Design by Committee: Travel

Christmas in Singapore

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:44:18 GMT

See the photos here.

We had a great time exploring Singapore over the last few days. Here are just a few of the highlights:

Arriving at the hotel well after midnight and reuniting with our German friends as we were checking in.
The Shangri-La hotel breakfast buffet. Each morning we power up for the day with a buffet the includes a build-your-own noodle soup section, Indian fare, dim sum, Japanese and Korean fare, fruits and pastries in abundance in addition to the full western buffet. Three plates each usually fattens us up enough to skip lunch, not to mention discourage an early dinner, but not enough to taste everything that looks delicious.
Double-decker hop-on-hop-off bus tour of central Singapore, introducing us to the city, a mix of colonial buildings, traditional two-story storefronts with upper-story shutters in a rainbow of colors, and glass and steel skyscrapers. Laced through with impeccably maintained greenery. I didn't expect Singapore to feel so spacious and gracious. It doesn't have that intensely urban feel like Hong Kong or New York.
Wandering through Little India, a maze of shops and eateries heady with burning incense.
Dinner at the home of a colleague of our friends, getting a picture of home life and how east meets west.
Trawling the many malls on Orchard Road. A little of that goes a long way for me, unless followed by...
A daily afternoon dip in the pool, before, during or after the brief but sometimes heavy daily rainstorm. An hour with a good book under a beach umbrella, listening to children in the pool or the patter of rain just beyond the shelter.
The Night Safari - a cross between a zoo and a wild animal park, but in a dark and rain-glistening tropical jungle lit by a full moon and artistically placed lighting not much brighter than the moon itself. Never though have I seen such an active and alert a collection of animals - Malaysian tigers, jackals, tapirs, capybaras, elephants, barbarosas (a lumpy wild pig with upturned tusks sticking right through the roof of it's snout), giant anteaters, sloth bears, bat-eared foxes, giraffes, hippos, water buffalo, antelope...
A boat loop on the Singapore river, starting at Boat Quay, a quaint strip of eateries tucked up next to the polished spires of the financial district.
Chinatown - a section of quaint and colorful storefronts and street vendors - though very few hawking cheap Chinese merchandise. For some reason Indian trinkets dominate. The Hindu temple is festooned with a layer cake of blue characters and a menagerie of animals, and the courtyard walls are topped with images of lounging sacred white cows.
Meeting with our friends in the vaulted lobby for Christmas eve present sharing, at the foot of a 30 foot tree, as a live choir performs intricately harmonized Christmas songs nearby.
A new iPod touch ;-).
Indochine, a trendy southeast Asian eatery housed in a wing of the Singapore Asian Civilization Museum on the waterfront looking towards Boat Quay and the financial district, provided the perfect Christmas Eve dinner venue. My top choices - a beef and prawn salad, steamed cod in lemon sauce, green mussels in coconut curry, lemongrass creme brule, mango and sticky rice. Wow!
The Singapore Art Museum, housed in a colonial former school, boasts an interesting collection of Asian contemporary art, some of which seems rather primitive to me, others quite sophisticated.
Perfectly manicured botanical gardens brimming with more kinds of palm tree than you had ever imagined existed. The fantastic orchid garden. My favorite specimen is the spindly and bizarrely twisting brownish-purple "Margaret Thatcher".
Club Chinois on Orchard Road for Christmas dinner - upscale, trendy, light oriental. Featured scallops on a slab of silken tofu, fois gras on crispy duck skin, chicken drumstick on a Chinese sweet radish salsa, minced 5-spice chicken on a disk of silken tofu, cod braised in a clay pot with baby bok choy, and cubes of tenderloin stir-fired with ginger and green onion in a crispy noodle basket. Chased down with apple pie, chocolate lava, peanut-encrusted rice balls filled with bean paste with a honey-ginseng tea, and a warm creamy almond "soup" in a new coconut shell. One of the best dinners ever!
Strolling through Christmas street party on Orchard Drive, with elaborate lights and decorations, bizarre floats (my favorite - the jumbo sliced pannatone loaf with fern-like shoots springing from its top and dotted with bread loaves in case you didn't get the "Jesus is the bread of life" theme), a concert. But mostly filled with shutterbugs milling around. At any one time, 1/3 were taking photos, 1/3 were posing for photos, and 1/3 were waiting to take a photo or pose in one. I'm not exaggerating!
Taking a cable car to Mount Haber (only a 100 meters high or so), and back down to Sentosa Island, which is gradually turning from a beach resort and golf course into an island-sized theme park. We caught a computer-rendered 3D chair-hurtling "log ride" down a mountain. Then strolled through Undersea World which held a number of interesting specimens such as the tiny red hearted but otherwise translucent sea angels, giant Japanese Spider crabs, and a long underwater tunnel where we could watch scuba divers feeding the manta rays and hordes of other fish. Even a dugong.
The Pink Dolphin show in the lagoon - standard fare with tricks and petting from volunteers. With quite a jostling crowd and corny tourist patter, it was remarkable only in that we actually saw the pink dolphins.
Dinner at The Banana Leaf Apolo in Little India, where dinner is served on a banana leaf mat that acts both as a placemat and plate. Gen was the only one who ate the whole meal of samosas, Tandoori chicken, chicken tikka masala, paneer in a creamy tumeric sauce, and a paneer/potato kofta in saag. Chased down with mugs of limeade.

