After Skopje, I went on a driving vacation. A driving vacation means you are doing just that: driving. I got on a bus at 8:30 in the morning at the bus-train station in downtown Skopje. The drive over the pass was a winter wonderland. Trees laden with snow. This is foreshadowing. Snow looks much better through a bus window or indeed any window, except a windshield when your are behind the steering wheel. When we got to Sofia around 2 PM, I walked to the Sixt office one block south, and got in my rented Skoda.

Google Maps workers live in a walled palace. They have no idea how roads are in the real world.

1. They don’t know about weather. The world has Snow! OMG! not like Mountain View. Google maps in Bulgaria made no time allowance for the fact it was snowing heavily on A81 to Montana, when telling me that was the quickest route north to Vidin. My human friends warned me but I don’t check messages while driving. I’m the only one in the Balkans who doesn’t.
2. They don’t know about left turns. Google Maps seems to time left turns at about zero, when estimating driving times. This is bad enough in the States, during rush hour. In a town like Sofia, it significantly impacts routing decisions.
3. They don’t know about Cyrillic characters. Seriously. And when the voice output comes to a syllable it can’t render, it omits it, leaving not even a speech disfluency. So if map direction algorithm outputs “Turn left on улица хан крум toward несебър стария град,”, the voice says: “Turn left ontoward”.
4. They don’t map potholes.

Uber robot cars will be worse. I was thinking on the drive into Bucharest, the next day, how many times I would have been killed if I were in an autonomous vehicle, but realistically, I think, the answer is none.

An autonomous vehicle placed in Bucharest and given a command would put up an alert that said:

“Your request cannot be completed safely at this time.”

and that alert would stay on the screen forever, while the hubcaps and then the wheels and then the trim and the engine were stolen, leaving a robot car indistinguishable from all the other cars in Romania, which is good, because if it stood out, somebody would rob it.

The problem is one of driving style. In California, you assume that the other driver is not paying attention. In Romania, the other drivers are paying attention, and you can count on it. The guy in the cement truck who pulls out into the street without even looking away from his cell phone can be confident that the other people on the street will notice him and swerve. The other drivers might look like they are engaged in fisticuffs or video games or drinking, but by California standards they are as attentive as one must be at the gates of heaven in the Sufi tale. The drivers will honk to say hello to the cement truck. Or to say that time has not stopped. I haven’t figured out honking down in these parts. In India it’s straight up “I’m here, this is your audio cue.” I do that myself on Old La Honda.

So you can plan your left turn out of the gas station with the idea that, even though it’s a dead blind corner, the people whizzing out of it will dodge you with surprising precision. And honk.

The border leaving Romania on the bridge between Giurgiu and Ruse would shame an African failed state. There are a few possible paths through the villages of the surrounding area, but the point at which they all come together is a dirt road which has had a deep stream carved into by the rains, and every 18-wheeler from Tallinn to Trieste is trying to get to Istanbul and they have to Evel Knievel this gorge to do it. Also, Uber cars take note, the Romanian drivers have a lot of hand gestures indicating their precedence, not all of them unfriendly, but your software needs to be able to recognize the glint in their eyes as well as the gang signs.

I did get in trouble at the border. I had not bought a Gas Tax “Vignette”. I did not know that word before, or at least that meaning of that word. I will either get a fine in the mail or I paid a bribe to the border police. Or maybe both. She didn’t give me change for euro 20 the bridge toll. I will see what Sixt has to say, when I turn in the car. If you go driving in Romania, find some way to buy a “Vignette”, even if the kiosk at the incoming border (Calafat) is obviously closed and people are looking at it curiously and driving on. If I ever drive in Romania again I will figure it out. Holy cow, you can buy them online. Learn something new every day.

I should mention, there were human interactions in Romania. I had not seen our friends in Craiova last year, due to lack of time, and this year, I didn’t see my friends in Iasi. But I got to speak in English with Andrei in Craiova, who will be 8 years old next month, and I got to meet Lara in Bucharest, who is four months old. Andrei’s uncle, Cristi, took me to a small museum in a house in Craiova, the morning that I left for Bucharest. This is Museum Week in the schools, and every place was filled with mobs of very young schoolchildren on field trips. That was the only generically touristic thing I did in Romania. Visiting with friends was the goal.

