next stop: københavn

Next stop on my long weekend was Copenhagen. It was a bit gloomy when I arrived in town, and as I read the hotel guide book to the city I began to worry. It had a list of common phrases in English, with the Danish translations, such as:

Excuse me, which way is ___? Undskyld, hvad vej ligger ___?
and
How much does this cost? Hvor meget koster den her?

... but that wasn't what worried me... it was this phrase that worried me:

Does it EVER stop raining here?? Holder det NOGENSINDE op med at regne her??

Yup, even the emphasis was included in the guide book. "Meh" I thought, "how bad could it be?", and so I continued on my merry way to grab some brunch. I have no qualms about recommending BarBar Bar for brunch either, the food was excellent. By the time I'd finished brunch however, it had begun to spit with rain. "Nevermind" I thought, "it'll just be a passing shower", and so I set off on a four hour self-guided walking tour. This is me at the half way mark, just before giving up:

Cold. Wet. Slightly miserable.

Consulting some more guides I decided to go back to my hotel, grab a change of clothes, and head indoors to some of the museums around town.

On my way back I passed some May Day protests, they seemed to be tame enough, but given the police presence, complete with protective head gear for the constables, I wasn't sticking around to find out. Trekking further towards the hotel I walked down a street that the Danes claim to be one of the longest outdoor shopping strips in Europe. That's fine... except when it's raining! BYO umbrella!

The Danes are masters of modern design. The Danish Design Centre provides some museum-esque exhibits of the history of Danish design, as well as an exhibition space for some of the latest pieces. Danish and Scandinavian design, whilst being modern, also tends to include a lot of wood. To force modern-ness on such a natural material they developed methods of steaming, bending and moulding wood.

It seems that the Danish design ethic is to be functional, aesthetically pleasing, and without ornamentation. From a computer-science view of the world, I like that this usually means that the objects have Affordance: that is, how the object looks, implicitly suggests how to use it. Sometimes, however, the objects were slightly abstract:

Looking at this jug reminded me of something... The beer is cheaper in Denmark than in Sweden! Time to head to a bar for a few brews.

Not content with only modern product design, I visited the Arken Museum of Modern Art. It's well worth the visit. Most of the pieces in the museum were created after 1990. Frustratingly they don't allow cameras inside. Some of the pieces in the museum were definitely worth a picture or two. I could describe them, but they really are visual things, so I wont.

The museum itself looks like a ship anchored to the nearby lake. Here's a view from the front:

That concluded my short, and somewhat soggy trip to Copenhagen. Two and a half days of long weekend still ahead of me, it was back to the airport, to fly to Berlin.

a netherlands teaser

This was always going to be ambitious. One weekend, three cities. Den Haag, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and a visit to Kinderdijk thrown in for good measure. It was good, tiring, and fun. And in the end it was easy to conclude: you've got to spend more than just a weekend in the Netherlands!

I arrived late in the evening on Friday, and met up with Carmen, Cynthia, and Roland. We had our own personal tour guide as Roland is from Rotterdam, but now lives in London. They'd been touring around before I got there, and so they met me for drinks in Den Haag after I arrived. Since the weather was good there were plenty of locals out drinking too. Den Haag has some old squares where you can buy drinks in the bars, and then take them out into the square which has tables and chairs set up. It's all very cool.

Saturday was reserved for Amsterdam. We took a canal tour that let us travel around the city at our own pace. We hopped off at the Rijksmuseum, home of many Rembrandt paintings. In addition to its' most famous images, the museum also documents a lot of the Netherlands "golden age": when trade, rather than a monarch or a religion, ruled the land; when the Dutch East and West India companies were trading and bringing back treasures from around the globe - either that or stealing them from the Portuguese!

The detail in the paintings surprised me. Some of the paintings depicted scenes with shiny metal objects, and the painter went to the effort of painting the reflection of other objects in the painting on the shiny surfaces. It made me laugh as I thought this must have been the equivalent of 18th-century gamers: always aiming to get more and more rendered realism, more pixels, more detail.

