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Delights of Zagreb
Jul. 1st, 2013 06:57 pmI have mostly heard Zagreb described unkindly, and I don't think it deserves that at all. It looks like a slightly more experimental version of Vienna, and I suspect that's mostly by direct decree of Franz Josef I: there is Secession-style everywhere, including the truly spectacular reading-room of the National Archives. This is decorated with brass plaques depicting babies doing things with folios that would horrify any parent or librarian; falling in neither category, I thought they were cute.
The fish plate pictured previously turned out to be poisonous and laid me out for twelve hours starting at 11pm Saturday; then I took the bus up to Zagreb. This starts off in spectacular limestone hills, with the sort of stunt autobahn construction in which the tunnels attach directly to the viaducts; having a motorway switchback up a mountain was the best bit. It then turns into rolling hills full of farmhouses in a sort of Alpine-meadows way: as if the tunnel led from very-east Italy to very-south Bavaria.
I made it to the EU welcome ceremony on Sunday night: short speeches from EU highest-officials and the Croat president, lots of folk-dancing, a particularly ostentatious cello duet, and at the end fireworks (invisible from the square) and the Ode to Joy belted out by two sopranos and a bass choir.
Today I've been museum-hopping, since the EU accession was celebrated by opening museums on Monday (unprecedented) and making admission free. Croatia's been a great place to live and trade for long enough that the Archaeological Museum was excellent, and the Pavilion containing a museum of the restoration of the Pavilion and an exhibition of noted exhibitions that had taken place in the Pavilion could not easily have been more self-referential. The Design Museum was good fun; but in three museums I don't think I saw a memorable Croat painting.
(there will be pictures later, but I have misplaced the blivet for getting them directly from camera to iPad)
Greetings from Split
Jun. 29th, 2013 04:29 pmAfter less time, though more faff, than the train from Cambridge to Plymouth, I found myself by the seaside in Split.
This is a glorious place; I knew it had well-preserved Roman walls, but not that it retained a fair amount of 3rd-century Roman architecture and a car-free medieval street layout, and while I'd looked at a contour map I hadn't realised how impressively the hills loomed behind it.
The guide tells me that this is definitely not a twenty-foot-high statue of Gandalf with a big toe burnished gold by residents touching it for good luck, but I'm sure she's in on the conspiracy
A plate of locally-caught fried seafood sufficient to comfort a moderately glum walrus cost £6.75 or so
Balancing a herd of elephants
May. 17th, 2013 07:39 pmOff the tightrope is hung a pair of rather large platforms, capable of holding eight elephants each; it is obviously vitally important that the weights placed on the two platforms balance perfectly, before sliding the platforms down the tightrope and sending the elephants to the other side. The weights of the platforms have, naturally, been adjusted to be exactly equal. Your job therefore generally involves the stewardship of an enormous number of bags of sand to be used as counterweights.
Elephants are of normally-distributed mass with a mean of four tonnes and a standard deviation of half a tonne; they come in herds consisting of sixteen independently identically distributed elephants.
You are paid ten pounds for every herd of elephants that successfully crosses the ravine, and must pay a thousand pounds to any herder whose elephants you cannot balance. One day you discover that some miscreant has thrown almost all your sand into the ravine, and you have only two kilograms of counterweight left. Can you still make a profit on average?
( maths )
Seeking a statistic
Apr. 13th, 2013 11:38 pmA figure I can't seem to find anywhere is the total payout from private pensions. This sounds the kind of thing that a government must determine, I just can't work out where they'd put the answer ...
Legal and General (in small print on page 17 of the annual report) say their annuities paid out £1.4 billion in 2011. I suspect they have more than 5% of the pension market, which indicates that the state pension still dwarfs private pension provision, but I'd quite like to know how big the dwarf is.
Aviva don't seem to mention the figure at all ... insurer financial reports seem to devote much more space to profits ('credit spread income on our annuity portfolio increased by £125 million to £813 million') and to new-business figures ('due to a 24% reduction in [US] annuity sales to £2,839 million') rather than to the kind of flow I'm looking for.
Written on the granite walls
Displayed as a grammar exercise in the square outside the Presidential Palace
and in engraved aluminium inside the Palace
and on a poster outside the cathedral in Mendoza
and as the name of a major chain of high-end kitchen fitters
Today and tomorrow I'm in Mendoza, on the edge of the Andes; 750 miles west of Buenos Aires, 250 miles east of Santiago in Chile. It has a bakery named for Brillat-Savarin
Five city parks (Chile, Italy, Spain, San Martin, and Independence) arranged in a quincunx
(This is the monument to Eternal Hispano-Argentine Friendship erected in Plaza Espana)
A civic building which, for no clear reason at all, has a set of councillor-style chairs pulled around the rotunda by a little train
On a hill a pleasant hour's walk west of the city centre, where you can see clearly how the city fits into the landscape and the foothills,
You can visit the excessive monument to San Martin
and to his horse
And have condors flying around above you much as you would have seagulls in England
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From the sublime ...
