Happy Birthday To Me (or: Go West, Old Man!)

Happy Birthday in the local time zone happy birthday to me.

I get a thirty-hour birthday this year, thanks to flying West across six time zones starting at 10:30 local time (2:30 AM eastern USA time).

Golden Circle Tour

Yesterday was a bad day to forget my camera. It was the day of ICALP's Golden Circle Tour, a six-hour driving tour around the countryside near Reykjavik. However, Wikipedia has pictures of everything.

First, we went to a volcanic crater - a very regular crater formed by a volcano's top collapsing into its emptying magma crater.

Second, we went to see Geysir (the geyser geysers are named after) and Strokkur, which are in the same place.

Third, we went to see Gullfoss, an amazing waterfall. At one point there was this magnificent effect where the persistent rainbow appeared to be a few feet in front of me to the left and to be out over the falls to the right - I had the distinct impression of finding the end of the rainbow.

Finally, we went to Þingvellir (read: thingveller) where the tour guides claimed, tectonically speaking, that you could put "one foot in America and one in Europe." Obviously this is crap, such a phenomena being impossible to specify that precisely, but it was a cute thought, and it was interesting to see the site of the Alþingi (read: all thing or al thing), one of the oldest parliaments in the world.

When we got back I rehearsed my presentation a bit, but I got frustrated and so I took a walk down the hill to the north shore to clear my head. I give the talk at 3 PM GMT. Wish me luck! Tonight we go to Perlan, which I hiked around on Monday.

On a bus through permafrost

At 5:30 PM (EDT) on July 5, I left my girlfriend Rachel and her sister Rebecca on a train platform in the southwest suburbs of Boston. Maybe 10 hours later, my clocks had been reset to 7:30 AM (GMT) and I was sitting next to a researcher from TTI Chicago, Prahladh Harsha on a bus to Reykjavik for ICALP 2008.

He mentioned that Iceland's population was smaller than Pittsburgh's - but it tuns out that Pittsburgh is a tiny, tiny bit smaller - essentially they are the same size, a bit over 310,000 people. His hometown of Hyderabad, on the other hand, has almost 10 million people. I had to prod just a little bit to get him to tell me where he was from - most American researchers on a bus in Iceland don't know where Hyderabad is. Most of them haven't worked in Bangalore for three months either. We talked about Hampi and air pollution in Bangalore as the bus drove past raw, cracked volcanic earth. And that's when it occurred to me to maybe write a thing or two in this while I'm in Iceland.

Departure

This will be my last post before I leave India; it almost certainly won't be my last post to this blog. I haven't told every story I intend to tell from this trip, and there are other stories that aren't finished yet. In particular, over the last two days I've done a lot of walking and picture taking of the parts of Bangalore I spent a lot of time in that I'll want to post when I have time.

Tonight, I turned in my Microsoft-issued cell phone and had dinner at New Shanti Sagar. It broke my heart when Brownie/Dennis/Goldie, the Microsoft dog with at least as many names as working legs (the poor thing apparently injured his right front paw) followed me most of the way to Bashyam Circle, and I had to tell him to go back. This is a hard thing to tell a dog, both practically and emotionally.

Lufthansa 755 to Frankfurt, Germany (ETA, 8 AM Local)
Lufthansa 444 to Atlanta, Georgia (ETA, 2:30 PM Local)
Drive to Pittsburgh (ETA, Wednesday PM)

Other people's pictures

One of the things about my picasa account is that it's all pictures I took, or at least pictures taken with my camera, and for various reasons it seems easier to keep it that way. However, mostly because I didn't get pictures in Savandurga, this is a big post of pictures I didn't take.

These first two were pictures of taken of the whole research group, though Christian isn't in these (we took some pictures, and then took some more, and were missing a different person each time!)




The rest are from Savandurga. I took this one from the car window as we approached the mountian.




We thought this rock looked like an elephant. Or an elephant trying to imitate a rock.

I think I'm checking my cell phone reception. I promise I also took in the spectacular view!

View from the top!

The Top.

Climbing down...

This fort is one of nine that once made up Bangalore's defence network.

See no, speak no, hear no...

Not in Hyderabad

I am in Bangalore. Depending on how outward-looking your favorite news sources are, you may or may not start hearing a great deal about Hyderabad in the next few days. Hyderabad is one of the closest major cities to Bangalore, but we're talking about a significant distance. In any case, no one has any idea what's going on yet, but two bombs went off in Hyderabad and they're reporting something like 40 people dead, a number that keeps rising.

