combination pretty well left me feeling like doing nothing in the evenings. So I stayed at the hotel, did email on a laptop borrowed from the office IT guy, and ate in the hotel restaurant. Which was about like most hotel restaurants. Tolerable but not exactly a fine dining experience.
The trip home was uneventful. Got to the airport about 7pm too tired to do anything on the way. Platinum status got me access to one of the lounges while waiting for the flight. Flight out of Sao Paulo at 11pm Friday, nonstop to Houston, arrived 5am Saturday. No empty seat next to me this trip. Got enough sleep on the flight to have a pretty normal Saturday.
Well, I guess I just proved that I don't really need my laptop. After arriving I booted up to check email and watch some episodes of Heroes to kill a rainy afternoon. Later in the evening I booted it up to review the material for class and ... dead dead dead.
Boot, blue screen, boot blue screen, rinse, lather, repeat.
After several attempts at safe mode and other variations I set it to not automatically restart after a failure. The message I get is "Unmountable boot drive". This happens after it has booted, let me choose the OS (there is only one, nothing fancy on the thing) and has started loading the Windows kernel.
Up until this trip I've been totally obsessive about:
This trip I did the first but not the second. So the class got started a little late as I had to copy a few dozen megabytes worth of PowerPoint slides from the machine back in Houston to a commandeered machine from the class.
The IT guy down here had a spare laptop of the same antique vintage as mine. So I spent my lunch break transferring things to that. At least I can do email and watch movies.
Oh, and once again I've been given a hotel room that sucks. The hotel is 22 floors and I'm on the lowest one. First room was on the same floor, by the elevators, I asked to change. After making me wait a couple of hours because no rooms were clean, I got moved to a corner room. I think the room by the elevators was quieter. It's a little windy out and every little gust roars around the corner of the building as if there's a hurricane in progress. Plus we're right on the flight path for the local airport. And there's an eight lane busy street right outside. Kind of makes me long for the nice quiet cave of a room I had in Beijing.
Yeah, I know, I'm whining. Most people would love to have the problem of being in Sao Paulo in the spring time. But I'm just ... tired and ready to be home. So this week is all about endurance.
On the positive side, once I got class going it's all good. Fifteen students, mostly locals, all bright and interested. One I had met before, one I know only by email.
I'm heading out tonight for Sao Paulo. This will be my ninth week out of the country, or eleventh if you count two weeks in Canada. Also gets me to my fifth continent this year and will get me to platinum elite on Continental.
Although it's been mostly a blast visiting all these places, I'm tired now. I didn't book this trip to give me any extra time on the ground in Brasil. I arrive mid-day on Sunday, about a 9 hour flight with a four hour time change. The flight is direct so no extra time wasted passing through extra airports. I will be teaching Monday to Friday and booked my return flight for 11pm on Friday.
I'm ready to be home for a while.
I've discovered that I cannot pack without a packing list. On the trip to Vancouver a couple of weeks ago I decided I didn't need no steenkeeng list and just started in packing. There are really only three things that can't be replaced easily: my laptop (because of the contents, not the machine itself), my passport, and my Ambien prescription. Especially just now when I'm heading for my 6th time zone in as many weeks, my sleeping patterns are totally wrecked. So I use Ambien to jump start myself into the new timezone.
Well, packing for the Vancouver trip I first planned to work from home on the Monday that I traveled. Then discovered that I had forgotten a vital bit of equipment at the office. Then I changed plans, packed and went to the office intending to go directly from the office to the airport. While at the office I realized I had forgotten to pack the Ambien so ... back home. And finally to the airport. All for the want of using my packing list.
End of the company conference. This evening those of us who chose not to take a red-eye home and arrive at 5am went out for drinks and dinner. It was a good group, good conversation over some nice Pinot Noir and Italian food at Don Francesco's on Burard Street in downtown Vancouver.
Back to the hotel early. Alarm set for 4:30am to get a 5:15am cab to the airport. The new arrangement requires U.S. citizens to have passports to travel to Canada by air. But we'll clear customs in Canada, not back at home. Which makes for an early ... early! departure to be thru the bureaucracy prior to a 7:45am flight.
End of day one in Vancouver. Now I remember what attending the user conference was like last year. Mostly tedious.
Last year we were in San Francisco. From the day I arrived to the day I left, I managed a total of two hours outside the hotel. This year will be slightly better because I've got a lighter set of duties, for example I don't have to work the booth. And they wouldn't let us stay in the hotels closest to Canada Place so it's a four block walk and I get to see the outside world.
I guess this balances out the trips to the Eiffel Tower and Great Wall. It's almost 8pm and I'm back in the hotel. Been on my feet most of the last 9 hours and ready to kick back and catch up on the episodes of Heroes that I've got squirreled away on the hard disk. Pretty thrilling.
Late flight out of Houston last night for a midnight arrival in Vancouver BC.
Up here for a company conference at Canada Place, the big exhibition center here. I should have a quiet morning catching up with email before plunging into it. Got two speaking gigs here, one this afternoon and one on Thursday. I'm doing part of a 3-hour tutorial today and just a quick update on our product line Thursday.
Flight home is scheduled for Saturday morning but I might see if I can change it to Friday.