On Wednesday, I drove off to Nessebar, Bulgaria, a Black Sea Resort with a World Heritage Site.

I arrived at the Ljubljana airport around 10 I suppose. I had to go between two desks to pay for baggage. The plane left 20 minutes late, around 12:30. They had picked up all the passengers from a canceled flight to Pristina. Pristina was completely fogged in but that no longer matters. The flight out of Pristina was curious, and probably the shortest scheduled flight I’ve been on: we were over Skopje in 10 minutes, and the next 10 were spent positioning ourselves over the runway to land.

Filip was there to meet me. We picked up Goran and went to a cafe and sat and talked for what, four hours? I hope I’m not being mean, forcing all these people to speak English for so long. I met Goran and Filip and three other of their friends at Lake Ohrid in 2008: he was captioned “Boy with a small turtle” in this photo from that trip.  He is decidedly not a boy any more:  a couple of years after I met him, he decided he would become a bodybuilder. He has dedicated his life to that. His arms are bigger around than most of the legs in the world, at least before mere obesity became the defining body characteristic of poverty.

Traveling of the tourism variety really is hard work, all that lugging suitcases and walking up tower staircases and transferring between underground stations.  But we extended this vacation to start a couple of weeks earlier so I could meet up with coworkers in Kiev and Szczecin.

I spent the rest of the day in Ljubljana doing lots of walking. I had a nice coffee, and elsewhere a greasy burek. Neither place would change my 50€ note, but their credit card machines both responded to my watch, which the first time they’d ever seen that. I went to the little Galerie Moderne instead of the massive National Gallery next door. Across from it I walked into a pretty Orthodox church. I walked back to the airbnb to get my bag out of it so that the next people could arrive, and took it to the train station which had lockers. (Another disadvantage of airbnb compared to a hotel.)  All the while, since the airport bus didn’t run late enough on Sundays, I was trying to get taxi companies to write back to me, making sure mine to the airport would actually be pre-arranged, after the experience with Ray’s earlier in the day.  I saw many picturesque things, including a wonderful portal in front of their parliament building featuring statues of naked Slovenians in all walks of life.  It was across from this strange pair of buildings that looked like other buildings had landed on top of them.  (One is a bank, the other is an energy organization.)

But the highlight of the walking around was deciding to kill a bit of time before dinner with a little walk in their little Tivoli park. I immediately discovered that there was an entire hill with a trail network just behind it, so I went into that as well. It’s much more extensive than is shown on either their or Google maps, but there was never an issue with getting lost. I got to Julija, the restaurant I wanted to go to, at the time I wanted to be there. But alas, it was fully booked. D’oh! I went to another restaurant nearby which had gotten so-so reviews. This meant that it was almost entirely empty. So empty they could easily accommodate an impromptu party of 13. The goulash was nice and spicy, but it was pretty second-rate overall, especially the canned beans in the salad.

My taxi driver was named Ottenheim, and was driving for income supplemental to his intended career of writing children’s books with his wife. I wished him the best of luck, and entered the airport, where my plane to Kiev, scheduled to leave around 11pm, actually took off around 12:30.

As with all my visits to Kiev except the first, I was greeted at the airport by a prearranged taxi. But this time it was about 4am. Poor Oleg, staying up that late. I slept late, and got into the office around 1pm. People there work late anyway, it wasn’t much out of the ordinary. They have to work late so they can be in meetings at 7pm which are at 9am for the people in California that they work with.

The week was very routine and businesslike, I got to work every day around 11 and left every day around 8. When I am in Kiev, I work harder than I do anywhere else. There are very few distractions, and I can just sit there and design or code or debug or whatever for hours on end. And it’s good to get to better know the other people that work on the same code, and to talk through issues with a few of them.