Galle

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 02:42:21 GMT

I did get to see the cultural show after all - quite entertaining with young women whose improbably double-jointed hands flitted around their flowered headpieces like exotic insects, and bow-stanced young men jerking around like marionettes to the drums, then flying into acrobatic twirling that would shame a dervish. Besides humor and grace, the show also had suspense, as the young men jumped around with elaborate demon masks on, flinging their copious tangles of wooly hair within centimeters of their flailing torches. I expected the whole costume to erupt in flames any minute!

Today I visited a spice garden near the hotel, associating spices to the plants that provide them. Who knew pepper was a creeper instead of a tree? And that cardamom blooms from the bottom of the plant? The Sri Lankans have an extensive herbal medicine practice, which makes me wonder whether the recipe (prescription?) of spices found in a good curry is intended to have similar curative properties. I picked up a few overpriced items in gratitude for an interesting tour.

Next I headed down to the old Dutch fort at Galle, supposedly a charming old town but in fact I found it a bit ramshackle and ordinary compared to the charming specimens littering Europe. I suppose part of the appeal is it's air of being forgotten by the stream of history. My romantic visions of old colonial splendor shrank as my sense grew of the desparate attempts to simulate something familiar in an impossibly remote and "primitive" place.

I again struggled to make some decent photos, with minimal success, mostly in close-ups, but did enjoy circumnavigating the ramparts. Each nook was filled with shy, straight-laced looking young Indian (Sri Lankan?) couples surruptitiously necking under the privacy of a colorful umbrella. The machinery of war turned to the purpose of love...

When sweat began to flow, I stopped by the venerable New Oriental Hotel for a lime and soda (the traditional drink of gastronomically-wary visitors here - the lime is fresh squeezed and refreshing, the fizzy soda is guaranteed to come from a bottle, and the sugar syrup on the side requires boiling to make.)

A few hours was sufficient to circumnavigate the whole promontory, and a bit outside it, and to investigate a few high-class shops tucked in among the dilapadated colonials. Wanting to ensure my arrival back in Colombo before dark cut the afternoon a bit short - and the drive back was as exciting few hours as usual - passing three fairly dramatic accident scenes en route.

Bits of destruction from the Tsunami are evident along parts of the coast here, but the main infrastructure is back in place (all new bridges and a widened, smoothly paved road.) Surprisingly, to my eye it is often difficult to tell a building partially destroyed by the wave from the ones that are simply dilapidated. And as usual, nature seems to protect her own - the palms lining the beaches don't seem to have taken much of a beating, and every scar has healed over in tropical green.

Expanded photoset here.

Here in this Place

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 18:22:05 GMT

The sun is deepening into an orange ball, dim enough to briefly eyeball directly, and dropping more quickly than I ever recall seeing before towards the Indian Ocean. Paradoxically, as the light dims and the air becomes heavily incensed with a burn-pile of palm leaves somewhere, my mind is clearing and brightening a bit, pulling out of the warm floating semi-coma it's been in all day, allowing me to think through some of the events and insights of the week.

Those events and insights are both personal and professional, a fortuitous combination that too-rarely accompanies a business trip. I've been in Sri Lanka for five days now, arriving after a 48 hour (minus the time change) trip from Sacramento to Los Angeles to Taipei to Kuala Lumpur, backtracking briefly eastward to Singapore, and finally Colombo. All that air conditioning left my sinuses a bit clogged and it took a few days for that to clear out too, but by yesterday I was feeling fully time-shifted and physically fit, yet mentally reeling from the firehose of information that accompanies my first trip to the home office as an employee.