Rush hour on Dong Chang'an Jie, BeijingBeen home for a bit over two days but still not back to this time zone. I'm falling asleep at 8pm and then wide awake by 2 to 4am.
The flight from Beijing took off at about sunset on Monday Oct 22 and landed in Newark 13 hours later at about sunset on ... Monday Oct 22! The route was northwest out of Beijing to the Mongolian border. Then turned north-northeast over Mongolia and Russia, up close to the pole, down over Canada to Newark.
The trip back was full of small annoyances.
It was really, really good to get home!
It's Monday morning in Beijing. This afternoon begins the 18 hour flight back to Houston via Newark. The inbound airplane was 90 minutes late leaving to come here so my flight is showing to be delayed.
There would be enough time for a final shopping trip, at least over to Wangfujing... but I'm out of money and out of energy.
Final impressions of Beijing
Weekend "Dirt Market" (PanJiaYuan Antique Market)
CCTV buildings going up
My two compatriots and I had arranged a trip to the Great Wall of China at Mutianyu today. Absolutely an amazing place.
There are four segments of the Great Wall accessible from Beijing. We had been warned away from Badaling as a tourist trap. One of my companions on this trip had been to Jinshanling on a previous trip to China and also seen Simatai off in the distance. He was trying to be nice about it but really wanted to make it clear that those were too challenging for someone of my fitness level... poor.
So Mutianyu was our choice. We arranged a car with the help of the office. Set price of 700RMB (less than $100) gave us the car and driver for the day. A bit under a two hour ride up to the parking area, the driver would wait until we came back down and then drive us back to our hotel.
From the parking lot we hiked up a row of t-shirt vendors, snack vendors et cetera until we reached the cable car terminal. Cable car up to just below a point on the wall at more or less the center of the accessible part of the wall. Then hiked on the wall.
The day could not have been more perfect, sunny and comfortable very early fall day with the foliage just barely starting to turn colors. For me, it was an overwhelming experience to be in this iconic place. It's one of those places that I never really thought I'd see.
From the cable car head we hiked westward and upward until we made it to the limit of the area where tourists are allowed. The last section (second picture) was pretty challenging for someone whose exercise has been limited to a 30 minute daily walk on the flats of Houston. The very last bit is very steep, practically a stone ladder. After a couple of rest stops on the way, I caught up to my younger, fitter friends at the top. I was gasping and seriously wondering if I had overtaxed.
We rested quite a while up there, had snacks and water and let me get my heart rate back to normal. Then back, mostly downhill, to where we started.
When we hit the spot to turn off and take the cable car down we sat for a bit again. If we ignored the cable car, the next stretch was also mostly downhill. At the end of it were three ways to get down: a gondola, a "toboggan run", or walk. We ended up walking it all the way down. Massively easier than up.
We were by no means alone on this segment of the Wall. But it was also not very crowded. The vistas were beautiful as the wall snaked along the mountain ridges. And even though the wall has been restored, just being on this ancient thing is very moving.
Altogether we spent about four hours hiking on the wall. We didn't quite cover all the way to the eastern end of the Mutianyu section but reasonably close. Total trip time from leaving the hotel until returning was a bit over eight hours.
We're in a pretty high priced hotel even though the company rate is dirt cheap. The room has all sorts of folders full of information about the half-dozen restaurants in the place. One of the things says "newsletter" on the top of the cover. It's about 90% very poetic descriptions of particular dishes served or the furnishings of the nicer rooms.
Near the back of this is this little gem of an article:
In the running up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Grand Hotel Beijing commenced its preparations for the training sessions in hospitality reception and services geared at 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, all relevant activities are fully underway with definitive objective and focal point in an orderly manner.
As an important part of the training for 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Party Office organized the employees in batches to participate in "Willpower Training Activity" - they are sent to Beijing Canal Golf Club to go in for labor of getting rid of the weeds. The training strengthened the willpower of the entire staff members, tempered their superior quality of willingness to work under pressure and to adopt the work style of hard struggle as well as the team spirit, so that the employees of the Hotel can perform the arduous reception tasks during Olympic Games period with excellent skills and sound mentality.
Um. Wow.
There is no such thing as "right of way" in Beijing. Cars and bikes routinely drive right through crosswalks packed with pedestrians.
Traffic lanes are only a mild suggestion. I've mostly been in the back seat of taxis but last night was in the front. The driver wandered freely from lane to lane including encroaching into the oncoming traffic lane.
Less pollution than I had been led to expect. The weather has been perfect. A couple of cloudy days but mostly sunny and beautiful blue skies. One day had something like a temperature inversion and the air looked a bit ... thick.
Construction every freaking where! They're in the run up to the 2008 Olympics. So there are major projects, building new venues. And there are alos signs of sprucing up everywhere we've been. Piles of bricks and tiles and mounds of dirt, lots of them.
Enormous. Everything is big and spread out. From the 12-lane street the hotel is on to Tiananmen Square to the spread of the place. Today I walked up a hill in a park just north of the Forbidden City. City as far as the eye can see in all direction.
Lots of people trying to scam the foreigners but also some that are just friendly and curious. Today while walking to the Forbidden city, two 20-something kids walking the same way struck up a conversation with me. I was wary, expecting them to want to sell me something. But we walked and chatted for a few minutes, then they said "good bye, have a nice stay" and headed down into the subway. I also had I think three "art students" want me to come see their school's exhibition and a dozen folks selling books and maps and flags hit me up during the afternoon. But that one encounter was ... pleasant.
