It hasn’t snowed, but nearly everything is white. The sky has been white with fog for the past couple of days and it’s been below freezing as well. The two seem to combine to “grow” ice crystals on nearly everything — it’s quite beautiful.
Mirabelka and i are in Poland for the holidays. The above is a sunset from the train as we headed Northwards to her parents’ house in the country. Here’s a picture from their house:
London has been unusually chilly of late, and so there’s not much difference in temperature.
The Winter Solstice is tomorrow… the Sun went down around 15:45 today, and it’s dark now (16.30).
She didn’t really look like any of the three representations above. For starters, she was three dimensional, and riding in a very special car, with an illuminated crest on top.
It was nearly two weeks ago, and i had just left work. It was only about 18:15, but already dark. I was biking North on Northampton Row, at Russell Square, when some motorbike police came up behind me, blowing whistles and stopping traffic at cross streets.
I pulled over to the side of the street at a corner, and then, a Bentley looking just like the one in the wikipedia link above went by with a woman and man sitting in the back; she with white hair, impeccable posture, and looking somehow familiar.
I stood there for a moment puzzling it out as various security vehicles trailed after the Bentley. There was a man standing next to me at the zebra (crosswalk) also still watching the motorcade being swallowed up as the city came back to life behind it.
me: “Was that the Queen?”
him: “Yes… Yes it was.”
Turning to look at me, he added, “Don’t see that everyday!”
I laughed and said, “No, first time this life.”
This isn’t really earth shattering news or anything, but the recent trip we took to Sweden was an interesting contrast in air versus train travel. Being from the U.S., i’ve travelled a lot more by airplane than by train. Of course, airplanes move faster — most commercial jet airliners are using cruising at about 780 kph, while many trains are probably cruising around 130 kph, though the fast intercity trains cruise at as much as 320 kph. Still, a big difference: airplanes are twice as fast.
But, to quote wikipedia on long-distance trains:
In most cases, high-speed rail travel is time- and cost-competitive with air travel when distances do not exceed 500 to 600 km (311 to 373 mi), as airport check-in and boarding procedures may add as many as two hours to the actual transit time.[5] Also, rail operating costs over these distances may be lower when the amount of fuel consumed by an airliner during takeoff and climbout is considered. As travel distance increases, the latter consideration becomes less of the total cost of operating an airliner and air travel becomes more cost-competitive.
And this assumes flights are on time, which for our recent trip was not true. Our outbound 09:30 flight from London City Airport was delayed and eventually cancelled due to fog (or low clouds), so we waited nearly 13 hours at the airport before we left. The flight was 2 hours (30 minutes less than scheduled), so the 1,423 km were travelled over 15 hours, so about 109 kph — about the speed of highway automobile travel, and definitely slower than intercity trains.
That’s an unusually long delay, but i seem to be running into more of these extreme delays lately — perhaps because profit margins are so small, the airlines are stretched too thin to handle weather delays.
So here’s how the comparison is looking to me:
Same or better for trains on shorter trips, but even for long trips it can be much better. For our round-trip train from one end of Sweden to the other (about 1,100 km each way), we paid about 430 GBP, versus 338 for a flight that would not cover the last 200 km. And the 430 GBP included lodging for two nights, with an en suite shower and loo, though it was small. :)
As mentioned in the quote above, for over 600km, it may be more time efficient to travel by airplane, but when one considers that trains usually come all the way into cities, one can save two hours (or more) each trip avoiding travel to and from the airports. When you add in the additional hour or more that one must allot for arriving before a flight, this is even more substantial.
Trains are easy. You get to the station 15 minutes before the train, and then you just get on.
Sweden’s state-own train company, SJ states that their trains are all electrical and the electricity is sourced from hydroelectric and wind-powered sources. So no greenhouse gas production. Of course not all trains are electric, but they’re similarly (if not more) efficient to airplanes, and there are theories that indicate that air travel is especially bad because it deposits greenhouse gases in the stratosphere.
There’s just no comparison here. On the train, there was more leg room in the passenger seats for the shorter, 5-hour trip, and for the 13-hour train, we had our own private room with beds and a bathroom, for roughly the same price.
And i get to carry on my own tub of Vegemite, and butter knife to spread it with, and bottle of water or beer or wine, etc.
We weren’t scanned, groped, or interrogated on our train trip. During the trip we were allowed to move freely around nearly the entire train, and could use the restroom whenever we wanted.
