February 28, 2006
Buongiorno Torino! Love those winter Olympics. No, we weren’t there, but we were glued to the TV. This time our eyes were on speed skating, for two reasons: The Dutch claim to have invented the sport, having long ago raced from city to city on frozen canals; and the Koreans dominated this year’s event, so Hyon didn’t miss a race.
French joke: In the last blog installment, I wrote about the Christmas lights in Meaux. Some of you asked, where's Meaux? It’s near La Rit and Coeur-Lis, of course!
Actually, my French isn’t good enough to understand much comedy in that language. But Hyon and I still had a great time at the Trocadero revue in Liège, the Sunday before Valentine’s Day. (Yes, it would have been romantic to take her to Paris for Valentine’s but I didn’t. Rap my knuckles.) The show went on for hours: singing, dancing, comedy skits, can-can, and they didn’t skimp on the skimpy costumes. Some of the jokes were about “us unsophisticated Belgian country cousins,” but there was real talent on the stage. The whole Parisian cabaret experience, 20 minutes from home, and the ticket cost less than what you’d tip the maitre d’ at the Moulin Rouge. Fun!
BTW, during the July 4 week, the Tour de France will pass through Valkenburg, 10 km from Maastricht. Hotels are booked solid, but we’ve got a spare sofa and floor space for visitors.
More travels
Last weekend was a long one due to Carnaval, so Hyon and I followed the Rhine southward from Cologne to its gorge, which stretches from Koblenz to Mainz.
Koblenz seems unremarkable except for the Deutchen Eck, a huge monument at the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle rivers. It commemorates successive waves of German unification. (There’s a good restaurant in Chicago called Zum Deutschen Eck. I didn’t understand the reference until this week.) Koblenz is an embarkation point for cruises on the two rivers.
The gorge features castle after castle, storybook villages, and immense, steep vineyards. Why would medieval warlords build their castles so close together? My guess is, they didn’t originally, but then one warlord built another castle nearby for a son-in-law, and so on, until the valley ultimately looked like a Castle Heights tract development.
There are also some freestanding stone towers, which reminded Hyon of the Rapunzel story. As we pulled into Bacharach, we saw posters for a weekend performance of… Rapunzel! (I’ve heard it said that psychic powers can be a curse. I imagine that’s especially true when it’s one’s wife who has them.) The castle high above the romantic 700-year-old town of Bacharach is now a youth hostel. We climbed up to it, getting our exercise for the month.
Bingen, though older, has no charm at all, so we ferried across the Rhine to Rudescheim and stayed the night in a hotel that offered authentic atmosphere and a dynamite free breakfast. The small ferries, incidentally, are identical to the ones on the Aransas Pass - Port Aransas run in Texas.
St. Hildegard’s abbey is not in Bingen, but in the hills above Rudescheim. Her life (she was born almost an even thousand years ago) illustrates how to be an agent of radical change in an organization. Interesting to a management professor, so I bought the book about her from the abbey’s self-service, honor-system gift shop.
Mainz is supposed to be 2nd only to Cologne for carnaval craziness. We found the costumes in the Mainz parade to be straightforward marching-band gear; the Mainzers reserve their creativity, political wit, and expenditures for fancy floats. Notable was the one depicting Uncle Sam wiping his tuchas with the Kyoto Protocols.
Gutenberg invented his press in Mainz. I was disappointed that the Gutenberg Musuem was closed for Carnaval.
Marc Chagall died shortly after completing the stained glass windows of St. Stephan’s church in Mainz, symbols of international and interfaith reconciliation. He did not live to see what he was probably afraid of, hack religious writers gushing about the windows’ implications for the theological unity of the old and new testaments. The silly St. Stephan’s guidebooks stand in contrast to the non-doctrinaire books at the Benedictine abbey of St. Hildegard. Pretty windows, though.
Hyon found a post card with the Heinrich Heine poem about the Lorelei. Thus inspired, and gluttons for punishment anyway, we climbed the Lorelei rock. Unbelievable views. And it made us good, cardiovascularly speaking, for another coupla months.