Just have time for a quick post. The picture is from a street market off Wangfujie a few blocks from the hotel. The market stretches for a very long Beijing block, probably a good 600 yards, of booth after booth selling all sorts of stuff. Most of which are not something I'd care to eat. The scorpions are obvious, I don't know what the heck those things to either side are!
Beijing has been quite different from my expectations. Not that my expectations were clear but I expected something quite foreign. In a lot of ways, it is. Almost everyone dresses in western styles. The people passing on the street wouldn't draw a second glance in any U.S. city. And there are a lot more signs and such with English on them than I expected.
But most people speak very little English if any. As a rule, taxi drivers do not speak any English. So to take taxis we have to get someone, either hotel or at work, to write the destination in Chinese characters. And we carry a card from the hotel with the hotel name and location in Chinese characters.
Everyone is either friendly or just ignores us as inconsequential.
More later.
I'm now two full days in Beijing. My free Sunday and one work day.
Sunday was a down day. I was depressed or culture shocked or maybe still just jet lagged even after a week on this side of the world.
I did get myself out of the hotel for a couple of walking tours of the neighborhood. The geographical center of Beijing is the Forbidden City. My hotel is just off the southeast corner of the wall enclosing that vast space. One of the several restaurants in the hotel is called the Red Wall Cafe because it looks out at the red wall that surrounds the Forbidden City. One block west is the gate to some parks that then lead up to the Meridian Gate. The trick being what comprises a "block".
The scale of this place is a little hard to get sorted out. I went walking Sunday, went about 1/2 kilometer west and got to a gateway in the red wall. Thinking I had made it to the entrance to the parks I turned in and headed what felt like a long ways north, probably a kilometer. Nothing that looked like the Forbidden City. I ended up looping around back to the hotel.
Well it turns out that I had gotten only about half way to the gate I should have taken. And it's the Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, a huge hundred foot tall structure with an enormous banner of Mao Zedong's face on it. Not something that could have been missed if I hadn't been a zombie.
My compadres both arrived at midnight last night after their own airport adventures. Tonight after we let our students loose, we struck out for a little stroll down to see Tiananmen Square, the largest public square in the world. The size of the space is ... stunning. It's a rectangular space that's 1/2 kilometer by over 3/4 kilometer. About 80% just open space paved with concrete pavers. We walked more or less around the perimeter. At 7pm or so on a weeknight, there were thousands of people out walking or taking pictures. And thousands didn't crowd the place, far from it in fact.
I managed to get out tonight without my camera so have no pictures of the square. I'll get back to do that but pictures aren't going to convey the scale of the place.
Oh, and about the title of the post. I was idly flipping thru the booklet that lists the hotel services and came on the "safety and security" section. In there are the kinds of things you'd expect. Lock your door, no animals, no explosives allowed etc. And there tucked in the "Prohibitions" list is ... You are kindly requested not to exit your room barefooted. Um. OK.
Saturday Oct 13 was a long travel day for me. Sydney to Beijing, 15-1/2 hours from take-off to final touchdown, two flight legs on China Southern Airlines.
Up at 5:30am to get a 6:30 cab and be way too early at the airport.
First flight was Sydney to Guangzhou (what we used to call Canton). That was the long segment, almost 9 hours. The seating configuration was 2-4-2, I got lucky and had a window/aisle row to myself. So room to stretch out, easy to pop up and down but no getting whacked by carts and passengers in the aisle.
The transit through Guangzhou was ... an adventure. Huge spread out airport from what I could tell. I cleared through customs there. Three separate forms filled out, three separate queues, none of them excessively long waits but it all added up. Then an interminable wait for the luggage.
I hadn't been paying close attention to the time as my schedule said I'd have 3 hours in Guangzhou. But at the transfer counter where I had to recheck luggage for the flight to Beijing, the agent got very excited. Her English was good enough to make me understand that I had to hurry but not good enough for me to understand just where to go! Turns out that I had 15 minutes before my flight would board. I was tired and a bit disoriented and just not "getting it".
Finally one of the young guys handling luggage grabbed my backpack, motioned for me to follow and took off at a trot through the terminal. They had been trying to get me to follow another young guy in a sort of bellman uniform. Turns out he drove the cart (which cost me $US2 to ride!).
After a bit of hurry up and wait we ended up with a full cart of mostly Chinese passengers and headed off through a maze of empty walkways. After a 10 minute drive from the A terminal he dropped us at the B terminal. Up the stairs, through security, down the stairs just in time to join the end of the boarding line. But this boarding line led to jam-packed buses bound for the actual gate... back at the A terminal. Up three flights stairs to the outside access to the jetway and onto the plane.
When the plane pushed back it had been maybe 45 minutes total from when I dropped my bag at the transfer counter. So I figured it would be a miracle if my bags actually made the flight.
But it all worked out. Two and a half hours later in Beijing, my bag was one of the first half-dozen on the carousel. The office had arranged a car to the hotel. I managed to follow the right exit sign and meet up with the driver. So probably 15 minutes after the plane started to unload I was in the back of the limo on the road into the city. Hit the hotel at midnight and was exhausted.
