My trip was to start with a flight from Hartford to Philadelphia and then a flight on to Dublin. I’m used to things going terribly wrong at some point during my international flights, so I was less than surprised when while sitting in the terminal in Hartford, sirens started going off and the loudspeakers informed us of a “critical situation” requiring us to evacuate the building. People gradually got up and headed towards the exit of the security area. There, everyone seemed to be milling around, unwilling to leave the area since then we would have to check back in through security. Weighing the risk of a fiery explosive death against having to take off your shoes is quite a difficult decision! Just before I was about to give in and leave the building, the sirens stopped. There were no further messages or explanations over the intercom, but we all assumed that this meant everything was fine and we were allowed to go back to our gates.  I suppose the sirens also could have stopped because the terrorists finally reached the control tower and disabled the alarm, but fortunately it appears to only have been a false alarm.

In the end my flight left more or less on time and we reached Philly with plenty of time for me to buy an overpriced slice of pizza and head to my gate. I was happy to see my plane already at the gate almost an hour early, and naively predicted an on time departure. Naturally that was foolish of me, and we ended up leaving about an hour late. Luckily I had no other flights to meet, and I ended up reaching Dublin only a little later than expected.

Once in Dublin I wasted time looking for an ATM (it turns out there was only one as the other two were out of service). At first I mistook the ATM’s line for the line to a Disney World ride since it wrapped around and around the terminal. Realizing this, I simply I changed $20 at a currency exchange and bought my bus ticket to go downtown.

I didn’t dally in downtown Dublin as I was anxoius to get rid of my luggage. I took the next bus to University College Dublin (about 20 minutes outside of town). On the bus I saw someone vaguely familiar carrying a Dell laptop case, and I sucessfully guessed that he was also going to the same conference. In fact he was a Rutgers student, and the following day I discovered he had actually been my TA for the Parallel and Distributed Systems course while I was an undergrad there the previous year.

We eventualy found our way to the registration area for the conference. We checked in, but didn’t go to any of the day’s tutorials. Instead I headed over to the dorms where I was to stay. There I discovered I had not been put on the list for a room, so I spent two hours sitting in the shade of a very nice tree waiting for the residence manager to return.

Eventually my housing was resolved and I dropped off my things and took the bus back downtown, as it was still only early afternoon. After a brief stop at an internet cafe, I walked down O’Connel Street to Trinity College.

Trinity has a very pretty campus full of old stone buildings and nice green lawns that you are not allowed to walk on. I stealthily followed a tour group about for a bit, and learned about the residences of a few noble laureates and other trivia. After an unsuccesful search for free wireless, I settled down on the main green where the students seemed to be gathering for their evening beers. As I said, you aren’t allowed to sit on the grass, so they were restricted to about a 15 foot zone of grass sourounding several acres of pristine grass. Somewhat strange, but I guess it adds to the social atmosphere.

After taking a brief nap on the lawn (I was jet lagged!) I headed back to UCD for an early bed time.

The next day I was up fairly early for the conference start at 8AM. The talks had mixed levels of interest. Most of the keynotes were industry speakers with high level talks about broad system automation that weren’t overly interesting. The later talks were better. I gave a 10 minute talk on the self-managing storage system I was presenting on behalf of a former student in my lab.

I ended up leaving the poster session early to go to dinner with some researchers from HP and IBM. The guy from HP had terrified me earlier in the day when he came up to my poster and immediately began complaining that we had “mischaracterized Jason’s work.” Since I had no idea who Jason was, I had some difficulty responding, although I must have placated him enough as he paid for my dinner later on! We went to Eden, a rather fancy restaurant downtown. Afterwards we went to a fairly touristy bar in the Temple Bar area and had some Guiness. It was interesting to talk to them about life in Industry.

At the end of the day, the conference banquet was at Johnny Fox’s Irish Pub… the highest pub in all of Ireland. Also sure one of its largest tourist traps! We sat at long tables on little benches and drank Guinness while waiting for our food. I had the rack of lamb, which was actually quite good. Very tender. The desserts on the other hand were less exciting.

After another long period of sitting around, the night’s entertainment began. There was a group of traditional Irish musicians who were probably a little disappointed by our complete lack of knowledge of the lyrics to the Irish songs that they kept trying to make us sing. The volumes on their microphones was poorly set up, so we couldn’t hear what they were singing at all. This was followed by some traditional “hooley” dancing. Two men and three women jumped around on stage in a tap dancing style show.