Ode to a Toyota. Ours is a ’98 Camry. In two years and 25,000 km, knock wood, it’s never lost a drop of oil or other fluid, and always started on the first crank.
If it weren’t for all the castles and half-timbered villages, the Rhine Gorge would look just like the Columbia Gorge, only smaller. In winter we had it almost to ourselves, but heard that in summer you can’t find a hotel room on the Rhine for love or money. What would it take to divert some of these tourists to Portland, the Dalles, and Hood River?
I also promised more musings on international business. Visitors to MsM from Uzbekistan (or wherever) can’t seem to wait for class to be over, then they’re out the door to shop for Versace, Ferragamo, Coach, etc. They’re in western Europe to shop, and it’s designer labels or nothing! Can they really be so shallow? Thinking the answer must be “no,” I looked for answers. One seems to be that in countries where the currency is unstable and owning gold is illegal, branded goods are better repositories of value than actual money. My faculty colleagues add that for post-Soviets who never had quality goods before, it’s as important to show the symbol of quality as to actually own a quality item. And then there’re national differences in the affective utility of a purchase: Dutch people think they made a quality deal when they bought a good item at a low price, while Belgians regard a transaction as high quality only if they got a good item at a high price. This is grist for further research, maybe a dissertation in IB for a student who’s interested in such things.
Artsy section. I’m
afraid Hyon’s art education is preparing her to be a forger. The
class spends a lot of time learning by copying. Her classmates
have given her the nickname “Rembrandt” because she’s showing a talent
for copying you know who. Maastricht School of Management likes
to put on art exhibitions from time to time, so Hyon has arranged a
show at MsM of the art of students and teachers from Maastricht's
Kumulus school, where she takes classes.
Randy Foster, if you’re reading this, you might tell Phillip Margolin his novels are well represented on the shelves of the Maastricht City Library. I’m now reading Lost Lake.
All for now!
Top
of this pagePreliminaries
I feel so European. I just pedaled home from the bakery with a baguette strapped to the bicycle.Buongiorno Torino! Love those winter Olympics. No, we weren’t there, but we were glued to the TV. This time our eyes were on speed skating, for two reasons: The Dutch claim to have invented the sport, having long ago raced from city to city on frozen canals; and the Koreans dominated this year’s event, so Hyon didn’t miss a race.
French joke: In the last blog installment, I wrote about the Christmas lights in Meaux. Some of you asked, where's Meaux? It’s near La Rit and Coeur-Lis, of course!
Actually, my French isn’t good enough to understand much comedy in that language. But Hyon and I still had a great time at the Trocadero revue in Liège, the Sunday before Valentine’s Day. (Yes, it would have been romantic to take her to Paris for Valentine’s but I didn’t. Rap my knuckles.) The show went on for hours: singing, dancing, comedy skits, can-can, and they didn’t skimp on the skimpy costumes. Some of the jokes were about “us unsophisticated Belgian country cousins,” but there was real talent on the stage. The whole Parisian cabaret experience, 20 minutes from home, and the ticket cost less than what you’d tip the maitre d’ at the Moulin Rouge. Fun!
BTW, during the July 4 week, the Tour de France will pass through Valkenburg, 10 km from Maastricht. Hotels are booked solid, but we’ve got a spare sofa and floor space for visitors.
