Vacation in Vienna

With the conference ending on a Wednesday afternoon and the necessity of losing half a day due to time changes upon returning to Japan, it wasn't really possible to get back to Japan in time for classes on Friday, which I didn't have anyway due to it technically still being summer vacation.  Thus presented with the opportunity, we scheduled our flights so that we could stay a little longer in Europe and see some of Vienna before flying back.  We're very glad we had that chance, and Ana especially geeked out the entire time.

Let's just start with some pictures, because a large part of the impact of Vienna is just how old and ornate everything is.  We opened up our tourist guides and found way, way more things to do in there that we were interested in than was possible to accomplish in the day and a half before we had to get serious about getting airborne.  So take a look at some of what we saw, and then I'll get into what we did.

 Normal street view in 1st District

 Another view from the same place, looking at a nearby building

 The front of that nearby building, which is the Children's Opera apparently

 Ok, so this is the Hofburg (Imperial Palace of the Hapsburgs and the residence of the Austrian president), not a normal building, but it is fancy, and would be fancier without all the temporary crap around it

Well, the first stop was the hotel, to which we took the subway from the airport where the bus had dropped us off.  We'd picked one a few subway stops out from the center of the city so that we could get something a little classier for less money.  Our choice, a hotel in a re-purposed textile plant, was quite pleasant.  Dropping our stuff there, we headed back out and took the subway to the 1st District, which is where the majority of the cool part of Vienna is, according to our maps.  We went down the long list of museums and things to do in Vienna (the opera was sold out, we checked) and picked (nerds that we are) the Natural History Museum because 1) we're nerds and 2) it was open late on Wednesday nights so we'd get more museum for our money there than at other places.  The Natural History Museum building itself was probably worth the price of admission - it was built by the local royalty a couple hundred years ago and is splendidly ornate inside, in addition to the impressive collections of minerals, fossils, animal specimens and the like.  We were accidentally without our camera during this visit, but search "Vienna natural history museum" at Flikr and you'll get results like this here.

Interior courtyard of our hotel

Picture of the outside of the Natural History Museum from the next day

After the museum, and we stayed several hours, we were in need of dinner.  We went and wandered around all kinds of stupendous buildings and narrow streets before finally and erroneously settling on a restaurant which proved to be overpriced and under-excellence'd.  The food was merely average, the prices higher than they should have been, and the service poor.  On the plus side, it was definitely edible, we were hungry, the wine was very interesting and good (they sell wines in Austria that you just don't see in the US or Japan, are distinctly different, and at least in some cases really good) and we could afford it.  After dinner it was quite late and we caught one of the last subways back to our hotel.

In the morning we had one clear and overriding priority - PONIES.  At least according to Ana.  Vienna is home to the Spanish Riding School, home and training grounds of the Lipizzaners.  They didn't have any shows scheduled during the time we were in Vienna, so we couldn't see one of those, but they do have a practice every morning that the public can attend if they're willing to fork over about $20 each for the privilege.  Thus, we grabbed sweet buns from a bakery, took the subway to the 1st District, and made our way to the annex of the imperial palace that houses the riding school.  Several hundred other people had the same idea for a Thursday morning, but we apparently beat the rush and had very good seats.  You aren't supposed to take pictures inside the school (or eat anything for that matter) but given the price of entry and what we were actually seeing I felt we were quite entitled to a few pictures and eating my breakfast.  Ana kept saying things like, "Oh, that's nearly impossible" and "Wow!" while I looked at horses that mostly looked to be walking funny to me.  They did a few of the more showy tricks, like having the horse balance on its back legs, jump vertically, and then land on the back legs again, but that only happened once or twice and I think Ana missed it.  I found a picture of it on the internet though.  I think I can skip practice in the future, but I would definitely like to see a real show.

 Outside the school of extraordinary pony-ness

Illicit picture from inside the school of extraordinary pony-ness

After horse practice viewing, we went to a restaurant that proved to be the culinary highlight of the trip, which was actually the house restaurant of Vienna's modern art museum.  Ordinarily, I would shy away from museum food but the internet and tourist guides had recommended it and we were pretty sure we could find it, so there we went.  The food was adaptations of local cuisines with some modern twists and the quality was unimpeachable.  The price was fair for what you got, and the service and atmosphere were very good.  Ana's entree was definitely one of the finest renditions of freshwater fish that I've ever tasted - subtle and rich and just plain tasty.  My grilled venison and gravy and cheese sauce and berries entree was, in each element, merely good, but when you put all the flavors in the same mouthful it melded into awesome.  The wine was a lot less expensive than the night before (which tells you how overpriced the prior evening was) and I would happily go back to that restaurant and pretty much just work my way down the menu.

