Just like Byzantium, but with more carpet (sellers)

I've been fascinated by Istanbul, née Constantinople, née Byzantium, for years, so it seemed foolish to come all this way and not drop by to say, "Howdy!" Thus, my weekend in Istanbul. I've been doing my best to make it a weekend in Constantinople, actually—nothing against Istanbul or the Ottomans mind you, I just wanted to start with the place that was, and work my way up to the place that is, if you see what I mean.

Not that it's really possible to make that kind of distinction here. For example, I started this morning at Hagia Sophia, the cathedral built by Justinian in the sixth century, the largest cathedral in the world for the next thousand years, which after the Ottoman conquest became a mosque (and, after the declaration of the Turkish Republic, a museum). The result is an odd combination of Byzantine mosaics and Islamic calligraphy, that nevertheless works somehow. And, of course, the dome is truly impressive1.

Anyway, I've hit a few of the Byzantine highlights, but Roman ruins and impressive churches are not the most striking thing about Istanbul. That honor must be reserved for the carpet sellers. There's a carpet shop around every corner in the old city; their ubiquity obviously presents a problem for erstwhile carpet salesmen trying to lure tourists into their shop. Hence, the carpet touts: a collection of eagerly helpful young Turks, each of whom just happens to have "friends" or "family" who just happen to run a small shop where they sell, oh, let's call them "authentic handicrafts."

Now, I'm well aware that this isn't shocking — People taking advantage of tourists? Call the papers! — but what is hard to convey is just how omnipresent the carpet touts are in Istanbul. If you look like a tourist, you can expect to be approached by maybe one per block in the quieter parts of Sultanahmet, while on the streets around Hagia Sophia that number needs to be increased by a factor of four or five. Seriously, it is an incessant stream of "friendly" Turks asking if you have lost your way, pouncing if you hesitate at a corner for even a second, or (heaven forbid) you have the temerity to actually pull out a street map! Frankly, it's exhausting, and it makes the city extremely difficult to enjoy.

Fortunately, there are no touts allowed in the archaeology museum, so I'm off for an afternoon with the worlds largest collection of Lycian sarcophagai.

1 Justinian hired a couple of mathematicians to design his church, neither of whom appears to have had any prior architectural experience. They took a look at the sources, did some calculations, and came up with a theoretically feasible design for the biggest dome in the world. Five years later, there it was, a miracle of engineering—that lasted for all of 20 years before it collapsed. It wasn't until after the conquest that the Ottoman architect Sinan finally managed to get the thing stabilized. As the (most likely insane) Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut (probably) said, "In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."

School, the Turkish way

ITAP, Turunç

I am in Turunç, Turkey this week, attending a constraint programming summer school. I've never been to Turkey before, so I wasn't really sure what to expect. Of course, I still haven't been to most of Turkey, but I can say that the Mediterranean coast is really nice. Turunç is tiny (pop. 2400), and I'm actually not in the village so much as above it—the school is at ITAP, a sort of retreat for Turkish physicists, where they can stare at the sea and think deep thoughts at the state's expense. How did a bunch of constraint programmers wind up here for the week? Couldn't tell you, but I'm not complaining.

The wifi only works from the terazzo, so really I have no choice but to hang out there all day…

The weather's been nearly perfect, so we've had our breakfast (olives, feta, and sour yogurt), lunch (some combination of eggplant and beef) and dinner (soup, salad and chicken, with a cake soaked in syrup for desert) on the terazzo every day. There's a nice ling break in the afternoons, to either hike down the mountain to town—the return trip is draining, err, I mean invigorating—or take a dip in the pool. The national beer (Efes Pilsner) is enough better than Swedish beer to make long evening discussions entertaining. In short, it's been pretty much the perfect conference so far. (Oh, yes, the presentations have been top notch, too.)

Constraint programmers in the sun.

Today we took the afternoon off for a "blue water" cruise. We piled onto a wooden boat and puttered out to a series of lovely little coves, stopping for an extremely salty swim in each, then had a grilled dinner and drinks before heading back to port. The young turks (metaphorically, if you get my drift) stayed in the village to find a bar, while the more reasonable of us have taken the minibus ride back up the mountain to relax by the pool, discussing the network simplex algorithm to the tune of a little Vivaldi.

"Would you care for a turkish coffee?" "Oh, thank you very much!"

Oy, I'm tired. Off to bed for me.

Beer and brats and Brits

Back in spring of 2008, a fika conversation at work had turned to Sweden's princess Viktoria and her betrothal to a fellow named Daniel Westling, who had been her personal trainer at the gym. The Swedes didn't seem to like him too much, and I remembered that they said he "looks like a brat" (brat, with a short 'a', as in spoiled child, not brat with a longer 'a' as in bratwurst). "What's a 'brat', and how can you tell"? I asked, which led to a long discussion of it.