Trains are less affected by weather. (The Swedish train engines had snow plows!)
We’re on the train from “Abisko Turist Station” towards Boden, where we’ll change to a sleeper train back to Stockholm. It seems unlikely that we’ll see the Aurora Borealis this trip – it was very cloudy at Abisko the “night” we were there (though it was dark most of the “daytime”)!
We enjoyed the trip up to Abisko very much, regardless. Being out of either the Summer or Winter tourist seasons, it felt as if we had the place to ourselves (we visited with the one other tourist we saw – a very nice Chinese graduate student (studying in Germany) named Lin, who was also hoping to see the Northern Lights).
We definitely hope to come back – i’m sure Tornetrask lake and the ample hiking in the mountains are amazing in the Summer (especially with the endless sunlight). Mirabelka took a lot of pics of our trip in Sweden. The colours were beautiful and striking in a very wintery way.
M & i have been in Sweden for a few days now (one less than anticipated and purchased but fog (low clouds) and British Airways caused us to spend the first day of vacation mostly at London City airport.).
We made it in to Stockholm at about 1am. The next day we had a very pleasant visit with my Uncle Howard, who showed us around the central part of Stockholm, and finished off the evening with a delicious meal at Lao Wai. Definitely the best Chinese food i’ve had in 10 years – if not in forever. (and the entire menu was vegan…)
The next day, we saw some exhibits at the Photography museum, and then took a night train North from Stockholm to Boden. The compartment was not big:
…but it was entirely ours.
Sweden is very long.
At Boden, we changed trains, and headed NorthWestish, past the mining city of Kiruna and now, slowly noodling through the hills and blowing snow towards Abisko – pretty much right at the top of Sweden, near the border with Norway, and along a large, dark lake with lots of waves.
This past weekend, M and i saw a couple of very good shows of two bands that M introduced me to:
The Warsaw Village Band – the closest thing i can think of to describe their music is Celtic folk, but it’s fairly different than that. (For starters, they sing in Polish…)
They put on a very good show… sextet of two violins, hammer dulcimer, electric double base, and two percussionists. One of the violinists also sometimes plays a strange sort if proto-fiddle that’s a bit larger than a viola, and she played like a cello. I think it might have had six strings. Their own sound guy is part of the band and tours with them because they make use of various effects (reverb, etc) in live shows (well, at least this show.)
The next night we saw the Amsterdam Klezmer Band, who put on an incredibly fun, high-energy show – at moments very Ska-like.
I really enjoyed both shows.
[Argh... i meant to post this about a month ago, but failed...]
Apparently, Dennis Ritchie died this past week. Few people will recognize the name, but it will be interesting to compare the media reaction to Steve Jobs’ recent passing. IMO, Ritchie had more of an effect upon the current state of computing than Jobs.
Ritchie created the C programming language, which is the language Unix was originally written in (at AT&T). FreeBSD (which Mac OS X is largely based upon), the Linux kernel, and much of the GNU software that accompanies the Linux kernel are all still written in C. Much of the server software you perhaps unknowingly use (like the Apache HTTP Server, the most widely used web server) is written in C. It is the predecessor to most of the other languages used to create most modern software.
M has her pictures from the Isle of Wight up on the Internet now.
They’re all good (she’s selective — what’s there is only the best 10-15% of what she took), but the Seaview Walk pics are amazing ; great colours!
Lovely weekend on the Isle of Wight — it’d had been some time since i’d seen so many people walking dogs; longer since i’d been around the sea. Here’s one of several hovercraft that operate as people-ferries. They are loud. In rhe background, you can see a little bit of Ryde.
Here’s a security canera perched on a sign for a pub named “The Falcon” (near the B&B):
Friday afternoon and evening we walked along the coast from Ryde to Seaview where i took a picture of this sign:
And then we made our way back from Seaview mostly along public walking paths just in time for dinner at the B&B.
Lots of sleep, and then Saturday, we hopped a bus over to Newport, where we walked on a very nice path along the Medina river:
Yummy lunch in Cowes, interesting conversation with the driver of a water taxi who took us across the Medina, and then we walked back to Ryde from East Cowes.
The next day, went via bus and foot to a preserved windmill in Bembridge:
And then we had a gander at the excavated remains of a Roman villa, near Brading, and back homewards via catamaran ferry from Ryde to Portsmouth, where this big structure is:
And now on the train back to London…