What better than to follow up a museum visit on a nice day, than with a walk in a park. With spring well and truly established, Amsterdam locals were out in force. It was so nice to see people cycling, lounging around, drinking, and generally not being in any kind of a hurry. Not hurrying also applied to the waitresses at lunch... slowest service... ever... Did we mind though? Nah, it was nice sitting in the sun.

It would have been nice to do what these locals were doing. Having wine and cheese in their very own canal boat.

The conundrum of the how long to spend at lunch - and when to get back on the tour boat to see more of the city - pushed us to keep moving on in the end. We sailed up to Anne Frank's house. This was a far more sombre affair contrasted with the Rijksmuseum. The later celebrated the Netherlands golden age, where as the former commemorated some of the Netherlands darkest years. The house tells the story of Anne and her close friends and relatives. It also explains the story of all the Dutch Jews. Of around 100,000 Jewish residents in the Netherlands, a puny 5,000 survived world war II. The quote from a holocaust survivor in the guide book accurately sums this up for me:

One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.

First impression of the house is that it is bigger than you imagine it would have been. Then it dawns: this was Anne and her seven relatives and friends home/prison for two years straight. The windows were blacked out, so there was no sunshine. And when it all came down to it, after two years in the dark, they were betrayed and sent to concentration camps. So it goes.

By the time we concluded our lap of Amsterdam by boat the sun was starting to dip in the sky.

At night the landscape changes... to a wonderful shade of dodgy red. You may have heard of the Amsterdam red-light district. Well, it's not so much a district, more like... most of the alleys and lane ways in the centre of town. Fun. Strange. Dodgy. Tourist attraction. Drug dealers. Drunks. Tits.

We didn't stay too late in Amsterdam because we wanted to avoid having to catch the night train back to Den Haag (which stops all stations).

The next day took us to Rotterdam. The most modern of the three cities, mainly because the Germans destroyed most of it in 1940 when they invaded. This has liberated Rotterdam from heritage that might have stopped them building interesting looking things like these apartments:

Bizarre aren't they? I'd love to return and see more of Rotterdam's modern architecture. Time constraints meant we had to move on, catch a boat, and see the most quintessential of all Dutch symbols.

That's right, no whirlwind trip to the Netherlands would be complete without a trip to see some windmills. We visited Kinderdijk, a world heritage listed collection of 16 windmills including one we could go inside and check out 17th century engineering.

Ingenious design really: the wind turns the wheel, which turns a drive shaft through the middle of the building. This turns either a worm drive type arrangement, or a water wheel, to move water from lower ground to higher ground. This allowed the Dutch to move flood-water out of the fields into the canals and rivers quicker that it would naturally drain. Fields were back in production quicker after heavy rain. If only Australia had this problem! You can solve flooding with 17th century techniques, but there is no solution to drought.

All too soon it was time to head back to the airport, with a vow to return.

stockholm in a weekend

Not last weekend, but the weekend before, I went and visited Stockholm; Sweden's largest city and capital. From my Australian perspective it's funny that the largest city is the capital - seems like it's getting everything its own way. Makes you realise Canberra is an anomaly, but we already knew that right? :-) Anyway, the Swede's are quite generous when it comes to "the youth". In Sweden you are a youth until you are 25, which means that I get discounted public transport tickets - and even better: discounted airfares with some of the Swedish airlines. Invited to a party in Stockholm, I checked the airfare, and it's less than $200.00 Australian. Going to Stockholm for the weekend was a no brainer.

Another thing an Melbourne native should get used to overseas is most big cities have a rail-link from the airport to the centre of town (Melbourne doesn't!). It shouldn't be a cause for excitement, but hell, I was anyway: the Arlanda Express took 20 minutes to hit Stockholm Central (40km away), and most of the way it was travelling at around 185km/h. (Possibly the fastest I've been on land?..)

The party was fun. Met a bunch of people from work and elsewhere - both Australian and Swedish. And also an Aussie couple that had become Swedes! There was plenty of discussion, nachos, music and red wine. The low down is that you need to visit the Vasa and Gamla Stan when in Stockholm.

The weather gods have been favouring me so far. Awesome snow on arrival, and now only a couple of weeks later Stockholm produced a sunny Saturday for all to enjoy.

