dusty day

Air quality comes in many guises.  Indians – when they're not busy distracting from domestic problems by stoking tensions with Pakistan – celebrate poor air like a home team's win in Twenty20 cricket.  That's what having the world's dirties cities does to you.

Concluding my trilogy on Indian air.

In Germany, cities close their streets to Diesel cars when particulate matter levels are particularly high.  It's as if tire wear and coal-fired power stations didn't exist.  This morning, I read in the newspaper that the air in underground train stations is even dirtier than in city streets because the dust produced by hundreds of train wheels braking can't go anywhere.  It ends up in people's lungs.

This afternoon, I took the family to Josefwiese in Zürich's Kreis 5 area, a former center of heavy industry now transformed into a wet dream of urban edginess, complete with reclaimed and recycled restaurants, bespoke carpenters of distressed furniture, and latte moms with bicycle trailers.  Josefwiese is a green space for greyed-out city folk, essentially a large lawn with a small café, playgrounds, and a rubbish incinerator for scenery.  The Swiss love of incinerating rubbish could fill a blog post all on its own.

© Peter Hilton at Flickr

While the large white chimney was quietly puffing out what looked like (and possibly was) nothing more than innocent steam, the fourth Urban Cross took place beneath.  This was the reason we were there.  Originally, cross was something for people with not enough pain in their lives.  Muddy and cold, the races tend to be miserable.  The urban version held in Zürich – sunny, dry and within walking distance of the amenities of the city – is something I could almost see myself participating in if I had a regulation cross bike to my name, though I'd probably break a bone and possibly the bike that I don't own.

Cross races are short, aerobic and rather technical.  This one was a loop of just under a mile around Josefwiese that each competitor had to repeat until elimination in a series of knockout battles – a good four hours from the time trial that kicked it all off to the finals, comprising two more laps, that determined the champions.  The racers had to cross a beach volleyball field, ascend the stairs to the railway viaduct and later come back down, and cross a shin-deep pitch of water with submerged steps.  Yeah, I would have definitely broken something.

In the corner of Josefwiese closest to the Hardbrücke train station is a playground with huge swings and a wooden jungle gym where dozens of kids bounce around with nearly as much energy as the racers just a few meters away.  They jump, run and fall, and repeat it tirelessly, all the while grinding the small pebbles that cover the ground into a dust so fine it coalesces into a cloud that just hangs there.

Despite the biting sensation in my throat and the heaviness in my lungs, it wasn't India this reminded me of but the ceramic sunflower seeds Ai Weiwei deposited in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall eight years ago.  The seeds looked vaguely like the pebbles on the playground and were ground to dust in much the same way by tourists and random visitors with child-like enthusiasm for participatory art.  Back then, Tate Modern cordoned off the exhibition after the first weekend.  The playground on Josefwiese will stay open, and I will be back before soon.  It's one of our favorite places in town, even without cross.

phish me

Yesterday I got an email from my PhD adviser.  He seemed to be in a bit of a pickle and asked me to help him out.  How could I not?  I wrote yes and hit reply.  Then it dawned on me.

The email wasn't written in his usual tone.  The urgency, the request no to contact him by alternative means.  He's never ended an email to me with regards.  Alarm bells all over, yet I had gone ahead and replied anyway.

The thing that made me reconsider was the return address.  dptdirector.sector@gmail.com isn't his.  I hit undo in Gmail, stopped the time-delayed sending of my email, and send one to his real email asking what was up with this.  Hours later came the response that I hadn't been the first one getting such an email, and that he had had no hand in sending it.

A day later, I wish I had followed up on this email.  What was the purpose?  What kind of information was I supposed to be tricked out of?  Are scams almost sophisticated enough now for me to fall for them?

literary nadir

It's hard to believe that in all of 2018, in an entire year that once again contained twelve months full of approximately 30 days each, I managed to read all of three books.  Three as in 3.  Three as in one every four months.  Three as in approximately zero.  It's pathetic.

I still like to read, and read a lot, but when I travel for work, when I sit on an airplane where I have the time, I tend to read magazines.  The other day I took The God of Small Things to India – as appropriate a book for the trip as there can be – but brought it back unopened.  The Economist was interesting, though, and Bohemian Rhapsody spectacular.

Anyway, here's what I read in 2018:

• I bought La Uruguaya by Pedro Mairal twice: once by chance in Oviedo when I strolled through town after a long conference and then with much difficulty online when I lost the first copy on my trip to Salt Lake a month later.  Not much of a contest, but this was my book of the year.  A bored writer with more dirty secrets than he lets on takes the Buquebus from Buenos Aires to Montevideo to pick up the dollars that his books earned him abroad.  And what's with the girl he met at a writers' workshop a few months earlier?  A quick and enjoyable read even with my limited grasp of Spanish.
• Anything by John McPhee is worth buying.  He can turn weeks of seeming immobility into gripping stories.  In Draft No. 4 he expounds a bit on the process.
• The only thing that I recall from The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017 by Laura Furman (Ed.) is that the woman selling me the book at the wonderful Kepler's Books near near Stanford was excited the 2018 issue was only weeks from being published.  There's not a single story I remember.