 Delicious fish entree

 Being snazzy in fancy restaurants in Vienna

 Admittedly not terribly photogenic venison entree

Fed, and quite pleased with lunch, we picked another museum to visit, this time the classical art museum.  I'd say a lot of what we saw and read was more educational than entertaining, and we saw a LOT of Renaissance-era and later paintings.  Our findings - everyone paints scenes from the Bible all the time, but almost unanimously fails to consider the fact that the Middle East of many hundreds of years ago did not look like what you see out your window in Austria or Italy in the year 1700.  Also, when one artist made a painting that everyone liked, everyone else started painting the same painting and now all those paintings are now hanging on the walls of this one museum in Vienna.  That said, reading the captions and histories of the different paintings and seeing the historical elements alongside the fantasy stuff was worth doing once, even for non-art-educated persons such as us.  The Greek and Roman statues and other antiquities were probably more fun than the paintings, and there was no shortage of either, though the coin collection billed as one of the biggest in the world seemed really small to us.  Also, the inside of the museum itself was mindblowing, as hopefully the pictures can show to some extent.  Seeing architecture like this changed my opinions somewhat on elaborate decorative schemes - done with unlimited money and power amazing things can be achieved.

 Hey look, I can sort-of-creepily-smile in Europe too

Kind of spectacular museum interior shot

After leaving the museum, we contemplated the evening.  With a lunch as good as we'd had, we didn't really want to go out to eat and have something inferior at a restaurant, so we sought out a grocery store (we also tend to explore grocery stores wherever we travel, so we checked that box by doing this too) and bought all kinds of luxury items like cheese and wine and chocolate for a late dinner whenever we decided to return to the hotel.  Ana had spied a large gelato restaurant during our wanderings, and went and bought some of that (mango for me, chocolate and blackberry for her) to tide us over until that dinner.  Our remaining priority after gelato was to get pictures of Vienna landmarks lit up at night, which we'd previously seen but not photographed.  It was a pity that several landmarks had all kinds of stuff in front of / in / around them for some kind of citywide convention that weekend, but there was still a lot to see and a lot that looked good despite the junk in the neighborhood.

I had to use kung-fu to get my cup back from her

 The first time we saw this cathedral, we thought, "this doesn't look quite real" then figured out that parts of it were in fact facades put up to cover the areas where they were doing restoration work.

We need a better low-light camera, this was so much more awesome in person

After doing our best to capture some of the local beauty, we returned to the hotel and scored some roast chicken and salad from the hotel restaurant to supplement the goodies we'd already purchased and had a quite satisfactory dinner full of things we can't get in Japan, or in some cases merely wouldn't care to pay for here.  In the morning, we made a much more leisurely trip to the airport than on our previous voyage, with no time pressure, and made the trip back to Japan.  We didn't have much time in Vienna, but we put a lot of activity into what we had and enjoyed it a lot.  I think we'll have to look for an opportunity sometime in the future to come back and do some of the things we missed this time around.

Slovakia for the SEFI/IGIP Conference

Our schools paid us to go to Europe for a week.  Believe it or not, this was pretty cool.  Of course, it wasn't quite that simple.  The schools only pay for travel to conferences if you're presenting a published paper there, so we had to come up with something the conference organizers would accept as science (or at least, about science) and make it through the selection and review process, and fill out some really exciting paperwork (in Japanese) to make it happen.  Incidentally, SEFI and IGIP are the West European and East European engineering education research groups, respectively.  They meet together every other year and have individual conferences on the off-years.

Ana wrote a paper titled "Collaborative Learning of Engineering and English: A New Approach", which talks about her school's new cross-cultural program where the English teachers and the English-speaking engineering teachers work together to get the students to use relevant technical foreign-language vocabulary and understand how to interact in engineering groups with Westerners.  A school up in Hokkaido with a program called EEE, or English Engineering Education, has a much higher bar for the language portion of the program where instead of trying to teach technical vocabulary, they simply mandate that students use English for their entire degree program.  However, writing about that program probably wouldn't have gotten us a trip to Europe, so CLEE it was.

