Archive for Juli, 2009

The longest night

Donnerstag, Juli 23rd, 2009

Unfortunately, Brussels was not one of my best experiences. The following things happened:

  •  I couldn’t find any CouchSurfing-hosts, so I had to stay in a hostel (internet: 1,5€/½h)
  •  The guy at the internet-cafe charged me for 70 minutes, although I couldn’t have been there for more than 30 minutes (4,50€).
  • Checking out of the hostel I forgot my anorak in my room, when I came there in the evening to pick up my luggage it was not there any more (the anorak, I still have my luggage)

But the worst experience was the flight back to Vienna. Arriving at the airport at 18:30 everything still looked alright. The first time I was suspicious was, when at the gate were two flights at the same time (we were supposed to leave at 20:10), this shouldn’t happen. We were told our flight is one hour late. After some time our gate was changed, arriving at that gate our flight was no longer to Vienna, but to Bratislava and the departure time has been changed to 1:05. I decided to buy some newspaper (maybe a c’t, haven’t read it for a long time), but unfortunately everything was closing at 9pm. Some long hours later (internet: 3€/¼h – no way!) our flight arrived around 0:50 (already to late to leave at 1:05), and due to some additional delays we finally took off at 1:52. Arrival Bratislava 3:15, from there we had a bus … not to Vienna, but to Vienna Airport. Currently waiting for next train (4:54), looking forward to bed (maybe around 6am?).

Posted in Rant, Travel | No Comments »

Northern France

Dienstag, Juli 21st, 2009

After Amsterdam I went to Lille, to meet Noémie, who was in my Bulgarian language course last year in Burgas. She invited everybody from the course to her home – unfortunately I was the only one who accepted the invitation. I was rather surprised to arrive on the French national holiday (July 14th), and we used to opportunity to see a military parade (which was rather boring) and fire works. I was wondering that the fire works were announced for 11pm, but it made sense, it’s bright really long in that part of Europe (and the sky looked just amazing before it got dark – I hope you can get an impression on the pictures). We saw the fire works from the central park, where they were accompanied by music and a story – the story of Europe after 2nd world war, as the day was the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. It was impressive.


The military parade
The sky, looking like water (at 22:58)
Fireworks

The rest of the days I spent sight seeing, in Lille and in Villeneuve d’Ascq, the home town of Noémie, just outside of Lille. It’s a calm town, a lot of green areas. And there’s a fancy automatic driver-less metro which offers a fast connection between to Lille. The architecture still has many elements which you can find in Holland or in Northern Germany, e.g. façades made from bricks.


The puss in boots in front of the Chateau in Villeneuve d’Ascq
Park in the same town
Noémie

Temporary exhibition of dragon babys in Lille
Modernised old church
View of a street in Lille

As I still had a couple of days left until my flight to Vienna (on 22nd July from Brussels), I searched for more places to visit. Luckily I had talked to Ilona, one of my former flat-mates in Sofia some time ago, and she told me she will be in Rouen in July. So my next stop: Rouen, another 3 hours south-west of Lille. Ilona told me, she won’t be able to host me, so I searched for a CouchSurfing host, and I found Morgane. Ilona arrived a day before me, and I got an agitated message from her, that her people failed to pick her up from the airport (in fact they came, but 45 minutes late). So she went to Rouen on her own, and I asked Morgane if she could ask her … which she accepted, although it was already 1am (CouchSurfing is just a great idea).

On my way to Rouen I had a short stop in Amiens which I used for a walk. By the way. I could find a CityBike-system like in Vienna (they have the same in Lille too), sweet mini buses and some churches. One of the churches was strange, it was open to visitors, but there was nothing inside. No people, no benches, just a small altar. And apparently nobody had cleaned for several months, even the air was very smelly. Spooky.


An impressive cathedral in Amiens
Spooky church
Clock somewhere in the centre

In Rouen: churches again. I have to admit, they look really impressive, but after the third city they are getting boring, because they all look the same. And cold and grey inside. It was a real relieve to visit the modern church „Jeanne d’Arc“, just next to the place where she was burned. A wooden roof, which makes a very warm atmosphere. The architecture of the buildings in Rouen already looks pretty different, many FACHWERKHAEUSER. A big historic centre, with cafes, shops and people (but hardly any ATMs).


