Maastricht

This past weekend we rented a car and drove to Maastricht, which is only a couple of hours away. As the car-rental place was all out of the teeny car I had reserved, they gave us a VW Scirocco (6-speed manual, navigation system, Star Wars looks). Here it is in the nicest underground parking lot I have ever seen. The painted floor was so clean that the tyres squeaked. The concrete ceiling (the ceiling!) of the garage was painted in a light-blue pattern.

Sporty Scirocco

Although Saturday was cold and drizzly, we wandered around the downtown. It's your typical maze of cobblestone pedestrian streets packed full of people who are similarly window-shopping. This photo of an alley is typically Dutch: narrow alley, lots of bicycles.

Of note is the large bookstore located inside an old church.

 

The café in the bookstore

Christine remarked that the interesting Europe she remembered from previous travels was somehow missing there. Maastricht (or at least the old, downtown part of it) has fashioned itself into a one-dimensional shopping destination (perhaps because of its location between Germany and Belgium: there might be tax advantages). So after a few hours it feels a bit artificial, like a shopping mall back in Generica (but nicer). The décor of old buildings and quaint little alleys is the setting for hyper-consumerism. I got sucked into buying a shirt that I didn't really need (but it was on sale!).

The following day (Sunday) was much nicer and sunny. We went to the Bonnefanten art gallery. Then we had to scoot back to Bonn (briefly hitting 160 km/h on the Autobahn). Just over the border in Germany are a series of gargantuan windmills. Really impressive and even mesmerizing when spinning. There's also a large nuclear reactor a few kilometers further along.

Maastricht for the weekend

We are off to Maastricht for the weekend. It is in the very southern tip of Holland and is (apparently) quite culturally distinct. We'll be staying at a B&B.

I don't believe in the Higgs-Boson particle

Have you ever heard someone say "I don't believe in the Higgs-Boson particle."? How about "String theory is not going to bring us any closer to a Grand Unified Theory."?

We never hear anyone disputing the veracity of these theories because they are so complicated and abstract that unless you have years of training in that particular field you cannot even begin to understand the debate. So to comment on them only makes the lay commenter sound foolish. I will therefore not dwell on them further, as I know little of the details and simply trust the scientists know what they are talking about.

But if one reads the comments section on any news item about climate change and you will see many people believe that climate change is some sort of communist plot devised by the U.N. as a way of oppressing us in an Orwellian New World Order. Really, I am not making this up, nor am I using one bit of hyperbole. This type of vitriol also encompasses death threats aimed at climate scientists. Even Canadian and British newspapers print reactions in which readers scoff at the dire predictions of climate research, saying that the science is all a bunch of hooey and that, anyways, the climate has always fluctuated so there is nothing to worry about.

This is fascinating. Nobody would say such things about chemistry or nanotechnology, but apparently the general populace is more informed about greenhouse gasses than the dozens of scientists who wrote the IPCC report calling for atmospheric CO2 levels to be kept below 450 ppm in order to avoid a pretty bleak future for all of us. Polite conversation at a dinner party would come to an end if you said you thought that you did not believe in evolution but rather that Adam and Eve magically appeared in a garden 6000 years ago. But I have met people who say "You know, I'm not sure about climate change - I don't think it is true.".

Really? I don't know how to respond to that without insulting their intelligence. One cannot pick and choose the science one "believes" in. Science is logically consistent and any part of it can be asserted with confidence by building upon first principles. There is a direct line of "if...then" statements that lead from 2+2 = 4 to the calculations that predict the existence of the Higgs-Boson particle, or the predictions of drought and sea-level rise resulting from increased CO2 emissions.

Yet somehow many people have decided not to "believe" the numbers generated by climate models. This is foolish - and at a societal level - very dangerous. I do not doubt that the calculations behind the search for the Higgs-Boson particle are correct. Nor do I doubt that the calculations behind the climate-change models are correct. I have no reason to doubt the science and so must trust that others are doing their job.

We are in for some heavy weather and to make-believe that numbers are not real makes the climate-change denier sound stupid.

Oh would Greece just default already!

Oh would Greece just default already!

