A Year in Europe

Last weekend we went to a place northeast of Budapest, near Tokaj. We left on Saturday and drove for two and a half hours to a place where, more than fifty years ago, someone mined a hole for some reason. Then 60 degree water burst out, and ever since it has been depositing salt there. The water is cooled and then put in a thermal bath for tourists. Then we drove another hour to a different thermal bath that is in caves. It was a bit more like an ordinary pool than I expected, but a terrific pool. It was in a large cave complex, with lots of passages and hard to be sure you’ve explored it all. Then we got dinner. Really nice pizza that was under thirty euros for eight drinks and three large pizzas. Then we got a hotel, watched most of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King on TV in Hungarian, with Hungarian subtitles for the Elvish which we couldn’t tell apart from the Hungarian. Next day we drove another hour to Tokaj and toured a wine cellar, dad tasted some wine and bought some, then we walked for about six kilometres up a mountain and then down a mountain. It was about twenty percent grade up for about two kilometres.

Cheese in Hungary is good. The main seems to be Trapista sajt or something like that. It is really good and it is a medium salty cheese that comes in these huge wheels that stick out because they make up half the cheese section and they are all in bright red packaging. In France nothing is special about brie, because it’s imported to Ireland so we know what it is. Hungarian cheeses are a novelty because you can only get them in Hungary.

Right now we are in a house in Balatonfökajar. It is very compact and efficient, and has a huge yard that has loads of mole mounds. There is a nice undercover patio that is very good for tennis, which I have been taking advantage of daily. The first day we were here all I wanted to do was exercise, and play various sports until three o’ clock. I played tennis against the wall, Nate and I played rounders for an hour, soccer for a couple minutes, and ran laps of the yard. I started at around eleven, and ended around three. Then we went for a walk. The sunsets around here are amazing every night. Tonight the sunset lasted twenty minutes, and was stunning all the way through. The sky was lava red, with black clouds contrasting it. And it’s stunning every night.

Dresden was an interesting city to visit. The first thing we visited, mostly because it was near where we happened to get off the tram, was the Frauenkirche. The Frauenkirche was destroyed during World War II, then rebuilt in 1994. From the inside, it looks completely different from any other church I’ve been in before. It is painted in pastel colors and is very cylindrical, rather than being a long rectangular room like most churches. Despite being a Lutheran church, it is fairly decorated.

The next thing we visited was a mural of the kings of Saxon. Each king was painted in period-appropriate fashion or armour. Their names were also painted beneath them. There was a long period when they had epithets, but then they stopped using them. The change in fashion of the hats was also noticeable.

After the mural, we went to the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon. There, the main exhibit was clocks. Wall clocks, pocket watches, table clocks, and astronomical clocks, all of them were there. Many had heavily decorated cases. Some moved on the hour or quarter hour. Aside from clocks, there was a mechanical calculator built by Blaise Pascal. Mechanically, it could only add, but through complementary numbers, it could subtract as well. There was a digital display explaining how it worked as well. There were also globes, both terrestrial and celestial, there. There was an entire room devoted to them and a world clock that told the time at every longitude. It did so by having the hour hand point down at all times and rotating the wheel the clocks were mounted to. In the globe room, there were a pair of globes each a meter in diameter, one celestial and one terrestrial. Celestial globes display stars and constellations based on location. Terrestrial globes display maps of the earth’s surface. The last thing in the globe room was an explanation of various projections – the cylindrical projection, the conical projection, and the flat projection. Each one captures a different band of latitudes most accurately – cylindrical projections are most accurate near the equators, flat projections are most accurate near the poles, and conical projections are most accurate in the band between flat and cylindrical projections.

The last thing we did that day was go to the Volkswagen transparent factory. We had been planning to take a guided tour, but we were too late. There was a free to access part where Volkswagen’s plans for electric cars were discussed. It seemed like just an ad, rather than imparting much useful information.