The cathedral in Rouen
Narrow street with historic buildings
More historic buildings

The church „Jeanne d’Arc“
inside the church
Morgane and some friends

You might have noticed, public and alternative transportation is very interesting to me. So here are some more pictures to this topic:


Bus system in Rouen (what is this nozzle on the buses)?
Metro in Rouen
Small buses in Amiens

CityBikes in Amiens
In Lille the passengers are protected from falling on the tracks
I think those trains are no longer real used (seen in Amiens)

Communication with people was hard, the prejudice, that French people only speak French is rather true. On the other hand I was really surprised how much French I still understand (I learned it many years ago in school), I remembered many words. But I totally failed to speak (no words, no grammar). But it was not really necessary, Morgane is translator for English and German (and French for sure), so no problem there. We spent a nice time together, talking, cooking, watching movies.

Right now I’m on my way to Brussels. I still don’t have a CouchSurfing-host for the night, I was very late to ask. I hope I still get a positive answer during the day. Tomorrow is my flight back to Vienna, and on Thursday I have to work again (after nearly 11 months).

Posted in CouchSurfing, Friends, Travel, Western Europe | 1 Comment »

Amsterdam

Freitag, Juli 17th, 2009

The time in Amsterdam was not only dedicated to the OpenStreetMap, I had a life beside the conference. Manuela – cartographer and CouchSurfer from Vienna, who also attended the State of the Map – and I were searching for CouchSurfing hosts together. And we find a really nice community, the Casa Robino, a house of travelers. Nice thing about the Casa: Everybody there becomes host him/herself, there are no guests. Most activities are shared, e.g. cooking and eating (at least vegetarian, mostly vegan), dumpster diving (to save money on food and other usable stuff), cleaning (we had some unwelcome guests: mice) and social activities. The best evening we spent at the sauna Fenomeen (which is actually a squat), where entrance was for free (due to a sauna festival in Amsterdam) and which is a very nice place – there were even some guests playing music (saxophon, guitar, singing). If you come to Amsterdam, make sure to go there. Another evening we were invited to a boat trip through Amsterdam, which was very funny (especially as you have to watch our for bridges, to not hit your head). So much for Amsterdam, next destination: Northern France.


Searching Space Invaders
Bicycle parking near the train station
One of the many grachts (canals) in Amsterdam

Somewhere in the centre of Amsterdam, on the boat trip
You have to duck!
Night impression of a narrow street in Amsterdam

Posted in CouchSurfing, Travel, Western Europe | No Comments »

State of the Map 2009

Freitag, Juli 17th, 2009

As announced on my blog before, last weekend I went to the OpenStreetMap (OSM)-conference in Amsterdam, called the ‚State of the Map‚. The schedule featured a dense program of interesting talks, and several coffee breaks for networking. This year the Friday was the business-day, filled with talks about data quality and using OSM data in applications. Saturday and Sunday were dedicated to the community, with talks about the state of the OSM in different countries, new challenges for the project as it gets bigger and bigger and applications, applications, applications.

Some of the things which were interesting to me on the conference:

Data quality is a big issue for most of the people I talk with, people just can’t imagine, that data collected by a community can compete with commercial data. It is true, that the OpenStreetMap still has big white holes, especially on the country side. On the other hand completeness in the densely built-up areas (especially Europe) is much higher than in commercial map data (points of interests, foot- and cycleways, …), although assessment of this data shows, that most of the data has been created by a couple of people. Still, comparison of the street data with commercial data (done in the UK with Ordnance Survey data) show a very high correlation. A big advantage of the OpenStreetMap is the high actuality of the data, data often gets uploaded as soon as changes in the real world happen.

One big advantage of the OpenStreetMap is the big community. In March of this year the 100.000th user registered, last week there were already 135.000 users. For sure not all users are really active in the project, but at least about 10.000 users were active during the last two months. The big players in mapping business (Navteq, Teleatlas) have around 800 employees. The next goal for the OpenStreetMap are 1.000.000 registered users, for this, the project has to become more user friendly and faster.

