My family and I had 10 days in Hisarönü, near Fethiye where I used to live in the early 90s. The resort itself was as I remembered it: a depressing mass of restaurants offering “full English breakfasts with real pork sausage!” but the hotel had a swimming pool, the mountains gave some cooling breeze, and it was easy to get to Fethiye, Ölüdeniz or the melancholy beauty of the deserted Greek village, Kayaköy.
I tracked down my old friend Asiye, who taught me lots of Turkish in 1993, and who I hadn’t seen since the year 2000 when we bumped into each other, utterly by chance, in the street in Bangkok. (Her Fethiye clothing shop, Şaman, has the strapline “there are no coincidences”.)
I think we can safely say that in 17 years neither Asiye nor I have changed one jot. Then:
Now:
And I’m delighted that there was no reason for my earlier holiday trepidation.
It’s with some trepidation that I look forward to my holiday soon.
There’s the usual worry of booking a package tour—will the hotel be as nice as it seemed on the Web? will the transfer taxi be there? (Actually, I only imagine these are the “usual” worries; we’ve never done a package before).
But I have an extra worry. The last time I visited this town was in 1993 -1995 when I lived there, working as a musician and tarot card reader, and I left because I was run out of town.
The story goes like this.
Opposite the bar that I was working in was a small area where three female students would spread out a cloth on the floor which they covered with hippie jewellry that they’d made in the hope of selling it to tourists. During the quiet parts of the day I’d hang with them, and we’d smoke cigarettes and improve our command of each others’ languages. As occasionally happened when I was young and slim, one of the girls and I became especially friendly.
Towards the end of the season, I was playing my guitar in the bar, and an well-dressed gentleman in his early 40s came and stood by my stool as I took off my guitar for my smoke-beer-pee break. This often happened; people came up to request favourite songs for the the next set. He waited while I carefully put the plectrum under the corner of the scratchplate and put the guitar securely on its stand. And then he punched me in the face.
As I regained verticality, I asked him why he’d done that. “For sleeping with my wife”, he replied. I assured him that he was mistaken, and pointed out my girlfriend who was looking horrified and backing towards the door rather than racing forward to cradle me in her arms. “Yes, he replied. That’s my wife.”
Ignorance is no defence and although true, objecting that that she had neglected to inform me of her nuptial status was unlikely to mollify him. But he didn’t come back with a follow-up punch but instead walked out of the bar, leaving two of his friends behind who very politely informed me that the usual penalty for wronging someone’s honour in such a way is to stab them in the buttocks. The reason is that there are no major blood vessels there, so the victim is very unlikely to die. However, it’s the largest muscle in the body so would take months to heal and lying down, sitting or walking would be agony. It was emphasised that if I were to remain in town more than one night, this might very well happen to me.
I left the next morning for Istanbul.
Seventeen years later, I suspect that none of the protagonists still live there. And I suspect that the years have suitably transformed me from the slim, bronzed beach bum that I was then into an unrecognizable and expanded figure.
But if I’m back early, after begging for a standby ticket at the airport, you’ll know why.
In the late eighties, I lived opposite a portakabin that was a Polish Club. Somehow I became a member and got to know the old Poles who would go drinking there at weekends. There was an old lady who had a tattoo on her arm from Auschwitz. Jan, the wizened old man who collected the glasses had a photo of himself in his wallet, taken in his Polish Air Force clothing, standing in front of a bi-plane. Over a few Okocim beers, he could be persuaded to tell the story of how, as a resistance partisan, he killed several Nazi soldiers. As we got more drunk, attempting to go across the 14 optics of vodka behind the bar, all the Poles would break out into patriotic songs and tell me how they were looking forward to seeing the homeland again once communism fell.
So, when I was invited to come to speak at the first SparkUp! conference, I jumped at the chance. With a freshly-minted presentation on Web Development 2.0, I arrived in Poznan on Monday afternoon with Remy, Ribot, Andy Budd, Yaili and Matt Biddulph.
Our hosts, Piotr and Krzysztof took us around the postcard-pretty old town of Poznan before a typical Polish dinner (pork-coma ensued) and a few beers.
The day of the conference was organisational perfection in a great modern venue (and this was the first time they’d done a conference!) and then it was party time: lots of Cheeky Bison (Żubrówka and apple juice) and murderous other shots.
Yesterday, I really meant to return to the old town with my camera. But a hangover the size of Gdansk forced me to spend hours in the beautiful 4 saunas, jacuzzi and swimming pool in my hotel.
So, thanks for having me, Poland. The vodka is amazing, the women are beautiful (please address your comments “dear sexist bastard”) and the locals friendly and clueful. I hope to see you again soon.
