Travel – Page 38 – The Bald Heretic – Short, bald dude with a goofy beard

Shiny Euros

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Shiny Euros

We have received our travelin’ Euros for the upcoming trip. I love the colour of European money. The holograms are so pretty. It’s like play money in that it doesn’t look real, but it also evokes the passion I associate with travel. Having Euros in hand makes the whole thing more “real”, if that makes any sense.

Of course, being the shutterbug I am, I wanted to photograph the bills as a matter of course so I played with different configurations and ended up with the above shot.

When I had finished procressing the RAW file and went to open it in Photoshop CS3, the strangest thing happened. This message popped up saying “”This Application Does Not Support the Printing of Banknote Images”:

In doing some research, this seems to be the same for the new American bills that were recently issued.

What stikes me is that this is not a scan of the Euro notes. It’s a photograph and it doesn’t even include a complete, unobscured bill in the photo. Yet Photoshop recognized the content of the image and produced that warning and, presumably, will not print it in the unaltered form.

It only let me save the oringinal file as PNG and I have not tried to print it.

Technology is cool!

Beer And Spiders

Cynthia @ The Dumon Chocolate Shop in Bruge 2005

We’ve been to Belgium once before, specifically Bruges. Long time readers of this blog might recall the “Maiming Of The Nose” incident where we had to rush Cynthia to the hospital after arriving on the train from Amsterdam.

When plotting the previous trip our friend Bill Shirley was most helpful in suggesting how to go about exploring beer options while we were there.

Cynthia is not a fan of beer. Prior to going to Belgium that time she had consumed less than one beer, pronouncing the drink undrinkable.

It was suggested by Bill that Cynthia try a Lambic, a traditional Belgian brew that is fruit flavored (peach, raspberry, etc.) to see how she would like that.

As it happened, we went downtown prior to our trip and ended up at The Flying Saucer where Cynthia was able to sample a Lambic prior to our journey. She liked it quite a bit and we made a point of acquiring some during our stay in Bruges.

Cynthia actually liking a beer is, well, incongruous. She had the few prior to and during our trip but none since. As we are laying the groundwork for our upcoming trip she’s actually mentioned how much she is looking forward to having a Lambic or three while we’re there (along with samples of chocolates from the some 80+ chocolatiers listed in the Brussels phone directory).

As we were reading up on the upcoming Christmas trip Cynthia found information regarding the brewing process for Lambic. Turns out it is not fermented the way other beers are. With traditional beer brewers, yeasts are added manually to ferment the wort. But with Lambic beer, wild airborne yeasts””present in the atmosphere in and around Brussels””are allowed to permeate the wort naturally.

To accomplish this, the wort is pumped into a copper tub called a “cooling tun” which sits in an open sided building, exposed to the elements where the naturally occurring, airborne yeasts fall naturally into the wort.

It is then poured into untreated wooden barrels where the wild yeast and and wort ferment.

The process cannot be duplicated manually and since the process is the only way to actually produce this particular brew, the Lambic brewers are exempt from any of the the same health standards and regulations that govern all other brewers in Belgium.

This has Cynthia conflicted. I believe the exact term she used was “eee-yewwwwww!”

On the one hand, she finds Lambics tasty and enjoyable. On the other hand, she has to reconcile the fact that the brewing process operates outside of sanitation standards she finds acceptable.

We’ll see how it goes. I wanted to see about touring a Lambic brewery, but just found out they have a tendency to attract spiders that feed on the bugs that are attracted to the wort.

Cynthia says God has quite the diabolical and ironic sense of humor.

Poor Impulse Control

Cynthia e-mailed me this morning saying:

OK- I’ve suddenly been bitten by the travel bug. I can be talked out of it though. Go ahead and tell me why it wouldn’t be a great idea to fly to Brussels for Christmas!!!!!!

I couldn’t think of a single reason…

3 hours later we have our flight and hotel booked.

