Royal Leamington Spa

We left Leicester by bus to stay with Rhiannon’s dad in Royal Leamington (lemmingtun) Spa. It used to be just Leamington Spa but the waters of the local spring were said to have amazing health benefits and when the queen came to test them out sometime last century she agreed and decreed the village to be royal. Rhi’s dad, David, met us by bike and we walked through Jephson Park back to his house, stopping to eat mulberries and see the elephant wash on the way of course. We had a refreshing drink in the garden and Rhi & I passed out on the sofas when David left us alone for a moment to answer a phone call. He had quite a hard time waking us up, trying all sorts of tactics from the typical hey wake up, to banging pots and pans around in the kitchen. In the end a snack and a stern commanding to wake got us up and we went to the bigger garden to pick berries, which we only agreed to if we got to eat our findings with chocolate ice cream. All the houses I’ve been to (I hesitate to say a more general all, but I’m guessing its pretty close) have gardens in the back, David also had a plot in the communal garden a mile or so away. We picked black & raspberries, yellow and blue plums and apples then returned home to make dinner. It was a gorgeous meal – roast chicken with potatoes and greens and carrots. Both Rhi’s parents are very healthy, meals tended to be very much like ours at home ma & pa. The next morning we were woken with a biscuit and tea, and after many hours of piddling around the house (which was nice after the go go go pace I’ve been maintaining since I left home) we went to the most famous local spot. We debated between Shakespeare’s birthplace, a castle ruins and the castle ‘theme-park’, finally deciding on the last spot given its must-see reputation. I was thinking castle yeah yeah, but we got there and this was a CASTLE.

Like I mean hardcore, built in the 11th century and lived in by Lords and Ladies until the middle of the 1900’s kind of castle. It was totally maintained, almost to the point of irritation, little things like blocking out little window holes and using artificial lighting instead. We wandered around for hours, watched a catapult show and an archery exhibition. Took pictures with some of the era costumes and in general wore ourselves out. It was difficult to grasp the scope of the history of the place (as with the country in general) because things have been around for so long, and any given room can only be decorated for one of any number of eras. They mixed it up a bit and we got a good sense of what it was like across the ages. It is absolutely amazing being in such an old building, of the type only dreamed of in the US, with such a different kind of age. In Nevada City a building looks ancient when its from the Gold Rush 150 years ago, here there are things from almost a thousand years on up till now all mixed together. It’s a totally different scope to think about. This was one of the big reoccurring themes throughout my journeys; I’d imagine it would be prevalent in any trip in Europe, the Middle East or parts of Asia, those areas where a somewhat consistent form of society has persisted through nearly all of our known history not only in culture but in visible landscapes and architecture.

We came home for an Asian-inspired dinner and then I started to plan my journey to London the next morning. David’s girlfriend, Iris, makes art with willows and straw and was consumed with a commission from Shredded Wheat which would be shown in a week in Leicester Square, London. Her mother Rhoda was finishing her master’s thesis in painting and was preparing for her final show, so there was an air of excitement and the anxiety of nearing completion around. Much like at Jocelyn’s house where she was in the last stages of finishing her PhD thesis. Exciting times. Rhoda only spoke a bit of English (she’s German) so we had a nice multicultural and academic artistic crowd, my time at UCSD made me very happy and comfortable with.We had great talks of food, art, society and all the rest, and Iris told me about a friend of hers who was having a show in London which was of great interest to me – I plan to go to it as well as the modern art museum and a market, all which they recommended. Thank goodness as I had no plans, tour book or slightest notion of what to do with myself!

leicester

all the normal-timed buses were booked, and rhi had a train ticket (costs about double the bus) so i ended up catching the early morning (8:30 is pretty early) to leicester (pronounced lester), england, where rhi's mum jocelyn lives. i had a two hour stop in birmingham (birminim) where i walked up to 'the bull ring' which is actually a shopping mall hidden behind this bizarre facade.