It has been over a year now since the European debt crisis touched down in Greece (after Iceland went bankrupt and Ireland had to be bailed out by the IMF). Every week brings another crisis or secret meeting in Luxembourg or riot in Athens or rating-agency downgrade. These developments have become as regular as clockword and yet have changed absolutely nothing.

As near as I can make out, a simplified version of the difficulty is as follows: Greece owes a lot of money to private banks, mostly in France and Germany. The loans have to be paid back soon but Greece can only get people to lend them more money (to repay the original loans) at usurious rates (currently 30% per annum on a 2-year bond, which is way higher than what a schmuck like me pays on a credit card).

Much of the wrangling is about deciding who is going to be short-changed when the music stops. If the lenders (the banks in France and Germany) are "made whole", somebody else has to pick up the tab. Because Greece can't, it falls to either national or pan-national governments. Does France have enough money to bail out its banks when their loans to Greece turn to dust? That means the French taxpayer is on the hook. Or does the European Central Bank help the various private banks out, in which case the people of Denmark and Croatia are sending money to keep the suits in Paris and Frankfurt happy? None of these are very palatable solutions.

Let us not forget the Greeks, who are stuck between a rock and a hard place. The austerity measures that the Greek government is being required to implement make the future look pretty bleak for most citizens. Sure, there was some loose accounting and (very) wishful (fiscal) thinking, but the regular people are not to blame for the poor management of previous governments.

Greece could simply default on its loans, leave the Euro zone, and go back to using the Drachma. This would lead to a pretty rough few years and a rapid decline in their standard of living, but that's what is now going to happen under the austerity measures anyways in order to satisfy the ECB. It seems to be a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

The thing is, this has been well understood for some time now. James Howard Kunstler's forecast for 2011 (now 6 months old) describes exactly the sort of pickle that the EU is now in:

The serial bail-outs engineered by the European Central Bank have been shams based on an imaginary "fund" that really only amounts to more promises of back-stops by bankrupt countries to other bankrupt countries. In the grand gesture last fall, around the collapse of Ireland, promises were made by the ECB to give the appearance that the usual suspects (the PIIGS) would cover their quarterly debt service obligations to March of this year. No real money was involved, only assurances, which will soon be revealed as empty. Bottom-line: another graver round of debt crisis in Euro-land in the first quarter if 2011.

     It can only be resolved two ways: by 1.) countries defaulting, dropping out of the Euro monetary system, returning to a currency of their own and activities that reality will admit; and 2.) Germany, France, and Holland taking the others in like poor relatives and paying their living expenses. I really don't see Number 2 working out. The voters in the bigger three economies will revolt. Of course, the Number 1 route implies the destruction of a whole bunch of European banks, perhaps all of them, and their shareholders positions, and big trouble for the wealthier Euro member countries - ultimately leading to the same place: a lower standard of living, even in Germany, for all its frugality and efficiency.

Back in October 2010 I attended a presentation in Ottawa by Nicole Foss of The Automatic Earth. I asked her afterwards whether she thought that the Greek debt crisis of May 2010 (that's a full year ago) had been successfully dealt with. Her answer was that things had simply been papered over and that the problem would re-emerge.

So it has been some time that smart people have been reading the writing on the wall. I think that even if this story has a happy ending with Greece paying back all its debts and the banks living happily ever after, it will only be a matter of a few weeks before the same debt crisis and escalating downgrades (down-scalating grades?) occurs in Portugal and/or Spain. Then it'll be another circus of special deals between Berlin and Brussels to insure that banks in Bruges don't bonk.

So Greece should default to put and end to this charade of a merry-go-round. It will suck for lots of people and the stock market will implode again. But it might give people a chance to regroup and rethink how Europe shares the Euro. 

Gummi bear capital of the world

Up until twenty years ago, Bonn was the capital of Germany. After the war left the country divided it was strategically unwise to have the capital of (democratic) West Germany surrounded by (communist) East Germany (which was confusingly called the German Democratic Republic). So the sleepy city of Bonn was made the capital. Then when East and West were re-unified after the fall of the Warsaw Pact, the capital was officially moved back to Berlin.

However, Bonn is still the Gummi Bear capital of the world! Yes, those delicious little chewy treats were invented here in Bonn. In fact, the company that makes them was founded here 90 years ago by Hans Riegel. 