Looks like we’ll be hitting up the Plaisirs d’Hiver/Winter Pret (“Pleasures of Winter”) festival to celebrate the holidays and ring in the new year!

w00t!

Seattle

Both of these best viewed large. Click image to see large version.

Downtown Seattle

Moonrise Over Lake Union

Another Resource

One of my friends/co-workers who follows along here at baldheretic.com and read about the grand scheme suggested I take a look at Facebook for information on the upcoming trip. Turns out there are several groups dedicated to Valencia and Las Fallas.

Another resource! I have joined some groups and posted to the public forums.

On a related note, I’ve had some very good dialogue with the contacts I mentioned previously.

Contact

Previous trips have benefited from online resources like Tripadvisor to get insight into which hotels to reserve and sites like Expedia and Travelocity to secure plane tickets. We’ve even used city/state/country sponsored tourism sites to gather valuable information about our destinations.

This will be the first trip for us to use social networking as a means to enhance our vacation.

It’s been less than one day since I started my social networking experiment and I have already made 3 contacts.

Via Twitter I have met Iwan, a Dutchman living in Spain for the last several years working as an IT architect, and John who is a transplant to Spain from the UK. John has been living in a suburb of Valencia for the last 20 years working as a professional translator, translating Spanish to English.

I love John’s e-mail signature which includes a clickable link to his geographic location (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=39.637,-0.6195).

Via Flickr I have met Manel. Manel does not speak very good English, but he’s an avid photographer and is an active Flickr user. His photo-stream includes pictures of a photowalk in Valencia. He and his friends look like the Spanish equivalent of any handful of Assignment Houston photogs.

They’ve all been very kind and receptive to my social networking experiment, each offering to answer questions and even meet up when Cynthia and I arrive in Spain for the festival.

We’re off to a good start.

Social Networking Experiment

Cynthia and I are going to Valencia, Spain next year for Las Fallas. As an experiment I am reaching out via Twitter and other social networking sites to see if I can make contact with technically and socially like-minded individuals in Valencia with the idea that I can glean more information about our destination from a person or persons who actually live there, and possibly have one or more contacts when we arrive.

Right now I am using the search feature of Twitter to see who lists Valencia as their home.

Right off the bat I have encountered some stumbling blocks.

1. Must weed through erroneous search results for Valencia, Venezuela and Valencia, California
2. Natives of Valencia, Spain tend to twitter in Spanish or Valencian (Catalan).
3. Erroneous results due to the recent Formula One Grand Prix held in Valencia

I have reached out to a few I have encountered that list Valencia, Spain as their home and that have twittered in English. One in particular appears to work in the IT field so I am hopeful.

Next up I am going to search around on Flickr which I actually think might be more promising. Socially networking photogs tend to be a friendly bunch as evidenced by the recent Assignment Houston gathering at the Houston Museum of Natural Science

I’m not sure how this will turn out but it should be interesting.

I Think I’m Learning Japanese

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to visit Asia. China, Japan, Korea…something. Cynthia has always wrinkled her nose and frowned at the idea so I wasn’t holding out much hope.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve loved the trips we have taken and I figured I’d be fine never going east.

Still, whenever the opportunity presented itself I’d revisit the subject. When a travel show would come on we’d watch it or I would mention that someone I knew just went or came back from somewhere.

Sometime earlier this year Cynthia caught a show on one of the learning/history/travel channels about life in Japan and something clicked. All of a sudden she was very interested in the idea of going there. We bought some books and she’s done her research and now it in the pipeline. If we can afford it, we’re planning for spring of 2010.

Cynthia’s also decided she would also like to learn Japanese and has signed up for language lessons. She in a beginner course and it remains to be seen how far she’ll take it.

Learning Japanese

She’s made flash cards of the first 40 Katakana characters she has to learn this week. I’m rooting her on the best I can and who knows, I might learn something myself along the way. I now know what the Japanese language is composed of Katakana, Hiragana and Kanji characters. That’s more than I knew last week.