There are many restaurants near the hotel, and I ate at a Georgian one, a Turkish one, an Indian one, and one which serves only dried fish and craft beer. There seem to be more Georgian restaurants than ever — even the Turkish restaurant served khachapuri. I tried to go to a Crimean one (twice) but they close early and are very popular, and two attempts were thwarted. For breakfast, an Israeli chain “Aroma” had opened up, which had fresh OJ, so I went there three times. I like Greguar, the hotel I stay in, because there is a washing machine in my room. I can wash the clothes I was wearing as well as the ones I had worn. Kiev was quite cold — one morning it snowed — but all the indoor spaces are nicely toasty.

On the last day there was a party celebrating 10 years of cooperation between Avid and Global Logic. It was in downtown Kiev, the area we’d visited in 2009 as tourists. It was a bit loud and obnoxious — there was either a cover band playing or a reverby DJ speaking Ukrainian loudly the entire time. The food was sufficient but not inspired. But it was fun to talk to people, especially after they got a little drunk. On the 45-minute walk to the hotel, which passed by various Kiev attractions, I found a very cute little restaurant called The Life Of Wonderful People, and spent my remaining Ukrainian currency on a drink called a Penicillin. I want to go back there for breakfast next time.

I got up early, and Oleg took me back to the airport. My plane to Berlin left only half an hour late. It looked like I would be walking down a jetway to the plane attached to the gate, but no, we were routed onto a bus, and taken to another plane out on the tarmac.

Ljubljana is a charming place with more restaurants than tourist attractions. Like San Francisco. The first night, we ate at Gostilna Krpan, a fish restaurant whose menu is only for reading. When it is time to order, the waiter comes to your table and shows you, on a platter, the fish they have tonight, and talks about what other dishes are good, and gently discourages you from whatever you might have been planning to have unless it is in top form that night. Maybe the best approach is just to say “Feed me.” He also recommends the good wines from Slovenia. We did not have room for dessert, but small glasses of blueberry grappa and herbal digestif were offered after the bill was paid. The waiter turns out to be the son of the owner. His sister made the grappa. The best restaurants are the ones with drinks with the staff, afterwards.

The following day, we went to Gostilna na Gradu for lunch, one of the many perfect dining places around the world which use mostly local ingredients but oddly have no geography the way Sam’s Casa de Goulash would. Beef tongue with Parsnips started us off. There were chive sprouts on things, or maybe chia. The scampi in squid ink on corn looked like huitlacoche. Visual puns are always found at such places. So is Pinot Noir. It was not expensive, by the standards of the breed. Of course it was excellent; excellence is in the root class of such restaurants.

We walked around town after lunch. Came back via the south end of the castle, not much to see there. The temperature continued to hover slightly above freezing.

On Sunday morning, Dave tried using the “Hopin” app to get me a taxi to the Postaja (bus & train station). “Here’s hopin’ that some driver will accept our request.” None did. The bus is much cheaper than a taxi to the airport (4.10 vs. 25). There wasn’t a taxi to take us to the central station, though. We walked. I got on the bus. On Sunday, the bus schedule to the airport is much curtailed. Dave stayed behind, for a later flight to Kiev, where he will work for a week. 

Just as the true San Franciscan will tell you to forget the Golden Gate Bridge and go see the Wave Organ, the true Münchner will tell you that Oktoberfest is pretty wrecked with English and you should really see Starkbierfest.

It is like a small Oktoberfest, but attended by few tourists from beyond Bavaria. The beer is not bad. This is ironic, because the story of Starkbierfest, as told by Dennis (our host), is this:  the local monks petitioned the Pope, some centuries ago, for permission to serve a particular beer during Lent. The sample which they brought to Rome was improperly made and improperly stored, and transported a long way, and when it was finally presented at the Vatican, it was so wretched that its consumption was regarded as compatible with the spirit of abnegation which characterizes the Lenten fast. Therefore, it is allowed to have this “Strong Beer” between Ash Wednesday and Easter, and “Starkbierfest” celebrates this.

Other than the history, there is not much self-denial in evidence. There is much noise in evidence. Many knees dancing, between Lederhosen and Dirndl and tall socks. Many knees eaten, which they call Schweinshaxen. If anyone out there has a kneecap fetish, it will be well served by sitting on the benches and watching the people jumping around on the tables, to some combination of cover band and DJ.