 

The name of the company is made up of the first two letters of his first and last names plus those of the city: HAns RIegel BOnn (HA-RI-BO, get it?). The factory outlet is about a kilometer from my office and is a paradise of every sort of squishy sweet you can think of. Packages of the cute & tasty bears can be found at grocery stores across the city (and probably all of North Rhine Westfalia).

 

When was the last time you ate a Gummi Bear?

Two days of extreme biking

On June 11 and 12 I went to the Winterberg Bikepark. The previous weekend (June 4 & 5) this was the site of the European DirtMasters competition. I had a great time and aside from some scratches and blisters didn't get hurt.

First, a clarification about the type of riding the park is designed for. Note the chair-lift at the right in the picture below. This is how one gets up to the top of the mountain - one does not ride up because it is both too steep and the bicycle is way too heavy and inefficient for anything more than a few hundred meters on level ground. Conceptually this is no different from skiing: while one can cover long distances on cross-country skis, you would never try to go further than the parking lot while wearing downhill skis. So although I have done lots of cross-country mountain biking and a bit of enduro motorcycling, I was pretty much a novice at this sort of downhill mountain-biking. The first few hours I tried to take it easy and get familiar with the bike and the tracks.

My (rented) Nicolai at the top of the mountain.

I hope this gives a sense of the vertigo that comes with some of these trails. There's about a 5-foot gap until one lands on the down-slope. Got to build up enough speed and hang on:

View of a jump in the "Truvative Slopestyle" track

The same jump seen from the side. Wheeee!

Here I am in the protective gear. It came in handy on a few occasions. The wooden platform behind me is part of the trail: it ends abruptly and one must maintain enough speed while riding off the end so as to land (mostly) on the real wheel. It's actually much safer to go fast than to go too slow.

Me in protective gear. Bobsled track in background.

By the second day I was much more comfortable doing jumps and drops. Going fast is fun, but I particularly like the technical challenge of the wooden "features". Here is a spiral feature that requires one to control both speed and balance while turning.

And the "Continental" track had a fun feature that wound between the trees:

It's only a couple of feet off the ground and it is not very steep, so you really can't hurt yourself (do mind the trees though). I found it to be lots of fun and tricky to not fall off the narrow logs.

There were see-saws in which one rides up an inclined wooden plank that is on a pivot (just like the playground variety). At a certain point you've got enough weight past the pivot-point and the plank see-saws down. Then, if you have not lost your balance and are still on the plank, you can roll forward off the see-saw and continue along the wooden board-walk. I did that a few times and only fell off once.

In case you didn't know, B.C. is the Mecca of this style of mountain-biking. One of the trails at Winterberg is even named "North Shore" in reference to the north shore of Vancouver, where there are some very extreme trails (see below). Every time I rode the chair lift and the other passenger found out I am from Canada, they each exclaimed in wonder about how great Whistler must be. Perhaps one day I'll get to ride there.

NOT ME! Vancouver's North Shore

Thanks for your interest in reading my blog. Now it's back to the office where I do much less extreme stuff.

The sound of music

The train ride back from Winterberg on Monday was quite the cultural experience. I had found a seat on the sunny side of the train next to a big picture-window and was ready to enjoy the scenery of contented cows, trimmed forests, and tidy villages as the train would be winding its way down from the mountains and into the industrial city of Dortmund. 

Sauerland train in Winterberg

Cute village (not Winterberg)

Naturally, this peaceful little journey was shortly ruined as a pack of young men (dare I say kids) decided to occupy the seats across the aisle. They were all joking and trash-talking that is typical of such gatherings. I tried to eaves-drop so as to pick up some words, but it was pretty difficult. They were actually just regular kids - clean cut and squeaky-clean, lolling about in their shorts and sweatshirts, fiddling with their handheld digital devices. Naturally they brought out a mini-speaker gadget and soon the whole wagon could hear what was playing on one of the iPhones. So I was serenaded all the way down the valley by German rap.

