EuroTrip '08
clock | May 26, 2009Last year in May, when I visited Belgrade, I gave interviews with Radio Belgrade, talking about science publishing, Open Access, science communication and science blogging. The podcasts of these interviews - yes, they are in Serbian! - are now up:
Part 1
Part 2
I know that this blog has some ex-Yugoslavs in its regular audience, people who can understand the language. I hope you enjoy the interviews and spread the word if you like them.
clock | May 8, 2008Recordings from the Open Access panel in Trieste are now available online. The order was a little different - I went last.
clock | May 7, 2008My daughter collects snowglobes. Or, to be precise, we collect snowglobes for her when we travel. She has a few from New York City, one from San Francisco, one from Murtle Beach, one from Milwaukee. I badly messed up when I went to Boston last year and did not get one. Last year, the TSA made a rule that snowglobes cannot be in the carry-on luggage (and I prefer to travel light and not check in any bags), but the lax security at Milwaukee airport let me smuggle one in.
Now, traveling around Europe provided me with the opportunity to greatly add to her collection: snowglobes from London,…
clock | May 4, 2008Grunewald station in Berlin is a small, unasuming train station that looks like thousands of such stations around the world. But it is at this spot that thousands of Jews were loaded onto trains to Auschwitz and other places, initially in precise batches of 100 people per day, later increasing to more than a thousand per day, some days skipped, some days seeing two trains off, most well documented, but some trains going off into unknown directions....
clock | May 4, 2008Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe where, by design, concrete slabs that are initially perfectly aligned, due to sinking of the soil, adopt all sorts of different angles. Looking down the "aisles", one sees people, children playing hide-and-seek, and suddenly disappearing. People vanish, while the entire structure slowly turns from perfect order to disorder:
clock | May 4, 2008More pictures from the Museum:
We found a Coturnix:
Enormous insects:
Linnaeus, Ernst Mayr and Charles Darwin:
clock | May 4, 2008Catriona and I, obviously, had fun here:
Fossils, including the best Archaeopterix in the world:
The Evolution of Life:
clock | May 4, 2008Time to put up some of the pictures. Catriona took me around Berlin, for whatever one can see in just a day and a half - the Brandenburg gate, a slab of the Berlin wall, etc....
Quick breakfast:
Going from West to East Berlin:
The Wall:
The oldest traffic light in Germany:
Evening:
clock | April 30, 2008For dinner, we went up high, really high - 230 meters, to a rotating restaurant, perhaps the highest blogger meetup to date?! There I met Cornelius Puschmann, Martin Fenner and his lovely wife, Catriona McCallum, Randolf Nesse, Bjoern Brembs and his girlfriend, and Mark who had to run early to watch, religiously, his team Chelsey in the semi-finals of the British soccer cup. We had beer and good food (some on dangerously looking skewers), quickly forgot about the vertigo, and discussed the future of scientific publishing:
clock | April 30, 2008After lunch, Catriona McCallum and Randolf Nesse (who, yes, writes a blog) met and discussed evolution and medicine and blogging and Facebook and Open Access and PLoS, etc.:
clock | April 30, 2008After a lovely flight, Catriona met me at the airport. We went to the Institute where I checked in my room, set up my wifi, then went down to meet the people and have lunch: various cold cuts, true Coca Cola, and a cream puff:
clock | April 29, 2008This morning I had to get up early to go and give my interview for Radio Belgrade 1, at the same time when my Radio Belgrade 2 interview was on. This one will be broadcast in ten days or so. All the radio interviews will be recorded and placed on the web so I can link to it later. Afterwards, my Mom and I went to visit the graves of my Father and grandparents, did some shopping, and ended up in "Polet", an ancient and excellent seafood restaurant in the middle of Belgrade, where we had, traditionally, fried smelt (or pilchard):
clock | April 29, 2008After watching the show jumping classes and chatting with my horsey friends, I went back to the city center, explored the place and saw that unlike most other types of stores, the bookstores are still there where I remembered them, not replaced by new boutiques and cafes, surviving the decades of hyperinflation, sanctions, wars and bombing. The Republic Square ("at the Horse"), the site of so many demonstrations in the 90s, is now a nice place for people-watching. I met a couple of friends from school there and we had cakes and reminisced about the good old times. They updated me about all…
clock | April 29, 2008Yesterday I went to the Belgrade Racecourse and the barns and was happy to meet many of my old friends, including my old trainer (with Professor Steve Steve below) as well as some good new kids, including two sisters who used to own and ride my old horse. There were two small show jumping classes yesterday (3'6" and 4'), both with simple, nicely flowing courses appropriate for the very beginning of the show season. The horses are all better than what we used to ride, the rides went smoothly, and both sisters placed in the bigger class that included a jump-off:
clock | April 27, 2008Today is Orthodox Easter. Most everyone here will have lamb for lunch today. We did something different....
First, for breakfast I had snenokle (here is a recipe from a delightful Balkans food blog Palachinka) and I ground some chocolate on top of them:
Then, we had eggs. Not just painted on the outside, but simmered for many hours in onion husks, olive oil and a bunch of spices until the eggs were brown to the core:
I was a very picky eater when I was a kid. One of the things I liked was a simple beef soup with star-shaped noodles. As this is a Nostalgia Trip this week, that is what…
clock | April 26, 2008My 'kum' Miroslav (see the previous post) is working in Nigeria right now. A few weeks ago he went to Lagos on business and took this picture from the car:
clock | April 26, 2008'Kum', in Serbo-Croatian language, denotes two things - godfather to a child, or the Best Man at the wedding. Well, I was a Best Man at a wedding some 20+ years ago. So, yesterday morning I went to visit them.
I saw the kids (20, 13 and 10: boy-girl-boy) - I have only seen the eldest one when he was seven.
I saw the cats: the black one is Professor Snape, the white one is Lucius, and Harry is suspected to be in Azkhaban.
Then we kicked the kids out to play, got on Skype, and had a marvelous 3-way, 2-hour chat. Ah, the wonders of technology. Velda (my 'kuma') is the LINUX…
clock | April 26, 2008I walked around town a little bit these days. My feet know the way, even if all the names of streets were changed from WWII National Heroes to saints and medieval princes. It has changed a lot - there are nice new stores, cafes, restaurants and apartment buildings everywhere, the parks are well kept and beautiful, and the people are beautiful and well-dressed. The old, gray, socialist city of my youth is gone and replaced with a modern European city:
This is the Serbian Parliament (formerly Yugoslav Parliament):
In the Pioneer Park, across the street from the Parliament, is the famous WWI-…
clock | April 26, 2008After the 1999 Clinton/Clark bombing of Belgrade, almost all of the ruined buildings were quickly torn down and replaced with modern buildings, perhaps out of spite (which is the national character trait). After all these years, the city is unrecognizable - it is cleaner, livelier, prettier, more modern and more optimistic than ever. Replacing the bombed buildings was also good for everyone's sanity here - to forget quickly, move on, build new...
But, if you arrive in Belgrade by bus, by train, or by plane (and then take the bus into town), one of the first things you will see are these…