Here's a pretty good description (in English) of what a Stockholm brat is. The short version is that a brat is a sub-class of the young and rich and idle, and even though that article is four years old now, the 'look' of a brat is still valid. But of course I wanted to see them for myself. "Well, they hang out in Stureplan, and I often saw them walking past an English-style pub there that I liked to go to sometimes," said fellow post-doc K., who is partial to things British after spending some time at Oxford. So a plan was hatched, to go and sit ourselves comfortably with a beer (which real brats wouldn't touch, as being too prole), and observe these creatures in their native habitat.

An odd thing that happened on the way in was that, somewhere between Märsta and Stockholm, our train was delayed because, as the announcer said, "there is an un-sober person on the tracks ahead of us." But we were routed around the person, and managed to get to her pub, The Bull and Bear, just after it opened. We therefore got great seats outside, facing the street, and commenced people watching. But it was a little too exposed, perhaps; as K. said, "It's hard to just look at people when they can look back." (Yes, I thought, that's a basic problem in behavioral research, for both the observer and the observed...) We were treated to a Thai parade, and a few brats (see picture above), but there were more tourists than brats. "Perhaps many of them have already gone away to their summer homes," said K.

We discussed the rich, and their odd ways, and I learned some important words pertaining to brats and their specific look, such as "kotlettfrilla." We had lunch and then left this pub to see more of the square, and window-browse at a bookshop, and to see more rich pretty people sitting outside at a restaurant for rich pretty people, and to check out Sturegallerian, a fancy-schmancy mall. If you click on that Sturegallerian link before June 23, you will get a Flash-heavy preview of its current exhibit, "Going Dandy," which is completely appropriate for the desired cliental. (It's hard to tell, sometimes, how much Swedes understand irony.)

We then took a bus to an even more British pub that K. likes, The Tudor Arms, which is small and cramped and cozy, has sports going on several TVs, and is more of a neighborhood hangout than a place to people-watch. And here, also, there were more people speaking English than Swedish. But eventually we'd had enough of beer and brats and Brits, and we made our way in the beautiful summer evening weather to Östermalmstorg, less fancy than Stureplan but still well within the borders of the well-to-do part of town. We took a rather frightening elevator down to the subway (it was shaking a lot) in order to get on the subway back to central station, and then a train home. And on the way back, our train was stopped again because of a person on the tracks, although this time, the conductor apparently didn't feel like giving us an assessment of their sobriety. "This is very weird," said K., "I commuted between Stockholm and Uppsala every day for a long time, and I never had a train delayed because of people on the tracks, and now we have had two in one day."

Boston, Rain

I'm attending a summer school in Boston for this coming week, and I just arrived in Boston this evening, after a week spent visiting my family in north Alabama. The past week has been fabulous—great food, visits with family I haven't seen in years, and lots of tennis and golf (a first for me) in 95°F heat—and frankly, Boston is going to have a hard time competing.

Boston got off to a strong start, though: it was 60°F and raining, and as I stood in the airport T station trying to figure out how to buy a 7 day pass, a traveler leaving the city handed me their pass, good for two more days. After an easy train ride to my hotel, I was beginning to fear it would be difficult to maintain my anti-metropolitan prejudices. If that had been the indicator of a trend, instead of the start of a roller coaster ride, it would have been difficult indeed.

Seeing my room brought me back to reality. I had forgotten that "good quality hostel" is a category quite a bit rougher than "no-frills hotel." Don;t get me wrong, it's clean and the staff are friendly, and I don't need a TV, but I'm old enough that I want my own bathroom. Sigh. And wireless internet in the rooms is only useful if it actually works. A week of only having internet in the lobby? This was looking grim. Feeling a little down, I set off in search of dinner (and shampoo).

After a bit of wandering (through the Boston Pride festival, which was just being shut down for the evening) I managed to find not only an open pharmacy, but then the best quick hamburger place I've ever been to (sorry, Krazy Jim's). My faith in humanity restored, I went back to the hostel for a shower, an episode of Community, and then dozed off to the sound of the strengthening rain storm.

I suppose the waning of the storm made the dripping sound more distinct; in any case, something woke me up before midnight, which was thankfully before the large and growing puddle of rainwater on my floor had made it to my luggage. The culprit appeared to be a rooftop drain pipe that ran down one corner of my room. It took a good 30 minutes for the befuddled night clerk to decide he had the authority to put me in a new, crappier room ("It's a triple, so you'll have plenty of space," he assured me, despite the fact that the only difference between the single and the triple was that they had crammed two more beds into the triple). Whatever. By one I was sound asleep again, and I woke this morning to dry floors.

OK, coffee break's over. Gotta run.

April was the coolest month

Joe just informed me that, if he read the newspaper correctly, it was actually the warmest April in Uppsala in 200 years. Nevertheless, I will stand by my post title. Here is a list of the celebratory things that happened, in reverse order, so as to save the best for last.

