After China, work sent me to one of our factories supplying the European Market, Usti! Traveling to the Czech Republic involves a flight to Amsterdam, a few hours sleeping like a contortionist on anti-sleeping-benches, and another flight across Europe.
Amsterdam: Basically I can only give a 10,000' overview of the Netherlands. They love canals, farms, and windmills (both modern and historic). Done.
Czech Republic - 10,000' overview: Prague is enormous, and much heavier into industry than the Netherlands (or the US for that matter). Smokestacks dot the landscape connected via a web of powerlines and steampipes.
Czech Republic - 6' overview: It's cold here. Colder than Baltimore and significantly colder than Huizhou.
The only picture I took this night...
For the first night, we checked into our sweet hotel (I'm a sucker for Marble everything) and headed out to dinner. Only getting slightly lost we headed to the main square, watched a disappointing street performer, and grabbed dinner across the street from the oldest running astronomical clock in the world!
Then, in an attempt to power through jet lag, we set out bar hopping. First we stopped at Steampunk where they had almost-functional mechanical creations. Then we hit a "bar" bar where I remembered how much I dislike bars. Abandoning this one, we set off down a random street with the assumption there had to be a bar somewhere along it. There was! Eventually. We ended the night at Rocky Orielly's Irish Pub, where we watched Premier League and Rugby until we were absolutely exhausted. You know, around 8pm.
Best friend taking pictures.
Sunday we woke bright and early (brighter and earlier than we expected to, at least) to see the sights of Prague! We wandered across town to the 700 yr old Charles Bridge, and then up to the 1200 year old Prague Castle. We then waited for the sleepier half of our party to arrive, looking out over the city and fantasizing about bouncy balls.
Seriously, imagine a few hundred rubber balls here.
The castle itself was cool, cold, and quite large. Almost a small town in a wall. In retrospect, we probably should have read a guide ahead of time. For our unguided ignorant tour the highlights consisted of hot chocolate, the cathedral, and climbing a hundred meters up the bell tower. (As you may remember from Paris, this is pretty standard).
Pretty great for shove-a-camera-out-the-window-and-hope
After lunch (goulash!) we had to head out to Usti where our plant is. After a few detours down one-lane, bidirectional back roads with incomprehensible signs, we made it to our hotel! Hotel Vertruse is a nice, non-extravagant hotel on the hill overlooking Usti-nad-Labem. it comes complete with it's own gondola, which we took down to the city center for dinner every night, and back most nights. Other nights, we had to walk up the too-steep and too-chilly switchbacks.
The week was the business-trip standard of working too long during the day and eating too much during the evenings. Czechs love meat and starches, so every meal involved either several potatoes, or a dumpling, which is basically a boiled loaf of bread. Interspersed with working and eating, we'd routinely trust the GPS just a bit too much trying to visit local scenery.
Luckily, we finished up our build two days early! One of those days we spent trouble-shooting other products at the plant, but on Friday we headed out to see the sights!
The sights were cold. Sight #1 was Castle Strekov, Usti's very own 14th century fortress! Unfortunately, it was closed. And as every castle should be, it was impossible to "accidentally" wander into. We know, because we tried.
Abandoning castle 1 (and picking the sleepy half of our party up from the hotel), we headed out to Narnia! Technically called Tisa
, Narnia is a rock formation that we referred to by it's starring role in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Tisa was amazing. Once we got finished driving there (aka getting lost in the fog and narrow roads), we stopped in a climbing shop for a tourist map and set out up the mountain. Tisa is a sandstone cliff with numerous towers, all just there for the wandering. Unfortunately for our footing, it had also just snowed. Fortunately for our pictures, it had just snowed. We spent a while taking photographs and standing increasingly close to the edge until our project manager started getting visibly nervous, then we wound our way down to the base. To be fair, dress shoes a snowy twelve inches from a 60' drop was enough to make me nervous too.
There was a lot of this
The base was like an expansive version of Devils Den. Winding trails cut around the hoodoos, while various tunnels offered shortcuts with differing degrees of difficulty. With all the bouldering available, (not to mention the dozens of trad routes we saw anchors for), I could easily spend a week exploring Tisa. Heck, I could probably even move there.