Mar. 24th, 2013 10:14 pmWhen backpacking around countries you don't know, there's a surprising amount of variance in where you eat each night.
Saturday evening, for example, I had the tasting menu at Casa Galan, the smart restaurant associated to a boutique hotel, accessed by the world's most ridiculously slow elevator - three high-ceilinged storeys at no more than ten centimetres a second. Salmon soufflé with an apple-and-blue-cheese crostini; octopus and squid in aspic; gnocchi with blue cheese and walnuts; amazing melon granita with prosciutto powder; filet steak in a cream sauce with morels and gratin dauphinois; a perfect poached pear on a millefeuille base with dulche-de-lechwe ice cream; three sorts of petite-fours. With a glass of Malbec, 240 pesos - £20. Marvellous.
Sunday lunch was a sixth that price. It was a Hawaiian pizza. In an Argentine variant: lose the tomato sauce, use whole slices of ham, place one pineapple ring on each quadrant of the pizza, and, after it comes out of the oven, place a glacé cherry in syrup, straight from the jar in the fridge, in the middle of each ring.
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An art museum to make you laugh out loud
Mar. 20th, 2013 07:29 pmAs you enter the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, your attention is first caught by a sort of tangled wooden thing at the side
As you go a bit further into the museum and turn round, you see another one
Turning right and carrying on counter-clockwise round the museum, you pass some gorgeous galleries of Sixties op-art and kinetic art, such as this spectacular fish tank
And suddenly turn a corner to see this
I must have stood there with a silly grin on my face, occasionally laughing out loud, for about a minute.
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Flora and fauna of the Rio Plate
Mar. 20th, 2013 09:38 amAs always, in the big city the bird that thrives best is the pigeon; in more rural areas large groups of sparrows dust-bathe fluffily.
These ones are ubiquitous (I'm assuming they're the female and the male): starling-sized though looking as if they ought to be tit-sized
In a park by the river in Colonia we had these attractive, but loud, parrots
This handsome white-bandannaed fellow who gave a regular alarm call
And this pair of pigeon-sized perchers
As for flowers:
And this, the least huggable tree in all Creation
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Yesterday I went to Uruguay
Mar. 20th, 2013 09:29 amIt's an hour on a fast ferry from Buenos Aires to the city of Colonia de Sacramento, built on the opposite bank by the Portuguese: as a haven for smugglers, if you ask a Porteño, or as a protest against Spain's unreasonably rigid colonial tariff regime, had you asked in Portugal at the time. It's a world heritage site, and the ferry terminal is five blocks from my hotel, so off I went, the skyscrapers of Puerto Madero - the new Docklands development of BsAs - receding.
The river is coffee-coloured, as were the non-opening windows of the catamaran. For a country populated by Spanish and Italian immigrants, the coffee here is strikingly watery, though I doubt the river is directly to blame.
Colonia is tiny - the world-heritage site, which is basically the area within the walls, is maybe four hundred yards on a side. It reminded me quite how awesomely filled with close-packed history Britain really is: this gate, which is apparently a site worth the journey, would have passed unmentioned in one of the walls of my old school.
Being once Portuguese, it has azulejas:
Otherwise, it has a bit of the aspect of Blakeney in the rain.
A nice evening meal: fish in a cream sauce with carrots, peas, pumpkins and chopped peppers. After three days of steak (glorious steak, tender and juicy and an inch thick, burned crispy bits on the outside and oozing jus when you cut it) accompanied by chips, a meal of more than one component was a nice change.
(Ruins of the old convent, from the top of the lighthouse)
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So, here I am in Buenos Aires
Mar. 17th, 2013 10:40 amThis full-block building, clearly designed by someone who thought Keble College lacked only balustraded turrets, is apparently the headquarters of the water board
I went to see Evita in the Recoleta cemetery: if you are well-loved after your death, your friends will get bronze plaques made and bolted to your large marble tomb.
This may be the daftest-looking Owl Symbolising the Contemplation of Mortality ever committed to stone.
I am now off to the main cathedral to see if anything attractively pontifical is going on, this sunny St-Patrick's-day morning.
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Things To Do In New York State
Feb. 8th, 2013 04:44 pm![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif){kind=small}
farthingparty, and realise that it's fifteen years since I last went to New York City or Washington DC, and therefore probably worth going down there afterwards.What should I stop off and look at on the train between Montreal and NYC? Or is every minute I spend in upstate New York better considered a minute that I'm not spending at the Smithsonian?