I planned to call back home, Alice and Aryn are off to "Dr. Penny's" wedding this weekend and I thought I could catch them... but I couldn't figure out how to dial home from my cell. The cell actually works in Beijing, a first for all my travels.
It's 7:30am on Friday Oct 12 in Sydney as I write this. This will be my last full day in Sydney. Flight to Beijing is at 10am tomorrow morning.
My work week here consisted of doing a 90-minute presentation on Tuesday followed by an all-day training on Wednesday. The software for the Wednesday training was loaded into a virtual machine. And when I checked it out on Tuesday it was completely fubar. The person who normally does training on this software was in Amsterdam this week. When it hit daylight there we started in trying to fix the problem. It took until 11pm to resolve the issue. For a while there it was looking pretty tense. The training went off pretty well.
Yesterday was the turn of my two colleagues to take over the training. I camped out in a cubicle at the office to fix up some very out of date material that I'll be using in the Beijing training next week.
The week hasn't been very adventurous. Dinner twice in the hotel restaurant. I had kangaroo. Rather like slightly lean beef. So now I've seen a kangaroo in Australia, cooked medium rare. We went into the city with one of the locals one night for dinner at a Lebanese restaurant named Habibi's. Excellent food there. And dinner last night was at a nearby restaurant named Basil's. The food was very good but it was a bit of an odd place. It claimed to be Italian but the menu was 90% seafood and the staff was all Chinese or Japanese.
My two colleagues aren't flying to China until Sunday so they will be moving to a downtown hotel this evening. It's not worth the trouble for me. I'll probably cab into the city with them and have dinner. We've got some sorting out to do for the training next week that is best done over a couple of bottles of wine.
Arrived in Sydney bright and early Sunday morning. The flight was uneventful. But note to self: try to remember that "exit rows" in 747s pretty much suck. I had the pod that holds emergency evac slide right in front of me. We had an abbreviated overhead storage and zero under seat storage as we faced the big door and a crew jumpseat. The only positive was unlimited leg room if I angled out past the slide. My other alternative was a middle so this was better.
After getting settled in the hotel (out in the boonies) and meeting up with one of my coworkers, we headed into town to mostly kill some time. Wandered about Circular Quay and The Rocks. There was a big street market going on in the Rocks. After a couple of beers there we decided to do a ferry ride to somewhere. Decided to go out to the Taronga Zoo.
We took the train over to Town Hall and walked to Darling Harbour. It was starting to rain a bit and had gotten a bit cooler. Dinner at Nick's on Darling Harbour was very good. Back at the hotel about 8. By 9pm I was crashing. Lots to do for work but still got time.
I deal with a lot of different time zones on a daily basis. My team is scattered across four time zones on three continents. And I answer questions or do conference calls with people all over the world. But not too long ago when I traveled one time zone away I couldn't figure out what time it was at home.
And let's not even talk about Daylight Savings Time rules in different countries and different hemispheres!
At some point I googled up www.TimeAndDate.com. This has been incredibly useful!
For example today I had to set up a time for a conference call that will take place next week. I'm currently in Houston and the person I'll be calling is on the U.S. East Coast. Next week I'll be in Sydney and he'll be in Amsterdam. I used the meeting planner on timeanddate.com. With that it was a snap to find a time that was suitable for both of us. And then translate it to my current time zone to put it on the Outlook.
Kudos to this site! Not only useful but very clean.
Twenty-some years ago when Alice and I were young and broke, Saturday night entertainment consisted of a bowl of popcorn (popped on the stove, pre-microwaves) and whatever movie was on television. We lived in the suburbs of the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN. One of the Minneapolis stations was running the old Charlie Chan movies.
The only reason these are memorable to us is that week after week, Alice would fall asleep 15 minutes before the movie ended. In other words, just as Charlie was solving the crime.
Well, the magic still works. I put Charlie Chan on Broadway on top of the Netflix queue and got it last Thursday. We watched it Friday night. Alice was out like a light about half way through.
One hassle came up today. I did a talk via web and conference call. To reduce extraneous noise on my end, I had to pack up the computer and go to a conference room. Could be worse.
Whew, dodged a bullet. The travel agency came up with a different itinerary for my Sydney and Beijing trip. It came in a few hundred more expensive but not enough to cause management to balk.
I'm now doing a straight three-legged route.
The other good news is that all of the flights will get me miles on my Continental account. Houston to LA and Beijing to Houston are Continental so those will count towards getting me to higher levels of elite. The other legs are on carriers that give miles on Continental.
The travel I've now got booked puts me within striking distance of platinum. That'd give me access to the Continental lounges all next year.
I just got a few thousand more miles added to my October travels.
Due to screwy airline pricing, round trips are hugely cheaper than one ways. So I'm doing a round trip from home to Sydney with a round trip from Sydney to Beijing in the middle of it. This reduced the fare by $5,000 from a more sane and simple point to point route.
My trip home at the end will be Beijing to Hong Kong to Sydney, lay over 6 hours. Then Sydney to San Francisco to home. From the time I lift off the ground in Beijing to wheels down at home will be almost 42 hours in transit. Ugh.
The total trip is nearly 30,000 miles.
The paperwork is in for approval now. We'll see.