On the 6th of February, (my birthday) we were touring Prague. Instead of the “Hop on Hop off” buses we have occasionally used in other cities, we got a private walking tour of Prague. He was a good guide, and very nice. My favorite thing he showed us was a sculpture of ‘The good King Wenceslas'(who was not actually a king, just a duke) sitting on the belly of a dead horse that was hanging upside down from the ceiling.  The creator said it represented the corrupt government and he would take it down when the country was stable again. Our guide said that a cheating business man was now top of the government. He had never done any politics and just decided that he wanted to be in charge. Remind you of anyone? After that sculpture we went to the old town square with the astronomical clock which got really crowded and we waited for about fifteen minutes, and then finally it got to the hour and it went for about a minute and then quieted down. It was fascinating hands, but I was disappointed with its performance.  The other tourist attraction is the Charles bridge. It was about as amazing as any old bridge. right next to it though is the Lennon wall that is all about the Beatles. 

Then we climbed up the hill to the castle, where the tour ended. Then we went into the castle. I guess it was ok. I preferred the other castle that we went to the 9th.

For lunch we went to a restaurant in a monastery.  I had a vacuum cooked burger. Delicious. It was like a pulled beef sandwich.

Next we walked down the hill, across the river, and to an escape room that we were doing for my birthday. That was really fun and took 65 minutes or something like that. It was a Nautilus themed escape room that was really good and very steampunk. We got to drive the Nautilus, which was really hard because the screen telling you which way to go was on the other side of a low wall behind the steering wheel. But we managed. We died in the end, even though we completed it.

9th of February

On the 9th we had a mission. To start with we were getting to a game shop that sold polyhedral dice. Including 4 sided dice, 6 sided dice, 8 sided dice, 10 sided dice, 12 sided dice, 20 sided dice, and 100 sided dice. (The 100 sided dice is really just a 10 sided, and another 10 sided marked with 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 00. So you roll the both of them and add them together, so if you rolled a 7 and a 40 your roll is of 47.(If you get 00 and 0 that is 100, but if you get 00 and 1 that is 1). We already had 3 d4s, 11 d6s, 3 d8s, 3 d10s, 3 d12s, and 3 d20s. At that point we had no d100s. We got 3 more of every dice. A private set for each of Nate, Ben, and me. Why we need so many dice is because of Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D. We have had a starter set that Dad Dungeon Masters, and all of the family play. But the times when we all want and can play D&D at the same time is pretty minimal. So recently Ben, Nate and me have started a campaign, because we want to play a lot more than everyone. I Dungeon Master, meaning that I tell them what is going on and they play. I have COMPLETE power over the world. Nate and I also have a campaign by ourselves, because we like to play even more than Ben does. Nate also likes DMing, and he has a campaign with Ben and I playing. We have 1412 pages of Dungeons & Dragons material related to playing, DMing, Monsters, and creating characters. After all the dice, we went to a candy store with cheap, bulk candy. We bought a preferably unnamed amount of candy. It was called Pedro store. Our guide had recommended deep fried cheese as an excellent fast food lunch. Mom, Dad, and Nate got sausages, and Ben and I got fried cheese. It was really good. Hard to eat though.

The other thing we had on our sights was an alchemy museum. In 1400ish a underground alchemy workshop was built. There was a legend that a fiery horse appeared on the other side of the square above, and vanished in a puff of brimstone. What is more likely is that a thing in the alchemy lab exploded and flames went up through the cobbles, and lit a donkey on fire that tragically expired in front of the house. Scary though. This alchemy lab was only found again in 2002, when Prague had huge floods, that caved in the roof of the lab, so that when the flood retreated a huge hole was in the middle of the square.  There were secret tunnels that led to several other alchemy labs. I found that very impressive. They also found the recipes for 4 elixirs, liquid gold, elixir of eternal youth, with they also found a full bottle of it, elixir of love, and elixir of memory.

After that we took the tram and walked to the other castle in Prague that I found so much nicer that Prague castle. Partly because of the local feeling, and partly that it was nicely shaded and I was hot. Something of the two. Tim

At 11:38 we went into a large ornate Baroque period Library. Honestly, I think that books are enough decoration, but the makers of the library didn’t know that I would visit and that I thought that books were enough, so I won’t blame them. ? (Breath in, breath out) Then we went for DUNH DAH DUUUUNH!!!!! LUNCH. (bet you didn’t expect that!). For lunch, all except for dad had mozzarella and basil and tomato sandwich. Dad had a mozzarella and sun-dried tomato sandwich. After lunch, we went to a beautiful organ (pipe) concert. Then we had apple strudel, a really good Viennese pastry.