More travels
| I had thought of s'Hertogenbosch
as a pass-through place on the way to Amsterdam, but when I went up for
an aikido seminar a couple of weeks ago, I found a large, bustling and
charming market center with distinctive architecture. The teacher
was Kenjiro Yoshigasaki, whom I hadn’t seen in 30 years. Here’s the story:
When I trained in Tokyo in ’76 with Master Koichi Tohei, Tohei had six
uchideshi (live-in apprentices) who shared responsibility for teaching
the foreign students. (They also made the 1st-pass translations
of Tohei Sensei’s books, then handed the manuscripts to us to clean up
the English.) It was clear to us that Yoshigasaki was the deepest of the six. He has, indeed, become a philosopher-aikidoist, and seems to have completed a joint development of philosophy and kinesiology – which might seem a strange combination, but it is one that makes perfect sense to a Japanese. It is very anti-Cartesian, but I think Westerners will ultimately move toward Yoshigasaki’s view. I’m trying to obtain his book, but it’s hard to find in English translation. He’s been living in Belgium for 28 years, and wrote the book in French. Philosophy, like comedy, is something I would not attempt to read in French. |
 |
Last weekend was a long one due to Carnaval, so Hyon and I followed the Rhine southward from Cologne to its gorge, which stretches from Koblenz to Mainz.
Koblenz seems unremarkable except for the Deutchen Eck, a huge monument at the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle rivers. It commemorates successive waves of German unification. (There’s a good restaurant in Chicago called Zum Deutschen Eck. I didn’t understand the reference until this week.) Koblenz is an embarkation point for cruises on the two rivers.
The gorge features castle after castle, storybook villages, and immense, steep vineyards. Why would medieval warlords build their castles so close together? My guess is, they didn’t originally, but then one warlord built another castle nearby for a son-in-law, and so on, until the valley ultimately looked like a Castle Heights tract development.
There are also some freestanding stone towers, which reminded Hyon of the Rapunzel story. As we pulled into Bacharach, we saw posters for a weekend performance of… Rapunzel! (I’ve heard it said that psychic powers can be a curse. I imagine that’s especially true when it’s one’s wife who has them.) The castle high above the romantic 700-year-old town of Bacharach is now a youth hostel. We climbed up to it, getting our exercise for the month.
Bingen, though older, has no charm at all, so we ferried across the Rhine to Rudescheim and stayed the night in a hotel that offered authentic atmosphere and a dynamite free breakfast. The small ferries, incidentally, are identical to the ones on the Aransas Pass - Port Aransas run in Texas.
St. Hildegard’s abbey is not in Bingen, but in the hills above Rudescheim. Her life (she was born almost an even thousand years ago) illustrates how to be an agent of radical change in an organization. Interesting to a management professor, so I bought the book about her from the abbey’s self-service, honor-system gift shop.
Mainz is supposed to be 2nd only to Cologne for carnaval craziness. We found the costumes in the Mainz parade to be straightforward marching-band gear; the Mainzers reserve their creativity, political wit, and expenditures for fancy floats. Notable was the one depicting Uncle Sam wiping his tuchas with the Kyoto Protocols.
Gutenberg invented his press in Mainz. I was disappointed that the Gutenberg Musuem was closed for Carnaval.
Marc Chagall died shortly after completing the stained glass windows of St. Stephan’s church in Mainz, symbols of international and interfaith reconciliation. He did not live to see what he was probably afraid of, hack religious writers gushing about the windows’ implications for the theological unity of the old and new testaments. The silly St. Stephan’s guidebooks stand in contrast to the non-doctrinaire books at the Benedictine abbey of St. Hildegard. Pretty windows, though.
Hyon found a post card with the Heinrich Heine poem about the Lorelei. Thus inspired, and gluttons for punishment anyway, we climbed the Lorelei rock. Unbelievable views. And it made us good, cardiovascularly speaking, for another coupla months.
Ode to a Toyota. Ours is a ’98 Camry. In two years and 25,000 km, knock wood, it’s never lost a drop of oil or other fluid, and always started on the first crank.