After being rained out twice, the city crew is out front with a backhoe.
The sidewalk in front of our house had settled unevenly and is a nasty tripping hazard. The settling also affected one section of my driveway. The sidewalks here are the city's to maintain, the driveway was a judgment call by the crew boss. He decided the settling was caused by problems around the sewer that were their fault.
They are out there this morning, beginning at 7am, ripping out most of the sidewalk and the affected section of the driveway. It's partly manual labor but mostly a big ol' backhoe thumping away to break up the concrete. Some of it seems to be extra stubborn. When they thump down on those the whole house rattles.
Plan is to demolish it all today, lay sand, forms and rebar. Then pour and finish the replacement tomorrow.
The crew boss and backhoe operator is one of my neighbors from the old house. He's really precise with the demolition. We have a big circular flower bed around a tree in the front. The edge is defined by stacked stones. The driveway segment they're demolishing is less than a foot from one edge of that bed and he hasn't disturbed a single rock.
Update: Added picture. I didn't get a picture of the demolition in progress. This is how it looks this morning. Bottom leveled, forms and rebar all in place. As of now there's a crew standing about waiting for concrete to arrive.
This has all been in flux for the last several weeks but it looks like it has settled out and will actually happen.
I'm scheduled for some more international travel in October.
I'll be teaching classes in Sydney and Beijing. Vancouver is the company's annual user conference. I've got a speaking gig there and will be back up staff for one of the booths, doing product demos.
Further out is a slim possibility of a trip to Sao Paulo either the week before or after Thanksgiving. And a week in Florida in mid-December.
If I can get enough of those trips on Continental, I might make Platinum Elite and get free access to the clubs. Probably going to come up short, though. No Continental or code share flights to Sydney. And the Continental route from Beijing back to Houston is via Newark.
Tropical Storm Humberto sprang up off Galveston today. I was completely oblivious to it until the facilities folks at work sent out an email. Chances of anything more than a good rain are slim. If you look at a county map of Texas, our house sits in the northernmost tip of Brazoria county. We're in the 20 to 30% band on the National Hurricane Center's tropical storm wind prediction chart. Humberto is expected to hit Galveston overnight and head to the northeast.
We dragged all the patio furniture into the garage. The new house has a single-car garage door that opens on the patio so that was all of a five minute job. There's enough wine in the chiller for a few days in case we get rained in. :)
Update
Humberto decided to visit someone else. About 15 minutes after we pulled all the patio furniture into the garage it became obvious that we weren't going to get so much as a good rain out of this one. Not that I'm complaining, mind you.
Raining here in Busch Stadium the third. Roofs may not be "pure" but there are no rainouts at Minute Maid!
This game did get played and with only a 30 minute delay from the original start time. Watching them pull the tarp back and make all the water disappear down a drain in shallow left field was pretty fascinating.
Trying to come up with the handful of stadiums where I've seen a baseball game.
Just after I posted about being off on a trip to St. Louis, they announced that we'd be delayed.
Seems the airplane was coming from Baton Rouge and it had been struck by lightning while on the tarmac there. Everyone from my flight tried standby on the next flight, which worked for only a couple of folks. After not getting out on that later flight I found that the original flight was back on and the plane was on its way from Louisana to Houston.
To make a long night into a short story, I arrived in St. Louis 3-1/2 hours late. The only trouble this caused me was navigating a mostly unknown city at 11pm. Printed directions are all well and good until you're alone in a rental car driving in the rain and the dark. But even with a construction detour I managed to get where I was going without any wandering about. So all's well that ends.
Oh, and about the plane that was struck by lightning: I rather suspect that lightning struck nearby and emp-ed out the electrical systems. It was checked out by maintenance and sent on its way. So that's the plane I flew on to St. Louis. Heck if the captain and rest of the crew are OK to fly in it, how bad can it be?
This is part of the Dilbert strip from Aug 23, 2007.
It's particularly appropos since Friday I'll be packing up my office for move into a fabric covered box. Apparently having over a decade with the company meant that I was at the top of the list for a primo fabric covered box. One side of my box will be glass. I'll have a third floor window cube with a panoramic view of the parking garage and the fitness center I never have time to use.
Oh, well. As things are shaping up for the next couple of months, I won't be spending much time in the box. Trips scheduled for the week after Labor day and almost all of October. More details to come. It seems to change daily.
Not going to belabor the rest of the trip. It was a good time but nothing as fun as the whale watching.
On the 8th, we did a bus tour of the city of Vancouver. Something to help us get our bearings in the place. More for a future trip than this one as we pretty well booked up the time we had this trip. The bus tour got us into the Harbour Place tower which has a circular observation deck with great views including this one of 
Canada place with a cruise ship docked.
It took us thru the major districts of the city, Gastown, Chinatown, etc. And out around Stanley park for a good look at the 
Lion's Gate bridge (which was, obviously, designed by the same guy who did the larger Golden Gate). The last stop on the bus tour was the 
Granville Island Public Market
. Looked like a great place to shop for produce, art, and wine.
