Rob Ewaschuk's Blog Rob Ewaschuk

/travel/ireland/Being an Immigrant

Today, I was an immigrant.

In Ireland, the term mostly applies to those from a place east of Germany, south of Spain, or west of Alaska. Since people from the "old" EU countries have been able to come and go as they please for a while, they're not really seen as immigrants. Since the so-called accession countries have joined, and many countries opted to not allow them to enter for the first two years. Ireland and the UK didn't, so they've come in droves, and been perceived as immigrants.

So, here's my story for getting my visa renewed.

In any case, my work visa was due up on December 24th. I was contacted by someone at work in October, but decided to delay, since one's passport needs to be valid 3 months beyond the end of the visa. Since my passport expires in October 2007, I decided I wanted to wait until I could get a new passport, so that I could get a full-length visa, rather than one that just ran to July. But since I was going to London in late November, I needed it for that, so I couldn't get a new one yet. The Canadian Embassy's website made reference to a certain amount of flexibility in the face of urgent travel concerns. I assumed this meant they could accelerate the passport application process, but in the end it meant that they could give you papers for a temporary passport.

Since work had told me that my visa application could go in up to the last date that my current date is valid. Obviously I didn't want to leave it quite that tight, so two weeks ago after I'd gotten back from London, I started trying to take care of things. That's when I found out I couldn't in fact get a passport in time -- it takes 15 working days, which left things too tight. So then I started trying to collect everything for the application.

The person who was helping me out at work had pasted me stuff from an Irish Government webpage, but it was neither complete nor concise. Because of this, it took a few tries to get the right stuff to her: copies of my passport's information page plus entry/exit stamps, payslips (to prove I've actually been working where my visa says I have), and a form. And a copy of my GNIB (Garda National Immigration Bureau) card. I couldn't find it last week at work, nor on the weekend at home. This is where things start to go a bit crazier.

Each time you get a new visa, you have to get a new Garda (the Garda are the Irish police force, from local and national policiing to traffic and immigration. They're large, and widely perceived as moderately corrupt and highly insular and resistant to proper internal investigations) immigration card. Since last time I got one, these cards have started costing 100EUR. But I also needed it to take a photocopy to apply for my new visa.

Last time I went to get a Garda card, I took a ticket and sat around for a while, then was called up, went through some form-filling-out, then sat down again, and later someone mangled my name and I went and got the instant-printed card. Not exactly painless, but not bad either.

This time, there was a pre-ticket line. Instead of taking a number, you now stand in a line that's about 15 minutes long with one person serving it, doing a "first pass" to make sure you're there for the right reasons, with the right documentation, etc. Unfortunately, this fellow has the job of telling people they're doing the wrong thing in a byzantine system all day long, so virtually by definition his job satisfaction must suck.

But here, we need to back up. The immigration office is not a pleasant place. I find it intensely stressful -- all the little things that you might have done wrong could get blown out of proportion here. More than anyone else you hand your passport to, these people are likely to try to keep it, or give you a really hard time. It's full of people who don't want to be there, most of whom are, like me, honest people doing good things for Ireland. It's not even clear to me why all that stuff is necessary. In a free-capital world, why should my personal capital be restricted?

So, I made it to the front of the line. The guy is sitting behind a glass panel, with a little slidy-slot thing for passing papers back and forth. He's virtually inaudible through the glass; I had great sympathy for all the people there who didn't speak English first. I tried to explain my situation as he looked up my information on his computer. He was immediately irate, asking why I had waited so long to apply. I explained that my employer had told me there was no rush, and he looked exasperated. And then I want on to why I was there -- I sorta needed a new Garda card to take a copy of it to apply for a new visa, for which I would need a new Garda card in a few weeks when the application came through.

He responded tersely that, in order to get a new Garda card, I'd need a letter from my employer explaining that they had applied for a new Visa. I said that they couldn't do that until I had a Garda card that I could copy. Then he said he couldn't do anything about it until I had filed a lost-property report with my local Garda station. I said I didn't know where that was, he asked where I lived and told me where the nearest one. Off I went, a bit frustrated, but not too bad, since things seemed to be progressing.

My local Garda station is the Kevin Street station, which I now know is "a big one." I spotted it only by the large Garda van in its characteristic white and yellow that was going into the complex. There were few signs, none indicating which entrance might be the visitor's entrance. So I went in the only one I could spot, which seemed awfully unfriendly, and parked my bike -- not locked to anything, for once, given the location -- and went inside. There was a little room with no useful sign, and an inner door that someone was stepping out of. I went in the inner door, and was promptly turned around to the unlabeled waiting room. A minute later, a little wooden window-thing slid open and I explained what I was there for. The Garda asked me to sit down, and so I stood around reading the various posters about depression and racism and rights and Garda policies and driver's licence applications forms in English and Irish. After about 15 minutes, he beckoned me over, and I explained that I had lost mhy card sometime between when I last used it to get in the country after my London trip, and, well, two days ago. At first, he was fixated on the exact time and date that I last had it, but when he realized how long the window was, he seemed to relax about whether it was 9pm or 10pm that my flight had landed. Eventually, he filled out a little proof-of-report form, stamped it, and sent me on my way. My bike was still there.

So I went back to the Immigration office, waited in the pre-line line to get a ticket to get a new Garda card. Now, he seemed to remember me when I got to the front, which was nice. He asked me for the letter from my employer, and I explained that I didn't have one because they hadn't applied for a new visa yet because I couldn't give them a copy of a Garda card that I didn't have. He replied that I couldn't take a copy of a Garda card that I didn't have. At this juncture, I'd like to point out that I don't think this man was dim, but rather that all of the circumstances -- my frustration, his frustration, the system, the glass that sat between us, and the fact that I was on a bad footing because I was applying late -- conspired to make this transaction very difficult.

In any case, I said that was true, and that I'd really rather not get one now and then have to get a new one in a couple weeks. He pointed out that it would only be valid for 12 days, and that wouldn't make a lot of sense to get one now. So he sent me on my way, and said to use a copy of the lost-property report in the stead of the Garda card copy.

So off I went.

If I could wave a magic wand, here are some things I would change:

• Clear signage at the Immigration Bureau entrance, saying what things you might be there for, what you need to have to accomplish them, and where to go to get in line
• No pre-line line. I understand the desire for some kind of triaging, but taking a ticket and sitting down is an immensely more pleasant way to have that happen than standing in a line with lots of other stressed people.
• Ditch the glass. I realize it's there to protect them, but for any serious threat a wire mesh would be just as effective, and a lot less headwrecking to communicate through.
• Big signs at Garda stations, even "big well-known" ones like the Kevin St. ones, indicating the entrance. Once you get inside, it should have a sign indicating what visitors should do. There should be lost proprty forms that you can fill out, rather than waiting to have a Garda fill it out for you.
• The process should be set up to be as unarduous as possible for "honest" types. Because anyone who can effect change in the immigration process is untouched by it (since you don't get to vote nationally until you're a citizen), I don't think it gets a lot of attention other than efforts to catch the "bad" ones.
• The document that my employer sent me needs to be corrected for our particular circumstances. (I'm working to get this done), and the misperception that the deadline is the expiry of the current card needs to be dispelled.
• All of this documentation should be found on the internet when I search for Garda Immigration and click the first link. The search engine is doing the right thing, but the web page is only basically useful.

So that's a brief trip through the troubles of being an immigrant. Who loses things. At bad times. And pushes deadlines. (All of which is to say that I recognize the debacle above was somewhat of my own creation, but, err, still.)

New Albums from the Gallery

/photos/Dublin and Morocco

I posted a bunch more photos recently, from our trip to Morocco and the Sahara and a few from around Dublin, one of which is at left -- a shoe left on the street after a stormy Saturday.

/meta/New Server

If you're reading this, something worked.

We changed servers, from OpenHosting to RimuHosting. OpenHosting was not serving all of our needs, and was running on outdated software for virtual servers like ours (A computer that simulates being several computers, so each person perceives having a whole computer to themselves).