I lodged initially at the Havelock Place Bungalow, a small (6-room?) inn mixing old-colonial charm (four-poster beds with mosquito nets) with contemporary styling (the office is approached by a bridge over the swimming pool), and avoids thoroughly the feeling of being the millionth customer in a multinational hotel chain clone. Co-founder Paul Fremantle had arrived earlier in the day from the UK, and he, Sanjiva, and Asankha, one of the local project leads, joined me at the hotel for a quiet meal.

The next two days were productively spent at the office. Dims arrived from Boston late Monday and James from Bangkok on Tuesday night, uniting the company in one place for the first time since I joined. On Tuesday after a tasty Sri Lankan buffet lunch we came back to the office and it seemed eerily quiet – only a couple of people working in the normally crowded and bustling office. And the stragglers were acting quite surreptitious. Sanjiva came back from a short errand and somebody asked him to look something over in the secondary office down the hall where half the employees work. He did and was shown into a streamered conference room with cake and 40 candles for his birthday! Since the average employee age is well under 30, many joked about the number of candles (which, as I've got a couple of years on him made me feel my age in a new and uncomfortable way), sang a rousing but poly-chromatic Happy Birthday, and called for a speech to which Sanjiva smilingly threatened “what goes around comes around!” and directly cut the first slice of cake. The affection and respect that he's given by all as a CEO, a mentor, a role model, and friend is palpable. The community he's created is one of the most valuable assets of the company, as well as simply being quite moving on a personal level.

On Wednesday afternoon about 15 of us piled onto a tour bus, which seems drastically outscale on the Sri Lankan roads, and drove south for a couple of hours to the Bentota Taj Exotica hotel and resort, sprawling terraces of rooms built above and around a rocky outcrop on a wide miles-long honey-colored beach lined with coconut palms and pandamas.

Between Wednesday night and Friday afternoon we planned out the 2007 product and release lineup and estimated resource constraints, with breaks to nibble on a constant oversupply of tasty snacks and meals, served al fresco poolside, in lounges with panoramic views and live entertainment, on torchlit patios with a surf-crashing soundtrack. An arranged local cultural dance performance fell square on the WSDL conference calls and as we're rushing to end that prolonged madness I felt, not compelled, but not eager either, to heed the Outlook calendar-chimes of duty.

Late Friday afternoon the bus returned and all but I piled on for the return trip to Colombo, and for Dims, Paul, and James, far beyond Colombo. I stayed on for the weekend to relax and explore more of the southern coast of this island gem. After a swim in the palm-shaded pool and a bit of time with a book, I returned to my room and essentially crashed - sleeping deeply for an hour and waking up dazed and empty. A couple of trips through the buffet (hate to see how much I'll gain on this trip) was insufficient to overcome my stupor, and I realized I've been processing far too much information about the world and my place in it physically, mentally, culturally, artistically, temporally over the last week to quickly snap out of.

Part of this overload is a deeper level of culture shock than I've ever expected, driven by a new-found awareness of the depths of my Western (partially in the European sense, but dominantly in the American sense) roots, the possibly irreconcilable difference between pioneer self-reliance and the colonially service-oriented culture here - where there are servants (hate the word even) to free one from the simplest of tasks. For instance, why would one walk a few blocks when a 50 cent tuk tuk ride is at hand? Why would one drive on these crazy roads when one gets a driver along with the car for not dramatically more than a rental car elsewhere? Paradoxically, I'm aware of how much I rely on Deanna to pull me out of solitary-reliance mode.

The difference in space itself here is also palpable to me. I feel increasingly that I'm shuffling or more accurately being shuffled from luxurious cocoon to luxurious cocoon, transiting safely and again luxuriously through a crowded, ungroomed, lively, jumbled, confusing corridor. Contrast that to the Western spaciousness where much of the wilderness beauty lies between the so-called civilized parts. Just as with Stegner, landscape is ingrained in my soul. I even realized recently that artistic endeavors lie in my future, they are undoubtedly landscapes in the broadest sense. Here, I don't feel the landscape yet and am wondering if I ever really can - is there really a landscape in the sense I'm accustomed to? I've been unable to even make photographs other than a desultory snapshot or two. The difference in the feeling of "rightness" between being in the High Sierra wilderness surrounded by not a single creature comforts, and being in this place, surrounded by them, shocks me.