i pretty much slept the entire trip, but i did manage to catch a few cows and some bright green pastures in the countryside. jocelyn picked me up and we drank earl grey and chatted about her phd (p haych d) about telling stories which are difficult to tell (she has been interviewing prisoners of war and works with child abuse victems). it was most interesting, both ma & grandma would really like her. (sidenote: she is a yoga instructer looking for a yoga school to visit after she finishes her thesis this fall, ma any suggestions in nc?) i computed while she picked up rhi and we had a delicious home cooked dinner before heading off to bed early.

the next morning we went to stamford, a georgian sandstone village known for its architectural consistancy and cream tea. we found the town also showcased very small doors, a nice little moat and a whole bunch of antique shops.

now cream tea is a bit misleading a name, as they don't even offer cream or milk for the tea, but you have clotted cream (which is an absolutly magical concotion somewhere inbetween butter and whipped cream) with fresh strawberry (strahburry) jam on warm scones.

we went all out and had a complete afternoon tea with a cake and sandwhich with their crusts cut off along with the tea and scones. it was reeeally expensive, so we split one, which was still more than enough. we walked around town and enjoyed the beautiful english day.

i haven't mentioned the weather much, but it has been just gorgeous. when they say it rains and is nasty all the time they were wrong, it's only sprinkled a wee bit twice since i've been here (knock on wood) and has been mostly sunny the whole time. i guess it's been a horrible summer - just rain and cold - and i seem to have brought the nice weather here with me and left the hot there with you.

we came home by 7 for me to make a conference call with my boss in LA, a potentional service provider in chicago and his techie in kentucky. we had a quick dinner and were off to a local pub to meet rhiannon's friends. a bunch of them are in a band who is having a mutual breakup, with one last show on saturday, but i plan to be in london then so will miss it. they were all really cool, and even humored me and had a 2am curry feast (as leicester has the best curry in the country, due to its vast numbers of 'asian' - aka indians - and since it is england's national dish, i though i must try it).

edinburgh

pronounced ed-in-bur-oh, it is considered one of the most beautiful cities in europe. (side note: many mainland europeans don't consider the uk europe, so i've been calling it pre-europe.) rhiannon's mum (you'll notice i'm picking up the lingo, trying to learn the accent) sent me a scotland lonely planet so when rhi & i decided to go to edinburgh spur of the moment on sunday afternoon we had a guide to tell us all the sweet places to check out.

turned out we didn't need it at all - actually did more detriment than good, but more on that later. we hopped off the bus and to our surprise the streets were all closed for a festival (we had been told all of the festivals had ended the night before, so you can imagine we were thrilled to hear they had not) and fireworks show at 9.

we found a sign for a free whisky (no e in scottish whisky) and champagne tasting, something perfect for each rhi and i, but when we went into the shop they said the tasting was actually on saturday. he hadn't been able to find the sign to bring it back in the night before. he obliged our request for a reward, and gave us each a taste anyways.

we happened upon the castle with no trouble at all, it was right in the middle of the city (although you can't tell from the picture, i'm standing on the main street with nothing in front of me but this massive, 11th century - there have been updates - castle), and decided upon a route of travel: first to the cheapest restaurant in the book, a chinese place, then the grave digger's pub, then back to the square for the fireworks and finally to a writer's & actor's pub before our midnight bus back to glasgow.

(ello? mum? whehre ahr yuh? mum, i cahnn heah yuh! mum!?)

the first stop was about 20 minutes away from the center of town. we found this telephone booth along the way (not much of a find, they are everywhere) but we didn't find the restaurant. since both of us were familiar with lonely planet we know the story: restaurant published and still not enough business to remain open for all those lonely travelers to visit. we tried out a few restaurants, even sat down and got rice crackers and water at one, before we landed in a thai place, the wild elephant. the pre-theatre meal sounded like a bargain but ended up being a little skimpy. no worries, we headed off to the grave digger's pub.