OpenHosting had excellent support, however they screwed up a bit at the end, not knowing why we had a port apparently open. This happened to coincide with a misconfiguration of the mailserver that made it look like we had been hacked and were sending spam (in fact, we were sending spam briefly, which really sucks, but entirely because we left the front door open, not 'cause someone snuck in the back one.)

So anyway, now we're on a shiny new server. You shouldn't notice a difference, except that the wiki is down for a bit.

/life/Dairy

So, I'm currently experimenting with a dairy-free diet. Why, you ask?

Well, when I was in Morocco, I had a bona fide asthma attack. There was no denying what it was. It took a fair bit out of me, and though I think I would have been alright without it, I was more than glad to take Clare's inhaler, which cleared things up right away.

The symtoms have been growing steadily, and are primarily of a sort of congestive nature. Kind of like after drinking a nice tall glass of milk. I've cut way back on sugar (which is incidental -- there was relatively little in Morocco, which has made me want it less and diswant it more), and (also incidental, happened just before Morocco) dropped fries ("chips") on account of the fact that, if someone sat down to design a food that would be more disruptive to human health for more people, they'd be hard pressed to do so.

So, amongst all these allegedly incidental dietary changes, I was hard-pressed to order at the pubaurant that we were hard-pressed to find amongst the Friday evening pubularity in Dublin. So I ordered lamb stew. Weird.

There's a host of things that have changed as part of moving to Dublin. I think my lungs are not one of them, at least inherently. I'm told that environmental particulate standards are much weaker here, and there's certainly more diesel engines on the roads. And then there's food -- a slow slide away from a strict vegetarian diet, with increasingly common dabblings towards dead animals. More junk at work. And lots more beer, of course. And whiskey. Surely that's good for you, though, right?

The weather is different, of course. As are the housing standards, heating standards, and air exchange standards. My current place is fairly damp, with black mould growing if we don't work hard to air the place out, which is difficult because it's ground floor and street-facing, so we can only open the windows when we're around. This would be the obvious candidate, except that things were reasonably bad last winter, before I had moved in here.

So, there's plenty to try over the next few months, as I try to avoid medicating the symptoms away. Asthma's symptoms -- closure of the lung's passage ways -- seem fairly reasonable to me as a reaction to toxins. Paul's suggestion to wear a face mask at least when commuting seems like a reasonable second try. I went around trying to find a Peak Flow Meter, which gives a metric on lung health (around both a personal baseline and published expectations based on height, gender and age) to try and lend some actual validity to my efforts, but neither of the two pharmacies I found had the right thing in stock.

So for now, out with dairy. Which is in a lot of things. Between sugar, dairy and fries -- and by the same argument, crisps/chips, but that one is a bit harder to maintain since I like them more -- there's almost no snacks at work I can eat. Oh the travesty, free luxury snacks not varied enough.

/books/The State of Africa

So, I've finally finished The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence. It was one of the most eye-opening, gap-filling books I've ever read. It's something that should be read by everyone who donates money to African causes, or goes to protest concerts or considers aid issues when they vote.

It's big, and it's heavy. Meredith doesn't shy away from any of what happened, and presents Africa's recent history as a series of somewhat-interlocking narratives. It's heavily fact-based, and light on the editorializing.

There are three big things that totally changed my perspective on Africa. The scale of the corruption went (and continues to go) beyond anything I had previously understood. Many of the "Big Men" leaders in Africa shot anyone who opposed them. The more civilized ones just tortured and jailed them. Few survived the end of their reign, so they had little motive to leave anything in working order. Foreign reserves (the result of trading with other countries) were routinely transfered to offshore accounts, completely debilitating the ability of these countries to trade. Votes were suppressed, rigged, then ignored. Racial tensions were exploited as distractions, or to sow fear. Aid was stolen, diverted, or skimmed. There were no lengths to which some of the despots would not go in protecting their power and gutting the wealth and hopes of their fiefdoms.

The second, which in many ways comes first was the utter lack of educated personel in the countries as they all cascaded into independence in the late 50s. Some of them had couple dozen university-educated natives in the whole country. It's no wonder these countries collapsed in on themselves. Despite what was no doubt the immense political popularity of African independence amongst the intelligentsia at the time, colonial governments almost certainly chose an immoral path in letting these countries run themselves so quickly, though they may well have not known it at the time.

The third big surprise was France's participation, aid and abetting of the Rwandan genocide. Their diplomatic support for the Hutu leader, provision of guns, and general tunnel vision in supporting a pro-French leader really shocked me. They clung on, denying the ongoing genocide very late. Along similar but less surprising lines, I hadn't realized how much the Soviet Union and the US waged proxy battles in Africa during the cold war. It was an explicit policy of the US to try to drain Soviet resources in Angola.

It's no wonder the continent is as fucked up as it is, and sadly, having read this book, I don't have a lot of hope for its future.

Good book. Heavy reading, but an excellent summary of what's going on in Africa, and why.

/travel/Morocco

On Wednesday, I got back from Morocco. It was a short trip, just 4 days. A terrible abuse of the necessary flying. We flew into Marrakech via London Gatwick, uneventfully.

Marrakesh was pretty cool. There was a large square with lots of little stalls, and snake charmers and story tellers and musicians. It was very much a part of the local life, it seemed; the stories were in Arabic, and only a small amount of what went on seemed particularly targetted at tourists.

Nearby there was a large area of tiny, windy streets filled with people and mopeds and donkeys and the occasional car creeping slowly through. There were shops of all kinds: clothes, cloth, food, mirrors, dishes, etc. The haggling was friendly but intensive, and not surprisingly they were much better at it than I was.

The country was poor, but things seemed to be fairly functional. While it's much lower on the Human Development Index than Ukraine (124 vs 78), things seemed less broken, perhaps simply because there wasn't the obvious contrast of how things "might have been" or "nearly were". The people seemed honest: willing to take your money, but not trying to scam you out of it. I was much more edgy about being scammed than I needed to be, I think.

Given the short time (Clare and the two friends we were with stayed on for a total of a week, so they're just back today) we took a ready-made trip to the near Sahara. It was about 6 or 7 hours of driving, with a few stops along the way. Our minibus had us, two slightly overwhelmed Americans, and a pack of six gap year (between high school and uni, so about 18) Australian gals. They were fun, if slightly loud.

We arrived to Zagora just around sunset, and then rode camels for about an hour and a half into the desert, in three lines of four camels, each lead by a Berber. Luckily, unlike horses, it turns out I'm not allergic to camels. We camped in a traditional Berber tent, each on a thin foam pad.

The desert is a desperate, rugged place. We weren't really into the Sahara...the sand dunes were small, and there was parched gravel ground that they flowed on top -- it wasn't "sand all the way down" as it is deep in the Sahara. It's dry and oppressive in a way that's hard to convey. On the drive, some of the landscape was completely barren, and lots of it was barren but for a few rugged, wispy shrubs clinging to the earth. I couldn't get the notion of dying of thirst out of my head. It's an expression we use lightly, but it seemed all to real there. One of the camels was acting up (we guessed he was too young to be carrying people) and so I opted to walk for the last half hour or so, partly to see what it was like. I drank a lot of water, and felt funny later, presumably due to lack of salts.

The food was alright, but veggie options were not always available, and they were virtually always fairly plain couscous or stewed veg dishes, so I had a few meat meals, which were more tasty. Constantly being paranoid about food ("peel it, bake it or boil it") is a bit tiring.

The country is a former French colony, so my french was very handy. It was nice to give it some exercise. They seemed to understand me fairly well, and only a few of them spoke better English than French.