The lucky Mrs Lawson is currently in Thailand visiting her parents, while I stay at home and try to prevent the kids seeing news reports of twenty dead in Bangkok.
The current crop of trouble-makers are the Red Shirts – supporters of ousted and exiled Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Shinawatra is a deeply unpleasant scumbag businessman turned politico. After his election, a programme of extra-judicial killings of suspected drug-dealers was ordered, with many photos appearing in the press of bodies shot at close range through the back of the head while miraculously resisting arrest while they had their hands and feet tied.
A raid on a mosque in muslim Southern Thailand left 50 prisoners dead after they had been stacked like logs on the back of lorries in the heat for hours. Thaksin said that it was the mens’ fault for weakening themselves through the Ramadan fast.
So there’s nothing to love about Mr Thaksin, except… except… he was elected by a landslide, was the first Thai Prime Minister to serve a full term. He introduced a range of policies that reduced rural poverty by half in four years, the country’s first universal healthcare program, and his re-election in 2005 had the highest voter turnout in Thai history. He was ousted by a military coup while overseas allegedly because of corruption (which he almost certainly was; corruption is epidemic in Thai politics). That’s the trouble with democracy, you see; sometimes, the people vote for idiots or villains.
The group opposing the Red Shirts, the PAD (Yellow Shirts), are the group that shut down Bangkok airport in 2008, causing incalculable damage to the Thai economy during the peak season. They are widely believed to be supported by the Queen and represent the elite of the country—the traditional old guard of aristocracy. Wikipedia sums it up perfectly:
“The Asian Human Rights Commission has noted of the PAD and their agenda that, ‘although they may not describe themselves as fascist, have fascist qualities.’ Citing the claimed failure of popular democracy in Thailand, the PAD has suggested constitutional amendments that would make Parliament a largely royally-appointed body. It has openly called for the military and Thailand’s traditional elite to take a greater role in politics”.
What the whole sorry situation shows is that while Bangkok is a primate city full of millionaires, Porsche cars, skyscrapers and aircon shopping malls, the rural poor in Thailand (most of the people) are as marginalised as ever. The traditional elite pretended a romantic idolisation of the farmers while either ignoring or despising them (much like Russian communists’ relationship with their peasantry), so the poor had to look to a nasty, authoritarian telecoms billionaire to hurl them some cash to buy their votes.
Meanwhile, we hope that my wife makes it safely back home before some idiots shut down the airport again.
Last year, my souvenir of the year was a beautiful batik picture I bought at the Sultan’s palace in Jogjakarta, Indonesia.
This year, I was given a lovely model ship from Stikom, Surabaya when I returned to Indonesia, and the gift of a wonderful day out from John Foliot when I visited San Jose for OSCON.
But souvenir of the year has to be something I purchased myself, and this year I bought it in a market at Dasaswamedh Ghat in Varanasi, India. It cost 120 Rupees (about £2) and it’s an automatic mantra chanter.
When plugged in, the portrait of the Shiva, Parvati and Ganesh is bejewelled with flashing lights while and a recorded voice sings a devotional chant. Pressing the button changes the chant; there are twenty different songs.
You may experience its glory through the power of YouTube.
Whew. The Opera Indonesian University tour finished after five cities, ten universities, 2600 students, 49 kilos of nasi goreng and 770,000 spontaneous Asian Poses.
(Here are the presentations, demos and slides.) Serendipitously, we ended at Udayana University in Denpasar, Bali so I decided to get two day’s downtime in Bali before returning back to the UK.
I don’t know what I expected of Bali, but what I found was Benidorm for Australians. But (fortunately) I wasn’t there for the culture. I had a pleasant (if seen-better-days) room at the Three Bothers Bungalows (recommended by Joel Overton—thanks mate) set in a beautiful garden of Hindu statues, coconut and jackfruit trees).
I could swim in the pool, sip a beer on my terrace at sundown, listening first to the sound of the frogs, then the squirrel scampering up the tree to steal some jackfruit, then the bats coming to munch the mosquitos, then finally the crickets before heading off for a massage and seafood.
I’ve got a suitcase full of souvenirs, a peeling nose, great memories and loads of photos. Once again, thanks for a lovely time, Indonesia!
I awoke bright and early and raced to open my curtains to take in the sunrise—a broadening orange smear of sunshine diffusing through the smog behind silhouettes of gigantic skyscrapers, many under construction. Even through the sealed hotel windows, I can hear the honking of buses and taxis taking commuters to work at Unholy O’clock to beat the horrors of the main rush hour.