It is heartening to know that the Blacks of Germany, who represent about 0.01% of the population, have been hard at work finding an equivalent for "Gangsta bitches" in the vernacular (rhymes with schnitzel). What with the phenomenal medical care, perfect public transport, and booming economy it must be hard for these DJs to make a musical career out of sullen posturing, but they are doing their bestest.

Of course I could have just gotten up and found a seat elsewhere. But if I went to the other car I would just be surrounded by the grey-haired wrinklies who are everywhere. Nope, this is the real Germany too I said, and it is just as valid even if it does not conform to the cuckoo-clock stereotype. So I stayed put and tried to grin and bear it, listening to the hit "Ficky, Ficky, Ficky" (try this fun do-it-yourself translation: replace the "i" with "u").

One of the kids then began to fiddle with the iPhone and suddenly the whiny tunes of "Wait a Minute Mister Postman" (by Shondelle and the Sha-Na-Nas) filled the train. That was the last straw: anything but 60's doo-wop! I wailed and covered my ears, imploring the guys in my primitive German to please turn it back to Ficky, Ficky. This elicited much hilarity, with some ribbing of whomever's iPhone contained such drivel. The ice was broken, and we joked around a bit.

Out of politeness the kids played English rap such that for the last part of the trip I was able to clearly understand the "motherficken" lyrics. So considerate of them.

Winterberg is the end of the line and a ski destination

Bikepark Winterberg

Having exceeded the recommended daily dosage of castles, I am going to go mountain biking this weekend. I really have not seen much of Germany beyond the closest cities up & down the Rhine, so this is my chance to do something that does not involve herbal tea and little cakes.

Even though it is summer, I'm going to Winterberg. I'll be staying at the Hotel Steymann, which is on the outskirts of the town. However it is very close to the Winterberg BikePark. I'll be renting a downhill bike (so heavy and of such extreme geometry that you can't really ride it as a bicycle for any distance) to tackle the trails. In the winter the place is a bob-sled run and a ski hill.

On Monday I will either take the train back to Bonn or will be found here.

Wonderful May

My apologies, I have been neglecting this blog for the past month as we have been busy. I will prove it with pictures!

So let me recap what has been happening:

My mom came to visit for most of May. We had a great time visiting castles, riding bikes, and eating well. It was also important that my mom was able to spend time with Arianne, and she got to see my daughter transition to being able to sit up unsupported. 

At the BUGA garden show, Koblenz

We took the train to Koblenz and saw the national German garden show. It was situated in a hilltop fort overlooking the city of Koblenz. We took a big gondola over the river to get up to the fort. Here's the view of the Rhine and the Deutsches Eck. 

Overlooking the Rhine at Koblenz

The Deutsches Eck is of some cultural significance, having been bombed to smithereens during one of the wars. Its rebuilding was a symbol of German resilience. It is a truly enormous statue. What's more is that the bas-relief carvings that decorate the base and surrounding monuments look like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark: Immense snakes and stylized skulls give the place a sinister feel, even on a sunny day.





The Deutsches Eck ("German Point") where the Rhine and Moiselle rivers meet



 

Allie climbs all the way to the top of Europe!

One outing we all did was to take the ferry across the river to Koningswinter to see the Drachenfells castle. I can see it every day just by looking out the window, so I had been wanting to go there for some time. As advertised, it is a real mess.


At the Drachenfells castle ruins

There's a train that engages cogs between the rails to climb up the mountain. This mini-railway has been there since 1882.  

The Drachenfels Zug

  And here's the Drachenburg Palace, which isn't very old at all.

The Drachenburg Schloss

Also Christine's pal from Brussels came to visit last week and we had fun playing Parcheesi. No pictures of that, but it was great to hang out with her.

In other news, I submitted an abstract to a conference to be held in Finland at the end of August. I learned a couple of weeks ago that it was accepted. So it looks like we will be off to Turku! Good thing my research project is going well. Otherwise it would be an uncomfortable presentation ("And this slide show where my results would go...if I had some.").

My German course is going well and will wrap up in a couple of weeks. It has been a bit of a slog, and I am not used to not being able to understand a single thing, but I am getting there and am more comfortable saying simple sentences. The half-dozen of us who have stuck it out are friendly and the class has a good sense of camaraderie.

That's all for now.