The conquest of a people is complete when their kids don’t distinguish the culture of the conqueror from their own: All the songs but one are 80’s-90’s rock radio USA. The one surviving German riff is that which cues drinking.

The Münchners clink glasses on the bottom — how does that square with the theory that the gesture derives from tipping wine into the other’s glass to prove that it is not poisoned?

Thursday, a friend came from Konstanz to visit us. We met Duje in Lisbon not so long ago. He approached us in a cafe because he hadn’t seen people writing post cards before. We have kept in touch. On this occasion, we walked around in the drizzle after tea and went to the art gallery “Pinakothek” which had a bunch of modern stuff and no stage lit black bits unless you count some of Mark Rothko’s more Black Flag Logo-inspired works. It’s always nice to tour a gallery with someone who has training in art.

On Friday, we took the Flixbus to Ljubljana. If you order on line from Flixbus, use a throwaway email; they will write to you every day, as if riding buses was what you lived for.

Aer Lingus wouldn’t let me check in on line and they wouldn’t answer their phone.  St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland. They couldn’t get us a window seat at the airport.  Their medium level boss at the counter in SFO said that on-line check-in is only available to people who book through Aer Lingus, not Expedia.  But, Expedia is the only place where I could buy the ticket with the 17 hour layover.  I wanted a long layover.  The best the Aer Lingus website would have done, would send us out at 6 AM on Tuesday.  Not going to do that after dinner and socializing.  At least they seated us together.

The airplane we got on to Dublin had presumably just arrived from there.  A video was still playing; it illustrated to the new tourists how to drive on the right and keep American policemen from shooting you.

Arriving in Dublin 2 days after St. Patrick’s Day is like all those people who are on arriving flights to eclipse spots when we are just leaving.  Life goes on, but they could have moved their visit up a day, right?

We stayed, during our 17 hour layover, at the Travelodge Airport South.  Same as the last time, or one of the previous times.  However:

In the elevator, a traveler chat:

“Just back from the weekend?” he said.
“Going to Munich tomorrow, where are you headed?” I said.
He said something Irish-like for, “I live here.  Temporary Accommodation.”

I am not sure what this portends in a civilized country.  In America, long term guests mean you are in a hotel that caters to people whose meth labs have burnt down. I avoid weekly rate hotels, unless they are clearly next to business parks and the residents look like George Clooney.  It may be that here in Ireland, SRO hotels are respectable because the people are respectable, or at least don’t have guns.

Anyway, nothing bad happened.  TripAdvisor would have told us.

There were green and orange balloon garlands still up everywhere.  The Irish flag is conciliatory in that respect, but in America St. Patrick is strictly green.

The main object of our visit, besides its being the cheapest available flight, was to see our friend Samuel, whom we met on the West Bank tour some years ago.  He has now finished school and been admitted to the bar.  I realized on the way to Munich, that I forgot to take any photos of him.  He hasn’t changed any.  Shorter hair, still a handsome devil.  Devilling is what they call his job, polishing up the handle of the big front door for a practicing attorney who is called his Master.  He speaks to judges about postponements and serving papers.  But, speaking.  He’s barrister-bound.  His debating years have paid off and will in future.

His girlfriend lives in London.  The same day we flew in, Samuel flew in from London where he had seen the rugby game Ireland/England with her.  Ireland won.  That outcome had been noticed by decorators of the shop windows downtown.

Samuel suggested that Dave and I go to the National Art Gallery on the following day, while waiting for our afternoon flight onward.  We did that.  The highlight for me was seeing The Gleaners.  I suppose that must have been in one of my parents’ picture books, because I have known that painting for longer than I can remember, and its social significance and all, but, I never actually thought of it as being a real painting.  It was a page in a children’s book that you finger through.  Seeing it unexpectedly on the wall was like seeing your elementary school teacher in the supermarket.