Where the money went, 2012 edition
Jan. 1st, 2013 03:18 pm
I bought a house; the actual deposit-handing-over does not appear in this pie chart, but the stamp duty, solicitors' fees, redecoration upstairs, redecoration downstairs, repair of garden fence, refurbishment of electric wiring, installation of one hundred feet of book shelving, replacement of cooker, new dishwasher, rewaterproofing of bath and replacement of hot water cylinder with a new unholy one do. That absorbed all my savings for the year and about three thousand pounds besides, but the stock market has been very good to me this year and accumulated dividends cover the gap even before looking at capital growth.
'HOLIDAY' includes my trip to Egypt in November, and the flight and first-few-nights accommodation for my upcoming trip to Argentina in March.
See here for last year's pie.
Books read in December 2012
Jan. 1st, 2013 03:12 pmThree books from late in ongoing sequences: Banks's Hydrogen Sonata, Bujold's Captain Vorpatril's Alliance and Butcher's Cold Days. The Bujold is very good; we get to see all sides of Ivan Vorpatril, and an ingenue's introduction to Vorbar Sultana in the late Gregorian. There's a slightly shoehorned-in plot of Jackson Hole's bloody power-politics, presented as a series of infuriatingly domineering in-laws.
The Butcher and the Banks rather less so; Harry Dresden books have a fairly precise formula, where a new adversary is introduced, Harry panics that he will be unable to defeat it, Harry defeats it anyway, and it carries on. Fourteen books in, both Harry and the adversaries are getting ridiculously powerful. Basically you read Harry Dresden for the moments of awesome, and they're quite well-done, but I wouldn't have minded if Jim had gone on to something else entirely after Changes.
The Banks feels almost like a mash-up of sections from other Banks novels, quite a lot of it could come from a bigger-budget remake of Consider Phlebas. It's a Culture novel, so it hits spots that other novelists generally don't, but it's not a first-rate one.
Noel Botham's Catch That Tiger was a cliche-ridden Second World War fictionalised biography not worth the £1.20 discount price. Kameron Hurley's God's War was just too bleak, grimy and full of betrayal to be very much fun to read, but I think that's more my attitude than the author's fault. Jonas Jonasson's The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Vanished has some very personable characters, but combined with dreadfully-researched history and a plot so entirely composed of coincidences that I at times wondered whether it was all a subtle parody on the contemporary Swedish crime novel.
Daniel Chamovitz's What a Plant Knows is a very good slim volume introducing the sophisticated sensory systems that plants have; it goes from Darwin's observational botany all the way to modern genomics, and there was lots of interesting material there that I didn't know. Stan Lee's Process Development: Fine Chemicals consisted entirely of case-studies and it wasn't at all clear whether I was missing the plot twists because I didn't know enough organic chemistry or because there weren't enough clues provided; it would have been much more helpful to have more 'we tried various conditions; T and U produced the wrong product because of side reaction R', V caught fire, W was much too toxic to use at scale, X turned out to be OK' than a constant sequence of 'it was determined that X was the best reagant'.
Paul Cornell's London Falling fits into a recent British tradition of paranormal police procedurals, but does interesting things with the genre because it 's much less conspiracy-driven; the protagonists gain paranormal powers in an industrial accident, and they're a pretty awful burden to them but useful as they track down a particularly unpleasant monster, but there isn't the secret magical infrastructure of Aaronovitch or of Kate Griffin. I recommend it.
Ian McDonald's Planesrunner is the start of a new YA series by my absolute favourite SF stylist; it works very well, with a pleasant combination of Masefield's Box of Delights and Pullman's Northern Lights, a new twist on steampunk with the background carefully written to get round some of the standard steampunk absurdities, and some really excellent zeppelins.
I intend to be in Zagreb to watch them doing so, probably taking the train down - staying a little while in Munich on the way out - and flying back from Split.
Would anyone be interested in joining me?
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huskyteer came along when I went to Prague to watch the EU rolling east in 2004, and it was a fun trip.
I also rode a donkey; I think the camel was better, if only because it was more firmly attached to a camel-guide and less self-willed.
The rivers of the Western Desert
Nov. 15th, 2012 07:33 pm
This is with an iphone out of the window of a plane flying Luxor to Cairo; there's mile after mile after mile of this sort of amazingly branching dried-up river bed. I don't have the slightest idea what it would have looked like when wet - it's not the Okavango Delta, they're clearly tributaries merging rather than an enormous thing splitting - or when it dried.
