travel

Dear Reader, it's raining in Hangzhou and I am not well. I have had the shits since Wednesday evening, some headache, and last night I seem to have had a fever. Both of the latter problems are kept at bay by wonderful ibuprophene. I was fully active and enjoyed myself Thursday and Friday. But I'm spending Saturday in my hotel room, with Junior in his across the hallway, because he's not in great shape either. I have just finished proof-reading a large chunk of my Ãstergötland book, mainly killing mishyphenations, though I had to stop for an hour's nap while the latest ibup pill took hold. I'…

My mother-in-law grew up in the mountains near Fushan in the prefecture of Qingtian (pronounced CHING-tien), inland Zhejiang province. Though the prefecture's name means "Green Field", it's pretty poor and has been a major emigration area for decades. The owners and staff of many or most Chinese restaurants in Sweden are from Qingtian. Yesterday we rode a train for nearly seven hours from Hangzhou to get to the district capital, and all along the way we were accompanied by a line of enormous new concrete stilts on which a future fast railroad will run. Next time the trip may take only an…

On the flight from Amsterdam to Hangzhou Saturday, I observed some interesting behaviour on the part of my Chinese co-travellers. After the main meal, the stewardesses went around hawking tax-free goods. At this time, a bunch of people stood up and formed a large prattling group in the aisles toward the rear of the plane where myself and Junior were seated. They seemed to be discussing the merits of the wares among themselves and with the Chinese stewardess, reading labels and handing packages around for inspection. The whole thing looked like a cross between a cocktail party and an Oriental…

I'm in last-minute-revision mode here, made mroe frantic by the fact that SteelyKid developed a fever yesterday, and had to be kept home from day care. I did want to pop in to note that I will be giving the Natural Science and Mathematics Colloquium at St. Mary's College in Maryland tomorrow, Wednesday the 13th. This will be the "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk, described for the colloquium announcement as: Quantum physics, the science of extremely small things like atoms and subatomic particles, is one of the best tested theories in the history of science, and also one…

So Friday morning, we swam in the hotel pool after breakfast. Then we went into town and had lunch with Heather Flowers at the Acadia café, whereupon I gave a well-attended lunch talk about my Bronze Age project to staff and students at the U Minn Anthropology Department. Good to reconnect with Prof. Peter Wells, and I received a tea mug! I've already put it to good use as everything on our hotel's breakfast buffet, plates cups cutlery packaging, is disposable. (We're re-using our table gear day after day.) Heather then took us on a road trip to Swedish immigrant country around Lindstrom…

Touching down at Minneapolis airport shortly before 19:00 last night, my wife and I were met by the charming Heather Flowers and Erin Emmerich from the Anthro Dept. They got us installed at our hotel and joined us for dinner at the food court of the monstrous Mall of America. (There's a theme park inside it.) Then to bed. This morning we negotiated the ample, varied and sugar-rich breakfast buffet here at the Fairfield Inn, and then went to the light rail station. We're in the second-generation periphery of Minneapolis near the airport, outside the old industrial fringe. The roads are 6-lane…

Three years ago I visited the US. Security at Newark was a little slow, but I just showed them my Swedish passport and sailed in. You see, there was a visa waiver agreement back then. And I thought there still was until 1½ hours before I was scheduled to take off to the US again this morning. I don't know if any country still has that agreement with the US. Sweden doesn't, and I found this out at the luggage drop. There's an on-line application routine for the visum (sing.) that often works really swiftly, but in my case it didn't. It's a black box and nobody knows how it works. So I missed…

Less than a month now! Dear Aard readers Heather Flowers and Erin Emmerich of the University of Minnesota have invited me to speak there in April. My wife will accompany me and interpret whenever we run into someone who speaks only Mandarin. Now, Dear Reader: can you offer me further Minnesota speaking gigs to help fund the trip? Pointers to Scandy associations that I should contact? I could speak about pretty much anything Scandy, not just archaeology. Heather has already given me an awesome contact list. Update 13 March: I'm bumping this entry along month by month to gather more reader…

Sweden is shaped like a ski, and people live mainly in the southern quarter, but in the other three-quarters there are many skiing resorts. I've been going there every few years since I was three. I'm not a competitive or particularly elegant down-hill skier, but I enjoy it and I can get down all kinds of slopes and I rarely fall. In recent years my wife and I have taken the kids to one of the country's southernmost skiing resorts, simply because if one of you is going to spend most of their time on the kiddy slope with a neophyte, then there is little reason to drive for seven hours one way…

For one obvious example, I'm typing this on a plane-- Southwest has started doing wi-fi on some flights, and it is totally worth $5 to be able to web-surf in flight.It would be even better if the flight wren't packed, so I could type more comfortably, but I'm ok with just reading (once I post this). Another example is the way that net access enabled me to have a far better time in Miami last night than I ordinarily would have. Everybody from the meeting I went there for took off, so I was on my own for the evening, and South Beach isn't my kind of scene, being neither rich nor famous nor fond…