If it weren’t for all the castles and half-timbered villages, the Rhine Gorge would look just like the Columbia Gorge, only smaller. In winter we had it almost to ourselves, but heard that in summer you can’t find a hotel room on the Rhine for love or money. What would it take to divert some of these tourists to Portland, the Dalles, and Hood River?
 |
 |
 |
| These
ersatz carnaval cops on the ferry ramp wanted us to stay on the Bingen
side to party. |
From
HIGH atop the Lorelei. For perspective, note the town along the
right bank. |
|
 |
 |
 |
| Bacharach. |
Yeah,
my kids used to tease me about this too. |
Elderly window watcher, Maastricht |
 We were back in Brussels for a conference. The Groot Markt after a storm. |
 |
 |
| Hyon's
peanut supplier on the Wolfstraat, Maastricht. |
Part
of MsM's atrium. |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Bacharach again. | Sir
Elton asks me to sit in, as he plays a mall in Düsseldorf.
Actually, both are dummies. |
Hyon
graciously photographs me with my new Belgian girlfriend. |
Brussels
at night. |
Departments
Truth is stranger than fiction. I promised you more examples in this vein. I saw the film Donnie Darko at the Hollywood in Portland. Lightning strikes teenage Donnie’s bedroom, casting him temporarily into an alternate reality of his family’s future. Some of the audience had seen this cult flick several times; they find it thought-provoking. But it happened to me! When I was a pre-teen, lightning struck my bedroom, making a tennis-ball sized hole in the exterior wall and bouncing around the room. I still have that bedroom furniture, and the head of the bed still has a scorch-mark right where my head would have been, had I not stayed up late that night huddled downstairs with my family. I don’t know which is the alternate reality and which is the original, but in one of them I’m dead, and in the other, I’m writing a blog.I also promised more musings on international business. Visitors to MsM from Uzbekistan (or wherever) can’t seem to wait for class to be over, then they’re out the door to shop for Versace, Ferragamo, Coach, etc. They’re in western Europe to shop, and it’s designer labels or nothing! Can they really be so shallow? Thinking the answer must be “no,” I looked for answers. One seems to be that in countries where the currency is unstable and owning gold is illegal, branded goods are better repositories of value than actual money. My faculty colleagues add that for post-Soviets who never had quality goods before, it’s as important to show the symbol of quality as to actually own a quality item. And then there’re national differences in the affective utility of a purchase: Dutch people think they made a quality deal when they bought a good item at a low price, while Belgians regard a transaction as high quality only if they got a good item at a high price. This is grist for further research, maybe a dissertation in IB for a student who’s interested in such things.
 |
 Art by HOP |
Randy Foster, if you’re reading this, you might tell Phillip Margolin his novels are well represented on the shelves of the Maastricht City Library. I’m now reading Lost Lake.
All for now!
January
15, 2006
| This installment of the blog
puts the artsy
section first, because
we’re all so proud of Hyon’s charcoal drawings. When we’re not
traveling, it's art classes at Kumulus that get Hyon through the Dutch
winter, and (after all these years) have pulled the true illustrator
out of the lady who was probably the world’s unhappiest microbiology
major. Politics section. One middle-eastern colleague, an Iraqi, told me why he thinks the US should pull out now. The insurgents, he says, are non-Iraqis who entered the country just to pull the noses of the Americans. These outsiders know Iraqis are not interested in an extremist-Muslim government, so if the Americans leave, the insurgents will also. A colleague from a neighboring country differs. He says the Iraqi borders are well-sealed, Iraqis have a strong violent streak, the insurgents are Iraqis - the bomb in Amman probably also set off by Iraqis - and if the US leaves, chaos will persist in Iraq. My analysis? The two remarks indicate much more about the mutual suspicion among the different countries of the Middle East than they do about practicable US strategies. They also prove we have to look beneath the news anchors’ glib references to “the Muslim world.” There is no such thing, at least in the sense of a large community of shared values and intentions. This is borne out by the many comments I’ve heard people from mid-eastern countries make about each other. |
 by HOP |
 by HOP
|
 |
International business. I
guess I’ve learned a lot about it in these 2
years. No time now to write much of it down, but I’ll try to put
a tidbit in each future blog entry. For now, I’ll note the Dutch
word for a start-up company is onderneem,
an “undertaking,” and
entrepreneurship is ondernemenschaap.
