Texas has a rep for being a wild place of the righteous cowboy way.
Austin has a reputation for being (a) weird (with a desire to keep it that way) and more recently (b) wired - and wired with intent, as exemplified by the SXSW music, film and tech conference mix
The whole state is also the place for cars - of all sizes (mainly big). Wide open highways and big wide roadways. I can't speak for the rest of the state, but in Austin at least, despite the CAR as the core means of individual transportation, drivers seem to be super pedestrian sensitive. Cars easily give peds the right of way at intersections. Interestingly, walkers also tend to wait for the lights at intersections, too. Jay walking seems the exception not the rule. And it seems to work. There seems to be an easy ebb and flow between cars and pedestrians that is rare. Now, maybe that's all just perception and not what a local Austonian (?) would tell you, but from the touristo/visitor perspective, Austin is a joy to walk.
One other thing? they have some interesting concepts with public transportation: core areas are seviced by something called the Dillo - a free bus service that takes care of the core area - about 5 miles square. It's free. But get this: public buses are 50c for adults. 50c for public transport!! AND Anyone with a university ID card can ride these buses FREE. Staff and students. The bus site has an effective route planner as well.
Austin is the third fastest growing city in the USA right now. It seems somehow incongruous that it would also have such a seemingly progressive stance on transportation. What a joy! visit austin: all the places you'd want to hit are available via bus or by walking - transportation is cheap and walkers are not treated as fair game for target practice.
Bliss.
(oh wow! and there's even wireless past every busstop! i'm posting this from a BUS coming down Congress AND THE CONNECTIONS coming out of shops and restaurants ARE FREE TOO!!!)
Technorati Tags: austin, pedestrians, technology, wifi, wireless
It never fails: get into a cab anywhere in the UK, and within minutes, i'll be asked "so, how long are you here for?" There are variations, "Are you traveling or on business?" - then the delicate probing to discover whether the accent originates from the US or Canada. This is followed by either "i have family in Canada" or "what part of Canada are you from?" - never mind that either (a) the person has never been there and so has no knowledge of what being from any region means or (b) their knowledge of the country is that they have relatives invariably either in Vancouver or Toronto. "They wanted me to come out there too, but...."
The surprise is the automatic assumption that if one has a north american accent, then that person is either a tourist or just in the UK on business. Even within a work context, i regularly get asked first if i am working over here and then "how long have you been here?" For a Canadian who's grown up around a sea of voices, such questions have never occurred to me to ask. But in the UK it seems it's the opposite. The assumption is first and foremost that you're visiting at most, and that if you're working here, it's just a quickie.
Is it so shocking to the UK psyche that someone from the New World/colonies would move to the old country?
In Canada, you're surrounded by accents, not the least of which is English of some sort. I've spoken with many many canadians about this: not once have any of us, on hearing a non-local accent EVER asked "so, how long are you visiting for?"
It's not that there's an assumption that the person either lives here (in Canada, say) or not. It's simply that to question someone about their locality would not occur as a question.
I was in yet another taxi awhile ago, and asked by the driver (a) where i was from and (b) how i liked it in the UK. When i asked her if she liked it in the UK, the reply was she hated it and wanted to leave. This is not the first time i've heard such admissions about wanting to get out.
I can't lay hands on it now, but there was a survey a couple years ago about Brits feelings about their home and native land - and nigh on 50% of them wanted to leave. Increasing numbers who can afford to are retiring to Spain and such warmer Euro climes - to the point where the local communities are getting quite miffed at the adamantly english invasion and lack of sensitivity to local cultures/languages.
Having only been here a few years now, i could only speculate about this angst to get out, whether these folks have ever been out or not, but it goes some ways to explaining the seeming mental hurdle that UK nationals seem unable to overcome when faced with a North American accent - a perspective that can't believe anyone who could chose to be elsewhere would be here.
In the US, there is a legal definition for a bedroom (must be for house selling purposes): it's a room with both a window and a closet.
In the UK, bedrooms - any rooms, even in new houses, do not have built in closets as part of the layout of the room. Tho many home-depot like shops will sell do-it-yourself build in cupboard solutions, these kinds of things are not part of the architectural imagination. C.S. Lewis Wardrobes, sans lion and witch, are still the norm.
