dormouse1953

I was in Kansas City last month attending Wordlcon.  This was actually my second visit to Kansas City.  In 1984, with a couple of friends, I travelled by train from New York to Los Angeles for that year's Worldcon.  One of my friends travelled all the way with me from New York, but the other, Peter, had been visiting friends in Kansas City and joined the train there.

The train arrived in Kansas City about midnight.  Therefore, until last month, all I'd really seen of the place had been the outside of the Amtrak station in the middle of the night.
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Do I look like the sort of person who'd want to buy a selfie-stick?

Spent yesterday afternoon travelling to Spokane by Amtrak.  The train left a bit late around 16:45.  It went through some spectacular scenery in the Cascades mountains.  There was also a running commentary about historical and geographical features we were seeing on the trip. Just about every other one ended by pointing out  that rivers were low and the mountains had none of their usual snow, due to climate change.

The train was scheduled to arrive in Spokane at 00:45 (where it links up with a train from Portland before going on to Chicago) and although it was 20 minutes late at its previous stop, it actually arrived just after midnight.  I'd checked in my suitcase in Seattle and had to wait for that to come out and then it was just a four-block walk to my hotel.  I was in my room by 00:30.

I have never found an hotel room more confusing when I got into it.  Firstly, I couldn't close the curtains and a quick examination showed that the curtain rails didn't actually go over the window; the curtains are just for show and don't close.

There seemed to be a blind in the windows but no obvious way of closing it.  There's a cable coming out of the wall next to the window, but that disappears into a socket near the ceiling.  Finally I spotted, on the other side of the room, between then air conditioning control and the light switches, a white panel with buttons with white arrows on a white background, and pressing the down arrow closed  the blind.

There doesn't seem to be a plug for the wash basin.  There is no lever to close the drain like you get in many basins.  I'm assuming  that you are supposed to wash under running water as in many European hotels.

Next to the bed is an alarm clock, a large triangular prism that looks like it's made of wood.  If you physically move it, it shows first the time, then the date, finally the temperature.  What I couldn't work out was how to set the alarm time.  In the process, I managed to do a complete reset and had to enter the time  and date again.  At least I was able to get it to use the 24-hour clock and display the temperature in Celsius.  But there doesn't seem to be a short cut to setting the alarm time other than going through a complete set-up cycle.

I finally switched of the light at about 01:15 and almost immediately noticed the wall opposite the bed was bathed in a faint glow.  I was so curious I got up without switching the light back on to see where the  glow was coming from. There is no bathroom door, just an alcove.  (No bath, either, just a shower.  I much prefer baths.)  On the wall opposite the wash basin is a light switch and that has a small white illuminated panel above it, about a couple of centimetres square.  I assume the idea is to be able  to find a light switch in a darkened room.  That light was being reflected in the bathroom mirror and diffusing into a patch about two metres square on the wall.

I've been in Seattle the last few days, arrived on Thursday night.  I take the Amtrak to Spokane this afternoon.

It was an uneventful flight over, apart from the thunderstorm in the south of England on Thursday morning.  Second international trip of the  year where I've set off in teeming rain.

It's interesting that  Virgin Atlantic no longer do the boarding by rows thing (or maybe it was because the plane was half full).  They announced boarding had started and nobody moved.

I had a brief stopover in Detroit and a flight to Seattle that arrived on time and then sat on the tarmac for a while.  Finally we  got moving again.  Then someone came on the tannoy.  There was a police car sitting at our gate and there were other planes backing up behind us, so we had to circle the terminal building until the gate was clear.

It was about seven when I got to my hotel - not far from the Space  Needle - but I still managed to walk to find somewhere to eat before retiring. Awoke very early Friday morning.

Since then  it's been mostly walking around sightseeing, although there was another thunderstorm Friday afternoon.  Fortunately there is a monorail service from the centre of town to the Space Needle.

The Museum of History and Industry was well worth a viisit yesterday.  Among the  displays was the sign from outside the first Starbuck's.  There seems to be a Starbuck's on every block, but I've tended to avoid them, although I think the cafe in Barnes and Noble is a Starbuck's.

So I was having a meal in a restaurant almost on the bank of the Rhine.  It advertised itself as an Argentinian Steak House but I ordered pork fillet in a gorgonzola sauce with rosti potatoes.  Neither a particularly Argentinian dish, nor specific to the Cologne area.  At least my kölsch beer was local, my second half litre of the evening.

A group of street musicians lined up outside the restaurant: two saxophones, trumpet, double bass, percussion and accordion - a piano accordion, not a button accordion for those accordion geeks out there.  I thought the button accordion was more common in Europe.  They weren't playing German oom-pah music, nor indeed anything South American.  They launched into a medley of Glenn Miller hits that made me feel all nostalgic.  OK, Miller died nearly ten years before I was born, but I saw The Glenn Miller Story enough times as a kid, and every time it got to the bit where his band played Little Brown Jug for his family after his death I got all misty eyed, even though I knew that was ahistoric, he recorded that song in 1936.  My father's two CD set of Glenn Miller hits made its way into my collection after his death and is on my iPod.

Then they did a few Beatles numbers which should be more the music of my generation.  I was ten in 1963, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP.  But that music has less appeal to me.

When they finished they passed a hat round and I found a handful of euro coins to toss in.