(A Jeremy has been provided for scale)
In the summer, at least. As it was, we got cold. My trigger finger was especially done with the climate. So we went back down the mountain to assure the sales-clerk she didn't need to rescue us, and buy some hot chocolate. After a small, warm, lunch we set out to find a castle! A real one this time, one we could go in. My minimal research indicated Fortress Konegstein was the closest option, so we set out intrepidly towards Germany to see what lie over the border.
The entrance gate is castle-sized on its own.
It was dumbfoundingly large. I've seen sky scrapers smaller than this castle. We ascended over a hundred feet in an elevator - up the short side of the castle. We then wandered around the outer wall, which circled the town and forest within. As we wandered it became clear that the castle was built on rocks similar to Tisa, only all the gaps were bridged, a wall was added, and any holes you could hide in were walled shut. Even after Mont-St-Michel this is the most impressive building accomplishment I've ever seen. When we got around to the high-side of the castle, which overlooked the Elbe, it became clear why this castle remained in use (and of course undefeated) until 1913.
I couldn't choose which pano to use.
Like Tisa, we were eventually defeated by the elements and the kilometers we'd hiked during the day, and called it quits. After a bit of a fiasco bribing a local for Euros so we could escape the parking garage, I was nominated to drive home. In the dark, in a manual minivan, in a new country, where we didn't know the signs or the traffic laws. Or the GPS. It was pretty great! Except for what I think was a speed camera - we should know in a few weeks. On the plus side, I pulled onto the autobahn, passed the "speed-limit-canceled" sign, and booked it past a polezie at 130! On the realistic side, that was 130 kph, it wasn't the unrestricted autobahn, and it was too foggy to go any faster anyway. After that it was back to the routine cable-car, dinner, and a few hours of sleep before we woke in the dark to reverse our journey, leaving Usti before dark, briefly visiting Prague and Amsterdam, and making it home to Baltimore all the same day, thanks solely to the wonders of timezones.
When I titled this blog years ago I assumed "back" meant "back home" - but it turns out I'm fated to return to the same places over and over again. And honestly, its working out pretty well so far.
Typhoon! You can see the KTV Hotel, the lake / gardens / market behind that, and the mountain with the temple behind the lake!
I left China wondering how I was going to find my way back there, and 8 months later a coworker asked me about adapting last year's test equipment for his project. And just like that, I had my in. Even better, I was traveling along with a team this time, which meant I had less to worry about. Not that that stopped me from dreaming about test fixtures every night my first week.
What was work? Some of this,
Some of this,
And a lot of this.
Pretty much every day turned into: work, eat a huge lunch, work, eat a huge dinner. Then, in the evening, either sleeping, sending email to the now-awake coworkers, or hanging out with colleagues at the hotel bar chatting with the lounge singer. (Mariana was an accountant from the Philippines who emigrated to become a back-up dancer, waitress, and masseuse before becoming a multi-lingual and multi-accented singer).
So, what did we eat too much of? Everything! Here's a list of animals.
Normal Animals:
Pork
Steak
Chicken
Fish
Goose
Duck
Octopus
Caviar, scallops (Pizza)
Weird animals:
Squid (whole), adult and fetal
Shrimp (whole, unshelled)
Snails (still terrible)
Pig Brain (absolute worst thing I've ever ate)
Porcupine (good, just your standard meat. More like beef than pork despite its name)
Snake (Great! Like really good chicken with fishbones)
Snake Skin (Not edible, but other than than not bad)
Snake Bile. (Not great. Disgusting or "kinda bad" depending who you ask)
Animals?:
Silk worm larvae (Bad, worse aftertaste. One of the local DeWalt guys told us all about raising silk worms afterwards though!)
Bamboo caterpillar. (Better, not good though. Not much to them once you fry them.)
100 year old egg (not bad, but I might just be immune at this point).
Sparrow eggs (like regular, small eggs).
Chinese restaurants tend to be more fun than ours. The "Animal Restaurant" invited us to pet our snake before they slaughtered/butchered/barbecued it. There is also "Hot Pot" where they boil a spicy soup base in the center of the table and you order raw food (or not food ((brains)) ) to cook in it, similar to fondue. Even more fun was the Korean grillhouse where they embedded a bucket of coals in your table, and you grill your meat to your liking (and fend off attempted theft of that almost-perfectly-done-but-not-quite morsel you've had your eyes on that your friend is eyeballing. I was grateful for the training that growing up with brothers provided,)
On Friday night after dinner we went out to see a karaoke bar. They are very different from those in the USA. You're given a private room with your group, and then you're given "female companionship". I think if they spoke English they might have been fun, but as it was it was basically a bored armcandy girlfriend pouring beer for you and checking their facebook. Luckily, it didn't matter. Half of our group spent the entire night singing, the other half spent all their time playing "Dice" - basically Liar's Poker - and analyzing the statistics / strategy of it. Exactly what you'd expect from engineers. Interesting night, especially from a people-watching point of view.
