Travels in June and July 2006

I travelled for three weeks, mainly to attend two conferences (in Utrecht and in Coventry) to represent the University. While travelling I alsol did some library research.

June and July 2006 conferences and research
Sydney
A Boeing 777-400
I left Sydney at about 12 noon in a business class seat on Singapore Airlines. Getting permission from the University to travel business class is always a struggle but I got it this time. The travel agent only delivered the tickets on Friday for Monday flight! He left some of the train tickets out which I had to take care on en route. To qualify for the discounted business class ticket, I had to have three stop overs (defined as at least 24 hours in one place). The first of these stops was Singapore. It is 9 hours flying time to get there plus all the waiting at each end.
Singapore
Singapore has a lot of tall buildings. Some are feng sui (energy of the land) designed but most look like every-place else in the world. Most Singaporeans are Chinese but there are also Malays and Indians, and a good number of foreigners like these men
on the airport train. While in Singapore I met with Dr Ramesh to discuss the journal he edits, Policy, Organization & Society.
The flight on to London is another 13 plus hours to arrive at Heathrow airport which is gigantic, ramshackle, and heavily guarded. As you can see. It takes a good 45 minutes of standing in line to get to Immigration and then that takes 30 seconds to get the stamp in the passport. Ha, the glamor of travel.
Heathrow is also always very busy with long lines, lots of people milling about with stacks of luggage on carts.
The main attraction of London for me is the British Library which used to be housed in the British Museum but now has a dedicated new building at King’s Cross. This shot is the forecourt. I read some 17th and 18th texts in English and French this time. I landed at 3 p.m. and took the express train to Paddington Station and then a taxi from there to Russell Square for the hotel.

The books in this case are the first volumes of the British Library donated by King George I in the 18th Century.
Here I am reading away in the Rare Book Room.
This is the Russell Hotel at Russell Square which the travel agent put me in this time. I have been by it numerous times but never inside until now. The public areas are rather grand but the room I had was basic and very modern (wood and steel). The style is high Victorian, the staircase is marble with gargoyle decorations, the lobby floor is a zodiac mosaic.
Our friends Mike and Kaye moved to England a few months ago, to York, and Mike was in London on business so we had dinner the night I got in, using the mobile phones to rendezvous. He is now the research director of the Higher Education Authority so we talked a lot of shop. The first two mornings in London I awoke at about 4 a.m. (still on the wrong time zone inside), but that was a good time to call Kate and to drink filter coffee from the drip coffee machine I carry around – Brisk Brew, but that is about all. I trooped around the corner at about 8 a.m. for the hot English breakfast that I like when I am here. Very little opens in London before 9.30 a.m. I walked to the British Library, showed my card and went to work. This is the third card I have had there, starting in 1980. After six days and five nights of reading, it was time to go to the Netherlands for the first conference – The Oxford University Network on Teaching, which met last year in Oxford but this year in Utrecht, The Netherlands, a place the travel agent could not find. I took the train that runs under the English Channel again. It leaves from the south station, Waterloo,
and has security comparable to an airplane but the train itself is far more comfortable. I had four seats to myself, and they come around with a continental breakfast. There is no drama the train barrels along and then it gets dark in the tunnel.
The train looks like this one,
but passengers never see the front. I took the train through Lille in northern France (where Charles de Gaulle was born and died) and onto the Brussels. I have never been to Brussels and since it is on the way I stopped off for two nights to see something of what Thomas More saw when he lived there before writing Utopia.
Brussels
It shows signs of its wealthy and colonial past with palaces and golden domes hither the thither.
I did a tourist bus ride, but the weather was grim, rainy and maybe 50 degrees Fahrenheit. I had my silver snapper and took lots of pictures.
This is a self portrait on the open air tourist bus.
Notice the blue plastic poncho for the rain. This is the place where the bus started, and I waited there, after another very early wake-up. It left at ten a.m., and I had been up and ready since about 6 a.m. This is the front of the hotel, the Hilton North in Brussels, nothing special.
A street shot of the World Trade Commission in the distance.
The bus went to Central Station to take on more passengers and while I waited there I took pictures and then went into the station
to buy my ticket to Utrecht, the Netherlands, that the travel agent had failed to do. I had plenty of time to get back to the bus. My efforts to speak French in Brussels always elicited English in reply except from the taxi driver from the train station. So I practiced on him.
The 11th Century cathedral that Thomas More and Erasmus frequented on a hillock in Brussels.
There were hills which I had not expected.
You see that the weather blows up in no time at all
More Brussels. Here is a high spot looking back over the new city.