What is equally distinct between North America and the UK, it seems, beyond ideas of what constitutes a bedroom, is the notion of the bed itself. Bed sizes are different. There is, for instance, no notion of a Queen size in the UK, whereas Kings are shorter in the UK than their NA equivalents. Box springs are rare: the mattress goes direct onto a platform (North Americans are most familiar with this approach when shopping for beds at IKEA).
These differences in size and support are as nothing to the myth perpetrated by hoteliers that two twin beds squished together can be advertized as a "king" bed in a room.
While not restricted to the UK, the UK must be the biggest perpetrator of this hotel slight of hand. A room advertised with a king size bed invariably means "two twins pushed together"
Word to the business traveler: if you're given the choice between a room with a double bed and a king, take the double. If traveling accompanied, even your partner will be grateful: that split in the middle where the twins come together to approximate a king, as you can guess, becomes experienced throughout the night as an increasingly vast chasm.
How did this bait and switch start? or does every native EU resident just understand that King at a hotel means squished twins, and it's just the naive north americans who take a King to mean a single unified mattress surface of king proportions?
The confusion is not mine alone: check out trip advisor for say any Radisson Edwardian in London, and look at the complaints about the faux king experience. Bottom line, it's just not comfortable. I was pleasantly shocked last summer when i had a gig in London requiring an overnight, where the hotel screwed up a room, and ended in bumping the accommodation up to their suite. It had an actual king in it. wow. the real thing: a vastness where you have to go on an expedition to get from one side to the other.
An advertised Kind that was a King. how odd.
In north america hotel travel, you may not get breakfast included with the room rate (uncivilized to be sure), but a bed is a bed and a king is a king and never the twins shall meet.
Sometimes business travel is like a long walk down a long, boring public hallway. It's better than the alternative - not to travel, not to connect with the people at one end of the hallway or another - but still the sojurn takes place in a pretty dull hallway.
I've just done a trip from london to frankfurt, return, where the gig was at the hotel connected to the airport. That epitomizes the hallway trip: get boarding card from machine, walk down hall, prepare for new "please remove your computer from your bag" step at security (north america has been doing this maneuver for years. alas, it's made its way across the water. why? how have machines changed in the past three weeks that computers now need to come out of bags rather than be left in, but that's another sidebar), then walk on, then sit down, possibly plug in, jack in, use computer for email for a bit; pack up, queue up, board, load luggage into overhead bin, sit. sit sit sit. eat. p. sit sit. "Please wait for the plane to come to a complete stop and the captain to turn off the seat belt sign." Get up, unbin bag, walk walk walk. In this case, the walk lead right to the overpass for the hotel. Consequently, there has been no sense of location shift (or fresh air). Yes, the languages one hears around one are slightly shifted at the different ends of the hall, but then one hears multiple voices in any airport.
No, the only real sign that you're not in kansas, of for that matter canada or even the UK itself anymore is not the language; it's the second hand smoke.
After hours of recycled air, the first inhalation off the plane is - second hand smoke. This is an experience of which most north americans have lost the memory. Not so in europe. Whereas in the UK, smoking is largely contained at airports in semi-enclosed plexiglass cells, in other EU country airports, the "no smoking" area signs are frequently, tacitly ignored. Beyond the airport, in the hotel, the aroma of tobacco products - mainly cigarettes - is pervasive. Rather than a few places being designated "smoking" areas, few places are designated as non-smoking.
Are the stats on the numbers of smokers different in the EU than in the UK or in North America? Or is smoking just less suppressed in the EU? According to the EU's Europe Against Cancer programme report of 2003:
Of the six World Health Organisation (WHO) regions, Europe has the highest per capita consumption of manufactured cigarettes and faces an immediate and major challenge in meeting the WHO target for a minimum of 80% of the population to be non-smoking.
The same report also indicates that 30% of all cancer is related to smoking. Despite its own programme, the EU, in a 2004 statement, said that it will not implement a plan for an EU community-wide ban.
