My jeans tore yesterday. They were old, I have another pair with me, plus dress trousers, plus bermuda shorts. Still annoying though.
The Boss has come down with a fever and is back at the hotel, suffering. The Blonde has a cold. I'm the last man standing.
The plan was to drive out to the Dead Sea tomorrow, and then head straight back to Tel Aviv to check into the Sheraton City Tower. Not sure now if that will happen.
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Erschalaim
Sunday was an uneventful day of work - met our instructor, who turned out to be infinitely cool. The most important thing I've learned so far though was that through osmosis, by figuring out what works and what doesn't, our team has learned most of what there is to learn about technical writing. It's highly vindicating. Most of us remember the time before the employer's major leap, when the Estonian branch had a corporate neurosis about not feeling like a real company. This translated to us: there is no history of technical writing in Estonia (I myself was, in all likelihood, the first person to actually carry the title back in 2002), and we simply had no frame of reference. Were we world-class? Did we completely suck? Could we use Microsoft as a quality yardstick, and then, how to measure that quality? As it turns out, we are as good as just about anyone in the real world, and better than a large amount of folks holding down jobs as technical writers. While not necessarily praising the state of the industry, it does make me feel good about myself and my coworkers.
Went out that night to watch the game. Osho pub in downtown Jerusalem, where we had some very nice Israeli wine (Galil Hills merlot) and some decidedly un-kosher food. I wonder if McDonalds serves cheeseburgers.
Today was awesome. One of our local colleagues that was there for the training used to do a regular three-day walking tour of Jerusalem, so he gave us the abbreviated 5-hour version. From the modern midtown market, down the pedestrian streets, out to the gardens and the Hebrew Union College, through Hell Valley and up past Sultan's Pool, through the main sites of the old city - all commented, with stories and explanations of significance. Enjoyed it tremendously. Took lots of pictures, including a few of the wall (visible in the distance) - I've flamed so much on the topic, on CoT and in other places, that I sort of had to.
Finished off the night in Spagettim, the Italian restaurant, where The Blonde and I had some very decent lasagne (with meat!), and The Boss had pasta with ham. Sic. I thought they simply wouldn't let shipments across the border, but apparently you can not only get non-kosher food in Jerusalem, you can even get pork.
Meat is actually a bit of an issue. Take the Regency's breakfast buffet, for example. They had the unenviable task of ensuring that guests do not mix meat with dairy. They solved the situation elegantly, by foregoing meat altogether. Generally Israelis do not eat very much meat, replacing it with truly outstanding baked goods. I'm a convinced carnivore - if God did not want us to eat animals, he would not have created them out of food - but even I have to admit, in this weather the local cuisine does actually work very well. Where Spaniards will not give up meat, instead instituting a period of rest to digest lunch, the Israelis simply modify their diet to suit the conditions. Like I said, it works.
Gave our guide a bottle of Vana Tallinn. It's more or less a condition of citizenship that you have to give people abroad Vana Tallinn. It is the landmark Estonian booze, although almost no Estonians drink it. It's 45% (sic) liqueur. Use your imagination.
Meeting a bunch of local tech writers tomorrow, and going to the Dead Sea on Wednesday. Updates will come as interesting stuff happens.
Went out that night to watch the game. Osho pub in downtown Jerusalem, where we had some very nice Israeli wine (Galil Hills merlot) and some decidedly un-kosher food. I wonder if McDonalds serves cheeseburgers.
Today was awesome. One of our local colleagues that was there for the training used to do a regular three-day walking tour of Jerusalem, so he gave us the abbreviated 5-hour version. From the modern midtown market, down the pedestrian streets, out to the gardens and the Hebrew Union College, through Hell Valley and up past Sultan's Pool, through the main sites of the old city - all commented, with stories and explanations of significance. Enjoyed it tremendously. Took lots of pictures, including a few of the wall (visible in the distance) - I've flamed so much on the topic, on CoT and in other places, that I sort of had to.
Finished off the night in Spagettim, the Italian restaurant, where The Blonde and I had some very decent lasagne (with meat!), and The Boss had pasta with ham. Sic. I thought they simply wouldn't let shipments across the border, but apparently you can not only get non-kosher food in Jerusalem, you can even get pork.
