Without a Traceroute

Budapest seems like a really cool city. There’s a lot of pretty architecture and the Danube is beautiful. Unfortunately, my attempt to escape cold, grey, rainy weather has failed. It does rain differently here, though. Whereas the Netherlands was prone to long downpours interspersed with periods of not-rain (I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘dry’ since the trees would be dripping and the streets damp) at entirely unpredictable intervals, Budapest seems to have very long spells of extremely light sprinkling with only the occasional serious rain. Also, the umbrellas are dirt cheap. I picked one up for 500 Hungarian Forints (about $3).

I went on a caving trip yesterday, along with my friend Rachel from Pomona, who’s also here in Budapest. I thought it was a pretty cool trip. We went into the raw, undeveloped part of some of the many kilometers of limestone caves which lie underneath Budapest. We had to do a fair deal of scrambling over rocks and squeezing through small spaces. One particularly tricky one was called the “vinklie” (spelling?), which according to our guide means “90 degrees” (right angle?). Basically, the passageway was shaped roughly like an isosceles triangle (with the narrow angle facing downwards), and about large enough for your shoulders and hips. To quote our guide, “You have to lift your hips up, or you will get stuck…not forever, but maybe you leave a shoe behind.” So you wiggle along lying on your left side, using your left arm and one leg to try keep your hips and shoulders elevated in the wider part of the passageway. Then, about 2 or 3 meters along the passage, it turns abruptly to the right (hence the name) and you have to sort of worm your way around the corner.

Our guide was pretty amusing in his own right. He was apparently a very avid caver, and spent a lot of time bragging about the really cool caves he had explored. At the same time, he was critical of boastful show-offs in the caving/mountaineering community who walk around the street wearing carabiners and talk about their adventures constantly. In his defense, we were in a very cave-oriented situation, so it made some sense for him to regale us with stories of his travels.

He also wins the award for the most inadvertently profound-sounding statement of the trip. When we turned off all our headlamps in one of the rooms, our guide was heard to remark, “Without the light, the people can see nothing.”

I’m off to Budapest and I’m quite excited. Budapest is one of those cities that sounds famous and exotic. Everyone’s heard of it, but nobody knows anything about it. It’s like Tripoli or Casablanca.

Uitfeest was awesome. I’ll post more photos later, but here’s the Float-In Movie. I found it very charming.

Dutch people watching movie on the canal

Don’t get me wrong, the Netherlands is awesome, but it’s cold, grey, rainy and depressing here. I’m really looking forward to going someplace with sun. Furthermore, I feel like I’ve been here too long. I’ve gotten to know Utrecht well enough that I can find my way around without a map (at least in the center), and I’ve met quite a few cool people, but I’m starting to feel too comfortable. Everyone here speaks English, I know where the grocery store is, it’s too easy. I’m not challenging myself and I’m not getting outside my comfort zone. It’s time to leave.

I have a flight to Budapest on Monday to attend a conference about the EU Data Retention Act. I’m excited and I’ve heard really good things about Budapest. It is kind of weird though, because once I know when I’m leaving, I get into this “get out of Dodge” mentality where I’ve been running around trying to do and see as many things as possible. Tomorrow is the Utrecht Uitfeest, and all of the museums, art galleries and theaters in Utrecht will be open for free with special events. Utrecht has kind of a ridiculous number of museums for a city of its size (it’s about 300,000 people, and there’s probably a dozen museums). I especially want to see the Spoorwegmuseum (train museum) tomorrow, because it’s supposed to be cool, but it’s normally quite expensive. Tomorrow night, there’s also a “float-in movie theater,” where they show movies on the canal and people watch from boats. It sounds like a lot of fun, but I heard you have to get there quite early if you want to get a spot on a boat.

1. They’re lazy. Formatting a blog post as a list is a really cheap way organize it. It spares the author from having to actually put their thoughts together in a logical, coherent manner because the list automatically imposes an organizational structure on the post. You don’t have to worry about making one idea flow smoothly into the next because you can just throw down the next number as abruptly as you want.
2. No intro or conclusion. You can get away without these basic elements of writing your high school English teacher wouldn’t shut up about. You don’t have to write an introduction because you just put #1, and you don’t have to write a conclusion because you can just stop writing after the last number. Usually you go for 10, but if you run out of ideas you can always have a “top 6″ list. (more…)

Digital dreams?

I’ve noticed that for most people in my age and socioeconomic cohort (basically, upper-middle-class college kids and early-20-somethings) their laptop is easily their most treasured possession. I imagine it occupies the place held by the stereo for kids coming of age in earlier generations.

When I was in college, the first thing everyone did when moving into their room at the start of a semester, before putting sheets on their bed, before putting away their clothes, before plugging in a lamp, was set up their laptop. Similarly, at the end of the year, the very last item to be packed away was invariably the computer.

For most kids, their laptop has become the catch-all indispensable device for living. A person in their 40s might read a newspaper to get the news, organize photos in an album or scrapbook, watch television shows on cable, and movies on DVD, listen to music on the radio or a CD player, and only sit down at their computer to get work done. For a 20-year old, all those activities are handled with their laptop.

Is it any wonder, then, that we take our laptops to bed with us? That we consider internet connectivity a utility on par with water and electricity? That we define ourselves through our files? That a dead hard drive is a disaster equivalent to your room burning down?

I’m in no position to say whether this represents an unhealthy dependence on, or obsession with technology, but I do think kids in my generation, who grew up with computers, relate to them as more than just tools.