Shanghai Bob

I concede that there is something slightly contradictory about having a to-do list for your time off, but one of my first steps after quitting was to make a list of things to accomplish during this sabbatical.  I realized today after reading Schwinger’s comments, though, that these goals are actually projects, and as such deserve cool names.

The project getting the most attention when I was wrapping things up at work was related to TAXES, and was called Project TEXAS.  My advice was, Don’t call it that.  At best, people will think you can do very simple anagrams.  At worst, they’ll assume you’re dyslexic.  In fact, as it turned out, the following conversation became common:

— Oh, TAXES, I thought you were saying TEXAS!

— I was, it’s called Project Texas.

— Sorry?

If you are impressed by the Texas/taxes “connection”, call it Project Lone Star, or Project Don’t-Mess-With-Texas, or Project Longhorn.  (I am morally certain that Microsoft’s Project Longhorn was named by or in honor of a UT-Austin alum.)

On one of my last days in London, I was walking through St. James’s Square on my way to Green Park, and passed Norfolk House, the building in which the allies planned Operation Overlord.  Of course it’s hard to separate the name from the history, but doesn’t it give you chills?  All projects should have such cool names.

I think Andrew understood this intuitively when he gave his own projects the following code names:

• PROJECT BLOOD-AXE 
• PROJECT ROCKSTAR
• PROJECT HONGIAO
• PROJECT SKYHOOK
• PROJECT FISH MAMA
• PROJECT SCOOBIE DOO

So I have also asked him to name my seven projects — I’ve provided the details and we’ll see what he comes up with.

If your project has a silly, inappropriate, or namby-pamby name, feel free to send me a project initiation document, and I will get back to you with an appropriately cool project name either from my own background in mythology or from Schwinger’s repertoire of smackdown-style designators.

When I was living in Tokyo, I created a conversational rule for myself:  if someone asked a question and I couldn’t answer it in three sentences or less, I would say, “I don’t know.”

After three sentences, people’s eyes glaze over — they weren’t really that interested in the first place, they are in conversational mode, so not ready to absorb a lot of detail, etc.  And “I don’t know” is a particularly good answer, since it can’t be misinterpreted the way, for example, “It would take too long to explain” is usually interpreted as a request to be cajoled.

The end result wasn’t that I ended up saying “I don’t know” a lot, though, it was that I got better at explaining things in three sentences.  Three sentences convey the right amount of detail to have a chance of making it into long-term memory, and they take the right amount of “conversational time”:  people often ask a question not because they want information, but because they want to introduce a topic, share some free-association the topic inspired, talk about their own experience related to the topic, or warm up to the “real” question they wanted to ask.  Making a short answer yields the floor back over to them so they can embroider on the topic they’ve introduced.

The three-sentence rule was extremely effective:  conversations with newcomers to Japan on the idiosyncrasies of Japanese food, culture, dating and the rest were suddenly much less like school and much more lively, and the success of the rule gave me some insight into PowerPoint culture:  PowerPoint presentations are not meant to provide detail on a subject.  They are meant to give your audience the three bullet points they need to explain a topic conversationally and yield the floor back to their interlocutor without having to say, “I don’t know.”

I made breakfast this morning (eggs over medium are a tempting foreign fashion here) and caught up this blog with some of the entries from previous days that I had written but not typed up yet.

Yesterday we hiked seven kilometers up to Kybfelsen in the rain and cold to see the view (mostly veiled by clouds).  Today of course is perfect weather for a hike, sunny but slightly cool.  Yesterday’s excursion made us appreciate our dinner (spätzle for me) in the St. Valentine Gasthaus, though, and I slept past 9:00a again this morning for just the second time in over two years.  (The first time was last Tuesday.)

Although I’ve dropped out of working life for the moment, I still spend time online almost every day (not just updating this blog!).  My online life is made more interesting and effective by the German keyboard.

This bit of gibberish:

siteÖwikipedia Äqwertz kezboardÄ

Is what you get as an American touch-typist pounding out the following google search:

site:wikipedia “qwerty keyboard”

After a few weeks in London, I got used to most of the English keyboard’s quirks.  These consist mainly of swapping @ and “, and adding the £ key where Americans are used to the #.  One quirk shared by the English and German keyboards is the slightly larger Enter key that has metastasized to engulf the forward slash+pipe key.  *NIX users typing something like “rmdir ./tmp/old_files/” tend to panic when the first forward slash is accidentally converted into an execute.

But the German keyboard seems slightly more unfriendly to the average internet user than the American or British keyboard setup.  The @ symbol, for example, is written with right-alt+q, which is fairly inconvenient for something you type frequently in email, and the forward slash is in the number range, a little out of reach.  These criticisms might be unfair:  If email address protocol had been developed by someone working on a German keyboard, the @ might have been replaced with something more readily to hand, like ä, which you don’t even need the shift key to produce on a qwertz keyboard.

But the most troublesome difference is the smallest one, namely the swapping of the y and z keys.  It not only requires a kind of double-think each time you want to type one of those characters, but because Undo is mapped to Ctl-z, when you get something wrong, your attempt to Undo it gets translated into Repeat.

Friday ended up being a busy day even though we hadn’t planned anything in advance.  I finished some paperwork in the morning, and so was able to play a couple of hours of ping-pong in the afternoon with a clear conscience.  After our warm-up, I lost four games in a row because, well, I hadn’t played for years, I decided to change my grip that day, the sun was in my eyes…

The two Meli’s joined us for dinner afterward (I cooked, but it was good), then we drove through woods that looked like something out of The Blair Witch Project up the side of a mountain to a Lindy Hop dance.  There were a fair number of people there, the music was good, and it was cool to see the lights of Freiburg twinkling in the valley to one side of the dance floor.