The interesting thing is, i see from stats on the web, as i wait for boarding down at the other end of the hallway, studies are also showing that in places where there are smoking bans, health levels improve quickly. Even local air quality improves.
So what's going on? Why is the EU the highest cigarette consumer when the evidence so clearly shows the benefits - financially to the cost of health provision as well as physically in terms of health and mortality rates - of (a) not smoking and (b) smoking bans to encourage folks to quit?
What does smoking mean, then? why are bans in some countries and not others? beyond the addiction, what's the cultural signifiers?
Hope they'll show "thank you for smoking" as an onboard movie soon.
In Canada, where i hail from, the term "brilliant" is gnerally reserved for truly outstandingly genius-like demonstrations of talent, intelligence, wit - whatever. It's not a term you hear often. If someone says "that was brilliant" or "she is brilliant" it's pretty much the highest degree complement with respect to intelligence or excellence one can achieve.
Not so in Britain (not prepared to generalize to the UK yet...).
In Britain, everything and anything can be "brilliant." Brilliant seems to be used in a way very similarly to the way "excellent" is used in most parts of North America. The one difference between the interchangeability of brilliant/excellent is the rather ironic way that brilliant can be used in the uk to indicate its opposite: you'll hear "oh that's just brilliant, isn't it" when something's really "a complete cock up" (to use another great brit'ism).
You'd rarely find a Canadian saying "oh that's just excellent" when it's a disaster. "That's just great...just great" is more common when going for reversal.
So if you're in the UK and someone says something you've done is "brilliant" - it's still a compliment, but it's just not as hot as you think were that epithet to be used back home. Alas.
Another expression that seems to have no Canadian equivalent is "bless 'em" or "lord bless 'em" or more simply "bless"
It's been harder to get a handle on when and how this particular expression gets used, but it seems to have something to do with covering one's ass after offering a critique of a person. Someone might say something to the effect of "he's not the sharpest tool in the shed" and follow this immediately with "bless him." The desired effect of the apostrophe "bless him" seems to be to mitigate the perceived harshness of the critique - so much to say "doesn't mean i don't like him or that he's not in other ways a nice person, no doubt."
The above interpretation is just deduction on my part based on the contexts of hearing the expression, and also the cultural context of observing the british reluctance (relative to canadians) of saying anything critical of anyone or anything.
This could well lead into an observation on canadian/british behaviour rather than word usage, but it's interesting to see how the two might be related.
It's just these small kinds of differences between english word usage that is part of the culture shock a person coming from Canada experiences when hitting the UK: the word differences become clues to deeper cultural differences that are more challenging to decode, because it's not a case of equivalences like "biscuit" in britain means "cookie" in Canada; it's a case of differences where there aren't parallels between the two places. So it sounds the same, but it isn't the same.
Even being in Britain for a few years now, i don't know how to interpret all the differences, but am better at recognizing them, and the recognition at least allows more comfort; less disorientation. I'll have to think of some examples anon.
Who'd a thunk it, eh? that two such supposedly historically close nations would have these, what would you call them, gaps in connection? I'm not sure what it's like for Brits going the other way, from here to Canada, if there's the same sort of sense of slight twilight zone off set. I have the impression of Canadians being so exposed, our heart, thoughts, everything on our sleeves, without being boisterous about it, that there'd be no difficulty getting a read on Canadian customs, practices and rationales for same. huh.
Mind you, try asking a Westerner why a Quebec'er may be a "separatist" and you'll soon see that we're not always so clear about our own culture(s), either...bless us.
My one previous experience of an apple store had been in a boston shopping center last summer when i watched in amazement as people came into the store, went straight to the cashier, pulled out a wad of hundreds, and requested an ipod. "Windows or Mac?" was the only question. More often than not, the answer was, interestingly, Windows. The cashier would turn to a wheeled cart, loaded with nothing but ipods, ask next "20 or 40" hand poised. The size was given and the exchange made. It mayn't have been a rush on the till, but it was a persistent and steady stream. And at least a transaction was taking place.
In London at least on this day, the grand Apple Regent Street Store was useless, unless of course your idea of a great store is something that disguises itself as an internet cafe - albeit one with some massive screens and the occasional ipod or digital camera attached. Maybe it's sale by virus? It was a pain in the ass. But since i seemed to be the only one in there interested in purchasing anything other than an iPod, maybe it's no big deal. Who am i to argue with a company that holds 2% of the PC market?