On the 9th, we had booked a trip up the Sea to Sky route to Whistler/Blackcombe. We took the 
Whistler Mountaineer train up and bus back. That gave us about four hours in Whistler. Which turned out to be about three hours too many. The train trip up was great, took tons of pictures as the train wound up Howe Sound and then up into the mountains. In Whistler we wandered thru one art gallery where nothing was under several thousand dollars and a few souvenir shops. There were opportunities to go zip-lining or ride a ski lift gondola to the top of the mountain. Alice doesn't do heights well so those were pretty well out. So we had lunch at an Irish pub and bought a shirt and an Inukchuk (an Indian symbol of welcome that's being used as the mascot/symbol of the 2010 Winter Olympics to be held at Vancouver and Whistler).
After the bus ride back down to our hotel in Vancouver we cleaned up a bit and went out for some shopping on Robson Street and dinner at the Imperial Chinese Restaurant. The restaurant used to have a real nice view over the harbor but it's now blocked by construction.
Nothing very exciting this day but a day of contrasts.
We headed into Victoria with the intention of spending some time in the government / museum area. It was the first work day back from "BC Days" holiday for the city. Possibly because of that there was no parking to be found for blocks around the area. Neither one of us felt like walking much so we headed the rent car up towards the ferry to Tsawwassen. Long wait for the ferry there and lots of traffic from Tsawwassen up into Vancouver but all incident-free.
One afternoon at the B&B, we had chatted with a couple on vacation from Hawaii. Who knew the people who live in Hawaii needed to take vacations! They had just come from a few days in Vancouver and had turned up a magic code that got us rooms at the Hyatt downtown for less than half the rack rate.
The room was very nice and about as much of a contrast from the B&B as you can imagine. From 19th century antiques at the B&B to 21st century modern in the Hyatt.
We had been eating these multi-course. expensive, late meals up to this point and both needed something a little more basic. We had fish and chips and a beer in a food concourse across from Canada Place. Back at the hotel we had the concierge set us up for a bus tour of the city and a trip up to Whistler mountain. More on that later.
Still blogging the past. We had no internet access at the B&B other than a laptop in the parlor.
We ran across this little fellow on the grounds of the Government House gardens, just a couple of blocks from the B&B. We slept in, had a late breakfast at the B&B, then strolled over to these gardens.
From there it was off to do some whale watching. We picked the Orca Spirit folks out of the recommendations at Prior House. We rode out on the top deck of the "closed boat" (i.e., not a Zodiac raft). The boat went out from the Inner Harbour area of Victoria. While waiting to board we had a walk along the seawall and watched the float planes come and go.
We saw a humpback diving. Didn't manage to get any decent pics of it. Then a "transient orca" followed by one of the three pods of resident orcas. None of them were breaching but one did seem to have the "Shamu roll on your side and wave" move going on. I was using the Panasonic digital cam with 12x optical zoom set in burst mode to try to get some shots of the beasts. Had to balance zoom level with my ability to locate the whales while on a rocking boat. So my best pic, in this post, isn't anything to write home about. 
I can probably crop it down a bit. Or just swipe some images from the Orca Spirit site and claim them as my own. :)
Whale watching tour was a good three hours. After that we went back for tea (and a bunch of sweets) at the B&B.
Finished up the night with a late dinner at the Blue Crab. I tried out some overly sweet special martini... won't do that again. Martini good, martini with blue curacao and some other sweet liquer bad. We had a nice half-liter of Grey Monk Pinot Gris with the meal and I had a killer chocolate dessert.
Butchart GardensOn Sunday we drove up to the Butchart Gardens. Massive gardens, 150 acres of converted limestone quarry and surrounding land. Not so much my thing but still pretty amazing amount of flowers.
Later that afternoon we toured thru Craigdaroch "Castle", a mansion built by a 19th century robber baron.
For dinner we drove to Sooke to the Sooke Harbour House on Whiffen Spit Road (love the name). Travel and Leisure rated the Sooke Harbour House #2 on their 100 best hotels in the U.S. and Canada last year. We got the single best table in the restaurant! There are two rooms, a larger and smaller one. We were in the smaller room, total of maybe 5 tables. Our table was in the corner with two sides facing out to the inlet and our backs to the room. It was like being in a little private dining room. The service was impeccable and the food was incredible!
Flew into Seattle this morning on our way to Victoria, British Columbia.
At the moment we're waiting to roll the car onto the ferry from Anacortes, WA to Sydney, BC.
Update:This day, Saturday Aug 4, was an all travel day. We took off from IAH at 7:30am CDT, arrived at Sea-Tac about 10am PDT. That gave us four hours to get the baggage, get the rent car, drive about 100 miles up to Anacortes and make the 2pm ferry. *#@% traffic on I-5 meant that it was barely adequate. If the ferry had been backed up much more we'd have missed it and there's only the one sailing per day to Victoria. The ferry left about 30 minutes late and the crossing to Sydney on Vancouver Island, with two short stops in the small islands, took 3-1/2 hours. Final leg was about a 20-minute drive down into Victoria to the Prior House Inn B&B where we stayed. Beautiful place!
Dinner at Cafe Brio. Had a really excellent local wine that had only 160 cases produced. Can't recall the exact wine, I really need to get in the habit of writing notes, but it was from Black Widow Winery.
A couple of months ago I did what until then was my shortest trip to Europe: Depart Houston on Monday, arrive in Paris mid-day Tuesday, return Saturday.