2019, despite the mishap on the way to India, shapes up better than last year.  I've already finished two books.  It can only get better.

still breathing

I'm still breathing but it's not much fun.

death by breathing

After the title of the post that described my first trip to Japan, here's another one I knew from the moment I would go.  You will find this one to be a better fit.  India, and in particular Delhi, is infamous for toxic air.  This is not somewhere you'd like to breath unless you absolutely have to.  I had to.  Work had sent me.

The trip was a bit different from all other trips.  As so often, I would represent my company at the commercial exhibition of a scientific conference, but this time I carried most of the material with me.  Sending it would have been prohibitive.  Instead we found a mutually beneficial solution that saved the company money and made my flight a bit more comfortable.  But I had to deal with the loot.

I'm not an utter novice in the temporary exportation business.  I've driven across various borders with goods I needed to declare and know how to handle a Carnet ATA, but I'd never done this at an airport, or in India.  The customs officer in Zurich was gloomy.  "You have to know how to fill these forms.  Make sure you get it right.  They have no clue in India."

My first trip, one-and-a-half years ago, taught me that generalizations about India are treacherous.  This is very big and very colorful country.  Anything can happen.  You can find total chaos, as I did in downtown Hyderabad, or an airport where you breeze through without any hitches, as I also did in Hyderabad.

Delhi airport was another pleasant surprise.  It was not as tranquil as Hyderabad but new and efficient.  The immigration staff were courteous and quick at handling thousands of visitors entering with electronic visas at one in the morning, only held back occasionally by temperamental fingerprint scanners.  It was probably less than an hour after touchdown that I had officially entered the country and recovered my luggage.

Now came the part that I expected to take at least another hour – if there would even be customs agents available at this hour.  Ominously, all "items to declare" lanes were closed, but at one checkpoint a bunch of people were huddled.  They turned out to not only know what they were doing but also do it cheerfully and with tea for everyone involved.  It all seemed to good to be true.

There is only one way for this story to continue.  When I stepped outside the terminal building, it was like entering an evil underworld.  The night wasn't black but diffusely lit by light scattered on a suspension of dust and ash in the air.  The haze hurt the eyes and the throat.  It felt like looking through dirty glasses, except I had just cleaned mine before taking off in Zurich.  Everything was dim and smelled slightly foul.

could be worse

"Where're you going, sir?"  If I had been traveling on my own account, or if my hotel hadn't been just a few minutes from the airport, I would have ignored the man trawling for fools by the exit.  This was a rip-off in obvious disguise.  But this is India, I thought, and how expensive can it be even if I overpay?  It was shocking, but after bringing it down by two thirds it was just acceptable.  By then it was too late to seek out the best value.

The driver deserves his own story, clueless about the hotels in Aerocity, a commercial development just minutes from the airport.  I would expect him to drive there ten times a day, but he had no idea where he was, ignored a big sign to the hotel and then drove boldly down a multi-lane one-way road the wrong way.  What little traffic there was wasn't particularly disturbed by this, and neither was I.

And so it happened that two hours after touching down in Delhi, I bedded down for a short night in a hotel whose biggest asset turned out to be the a/c that pushed beautiful clear air into the room.  And for once in my life I am happy that the windows stay firmly shut in my room.

kindergarten

Hard to believe that the girl is getting ready to go to kindergarten.  Hard to believe because it wasn't all that long that she was a tiny screaming bundle of a few pounds that we didn't have the faintest idea what to do with.  All that long?  It's actually been more than three and a half years.

In Switzerland, school is mandatory from age four.  This sounds harsher than it is.  What would a four-year-old do in a school?  Turns out kindergarten is part of the school system, and its attendance is mandatory from age four.  This is something I can deal with.  To help me prepare for the rest, I attended an information event organized by the municipal school system last night.

Before a slide highlighted students from 76 nations (across all grades) who speak 32 languages, the audience was warned of potentially distracting noises because of simultaneous translation of everything that was being said.  On the walls of the hall were big banners for all languages with translators present: Serbo-croat, Portuguese, Albanian, Tamil, Italian and Turkish.  Native speakers of these languages were invited to gather underneath their banners to get information in their language.  Throughout the presentations, there was a constant polyphonous whispering at the periphery, but it was really only noticeable when one was really listening for it.

This level of diversity could be a big benefit for children.  Languages and cultures of a round-the-world trip without having to leave the classroom.  The drawback is that not all immigrants came for high-paying jobs.  Some are refugees, some are just scraping by.  Those who only speak their native language face additional challenges.  Our town has one of the highest ratio of welfare recipients in the canton.  A tinderbox of dissatisfaction and anger?  Maybe it's just another aspect of diversity that we in our privileged lives should be thankful for.

We're definitely thankful that we won't have to pay for childcare anymore, at least for the girl.  Kindergarten is free.  But it's not all golden.  Kindergarten only covers the mornings.  What to do with the afternoons?  Both of us work.  Turns out select kindergartens, among them the one closest to our home, offer after-school programs.  They aren't free, but they feed the kids and keep them entertained.