So far, so good: In English
we also call a project an undertaking. But we do not, as the
Dutch do, call every entrepreneur an ondernemer,
an undertaker. Holiday travels & visits. Gina joined us for her semester break. Anna scored Rose Bowl tickets, and forsook Europe for a road trip with friends to Pasadena. We spent a nice evening in Monschau, a picturesque German town an hour or so away, known for its Christmas decorations and shopping. The three of us drove to Normandy and Bretagne for our major trip of the break. En route (see, I speak French!) we enjoyed some cities off the beaten path. Amiens on the way to the coast, and even more so Alençon on the way from, were both charming, interesting places to walk around in. In Amiens, the bakery we very much wanted to go to was closed. Gina asked how to say a certain bad word in French. For some reason (we later learned), Hyon thought Gina was asking how to say “no.” Hyon then bought some batteries from a street vendor; he asked whether she wanted a sack for them, and she replied, “Merde.” |
Next to St. Malo is Dinard, where I re-established contact with the French fellow I traveled with in ’71. He now runs some bars and discos in Rennes.
Hyon wanted to shop at Val d’Europe, near Eurodisney. We checked out the Cheyenne, said to be the cheapest of the theme hotels near the park. They wanted €175 for a room for 3; we left with alacrity. (Otherwise, I might have bought that Mickey Mouse wizard hat… way cool.) We drove for 15 minutes toward Paris and found a nice room for €70.
On New Year’s Eve we took Gina to meet a friend coming in at Aeroport Charles de Gaulle (a hellish place for drivers or for air passengers), and left Gina and friend to train into Paris. Hyon and I drove back toward Maastricht. The Christmas lights in Meaux were exceptional. Lucky to have filled up the tank when we did; the long drive through the Ardennes showed little habitation or commerce. I had no idea there were such vast empty stretches of France and Belgium. We emerged from the forest into Liège exactly at midnight, to see fireworks left and right. More fireworks in Visé, and more in Maastricht!
Gina returned to Maastricht by train a couple of days later, but really wanted to visit London. Read on…
Sleazy Weeze and Cryin’Air – secret business models revealed! Gina booked a Düsseldorf-London ticket on this “discount” airline. We delivered her to Düsseldorf airport in plenty of time. Oops, wrong airport! After what I’ve told you about Girona and Charleroi (yes, this blog is getting self-referential; you’re just going to have to be a faithful reader, nothing else for it), we could have anticipated this. The e-ticket said “Düsseldorf Weeze Airport.” There is no such airport. The Düsseldorf Airport info desk, accustomed to people being misled by Cryin’Air, just flipped us a mimeographed sheet with directions to Weeze Airport, 70 km away – much closer to Nijmegen, actually, than to Düsseldorf.
Admit it, if you had read “Düsseldorf-Weeze Airport,” you would have thought of Chicago-O’Hare Airport, named after that O’Hare fellow but located in Chicago. Would you think, oh, maybe that’s nowhere near Düsseldorf and perhaps closer to another major city?!
So I speed up the autobahn and we pull into Weeze Airport 42 minutes before plane time. The desk person ostentatiously ignores Gina (and one other couple, and a family of five who arrived before us) until 40 minutes before plane time, then closes the ticket counter! Says customers must check in 40 minutes prior (tho it’s printed nowhere on Gina’s e-confirmation, and the London couple affirm the London desk stays open until 5 minutes before plane time); she’ll try to rebook everyone on the morning flight, for a €60 fee per person!
“Well,” says I, “Here we are and here you are, so open the check-in again.”
“Can’t do that,” she replies. “I’ll be back in 20 minutes and rebook all of you.” She disappears through security. I urge Gina to go through security and just get on the airplane. The security guy won’t let her, he’s instructed to admit only people holding boarding passes.
The 20 minutes turns to 40. No sign of Ms. Nasty. Everyone’s angry, natch. When she shows up, we take her name, and one of the others threatens to get her fired. She answers, “I get complaints like this every day, and I’ve been working here for two years now.”
