The Continuing Adventures of Dr Dzoe

Getting everyone up and out in the morning can be quite a challenge.  So much so that I’ve gotten in the habit of taking short journeys in the mornings until everyone is ready to go.  (By this you should note: Dad still has the most stamina for tourism, something I was wondering about now that the kids are all in their twenties and the years are growing on my own roster.  Go Dad!)  This morning, Andy and I walked to the Imperial War Museum, a rather excellent museum containing tanks, planes, really big guns, and various exhibits about Britain’s wars from WWI to the present.  Here’s Andy with Montgomery’s tank from WWII:

Then it was off to lunch, and then one of the great tourist sites in the world: the Tower of London.

One of the things that makes the Tower of London such a great tourist destination is that it has some of the best tour guides in the world.  The Beefeaters, or Yeoman Royal Guard, are all retired sergeants from the British army.  (Well, some are former marines, navy men, or airforce.  But traditionally they were army.)  They do a terrific job giving tours that focus on the gorier parts of the Tower’s history, with detailed descriptions of the more gruesome beheadings that took place.  Here’s the one that gave us a tour today:

Now there’s one thing you should know about this guy.  He was showed up in a most embarrassing manner by a certain American tourist.  See, the guide mentioned that Henry II was Edward I’s grandfather.  Silly him, everyone knows that Henry II was Edward I’s great-grandfather.  Which a certain uppity colonial told him (while in a break between stops – that colonial isn’t completely uppity!).  The guide had his doubts, but a quick perusal of Google shows that the colonial was right in this case.  Hooray for America – we know more about British history than the Brits.  (Well, some of us do, anyway.  Some of the more obnoxious of us who love nothing better than to correct a tour guide!)

Then it was off to St Paul’s Cathedral.  This is my second-favorite building in the world (the first is the Taj Mahal).  I loved the trip – a quick dash up the spiral staircase to the dome, a quick descent down to the vault under the cathedral.  Alas, no pictures – they wouldn’t let us take any.  But we paid our respects to Lord Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, both of whom are interred here, and I basked in that lovely white marble dome.

We went back to the hotel for a short break, then it was off to the first of the plays for which we have tickets this week.  “Much Ado about Nothing,” featuring David Tennant and Catherine Tate as the leads.  If you are of a certain geeky disposition, you’ll know that these were the leads in the British science fiction series “Doctor Who” a couple years back.  We Dzikiewicz’s are of such a disposition – the girls in particular have a crush on Tennant – so this was a real treat.  It didn’t hurt that the production was absolutely marvelous.

Note: you won’t see many pictures of Diana in this blog.  She’s here and having a good time – I assure you!  (She’s smiling next to Kate in the pre-cropped version of this picture.)  But she doesn’t like having pictures of her posted online, so the couple of times she’s appeared here, it was with her express permission, for which I am grateful.

Today we went on the first of our day-long guided bus tours for sites near London.  First stop, Stonehenge!

It was a dramatic cloudy day, just the thing to imagine all those ancient Britons dragging rocks across the field for whatever reason they dragged all those rocks.  We had a grand time.

And here’s a Kate-and-Diana henge, visible through the stones:

Then it was a matter of who could do the best impression of the frowning stone.  You tell me – who wins?

Then it was off to Salisbury, a town near Stonehenge, where they have a terrific gothic cathedral and plenty of Elizabethan architecture.  In fact, Kate looked at buildings like this one and said that she always thought that kind of thing was just a spoof in amusement parks.  She found the real thing to be quite disorienting!

I particularly like the way that the British include a little modern art with their ancient buildings.  They had several plastic statues of modern folk around the cathedral.  Here’s one of my favorites:

And here’s the modern baptismal font, complete with reflection of the cathedral ceiling.

Interesting factoid: William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, was a teacher at a boy’s school in Salisbury.  Yes, that’s right.  Lord of the Flies was inspired by its author’s time spent teaching young boys.

Then it was off to Bath, including the Roman baths there.  Where, interestingly, we ran into our guide from the Jack the Ripper tour last night.  (Good thing too – he owed me a piece of candy for knowing who the current Duke of York is, which he paid off today.)