Meat is actually a bit of an issue. Take the Regency's breakfast buffet, for example. They had the unenviable task of ensuring that guests do not mix meat with dairy. They solved the situation elegantly, by foregoing meat altogether. Generally Israelis do not eat very much meat, replacing it with truly outstanding baked goods. I'm a convinced carnivore - if God did not want us to eat animals, he would not have created them out of food - but even I have to admit, in this weather the local cuisine does actually work very well. Where Spaniards will not give up meat, instead instituting a period of rest to digest lunch, the Israelis simply modify their diet to suit the conditions. Like I said, it works.
Gave our guide a bottle of Vana Tallinn. It's more or less a condition of citizenship that you have to give people abroad Vana Tallinn. It is the landmark Estonian booze, although almost no Estonians drink it. It's 45% (sic) liqueur. Use your imagination.
Meeting a bunch of local tech writers tomorrow, and going to the Dead Sea on Wednesday. Updates will come as interesting stuff happens.
Sunday, July 09, 2006
We're not in Kansas any more...
Arrived in Jerusalem, and so far The Stereotypes have singularly failed to get blown up. We fully intend to keep up the good work, although at this point I'm starting to wonder.
For the last several days I've been having a streak of small annoyances - tiny bits of bad luck, of no real significance really, but enough to notice. The Boss commented that me and reality are not on the best of terms at this point, and I need to consider wearing a tinfoil hat.
The curse (or rather cursoid) does not seem to diminish with geography. The guy next to me on the Lufthansa commuter flight to Frankfurt seemed at first like a nice enough man - what's known as a "väliseestlane", born into a family of WWII-period Estonian refugees to the West, in this case Toronto. Eventually I asked him what he did for a living. Nothing; he's a missionary volunteer; a Jehova's Witness. He showed remarkable restraint, but did end up trying to convert me. I told him about Popper's falsifiers and Adams' puddle argument, but I should've known better than to try to use reason and common sense, really.
Frankfurt Airport, if not depressing, is at least surprising. As Lufthansa's main hub and a huge international half way point, I'd expect it to be a tad more impressive. Instead it feels old and industrial. Our connection was fairly tight (only an hour to get from the commuter parked in the ass end of nowhere to a 747 skybridge); we made it, but it involved a lot of walking and two separate security checks.
This was my first time on a Jumbo Jet, and I can see Clarkson's point - it's a lot more pleasant a place to be than the Triple Seven I rode to California a couple years back. A less than four-hour hop down to Tel Aviv was entirely unstressful, save for a slightly exciting landing.
There is an island somewhere in the Caribbean whose major attraction is the fact that it consists almost entirely of a runway, with a beach at either end; on this runway lands a weekly Air France 747. The runway is still fairly short, so the plane comes in very exactly, touching down at the edge; supposedly the experience of a heavy airliner gliding just above your head is one-of-a-kind indeed. But the sensation of being in one as it powerslides at low altitude onto Ben Gurion's main landing strip is not something to ignore.
I am by no means the world's least suspicious traveller, which is kind of ironic, considering I'm a very law-abiding one. I may have mentioned that I repeatedly get stopped by customs in Stockholm's Frihamn seaport, but in this case the customs guys were the only ones utterly disinterested. Israeli security actually took me aside at the exit gate, though the agent was satisfied by my story and the fact that I actually had something with the employer's logo on it with me.
Ben Gurion is actually a very pretty building. It's distinctive, local, and looks like somebody actually put some thought into both planning and decorating it. I remarked on this as my queue for passport control promptly ground to a halt, and kept thinking it as I was questioned again by a second agent at the airside exit, this one only made happy by the sight of my return ticket and a promise not to go anywhere except Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, specifically not Ramallah.
Israel has a smaller territory than Estonia, but over three times the population. I had thought Jerusalem would be a longer trip than it was; the highway is of very good quality and the scenery is awesome. I'd long since lost any feeling of exotic travelling through Europe, but this country really feels like it's somewhere different. My understanding had been that Israel is still fundamentally a Western state, but now I'm starting to wonder.
The Regency hotel in Jerusalem is advertised as five-star luxury accomodation. If your understanding of hospitality is calibrated for Europe, as mine is, you will be sorely disappointed. The building itself is extremely impressive, a pyramid carved into the side of a mountain, if quite hard to find (our cabbie - equipped with an address, a map and a tinfoil-suggesting engine issue half way down from the airport - failed to deliver us there without the aid of a local colleague). But it was built a long time ago, and nobody has bothered to renovate it since. My first suspicion arose during checkin, when I saw that the WiFi was not free. The room only extended my disappointment. Maybe this was five-star stuff in the 1970s, in an age before laptops, MP3 players and digital cameras, when it was not presumed that a traveller may have any need to extract electricity. The room has a desk, letterhead paper and envelopes - but, curiously, no pen; and infuriatingly, no sockets in sight. The power cables from the desk lamp and paleolithic TV set snake off into the nether regions behind the cupboard and bed. I found an outlet eventually, just the one - hidden behind the curtain in the bottom corner of the wall, quite possibly the least useful possible spot.