After that, we went to an armor and musical instruments museum. Then we went home. Next day we went for a 30km bike ride.

This weekend Fri-Sun we were in Berlin. On Friday we saw a lot about the Nazis and WWII. We went to Bernauer strasse, Mauer park and the East side Gallery. A very historically oriented day. Saturday we went to the DDR museum, German museum of tech, and the German spy museum. A very museum oriented day. Sunday we went to the Berlin zoo, which wasn’t all that nice to the animals and the aquarium. The aquarium was a bit weird, because there were four levels to the building. The first was one aquarium with water and fish. The second level was devoted to reptiles in the desert and forests. The third level was another reptiles level. Fourth was amphibians and insects. The zoo had all sorts of different animals that were in small areas. There weren’t any cages or walls (except for the birds and some of the monkeys. But the enclosures were small. the bull elephant had a winter enclosure that was only a few times larger than him. The mountain goats were extremely bored and were just lying there. Same with most of the other animals. The primate house was saddening. But one of the best bits was that they had chickens that had massive feathery shoes.  Also on Sunday we went to the topography of terror and the holocaust memorial.

That weekend we walked a total of 40km.

On Friday morning we left for Berlin. We woke up at seven’o’clock and had breakfast. Then we piled into the car to drive to Fulda, a town that has a train station that ICE (Inter City Express) come to. We hopped on the ICE that we booked, and off we went. When we got to Berlin we hopped on the S-Bahn, a public travel service. We got off at Anhalter-Bahnof, the hotels station.

First day we did wall stuff. Next was 3 museums. Next day we did the Berlin Zoo, The Berlin Aquarium and Kaiser Wilhelm Church. The Wall I won’t say much about except that it was kinda boring. The first of the museums was The DDR(Pronounced De De Er ), which is a museum devoted to life with the wall.(At the end there was a TDS (Trabant Driving Simulator) which I LOVED.)

We went to Berlin over the weekend. One of the museums that we saw was the German Spy Museum. It was a very interesting and amusing place.

The first thing we noticed was that the museum offered free WiFi. You probably know that for security reasons, you shouldn’t use public WiFi for anything private or secure, like banking. That’s in things like coffee shops, where their business probably isn’t knowing things that they shouldn’t. Spies are in that business. I tunnel all my internet usage through a VPN, encrypted, and I didn’t connect to their network, even though I wasn’t doing anything that used authentication. I really didn’t trust their network.

They also offered free phone charging. Are you starting to see a theme here? Non-wireless phone chargers necessitate plugging a cable into the phone. Most phones allow data syncing over a cable. The data sync port is the charging port. Looking at the phone chargers in the lockers, you can’t tell what they’re plugged into, meaning they could be plugged into a computer. It would also be remarkably easy to destroy a phone by using too high of a voltage in the charger. This is normally impossible to do accidentally, but by cutting the cables and splicing in a stronger power source, it would be possible. Anyway, if a malicious actor has physical access, there’s really nothing that can prevent data destruction, and very little that can prevent data theft, most of which destroys the data.

Interestingly, the charger cables supported the old apple charger that was last used for the iPhone 4s and iPad 3rd generation. Neither of those are seen commonly anymore.

Later in the museum, there was an interactive ‘How secure is your password?’ display. You type in your password, and it tells you how long it would take to brute-force your password and if it’s a common password. The common password part didn’t catch correcthorsebatterystaple (https://www.xkcd.com/936/), but that’s not even the biggest problem. You just typed your password into a computer that you don’t control. The answer to ‘How secure is your password?’ is now ‘It’s not’.

You might think that based on this post, the German Spy Museum is a bad idea, but it’s really not. It was very interesting, and I learned a good bit. If you do go though, be careful. They probably aren’t actually using these security holes, but it’s good to be on the safe side.

Two weeks ago we were told that wolves lived in the area. Last full moon we listened. I’m sure I heard some, but it may have been my imagination or domestic dogs.