There were two attacks that were successful from what we know now, around 8 PM - that's 10:30 AM for those of you on the east coast. The attacks were at popular tourist/family destinations, one was at a popular Gokul Chaat store and the other one was at Lumbini Park where a laser show was taking place.

It was an odd irony to hear about laser shows, I was speaking about laser shows today when nine of us from the lab climbed Savandurga, essentially a big brother of Stone Mountain, and my suggestion that this mountain would be a reasonable place to project a laser show as well was ... um ... not enthusiasm - "then they'd put this place in Lonely Planet and it would ruin everything!" I didn't get any pictures: I woke up late and got my camera - sans batteries. However, I mapped out the way we walked up the mountain:


View Larger Map

Metropolitan Badami

I've finally uploaded the pictures from the second day in Badami. They're extensively commented as usual, but I think I'm going to be too lazy to map them all out.

Day Two in Badami was not actually spent in Badami. We took buses to get from Hubli Junction to Badami on Day One (buses as in the plural of bus - at the Hubli bus station we were pointed to this random bus to some unheard of place that I only ever referred to as Point C (jokes for nerds!) where we were able to catch another bus to Badami. However, we didn't necessarily trust this system to get us back to Hubli in a timely manner to catch our train Sunday night, so we hired a driver, Suresh, for the whole day to both take us to two surrounding ruins in the towns of Pattadakal and Aihole and then drive us back to Hubli (in style!) for the train. I'm very glad we took the buses there, and I'm equally glad we had Suresh take us back.

From Badami Etc.

In any case, both Pattadakal and Aihole were fascinating places. Pattadakal was this place where a lot of different designs for temples and shrines and idols were tried out; many didn't work, but many caught on and were familiar from other temples. It oddly reminded me of Granddaddy's workshop - the way things had obviously been worked on, set aside, and then "piddled with" over many years.

Aihole was also pretty nifty; the temples there were not as impressive, but there was one very well put-together temple that actually reminded me of pre-Gothic cathedral design, but based on whatever scraps I know of pre-Gothic cathedral design it's simply a case of a similar design working well for temples in general. Also, we were able to walk out onto the roof of one of the structures, and there are some good pictures of that in the Picasa album. Also, it didn't rain the whole time like it did in Pattadakal. Good times.

Badami!

From Badami Etc.

Most of my pictures from Badami are now uploaded; I've got a few dozen left to upload and then I may map them all out like I did in Hampi. We had a great if slightly rainy weekend, and none of us had our purses stolen by monkeys, which is more than some people could say (the picture to the left is someone trying to retreive such a stolen purse).

Now everyone is starting to file out - of the people that went on that trip, two have left (Prasad and Natalie) one is leaving tonight (Nels) and the other is leaving in a week and a half (Christian). Then I leave in three weeks and Camilo leaves after that; I guess I have a great deal of time left, but with everyone else leaving I'm in a very "leaving" mindset; it feels like I'm about to leave too!

Badami, Etc.

Gave the first of two talks today on some CMU-related things (Twelf), it was well received by the MSRI crowd and I was happy about that.

Got profiled by Microsoft Research's PR team, and while that's really awesome I really hope they change the picture (I gave them a great picture of me in front of the Queen's Palace in Hampi that Jason took, but they made it a ridiculous-looking windswept sunglass-wearing headshot).

Going to Badami this weekend with five other people, and while I'm kind of exhausted after the talk and want to just lie down for a long time, it should be a fun and exciting trip!

[Update: They did fix my picture. And I'm back from Badami, and can't find my darn USB cord so that I can upload the pictures from the trip. So that will have to wait 'till at least tomorrow I'm afraid!]

More Hampi

Hampi

I just posted and commented on (and, for the most part, mapped) 108 of the 140 or so pictures I took in Hampi - and that's with my camera batteries dying twice during the weekend! Enjoy, I'll put an overview of the trip here --> <-- next chance I get.

Hampi!

I left work a little bit early (okay, 6, but I got in after 10!) today because I was tired, and I realize to my enormous dismay that I've forgotten my USB connector at the office so I can't upload pictures; so much of this trip I want to narrate in pictures, so I'm going to hold off on writing until I can do it properly.

In the meantime, Nels has put up some pictures, I especially like this one from the Queen's Bath. The girl in the picture is Natalie - Natalie, Sonnett, and Nick are three astrophysicists who were invited by Christian, a Microsoftie from Denmark, to come to Hampi, but when Christian got sick and didn't tell us about them they appeared as somewhat of a surprise on the train ride. Nevertheless, a awesome (some might say cloak-and-dagger-ly) time was had by all.