Like any school, kindergarten has school holidays, an ungodly amount to a working parent.  Good thing the after-school activities are extended to optional full-day activities during holidays.  I don't know how prices are adjusted, but at least we don't need to take 12 weeks off work every year.  Only two weeks in summer remain when everything is closed.  This is exactly as it is now, and largely compatible with our routine of jetting off to Argentina for a few weeks on Christmas.

One speaker mentioned a few of the things children should know when they enter kindergarten.  Go to the toilet, brush teeth, use scissors, dress and undress.  These are not challenges for the girl.  All would be good were it not for an overambitious dead.  By the time she'll set foot inside kindergarten for the first time, the girl better know how to read and write.  Seven months to go!

bizarre

During the drive back from the workshop near Oxford, the pundits on the radio were arguing whether the government should reveal, for the sake of transparency, what it considers state secrets, and whether revealing them would compromise Britain's position in the negotiations with the European Union over Britain's exit from said Union.  Like almost everything that has happened in the UK since that fateful day in June, this discussion is a bit bizarre.

It is bizarre because a deal for the exit of the UK from the EU has been laboriously negotiated over the last year and a half.  The negotiations are now over.  A deal has been agreed on.  It's up to the British parliament to ratify it and sever for good the ties that many were not happy with.  That many fewer consider this deal a good one is beside the point.  Negotiations end in compromise – or they end in tears.

When it comes to Brexit, the idea of compromise is not popular in the UK.  Those who voted against leaving the EU still don't want to.  Those who did would rather cut all ties, whatever the cost, rather than remain, in whatever way, associated with the EU and bound by its rules.  The leavers, as they are called, talk of sovereignty and strong borders and control over their own affairs without foreigners' interference.

Bizarre then that one of the sticking points during the negotiations was the Irish border, which the UK doesn't want for fear of upsetting those in Northern Ireland who identify as Irish – and the smooth flow of goods.  The latter is of course one of the key principles of the customs union that's at the heart of the EU.  Bizarre that the idea of strong borders loses appeal as soon as it is to be put into practice.

The border issue is actually trivial to resolve.  There are three options:

1. Stay in the customs union.
2. Hand Northern Ireland over to the Irish.  Whether they'd want to pay for its maintenance is a different question, but it would be in keeping with the Olympic spirit.  In the Olympics, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland competes as Team GB – as if Northern Ireland had nothing to contribute.  Unifying Ireland would risk upsetting those in the North who identify as British.  It might be construed as democratic, though.  Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU by 11 to 9.
3. Build a strong border.

It's really not that difficult.

It wasn't difficult from the beginning, and yet the process is drawn out, unclear and unresolved.  By the time my flight back to Zurich was ready to board, the parliamentary debate hadn't ended.  Even if it had, the Brexit saga would go on.

whisky and tea

When I learned that I would need to travel to Japan for work, I came up with the title of this post almost immediately.  I like Japanese whisky and I like green tea.  In the end, there was no whisky – the duty free shop at Haneda had even run out of Hibiki – and very little tea.  But the title stuck.  I still like it.

I had business in a town an hour outside of Tokyo.  For these two days, an eleven-hour flight was hard to justify.  I tagged on two days in Tokyo to make it more bearable.  Here's what happened.

This was my first time in Japan, and I came somewhat prepared.  I had purchased a compact guidebook on the city and noted down some points to visit.  Almost all of them turned out rather silly.  The guidebook also didn't tell me about the two-day travel card I could have bought at the airport.  I survived that first day anyway.  Here's what I did.

The sights of Tokyo

• Shibuya is famous for a crossing that inspired the one at Oxford Circus, except in London they did it right:  They painted two intersecting diagonal crosswalks for maximum chaos.  In Shibuya, there's only one.  This means no collisions but also no reward for skillful weaving.
• The Meiji Shrine was full of tourists.  Maybe they walked up from Shibuya as I did (without a map but with a good sense of direction).  There were also plenty of Japanese there, doing the things the Japanese do when they visit a shrine.  There was even a Shinto wedding, but overall the vibe was mixed at best.  Kevin from New York had left a votive tablet exclaiming that he "felt so much", as if traveling were about reliving your favorite movie and doing better than the protagonists.
• The Tokyo Municipal Government Building attracts unsuspecting tourists with the seemingly unbeatable offer of a free view over the city from the 45th floor.  It's hard to turn that down when the lights come out in town – and I didn't – but other viewing platforms might offer 360-degree views and less glare on the windows.  Paying for the view might pay.
• The number one spot on this list of ignominy goes to Roppongi Hills.  What a waste!  Walking around this shopping center with its brands of international exchangeability I lost all sense of being in Japan.  One doesn't have to fly halfway around the globe for this.  Any major city will do.

What about experiencing Tokyo?  This I did on my second day, but I can't promise that the post about it will follow this one quite as closely – or at all.