If you haven't been, the London Regent Street store is all open plan, pale wood floors, aluminum trim and glass panels, two floors. The crowd on the day i was there was largely 20-somethings taking over all the computer demo stations - to do email on a web browser or to configure IM to do fast chats. It was amazing. MSN messenger is certainly THE IM client - not ichat. There was a lot of IM'ing in spanish going on. Had word gone out to the backpack tourist crowd that this was the place to connect up with home? Something in the casual sashay of the staff suggested, however, that this was par for the course.
I had gone in to check out a new midi keyboard Apple was vending: it was attached to a 12"powerbook on a very short leash - and the guy "looking" at said power book was also just running a chat. When i asked about it wanting to check it out, the black shirted, black trousered "apple genius" was not particularly helpful: i wanted to try it. Like maybe to buy it. Oh well, too bad. Someone doing their email was using the space, so the customer can stuff it. Excuse me? i mean it must be a business plan right? Let people come in and use all this techno as a free internet cafe and that'll build brand loyalty. Don't ask them to move over because an actual customer might want to buy something or look at something. email/websurfing access is too important to the culture.
Two glorious 30" monitors set up side by side running off a g5 were not showing the marvels of final cut pro (aside: surely one 30" would do? have you seen these things? it's like swimming in a screen - just one - two is a jaw dropper. Who has a desk this wide? an office this wide??). No, these beauties were occupied by another person checking their mail. And that seemed to be just fine with all the staff.
And i mean all the staff. No shortage of the lads (i didn't see any women employed there: maybe they were all in the bathroom) who could point over the shoulders of the internet cafe-ers to try to paint a verbal picture of what the system would be like if you could actually get close to seeing it.
There were what appeared to be queues in front of many of the machines, but when i asked someone if they were in line (to try out the machine?) they said no. What they were doing, standing, staring, is still a mystery to me.
On the second floor is the theater. Some poor soul was giving a tutorial on the image editing software photo elements and doing some cool stuff. No one seemed to be watching - or listening; they were im'ing on their own laptops. Maybe the apple store is an open wifi point? so why not on a hot day come into the Xanadu of computer design, sit in a comfy chair, in a semi-darkened area, headphones on, and surf? Perhaps that's another subliminal message: Apple is so cool it provides free wifi; it is the internet cafe location (though there's no coffee on site) of choice. You don't need to come here to shop; just to absorb.
I'm trying to think of any other store where people could just come in an use the stuff for nothing to do with the store, actually stand in the way of potentially paying customers. Does this actually add, not lose sales?
Upstairs there was a line up not for the till, (like boston, ringing up ipods only there) but for the "genius bar" People with laptops, with questions, earnestly pouring out their hearts to another load of lads in a row, asking for healing, for vision, for confirmation that this was the end of their personal techno hell, the summit of wisdom had been reached.
At another round version of same, people sat in a circle looking earnestly at digital video cameras as the geniuses there walked the inner circle, helping decisions to be made.
While the first floor was the land of the internet cafe twenty-somethings, the info bars were the realm of people who looked like they already had substantial mortgages. Who might actually buy something - a digital camera not made by apple at the round bar - or who had actually bought something - at the line dance on the other side of the glass stares.
At uni i recall the rationalization for either selling software cheap at education rates was to build brand loyalty. Similarly, the looking the other way if someone had "illegal" software on their deck was rationalized as "heh, when i get a job and i can afford it, i'll buy it" - that's generally held true.
Maybe Apple's store is trying to build this kind of deferred product lust. Maybe that's a bigger market than the too few of us who might actually walk in to try something specifically with an eye to buy. Maybe it's working for apple. And the value of the many in the future exceeds the possible purchase at that moment by the one? Does this work? Or was this just a blip in the day of the life of a "flagship" Apple Store?
From a cultural perspective London Regent St Apple Store was an interesting experience, but as an individual consumer, it was a turn off. And if i wasn't already a long term apple customer, i could say one of those kinds of turn offs that make you feel you won't be back.