Here’s the baths, with Kate in the foreground:

But my favorite thing that happened in Bath was when we hit the gift shop.  There was a copy of a guide of the Bath Fashion Museum.  Fashion museum, said Diana?  We still had forty minutes before the bus had to leave, and it was only a ten minute walk to the museum, so Diana and I put on our rocket boots and sped our way through the lovely Georgian streets of Bath.  We did a mad tour of an exhibit on movie costumes, including the following from Young Victoria:

Then, confident that we had twenty minutes left, allowing for a leisurely wander back down the hill and a visit to the Bath Abbey (where Julie, Andy, and Kate went instead of the Fashion Museum), we turned a corner and found – there was another whole floor of period clothes!

Yes, we did that floor.  Yes, we picked up a book for Diana in the gift shop.  Yes, on the way back we did a quick pass through the abbey.  And yes, we made the bus on time!

I do love adrenaline siteseeing!

It’s our first full day in London.  And what did we do today?  I’m glad you asked.

As usual, I woke up early and had to GET OUT AND DO SOMETHING!!!! So while all the lay-abouts were lying in, I went on an early morning walk to Hyde Park.  No great pictures, but I had fun.

We all gathered for breakfast at 10.  (Well, Julie and I had eaten earlier, before I walked and she decided a little more sleep was in order.  But we sat with the kids while they ate.)  Then it was off to the Victoria and Albert Museum of Design.  I got a chance to let out my inner peasant:

The V&A is a terrific museum.  The first time I went, I didn’t know quite what to expect.  I mean, a museum of design?  Really?  But the place bowled me over.  It’s full of strange statues, medieval tapestries, unusual ironwork from around the world, and just about anything else to surprise you.  As Andy described it, every time you turn a corner you’re likely to run into something weird and completely unexpected.  We all loved it.

Then it was the Natural History Museum, which is right next door.  Ooh boy, was it crowded!  Julie seemed to want to roll up her sleeves and kill someone.  Probably me.

But we still had a great time, though in the butterfly exhibit, Kate was attacked by a particularly vicious butterfly.

But an unfortunate note: Diana is fascinated by clothing and costume, but the clothing gallery was closed for renovations at the V&A.  Kate is fascinated by dinosaurs, but the dinosaur gallery was closed for renovations at the Natural History Museum.  Some days are like that, even in London.

Then it was time for the Science Museum, something that Andy likes to visit.

We then grabbed dinner (nothing particularly noteworthy), then Julie, the girls, and I went on a Jack the Ripper tour.  This was a guided bus tour focusing on the darker side of London, followed by a walking tour through Whitechapel where we visited the places where Jack the Ripper made his kills.  There really isn’t much left from those days (the site of the last and most brutal killing is now a parking garage, though at least it’s reported to be a haunted parking garage), but the guide was superb and there was an eerie feeling from walking the streets where Jack walked.

At one point, the guide was talking to us, describing one of the killings.  Julie and the girls happened to be standing next to him, so I started snapping pictures.  Suddenly, he turned to me and said, “Are you a newspaperman?”  (And with the Murdoch scandals leading the news, right now reporters in London are about as popular as old Saucy Jack.)  We got that resolved, but there was that strange moment of confrontation.

Of course, there does seem to be something about Whitechapel that brings out the worst in some people.

I’ve been to London twice before.

The first was the summer of 2001.  I was on a business trip to Dublin and arranged a lengthy layover in London.  The eight hours I was there allowed me to see the Tower of London, St Paul’s, ride the London Eye, visit the Churchill War Bunker, walk through St James and Hyde Parks, passing by Buckingham Palace, and almost get beaten up by a punk for taking his picture.  A busy day!

The second time was fall of 2003.  Julie and I spent four days in London and another four driving through southern England.  We visited a great deal more of the sites and had lots of fun.