Every few hours (starting at just after 5am) there was a wailing call to prayer, no matter where you were. Both male and female tourists are admonished to cover knees and shoulders (and everything in between, of course). There was no alcohol to be had, at least easily, since drinking in public places is illegal. I kinda liked the lack of alcohol. It was replaced with simple mint tea (made with fresh mint leaves and a healthy dose of sugar), which they drank morning, noon and night. And when you checked into a hotel. And pretty much any other time. In the mornings, there were mopeds stacked with giant mounts of tea leaves cruising around, making deliveries. Others were loaded up with giant wicker baskets full of who-knows. In the countryside, women were seen carrying big loads of branches and stuff on their head, presumably to keep warm in the cool desert nights, or perhaps just to make a roof. Kids would run up to us, certainly to ask for money (often in exchange for "gifts" of small folded-grass animals), but it seemed also just to see us and say hello. Again, most of them were very friendly, though a couple seemed a bit aggressive (which I can't blame them for, really.)

I've very nearly finished reading The State of Africa, which is an excellent, eye-opening perspective on Africa. It changed most of what I think about the source and solution to the problems that Africa faces. I hope to review it more properly soon, but who knows if I'll find time. It was good to have read so much of it before stepping foot on that continent.

/photos/Kerry and Fire

There are new photos from the cycling trip Clare and I did around the Ring of Kerry and some others from a giant carbon-burning (but very cool) fire "performance" at the Dublin Fringe Festival last weekend.

Clare and I are off to Greece for a week. Hurrah!

/Free Via Rail Money

Thanks to Via Rail's generous delay-related policies, I have a ticket stub worth (I think) ~120CAD in "Via Rail Bucks"; half of the value of my ticket can be used against a Via Rail purchase made in the six months after the delay in question, which was July 10th.

I have no use for this, so the person with the best story and/or equivalent donation to suitable charity is welcome to it.

/travel/freighter/More Photos

I've finally posted the rest of the photos from the rest of my time on the MSC Malaga. I thought I'd done this a while ago, but apparently not. My bad.

I've told lots of stories about it to lots of people, so I sorta forget what I wrote about. After the last (truncated) entry, I basically spent the last day hanging out with the various pilots that came on board to guide us through the St. Lawrence Seaway. We got into port at about 3am, and I was told I'd have to wait 'til 9am for customs to come onboard to clear me.

At 9am, I was told a cruise ship had come in, and they got priority. I was stuck on a boat, moored in a port of my own country, and I wasn't allowed to hop off onto the land. Weird feeling.

Finally, they came onboard. Two women, one in tough boots and generally tough looking, one rather more dolled up. Very good-cop, bad-cop. They asked me a lot of detailed questions, about why I took a frieghter, etc. They asked if I had obscene material on my laptop. They searched my stuff really thoroughly, but didn't pat me down, presumably 'cause they'd have had to call in a guy to do that. Finally, they decided I was clear, and pointed me at how to get out. They sat in their van, running the swabs that they took of my stuff, and then made certain I left the port area, and had the guy at the little entrance booth place call me a cab, and off I went.

I watched the finals (IIRC) of the World Cup while eating a pizza in the Montreal bus station, and caught a bus to Ottawa to visit Kathleen.

/meta/Renamed

I've renamed my blog. No longer does it share its title with a Pixar film.

It's now called ... wait for it ...

"Blog".

Oh yeah.

/travel/ireland/The Irish Don't Either

The committed reader may recall that getting a smile from Finns was hard work. I've finally started running again, and it's pretty clear to me, the Irish don't smile much either.

They do the same no-eye-contact thing, and many seem to do the same I'm-smiling-because-I-think-you're-crazy thing. On Thursday, the only proper response I got was from a sharply dressed Indian boy, who appeared be late for school, and so was running in the opposite direction. I got a couple of reactions today, but most people dont' even look at you, and avert their eyes when they realize they've accidentally made eye contact.

I had convinced myself that my runners were too old, and combined with my iPod being hosed, running was too unpleasant. Now, my iPod is back, and away I go. Hurrah.

Yesterday we had an "offsite" with work. It was the sort of team-building exercises you might imagine it to be -- cooperation, leadership, blah blah blah. But we have pretty good input into what we do on our offsites, and this one was organized by another engineer, so we all have a good time. It's sorta funny how the people running these things seem to assume (1) we don't want to be there and (2) we're not used to working as happy team. The closing little "goodbye and thanks" speech from one of the event people was all about how they hoped we'd gained something from it all. Hah.

The offsite was in Carlingford, near Dundalk. Clare and I spent a weekend there with another couple just after I flew back to Ireland, so I knew it well. It's a really gorgeous setting, and there seemed to be some interest amongst my co-workers to go back there to do some sea kayaking.

Work is really good these days. The whole Dublin office is doing well, and we have some exciting stuff coming up that we're getting ready for. We've had lots of visitors over the last couple months, including a guy sent out to train me on some new stuff, which was great. He was a fun guy, and did a good job teaching me what I needed to know.

I found a couple of blog postings that never made it, from my trip to Ontario. They're below "Crude Awakening" or you can find them in the significant new /travel/canada category.

I've been working on an essay that I hope to submit to the Globe and Mail Facts and Arguments page, though it was rather longer than they ask for, and I like it less now that it's been shortened. We'll see.

In other news, a couple days ago I received the final, utter, total rejection to all things I applied to: I was on the waiting list for University of Victoria Law, despite having no intention of going (and I told them as much), just to see if I made it. I got the mail a couple days ago that I hadn't. My plan now is to take some distance ed economics courses from UW this winter. We'll see.

/movies/Crude Awakening

I just watched A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash. It was produced and directed by the father of someone at work, so this was apparently the first "public" screening outside of a film festival.

It was very very good. On my way down to the canteen/cafe where it was being shown, I was joking about how I'd leave after the third scientifically frustrating statement. By the time they did that (discussing the "Hydrogen economy" solution), the movie was nearly over and I was totally engrossed.

The overarching premise was this: ever since the term "peak oil" was born, shortly before the US hit peak oil production exactly as some had predicted, many countries have followed an extremely similar curve. It is apparent from various pieces of evidence that this is proceeding essentially on schedule in every oil-producing region. Moreover, no substantial new oilfields have been identified in the last ~25 years, despite intensive efforts and new technology a-plenty. I like to consider my self a sceptical person, and it didn't leave me feeling particularly sceptical. They had interviews with several people on a range of subjects snipped up throughout, and while some of what they said seemed over the top, the story seemed coherent and the evidence convincing.

Moreover, there's no reason to think that this won't at some point be the case; it's not clear when, but it's certain that the quantity of oil in the world and the rate at which we are consuming it is not so many orders of magnitude apart that we can ignore it.

The movie was pleasantly surprising in that it never conflated the resource crisis with the entirely separate (but obviously correlated) polution crisis.

There's an interesting parallel with vegetarianism here: ultimately, my reason for being vegetarian is that there are several separate arguments, each of which stands alone as a good reason. (I count among these efficiency and environmental, animal treatment and morality, and health). This movie convinces me of a second compelling reason to get off carbon.

It's important to separate the two distinct fossil-fuel related crises. Imagine two barrels, one full of water, with a padding of sand at the bottom, the other empty. The first is oil-the-resource, the second is the earth's capacity to absorb carbon dioxide without dramatic effects. Now, a couple hundred years ago, we started dribbling some from one to the other, and we've been accelerating it ever since. It is certainly unclear to me which barrel is larger; will the CO₂ barrel overflow while the oil barrel still has plenty to go? If so, our economic incentives will be naturally weak -- uncertain, global, future costs versus present, personal gains are perhaps the worst-case for the "invisible hand" to cope with. Only a very significant dose of personal responsibility and political action can help there. Or maybe the absorptive barrel is relatively huge, and we'll first run out of water to scoop up. And then we'll have to go through the painful exercise of getting the last bit of oil...err, water, from the sand at the bottom of the barrel.