In his novel Pattern Recognition, William Gibson describes his American heroine's experience of visiting the UK, staying at a friends apartment, as a trip into "mirror world:"
Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs, in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have a different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money.
For someone coming from (anglo-english Toronto) Canada, still acclimatizing to (southern) England, this is an apt description of the dissonance experienced - the slight offset of one English speaking region next to another: the expectation of similarity against the twilight zone oddness of same, but somehow, not the same. Caesura. or hiatus. or dissonance. Enter, the Tea Kettle, restorer of equilibrium.
One of the most amazing, awful (in the awe-full sense of the word) differences, of that "current that only powers electric chairs in America" is its manifestation in the EU Made Tea Kettle. No where, it seems, is that difference more sublimely embodied than in the model pictured here: the three THOUSAND watt Rowenta Equinox Uber Kettle which proves Einstein's theory of relativity by boiling water so fast, it's happened in the past [1] [2] before you even get up to fill it up. It is a beautiful thing. Stout but streamlined. Elegant in brushed steel. 1.5 liter capacity, easy to read water level, and scary scary fast at bringing water to a boil. It is, to use the British expression, "brilliant." It enables the making of that soul-restoring to a culure-shocked cannuck beverage, Real Tea.
Some time ago, not long after i'd arrived, i was amazed to find myself engaged in a discussion with two English colleagues who knew their kettles. They even knew what the usual amperage of kettles is without looking it up in google (half the Rowenta). When i exclaimed that the Rowenta was DOUBLE this state at 3000watts, they did a fast calculation on how long it would take a liter of water to boil and even they were impressed (i was impressed by their ready calculation of same, but then these were the guys who were behind the "spud server" [bbc][exn][register]). Initially disbelieving that such a marvel existed with such amperage until pointed to on the Web, they concurred, that this is quite a thing.
Tea time of the soul. One of the profound links between (a good chunk of anglo) Canada and the UK (or at least a good chunk of England) is an understanding of what constitutes real tea. The fact that there is an understanding about what "real" tea is also implicitly demonstrates the great impact of America on the Rest of Us. In my limited experience, if you get anglo-Canadians together with English sorts in some country where either is not a citizen, one can generally be counted on to establish immediate rapport in the glorious and shared generalization that "americans don't know how to make tea."
Tales of terrible tea in restaurants emerge that regularly share the same core elements:
The true commiserators remark that they travel with their own tea bags and secret them into the uncontaminated-by-tea hot water pots when the server isn't looking.
The truly desperate traveler in the US will reflect on how they will beg hotel managers to send up a tea kettle in order to make hot water for tea. "But you have a coffee maker in your room!" Exactly. The water tastes like coffee.The results of the tea kettle request in America have met with mixed results: carafes (last used for, yes, coffee) of hot water may be brought up; another "newer" coffee maker may be produced, and sometimes, a tea kettle of a certain age may be found. An English colleague has mentioned that the notion of the tea kettle itself does not appear to be well understood in the States. He tells the tale of looking for a kettle in a shopping center and only able to find the stove top variety. In the UK, the tea kettle is the default hotel beverage accouterment, no matter the hotel grade.
The default coffee, by the way, in a British hotel is a cylindrical packet of Nescafe. You can order Nescafe Instant Coffee in restaurants, too, and you'll also find it as a common (if not prefered) domestic means of making coffee. Perhaps this explains why the Senseo is making such a splash now that its broken past the Netherlands's borders. Instant. Singular. But tastes, heh, like, i dunno, coffee?
To be fair, Americans i've met who like "hot" tea certainly know how to make a proper cuppa, from heating up the pot first, to stirring, etc. And some of the stories i've heard from Irish colleagues of their relatives making tea by leaving a pot on the stove with tea bags left in for an indeterminate amount of time have left me sure that generalizations are of course generally apt to fail. Weirdest tea experience: Palo Alto, ordering a pot of tea, where the cafe seemed to make a fetish of selecting leaves, placing them in carefully selected squares of material, tying the baggie and then reverntially placing the baggie in the pot. I was too stunned by the production to really note whether or not they put water in the pot first or after the bag. My mind seems to think after all that, they'd delicately dipped the bag into the hot water rather than scalding it. sigh. When one is dying for a cup, taking such time to produce what was, alas, actually only an ok brew, really does seem too much.