When this was over, it was nearly midnight. We had expected dinner to only last until 9, so people were itching to leave. After all, there were talks starting again the next morning at 8 AM, and we had a 30 minute ride back to the hotels! Just as we all got up to go, the announcer told us that the band was about to return for another performance. In an extremely awkward moment everyone looked around and then continued their way out the door. I’m sure the band was a bit surprised when they returned to an empty hall!

Thursday was the last day of talks, and they went by pretty quickly, although it still lasted until around 6pm. I was tired so I headed back to my dorm and relaxed for the evening.

Friday morning I was finally free, so I headed into town. It was Bloom day (for James Joyce’s character in Ulysses), so I went by the pub on Duke St which is supposed to be one of the main stops. I was a little disappointed – there were a ton of people standing around, but none of the street performers or reciters which I had heard about. Perhaps I came at the wrong time.

Next I headed to the Natural History Museum, although once I was inside I discovered I was actually in the National Museum instead. That was also on my agenda for the day, so no big problem. They had interesting exhibits on Viking and Medieval history. Next I went a little further down the road and made it to the actual Museum of Natural History. They have something like 10,000 animal specimins on display. Some were very interesting, including skeletons and antlers from Giant Irish Deer – a long extinct creature which made their moose specimin look tiny.

After this I headed to the National Art Gallery which has a mix of classic paintings and a large Irish section including the work of the Irish impressionist Yeats.

And that seems to be all I wrote down.  The following day I took a nice trip up to Glendalough where I took a slightly rainy hike through some amazingly green scenery.

Later in our trip we returned to Nelson County (for more gluttony) and witnessed a spectacular sunset. There are always nice views from their front yard, but the wide glowing sunset really showed off the mountains!

When we first arrived, there was far more snow in “tropical” Virginia than in Massachusetts!

We also took a ride up into the hills around their house so we could see what real farm country is like.

Thanks to Monika for the extra pictures!

I just got back from a conference in Big Sky, Montana. The conference hotel was up in the mountains at a ski resort, and although they were starting to get their first snow of the season, the slopes weren’t quite ready yet. The scenery was quit breathtaking (especially for someone from New Jersey), but unfortunately I only got to walk around and take pictures during one of the cloudy days. The conference itself was quite interesting. It was much busier than any of the others I’ve been to. I met a number of new interesting people, and got to see a few other familiar faces which was nice.

We spent our days relaxing on the beach, and our nights at Sweetwater Forest Campground, which had decent size camp sites that were reasonably separated. One afternoon Bobby fished in the pond near our campsite, and caught us two small sunfish… better than the guy near us who only pulled in weeds. On the Fourth we made our way through the crowds of men in muscle shirts to see the fireworks in Provincetown. Megan and I spent part of our last day biking along the Cape Cod Rail Trail, which was a very nice ride. We also zipped through some of the more hilly trails in Nickerson State Park, before returning to the more leisurely CCRT.

It didn’t rain on us too much, but it was very cloudy and gray. I’ll add some more of the pictures that Megan and I took later.

This is the third installment of excerpts from the travel diary I kept during my trip to Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand in 1999. The previous posts covered Singapore and Kuala Lumpur and Penang. Present day thoughts are in italics — after Penang I didn’t keep up with my journal very well, so the remaining posts will be mostly annotations.

Bangkok

Bangkok is full of amazing temples – it often seems like there is one on every other block. The Grand Palace was also amazing and truly spectacular. It is huge and covered in gold. Other than that though, Bangkok wasn’t too interesting. It is dirty, full of smog, and has terrible traffic. We went on a boat tour mainly through the outskirts of the city. The guide was an interesting lively guy, but he kept us how extremely happy and content the people that lived in little shacks along the river were, which seemed a bit of an exaggeration. They let us off at a snake farm where we saw an impressive show. Men grabbing poisonous snakes with their mouths, stuff like that.

I may not have liked Bangkok too much because I got sick during our first or second day there. Having an upset stomach while in the country with the greatest food in the world is a terrible misfortune, so I can’t have been too happy.

It was neat to explore the ancient buddhist temples and imagine what the lives’ of their safron robed monks were like. Many of the monks were very young – barely teenagers. It is common in Thailand for kids to spend a few years at a temple. How would that experience change the life of an American teen?

The Grand Palace was an incredible place. Since this trip I’ve been to a number of European royal palaces, and while they are obviously majestic in their own right, none have the level of detail exhibited by the exquisite carvings and statues everywhere on the palace grounds. Not to mention the fact that literally everything seemed to be covered in gold.