However, there's good reason to think they'll actually happen around the same time: by all accounts, that oil was produced from atmospheric carbon being photosynthesized into carbohydrates from a relatively high-carbon atmosphere. The organic matter was then subducted and pressurized. Now, we're pulling it out as fast as we can, at an exponentially increasing rate. It's not surprising that the state before all this and the state after will be similar. I suppose ultimately that this system had some losses, and so some carbon is simply inaccessible, so we can't undo it all.

Several people in the movie state that a barrel of oil has the equivalent of 25,000 hours of manual labour, which is about 12 years at 40 hours a week. I don't know how they calculate it, but even if it's off by and order of magnitude, it's still unfathomably cheap "work", given the < 10USD extraction cost for most oil so far extracted. This has an interesting implications for the Drake equation, particularly f_L and f_C -- the chances that life on a planet ends up having the means and desire to communicate, and the period of time during which those civilizations live. While an abundant source of easy to obtain energy is not a strict pre-requisite, it was certainly on the critical path in the only example that we know of.

/travel/canada/Toronto to Halifax and Back

I'm sitting in a Greyhound bus, soon to depart for St. Catherines. It's much cooler than the train I was just on, for the Montreal-Toronto leg, and much warmer than the train I was on from Halifax to Toronto. In fact, it's just right.

There were no unseemly events on the rest of the train journey there, or back. I finished "Blink" and it was pretty crap, but not as crap as Tipping Point. Or maybe I was just braced for it. It had interesting stories and anecdotes and studies, but it was desparately trying to be rigorous when it wasn't. And, unless my recollection of Aeron chairs is incorrect, the author doesn't seem to know the difference between "dependent" and "independent". His word-choice is frustratingly lax, and the way he draws parallels if often dubious. I guess that's why it's called Pop Psychology, and not Psychology literature, but I wish he'd find a slightly more rigorous middle ground.

On the way there, I met an Irish girl from Galway, but who now lives and teaches in Dublin. We chatted about our various countries and their stereotypes, pros, and cons. I was surprised to find someone like that on the train. In fact, I'm surprised to find a lot of people on the train. There were single people, high-school aged couples, old couples, families. Most of the way I was sitting solo, but for the last leg of the journey, I spoke at length with a Kuwaiti-born of Indian descent studying in Canada. He had interesting -- if somewhat pessimistic -- views on the Middle East Conflict, and seemed to strongly concur when I mused about my utter lack of understanding the strategy of provocation involved in the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. We talked about oil, Iraq, Canada, I gave him a brief overview of the (largely defunct) Northern Ireland conflict, and the current status quo. There was also a fellow who could only be described as a pimp; he wore matching bright sports top and bottoms, two big gold chains with pendants, and some kind of brass knuckles with what appeared to be lion head engravings. He talked quietly on the cell phone, admonishing the other participant not to share news of his arrival. At least one other person was taking the train for environmental reasons -- her Nalgene bottle announced that "environmentalists do it for future generations."

This bus driver is doing the semi-standard announcments. He seems a bit eccentric: he's talked about the weather, the fact that we can't chat with him about the World Cup since it's over, and the interior temperature -- "Which is set to 22 degrees Celsius, for you Canadians you know what that means," he said with a light brogue, "for you Americans, that's...'nice'." Apparently 22 is the guideline from the Ontario Ministry of Transport. And traffic is light. And you can use the washroom in an emergency, but you're better off to wait until we get to St. Catherines.

I had a good time in Halifax, saw all my family, hung out on a nearby beach, each day building a more grandiose sand castle with my nieces and nephews, each day hoping the tide was coming in to provide a classic struggle of Man vs. Nature, each day being disappointed by the tide heading out. On my last evening, we went back to the beach hoping the tide would be coming up, to watch the destruction of all our efforts. We were greeted, instead, with a lively lightning storm, and eventually with rain, which probably won the race to destroy the rock-reinforced castle, and the nearby forest of sand-trees.

I played Scrabble, Boggle, and Trivial Pursuit aplenty. Two years of reading the economist have helped my history immensely, which my Econ 102 prof ("The history of economics is the history of society.") would no doubt be delighted by. I was also bested by my 8 year old neice at Boggle. Just once, mind you, but beaten nonetheless!

Tonight I'm visiting my aunt on my mother's side, and hopefully tomorrow my aunt, uncle, and cousins on my dad's side. The future beyond that is fuzzy. I fly back Wednesday night, arrive Thursday morning, and proceed directly to a wedding. Do not pass go, do not collect $100. (I played Monopoly, too, and was beaten by my sister, as expected.)

/travel/canada/Morbid Delays

The Via Rail train #60 from Toronto to Montreal is stopped. The view from my window hasn't changed for nearly two hours, and it will apparently be another 45 minutes before we're on our way.

Just after Brockville, I was roused from my sleepy reading to the train slowing, then to the smells of overheated engines. I cursed, remembering the time a bad engine made us creep into Ottawa, past whizzing cars and busses, at about 8km/h.

A minute or two passed before one of the train's flight attendants announced that she didn't know why we were stopped, but that she'd keep us apprised. A few minutes later, she kept her promise, vaguely mentioning a railway accident "ahead of us", and that the engineers would need to be relieved. It was all very underspecified, but it was going to take between two and three hours to get things sorted out.

I kept reading for a while, and then eventually started walking the length of the train, heading backwards first. When I reached the back, the vagueness became clear -- about 300m back, there was a crossing, with a couple of cars and some pilons. A few others gathered around the window filled me in on the rumour mill: we'd hit someone, maybe two, it might have been a child, they threw themselves in front of the train, that red car has been there since before anyone else got there. Why were we waiting at all; they're already dead? Why would someone do that? Why does it take so long to get going again? I put in my two cents -- procedures, trauma to the engineers, waiting for the coroner, and replacement conductors. Most people seemed pretty understanding about the whole thing. Some lamented that they continued to charge for the coffee and tea. The capitalist in me knew that was the best way to distribute what was no doubt an inadequate supply, though it did seem rather cutthroat.

I paced my way through to the front of the train, squeezing by the emptying snack carts, chatting with people as I passed. Each car seemed to have a different personality. Some had people up, standing, chatting, others had a good few glasses of wine going around. Several were quiet, some had children playing games, or irritating their impatient parents.

In the stuffy section between two cars, a fellow from Toronto had his guitar, and was strumming away quietly. He had gelled up hair, and a guitar that was well-worn, with a bit of stuff stuck to the body. Marshmallows from a recent campfire singalong, he explained without sheepishness. Just a part of his guitar's character. I encouraged him to play for one of the cars, but he declined. A young man whose seat was across the aisle from mine came into the compartment. The guitarist asked him if he knew how to sing, and the young, freckled, fluently bilingual Quebecker suggested "You Are My Sunshine," and upped the ante: He wanted to sing it to his girlfriend. Strike that, fianceé; not being romantic, he'd proposed to her last year, in a parking lot. The musician said that this was "the good stuff", true love, and all that, in that mellow, sincere way only an artist can.

I went and sat back down, to the last dregs of work that needed to be done before my vacation can begin in ernest. A few minutes later, the freckled Quebecker surreptitiously handed me his camera, and asked me to take a few photos. He and the guitarist returned a couple minutes later, and I ducked behind to take some photos. The car joined in a little, with a few claps, but not as much as I sorta hoped.

After this interlude, I started pacing back and forth, visiting the back of the train. Eventually, the morbid interest got the best of me: I had been refusing to take photos, but when some police officers were walking back towards the accident, I used it as an excuse to take a photo of the scene.

It's physically the closest I've ever been to death, and no doubt it was a fairly gruesome one as these things go. There were certainly a lot of disrupted plans, my own included, but perspective must be maintained on those lives were interrupted, or halted, far more than ours: the conductors, the victim, and their friends and family.

We're moving again now, full tilt toward Cornwall.

/travel/freighter/Canadian Waters

Thursday, 07:50

Our clocks are now as retarded as they'll get; sometime early this morning, we came around Newfoundland. And the sun came out. It's been foggy for most of the trip, coccooning me such that not only can I only walk around in basically an eight story corridor and a few rooms, but I could only see a little more than that. There were times when the front of the ship -- 190m from the decks -- was shrouded. It was like that Star Trek episode where Crusher's in some kind of temporal vortex warp light anomaly thingy, and her universe is shrinking.