Company policy states the laptop needs to be left in the room's safe when leaving the hotel without it. The safe, never mind that it's too small to fit the thing in the first place, does not actually work. There's a minibar, and I'll give you three guesses about that.
I'm typing this up on my laptop on Saturday night, saving it in a Notepad file. Hope to post it tomorrow or whenever I get to a working network connection. On the upside, I've got some very nice pictures that I'll be posting. Stay tuned for more!
For the last several days I've been having a streak of small annoyances - tiny bits of bad luck, of no real significance really, but enough to notice. The Boss commented that me and reality are not on the best of terms at this point, and I need to consider wearing a tinfoil hat.
The curse (or rather cursoid) does not seem to diminish with geography. The guy next to me on the Lufthansa commuter flight to Frankfurt seemed at first like a nice enough man - what's known as a "väliseestlane", born into a family of WWII-period Estonian refugees to the West, in this case Toronto. Eventually I asked him what he did for a living. Nothing; he's a missionary volunteer; a Jehova's Witness. He showed remarkable restraint, but did end up trying to convert me. I told him about Popper's falsifiers and Adams' puddle argument, but I should've known better than to try to use reason and common sense, really.
Frankfurt Airport, if not depressing, is at least surprising. As Lufthansa's main hub and a huge international half way point, I'd expect it to be a tad more impressive. Instead it feels old and industrial. Our connection was fairly tight (only an hour to get from the commuter parked in the ass end of nowhere to a 747 skybridge); we made it, but it involved a lot of walking and two separate security checks.
This was my first time on a Jumbo Jet, and I can see Clarkson's point - it's a lot more pleasant a place to be than the Triple Seven I rode to California a couple years back. A less than four-hour hop down to Tel Aviv was entirely unstressful, save for a slightly exciting landing.
There is an island somewhere in the Caribbean whose major attraction is the fact that it consists almost entirely of a runway, with a beach at either end; on this runway lands a weekly Air France 747. The runway is still fairly short, so the plane comes in very exactly, touching down at the edge; supposedly the experience of a heavy airliner gliding just above your head is one-of-a-kind indeed. But the sensation of being in one as it powerslides at low altitude onto Ben Gurion's main landing strip is not something to ignore.
I am by no means the world's least suspicious traveller, which is kind of ironic, considering I'm a very law-abiding one. I may have mentioned that I repeatedly get stopped by customs in Stockholm's Frihamn seaport, but in this case the customs guys were the only ones utterly disinterested. Israeli security actually took me aside at the exit gate, though the agent was satisfied by my story and the fact that I actually had something with the employer's logo on it with me.
Ben Gurion is actually a very pretty building. It's distinctive, local, and looks like somebody actually put some thought into both planning and decorating it. I remarked on this as my queue for passport control promptly ground to a halt, and kept thinking it as I was questioned again by a second agent at the airside exit, this one only made happy by the sight of my return ticket and a promise not to go anywhere except Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, specifically not Ramallah.
Israel has a smaller territory than Estonia, but over three times the population. I had thought Jerusalem would be a longer trip than it was; the highway is of very good quality and the scenery is awesome. I'd long since lost any feeling of exotic travelling through Europe, but this country really feels like it's somewhere different. My understanding had been that Israel is still fundamentally a Western state, but now I'm starting to wonder.
The Regency hotel in Jerusalem is advertised as five-star luxury accomodation. If your understanding of hospitality is calibrated for Europe, as mine is, you will be sorely disappointed. The building itself is extremely impressive, a pyramid carved into the side of a mountain, if quite hard to find (our cabbie - equipped with an address, a map and a tinfoil-suggesting engine issue half way down from the airport - failed to deliver us there without the aid of a local colleague). But it was built a long time ago, and nobody has bothered to renovate it since. My first suspicion arose during checkin, when I saw that the WiFi was not free. The room only extended my disappointment. Maybe this was five-star stuff in the 1970s, in an age before laptops, MP3 players and digital cameras, when it was not presumed that a traveller may have any need to extract electricity. The room has a desk, letterhead paper and envelopes - but, curiously, no pen; and infuriatingly, no sockets in sight. The power cables from the desk lamp and paleolithic TV set snake off into the nether regions behind the cupboard and bed. I found an outlet eventually, just the one - hidden behind the curtain in the bottom corner of the wall, quite possibly the least useful possible spot.