The London weather apparently tracked me down and we had a solid 24 hours of rain, which I spent as follows:

• sleeping
• visiting Freiburg’s museum of early- and pre-history in the Colombischlössle
• eating at Lorenz Straußi in Kirchhofen

A Straußi is a kind of restaurant that produces everything it serves itself or sources it from the neighborhood.  They get a tax break through not having to purchase the standard restaurant license.  The portions were huge, I could only eat half of what I ordered, and since pumpkins are in season there were a lot of pumpkin dishes on the specials board, including a delicious pumpkin soup.

On the way out we saw some little kids who had set up a stand to sell grapes, one kilo for 1.80 euros, but they only had one kilo.  I thought it would be a good idea to encourage these miniature entrepreneurs, so I handed over a two-euro coin.

The kids were clearly running a just-in-time operation.  As soon as the coin changed hands, four kids took off in different directions, one returning shortly with a new plastic bucket, and two returning with a new bunch of grapes (from where? the neighboring vineyard?).  The coin went into their piggy bank, which differs from a cash register in that it’s built not to give anything back until you smash it open.  I was shortchanged by an eight-year-old.

Freiburg for me is “a mix of old and new,” not in the sense of the guidebook cliche that is so often applied to fast-developing cities (especially since Freiburg is the opposite of dynamic), but because my experience of Freiburg has such distinct boundaries:  I lived here before I finished college (old), and am back now after over eight years in the working world (new).

Things I learned in Freiburg:

• German
• How to cook (my friend “majored” in cooking, textiles, and French)
• How to play chess (on the outdoor, giant-sized chessboard* where every defeat is a public humiliation)
• How to play ping-pong
• How to pronounce Pädagogische Hochschule.  I realized later that no one bothered — they all abbreviate it as “PH” (pay-hah).

What’s typical Freiburg:

• The river Dreisam (Bist du einsam, gehe zweisam an die Dreisam:  ”If you’re lonely, go with a partner to the Dreisam.”)
• Freiburg’s “Bächle”, the little runnels carved in the streets of Freiburg that channel Dreisam water through the city.  Local legend says that if you step in one accidentally, you’ll marry a Freiburger/in.

• The Münster.  What’s the difference between a cathedral (Dom) and a minster (Münster)?

• Spätzle
• People saying it’s the warmest city in Germany
• Green-ness, in both senses of the word:  it’s a very eco-friendly city, and is literally green.  The city covers the streetcar tracks with sod, and cultivates ivy to grow to cover the electricity poles so that even the infrastructure blends in with the Schwarzwald.

• None of these things is particular to Freiburg, but I got hooked on them here:  banana juice, Happy Cola, Ritter Sport chocolate

* The chessboard in the Stadtpark has apparently been replaced by an outdoor amphitheater.

I was talking with a friend of a friend in Borough Market’s Monmouth Cafe before I left, and she mentioned that there is no word for “guilt” in Tibetan.

That may be, but just because a language doesn’t have a single word for a thing is no indication that it doesn’t exist in the culture.  Take the Germans.  If you ask a German what the opposite of smile is, most likely he or she will say “to wrinkle the forehead” (Die Stirn runzeln) or “to make a sad face” (Ein trauriges Gesicht machen).  Yet Germans love to frown, especially in disapproval.

My flight from Heathrow to Frankfurt was delayed by an hour, so I missed my connection to Basel/Freiburg.  When I got to the Lufthansa desk in Frankfurt, they said the next flight was the following morning at 9:00.  I asked about a train.  [Frown] The clerk called, chatted with someone, put the phone down and told me that the last train was leaving in just ten minutes and suggested I wait until the morning.  I said I wanted to make the train.  [Frown] He hand-wrote a train voucher and put me in the immigration queue.  The first immigration officer told me I was in the wrong line [Frown].  The second immigration officer told me my brand-new replacement passport was invalid [Frown]:  I hadn’t signed it.  I ran to the train and handed my voucher to the attendant.  He said, [Frown] “I don’t think we can accept this.”

Not having a word for something in your language doesn’t mean you don’t understand or use the concept.  Germans frown.  Tibetans likely experience guilt.  And though they had to borrow a word for it, Anglo-Saxons definitely take pleasure in the suffering of others.

As I spent two of my precious ten minutes before the train left waiting patiently on the escalator behind several elderly travelers with large luggage, a less patient person forced his way up past all of us, smacking the old folks with his laptop case as he went.  When I got to the top of the escalator, I ran down the corridor, with Laptop Guy far ahead.  At the track flyover, I saw the sign and stairs for Track 5 hidden on the left.  He had gone straight.  I considered calling out to him, but I didn’t.  I went left down the stairs and on to the train just 30 seconds before it left.  As the train pulled out I smiled with Schadenfreude, then immediately felt guilty.

Farewell, London. I’m leaving today! First stop: Freiburg, Germany, where I lived for a while when I was twenty. It’s a small, charming city, I’ll get to see a good friend from my time in Tokyo, and the weather is bound to be nicer than the rain here in London.  (Though it rained heavily last night and today looks like it’s going to be very fine.)

Andy and Mechelle got me a beautiful journal as a going-away present. The leather smell reminds me of boots and saddles, so it’s kind of an invitation to travel as well as a way to record the trip. I took this picture of it on top of Manny’s “world traveler” chest, with China in the upper right.