Unfortunately, by the time I went up to the bridge, we were out of sight of land again. The sun is a welcome change, and will hopefully mean I can go wandering about on the deck, to see the cargo up close.

I caught my finger -- just barely -- in a door this morning. It could have been a lot worse, since that door wasn't stopping, but it just squeezed my finger out of the way a bit.

I've mostly been reading, not writing as I was hoping. The writing often hasn't sat well with my inner ear, or something, but it seems okay now. The upshot of the reading is:

Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood: Good. Entertaining, interesting ideas, well written. Lacked "point", but that's okay, it's fiction. :-)

Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell: I can only remark on the first half, which was sufficiently bad to stop reading. Full of applications of the Law of Egregious Capitization the Power of Naming Things. Unscientific. Amusingly, directly contradicted things in Freakonomics, of Gladwell said "prepare to be dazzled." The most charitable explanation I can give this book is that the only interesting things it has to say have since entered pop culture, and so all the interesting bits were already in my head. I don't think that's the case, though.

Undercover Economist, Tim Hartford: Very good. Interesting applications of economics. Piqued my interest in Microeconomics. Mostly rigorous and well-explained. Some diagrams and charts would have helped make some of the explanations shorter.

Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner: Fine. A bunch of interesting stories about "teasing" information from some serendipitous sources of data. Not always convincing, often proposed random explanations. Good stuff about how often-wrong "conventional wisdom" is, though not many tools to tackle that.

I'm onto Mythical Man Month, but just started. I'm not actually

/travel/freighter/Belly of the Beast

Since an hour or two before I woke up to in Liverpool to watch was we left bridge, there has been a steady, slow rumble. It's quieter, and lower frequency than the background noise on an airplane. Down in the base of the ship is a fearsome engine. It has sixteen cylinders, each perhaps 16 feet tall.

She burns 65 to 70 metric tonnes of fuel oil per day. The fuel has to be heated to about 100degC before it is sufficiently liquid to go into the engine. Unfortunately, between the accent and the noise, I didn't catch many of the explanations of the Chief Engineer about what various bits were.

This ship has about 2200 containers on it, and (IIRC, ICBW) 24000 tonnes of cargo. The total journey (Montreal to Antwerp to Liverpool to Montreal) is about 5000 nautical miles, or about 9000 kilometers, and they use 900 tonnes of fuel. So we have one tonne of fuel for every 10 kilometers. Which gives 22,000 container-kilometers, or 240,000 tonne-kilometers per tonne of fuel. Or 240 tonne-kilometers per kilogram of fuel. If you prefer.

I asked the Captain about whether there was pressure to save fuel, since he had mentioned that if the ship is even a little off-keel, the fuel usage goes way up. "No, not at all, it is always about speed," was the jist of his reply. Full tilt. The engine is running at 19.5 knots, but the roundtrip average is a little higher than that. He said even a small slow-down got big fuel gains. I'm hoping I can see the curve of fuel usage/km at various speeds, but not sure yet.

The whole engine thing is story told better by pictures.

/travel/freighter/Leaving Port

(It's Monday now, but my first shot at sitting at a desk to write was quickly bested by my moderate sea-sickness. :-/ )

At just before 0300, I went up the bridge. This was my first time up there. It's a large room, with its forward-side covered in windows. Myriad lights, buttons, wheels, dials, levers and screens are set facing two chairs. A few are recognizable from movies -- radar screens, a periscope -- or labeled clearly enough even for a landlubber to figure out what they are. Outside the side doors are two "wings" that stick out far enough to get a good vantage point. The sun is just starting to come up, but it's still chilly.

A man with an English accent was aboard. I wasn't sure where he came from, but he seemed to belong to the port, and was guiding us out to sea. They did the whole "repeat the command a bunch of times" thing you see in submarine movies -- "dead slow," the pilot would say, while he and the captain ("Master") stood out on the starboard wing. The captain would repeat it, then two fellows at the controls in the bridge would also repeat it. And so it would be done.

With the help of two tugboats, we navigated a lock just barely big enough -- the ship was touching one side -- and then out into the River Mersey. Slowly, we went along the buoy-marked path, until we were clear of the harbour area. A little red boat came into site, and the pilot climbed down a ladder, and hopped onto it and off he went.

Three days later, we're some 900 miles from our departure. I hadn't really realized that I've never been so hopelessly unable to see any land; even on the long slow-ferry to Newfoundland when I was young, I suspect there was always land in sight. Here, there is nothing, even when it's not foggy. The HF (High Frequency -- the frequency range that everything uses is one of the first things the crew mentions about a device; the tradeoff between distance and detail is critical) communications device that broadcasts dozens of details about our ship, and picks up like transmissions from ships within about 100 miles, ran blank. 21 people within 100 miles, and no way off. Leaving Port The swells got a little bigger last night, and pushed my thusfar slightly uneasy stomach into nausea territory, though no further. I went up to the bridge, to see who was there. There's always one person on watch duty -- though on some ships, it's two -- and this time it was Jani. He gave me a pretty thorough presentation of the controls, each with an automated version, a semi-manual override, and a more manual override. Though there's no wooden wheel to turn the rudder, there's still a strong preparation to be able to do things manually. It's interesting to see what 500+ years of solid reliability engineering does to a system, and to compare it to what I do in work every day. I'd put my faith in ships over computers. :-)

We had changed from the planned course a little bit, heading straight west for a while, rather than along the south-west line from the Irish coast to the St. Laurence Seaway. The Captain was hoping to avoid some bad weather or big waves. While I was up there, the swells were getting bigger, and the captain showed up, looked at some maps and forecasts, and went outside -- "sniffing the air," Jani said -- then angled us back towards our original course. We started hitting the swells at a slightly better angle (more perpendicular, I think).

Signs scattered around the boat reminded everyone to "retard one hour tonight". We shift timezones smoothly. The extra time is spread through three people's shifts, so Jani had to stay an extra 20 minutes. He changed the clock twenty minutes backwards, and said "That is now the ship's official time." Fancy.

He had a few duties to do: reporting the weather for the day back to the German meteorological folks, clickity click, copy to floppy, and then send as email; reseting a fifteen-minute "dead-man's" switch, to make sure he's still awake and...well, alive; calling the next person to come onto watch duty. Not much else, though. We chatted about a variety of things. I mentioned my increasing-but-still-moderate seasickness, and he said "That's good, it means you're normal." As the medical officer, he said he could give me something to help. "Only babies and midgets don't get seasick," he told me, since apparently both have an underdeveloped sense of balance. After his shift, we went to the medical area. He opened a book of problems, found "Seasickness", made a joke about how I didn't need the suppository version at this stage, and then dug out a packet of what I assume to be Gravol. It certainly put me to sleep that night. Other than doctors and paramedics, ships' captains and medical officers are the only people allowed to give morphine, and make certain other medical decisions.

It's 13:30 right now, Laptop Time. I thought we'd only retarded one hour, but when I went down for lunch about an hour ago (so 11:30, Rob's-head Time), he told me to come back at 11:30. I'm going to pop up to the bridge now, look at the official Ship Time, and then hopefully go for lunch, unless I'm still wrong about what time zone we're in.

/travel/freighter/Conversations with Crew (and Officers, too)

The crew are very friendly and welcoming. The officers consist of one Finn and six Germands, and the crew are 13 Philipinos, as I understand the divisions. They don't seem to draw strong lines between crew and officers; though they eat in different places, the officer's lounge seems to be fairly inactive, while the crew watched football, and the officers joined in.

The Ship Master is a burly man, of appropriate stature for a captain. His English is accented by comes easily, and is easily understood. He is friendly, and invited me up to the bridge to see us exiting port at 03:00. The captain was talking about how he was trying to get internet access onto the boat, but that no satellites covered the mid-Atlantic, and no company would give you an account that would work in both Europe and North America. I guess the non-stationary market is pretty limited.