Some bookkeeping: since I've started collecting lots of links of places and people, and because in general none of my own photo albums include pictures that include me (because I took them!) I've put up a bunch of links over to the right that should fill out a lot of background that I'd never find the time to explain thoroughly on my own...

Busy week into busy weekend

Gosh things have been busy! A couple of updates.

• Last weekend I reserved my copy of Harry Potter Book 7. I get it at 5 AM July 21st, which is to say 4.5 hours before it will be available for you Eastern Daylight Time suckers.


• I'm heading to Hampi this weekend with Prasad, Nels, and Jason - Christian got sick and Pavol got busy.


• My mentor, Aditya, has a new son! His wife had a baby a week ago, sorry I didn't blog about that!


• I got the Harry Potter reservation (pictured above) last weekend when we went down to the main drag (M-G Road). M-G stands for "Mahatma Gandhi," and some of us Americans think it's strange that it's not called "Ghandi Road," but coming from a city where Ponce is a road I suppose I have little room to complain. My Misc. India album now has pictures of us bowling, and of the aftermath of an apparently fatal windstorm near M-G road.

See Rock City

A delayed post about my trip to Mysore - work is pretty intense right now, and will be at least for the next week or so, so I have had less time to blog. I mentioned pictures of the trip two posts ago, but I will try to tell some stories now. No travel this weekend, but we have tickets to Hampi next weekend. Mysore was fun, though it seems to be more of a tourist destination for people who live in India - Pavol, Jason, Nels, and I may have been half the white guys some people saw all day there. It's not the place you need to spend more than a day at, according to everyone we've talked to (and I agree) - in short, I'd declare Mysore the Rock City of the metro-Bangalore region. That said, for a day trip, it was quite nice.

We saw the palace, which was interesting, and Jason and Pavol rode an elephant while Nels and I stridently did not ride an elephant. After that we took an autorickshaw up to the temple atop Chamundi hills, which was kind of a mistake in retrospect. See, these autorickshaw things, mechanically, are are like a cross between a decent motorcycle and a really awesome lawnmower, not the kind of thing you necessarily want to use to get three people up a large (say, Stone Mountain-sized) hill. Our lawnmower barely, barely made it up the mountain - we were getting passed by everything, including large farm equipment. It made me glad that we didn't haggle down the price (which was less than $5 equivalent already), as this driver probably melted his engine in the process of getting us up the mountain.

In general, and especially at the top of the hill, poverty was more evident than it usually is in Bangalore... it was at times quite striking, there were definitely a number of begging children that followed us around for some distances on occasion. However, the increased amount of obvious poverty in Mysore when compared to Bangalore was offset by a curious effect that in Mysore, everyone was following us around for some distance - people selling flutes would follow us playing the flute, kids would start up conversations any way possible and then try to direct us to particular markets or sell us drugs (one young guy just shouted "Marijuana!" out of nowhere). In this environment you quickly train yourself to ignore everyone that you're not explicitly interested in facilitating a commercial transaction with (say, an autorickshaw driver), and as a result of this effect you notice beggars less - you've already had to turn off your instinct to engage with people to avoid getting anywhere without being sold things. I was trying to get Pavol to teach me Slovak so that I could respond to people asking me questions/trying to sell me stuff in Slovak and they would go away - a similar strategy actually worked for me in France.

When we walked down the mountain, we were so in ignore-everyone mode that we (or at least I) had to consciously think about the need to re-engage with people, that the people we were encountering on the big staircase were either being friendly or wanted to practice English (or perhaps wanted to take a picture with us.)

That's all for Mysore, at least for now. Tonight I was invited randomly by Kentaro to go to dinner with a young full-time employee and a visiting professor from NYU at the Windsor Hotel, which is right next to my apartment. The food was north Indian - it was supposedly Lucknow cuisine but I was told it seemed more typical of Hyderabad. Whatever, it was wonderful, a much nicer restaurant than I'd been to since I got here, the food all smelled like perfume and tasted fantastic.

Travel

Mysore

It's Afternoon in America and Really Crazy Early In The Morning in India. I'm taking a day trip by rail to Mysore, and if you read that page on Wikipedia you will know more about Mysore than I do.

[Update: Oh my goodness need to write about the trip; in the meantime here is a link to one of the picture albums. The other picture album from the trip is just 70 pictures of Jason and Pavol riding an elephant.]