an hour later, 10 degrees cooler and a lot of wind blown around our cold little ears we found the graveyard. we didn't realize we would need a big hearty meal to account for all the exercise and suddenly winterish weather.


the pub was nothing special, and it had taken so long to get there we just had a drink with all of the old men who were there (just old men. old men who were really surprised to see us. lonely planet got us again) and headed out for a bus back to catch the fireworks.

we ran to the bus as it pulled up alongside us and asked the driver if he was going to princes st (one s) the main road where the castle and fireworks were. he said no. so we asked which bus goes there. he said none of em. hmm. after a pause he adds, princes st is closed for the fireworks. oh yeah yeah we mean which goes close? this was followed by a bunch of scottish garble which neither of us could decipher even after 2 huhs each. we finally decided he said i don't care which stop you get off at, you're going to miss the fireworks anyways. nice. anyways we got off where everyone else got off at and ended up with a great view (which seemed even better after we moved around a bit).

(i couldn't decide which one i liked better.)


i found a few conference friends in the crowd - i mean people i hung out with every day and i mean a crowd of 500,000 people. crazy luck! we were so cold and tired we skipped the writer & actor pub and walked back with all the people to our bus stop, at which point it began to rain. the first bus was filled so we went to the pub next to the stop and waited for the next one.

the end of the conference

yesterday was the last day of my european summer school in information retrival, and as with most endings, it was bittersweet. i had so much fun, met so many interesting people and learned so much, but i was very tired and ready to have some time to myself. we had lectures for 8 hours everyday (from california time 1am-10am) and social events every night (not that i'm complaining) so it was very energy consuming. there were lectures about all kinds of interesting things, like that 87% of americans can be uniquely identified by their gender, birthday and zip code. with this they can be matched to 'anonymized' government (health, voting, etc) records, and with a little tricky computing, self-declared online information, regardless of identity. so that means your fake profiles (those with pseudonyms, vague location data, etc) can be matched with your real ones along with your shopping habits, medical history and political preferences. the way to combat this? act normally. the more average your activities on the internet the more difficult it is to pick you out from the crowd. ie when you write reviews for movies review the popular ones, have babies on the most common day, live in a city; having specific or abnormal tastes/stats gives identifiable trends to be picked up. ha! that's a lot to think about...

so now i've lost my train...what have i been doing? hanging out with my new forgein friends (who have now all left) and sleeping. but i'm thinking you want to know about what i waaasss doing. a typical day: i get up at 8:10 to get to class late at about 9:15 (by friday i was on time though!). it's about a 10 minute walk from my flat to the lecture hall. lectures were either 1.5 or 2 hours, always with a coffee/tea break between them. lunch continued to be those strange sandwiches throughout the entire week. oh my god i never want another small, triangle, mayonnaise filled sandwich ever again (not that i wanted one in the first place). a few late additions to the menu included tiny shrimp and dill in mayonnaise, chicken in mayonnaise, egg in mayonnaise and salmon in mayonnaise. there would be big long lines around the tables of sandwiches and many, many unmarked trays to choose from. i would always get decision anxiety and end up just grabbing whatever was near me and missing the good ones (ok, better ones). but it literally took 6 or 7 to get filled up. i'm really wishing i had taken pictures of them. all the meals had orange or apple juice and flat or sparkling water, no soda. at the bars they measure out all the liquor in little tiny shot glasses and it is illegal to pour it directly into a glass or to sell more than 2 shots at a time to any person. the beer on the other hand, flows just as in the states. the tap water is pretty good too.

i'm not enjoying telling about an average schedule, it varied too much once the lectures were over. we had a soccer game one night (i cheered), a banquet another night (complete with a paper airplane war) and typically went to a pub after any event. it was really interesting because the first day i was awake in the morning lectures (1am - 4am in ca) and tired in the afternoon. makes sense, i'm a bit of a night owl. the second day i was tired in both sessions and the third day i was tired in the morning (9am - noon here) so i could tell i was getting used to the time finally; tired in the morning like a normal person. regardless i was always awake around social hour, given the activity combined with the time, it was either early afternoon or early evening, both easy to be awake in.