Days 7-8: Penang

I like Penang.  It is a dirtier, older version of Singapore.  There are tuk-tuks, trishaws and people on bikes everywhere.  It isn’t a particularly beautiful city, but it has a real flavor of south east asia.

I remember taking a ride on a trishaw (basically a bicycle cart taxi) around town when we first arrived in Penang. Besides that, we walked everywhere during our trip. Since then, whenever I am abroad I much prefer walking around the cities that I visit.  I use public transportation when the distances are long, but taxis are an absolute last resort. In most cases, I’d rather walk from point A to point B so that I can really see what the surrounding areas are like.  Perhaps this habit comes from Penang where I remember laughing at the overweight american tourists in Hawaiian shirts and sun glasses being ferried around in trishaws. It seemed like they spent more time inhaling the exhaust from the cars and motorbikes zipping around town then actually seeing what the city had to offer.

Today we have had bad luck.  First, a clan headquarters that is supposed to be a very interesting site was closed for repairs.  Then the museum my dad really wanted to go to was closed since today is Friday.  After that, the restaurant we walked all the way across town for wasn’t at all what we expected and didn’t seem to sell lunch.  Now it is starting to rain.

Our hotel room is currently covered in drying clothes.  The clothes I washed back in Taman Negara did not dry at all due to the humidity [in retrospect this is somehow not very surprising].  Hopefully today they will make more progress. There are also lots of rats here, and dogs – the first we have seen this trip.  Hopefully neither of those will end up as our dinner.  Money changers are everywhere in Penang.  They usually also sell jewelry and/or (oddly enough) used books.  Actually, it seems that everyone sells used books.  There was a place that sold “used English books and motorcycles”.  Quite a market niche.

I think I liked Penang because it truly felt different from any place I had been in America. The fact that nearly all the stores doubled as used book stores and money changers, made it seem like the island must be full of sailors and expats from all over the world. Ironically enough, the picture of the money changer above is not one of my own, but from the Penang tourism web site.

It rained again our second day, and it rained hard.  Some streets were so flooded that we had to retreat and find a different route.  We took a driving tour around the island.  Unfortunately because of the weather our guide didn’t want to go around to the other side of the island where the roads are apparently even worse.  Still, we managed to visit a few interesting places, various temples (including the snake temple), a nice museum, and a batik factory.  We also went to a restaurant with very good seafood fried rice.  For dinner we went to a hawker center by the ocean and had some great satay.

I remember the open air market was filled with little grill carts and stands selling satay – deliciously marinated and grilled chicken or beef, typically served with a peanut dipping sauce. There were other stands with seafood, since Penang is of course an island.

Yesterday we also went up Penang Hill.  The ride up was on a small train [I think it was a cog railway] and it was very steep.  At the top we were treated to a very foggy view of the city.  We had dinner at a hotel at the top, probably the best (and most expensive meal) to date.  As we ate, the view cleared which was nice.  We also got to see the hotel’s resident vipers!  There were two or three of them and nine babies – all very deadly.  They were the same kind of snake that we later saw at the snake temple.  After dinner I also spotted a pretty large monkey in a tree.  It was a nice excursion, and much more successful than today’s.  Tomorrow we fly on to Bangkok.

The vipers were living in the vine covered lattice above the restaurant’s outdoor terrace. They had closed off the terrace because of the snakes, but our waiter was still excited to take us out and show them off. They were a beautiful bright green color, but it was a little unnerving to be so close to a family of poisonous snakes. In the end, I was glad that we were staying downtown in our little hotel rather than in the fancy (and potentially deadly) one on top of the hill. Maybe our hotel had rats living down the street, but at least that was a good indicator that it was not infested with poisonous snakes.

I recently found the travel diary from the trip I took with my dad to Singapore back in 1999 (when I was still in high school). This was my first trip out of the country, and an amazing experience. To help preserve it, I’m going to repost bits of it here along with some of the pictures I have. I’ve added some annotations which are in italics. Enjoy!

Days 1-2: Singapore (Aug 13, 1999)

We arrived in Singapore at around 6:30AM after a very long flight (about 24 hours). Singapore is beautiful. The bus ride from the airport was spectacular, exotic trees lining the road, beautiful flowers, etc. Once you get into the city the trees start to disappear although that does depend on where you go.

While we were walking around we came to a Hindu temple where an elaborate ritual was going on. Drums, chanting, all that stuff. Next door was a Chinese temple which was also bustling – perhaps because it was Friday the 13th?