Saturday thus turned from a planned day of exploration to a day of recuperation. A long stint by and in the pool after breakfast, followed by a long walk to the farthest end of the beach, the remaining bulk of a Wallace Stegner essay collection, the development of an uneven yet luxurious sunburn and stinging foot-soles from the sandy hike and broiling rocks around the beach-end tidepools, practicing occasional but varied styles of hawker defense, the lazy contemplation of middle-aged potato-shaped cellulite-bulging Russians with horrifyingly scanty swimming attire, and thankfully of a few nubile ones that can actually pull it off, and another dip in the pool restored me to my rightful mind and put me in the mood to write/think and prepare for more active pursuit tomorrow. I've arranged for (with the intermediary assistance of the concierge of course) a car and driver for the day and plan to visit Galle, probably the Brief Gardens, and anywhere else the winds of interest take me before returning to the Havelock Bungalow for another work-focused week.

Clearly this is turning into an unforgettable trip. I'd apologize for the long post but most of you will certainly have abandoned the narrative already and thus miss the apology ;-).

By now the orange sun is long replaced by a thin crescent of moon in deep black, fading and darkening again as the heavy tropical atmosphere thickens imperceptibly into full cloud cover. I've relocated from my nook overlooking the beach to a poolside lounger, from which I can smell the tandoori charcoal and the imminent buffet in the warm air. Soon it's pull will be irresistible.

A day in Hong Kong

Tue, 24 Oct 2006 04:53:04 GMT

I spent a day in Hong Kong earlier this year, a 12 hour layover on my way to visit Sanjiva and WSO2 for an in-depth look. I'm just now getting around to posting them. Better late than never I suppose!

[Written Aug 17th, 2006 10:30 AM, Hong Kong time.]

I'm sitting on top of Victoria Peak, over 1200 feet above Hong Kong's dense glass-and-steel pungees. It's 10:30 in the morning, but already a break in the shade, with a little breeze to combat the humidity, sounds great. Hong Kong is a vertical city, almost right from the waterfront, and when I arrived in Central Hong Kong this morning at about 7AM, I inevitably started climbing hills. I wandered a bit among the dim and still quiet canyons between the highrises, at last finding my way to the Zoological and Botanical Gardens, themselves a terrace of manicured gardens with a few bird and monkey cages scattered throughout. A jaguar cage too, but they seemed to be hiding out at this early hour.

The gardens are full, not surprisingly, with middle-aged folks performing a variety of exercises, most of which appear to be a form of Tai Chi, but a few are jogging or doing a strange exagerated walk resembling the swimsuit portion of a beauty pageant. Not actually a very pretty thought for these middle-aged housewives…

It took me a while to find the tortuous series of footpaths the few blocks to the start of the Peak Tram, although the roads are marked on the map, they often don't have sidewalks, or the sidewalks are a separate path going over, under, and along other roads. I ended up on the wrong side of a gate of a church at one point and had to hop the fence to proceed.

The Peak Tram is a funicular, pulled by a single cable to a saddle and gleaming shopping mall at the top of the hill. It is so steep, that as you go up, as much as you try to compensate your perspective for the tilt, the skyscrapers appear to lean precariously. The north side of Hong Kong Island crowds below, and across a fairly narrow channel plied by junks, ferries, and all kinds of cargo vessels, Kowloon continues the urban density, quickly climbing into it's own boundary hills.

I walked along the roads winding around the summit, admiring not only the views but the extraordinary measures taken to combat erosion. The roads are narrow, with steep, overhanging walls on the downhill, and spray-on concrete covering the upside. The concrete has small accommodations for trees to grow, and they seem fairly happy with the situation. Although there appear to be a few private residences up here, many of the buildings clinging to the mountaintop are multi-unit dwellings, some over a dozen stories high. Ever seen a skyscraper on the top of a mountain? Weird. But the real estate prices here must be simply crazy - my guidebook tells of a house nearby (which I couldn't locate) which was completed in 1997 and the builder turned down an offer of $900 million HK ($120 million US) for it. But then the market crashed and it's probably not worth even $50 million anymore.

I plan to descend the mountain using the old Peak Trail path, find some good Chinese for lunch, and take a Ferry to see the city from the waterfront.

[5:30PM]

The winding path down was steep enough in places to force me into little voluntary 5-step mini-switchbacks. And in the jungle, the air was still enough to bring the sweat out. Getting used to the humidity takes some doing - I've drunk about 4 liters of liquids today, and am still a little thirsty. I tended west at the bottom of the path, and managed to find the series of escalators that ferry pedestrians up the hills from the downtown/waterfront level, to the "Middle Levels". Of course, I was heading downhill, so I was still doing steps.