Company policy states the laptop needs to be left in the room's safe when leaving the hotel without it. The safe, never mind that it's too small to fit the thing in the first place, does not actually work. There's a minibar, and I'll give you three guesses about that.
I'm typing this up on my laptop on Saturday night, saving it in a Notepad file. Hope to post it tomorrow or whenever I get to a working network connection. On the upside, I've got some very nice pictures that I'll be posting. Stay tuned for more!
Friday, July 07, 2006
Off to the Holy Land
I love travel. Whereas most people enjoy visiting a foreign place, I am actually also rather partial to the process of getting there. The prevailing sentiment is that airports are the hubs of Hell, I've always liked the feel of being there, the sensation that everyone is either going places or coming home. (If you've seen the movie Love, Actually, you'll recognize the notion.) I also haven't done enough air travel to generate familiarity.
Me and two of my coworkers are going to Israel tomorrow, for business. The Boss is a tall, scrawny man that not only looks like a geek, but relishes it. He is a Dungeon Master, and has more geek pride than anyone I've ever met. The Blonde is one of my old acquaintances from Posh Uni. She's the object of all the blonde jokes here in the Document Lounge, and doesn't seem to get offended. She's not dumb, but she is a blonde, and she does like pink fluffy things and kittens. Include me - a big bloke with facial hair and the wardrobe of a Hell's Angels prospect - and you may as well collectively call us The Stereotypes.
I've had longer journeys than the one I'm facing tomorrow, and less comfortable ones (it's coach class air travel, but it's Lufthansa at least), but I'm still preparing for it. Today's last-minut lunchbreak shopping included a couple of books, despite the fact that I've got half a dozen DVDs at the ready. The Boss is omnivorous in terms of reading material, but alas I am more discerning, so I've been lucky to find something even remotely promising in the Tartu bookshop. I also intended to stock up on sun tan lotion, but didn't. The sort of "SPF Fuck" sunblock that I'm after is quite expensive in Estonia and, I presume, ubiquitous in Israel; besides, I remembered what a native of Arizona once told me. Some of the palest people you will ever meet come from Las Vegas; in the middle of the desert, civilization is constructed so as to limit sun exposure to an absolute minimum.
I'm carrying new toys - a Dell Latitude D620 and a Canon PowerShot A620, both clad in ballistic nylon - so I'll do my best to document the journey and post updates from the road.
And yes, I'm typing this up on the laptop, reclining on a bright red leather couch in a nook of the Document Lounge. I feel so Web 2.0.
Me and two of my coworkers are going to Israel tomorrow, for business. The Boss is a tall, scrawny man that not only looks like a geek, but relishes it. He is a Dungeon Master, and has more geek pride than anyone I've ever met. The Blonde is one of my old acquaintances from Posh Uni. She's the object of all the blonde jokes here in the Document Lounge, and doesn't seem to get offended. She's not dumb, but she is a blonde, and she does like pink fluffy things and kittens. Include me - a big bloke with facial hair and the wardrobe of a Hell's Angels prospect - and you may as well collectively call us The Stereotypes.
I've had longer journeys than the one I'm facing tomorrow, and less comfortable ones (it's coach class air travel, but it's Lufthansa at least), but I'm still preparing for it. Today's last-minut lunchbreak shopping included a couple of books, despite the fact that I've got half a dozen DVDs at the ready. The Boss is omnivorous in terms of reading material, but alas I am more discerning, so I've been lucky to find something even remotely promising in the Tartu bookshop. I also intended to stock up on sun tan lotion, but didn't. The sort of "SPF Fuck" sunblock that I'm after is quite expensive in Estonia and, I presume, ubiquitous in Israel; besides, I remembered what a native of Arizona once told me. Some of the palest people you will ever meet come from Las Vegas; in the middle of the desert, civilization is constructed so as to limit sun exposure to an absolute minimum.
I'm carrying new toys - a Dell Latitude D620 and a Canon PowerShot A620, both clad in ballistic nylon - so I'll do my best to document the journey and post updates from the road.