The Amsterdam trip I just finished beats that by quite a bit. I left Houston on Tuesday, arrived in Amsterdam on Wednesday mid-day. Left Amsterdam on Friday mid-day, arrived home Friday evening.
It was a very weird trip. Our office is near Schipol Airport about a block from a Radisson where I stayed. After arriving, I showered, changed and went straight to the office. That evening I had to do some work to prepare for my talk on Thursday so I didn't get into the city at all. Had dinner at the hotel with five other folks. Six people at the table, six different countries. The entire day Thursday was spent in the meeting, including my one hour talk. That evening I joined a group of UK folks for dinner in Amsterdam. We rode the train from Schipol and then took a tram because it was raining. After dinner it was raining again so we all piled into a cab and returned to the hotel. I never really did see anything of Amsterdam.
I've got a bunch of pictures from my two previous trips there this year but I did want to see the city with leaves on the trees.
I never even took out any cash while over there. I was either with someone who was picking up the tab or I used plastic.
The economics of this trip still kind of boggle. Four days of my time taken up to do a one-hour talk. But I seem to be the only person who was qualified to do it. So it's nice to be needed.
All in all I hope not to do any trips this short again.
The nasty end to the trip came as I headed home from the airport parking. Some kid in a Honda Civic rear-ended my pickup on the road from the parking lot to the freeway. Just enough rain had fallen to make the roads nice and slick. He was driving too fast and when I slowed for someone turning off in front of me he locked up his wheels and smacked my truck. Slightly scraped the rubber coating on the bumper of the truck and seriously mashed in the front of the Civic. I'm bettin' a good $5,000 damage to it. My bumper went above his so it mashed his hood back to the radiator and did damage to both front quarter panels. I don't think his car was drivable, it was leaking either radiator fluid or oil or both. There was a cop handy so all the info got recorded. The cop sent me on my way after making sure I had the kid's insurance info.
I had someone rear-end the pickup about 5 years ago with pretty much the same results. But that time I ended up with a nice neck snap. A few days later I found myself in a lot of pain. It took a couple of trips to an orthopedist and an MRI to discover that I have a degenerated disk in my neck and the pop from the accident had caused a nerve pinch. I'm really hoping this one won't have the same results.
Dinner before hand at Pronto Cucinino on Montrose was very good. Dessert afterwards at Birraporetti's next to the Alley was also good.
Going to be a heck of a lot cooler there than down here on the third coast in Houston.
I'll doing a 1 to 2 hour talk on Thursday at an internal company event. For that I'll spend 18 hours on an airplane (counting both ways) and just over 48 hours on the ground in Amsterdam.
Now I'm in search of a protector for the LCD. One of the main points in favor of a small camera like this is the drop-in-pocket size. I had carried the camera in a jeans pocket or backpack across 4 other international trips before I broke it. I don't want to go to a camera case and lose the size advantage. I've come up with a number of stick-on LCD protectors aimed to protect against scratches and smudges. There are some for high-end digital SLRs that look like what I really want. But I'm not sure any of them will fit the little Canon.
Our fourth, however, was a completely lost day. We ended up with no plans at all and the weather was ... dampish. A couple of inches of damp, in fact. So we just hunkered down and did absolutely nothing useful. I went the whole day without stepping outside the house. Reading, napping, generally recharging. Boring. But I think I needed it.
That's one of those things that can be real annoying as it usually seems to happen when you're far from home. Both of mine were amazingly painless, though.
Alice's Honda battery was stone dead when I came out from church. A friend there got me jump-started and I took it straight to the NTB store near our house. Since they're open Sundays and weren't busy at all I had a new battery in less than an hour.
Today when I jumped in the pickup to go to work my battery was dead. I've got a battery charger and managed to get enough of a charge on it to get it running and went over to the same NTB store. Mid-day on a week day is another good, non-busy time so again I had a battery in less than an hour and got on about my day.
Googled up another upside down Sam Adams label on Flickr.
Somehow ended up with a "charmed" trip. Bumped up to first class both ways on the flight and got a suite at the hotel!
Last Christmas I knew that I'd be on something of a "world tour" this year. At that time I was expecting to go to Amsterdam and maybe Sydney. Alice bought me a great little Canon SD 800 IS camera so I'd have it for the trips.
So far, I've carried the thing thru two trips to Amsterdam, once to Sydney, and two trips to Paris. I've always just dropped it in a jeans pocket without much concern.
On the last evening of my most recent trip I got off the Paris subway in Montmartre on my way to visit the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur. When I pulled the camera out and switched it on I found that the big LCD on the back was cracked and useless.
I had been using the camera a lot during the trip to that point and knew how many presses of which button got to a few specific settings. So I was able to get some shots of the outside of Sacré Cœur using just the optical viewfinder. However, the camera is all but useless without the LCD. The viewfinder doesn't show any information or menus.
A little bit bummed. Hopefully the repairs won't be too large a fraction of the price of a new camera. It really is a gem of a camera for travel.
The hotel clerk in Paris somehow mangled the mag stripe my corporate AmEx card. When I got back home I called AmEx for a replacement card.
My first attempt got me to someone with a strong Indian accent and speech patterns. When I told her what I wanted her response was "I would be most happy to be fulfilling your request but right now our computer systems are updating. If you could call back in half an hour we could easily help you.".