I co-wrote a paper called "Understanding Student Performance Diversity Using Clustering Techniques" which is about gathering ~50,000 data points relating to how students perceive and perform in one of the mandatory-for-all-students classes my department is responsible for, and shoving those data points into algorithms that tell you which ones are more like each other and less like the others, which allows us to see the student body as a number of cohorts with meaningfully different characteristics rather than a homogeneous blob.  All that sounds cool, and it sort of is, but without a decade-long program to expand and make use of the technique for feedback and improvement it will ultimately be not very useful, except for getting me a trip to Europe to talk about it.  The techniques used to cluster and study the data were pretty interesting and could be very useful in future endeavors as well.

We had the papers submitted and accepted by the beginning of the summer and the travel and other arrangements pretty much sorted out before we left on our month-long trip to the US in August, which was really good because we only had 17 days between getting back from that trip and leaving for this one.  We were definitely feeling a little traveled-out as we re-packed our bags and caught the bus back to the airport, but we found that once we were in it, the novelty of where we were and what we were doing got us back into the world-traveling spirit.

Due to the time of our flight out of Tokyo, we had to spend the night before at a hotel outside the airport, which wasn't a particularly interesting experience except that they had a surprisingly good buffet restaurant featuring both Japanese and Western cuisine.  The second interesting thing about that night at the hotel was that we overslept by about two hours (we were using an alarm set to go off only on weekdays, and it was Saturday) and thus found our schedule for making the flight somewhat compressed. We needed to be packed and in the lobby about ten minutes after we woke up in order to make the next shuttle bus to the airport.  We left little burning streaks behind the wheels of our bags in the hallways of the hotel and made that bus.

We found the Austrian Airlines counters, which had nobody in front of them because everybody else for all of their flights that morning had already checked in.  The attendant put "Priority" tags on our bags and told us to be at the gate in 15 minutes, which is not a reasonable timeframe for clearing both security and immigration.  We knew that that was the time that boarding would begin, and that boarding for a 777 takes at least 20 minutes to half an hour, so we weren't completely screwed.  Security only took ten minutes, and immigration maybe fifteen, so with some high-quality scampering between where we were and each place we needed to be next, we made it to the gate in time to see the tail-end of the boarding queue entering the plane and to join them.  Very few people came after us, but we made it onto the plane, so the oversleeping cost us nothing but breakfast and a couple very stressful hours.  One can enter Narita Airport and be boarding a plane 45 minutes later, but I cannot recommend counting on doing so.

The flight was direct from Tokyo to Vienna, where the conference organizers would be providing a bus to take us to the actual conference venue.  The flight was between 12 and 13 hours long, and the seats were tiny - easily the least legroom I've had on an international flight.  Thankfully, we took a different plane on the return trip with much more legroom and upgraded TV/movie offerings.  Small legroom aside, the food and service were pretty good and we slept for about half the flight so I can't complain too much.

We had to wait around in the airport for a couple of hours before our bus would be there, and ended up meeting two other KIT professors during that time, one (my co-author) who'd actually been on the same flight as us.  That gave us someone to talk to as we waited for and then took the bus.  The bus didn't spend much time in Austria before crossing the border into Slovakia and driving through the capital, Bratislava, then past endless fields of wind turbines before finally arriving at our destination, Trnava.  Trnava is not a very big city (population less than 70,000 people according to Wikipedia) and all the hotels near the conference site were booked before we got around to reserving a room, except for one hotel - the brand new Holiday Inn Trnava, which, based upon what we heard and saw from other people, was among the nicest hotels in the city.  Definitely among the nicer ones I've stayed at, with a few features I've not encountered elsewhere.  We got dinner at the bar in the hotel, which wasn't cheap, but was surprisingly good, and finally ended the day that had started something like 20 hours earlier in Narita.