The food, the beer and the music left me in a good mood.  I went passed the Gay Pride event in the Heumarkt where a woman was leading the crowd in a number of popular German songs.  (I think it was a woman, although given where I was it could have been a man in drag.  I was too far from the stage to tell.)  I felt slightly annoyed that I didn't know the words so I couldn't join in.

I travelled down from Hamburg to Cologne today.

When I checked into my hotel in Hamburg on Tuesday night, I was told breakfast was an extra 11 euros on top of what I'd paid when I made my booking.  But when I checked out this morning, they said, "You had one breakfast this morning."  I replied that I'd had one breakfast every morning, but I was told the total due was 11 euros.  Well, on Wednesday they'd asked for my room number at breakfast.  There was no-one on the entrance to the restaurant yesterday, and this morning not only did they ask for my room number, they asked me to sign.  I wasn't going to press them on the other two breakfasts I didn't get charged for.

For some reason my train booking today was not a direct trip; I had to change at Hannover.  According to the timetable, I had ten minutes to change trains at Hannover, but my train from Hamburg got in ten minutes late.  Fortunately, my connection was running 20 minutes late.

Near where I was waiting on the platform in Hannover, there was a young lad, looked about 14, who was annoyed about something.  I couldn't work out what, not because I don't understand German but because his entire vocabulary consisted of the words "Verdamnt" and "Scheisse". Maybe it was to do with the train being 20 minutes late.  At first he was shouting at a woman I assume was his mother.  Then he started on the platform staff.  Finally the pair of them started down the platform, he still shouting at the top of his voice, the platform staff responding with the German equivalent of "The same to you."

After two hot days in Hamburg, it was cool and raining this morning, but Cologne is even hotter than Hamburg.  And my hotel room has no air conditioning.

I'm back in Stockholm for the night before setting off back down to Hamburg tomorrow.  I thought I'd investigate the route from my hotel to the nearest underground (T-bann) station as the recommended quickest route takes you over a footbridge I didn't think I'd be able to cross with my head for heights.

I found an alternative route and got to the station and was about to go back to the hotel when I realised it was only 36kr to get to the centre of Stockholm.  The taxi here last week cost 197kr (about £20) so I thought I'd go into the centre for the evening.  (Sunset is 22:07 tonight and it was only about 19:30.)  And having got into the centre, I just had to go and have some Swedish meatballs.  Even found the place I had them when I was here back in 2011.  I'd forgotten that the place was actually a Swedish-Italian restaurant.

The entry to the T-bann was through a long tunnel, the wall of which had a number of ads, many for the Stockholm transport system itself.  At the bottom of the ad, it said, "För mer information ring 08...".  That's not written Swedish, that's an Englishman's attempt to write pretend Swedish, and even then they've given up after only two words.

I've just arrived in Cologne, the  first stage in my journey to Archipelicon this weekend.

When I was on the Eurostar  this afternoon, the guy sitting next to me was trying to find out  where he could plug his laptop in and what type of socket it was.  (The answers are, between the two seats in front, and European.)

At which point I  remembered I'd forgotten to pack my mains adaptor.  I got checked into my hotel by 19:30 so I went wandering and found a German equivalent of Currys PC World that stayed open till 20:00 and bought a Reisestecker for ten euros.

I always forget at  least one thing when travelling.  (One Eastercon I discovered I had no clean underpants and had  to make a shopping expedition  to  Hinkley.)   I hope this is  the only thing  I've forgotten this time.

UPdate:  Well, I've just discovered what else I'd forgotten to pack - toothpaste!

I'm spending a few days in Cologne at the moment.  When I booked the trip, I had forgotten that there was a football tournament going on, the Welt Meister (WM) as they call it around here.

And this evening I was getting ready to go out to eat when I heard an enormous roar from outside my hotel window.  Seems that Germany had just scored.  I'd seen the headlines in the papers all day "Ein guter Tag für Helden" so I should have remembered this was happening.

My hotel overlooks the Rhine and all the hotels and bars along the river had huge crowds outside watching the game on big screens.

It also turns out to be Cologne Pride weekend and there is a big fair set up in a nearby market.  As I walked through it just now, there was what looked like Germany's equivalent to Graham Norton introducing the proceedings but competing with all the bars showing football.

There was no escaping the football and I eventually found a place to eat where the football was inside and I could eat outside.  The place was crowded (the second half was just starting) and service was slow, but I did get a good meal.  When someone asked if he could stub his cigarette out on the ashtray on my table and he discovered I was English, he commiserated over the England team's early exit.

The party seems to be continuing outside.

Incidentally, an oddity with my hotel room.  The loo flush is a large rectangle of brushed aluminium on the wall, so place that if you lean back when sitting on the toilet, it flushes.

When I left my hotel room this morning I was totally disorientated.  I had been in such a daze getting to the room last night, and the scene outside my door was such a maze of twisty passages all alike, I had no idea in which direction to go to get to the lift.

Seems like the only people I know who are here are all Swedes.  Met two at breakfast and two more when I set out to explore.

Actually, I made an earlier attempt to explore just after breakfast, but it was so early, nothing was open.

Reacquainted myself with the layout from when I was here back in 1997.  (Princess Diana died the last time I stayed here.)  Apparently it had been raining yesterday, a rare event here, and it was hot and humid walking around, and no sunshine.  Got to the Alamo, which is more or less next door, just through the shopping mall.  I'll maybe do the full tour later.

A bit too tired to do too much today.