This time, we’ve taken the kids.  Yesterday was our first day here.  Not surprisingly after a redeye, Julie and the kids were fairly jetlagged, so once we had lunch they all collapsed in the rooms for several hours.  But not me!  I was off, walking past Buckingham Palace (there were tons of tourists), wandering through St James Park (there was a brass band playing Gershwin that I tarried to hear), visiting the Guards Museum (nice uniforms and stuff, not terribly noteworthy), passing through Trafalgar Square, wandering through Whitehall down to the Thames where I saw Cleopatra’s Needle (an Egyptian obeslisk: Julie and I visited it’s twin in Central Park a couple weeks ago), and passing by Big Ben and Westminster Abbey.  Here’s Cleopatra’s Needle:

and here’s Big Ben:

I got back to the hotel around 4:30.  Julie and Kate were up for some wandering, so we set off back to Westminster Abbey and Big Ben.

Then dinner with all.  Andy was still tired – he hadn’t slept on the plane at all.  So Julie, Kate, Diana, and I went out and saw Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, a most delightful and cheesy haunted house, and rode the London Eye.  Here’s some pictures.

It was an odd weather day.  When I had been out on my solo walk, it alternated between partial-cloudy and light rain.  When I got back to the hotel, Julie wouldn’t trust my weather report.  Looking out and seeing clear skies, she said she’d risk going out with no raincoat or umbrella.  Cue the rainstorm!  But by the time we went for our post-dinner wander, the sun had come out and the skies were blue.  There remained just enough clouds for rainbow fragments and strange coloration.

But all in all, a great start to what should be a great trip.

Julie and I are both in need of new clothes for the Egypt trip.  Our shopping experiences go like this:

Julie:

• Spend several hours on the web deciding on a store that has just the right collection of clothes.  Narrow it down to three choices.
• Spend several more hours picking out boots.  Order five pairs in various styles and sizes.
• Go to stores at two malls.  Reject first store out of hand.  Spend an hour in second store picking out several hundred dollars worth of stuff.
• Go back to second store two days later.  Pick out another several hundred dollars worth of stuff.
• Delivery guy comes with boots while at mall.  He’ll bring them again tomorrow.  Tragedy!
• Agonize over purchases.  Decide that a couple of items aren’t right.  Bring them back to store.
• Boots arrive.  Pick out favorite pair.  But there’s a problem: they fit too well.  (Joe confused: fitting too well is a problem?)
• Return all but favorite pair of boots.  Determine that can return them within a year if perfect fit turns out to be a disqualifier.
• Wardrobe ready, for now.

Joe:

• Notice that the JC Penney website is having a sale.  Favorite washable silk hawaiian shirt is only $20.  Order a dozen in various colors and patterns.  Get free delivery.
• Shoes are no problem: last time I bought favorite shoes, I got two extra pairs to keep in closet for when the first pair wears out.

As I’ve noted here, my big Mixx adventure is at an end.  It was a terrific experience, but it’s over now.  And as of now, I’m done with UberMedia, the current owners of Mixx: my employment with them ended on this past Tuesday.

So what’s next?  Time for a vacation!

For the first time in years, decades, I’m going to take a summer off.  And at the end of the summer, I’m going to figure out what to do next, which mostly means to find or make an opportunity to do another CTO-like thing.  (I really enjoyed being Mixx’s CTO.  I loved the start-up life.  I want to do it again.)

So what exactly am I going to do with these great gulfs of time stretching out over the next couple of months?  Well, it’s not going to be a leisurely summer.  So far, I’ve got plans to do the following:

– Travel.   Julie and I are going to New York for a couple days next week to see Sara, Marjorie, and Gary.  In mid-July, we’re taking the family to London for a week.  And in October, we’re going to Egypt – I’m really excited about that one.  And we’re still thinking about fitting in one more trip in August or September, possibly a road trip somewhere.  And there’s plenty of day-trips that I want to take.

– The beach.  Gonna spend lots of time at our beach house, and a lot of that time sailing on the Chesapeake.  The week of the Fourth of July, of course – that’s a family tradition.  And we’ve got guests lined up for two weekends in September.  And the kids have guests coming too – Kate had some friends to the beach last weekend, Kate and Andy are having friends over the Fourth, Diana is talking about having friends down sometime.  I’m sure we’ll schedule a lot more time at the beach, though I’m not sure when.

