3 posts tagged “vacation”

Flickr archaeology: pictures from Prague trip, 2002

Aug 10, 2008
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In November of 2002, May & I got to take a trip to Prague, in the Czech republic.

(As opposed to, say, Prague Oklahoma or Prague Nebraska. Yes.)

The city had the worst floods since 1954 a couple of months earlier, and was still recovering when we got there -- the subway was shut down, and a lot of streets & sidewalks were getting repaved -- but it was still a lovely place, like something out of an old medieval knights & dragons storybook. (In fact, Hollywood saw it the same way -- the Jackie Chan / Luke Wilson movie "Shanghai Knights" was being filmed there at the time we visited.)

May brought her then new-ish Olympus D-340L digital camera (with a whopping 1.3 megapixels! from "off" to "able to take a picture" in 30 seconds flat! able to hold up to 60 pictures on a single 16mb SmartMedia card!), while I was still using my parent's two old Nikkormat (1970s consumer Nikons SLRs, similar to today's entry level D-series Nikons) SLRs from the early 1970s. The older one seems to have been a Nikkormat FTn, purely mechanical, purely manual exposure; the newer one looks like a Nikkormat EL, their first "electronic" camera body, meaning if you selected an aperture, it would attempt to pick a matching shutter speed to get a correct exposure. These were the cameras I learned on, and while they're getting old now, and I think at least one has a faulty light meter, and I can't ever see shooting film again, I still love these old camera bodies. Each of them was built like a tank, and heavy as one too.

When I got the film developed, I had the foresight to get a PictureCD produced with each roll from the Nikkormat, so while the scanned resolution isn't much by today's standards (roughly 1.5mp from the 35mm negative), that's fine -- I'm just glad to be able to import them in to iPhoto now, and put some of the better ones on Flickr.

Here's a sample, but the Flickr set has much more -- about 150 in total.

Prague 2002: tourists in Staroměstské náměstí (Old Town Square)

Prague 2002: detail view of Pražský orloj (Astronomical clock) at Old City Hall at the Staroměsts

Prague 2002: View over statues of Karlov Most ("Charles Bridge"), with Prague Castle in distance

Prague 2002: Musical brass instruments on chairs at a museum near Karlov Most ("Charles Bridge")

Prague 2002: propellorhead saints statue on Karlov Most ("Charles Bridge")

Prague 2002: streetside chalkboard menu doors at a restaurant pub

Prague 2002: night time street view of people, a tram, etc; I like this one

Prague 2002: sassy May on tower by Karlov Most (Charles Bridge)

According to Wii data, more Swiss people have swam in the ocean than Italians & Greeks combined?

Aug 6, 2008
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I mean seriously, think about this.

Everybody_Votes_Channel

The Everybody Votes Channel on the Wii menu had a recent global survey:

Have you ever been swimming in the ocean?

Yes or No.

I thought this could be interesting, both for the USA and worldwide. In America, while visiting the beach is a popular vacation destination, most of the country is land-locked and hundreds or thousands of miles from the coast, and a lot of people won't travel that far for a vacation. Then again, the biggest population centers are on the east & west coasts, so a large fraction of people don't have to go very far at all to get to the ocean. I voted that a majority would say "yes", and I ended up being right -- the actual number was something like 78%, if I recall.

But unlike other polls on the Wii's EVC (I'm too lazy to type that out right now (but not too lazy to have a parenthetical remark longer than the bit I was eliding (where was I?))), this one was global in scope, not national, so the dynamics are broader than just North America. You have to account for where people live, which countries are likely to have lots of Wii users that would be voting on this kind of silly question, etc.

I figured the global results would be similar to my guess for America -- "yes" -- on grounds that while a lot of the world is landlocked, a lot of the landlocked places are thinly populated & not necessarily economically advanced enough to have lots of Wii users. Moreover, a lot of the places where the Wii should be expected to be popular -- Japan, Korea maybe, the UK & Ireland, plus western Europe -- are either islands, or otherwise still close to the ocean. So, again, "yes".

Okay, we get it, so what's the point?

Get to the point already.

Predictably (a ha! a ho!), "yes" was the worldwide winner. And when you drilled into the national breakdown of the results, in most countries, "yes" was the winner locally as well.

Shepherd-c-012

The notable standouts to me were Switzerland, Italy, and Greece.

Switzerland is a land-locked country, ringed by towering mountains, savage Visigoths, and fierce Gauls. And yet it looks like something like 85% or more of the population has been in the ocean.

Italy is a long, skinny peninsula, hemmed in by towering mountains to the north, the snarling Gauls to the northwest, Archduke Ferdinand's Balkans to the northeast, and the serene, inviting waters of the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas on all other sides. Clearly, there's nowhere to go but swimming, right? And yet it looked like less than 30% had been in the ocean.

Greece is a chain of peninsulas and actual islands that is, again, boxed in by mountains and the Archduke's Balkans to the north, and the warm, refreshing, and famed Mediterranean both all around and actually inside the rest of the country. And yet less than 20% had been in the ocean.

Can this actually be possible? Kidding aside, do the landlocked Swiss actually spend more time in the sea than the Italians and Greeks? How can that be possible?

I mean, okay, sure, there's that whole myth about that guy and his crew getting lost for like a decade and having a hell of a time in just getting a ferry ride over from Turkey to Athens, but come on: (a) it was a long time ago, right, they didn't have GPS back then, (b) I'm pretty sure they weren't being serious about the Cyclops, Sirens, Scylla & Charybdis, etc. Urban legends, all, right? You can go back in the water now, it's okay.

I mean, hey, just look at Martha's Vineyard, right? They know it's safe to go back in the water