Hilarious Holiday Inn Trnava room party lights

We arrived on a Saturday, and nothing conference-related began until Sunday afternoon, so Sunday morning we ate breakfast at the Holiday Inn (so many, many things that cannot be obtained in Japan, like real cheese, cured meats, multiple styles of granola and nuts and fruit; everything was very high-quality and it was wonderful) and had some time to walk around Trnava.  Initial impressions were not tremendously favorable.  The city features quite a lot of graffiti, which is unfortunate because many of the buildings under the graffiti are hundreds of years old.  There were some pretty nice things, like the old defensive wall, which predated weaponized gunpowder, and a couple of pretty serious churches, but nothing really spectacular.  Also, due to it being Sunday, almost everything was closed and the streets were mostly empty, which was a little creepy.  The town seemed much nicer when the shops were open and people were walking around, though it would be hard to recommend the place as a tourist destination.  For someplace we got to visit on a paid trip, it was great.  We got lunch at a restaurant on the side of a big plaza and paid about $5 for lunch for two with wine.  The food was good but the wine fully justified the 75-cents-per-glass price.  Note that we've finally come to a part where we have some pictures.

 Graffiti and Soviet-era buildings were in evidence, though the old section of the city seemed lighter in both

 Defensive wall from way back, goes around some of the edges of the old part of the city

 There seemed to be a major church on every street corner

 The streets were very empty in some places on Sunday

 View from the street outside the restaurant, shown on the right

Potato battered fried chicken with cheese and crappy wine

In the afternoon, registration for the conference opened and we confronted a difficulty - nowhere on the website or in the promotional materials was the exact location of the conference explicitly shown on a map, and the location shown on Google Maps when we put in the address of the school that we had was clearly erroneous, because it showed it in the parking lot across the street from the hotel.  There was a school-like building in the vicinity, but it appeared to be under renovation and had no open entrances and no signs.  We did a couple of loops around the neighborhood of gradually widening diameter, looking for signs saying "This Way" or other evidence of our target.  We eventually picked up the trail when we witnessed passers-by carrying bags with the conference logo carrying conference materials walking through one of the big plazas.  We observed the flow of pedestrian traffic and determined that the people carrying bags issued mostly from one particular street, and began following the bags upstream until we successfully located the conference location.  We registered without difficulty, claimed logo'd bags of our own, and then went back to the hotel and grabbed a much-needed nap prior to the evening reception.  We later asked people how they'd found the conference location and they either reported that they'd asked their hotels or that they'd followed someone who already knew.  Cheaters...though I think it is pretty lousy planning not to have put a map on the conference website or something.  The reception was a pretty casual affair, though well-stocked with appetizers and other snacks, something that could be said about the event as a whole - they never missed a chance to feed the attendees heartily, and in most cases, pretty well.  We enjoyed somewhat higher quality local wines (freely available) and met a bunch of people from a bunch of countries, including some faculty members from various universities where we may seek PhD's in the future, which was nice.  We were still beat from the jet lag and called it a night when the party ended.

 A view from on the trail of the actual conference location - take a right before the yellow building there

This building was much harder to find than it should have been (picture borrowed from conference website)

Monday and Tuesday were similar.  In the morning, we bought breakfast from a local bakery (paying ~$1 for several excellent rolls which we were initially surprised to find out were covered in garlic, not sugar, upon tasting) then headed to the school where everybody gathered in the big auditorium for several keynote speakers (varying in quality between mediocre and pretty good) followed by splitting up into five or six different rooms based around different areas of research for the presentations of the individual papers.  They fed us lunch (their lunchroom was totally crushed by the number of participants, was not a good idea to go during the rush) which generally had some good and some bad elements  - probably would have opted to go to a restaurant if the food at the conference hadn't already been paid for.  In the afternoon we returned to the five or six rooms for more presentations and discussions.

The big auditorium filled with captivated listeners (borrowed from conference website)

On the whole, the academic level of the materials being presented was lower than I expected, with a fair bit of fluff and "In our country, this is the state of higher education" which provided a lot of nice background material on global educational initiatives but not a lot of stuff that anyone had actually taken to a classroom, implemented, and tested against the alternatives.  The conference theme was "Diversity unifies - Diversity in Engineering Education" so it's not that surprising that programs like that (Ana's paper is an example of the species) were the norm instead of papers based on hard data.  At any rate, we learned a few things, met some people, and attended our first international conference, and we were paid to be there, so we surely cannot complain too much.  In other news, students in Finland don't pay for college and face no pressure to take a full course load, resulting in an average length for a bachelor's degree of seven years.  Who knew?  