And yes, I'm typing this up on the laptop, reclining on a bright red leather couch in a nook of the Document Lounge. I feel so Web 2.0.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Estonica: National
As Estonia's economy soars at almost 10% annual growth on the back of international business, the message to foreign investors is: We really like you guys and are happy to be working with you, just please don't move here.
Estonians are nationalistic. It would be wrong to call them xenophobes; they are a small nation, and smart enough to realize that they cannot survive and prosper without interaction with others. But, while modern middle-class Estonians love to travel, they are not particularly happy about anyone coming over here.
You can see where they're coming from. Estonia has been conquered by more or less everyone in the general vicinity (would you believe, Poland?), and recent history has not shown it to be in any way beneficial. Estonians don't actually hold grudges as a nation; they're quite happy dealing with Germans, Swedes, Danes - yes, even Poles. The enmity between Estonians and Russians will disappear over time; as generations change, people who have never lived under occupation will have no reason to treat Russians with undue contempt. Local Russian-speakers have mostly done well to integrate into a national society, and tourists from Moscow and St. Petersburg are actually quite welcome; they spend lots of money and behave a lot better than the drunk Finns* or British stag parties. But Estonians still have every cause to dislike foreigners.
This might be a major part of the reason for Estonia's IT miracle, the staple of the booming new economy. The funny thing about globalization in the early 21st century is that it actually allows national cultures to be preserved better. Local programmers can be a part of the worldwide workforce, right at the leading edge of the industry (Kazaa, Skype and Hotmail were all developed by Estonians) without necessarily having to turn the country into a 51st state. My employer, who you have never heard of unless you're in the industry, but whose major customers are household names all over the 'Net, is a shining example of how a multinational enterprise can become hugely successful by using passionate southerners for customer relations purposes, leaving the technical solutions to cold, methodical northerners.
In a connected world, multiculturalism may soon outlive its usefulness; prosperity can be spread to outlying territories without imposition of alien values or lifestyles. Tolerance for other cultures may effectively give way to a mild form of nationalism, with ethnocentric states acting as fully functional elements of the global economy. There is no compelling reason for thousands of Indians to move to London if they can have a decent quality of life back at home.
----
*Finns are Estonians' cousins and the two countries are closely aligned in political terms, plenty of Estonians have family across the bay, and generally Finns are well-liked; but the vodka tourists are still fucking annoying.
Estonians are nationalistic. It would be wrong to call them xenophobes; they are a small nation, and smart enough to realize that they cannot survive and prosper without interaction with others. But, while modern middle-class Estonians love to travel, they are not particularly happy about anyone coming over here.
You can see where they're coming from. Estonia has been conquered by more or less everyone in the general vicinity (would you believe, Poland?), and recent history has not shown it to be in any way beneficial. Estonians don't actually hold grudges as a nation; they're quite happy dealing with Germans, Swedes, Danes - yes, even Poles. The enmity between Estonians and Russians will disappear over time; as generations change, people who have never lived under occupation will have no reason to treat Russians with undue contempt. Local Russian-speakers have mostly done well to integrate into a national society, and tourists from Moscow and St. Petersburg are actually quite welcome; they spend lots of money and behave a lot better than the drunk Finns* or British stag parties. But Estonians still have every cause to dislike foreigners.
This might be a major part of the reason for Estonia's IT miracle, the staple of the booming new economy. The funny thing about globalization in the early 21st century is that it actually allows national cultures to be preserved better. Local programmers can be a part of the worldwide workforce, right at the leading edge of the industry (Kazaa, Skype and Hotmail were all developed by Estonians) without necessarily having to turn the country into a 51st state. My employer, who you have never heard of unless you're in the industry, but whose major customers are household names all over the 'Net, is a shining example of how a multinational enterprise can become hugely successful by using passionate southerners for customer relations purposes, leaving the technical solutions to cold, methodical northerners.
In a connected world, multiculturalism may soon outlive its usefulness; prosperity can be spread to outlying territories without imposition of alien values or lifestyles. Tolerance for other cultures may effectively give way to a mild form of nationalism, with ethnocentric states acting as fully functional elements of the global economy. There is no compelling reason for thousands of Indians to move to London if they can have a decent quality of life back at home.
----
*Finns are Estonians' cousins and the two countries are closely aligned in political terms, plenty of Estonians have family across the bay, and generally Finns are well-liked; but the vodka tourists are still fucking annoying.
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