I started looking for a lunch place, but the area called "SoHo" for "South of Hollywood Road" is so international that local fare isn't readily detectable among the multitude of interesting eateries. But after a few blocks I reached Gage Street, which looks just like San Francisco's Chinatown, squared. Between the many fruit, herb, seafood, and meat vendors, I found a tiny place upscale enough to have air conditioning, and ordered the local special - Beef Brisket Noodle Soup. It came with a delightful iced Black Frothy Milk Tea with Tapioca Pearls that was so refreshing I ordered and downed another!

After wandering the streets for a while, enjoying the strangeness of a few of the items spread out under the colorful awnings, such as a bright fushia fruit shaped like an elongated kohlrabi named "dragon fruit", and the Durien which tends to catch your nose unawares with a tropical open sewer smell, I exhausted my interest and headed for the Star Ferry terminal.

I paid the $2.2HK (30 cents) you get the upper, premium deck, and the 10 minute ride gives you a fresh breeze, a great view of the Hong Kong skyline, and a closer look at some of the watercraft plying the waters. Upon arriving in Kowloon I found my way into an air conditioned mall which went on for about 10 blocks before depositing me next to Kowloon Park, where I rested in the Chinese Garden near a McDonald's branded ice cream stand. A knock-off? Or a local adaptation?

I walked some of the "Golden Mile" which is supposed to be hopping, especially at night, but it was just store after store of the same westernized merchandise. I followed a parade for a bit, drums, cymbals, gongs, oboe-like horns and those little funky cellos made from a gourd. What a racket! A last panorama from the "Kowloon Western Promenade" which was a semi deserted car park in between undeveloped fields reclaimed from the bay, and I collapsed into the train back to the airport. Still thirsty, I ordered a drink of Sago (Coconut) with Tapioca Pearls and Mango jello slivers - another great combo!

In all Hong Kong is an interesting place. It does seem dense, and vertical, but not as huge or crowded as I'd expected. It is not intimidating, and fun to wander in, and I'll look forward to my next visit.

Adventure blogs

Sat, 15 Jul 2006 18:49:46 GMT

As I prepare for my own adventure, I am following the progress of other adventurers of my acquantence.

My good friend Kenny is travelling through the far east this summer, returning to some of the places, and memories, he knew from the Vietnam war. Still trying to make sense of that waste I suppose.

Bobby, camp director for the Adventure Unlimited ranches in Colorado, at which we attended family camp a few years ago, has taken his family including 13 and 14 year-old daughters and two burros, and set off for six months traversing the Continental Divide Trail from Canada to Mexico.

See if that doesn't whet your appetite for adventure!

Fuji

Mon, 07 Nov 2005 04:25:29 GMT

We're all familiar with Hiroshigi's Great Wave, undoubtedly the most recognizable piece of Japanese art in the world, part of his "21 Views of Mt. Fuji" collection, in which the activities of the Japanese are documented, always with Mt. Fuji in the background.

I felt like I woke up in a contemporary Hiroshigi print this morning, as I woke, not to rain and grey as I expected from arriving last night (last time I was here, I never saw the sky at all), but to Mt. Fuji emerging gently from the pre-dawn light over the jumbled cityscape of Yokohama. A couple of red and white radio towers made a clean nature-only shot impossible, but somehow that fits in well with Hiroshigi too…

See the full panorama here.

Berlin bears its soul

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 15:40:23 GMT

When I was in Berlin earlier this year I found painted bears scattered throughout the city. Inside, outside, from 6 inches tall to 6 feet. Some beckoned you into an establishment (like a pub). A number were painted to represent different countries and the brotherhood between them. Most just seemed to be displayed for fun. I took lots of pictures, but I haven't yet figured out what to do with them. I put together a crude collage as a test drive of Adobe Photoshop CS2 (worked well on such a massive file!) but I'm still waiting for inspiration to strike me - perhaps a Photostory is a better way to display the collection...

Anyway, I wondered at the time what the meaning of all these psychadelically painted bears was. One rather interesting explanation occurred to me - that Berlin is downplaying its place in some of the awful events of the 20th century. Any tourists afraid of the (Nazi, Soviet) bear? No need to worry, you can see the bear has been tamed into a colorful, friendly, and harmless cartoon. Disney-ification is the ultimate symbol of Westernization.

Last day in Berlin

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 04:30:38 GMT

I went further afield in Berlin today, looking for secret gems in the corners of Berlin mentioned briefly in the back pages (if at all) of the guidebooks.