Pingu Lake!
On the weekend we hiked out to see the sights. Saturday I set off solo to wander around the lake (bridges were closed due to typhoon debris), saw the market (with all the same snakes turtles and eels that I remember. Hopefully not the exact same ones, but you never know), and got trapped in a garden while it rained. A very relaxing way to spend a day, actually. Sunday the whole group of us hiked up Gaobangshan mountain to see a local temple! It was exhausting, especially for a group of guys that aren't college aged like they think they are. But the views were worth it, and the temple itself and the surrounding views made up for it. It was surprising how abruptly the city becomes jungle, without the sprawling suburbs endemic to the US. It was also a huge city, littered with tower cranes everywhere I looked.
Inside the temple we had our locals translate for us... Interestingly, they would occasionally come to a character and just say "I don't know. This is probably a name but I have no idea who it is." Very weird to think about, since all my alphabets are phonetic and I can attempt a pronunciation on anything, even if I butcher it.
Not a pano! Don't tell anyone. Also should have been HDR'd. Next time?
After a successful build we headed back to Hong Kong! I've always loved Hong Kong, it has a foreign-future cyber-punk mystique in my head. Unfortunately, we had no time to take in the sights as we had an 10am flight to catch. 11am flight to catch? Ok, so maybe 12.... we ended up spending six hours in the plane on the tarmac as they repaired the guidance system and then attempted to relocate our layover to keep the crew from maxing out their hours. Then we spent even more time in line, getting our bags back, re-immigrating to Hong Kong, and getting rescheduled. Eventually, they comped me a hotel for the night, and I set off across Hong Kong! Unfortunately, I didn't get to see the Special Administrative Region beyond a the most organized taxi system (colorcoded and multilingually labelled), the fastest hotel check in (sub-45-second), and the best cityscape I've ever witnessed - which means the Fragrant Harbor retains her mystery.
Brice: So, it's that time of year again. Time to remind ourselves how much we hate ten hour drives, and time to remind us why we do it. [Ethan: Twice.]
This time, we left Friday afternoon to go visit Adam in Albany. He gave us the unofficial Air Traffic Control Tower tour! It was fascinating to see what goes on behind the scenes, and how much optimizing controllers do in order to efficiently route planes while maintaining safety margins and relaying relevant information to the planes in a structured format.
After that we caught up over pizza, beer, and flying micro-drones into each other / walls / the turtle tank.
Saturday morning left mid-morning to head to Montreal. We were barely on schedule, but a rain shower here, a border delay there, a little slow-down everywhere meant we missed all but the last lap of Qualifying.
However, we had plenty of time to take in the support races. First came the Formula 1600 drivers with zero downforce and cute little fireballs on downshift, then we experimented with different viewing positions to watch the Ferrari's and found a great viewing spot where you can look out under the grandstands right at the hairpin. Meaning - for one unsettling moment - the cars drive directly at you.
Lis: “That beautiful spark-glow when they brake hard enough for the hairpin”
Brice: "That was super blurry I'm sorry"
Ethan:
There was a brutal crash with the green and black Ferrari. He was safely tucked aside, then tried to get out (which went okay), then lost it when he tried to accelerate in the pack. He put his nose into the back half of somebody and they left for the grass where they started throwing smoke.
Brice:
After the Ferraris we made our way to the pits to see them up close. Beautiful cars, amazingly clean (except for the ones that were rather broken). Overheard fact of the day: One of these cars will cost you $500,000, with all the included support equipment, with fees of up to $25k for a race weekend - which includes gas, tires, maintenance, etc.
Only $500,000!
We got back to the track just in time to see the Porches run, and try out another position further back in the hairpin. The view was good, but not great. Just like Porsche traction, which makes for a very entertaining race.