– Bunches of web projects.  Julie and I are putting together a website for a friend who is launching a set of rules for miniature wargames.  I’m building another site for a stealth-mode startup with some friends.  I’ve got yet another friend who is working on an online game that I’m going to help.  Julie and I have a few other ideas that may or may not come to fruition.

– A little consulting on the side.  I have a friend who runs a tech consulting agency.  She has a possible short-term contract that I may do some work on.  It may involve a little travel – yet another trip.

– Miscellaneous stuff.  I’ve got several thousand old photos that I’m getting scanned, and organizing them takes time.  I’m redoing a room in my house as a library and still have some work to do.  My home office is a frightful mess.  I recently got a new camera and am trying to learn to be a decent photographer, moving beyond point-and-shoot.  I’ve got a bunch of miniatures to paint.  I need to read up on the history of Egypt to make the most out of that trip.

Add it all together, and my summer off may be one of the busiest periods of my life.  What joy!

That’s the problem with waiting so long between updates: I start to forget what I’ve been reading.  There’s probably going to be more to come, but I did just remember one more, this one read on e-book:

– The Fiddler in the Subway, by Gene Weingarten.  This is a collection of feature articles that Weingarten wrote for the Washington Post.  I’m a big fan of Weingarten’s pieces, and I greatly enjoyed this book.  I had read several when they were first published in the Post, but there were plenty of ones that were new to me.  I even enjoyed rereading the ones I had read before.  Relatively short pieces, as you would expect from newspaper magazine articles, consistently entertaining, some quite moving, and all worth reading.

Later: one more, this one I read in dead-tree media, a birthday gift from Andy:

– The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely.  A book by an experimental psychologist, all about the ways in which humans are irrational and, surprisingly, the benefits that can come from such irrationality.  I find cognitive psychology fascinating, and this one was a good read.

Boy, been a while since I’ve posted one of these. Let’s see if I can still remember all of this!

Audiobooks:

– The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, and Colonel Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris.  Nice big three volume bio of Teddy Roosevelt.  Superbly well-written and researched, and TR was a fascinating character, larger than life in every possible way.  Strongly recommended in any format.

– Bossypants by Tina Fey.  I listened to this one on a trip to the beach and back with Julie and Diana.  We all enjoyed it greatly.  Funny and forthright, with the added benefit that Fey went to UVA, so we were well able to picture the stories that took place in the college chapter.

– On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers.  The latest “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie was loosely based on this, but don’t hold that against this lovely book.  A fun pirate yarn, complete with derring do, voodoo, and Blackbeard too.  The movie has almost nothing to do with the book except for the presence of Blackbeard and the Fountain of Youth.  (The book is MUCH better than the movie.)

And e-books:

– The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes.  A history of the scientists of the late 18th and early 19th century England, focusing on Joseph Banks (naturalist), William Herschel and his fascinating sister Caroline (astronomers – Caroline was the first woman in England to be paid as a scientist), and Humphrey Davies (chemist).  The book also spends a lot of time discussing how the works of these folk influenced the romantic poets such as Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.  Extremely interesting stuff, and the tales of, for example, how Europeans reacted the first time they ever saw surfing (which happened when one of Cook’s expeditions, with Banks as naturalist, stayed in Tahiti) was marvelous.  What do you mean, they’re walking on the waves?  Just for the fun of it?  How odd!  A little more focus on the poets than I would have liked, but that’s not my thing, so your mileage may vary.  One odd thing that the book brought to mind: astronomers like Herschel (discoverer of Uranus, the first planet discovered with a telescope) had adopted an old-universe model of the stars well before Darwin was born.  So why is Darwin the fall-guy for Biblical fundamentalists?