rhiannon came home at 5am on thursday, so i had to kind of grapple with the issue of her wanting me to hang out with her friends and me wanting to hang out with my nerdy conference friends. the first night i just ditched her, the second i tried to mix the two groups, which went surprisingly badly. not like there was any lasting damage to any parties, but mixing 30ish computer scientists (cs) with 21 year old british college girls somehow didn't work as i predicted. the girls wanted to go home and the cs people wanted to go out (the bars closed at midnight). the girls were offended by our complaints about the early closings and comparisons with our home countries. it really convinced me that the uk is pretty much just like home. i mean that i always think places are just like home but here even more so. people are so defensive. and there's a lot of money, which i think makes people somewhat less interesting or motivated or exciting or something.

many of the lectures have been about making distinctions between things: classifiying and comparing documents, web pages, images, music (which was why i was there!). humans are very good at this, but very bad at explaining it. we can take two things and tell you which is which, which belongs in which group or not. computers can be trained to do this fairly easily, but when they make mistakes they are very, very obvious. human mistakes on the contrary, can always be justified in hindsight. (haha, i mean in the context of classification...perhaps in any context? that is debatable. i will amend my earlier statement with nearly always justified.) if i am given a beatles song and asked to supply its genre, i give rock n roll. sure. say we have two systems which we ask the same to. one gives a response of classic american pop and the other reggae. now i tell you the human gave the first answer and a computer the second. we say the first answer is a 'less bad' mistake than the second because its close to the right answer since the beatles are classic and they are pop and famous in the us. reggae on the other hand has nothing to do with the beatles. the problem is there is an endless number of justifiable mistakes which we can't come up with before the fact, but we know how to explain it when we see it. ahh the ultimate computer. so what does this have to do with anything? i'm not sure but it was in my head during the culture clash last night.

how is it some people can into all different kinds of situations, environments and social atmospheres? how is that some people are very bad or very good at it? what's the difference (similarity, haha) between seeing differences and seeing similarities? when you contrast rather than compare, i mean that you look for things which are different rather than similar, and you find them, you feel separate and alone. if you pay attention to the similarities you can fit in and feel comfortable. differences are more critical to us than similarities - not more important but more likely to cause problems (or misclassifications to go back to my original topic). it might not be especially beneficial to the human, but i'm starting to think this is what the computer needs to classify and make those human-like mistakes. if my beatles question had been given to a computer system which made decisions based on differences, without any information of similarities to use at all, it sure couldn't have come up with reggae. unfortunately, training these systems is somewhat of a black box - you can't decide how the computer makes its decisions unless you literally give it an answer for every available option - but you can decide what kind of data it uses to make its decisions.

hmmm exciting blog post? sorry, i haven't been doing much exciting, but there's a piece of my mind either way.



(post script: that was the wrong video, but it took so long to upload i'm a. not going to delete it and b. not going to upload another. see, i'm alive!)

ok now for scotland

where do i start...hmm well i got in around 9am local time on sunday. unfortunately my keys were behind locked doors until 9am monday and conference check in wasn't until 3pm. fortunately i missed my bus stop and had to get a taxi back and this particular taxi had an amazing driver who filled me in on everything glasgow. he was very concerned that i had no place to go and we decided the best option was to drop me off at the on-campus art museum for the day, hoping they had a locker or something to leave the baggage. now this was no ordinary university art museum, but a world class for real art museum.