I started with a walk along the river, where Berlin's most prevalent art form abounds. That is, graffiti. Every surface imaginable is tagged - buildings, walls, sidewalks, trains, cars and even trees! Some of it is pretty elaborate, none of it is any more legible than the American variety, but altogether it makes a pretty strong statement that some Berliners don't care about their environment much. One building especially thoroughly covered (several stories high) turned out to be an artistic co-op, and later on that day I found a makeshift graffiti sign touting Berlin as the "street art" capital. Oh well, call it art then. But I think the pride being shown by the numerous construction and renovation projects going on in Berlin contrasts harshly with the lack of pride shown by vandalistic graffiti.

After getting drenched (for the first but not last time today) in a sudden squall, I took the city's extensive subway and train system to the Vitra Design Museum located in a residential neighborhood north of town, in an huge brick former power plant. In the past the museum has hosted exhibitions of product design, furniture, fashion and so forth. However, I was to be disappointed. The entire space was taken by a large installation by a photographer to raise awareness about osteoporosis. Hard to think of a less appealing subject! Apparently the museum doesn't have a permanent collection, so that was that. I got soaked again before I reached the subway.

I was pretty disappointed with my run of luck, especially after my visit yesterday to the Bauhaus-Archiv, which has a collection from the Bauhaus school of art, including Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Lásló Moholy-Nagy. The museum building itself was designed by Gropius and is pretty interesting - you enter on a walkway that takes you over the museum itself in a brief and forced-but-pleasant architectural tour before depositing you on the far side where the entrance is. As I'd been forewarned, they are preparing for a new exhibit, and the reduced one euro entry fee only covered a single exhibit room (plus the gift shop which was virtually an exhibit too). There were however a few treasures here. One charcoal drawing (can't remember by who any more) was pretty amazing - up close it was a series of crude vertical stripes made by the side of a charcoal stick, with occasional interruptions. From a greater distance, it became an study in architectural forms as the marks read as stories of a building and the breaks as windows and corners. Some of the architectural sketches were amazing too. I could see the genesis of the style that now pervades many of the new buildings and virtually every furniture store.

With less than perfect luck on the design museum front, I moved on to something different. In the southwest corner of the city, just up from the soon-to-be-replaced-by-a-brand-new-one-downtown American Embassy, a mile from the subway in a residential neighborhood (and guarded today by another violent squall) is tucked the Brücke Museum. The museum has a collection of art by German expressionists known as the Die Brücke school from about 1905 till 1913. Currently it has a pretty extensive show of block prints and lithographs, ranging from about 3 inches square up to 18 inches square. Some of them were quite amazing! My favorite pieces were those by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and (new to me) Fritz Bleyl. Bleyl especially was able to capture the minimal essence of a landscape, a figure, or an object, yet made each of its constituent black and white shapes unique and individual but supportive of the whole. Rarely does one find such a simple piece of art with such power in each component. And the composition of each was masterful!

My advice to those visiting Berlin or any big city: sure, go see the Pergamonmuseum and the Neue Nationalgalerie or whatever the big showstoppers are, you'll see the expected amazing treasures Picasso and Monet and ancient Egypt, but also set aside some time to seek out the small treasures. In the long run, they are likely to be the ones you remember, and not just because everything dry looks better after you've gotten a good drenching.

Berlin

Sat, 04 Jun 2005 16:44:59 GMT

I've been in Berlin all week participating in the W3C Web Services Description Working Group and the W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group. What a full week! For WSDL we're down to ONE active non-editorial issue! WS-Addressing made some progress as well (but not as much as I'd like).

Berlin has confounded my expectations in several ways. First, I expected a shining sea of glass skyscrapers in a river of immaculately groomed landscaping in West Berlin, and a crumbling mass of soviet relics in the East. Instead, a lot of the most important stuff is in the East! The museums, theaters, old churches - the real city center - belonged to the East. If anything, the East is undergoing a renewal that seems to have detracted somewhat from the maintenence of the West.

I've also been very impressed at the design sensitivity being demonstrated. The Reichstag exemplifies this - the roof of this glorious Romanesque building was bombed away and has been replaced by a complete contrast - an ultramodern glass gallery and dome with a helix of pathways leading to the top of a tornado of glass panels which direct light down into the Parlimentary chamber. Rather than being stuck in the past, or doing away with it all together, Berliners have married the two in a way that enhances both. I'll edit my photos soon and see if I can put together a series, till then here's one quickie to try to illustrate my point.