5. Valborg. The traditional Walpurgis night here in Sweden, on which bonfires are lit to either welcome Spring or scare away the witches, depending on your view of it. We traveled out to the old Viking-era burial mounds where they have a huge fire, and fireworks, as we've done in years past. Our Swiss friends L. and J. drove, and brought a delicious hot soup with them, a traditional soup for the carnival season made mostly of flour and butter. The hot soup was very welcome, as it was nearly freezing temperatures, and therefore quite crowded around the fire. L. and J. had gone to the continent for Easter with family, so we didn't get to break cascarones over their heads as we've done in the last couple years. No worries—we got them at the fire. It's been probably more than a decade since I've surprised someone with a cascarone, and it was quite gratifying.

4. Sista April. The day of Valborg is the last day of April, which is specially celebrated in university towns in Sweden—the day when the students or anyone who has anything to do with the University goes nuts. In previous years, we've been ambitious enough to make it to the student raft race, but this year, for the first time, it was webcast by the local newspaper, so we watched it with breakfast instead, which is much more relaxed. And having a picnic is also traditional, but this year the weather wasn't so nice—see Valborg, above—so we had our picnic on the floor of our living room. In some ways, skipping Sista April makes us seem more like real townies, but on the other hand it is fun to see the craziness, so I hope next year the weather is better.

3. Easter. We missed celebrating St. Patrick's Day this last March, so we decided to both 'holidays' in one weekend and call it "St. Patrick's Resurrection Day (Observed)". Saturday night we had a Guinness, and home-corned beef (you can't get it in the store here) and cabbage and potatoes, then we had Sunday brunch in which the beef was miraculously revived as hash, and there were Easter eggs and a home-made Danish coffee cake. Since the weather was quite nice we took a stroll over one of the large grassy areas by our house to do our traditional cascarones.

2. Joe's birthday was a few days before Easter, and right in the middle of a very busy time for him, but we had fun that night anyway, with balloons in the window, and pizza and ice cream and cake (home-made pound cake as per request) for dessert. I managed to convince Joe that he really should take the second pound cake in to work, which made him very popular with everyone and especially his advisor, so I'll count that as a win.

1. And last but certainly not least... we always knew that Joe was a nerd but now we have proof. In early April Joe learned that the Swedish Artificial Intelligence Society had chosen his masters thesis as the best in Scandinavia. He has therefore been invited to present that research at their every-third-year meeting, which this year is in Trondheim, Norway the week after next. The announcement was celebrated with a bottle of champagne. Congratulations, Joe! (Please note that, although his advisor was on both the selection and evaluation committees, he won the prize before taking in the birthday cake.)

Geek night at the nerd museum

The Nobel Museum in Stockholm must surely be, on normal days, one of the very most boring museums in the city. In general, I'm all for old-fashioned Museums—give me endless displays of obscure items accompanied by a page-sized placard of information, written in a far-too-small font, and I'm a happy camper. But at this museum, the relics from Nobel Prize winners are perhaps a little too obscure to be of immediate interest to all except the truly devoted. Take the display on Albert Schweitzer, for instance. It consisted of three children's books in Swedish, about Africa. The placard described Schweitzer's work briefly, mentioning that he had given several lectures in Sweden. At the very end, we learn the relevance of the books in the display case: these books were donated to the Museum by the some relatives of Schweitzer's friends in Sweden. See what I mean about tenuous connections to the artefacts?

But a couple weekends ago, it was Culture Night in Stockholm, which meant most places were free to get into, and open late, and having various activities. The Nobel Museum decided to do Space. Here's the text of their English ad:

18:00-01:00
Nobelmuseet (the Nobel Museum)
Weightless groove, live Stormtroopers
and planetary activities
Listen to weightless groove all evening at the
Nobel Museum with DJ-Chekov, mingle with
live Stormtroopers and, if you are childish, you
can take part in the planetary activities.

DJ-Chekov? Planetary activities? Live Stormtroopers?? Who could possibly resist that? (The Swedish text was even better, as it said "living Stormtroopers", and also specified that there would be 'Klingon vodka' in the cafe. They also showed a film, a 50s Swedish movie called "Space invasion in Lapland.")

But at night, with some suitably-colored lighting, and a couple walls of slowly pulsing LEDs, and a crowd of good-natured people out to have fun, and a couple of DJs playing space-themed music, the Nobel Museum can transform itself into a respectable-looking nightclub. Who knew!

We wandered around the displays — ran into the Stormtrooper — learned a little about various Nobel Prize winners — caught the tail end of the "Pictures from Space" slide show. We missed the movie, and unfortunately the 'Klingon vodka' was all gone by the time we snagged a seat in the cafe, and they had switched to 'Klingon gin', apparently in the belief that geeks will drink anything as long as its 'on theme' (yup, we had some, it was fairly nasty). But we had a lot of fun just hanging out, and making fun of the live entertainment, an American with a quite bad singing voice and what sounded like a Casio. Thankfully he finished, and the job was taken over by a couple of young guys who did a much better job of sticking to the space theme, and of playing music that at least one tableful of middle-aged women were happy to bop along to right up until the end. Hey, I closed the Nobel Museum... on purpose... and it was fun! How nerdy can you get?