Central station in Brussels. I clutched my ticket and wheeled my bags down the steps to the platform and tried to figure out the system. There were announcement in French, Dutch, and English. The sign above the tunnel is a tribute to railway workers killed in World War II.
The train took me to Rotterdam where I changed trains for a local to Utrecht. The conductor who marked my ticket very kindly told me which platform in Rotterdam (another very large and busy station). Then on to Utrecht, a small, quiet town in the green leafs of the Netherlands. A few pictures from Utrecht:
This is the outlook from my hotel window.
This is a university building and in the foreground are some of the conferees. While in Utrecht I caught up with a former student Ed, who patiently went snow dome shopping and coffee drinking with me for a couple of hours one afternoon. I had packed the camera by then so no snap.
It looks fine in good weather but like everywhere else in the Netherlands it rains continuously ten months a year.
A street shot. I did live in the Netherlands for six months in 1983 but the language was beyond even my self-confidence.
The cathedral clock tower.
The conference was intense for three days but well worth doing, because it convinces me that we are way ahead of all the others (Princeton, Cornell, Edinburgh, Lund, Copenhagen, Queens, MIT, and so on) and then it was time to go, by train on to Berlin. Kate and I went there once before, in 1994 when the division between East and West was still very clear, and the war damage that the Soviets had left in the East was visible. The symbolic representation of all of that was Potsdamer Platz, a large public square near the Brandenburg Gate that was completely open, waste ground in 1994, virtually a field in the middle of the city. Not any more. Berlin is thriving, and I was there during the semi-finals of the World Cup so it was buzzing too. This is a remnant of the Berlin Wall in situ.
Here is part of the buzz. Street entertainment.
I am not on the tourist bus on the right but rather walking around with an old friend, Ekkehard whom I got to know in the Netherlands in 1983. So these 23 years later we got together in Berlin for a day or two. We talked about replicating a project we did all those years ago, but he said I would have to come back to Germany to do that. Who knows, maybe I will. My efforts to speak German were dismissed with English answers when I tried with train conductor, cab driver, hotel reception, and sales staff in a department store. So much for my efforts!
The fountain the foreground is playful and the mirrored building in the background reflects other buildings.
The boy is posing as if one of the figures I guess.
I took this picture for Kate. The spire in the middle is the remains of the royal church destroyed by English bombs in 1943. At night the new tower beside it lights up in blue glass. We stayed near it in 1994. Here is better shot from a web site.
Another shot for Kate who always snaps street cover art. Berlin water and sanitation it says. It shows the city once again whole, starting with the radio tower in Alexanderplatz, the Brandenburg Gate, the Egyptian obelisk, and a lot of stuff I do not recognize around to the Reichstag – the building Hitler burned, blaming it on others, and left in a ruin to remind people of the folly of democracy.
It was World Cup time and many streets were blocked. I took this one because of the construction cranes which were all over the city. This is a view of the Brandenburg Gate from the side. During the Cold War this was a killing field.
This is the rebuilt Reichstag with that glass dome on top. I stood in line to enter but the guard estimated it would take two hours and I decided to walk on. The weather was fine and there was much else to see and do.
The street puppet again.
One reminder of the past is this private memorial to those from the East who were killed crossing the wall. Even as late as 1989, the year it came down. This where I took that side view of the Brandenburg gate above. This is some kind of private, amateur memorial to some of those killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall, notice that Chris Goeffrey was killed in February and the Wall fell in October of 1989.
And this reminder of the past which is a sign near one of the busiest metro stations in Berlin that says “Lest we forget our great crimes:” and then lists twelve of the Nazi death camps. That was not there in 1994 and it is quite striking and must have caused a fight when it was proposed. Imagine it outside David Jones in the city and you get the idea.
On a lighter side there was a United Nations friend bear display:
Berlin is a city with books piled up in the streets just look!

This tribute to the great thinkers and writers of German is outside the national library and across the street from a memorial to Nazi book burning.
That is about it for a photographic record. To leave Berlin on a Sunday afternoon I took a taxi to Tegelhof airport and waited and waited amid a throng. Finally got the British flight to London, and did the second conference by taking the train to Coventry and back. This conference was not so valuable, but we had to put in an appearance. I also spent another day in the British Library.
Then it was time to head to the States by taking the Paddington Express train from London to Heathrow Airport and navigating its dark, dirty, and crowded corridors to the United Airlines trans-Atlantic flight. More waiting, including about two hours on the airplane sitting on the tarmac waiting for the weather to clear en route. Ergo we left late and I had a very tight connecting flight to Omaha from Chicago. Nine hours later in the vast steel and glass of O’Hare Airport in Chicago for the connection that had me running from part of the airport to another and off to Omaha. My bags were slower than me and did not make the connection, so I when overnighted in Omaha; they arrived the next morning. Yuk. I visited the Icarian Archives at the University of Nebraska Omaha, again. I had thought I might drive to Corning but I lacked the energy to do so. To that next time maybe I should base myself in Des Moines.
The return via Chicago was even tighter and more stressful but I got it and amazingly enough so did my bags because we both emerged in Sydney. The flight to Chicago is one hour plus. Then a short connection, so no waiting this time, but more running. Then five hours to San Francisco, flying around some rough weather. Quite a wait in San Francisco because the connecting flight was late. Maybe three hours in all. Left San Francisco two hours late for the fourteen hour flight over the Pacific. I was flying business class again but this time on United which is not in the same league as Singapore. Nonetheless I made it and I was walking through Sydney airport Kate SMSed me to tell me she was on the spot for a pickup. I handed over the snow domes I had collected along the way. By the way the trip was funded entirely from my earnings in consultancy accounts.