The Chief Engineer is also German. He seems somewhat quieter and more surly, and has slightly more halting English, though he was easy enough to understand. He still seemed quite friendly, though.

The electrician -- one of the Philipinos -- was particularly friendly, asking me questions and answering mine. He was very careful in his questions, making sure it was alright to ask me where I worked and such. I guess when you carry two thousand containers without knowing particularly what's in them, you gain a sense of presumed privacy. He's been on boats for about 11 years, and an electrician for longer. The money is better on boats than in the Phillipines, though he said being on the chemical tankers wasn't worth it, for the fumes and other risks.

The ship's generating capacity is around two megawatts, the bulk of which goes to the "Reefers" (refrigerated containers). It's 440V AC through that stuff, 220V AC through the cabins and such, and there's a 24V DC control system. They normally generate even when they're in dock, though if they're in drydock they can accept power from land. There are two tiers of backup systems.

The ship has many signs up for procedures, and papers about various protocols (or "protokolls") lying around, with some references to ISO-9001 practices. Thers's a flowchart about waste disposal -- plastics and toxics are always separated and dumped onshore, while dumping food waste and other (nontoxic) waste into the ocean has a requisite distance from shore.

We'll have TV for about a day, if we're lucky.

The route that the boat will take is decided almost exclusively on weather and distance. Under ideal circumstances, it's six days, but more normally seven or eight. Wind direction and speed is basically irrelevant, except inasmuch as winds make waves. We're heading north, over Ireland, and then down by Newfoundland, so that we can avoid a low pressure system. The companyy that charters the boat (MSC) provides their desired route, which the captain can override if he sees fit, but then he takes responsibility for what happens.

One person's job is to control flow of water in and out of the ballasts as the cargo is loaded, to keep the boat balanced and floating with enough freeboard.

Jani, the fourth mate, works roughly 3 hours in the morning, 3 at night, and then has some other administrative work to do throughout. It seems like sleep schedules are all pretty flexible, which makes sense. And the clocks shift roughly with time zones -- some nights we'll change, some nights we won't.

During the soccer match (Angola: 0, Mexico: 0), the crew and officers were swapping tips about where to go when they get to shore: shops and parks and pubs within walking distance. I was a bit confused, since we were packing up and leaving that night, but of course they'll be back in about three weeks, and have been here several times before.

/travel/freighter/Food, Safety

After lunch (more below) I spent some time reading "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood. I'm about halfway through, and quite enjoying it, though I hope it goes somewhere, and isn't "just a dystopian story" about genetic futzing around. I'm enjoying the main character's involuntary construction of a mythology for his unintentional worshippers, including a creation myth about animals (Children of Oryx) and his worshippers (Children of Crake), and the detailed contortions he has to go through to keep things consistent.

I've brought some videos to watch, but it turned out I didn't have the necessary software to watch them. Since we're still in port, I muddled around until I managed to get my laptop talking to my phone via Bluetooth, and my phone talking to the internet via GPRS. (Thanks, Keith.) Thus the miracle of blog postings.

Then I got the safety tour. My life jacket is just above my closet, in its own special place. Seven short blasts, then one long blast is the abandon ship signal. I should go outside, and down two decks. There are three separate small-craft setups: a primary "abandon ship" covered boat, two backup inflatable rafts, and a small motorboat for rescuing me when I fall overboard.

I also got a tour of the other facilities on the boat -- a small swimming pool, to be filled with sea-water, a sauna (which, presumably from Jani's influence, everyone pronounces in the correct, Finnish way: "sow'-na"), laundry, and such.

I then had a short nap. Which turned into a long nap, and I very nearly slept through dinner. The steward was kind enough to feed me anyway, though.

Eating the Children of Oryx

Lunch started with a fairly-tasty French onion soup, proper and home-made, with a make-do piece of toast and cheese floating on it. The table had a little ledge, so your plate wouldn't fall off. The main course was fish, with potatoes and white asparagus, in a buttery gravy. That was the first time I've eaten a whole piece of fish in five years. It was nonplussing, since I've had a few nibbles here and there.

Dinner was a bit more harsh -- "Goulash" to me is a sort of stew, but in this case it was basically just stewed meat, with new vegetables, served on a plain pasta. I neither enjoyed nor was bothered by the taste, nor the concept of what I was doing, despite careful consideration of the source of that food. There was also coldcuts and some bread and cheese and such.

On my way out, I noticed that a weekly menu is posted, so hopefully I'll be able to improve my food with tactical requests to increase pasta servings, etc.

My stomach felt a bit heavy from all the tough meat, and my teeth are slightly sore with chewing (it wasn't the most tender meat, though still quite edible).

Thus far, while I'm not bothered by it, I suspect this will serve mainly to reinvorce my vegetarianism.

We were a bit late getting loaded, and the boat needs high tide to exit the port, so we're not leaving 'til 03:00 now.

/travel/freighter/Arrival

June 16, 10:30

I'm now on board the MSC Malaga. She's docked at the 4th container terminal, at the very north of the Port of Liverpool. I'm sitting on a wheelless chair in my cabin, which is, as best as I can assess, at the aft (rear) on the starboard (right) side, with a window in each of those directions.

How I got here was not how I expected.

Departure

Last night, Thursday, I finished up my last bits of work, Clare and I made a quick pasta-and-sauce meal, and we scrambled out the door, 10 minutes later than planned. I wanted to swing by a grocery store, just to have a wee bit of food. One of my nightmare scenarios was finding out that they in fact did not have food for the passengers on this ship. It's crazy, of course, but every question unasked left a story in my head, and indeed I didn't ask many questions.

We picked up some groceries -- juice, some fruit, a bag of muesli -- and went on our way. First trying to find the P&O ferry port, for which the roads were blocked off. When we got there, the woman in the booth said they didn't take foot passengers. "I called ahead, they said you did," I replied rather belligerently. As it turns out, I had been confused about which ferry company indeed took foot passengers. She redirected us to Norse Merchant ferries, which rang a bell. We headed there, eventually finding it in the twisty maze that is the fairly old Dublin port area, only to find a big dark building. Then we drove around some more, and found a booth with some people in it, and asked where we were supposed to be. Since I looked rather desparate (having neglected to have a concrete backup plan), they made a phone call or two, but told me that the bridge was lifting.

So that was that. We drove around a bit more, found where we should have gone, and then headed to my office, which was nearby. Phil was there, and was most amused by the situation. We looked through the options -- fast ferries, ferries from Dun Laoghaire, ferries to Holyhead, ferries from Belfast, but nothing was going to get me there in time. So I ended up flying, undoing some of the precious carbon savings I am after in taking this mode of transit. I flew into Manchester, departing at 06:30, and took a fairly short trainride to Liverpool.

From there, I hopped in a taxi, and tried to explain where I wanted to go, not entirely certain myself. Despite having seen the maps, the Port of Liverpool was incredibly long; a reasonably well-kempt passenger-ferry area, and then progressively more industrial and giant-sized shipping areas, down to the container terminal. I hopped out at a police guard booth, and she directed me onwards to Dock (?) #4. Found another booth, and showed some papers. They told me that I was in the right place, and so I paid the taxi (10.70GBP..ouch), and hopped out. A rickety old van with torn seating and flooring showed up and drove me to the boat.

The van dropped me right beside the front of the boat, and I stepped out beside the giant rails that the container-loading machinery rolls along. I asked where to go next, and he said "up to that gangplank there" in a thick Liverpudlian accent. I walked over to it, and climbed up.

I fear none of this conveys the utter sense of lack of knowledge of the whole thing -- where to go, what words to use, who might know things and who might not. This boat takes up to 5 passengers, and this time I'm the only one, so even to various people involved, I was an oddity or a surprise. When I came onboard Philipino greeted me formally: "What is your purpose visiting the ship?" I explained that I was a passenger, and he warmed up immediately, checked my passport, and called the First Mate.