– 1635: the Eastern Front, 1636: the Saxon Uprising, by Eric Flint.  These are the next two books in a series that started with 1632, in which a town in West Virginia, by various means, has found itself transported into the middle of the Thirty Years War.  I’ve greatly enjoyed the series, and especially enjoyed these two volumes.  (I haven’t much liked some of the peripheral books in the series, and would recommend avoiding any of the series books that list Virginia DeMarce as an author.)  I particularly liked a twist at the end of 1635, one that plays out in 1636.  (Though I thought it wasn’t carried through as well as might be hoped in 1636 – all details left out to avoid spoilers.)  Certainly nothing serious, but nice, fast reads.  (I read 1635 on the plane ride to Bangalore.  It made for a terrific read for a loooong flight.)

– The Eichmann Trial by Deborah Lipstadt.  A book about the capture and trial of Adolph Eichmann, and its aftermath and the way in which it affected what we think of the Holocaust.  A nice read.

– Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.  I’m fairly certain that I read this way back in high school, but Julie wanted to read it so we decided to read it in parallel to discuss.  Fun stuff, classic gothic romance, though I’ve got to say, I don’t much care for the men in Jane’s life!

At one point on Sunday, my credit card stopped working.  I’m not a deadbeat – I swear – so I was sure that the card companies were wondering who’s the guy in India using Joe’s credit card.  (This was particularly annoying seeing that I had called my main card provider to tell them that I coming here, but I suppose I should be grateful that they’re keeping me safe.

When I got in, I called the American Express hotline to tell them to knock it off and let me start using my credit card already.  But using the hotel phone to make an international collect call to AmEx seemed nigh impossible.  So instead I used Skype to make the call.

As it happens, the representative that I spoke to was in Mumbai.  So here I am, in Bangalore working with Indians, talking over the internet to the US American Express customer service line, connecting via some network back to Mumbai, where I was speaking to an Indian rep from another US company.

Welcome to the wonderful world of globalization!

After touring, I did a little shopping.  (The family have all got their favorite India items, after being the beneficiary of many of my previous trips, but some are in need of replacing.)  Let me describe what it’s like to shop on Commercial Street, one of the major centers of shopping in Bangalore.

FIrst off, you should note that Commercial Street is the place where, when Julie visited here, she threw her hands over her eyes and said, “Too much visual stimulus!  Make it go away!”  Sure enough, there’s vast amounts to see in all directions, all sorts of color, plenty of small shops, and a wide range of humanity.

A typical street in this area is a narrow one-lane road with small shops lining each side.  People walk in the streets, dodging the occasional car, motorbike, or autorickshaw (these are three wheel vehicles that in stability and size resemble a golf cart.  I love them, but Julie, that wise woman, wouldn’t get in one when she was here).  The crowds are big, the shops are small, and the road is crowded.

But if that’s too open, if you’re feeling a sense of agoraphobia, you can always turn down one of the alleys.  Now you’re in a much tighter space, surrounded by yet smaller shops and stalls, and with even more difficulty dodging the cars.

Still, though, things seem rather open.  Now it’s time to go down the alley-off-the-alley.  This is about five feet across, there’s no more cars or autorickshaws, and the motorbikes tend to be being pushed.  But there’s still plenty of small stalls and even a few shops.

Finally, you come out and see the following mixed among the traffic:

Shopping in a shop can be fun too.  They believe in lots of service here.  Visiting one of my favorite shops, Mysore Saree, to pick up some silk (yes, Diana, I got your silk) involved sitting down on a stool at a small table, having the sales staff bring me a drink, and having other salesclerks running this way and that finding bolts of cloth that match my descriptions of what I need.  And match their ideas of what else I might be persuaded to buy.  Finally, when I’ve picked out all of my cloth, they say, “Would you like some pashminas?”  What do you know, those are on my shopping list too, so I say yes.  And they bring forth the nicest ones I’ve seen all day (and I’ve been looking), and I pick out several in different colors for my womenfolk to divide however they so choose.  (Yes, Julie, Kate, and Diana – I’ve got your pashminas.)

(Don’t worry, Andy, I found your wooden snake.  Though I think you would have best enjoyed the Bangalore shopping experience, with your taste for bizarre bazaars.  You probably would even have bought food from the street vendors, a little too daring for me!)

Special bonus picture of animals in traffic:

This was the first time I’ve seen a camel in Bangalore.  I’ve seen them in other parts of India – even rode one once.  But never before here.