I'm thinking "yeah, right. You don't have a script for this one and you know that if I call back even in 30 seconds it will be somebody else's problem.". So I said thanks and hung up.
Dialed again immediately and got thru to a different person who this time sounded like a native English speaker. Made my request, the card's in the mail, done in 30 seconds.
Sigh.
I've now done this teaching gig five times since the beginning of the year. Paris was, by far, the most fun.
I think that's largely from choosing to stay in the city and commute "out" to the office. Our offices are all out in the sticks where real estate is cheaper. Of the other locations, only in Amsterdam would it have been possible to do the reverse commute. The Amsterdam office is the only other one with easy access to cheap, fast transportation.
The French desire to start the class later also helped. That meant I didn't have to be up and coherent as early so I felt able to stay out late.
And finally, there's just so much to see in Paris! Even just being a "tourist" out on my own I never felt at a loss for finding somewhere interesting to go.
I've been told that French people hate Americans and will be rude just for fun.
I certainly didn't find that to be the case. I took three years of French in high school and college but that was all more than 30 years ago. It gave me enough to be more or less read a menu and to attempt to speak in their language. That attempt made all the difference. I think that being rude causes rudeness. American waiters don't, in general speak any foreign languages. Well, ok, in Texas they very well might speak Spanish. But tourists in other countries seem to demand that the locals must be able to speak and understand the tourists language. Or if not that, English.
My last night in Paris, I stopped in to a sidewalk cafe at about 1am for a glass of red wine. After I had ordered some German (I think) tourists plopped themselves down and bellowed across the cafe "Ve vant some trinks". The waiter, who had just been able to understand my mangled French and English without any problem suddenly had immense difficulties understanding their needs. It was pretty comical. I got my wine in good time and had been sipping it for quite a while before their "trinks" arrived.
Nothing in Paris happens in a hurry.
Having dinner at a cafe or restaurant takes two hours. It just does. The pace is slower. Nobody is in a rush to get served, get their food, and leave. The restaurant isn't in a hurry to turn the table and get someone else in. Everyone lingers over a pre-meal aperitif and an after dinner coffee. You can sit in a sidewalk cafe and nurse a drink and talk for hours. Once you adapt to the pace, it's great! Until you adapt to it, it's crazy-making. I'm used to the "protocol" of American restaurants where you're grudgingly allowed to sit at the table only if you're generating enough revenue for the restaurant.
Paris is more crowded and busy than I expected.
People may not be in a hurry in general but there are a lot of them. The trains at normal commute times were packed to the gills. And there were hundreds of people passing thru the square near the hotel even quite late at night. But everyone was unfailingly polite. Nobody pushed or was rude on the trains. The drivers seemed to mostly take lane markers in traffic circles as a suggestion but then all wove together. I hardly ever heard a horn honk. And bicycles, skaters, motorbikes all zipped down the narrow streets with no problems. The most surprising thing was that drivers actually yielded to pedestrians in crosswalks even when the pedestrians were crossing against the signals.
After seven days of riding Metro trains, this was the only time I came out of the subway station and was completely turned around. I came out thinking I knew where I was going and struck out in the "right" direction. Turned out to be 180 degrees off. After some wandering about and map consulting I got to what I was looking for, the cable rail line up the hill. And found it "closed indefinitely due to a technical problem". So I got to climb the stairs up to the Basilica of the Sacré Cœur. In multiple stages with rest breaks along the way. I spent maybe an hour wandering around inside the Basilica. Stunning place.
After that dinner at a randomly selected restaurant in Montmartre, a Metro ride back to near the hotel, and a final glass of wine in a sidewalk cafe at about 1am.
I had the entire day Saturday in Paris and I was determined to go until my feet completely gave out.
I started the day by walking towards the Rodin Museum. On the way I passed the Hotel des Invalides and Musée de l'Armée (Army Museum). I wandered around the outside of those and into the gift shop. They had a nice coffee table book of Paris from the air, low level aerial photos. I almost bought it but really didn't want to lug it around all day.
The Musée Rodin was great! Most of the sculptures are outdoors. I first saw his work (other than "The Thinker" which everyone knows) at one of the Smithsonians in Washington D.C., maybe 20 years ago. His enormous "Gates of Hell" sculpture will give you nightmares if you look at it too long. Standing next to "Bourgeois de Calais", I suddenly felt like they were alive, like street performers striking a pose.
From near the Musée Rodin grabbed a Metro north a couple of stops to the Place de la Concorde. If I've kept it all sorted out correctly, the commentary from the tour boat said that the guillotines were set up here during the French Revolution.
After a wander around the Place de la Concorde, another short Metro ride to the Louvre. I had been in the square in the center of the Louvre and seen the glass pyramids on my previous trip to Paris so this time I went directly in to the museum from the Metro station. I decided that not only was there no way to see a significant fraction of the Louvre there wasn't even any way I'd see the highlights. So I just picked a gallery entrance more or less at random from the museum map. I went thru the ancient Egyptian exhibit, a little of the exhibit from the rest of the ancient Middle East and ended in a gallery of sculptures by French artists. That's where my camera battery gave out. I took that as a sign that I should take a break and caught the Metro back to my hotel.