Our second day we continued to explore Singapore. We visited a “theme park” designed to teach Chinese mythology which was pretty interesting. However, it was pretty much empty, so I guess people aren’t too interested in learning that kind of thing. Afterwards we went to the Singapore Cruise center and then toured an old cargo ship. For dinner we went to the “Malay Village” which was disappointing because of both the rain and the lack of things there. We did have some good satay though.

What I remember being most surprised by when arriving in Singapore was the huge diversity of the city. Some streets had towering skyscrapers, giant malls, and video screen billboards – technology which wasn’t yet common in the US. Those areas felt like they could be any modern US city, although the streets were cleaner and nobody jaywalked. Other areas of the city had a completely different feel. The ethnic Indian and Chinese areas felt much more “real” than walking through china town back at home. In those areas it was clear that we truly were in another continent.

Days 3-4: Kuala Lumpur

This morning we took the train from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. It was a long ride with lots of palm trees along the way. On the train they showed us an interesting collection of bad American films and a British sitcom, none of which interested any of the passengers.

When we finally did reach KL we discovered that all the money changers in the area were closed (it being Sunday) also, the only ATM that accepted American Visa cards was out of order. We went to the tourist info center where they suggested we walk 10-15 minutes to the central market and gave us some very vague directions to help us on our way. Once we left the station and emerged into the sweltering heat, we quickly realized that one doesn’t walk far while in KL. We found a taxi which accepted our Singaporean money (meaning they got about 4 times the normal fare) and drove us to our hotel – The Coliseum. It’s a pretty nice place and costs us about $7 a night. I am writing from the lounge downstairs which is comfortable and air conditioned. Our room is also listed as “air conditioned” – meaning it has a fan.

My first impression of KL is that it is closer to New York City than to Singapore. Traffic is heavy and aggressive and things are somewhat rundown – although not everything, there are two giant syringe shaped buildings which are supposedly the tallest in the world if you include the big needles. I really haven’t been out into the city except for our cab ride yet, so I can’t really make a judgment yet. The cab ride was my first driving on the wrong side of the road experience, and was a bit disconcerting.

Kuala Lumpur has lots of interesting buildings and some trees. It is certainly prettier than some US cities I’ve been to. It is a small city too. Today we got lost and wandered for a bit until we found ourselves right near our hotel when we thought we were on the other side of town. Still, walking isn’t too much fun here. It is hot, polluted, and the drivers are crazy. Also, it is laid out strangely with streets at all angles. Big freeways and ramps get in your way while walking about. Now we are getting used to it, but of course that means it is time to move on… to the rain forest.

I don’t remember too much more about KL than the traffic and the heat. There were more arab influences in a lot of the architecture than in Singapore (not surprising since Islam is the state religion in Malaysia). Of course what I remember the best is the nasi goreng (SE asia style fried rice) and some of the Indian breads. Delicious!

Days 5-6: Taman Negara

Today we arrived in Taman Nagara on a little boat. The shores of the river leading to the park are completely overgrown with trees. I suppose that is what one should expect in a rain forest though. On the way up river we saw a fair number of water buffalo, but little else. In the evening we planned to watch a video on the park and then go on the night safari. After a long time of searching through the dark we found the place. Then we go to sit and wait for a while. Finally we got to see the movie, but I fell asleep and missed much of it – it had been a tiring day. We had to leave the movie early so we wouldn’t miss the safari, ingenious planning on the park’s part. The safari was okay. We didn’t to see anything interesting except a snake. Still, it was neat to be in the woods at night, the jungle was very dark and menacing.

Our second day we went on a walk in the jungle. It was hot and wet… very wet. The air was cool, but we were drenched from sweat and the mist. The climb was steep, but not too bad going up. Down was worse because it was much muddier. Afterwards we went on a rather disappointing boat ride through some rapids. It was really just an excuse to take you to the other resort so you could spend money there. Our driver did a good job of avoiding all the big rapids. I also got around to washing my clothes, which took a long time. Hopefully they will be dry by tomorrow. We have changed our plans and will be leaving here a day early so we can go to Penang. It is supposed to be very different from the places we’ve been to so far.

This was my first experience in a true rain forest. The humidity (and leeches) weren’t great, but it was really cool to see so much green. The picture above is from a tree top catwalk–this was a very nice way to see a whole new “layer” of the forest which we would have missed just being on the ground. Unfortunately we didn’t see much wildlife there–probably because some of the other tourists on the catwalk were having a great time jumping up and down on the bridges… stupid Americans.

We stayed in a small bungalow across the river from the main park. I think we had electricity, but it was very basic. Most of the village nearby did not have power, but amazingly enough there was a small internet cafe!