First stop when exploring Stockholm is the tourist bureau. Purchasing the Stockholm card seems to be the sensible thing to do for a weekend - it allows unlimited use of the public transport system and entry to all the museums and other attractions. It's a short walk from there to Gamla Stan - otherwise known as "Old Town". Gamla Stan exists completely on the island of Stadsholmen (literally: City Island), and until the 19th century the Stockholm was contained on the island. Given medieval towns were prone to burning down, Gamla Stan contains architecture from the 17th century onwards. This includes the Swedish royal palace which burnt down in 1697 and had to be rebuilt. The palace is still in use today as the official residence of the head of state, and it's open to visitors. It wasn't that interesting however. I should have visited the Swedish parliament (the Riksdag) instead, but I didn't know I was looking at it, even when I took a photo of it! Ooops, haha.

Stockholm city hall is an impressive brick building on the corner of one of the islands. Unfortunately the hall was closed for a function on the weekend I visited.


Wandering back out onto the streets, I almost missed the Nobel Prize museum. Don't miss it though - it is really interesting! Over head is a rail which constantly rotates profiles of each of the winners, down the middle you can read about the things that have been "prize worthy" through-out the years and the social and political context these have fitted into. To one side there is a theatrette showing 3 minute interviews with the prize winners - explaining their inventions, discoveries, or contributions in their own words.

At the back there is a space for temporary exhibitions. Currently the museum is hosting "Design4Science", an exhibition dedicated to the sculptures, illustrations, sketches and models that have helped advance molecular biology. For example the structure of haemoglobin was not known until Max Perutz built a model of it from x-ray images he'd taken. Some of the most complex ideas can be simplified by models, such as Ahmed Zewail's 1999 prize winning invention, a method to photograph chemical reactions. The video below demonstrates the concept: a laser is broken by a spinning disc with slots in it, this is aimed at a fast moving 'thing' (i.e. a chemical reaction).

Not content with finishing a day of tourism just yet, I headed to the Armémuseum. Yup, that's a funky Swedish spelling of Army. The museum documents military history in general as well as specific Swedish history. Unfortunately all the information is in Swedish! I got by, but I'm sure it's a lot more interesting if you know the language ;-)

A quintessential Swedish military innovation is moving their bicycle infantry around not by marching, and not even by the soldiers peddling their bikes, but instead the bicycles were towed by a tractor!

That's enough science, culture, and history to work up an apetite! So that night I met up with Shona, a friend from university and work, and one of her colleagues for dinner. We had Indian, and after joking with the waiter that Swede's can't eat hot food, they served up the hottest vindaloo you've ever had! We barely got through it alive. It had to be washed down with beer - of course! After a false start in a crappy bar (though it was cheap), we then hit the suggestively named Berns Salonger. Berns' is quite fancy, and with fancy came the famous Swedish alcohol prices (i.e. expensive!), but it was fun.

Sunday brought an overcast day, but that didn't matter too much, I headed indoors to check out the massive Vasa. The Vasa is a 17th century warship that the Swede's built, and then it promptly sank on its maiden voyage. In fact it didn't even get out of Stockholm! Why? This is a classic study into not being able to say "No" to a demanding customer. The King demanded a massive ship: it was to carry 64 guns, all to be heavy artillery, and 300 soldiers. Ship design in those days usually had one gun-deck, but to accommodate 64 guns the Vasa had two. Putting heavy artillery on the upper deck made the ship unstable and top heavy. The ship was to be manoeuvrable, and so it was built too narrow to support its weight. A stability test (30 men running from side to side) showed that it was unstable, but the Admiral ignored the results because the King was fighting a war in Poland and needed it immediately.

Can anyone see the parallels in software engineering here? Customer demands every feature, plus a few more; testing shows its got bugs but the customer needs the software today; deliver the software and then watch it crash!

Given that it sank, you'd expect this all to be history, but the Baltic Sea isn't as salty as other seas. The ship was well preserved in these waters, and in the 1960's it was found, lifted, sealed with plastic, and then put in a museum. It's all quite impressive and well worth a visit. It's so big that I couldn't get far enough away from it to get a good overall photo of it.

Just down the road from the Vasa is Skansen - a Swedish version of Soveriegn Hill. I was mainly attracted by the promise of seeing some bears. The promise was fulfilled: they had recently woken up from hibernation and were roaming around their enclosure, and even play fighting a bit.