Aha, now it’s clear how this scummy operation can afford to sell seats for 1¢! They deliberately send people to the wrong airport, don’t let them check in on time, and maximize penalties and change fees. Were we to write to corporate HQ, not only would they fail to reprimand Ms. Nasty, they would give her a bonus! They grab some more bucks running shuttle buses from these nowhere airports to the city you really want to go to. And another web blogger has picked up on the hawking of lottery tickets in flight to hypothesize a planned evolution of the business model to “in-flight gambling.”
“Let us talk to your supervisor.” There is no supervisor; Nasty is the only Cryin’Air employee on duty. This is why she shuts down 40 minutes in advance – she goes through security herself and re-collects the boarding passes at the gate.
The Girona authorities kindly allow young backpackers to sleep on the floor in the terminal. The Weeze airport, however, closes at 11 p.m., and this was a cold night. Thus do I suspect the city of complicity in the scam. The young couple and we found hotel rooms in Weeze, and the other family drove 2.5 hours back to their home in Hannover, to get a few hours sleep before driving back to Weeze again.
The latest WTO agreements have strengthened rights to geographic appellations. There will be, for example, no more California “Champagne.” I fervently hope the city of Düsseldorf will prohibit Weeze and Cryin’Air from misusing its name, and sue for the cost of those mimeographs.
Before you fly, you might want to check out http://www.michn.dk/ryanairsucks/index.htm. Another blogger, http://ex-parrot.com/~chris/sucks/flying.html, mentions his Cryin’Air flight was delayed, “and from time to time there were announcements on the Tannoy explaining that this was due to ‘technical problems’ of a nature which was not described. However, in the departure lounge there was a television, which showed a news report. Apparently, one of [Cryin’Air's] other aeroplanes had caught fire at Stansted airport and this was delaying all other flights. I suppose ‘technical problems’ does sound better than ‘one of our aeroplanes caught fire; don't panic, and remember the bar is open.’”
Truth is stranger than fiction. I love novels, eat ‘em like candy. Now that I’ve seen the world, though, it’s harder to impress me with fiction. I will dole out examples over the course of future blogs. Today I forward a tragic one, Pune Police arrest real estate agent for beheading German archaeologist, just received with these comments from another old friend and traveling companion who now goes often to India to train in yoga. Mark writes,
I first met Gudrun outside Pune
in Feb 2002. She was [an] archaeologist
who studied with the Leakeys in Africa and was on the team that
discovered Lucy. She had spent 50 years walking around Africa, India
and most recently 10 years in Nepal sorting out some controversial
issues on how Nepal happened. She was settling down in Pune to write
books on her discoveries.
Gudrun Corvinus first came to Pune in her 20's straight out of graduate school with her soon to be Indian husband. He was the son of a Maharaja in Pune and their wedding was by all accounts spectacular. The marriage did not last and there were no children so she was soon off to wander in Africa.
When I mentioned BKS Iyengar she knew of him; had met him socially many years ago and was surprised he was still alive. She would spend hours hiking in the Ghat mountains. She was very healthy, alive and alert. And extremely difficult when it came to negotiating real estate purchases.
Somewhere there are boxes of meticulous notes in German and English of all her observations made over 50 years. I wonder if her discoveries will ever be known.
Gudrun Corvinus first came to Pune in her 20's straight out of graduate school with her soon to be Indian husband. He was the son of a Maharaja in Pune and their wedding was by all accounts spectacular. The marriage did not last and there were no children so she was soon off to wander in Africa.
When I mentioned BKS Iyengar she knew of him; had met him socially many years ago and was surprised he was still alive. She would spend hours hiking in the Ghat mountains. She was very healthy, alive and alert. And extremely difficult when it came to negotiating real estate purchases.
Somewhere there are boxes of meticulous notes in German and English of all her observations made over 50 years. I wonder if her discoveries will ever be known.