Samuel had pointed out that there was a Caravaggio there, by way of encouraging our attendance.  It’s true, they have “The Taking Of Christ”.  It has affected their minds, because the other paintings they have from artists of that period — especially the ones with stage lighting and black backgrounds — are compared on their captions with Caravaggio.

It is interesting to reflect on the kind of world it was, when the police would be trying to arrest someone who was in truth a public figure, and they had so little idea what the man looked like that they had to pay somebody 30 euros to kiss him.  It’s like, Javascript and Load Images were always off.

The faux Caravaggios were more interesting, for example their Guercino.  The Getty has recently restored this painting, so the Internet is teeming with a lot of news.  The associated museum label exemplifies Church of Rome revisionism and denial.  The official explanation is that Jacob is blessing somebody’s sons, with the symbolism of the right hand positioning and on and on,  but what we see is an old dude who has been surprised in flagrante by dad.  The expression of the son in front is that of one trying to decide whether to spit or swallow; we’ve all seen that enough to know, right?

But the story had to be recast for a family museum.

After that we went to the airport.

Long ago, in a country far, far, away, there was a pod at a high school in Sebastopol who engaged in mildly criminal activities of the sort which are tolerated among white people, and one of them went to a summer camp and met a counselor of the fun loving randy sort who would be pilloried in the press in our more enlightened times; and when this counselor got a little older, he went to work for the music software company “Opcode”, and his band would have parties at the house of the company owner and the camp people, now suitably 18-ish, would come, and bring girls whom they had met on the primitive social network they had established with no money provided by Russians or Elon Musk or anybody, which is now physically impossible even though the Flat Earth no longer is, and that is the received aition explaining how this group of 16 people stopped at the Dutch Flat Hotel on a snowy evening two decades later.

Doug, from the Opcode side, has meanwhile married Hind, who is a mad cook. Hind cooks large. It would take a flock of chickens even to eat the vegetable peels when she prepares a feast. I suppose that back home in Lebanon, there was such a flock. Those chickens would have been busy for a few days, just to lay the eggs to make the butterscotch pudding when she took over the hotel kitchen. Justin likes custard and it was his birthday. Well, a month after his birthday.

Caramelizing sugar is quite an art. You really have to have everything be ready at just the exact right moment, and there were a lot of distractions with 16 people wandering in and out of an unfamiliar kitchen. The caramel turned into a brown blob reminiscent of the Elephant’s Foot formation at Chernobyl, but it was eventually broken up and persuaded to go back into solution with the egg yolks and milk. You can’t go wrong with milk, eggs, sugar, and half a box of cornstarch.

Other people brought bits and pieces, but I told Justin that the new rules of pot luck are:

Rule 1. If you ask Hind to bring food, don’t ask anyone else to bring food, and
Rule 2. If you ask Tollef to bring his bar, don’t ask anyone else to bring alcohol.

The snow outlined the branches like a Currier and Ives. Or, I guess in this century you would say Thomas Kinkade. Well, last century. Who paints pictures of horse-drawn sleighs in snow banks in 2018?

On St. Patrick’s Day, we went for a walk through the snow to one of the town’s many cemeteries. Dutch Flat now has only a few hundred retirees and remote workers in these post-Kinkade, pre-war years, but in Currier and Ives days, when the railroad was being put over the Sierras and gold flushed out of the hills with giant hoses, there were several thousand. Mostly Chinese, says Wikipedia, but I didn’t see their graves.

That was the start of our vacation. On Sunday, Dave and I drove down to San Francisco and got on a plane.

We are getting ready to leave the Bay Area for seven weeks. We have taken over the Dutch Flat Hotel for Justin’s birthday party, and tomorrow we will fly to Europe. After a week of settling in, I’ll do some work in Kiev and Szczecin, Ray will tour Bulgaria, and we’ll both go to Paris to see a concert and celebrate Doug’s birthday. Then we’ll make our way to southern Sweden to watch Doug perform a couple concerts. A few days later, we’ll fly to Haiti, visiting our friend who works there. He will get married a few days later in North Carolina, and we’ll do a little Appalachian road trip for the following week.

We’ll try to keep you up to date with our adventures as they continue.