Now that the races were done we left the Island to head into the city and found old town (literally: Vieux-Montréal) on the first try! All this practice is finally paying off! The evening was split between watching street performers, sharing three dishes three ways, checking out cars (Model X!), and racking up a surprisingly high bar tab while people watching and discussing seating strategy. People watching was reasonably tame until a bachelorette party crossed paths with a bachelor party, and then loud, cheery chaos broke loose. I'm giving away all my secrets here, but if you ask "Can we have that table?" instead of "Do you have a table?" you always get a streetside seat!
Ethan:
Back to the hotel. This is probably the simplest part of the day, right? Well maybe not so much. As we approached the stoplight just past our hotel (as it was on the other side of a divided roadway), our phone GPS told us to pull a U-turn and drive 100 yards (metres?) into our hotel parking lot. A quick check of Canadian traffic signals/signs yielded nothing negative, so we followed that instruction as soon as we had the green arrow.
This maneuver was rapidly succeeded by flashing red and blue lights in our rearview mirror. I pulled over (into our hotel parking lot) and, for the first time in my life, had to deal with a cop.
Cop: “Bonjour.”
Me: “Bonjour…parlez-vous anglais?”
Cop: “Uh...a leetle.”
So why did I get myself pulled over?
Cop: “Zere was a left arrow wif a… uh… a *schwit*.”
After a very polite delay, Ethan was returned his passport and registration, and told to “haf a good night.” A cursory inspection the next morning (as we left the hotel) yielded no “schwit” present.
We almost hit our goal of being in line by 7:30am - a bit further back than last year, but still pretty good. The gates opened and those in the front literally ran to claim seats. We settled on a brisk walk popping through whichever gaps appeared. Ethan peeled off to claim our first priority... and we aborted the rest of the strategy when we saw he'd aced the best spot. Now to wait in the cold! I wrapped a poncho around myself as a blanket, Ethan pulled out random hiking equipment for more layers, and Lis took to wearing the chair-bags as leggings.
Ethan:
Today, they ran the support races first. They started at 9 am with the 1600s. This was a great race that involved lots of spinning out in the hairpin. As they flew into the last lap, Brice mentioned that it was “time to do something heroic. Or stupid.” Sure enough, two turns later, 4th place’s left front wheel overtook third, and the two cars ended the race prematurely. Very enjoyable.
Brice:
Second were the Ferrari's, which started out under a safety car since the rain had started spritzing, dampening (or possibly moistening. We spent an hour debating the scale of wetness during our travels north) the track. This was also a great race, with 3rd place spinning 2nd out before being penalized and working to make his way back up the points. The best part of the Ferrari race was it meant we could start drinking, so we broke out the wine juice-boxes and took the edge off the cold. Actually, the best part was the crashes, followed by the victory donuts, but the liquid jacket was very appreciated.
The last of the support races were the Porsches. This was always destined to be great, as porches are tail-happy in the best of weather, let alone on a drizzle. They started under the safety car and doubled my sarcastic prediction of someone losing it under caution. Amazingly, they mostly kept it together after that, mostly. There were a few interesting moments of course, (off course?) including someone who came into the corner way too fast. And backward. I was too distracted watching him to notice the other crash happening simultaneously, but no real damage was done and everyone got back underway. The skill required to fight off other drivers while your own car is actively trying to kill you made it my favorite race of the day.
Finally it was time for the parade! Woo! And the flyover! Woooo! And the second flyover! and the actual race! More Woo!
Lis:
The first year I was just trying to figure out what to watch for (passes and wrecks). The second year I knew the racers a bit more and was invested in who was winning. This year, I didn’t care who won. I was just inspired by the talent, the competition, and by what minute actions caused changes in speed: tire wear, pit stops, angles through the hairpin (for which we were in the perfect spot!). I was also more aware of less obvious variables - the speed of the crew in the pit, the design of the car, or a new and unfamiliar adjustment - which can cost fractions of a second and make the difference in making or a pass or not.
Brice:
We timed gaps to gauge progress, shared our awesome photography spot with neighbors, our neighbors shared beers with us, and generally everyone had a great time.
Lis:
For the ride home, we were beat. We felt like we had just pulled all-nighters, being so light-headed and thin-muscled. But we traded driving and sleep so it wasn’t so bad. We also had interesting conversations about travel, space, chemistry, high school, and family traits. As someone who bonds strongly through conversation, it’s a part of the trip I’ve always enjoyed. :)
