To: Amsterdam via NW airlines

About 2 hours into the flight, as we passed over northern central Canada, the view out the window was filled with white sheets of snow and ice, I think. Frozen something in any case. It was very arctic looking. This was interesting for about ten minutes, then I slept for 5 hours. When I woke up, it was 7 am Amsterdam time. In my notebook, it says:

MOSTLY THIS FLIGHT IS LIKE A NORMAL FLIGHT EXCEPT THAT IT LASTS FOR NINE HOURS

Layover:

Amsterdam. DUH WALKING AROUND THE AIRPORT MALL LOOKING AT OVERPRICED EURO BRANDS OF TECHNOLOGY AND GIANT MIFFY DOLLS (x:3 5hrs

To: Budapest via KLM.

One thing about flying Dutch airways: everything is blue. In the "world club": blue blue blue. Not always the same blue, but on everything. I'm on the plane now. Even the barf bags are blue. Inline side note: I would be VERY UPSET if any of the passengers around me had to use the barf bag for its intended purpose. Imagine! Halfway through a 5 hour flight, you're squirming in your seat trying to avoid enjoying "wild wild west" for the third time when suddenly the man seated 2 feet to the right of you grabs desperately for the air sickness bag and lets fly with a glissando of strained groaning sounds which erupt into a flood of wet gurgling and splatting noises, which slowly rise in resonant tone as the bag fills. Upset yet? I would be.

Hey, orange juice looks really nice against the royal blue airplane interior.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we might be having a slight technical- *static*"

In Budapest:

I'm staying in the Marriott in Pest. The city on the other side of the Danube is Buda. The Danube is shallow with opacity, and olive-green. Bleh. At one point I was riding down the hotel elevator with a Magoo-ish old man, he hits the "close door" >|< button on every floor, not seeing the people outside who had hit the call button. On my floor he hit it, but I enter elevators quickly and mistrustfully and no intersection of me and doors happened. On the next floor down, a gang of elderly women was scuffling on as the doors closed, and they got gummed fairly solidly by the elevator doors, as Magoo watched in befuddled silence. Next floor down he hits the >|< button AGAIN before a bell person appears pushing a large luggage cart, all of which gets chomped by the elevator doors for a good 10 seconds, as the Magoo-ish guy jabs frantically at the buttons, trying for "open door" but hitting floor numbers and close door instead, causing the elevator to re-try closing, catching the luggage cart again. Clunk bonk bunk. We reach the bottom floor. No one is saying anything about it.

They make a lot of lace here. If I ever decide to decorate my house in doilies, I'll have to come back to Budapest.

I go to RIPE and do work stuff which I'm so sick of thinking about I can't bear to describe it right now.

WE go to a Hungarian restaurant and a woman named "Ren" orders lung. It is chewy, say those that try it. I resist the peer pressure and have no lung.

I see a museum of Imri Vargas work. It is good. If you're in Budapest, look for it.

I visit Buda Castle. The floors are so clean, my new boots squeak. They squeak so loudly my traveling companions chuckle in sympathy and embarrassment. I try walking on the outside edges of my feet. In only helps a tiny bit.

The money in Hungary is the "Forint". There are around 280 forint in a dollar. The economy is depressed, our group of 20 eats at an extremely nice restaurant for about 60,000 forint. That's something like 10 bucks each.

The outlets here are funny, and I'm always losing my power adapter in them.

One thing they're big on here is IPv6. It will be funny to watch everyone scramble to learn IPv6 when the time comes, if it does. IPv6 addresses are not dotted quads anymore. They're 128 bits. The dots are all in funny places too: 3FFE:501:8:1234:260:97FF:FE40:EFAB. DNS is very important in the world of IPv6. We haven't run out of IP space yet, but if it happens, it will happen in a big hurry.

The days go by.

I have photographs but they haven't been developed. Imagine a big city with castles in it. That's Budapest.

The only time a cab driver has said anything to us so far is when we were driving by an elaborate building with scaffolds around it and Jake said "Hey, that's a nice church." Without turning his head, the driver sharply said, "Is not church! Is Parliament!"

Blah blah blah different countries are different etc etc

We see an organ concert in a famous cathedral. Behind me is Ann Lords from APNIC, who doesn't shut up through the entire thing.

Bill Manning looks like how Jerry Garcia would look if he was into computers, I thought, with his tie dye shirts and beard. I later see that his Vaio laptop has a grateful dead bear sticker on it.

I meet Anna, a person from my company who's to be working on a project with me, to be one of my contacts in Amsterdam. He had to find me, as Jake and I both thought Anna would be a woman.

They sure like bacon here. And Goose liver! I wonder what they do with the rest of all those geese.

There's a bidet in my hotel bathroom. I don't know how to use it, so I just avoid it.

The "All American" room service breakfast comes with several fistfuls of bacon. You could eat nothing but bacon for breakfast (like, say, if you were on the Atkins Diet) and still fill up.

I thought of a new stupid party game. You eat an entire plate of bacon with your bare hands and then try to open a metal-capped bottle of Perrier.

They like carbonated water here ("with gas", is how you specify it, though if you don't state a gas preference, a lot of the time you get gas. I mean "gas".).

I find little bear crackers in two flavors: Onion/something and Ketchup.

At the little street carts outside the hotel, I could buy an entire wolf pelt. When you get right up close to it, the grossest parts are the visibly stitched-shut eyes.

There's some kind of public performance art involving whips. Whip cracking seems to be considered highly entertaining here, as they have a whip-cracking segment of entertainment during one of the dinners.

Writing about this stuff is tiring. I have little spare time.