On Monday night they had another reception and on Tuesday night they had a big formal gala and everybody got dressed up.  By that time we knew several people at the conference pretty well so we had a good table to sit at with enough English to keep the conversation lively.  Wednesday morning was like Monday and Tuesday morning, but with fewer people in attendance - we might have skipped it and slept in if one of our new acquaintances hadn't successfully lobbied us to attend his presentation (on the new Master's program in Humanitarian Engineering being worked on with Australian Engineers Without Borders, which incidentally looked very practical) before heading back to Vienna on the afternoon bus.

Incidentally, the big party was definitely at the Holiday Inn (borrowed from conference website)

 We got some pictures of the wind turbine fields on the way back

You can see the pictures from this trip here.

Conference website is http://www.igip-sefi2010.com/ but I'm putting this here to give credit for their images, not because I recommend going to the website, though you could if you wanted to...

Summer Vacation 2010: The Lower 48

After the Alaskan adventure, we stayed with family and did a lot of running around.  First off, there was Adam and Megan's wedding:

Next up was some fun with family and friends:

We ate a lot of non-Japanese food, almost too much, and visited Canada:

Finally, we spent some time with college friends and went to Carmen and Sneha's wedding:

And then had to go back to Japan...for all of three weeks before our next international trip, this time to Austria and Slovakia, for an engineering education conference.  Stay tuned.

Summer Vacation 2010: Denali National Park Hiking

Our second full day in Denali National Park we planned to exercise one of the more unique features of the park buses, which is that in addition to yelling "Stop" to bring the bus to a halt in order to take pictures of wildlife, you can also just get off the bus whenever and wherever you like, barring places directly adjacent to wildlife and certain protected spots like the wolf dens.  Being from the east coast, where "stay on the path" is the mantra for public wilderness, this was different enough to cause us to do some math.  Based on the length of the park road and the number of people who go hiking in Denali (I think we got that info from a brochure or something) it works out to something like, for every 250 feet of road one person gets off the bus to go hiking per year.  Thus, the only paths are those made by animals in most places.

We were most fortunate in that we had one of the very few clear, sunny days of the summer for our jaunt and this made for incredible pictures in addition to just plain being more fun than being out in a downpour.  We were up early again (made easier by the extreme quantities of light and jet lag) and greeted by nice views even from the campground.

 View from the road in front of the campground

We wanted to have plenty of time to go hiking and return to the road before the buses stopped running, so we went to the bus stop early enough to be first in line and to get seats on the first bus out into the park.  The sunlight gave a much different view than the clouds of the day before, and some nice pictures as the fog burned off.

 Natural Beauty

 Wildlife - note that we saw a whole bunch of bears too, go see them on Flikr.

MORE Natural Beauty

And eventually we came around a corner and discovered that not only was it nice out, but Denali itself was clear.  This can change very quickly, so we stopped the bus and got pictures in case we never saw it again.

The mountain remained clear though, we had unobstructed views for the rest of the day.

This one is from Eielson Visitor's Center, a few dozen miles closer than the previous picture.  Standing there it feels like the mountain takes up half the sky.  They have telescopes there to zoom in and see details - could probably have seen climbers if it was in season for that, but it wasn't.

We got a few tips from the rangers at the Vistor's Center on the best place to get off the bus for our intended destination - the toe of the Muldrow Glacier, which is actually less than a mile from the road.

Our disembarkation point - note the complete lack of anything but wilderness and how nice it is out

 We discovered that the tundra here was incredibly deep and springy - might have your foot compress the moss six inches when stepping - was like walking in low gravity or something

 The tundra heavily featured wild blueberries, and the dew on them prompted Ana to take about a hundred pictures to try to catch the sun in the dew.  Practically, I ate blueberries while this was going on.

 We saw clouds crossing over the top of the Alaskan Range, and it was good.

The tundra bushes were somewhat deep in places.

We found tracks indicating that in the last week or so, grizzly bears had stood exactly where we were standing at the time.

We came to the dead ice at the bottom of the glacier - the black cliff over there is exposed glacial ice with dirt and rock ground into it.

Exploring around the edges of the dead ice, we found an ice cave which was pretty neat to look at.

Ice cave video

We found some exposed ice where the different layers of grit could be seen between sheets of ice.