So, I'd arrived, dazzled but definite.

/travel/freighter/First Impressions

June 16, 11:00

Distinctly rolling his Rs, the First Mate introduced himself as Jani. I asked if he was Finnish, nearly certain of it, and indeed correct. I mentioned spending time in Oulu, which put us on the right foot. He was friendly, showed me the B ("Bravo") deck where lunch will be served in the officer's mess, at 11:30. Then up to the E ("Echo") deck, where my cabin was.

He asked for the contract, my insurance papers, and my passport. He explained that he'd take copies of the first two, and the captain would keep my passport until we arrived.

The cabin is spacious but not huge, perhaps 20' (6m) x 12' (~3.5m). Its features are strongly reminiscent of my parents' travel trailer: clicking nobs on doors, no wheels on the chairs, little guards on all the shelves, all to keep everything in place. And the little cupboards have the same cooped-up-wood smell as the trailer always did.

Out my window, I can see the underbelly of the global economy in action; containers being stacked, raised, and loaded. Or unloaded into stacks, and then pulled off.

The scale of everything is incredible; the containers -- these are what seems so oppressive to a normal vehicle when they're on the back of a lorry, remember -- are moved around like small boxes. The machines lift them smoothly, like pieces of a machine I might have built from lego as a child. It's about 160 steps to the top of the largest device, name unknown, that sites near my window, doing the main movement of containers on and off the boat, as far as I can tell.

It's lunchtime now.

/travel/ireland/Sucks to my ass-mar!

The weather here has been crazy delicious. Hot and sunny, but not too hot. I've got a bit of a sunburn (but don't tell anyone I admitted it!) from cycling this weekend -- Clare and I did a gentle ride to some beaches north of Dublin. We bought some food and had a picnic, and then headed inland for the return journey, to avoid the worst of the seaside winds. I have some nice sharp lines from my cycling jersey.

While we were there, there was a man collapsed on the sidewalk. I was rather more paralyzed than I like; he seemed to have a friend next to him that could barely stand, presumably from drink. I ended up just watching for a minute or two until someone came along and relieved me of my moral duty.

Last weekend we went down along the coast south of Dublin, through to Bray. On our way, we saw a little boat getting ready to ferry some passengers off to a little island. We decided to go too, and caught the next one across. The island had a Martello Tower from the times when Napoleon was a threat to the then-British Ireland. There were some further fortifications, including what appeared to be a giant cannon pivot -- a bracing point against the wall, with a rail with about a six-foot radius centered at the pivot, presumably so a wheel on a canon could enable it to turn nearly 180 degrees.

A few weeks ago I went to my very first Rugby match. One of Clare's friends Claire (yes, she has more than one friend Claire. Keeps me on my toes. :-) ) scored us free tickets. It was pretty good -- I actually found it quite a bit easier to follow than I do when it's on TV. It kinda made a certain twisted sense, even. :-)

On Thursday, I'm catching a ferry to Liverpool, then hitching a ride on MSC Malaga, a 34,000 dwt ("dead-weight tonne") freighter. That's about half the size of a "superfreighter", so it's quite a big ship. My reasons are environmental, and out of interest. The journey will take 7 or 8 days. Freighters take on a few passengers -- up to 12, otherwise they have to have a doctor on board. There's a proper passenger cabin, and food is included.

I'm much looking forward to 7 days without connectivity. I'll have my laptop, and a bit of work to do, but that will only last a day or two. Reading, writing, and maybe even some 'rithmetic, will have to fill the rest. I'm considering doing an experiment in Polyphasic sleeping while I'm on-board, but that will depend a lot on having enough to do. I probably won't do that, but it's an interesting opportunity.

To go on the boat, I had to get a doctor's note saying I was in good form. In Ireland, the health-care system has user fees -- 50 euro, wehether you're going for a big checkup or to get a little note signed, so I decided to get a physical. And after complaining a bit about coughing and stuff, he started asking a bunch of questions, and I ended up getting diagnosed with asthma. I've read a lot about it, and I'm pretty unconvinced about the whole thing. I have inhalers now, and I'm not convinced they're making a difference, but I'll give them a run-through and see.

So yeah, sucks to my ass-mar.

/travel/ireland/Walking the South Wall

The Dublin port has two great big walls going out to the sea. The South Wall was built in the late 1700s, and the North Wall followed when the South Wall was unsuccessful at the seascaping it was meant to do. Yesterday, Phil and Clare and I walked out and back, and then had went for Italian food in D4, the posh Dublin postal code.

Dublin postal codes are big; there's about 30, I think, for the whole city. All of the low-digit ones have reputations, but the reputation usually comes from a small area. My office building is in D4, and so are lots of places I've been, and I never really grokked the whole "D4 is posh" thing. I get it now. The restaurant wasn't super-fancy or whatever, just very modern, slate-and-glass-and-white-tiles kind of thing. Food was alright. All the chefs in the Italian restaurant were Chinese -- a common enough trait in Canada, but I've never noticed it here.

I just finished ploughing through Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson. It was excellent; entertaining, interesting, well-paced. Sometimes it was a bit cheap in its appeal to geeky folks, and sometimes the explanations of geeky things aimed at non-geeky readers stood out a bit, but that's fine. Very good.

I was reading "In Praise of Slow", but I gave up. It was absolute crap. The guy was flying all over the world to try "slow food". Every once in a while he'd try to backtrack and say that "slow food wasn't about posh food", but it was totally unconvincing. Ugh.

My piano is going well, much better since I bought a keyboard (full size, weighted keys. Expensive beasts, they are.) The trick is to practice things you like. Just in case you were wondering. :-) My "When The Saints" rendition is coming along well. At a grade one sort of definition of "well".

The STUPID BROADBAND PROVIDER BT SUCKS HI GOOGLE that I'm with is taking forever to relocate me. I can't even get a clear answer out of them what actually has to be done. At first it was a week or so. Then another week or so. Now it's two more weeks, definitely done by three, and maybe, if the person I end up talking to is feeling charitable, I might get a refund for this time.

Crikey.

That is all. Back to fishing.

/travel/ireland/"Port Lairge"

I just arrived in Waterford (which Google Maps has wrongly marked with its Irish name, Port Lairge.) I cycled ~190km yesterday, making it my second longest day ever. Then today it was 15km from the B&B that I stayed in. I figured most B&Bs would be open for the season, but I ended up wasting ~10km chasing down phantoms late last night -- not fun. I was pretty tired at the end of yesterday, and I had started to get a headache, so I was a bit anxious to find somewhere. (Not anxious enough to pay 60EUR like the first place wanted, though.)

When I got here, I found the tourist office -- Clare is driving down today, and I figured we should meet there. I sat on a bench on the pedestrian street, and within about 5 minutes, an older Irish man came up to me and said "Welcome, welcome, welcome." We had a chat about where we had come from, then he said "Will I tell you a joke?" "Sure," I said. "Do you know the island of Nantucket?" Uh-oh..."I've heard of it." "Well, there once was a man from Nantucket." And a pause, for effect. "He kept all his money in a bucket; his daughter Nan ran away with a man, and as for the bucket, Nan took it!" He finished with a grin, "It's a good one, isn't it?" "Yes, but that's a limerick, I'd expect to hear them in Limerick not in Waterford!" "Well, I was born in Limerick, you see."

So I guess there is some kind of connection. I also learned that not all limericks involving Nantucket have dirty endings.

The cycling was great...I had a tailwind (very unlikely for the direction I was going), the traffic was calm and abiding, and I even got a sunburn (also unlikely!). It's a gooder, quite sore to the touch. I was riding on my smaller road bike, with almost no gear -- Clare is bringing down a couple changes of clothes for me -- so it was quite different from distance touring.