There were an array of other Swedish animals from wild wolves, wolverines, elk, otters and seals, to domesticated horses, ponies, sheep and goats. The main purpose to Skansen is to preserve what life was like in Sweden before and during the early parts of the industrial age. Not that thrilling really.

After Skansen it was time to get back on the Arlanda express, head to the airport, and get whisked back to Göteborg and work for another week.

sunday in hanoi

As it turned out I did have a whole 2-day weekend, as work was delayed. Furthering my opportunities to be a tourist, one of the local engineers, Manh, took us out for a look around town. First stop was another of Hanoi's museum's, the Museum of Ethnology.

The museum attempts to preserve and display items from all the different ethnic groups in Vietnam - of which there are around 50. With such a varied landscape, from flat delta flood plains, to jungle covered mountains, you can imagine how varied the ethnic groups are too.

Some tribes operated along matrilineal lines, whereby a new married husband would live in his wife's family's home. This is or was common in parts of southern China, and so by extension some of Vietnam too. Other tribes operated along patrilineal lines whereby a newly married bridge would live in her husband's family's home. These kinds of traditions are all being eroded now as western influences take hold.

A common feature among the ethnic groups was to have a large common house in the village where guests of the village could be entertained, or indeed the village could meet and have entertainment for themselves. The different groups, however, had vastly differing designs for these common houses. One group built them very long: up to 100 metres in length, but only 6 metres wide. Another group built theirs very tall. Here is a photo of a reconstructed common house that is around 5 stories tall - pretty much exclusively constructed from bamboo and straw except for the foundations:

These common houses also helped out the local single men. At night they were able to sleep in them! A community sponsored bachelor pad?...

The best exhibition however was dedicated to life in Hanoi between 1975 and 1986. From the end of world war II until1986, Vietnam had strictly controlled economy. Central to this was a voucher system, which rationed goods. No matter how much money a person had, they could not purchase more than their allocation of a type of food or product.

There were personal anecdotes dotted among the exhibit which added a human touch and made the exhibition quite emotional and striking. Manh said that when "old" people visit the museum, often they cry when they view this exhibition. Half of Vietnam's 80 million people are born after 1975, so they don't even really remember this time. I asked Manh if the people who were lived through the period hoarded stuff - food, money, etc. "Of course!", even though they earn lots now, he said, they don't spend any money. He continued, "my generation earns and then spends." Sounds familiar : )

In those times licences were required to own radios and bicycles. If a bicycle was stolen, it could be traced by its registration! They even had number plates. Only mid-range public servants or higher could even hope to own radios and bicycles. The ration of meat for the lowest member of the public service was 400-grams a month, this increased to 4-kilograms a month for the most senior ministers.

The best students Vietnam had to offer at the time were able to study in the Soviet Union. The ultimate gift to bring back was a television! Of course other smaller items such as electric fans and clothing irons were also appreciated.

Now Vietnamese dream of owning cars, instead of just motorbikes. Another local engineer, Tung, told us that he thought there should be more cars. Mark and I weren't so sure. The streets would stop working! Permanent traffic jams would surely ensue. Tung answered that the government needed to build bigger, better roads anyway. I remain unconvinced. Then again... it rained the other day, and I was glad for a fully enclosed taxi-car, rather than a motorbike!!

Finally we visited Lake Hoan Kiem. This is a famous Hanoi landmark, with an equally as famous legend to match. It is said that emperor Lê Lợi had a magic sword given to him by a golden turtle, and that after defeating the Chinese the turtle took the sword back and took it to the bottom of the lake. Hoan Kiem Lake translates to the lake of the returned sword.

In the middle of the lake is a temple dedicated to another military figure in Vietnamese history. Trần Hưng Đạo defeated the Mongolians a couple of times when they attempted to invade Vietnam. He was well read, and especially liked Sun Tzu's "The art of war", and this was reflected in his tactics - often resorting to guerilla tactics to aggravate the enemy into mistakes.

The bridge to to the temple is a common sight in tourism brochures:

It was cool to see that even among the hundreds of tourists milling around that some locals could still find some space for a game of chess.