i laid outside on the bricks until it open at 11 (i was, as you could imagine, exhausted) and much to my delight they had a coat check for me to check my large, square and heavy rolling 'coats'. i actually packed very light, one carry on, a purse and a medium size suitcase (considering i was wandering around all kinds of climates, with all kinds of electronics, for three weeks AND had a bunch of rhiannon's things taking up most of the suitcase) but i pretty much pulled my underthearm muscle and have blisters from carrying all of it around all day. so the museum was great, despite the youth focus which was kind of irritating, but i could only make it two hours or so before i wandered into the library and passed out in a large, verrry comfortable and not at all airplane like red leather chair. i awoke to security (of course) and decided to get some lunch. there was a little cafeteria (which in reality was quite fancy and not a cafeteria at all) where i had an amazing mussel, sweet potato and basil chowder with fresh rolls and yellow butter. the service was all young scottish folk, like everywhere here that i've been, even in the corner markets and whatnot.

i waited until the organ concert ended and headed over to the conference registration. or tried to. i have to say there is very little signage and no sense to the streets around here and i wondered around, trying not to get really pissed, for what seemed like an eternity until i saw a group of computer-nerdy looking guys who i followed, til i realized they weren't informed either, and merged into another group of computer-nerdy looking guys who had a better sense of direction. i ended up beating both groups, even with all my luggage, thanks to a small, out-of-scale and half-way complete map the front gate gave me. i signed in and got my bag and shirt and nerd swag (mouse pad, google notebook, etc). at that point i checked my email and rhiannon had realized about the keys and had her friend's mom coming over to open the door at 9pm. luckily there was a social event the researcher's pub (yes - the researcher pub) with pizza and open bar to keep me entertained from 5-9 after the 3-5 registration ended.

i met quite a few people that night, only about half knew of the other tiffany hopkins (this is a conference which is basically how to make good search engines so everyone is a google freak) and very few were from the us (one other to be precise). i love the mixed origin crowd - one of my favorite parts of traveling - and this is one of the best i've been in. 214 delegates from more than 30 countries.

i made it home and crashed around 11; before i knew it i was snoozing and snoozing and snoozing and snoozing and then i was late. i pretty much was as close to miserable as you can get in such a sweet place - trying to stay awake during the sometimes totally mellow sometimes insanely complex 8 hours of lectures. but they fed us tea and biscuits ever two hours and a great lunch of strange little sandwich triangles including favorites like tuna and corn, roast beef and jelly, cheese and mayonnaise salad with horseradish and turkey cranberry and butter. one of the lecturers talked about my advisor rik's book and how awesome it was, so i'm excited to chat about that once i can track him down. once the academic part of the day was over i ran home to do i'm not sure what - i thought to relax but i spent more time walking than relaxing - and then headed back for the reception in a museum (not the art museum).

the reception was sponsored by google so there was lots of good food and we were constantly hounded about refilling our champagne glasses (i know, it's a tough life). again local curiosities like brie and jam on a croissant and small pressed chicken patties (not like fried but ground up. ew sounds grosser than it was). after i got bored of socializing (god this is a lot of socializing) i checked out the museum - which was awesome! there was this specimen collection from an 18th century doctor (the school dates back to the 15oo's omg!) with everything from an ovarian cyst to a progressive series of skulls inflicted with syphilis (which they treated with mercury at the time...) to 6 legged pigs and deer. yeah it was bizarre. on the walk home the full moon was amazing. everything is lit up to seem even creepier and it works...there must be an awful lot of ghosts around here.



Find more photos like this on ESSIR 2007




ps i finally figured out spell check, so i hope this will be a little easier to read. eeek i didn't realize how bad it was!

conference day one

well i just got a quick few minute break and wanted to check in to say things are fantastic and very busy! luckily they are keeping my mind and body fed and i will be back tonight for details and visuals. hehe trick post.

ehscotland

(that's how they would say it in south america.)


I MADE IT!

i haven't made it to a bed or shower yet but i have checked in with the conference for my free tshirt, etc, visited the art museum and had a very nice lunch. much more later - just wanted to let everyone who's keeping tabs know (aka grammie - thanks for being my most dedicated reader. if anyone is trying to compete good luck: she's got the rss feed going to her. beat that!).