I've learned that nobody in Ireland knows the numbers assigned to roads, though in general they're marked quite well. You have to look on your map, and guess which place they're most likely to know the way to. And even that only works if there's no chance they'll direct you by the busy roads.

This internet cafe is killer expensive, so that's all for now. And I didn't bring my camera, so no photos.

/travel/ireland/A Bit Of A Follow-up

(You should read the one below first.)

I'm in a Quiznos now. It's otherwise empty. The store's only employee is from Poland, probably, though it could a Czech accent, or others near there. He seemed very keen about his job. A "large" sub here is a paltry eight inches, and he forgot my guac. It was probably for the better, though -- the irish concept of guacamole involves more cream and sundry additives than avacado.

This is the first Quiznos I've seen in Europe. I suspect, for some reason, Ireland makes a good test market for expansion, possibly because they're more American-friendly than most EU countries. Starbucks is here in force now, with a growing number of central locations. A year ago there were two: on the Microsoft campus well south of the city, and at one of the universities. Ireland's coffee-shop culture is alread weak, due to the dominance of its pub culture, so it will be interesting to see what effect Starbucks has. But that's not why we're here, is it? Not to talk about multinational restaurant chains (though I watched McLibel last night -- it had a fascinating surreptitious recording of a meeting between the two defendants, and the McDonald's Inc. board of directors, but was otherwise pretty much what you'd expect it to be), but for a bit of an update.

I've been taking piano lessons again, which is nice. It's at 6:45 on Thursdays, so it gives me an good retort when PSTers try to book meetings at 10AM PST (= 6PM GMT) thinking they're making a sacrifice by being in early.

I've moved from Rathmines, obviously. The situ there wasn't working all that well -- it was small, and not very sociable, lacking in outdoor space, and there was moderate tension with the landlord. I like my new place a lot, and it's much more amenable to having visitors (*hint, hint*).

My uncle on my mother's side passed away a few days ago. I agonized about whether to attend the funeral, but in the end I decided not to. I hope it was the right decision.

There was a military parade in Dublin on Easter Sunday, to commemorate the deaths of those who fought for Irish independence in the 1916 "Easter Rising". These parades used to be held annually, but were cancelled 30 years ago as the "troubles" with the North got worse. It was a very controversial, and very interesting issue. There are some Sinn Fein parades throughout Ireland, so by having an official parade, the government mitigated the possibility that Sinn Fein would hold one in Dublin. And the IRA has disarmed (by all accounts, for real), and so it's quite a different political context. On the other hand, the recent riots in Dublin were the worst troubles it had seen directly in a long time, and that seems to be a fire better left unstoked. And a military parade just isn't something most Western Democracies have. (I believe, though I've not seen photos, that it involved tanks rolling along the streets of Dublin.)

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the environmental impact of flying. It's totally dominant in my environmental footprint -- last year it was probably nearly all but the toes. The impact is huge, hard to mitigate, hard to avoid, and an intrinsic part of my professional and personal lives. It presents one of the largest moral conflicts I've ever faced. The easiest pay-my-way-out buy-my-indulgence-and-run solution, namely buying Carbon Credits on the retail market, looks dubious to me. I haven't dug as deep as I need to, but one of the first things I read about what they actually mean in practice was targeted at Iowa farmers (bless ye, Google). If they changed their farming practices so more carbon stayed in the soil, they might qualify as carbon sequesterers, and be able to sell carbon credits. However, it's hard to imagine that if they then reversed their new-found green practices, they'd be forced to buy back those same carbon credits. If this sort of imperfection is inherent in the system, it will become a question of pragmatism vs. principle -- should one tolerate a flawed system to try to help it develop?

I don't know if I've mentioned it here, but I have applied to go back to school -- law, economics, or maybe policy studies. I haven't heard back much, though University of Victoria found my marks to be lacking, and rejected my application. We'll see how the rest falls out.

This weekend, I'm hoping to cycle to Waterford (yes, famous for its crystal), possibly on my "red bike", the road bike I bought a while ago, with the least of gear. We'll see what the weather's like, though.

As for the question that burns at the back of this writer's mind, as it does yours, dear reader, I don't know if this is the beginning of more writing to come, or merely a brief rest from the arduous life of fishing.

/travel/ireland/A Bit Of A Catch-up

It's the Tuesday after Easter Monday. I was on call all last weekend, including Monday and Friday which are both stat holidays here. I get my four day weekend in a few days, though, and today is a "comp" day. While we are generally offered a day off after a weekend on call, European employment law essentially requires it, through limits on hours-per-week, consecutive days, etc.

I'm in a little park, by the vine-ensconsed ruins of a chapel. There's a tree growing in the crook of its cross shape, with two birds eking it out for chirpiest chirp. A couple and their two children were here when I arrived, but they just perambulated their way back out the only gate. The gate faces a tiny lane -- one-way in parts -- that is the quickest route from my new place into the center of Dublin. It's quiet here, and I've been silently long enough that the birds have started poking their way around again. There's tulips and daffodils, both well past their prime; they pop up too early here for my tastes.

I've moved to a bigger, two bedroom flat with a "random roommate". She's a Spanish-born Irish gal, who works in a bank. We haven't actually seen much of each other, since I moved in, a week and a lifetime ago. For a week or so before that, I was staying on friends' couches and spare beds. I know a lot more of Dublin now than I did, from house-hunting and couch-crashing.

Dublin has a very large ("Europe's largest enclosed urban park, unless you count those crazy new Euro countries," in all its glory) urban park, on the northwest edge of city center. One of my co-workers lives just beyond it. The cycle to and from work was about 13km, along the quays of the Liffey. In the mornings, they were the most tightly packed traffic I have ever seen. Even on a bike, the cracks between the cars were often too small.

The threat of rain has manifested itself, so I'd best finish this another time.

/Gone Fishin'

Yeah, there haven't been many updates lately. Don't feel like writing about stuff these days, I guess.

Check back in a month or two.

/travel/ireland/Sligo, Sugarloaf, Christmas, New Years

So my sister asked me what happened to my blogging, which prompted me to fix it up and post something. November and December just kind of disappeared into busy-ness and life and stuff.

There's some photos posted of a trip we took to Sligo in north-ish west Ireland. We climbed up Knocknarea, a big hill/small mountain, where there's a c. 2500BC burial mound. It's huge, and crazy. We also visited one of the largest stone age burial grounds in the world. Stone circles and little Portal dolmen all over. It's just in a big field, and they've rebuilt one of the mounds to look how they thought it was original.

The next weekend I went hiking with a couple of co-workers, and climbed Great Sugarloaf. It was a nice climb with a nice view back over Dublin.

Christmas was good...it was strange to be away from my family, but I had a good time. Clare's relatives mostly got me food and kitchen stuff, which was remarkably successful given my general scrooginess. Our flat is pretty well kitted out now, just in time for the lease to run out. I had a little tussle over rent a while ago, so I'm not sure how amicable the landlord will be.

I've been trying to follow the Canadian election from here, but it's not easy to get the vibes. I haven't arranged my voting yet..need to do that soon. Still not sure who gets my tick mark. They're all crap.

I went back to Tullamore castle for New Years, and it was done up pretty slick. Wasn't in too much of a partying mood, but I never am for New Years.

I went for a run this morning; while I do it often enough that I can pretend that it has nothing to do with New Years resolutions, I'm not sure that would be entirely honest. There were a lot of people out, though...way more than I've seen before. Funn-ay.

Today Clare and I cycled out to Howth. It's one of the two main heads that form Dublin Bay, 'bout 40km round trip. We had a snack out there in the slowest restaurant in the universe, but it was tasty, so that was okay.

There's some kind of 70s week on RTE2. I'm watching Saturday Night Fever, and Taxi Driiver was on last night. Not movies I would normally watch. They seem alright. :-)

So there's an update. Hope folks had a good Christmas/holiday/New Years.

I'll be in Halifax, Saskatoon, Edmonton, San Francisco, and Chicago between January 26th and February 26th.