But to the kettle, perhaps i generalize too much to suggest that the accelerated speed at which a UK kettle boils water could have such a stabilizing effect on the Newly Landed. But in the UK in particular, where, as Gibson's narrative so aptly captures, things do initially seem slightly off kilter (electrical switches that should turn things on turn them off, for instance), the fact that, while much around you feels a little weird, tea, that calming centering beverage, is not only possible but stirringly ready at mind bendingly fast speeds, means that all can still be well in the world, reflected, refracted or otherwise.
Why not just say "go to the light...to the light"?
The safety films on aircrafts always explain last that you should not inflate your flotation device until you are outside the plane. It then shows the emergency exit as a white, glowing light, towards which the camera (in place of the imagined you, exiting) is moving as if what? what is that white light? where are we all supposed to be going? why is the theme music so cheerful? do they know something we don't? think happy thoughts think happy thoughts...
There is a famous NFB cartoon called "the Big Snit" (made by Winnipeger Richard Condie) which features an older couple and some of the things that drive them crazy about each other. Famous scenes include the husband complaining of a wife during a scrabble game "stop shaking your eyes (she does take her eyes off and shakes them - they occaisionally get stuck the way a toy's eyes do from time to time) -" you shake them over here you shake them over there"
She retorts that he is always sawing. His favorite TV show is sawing and when watching he gets out his saw and saws along - sawing the furniture as soon as the show announcer says "begin to saw"
This inspired a new possible ending for the safety video: in the event of an emergency rather than having oxygen masks drop from the ceiling, and life jackets retrieved, drills would come down on their power cords and passengers would be instructed to "begin to drill" to take the plane apart before it crashed.
The Royal Ontario Museum has had one of the best presented ranges of Asian collections anywhere. Korea, Japan, China.
The British Museum is a grand place, with a masterful range of artifacts, but when it comes to the Asian artifacts it can't hold a candle to the ROM for presentation. Where the ROM sux, unless this has changed in the past couple years, is the lack of explanations for its displays. Here places like the British Museum come first every time.
Still, it's the display, the sense of mood, that the ROM creates. There's one room that has a set of wood carved statues of Chinese deities that is remarkable. The near life-sized carvings are on a raised platform with a wooden railing running round it - as if you're looking into a forest. Around the walls of the room are massive tapestries depicting scenes of enlightenment, and more carved sacred figures. The tone of the room is hushed, dark, deep. It's a wonderfully soothing space, with rich wooden benches for resting.
There's another gallery that had the statuary of a funereal garden or temple (forgive me, i do not know the terms). A model explains how the complete layout works. Two favorite pieces are larger than life grey statues of two guardian-like figures. one a warrior and one if i recall aright a scholar.
It was always disturbing that the museum hosted functions in this space (the gallery has large windows and you could see it from the street). Weird karma, that. Have a toast by someone's guardian of the dead?
The ROM also has a great rock/mineral collection. Here the explanations are better, and the flow of the displays are more tractable than the overwhelming number of cases at say the Natural History Museum in London.
Unfortunately, right now it seems that
most of the first floor (where all these galleries are) is closed (the page on closures is updated regularly) for a whopping renovation: the new facade is to have the museum appearing to come forth
from a giant crystal. Only hope this doesn't wipe out the great stuff that's been there like the last renovation did!
Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queen's Park
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 2C6
http://www.rom.on.ca
If you like Sushi and are in Toronto, the best deal and best sushi in town has to be at Sushi Time.
They have two locations: one up around bloor and spadina, and one on the trendy queen street west.
They have great lunch specials and great combos. My favorites are the sashimi combos, which come in baseball, hockey and basketball sizes. Combos come with miso soup and green salad. All this for around 10$ Canadian for the baseball size.
The staff is also excellent, and seem to float between both locations.
Sushi Time
394 Bloor W, 416-323-2288
339 Queen W, 416-977-2222
My preference is for the location up on Bloor.