I am in Florida for a meeting this week, having flown from Albany to Ft. Lauderdale. Due to the vagaries of the air travel system, though, this required a change of planes in Orlando. The Orlando-Ft. Lauderdale flight is sufficiently short that I like to think of it as a ballistic route-- you're not cruising at altitude for any significant time, but start going down practically as soon as you're finished going up. Let's imagine that we have a commercial enterprise-- let's call it Angry Birds Airlines-- that wants to fling objects from Orlando to Ft. Lauderdale. What would that require? That…

I was at a Viking Period workshop in Birmingham until Wednesday noon. A sudden, major and sustained snow dump on the area south of London meant that I couldn't go home the way I had planned: train to London, train to Gatwick airport, plane to Skavsta, bus to Stockholm, be home in the early hours of today. Instead I had to sleep at a B&B near Gatwick, and then strike out for home after breakfast. Here's what I've managed so far. Bus through the snow from Gatwick to London, train from London to Stansted airport where I type this, and now I have an air ticket for this evening to Gothenburg.…

In the preceding entry I gave a list of good stuff about a Gambian vacation. Here's the flip side. My first trip to Africa, a week in Agadir, Morocco in the mid-1990s, was marred (but not ruined) by the locals' constant begging and aggressive attempts to sell me stuff. I recently relived this experience in Gambia's coastal resort district. The Gambians don't beg. But everybody tries to sell you goods and services all the time, often making you feel quite besieged. The room cleaner tried to sell my wife apples in the bathroom. The hotel's tailor nagged us daily about arranging an outing for us…

Gambia is Africa's smallest country, with 15 million people living on a flat stretch of river plain carved out of central Senegal. Besides peanut cultivation, tourism is an important source of revenue, and indeed coastal Gambia is one of the most Westernised parts of sub-Saharan Africa in this respect. I recently spent a week there with my wife and kids. Here are some of the high points of our stay. Sunshine, heat, beach, hotel swimming pool. These were the main reasons for us to leave Sweden at all. The locals are friendly, sociable, and not in the least deferential to tourists. Most speak…

Any Dear Readers in Birmingham? I'm going to be there from Monday to Wednesday for a Viking studies workshop. Email me your cell phone numbaz and maybe we can meet up!

A Gambian moment. We're in an extremely dilapidated taxi that has stalled at the roadside, just a stone's throw from Tanji village's main taxi hub. Before getting into the car, my wife and I had to haggle for ten minutes with the drivers assembled there under the dull gaze of the village idiot. And then we were accused of rich white chauvinism by an angry man whose whole family the assembled drivers forced to change cars because of us. But now the car has stalled, and no amount of joining the two wires dangling under the wheel will get it to go. All the windows are open in the afternoon heat…

Kevin Drum posted an anti-rant about the TSA, which argues that the new scanners and pat-downs aren't an outrage because they really mean well: I'm not trying to defend everything TSA has put in place. Some of the stuff they do, like the penknife and nail clipper bans, really is stupid. And maybe backscatter scanners don't work. I'm certainly open to the idea. But honestly, most of what they do is pretty easy to understand: they're trying to make it so hard to get weapons and explosives on board airplanes that no one bothers trying -- and the few who do can't pack a big enough punch to do any…

Last week I rode some planes: Stockholm - Brussels - East Midlands Airport - Brussels - Stockholm - Oslo - Stockholm. Two of the engines involved were kind of fun because of their small size. The movements of EU bureaucrats has created a market for short plane hops anchored in Brussels, and so the cheapest way for the rest of us to move about by air in Western Europe is often to join the briefcase carriers and change planes in Belgium. These were the machines: Avro RJ 100 (British, production start 1992, being an upgraded version of a 1983 model) Embraer ERJ 135 (French Brazilian, production…

Compared to the Swedish system, academic recruitment is extremely swift in the UK. In Scandyland, it's typically 7 months from the application deadline to the rejection letter, mainly because of slow external referees. The worst I've seen was 14 months. But in the UK, it's all done in a matter of weeks. I recently had the pleasure of receiving my first invitation to an interview for a UK academic job. Though in the end I didn't actually get the job, it was overall a very friendly and pleasant experience. Before I describe my trip, I'll relate a story told to me by one of the other applicants…

I type this during the last act of TAM London, Alan Moore, who is being gnomic in a basso north English working-class accent. Interesting character, a little perversely irrational ("I worship a 2nd century snake goddess") while leaving no doubt that he's keen as a whip. The day began with a talk by Randi where I learned that he was friends with Richard Feynman! I knew that though my acquaintance with the Amazing One I'm only two steps from Alice Cooper, but Feynman as well - wow! Science writer Marcus Chown then gave us his ten most mind-boggling physics facts. Good stuff! He could have…