We also discovered that Muldrow Glacier mud is deep, sticky, and quite possibly corrosive, based on what the boots looked like afterward - took the paint right off the metal.

A river that might have been cross-able on a cold day was more than we were comfortable fording due to the sun causing there to be a lot of glacial runoff - note the concrete color of the water due to the silt.

As we couldn't cross the river, we couldn't get up on top of the main body of dead ice - may have to go back and follow the dead ice up to the dogleg turn where it becomes live ice someday, but that's about 14 miles and a lot further from the road than we were going to be on this day.

For comparison, here is a point that a freshwater stream and a glacial stream mix

We made it back from our minor off-road adventure safe and sound, picked up by a different bus headed back towards the entrance.  Couldn't really have asked for a nicer day for our short hike.  We both feel like we need to go back to Denali National Park for more adventure, preferably a multi-day hike into the wilderness rather than staying at a camp site, which was perfect for this trip but limits where you can get to.  After this second day, all that was left was the ride out, and the next day was still clear, so we got to see the mountain almost all the way to the front of the park - on a clear day it is visible for something like 80 to 100 miles.

Last look on the way out

We took a bus back to Anchorage, which was faster and cheaper than the train, but substantially less scenic, which was OK because I think we slept though most of that drive.  Back in Anchorage, we took it easy for a couple of days, eating in fancy restaurants and buying souvenirs like caribou jerky and seal-oil candles, before flying back home to attend various weddings and see our families.

Summer Vacation 2010: Denali National Park Bus Tour

For our first full day in Denali, we got up (very) bright and (very, for us at least) early, had bagels instead of trying to cook oatmeal, grabbed some apples and other snacks, filled the Camelbak bladder at the spigot, and headed out to the bus stop.

We got there before 7 AM, but that wasn't early enough.  There was already a family in line to head out on the first bus and they managed to get the last seats available.  We hung around for the next bus that went the full distance to the end of the park, which turned out to be the next bus, and managed to get seats on that one.  We headed out with our camera ready, hoping to see some wildlife and natural beauty.

Wildlife

Wildlife

Natural Beauty

We certainly got what we wished for!

We were told several times that only 30% of visitors to Denali National Park get to see one of the park's biggest draws, Mount McKinley (also and perhaps more commonly known as Denali - apparently there are a couple of Senators from wherever McKinley was from that have managed to keep an official name-change from going through for decades).  With the weather patterns of the area, there is quite often fog obscuring at least parts of the mountain and frequently the whole thing.  Throughout the day, the mountain was mostly obscured, but we were able to see bits and pieces of it.

 30% of Denali

The park road goes through valleys and also several high passes, with changes in altitude on the road of more than half a mile and back down again.  The scenery changes with the height and location significantly.  This first day, fog and clouds kept close in and gave everything sort of a mysterious look.  Several times we could look out and only the half of a valley closer to us, or the bottom (or top) half of a mountain range.

 Off the edge to the right it goes down for a loooong way.  The bus driver said something pretty close to "Quit whining! If you die, I die.  I'm highly motivated not to drive over the edge, and I haven't driven over it yet in 17 years."

The Dall Sheep would have been uncaring witnesses to our deaths if the bus driver had spoken too soon.

At the far end of the park road is Wonder Lake.

Apparently the ultimate photograph from the park is to capture Mt. Denali (behind us in this picture), with no clouds over it, being reflected in this lake, such that you see the mountain and a perfectly clear reflection at the same time.  I guess one guy did it once, and it was impressive.  They said he spent the whole summer camped on the other side of the lake to get it though, and it finally came through for him at something like 4am the week before he left.  I think a better idea is to buy prints of his picture than to try to get your own.

After turning around, we now had seats on the "good" side of the bus, which is the side facing the view 65% of the time instead of 35% of the time.  Even on the "bad" side, you get to see plenty.

The sun started peeking through the clouds on the way back, producing dramatic scenes.  This valley is filled with glacier, the very toe of the Muldrow glacier stretching 40 miles and a hard right turn from the face of Denali itself.

We got back at a reasonable hour, played around with our camping stoves, produced quasi-edible food (wasn't the stove's fault, instant stovetop-type food I wouldn't eat at home), switched over to candy (things we can't get in Japan) and retired early to read books in the tent by extended daylight until we felt like going to sleep.

You can see our several hundred Denali National Park Pictures here.