Apart from the preponderance of mosques over temples and more ladies in hijab (not universal; I reckon about 50%), I was once again by how much Jakarta reminds me of Bangkok (and I lived in a muslim area of Bangkok so the differences are even smaller).
Reading the newspaper over breakfast (papaya, miso soup, nasi goreng and omlette) reinforced the similarities. Just like in the Bangkok Post, the Jakarta Globe runs stories on alleged police inactivity, corrupt politicians, urban flooding, a pretty girl in a sex scandal and school bullying going tragically wrong.
There were a few peculiarly Indonesian stories: pilgrims to Mecca complaining over the government Hajj organisation’s lack of transparency, bad food and not issuing prayer books early enough.
Some local students have invented some sunglasses with “sonar” that alerts blind wearers if they’re going to walk into an obstacle, and elected not to patent them “so that every blind person will be able to take advantage of them”.
There is a debate in the letters page about whether mosques should all re-broadcast a centrally-chosen muezzin’s call to prayer or whether each muezzin should continue to do his own call but do it without amplification. The point is that it can become pretty noisy when lots of mosques all do their own calls through loudspeakers.
I can speak only for myself, but one of the joys of my time living in Turkey was the cacophony of different men, all singing the same ancient words “Allah-u Akbar Ash-hadu allā ilāha illallāh” in their different voices simultaneously at prayer time.
Now to finish writing my presentation and to celebrate my birthday a day late by reading beside the pool until I feel energetic enough for a massage.
The miserable bloody English weather has conspired to give me two colds more or less back to back, so it was with only minimal trepidation that I spent 24 hours travelling by plane to Indonesia, to spend my second birthday on the trot jetlagged in Jakarta where I’m embarking on a frenzied schedule of university visits to persuade Indonesian students of the value of Web Standards.
The kindly Indonesians laid on a huge rain storm just as I landed (so the 30 celcius sun they’d been enjoying didn’t make me too culture-shocked). Cue flooding and gridlock. The 30 minute drive from the airport took two and half hours of buttock-clenching frustration—but at least it didn’t end up like that other Friday 13th.
I flew in, dazed and confused, on Tuesday night and only managed to see the first morning of OSCON before I had to crash for a couple of hours in the afternoon, but I did get to see Jono Bacon present on building communities around Ubuntu – very relevant to my line of work and very interesting.
Tuesday night saw me in an iridescent lime-green t-shirt at the Linux Fund party, where I drank more than I should have (but not as much as Stuart Langridge, so that was alright).
Then it was back to San Jose for dinner at the invitation of Google. It was odd to be surrounded by giants of the Open Source world, many of whom I’d never heard! Likewise, one guy I was talking to was developing a browser but had never heard of Zeldman—odd how two worlds coincide while rarely touching (Langridge is the only guy I can think of who passes easily between them). Swag was excellent at the Google party: an unlocked developer’s G1 Android phone. I can’t wait to get back to the UK to try it and download Opera Mini for Android.
Friday
Having woken up feeling fine, through the clever gambit of not drinking loads the night before, it was time to wander in and give my presentation. I felt fine until I was told that I was moved to the huge space where they do the keynotes because so many people had signed up to see me (about 120 expressions of interest).
My nerves were further shot when I tried to edit out a joke that I decided at the last minute wasn’t going to work, and Open Office crashed—2 minutes before I was due to start, leaving me to do ctrl-alt-delete and go into document recovery mode in front of an audience watching it broadcast on 4 huge screens.
Anyway, the talk went well, with some great instant feedback via twitter, and I didn’t do my usual trick of over-running.
I confess that I was nervous, too, about presenting to a lot of very active Open Source coders as the rep of a closed-source company, on a Windows machine. (In my defence, it’s a dual-boot Ubuntu/ Windows machine and I needed to demo Internet Explorer).
I’m delighted to say that I had nothing but friendship and courtesy from all attendees, who applauded the fact that Opera evangelises, develops and follows Open Web Standards. I’d like to thank all those who made me feel so welcome; it was an honour to meet you.
If you asked most people outside India for their ideas about the country, they’d probably say “fabulous history, ancient glorious culture, techologically third world”.
But here’s two technological things I saw during my recent university tour that we could learn immediately from India. The first is the complete abolition of plastic bags in the capital, Delhi:
The second is this full-page magazine advert that reads
India.gov.in is now accessible to visually challenged. Yet another step to make the national portal citizen-centric in its true sense. Physically challenged friendly, mobile devides friendly, senior citizen friendly, assistive technology friendly.
I’m not a screenreader expert, so haven’t verified its usability with assistive technology, but I would be delighted to see such publicly-expressed commitment from my “first-world” government for user-centric inclusive design. Compare this with the Department of Trade and Industry fiasco, for example.