Talking about user friendliness, one very interesting project are the ‚Walking Papers‚, designed by Michael Migurski (who I unfortunately failed to have a chat with. I wanted to talk about another of his projects, Cascadenik, which is used by my project OpenStreetBrowser). The idea is as brilliant as it is simple – you print a map of the region you are interested in, as you walk around you mark missing details (points of interests, roads, road names), scan the papers back in and upload them to the server, where they became available as background in your (and everybody elses) editor, to be drawn after. You don’t even need a GPS for this, because you can guess the position on the map. If you don’t have a scanner, you can send your papers per mail to some address, and they get scanned in for you.

It’s not possible to fit all interesting things I learned on the conference into this blog post, therefore I recommend you the video site of the conference, where eventually all talks will appear (hopefully; from last year still some talks are missing). All pictures uploaded to Flickr got the tag sotm09, all twitter messages got the tag #sotm09. On more link: a new webpage showing some great examples of mapping efforts: bestofosm.org.

In total about 250 people (mostly male geeks) attended the conference. I had the opportunity to talk to some of them and present my project the OpenStreetBrowser. Most were pretty impressed – I still hope it gets famous ;)


A cake with a map (made from OSM data, CC-BY-SA)
people eating cakes, drinking coffee and networking
Group photo of most conference participants on Sunday afternoon

Posted in OpenStreetBrowser, OpenStreetMap, Technix | No Comments »

My last weekend in България/Bulgaria

Montag, Juli 13th, 2009

In the beginning it seems it will never come to an end … but finally time is racing to the last days. I would have had time to travel around – but actually I was tired of traveling – especially traveling alone. But for the last weekend I got invited by friends – Samantha and Mladen – to Karadere, a beautiful wild beach on the Black Sea coast between Varna and Burgas. I didn’t take me a lot of thought to decide to join – you shouldn’t miss such opportunities.

We went there with a fully stuffed car – us, our equipment and half a band equipment (amplifieres, speakers and wires) – which took us twelve hours (double the estimated time), because we stopped in several places to pick up stuff or meet people.

The beach was just great – no hotels, not even houses, no electricity, no water, no mobile phone; just a bunch of people camping and having a good time. The water of the Black Sea is very nice – clear, warm and not very salty. We enjoyed the days hanging on the beach, reading, playing, swimming and talking, the evening doing barbecue, eating salad and drinking rakia – the nights doing a jam session – live music, powered by the battery of our car.

If you want to experience this too … my friends will organize a little festival on that beach  for beginning of August (and later to a street festival in Istanbul). I want to go there again next year.


Karadere – one of the last wild beaches on the Black Sea coast
Jam session – Samantha on the drums, Mladen on the mic
Sun rise after a long night – what’s better to go for a swim?

Posted in Culture, Eastern Europe, Fun, Travel | 1 Comment »

Cycling once more

Mittwoch, Juli 1st, 2009

So, now it’s the last week of Erasmus in Bulgaria. Tomorrow we will have a little fare-well party, then with some friends to the sea side for some days. I’m looking forward, it will be very nice for sure. I suppose this is the last post on my blog which I write from Bulgaria, at home the internet stopped working today (new month, I don’t think it’s worth to pay for it anymore, but a friend of me has her diploma presentation today, therefore I went to university and took the opportunity to make use of one of the open wireless networks around). Next week I will have one day in Sofia, on Wednesday I’m going (by way of Vienna to drop of some things) to the ‚State of the Map‘-conference (THE OpenStreetMap-conference) in Amsterdam. I’m sure I will be able to give you some „live“ impressions from there on my blog.

Now I want to raise some more thoughts about cycling. Even the Sofians start to build bicycle lanes everywhere, but they still have a lot to learn. In my opionion it’s not (only) the amount of bicycle lanes that matters, it’s the interconnection of those. A good example is the first image: You see that bicycle road parallel to the big road? It’s a good road, I used it many times (for walking and cycling). But if you want to go there or leave it, you have to cross the bridge to the left (which is brand new), where you find more or less the same situation (at least you can go to some underpass), or you do it like the cyclist, who bravely crosses the big road.

The second picture: Do they really want to make us cycle on that lane? Not that it’s curvy and narrow as hell, there are also many pedestrians. Beside the high possibility of accidents, the pedestrians will not be happy about the cyclists, although in fact, it’s the politians who make these stupid decisions (but they will be angry about the cyclists, like in Vienna). If I cycle, I want to cycle fast.

What shall I say about the third one? Actually I’m surprised how they managed to paint the bicycle lane, maybe they were waiting for each parking space until it was free.

In the last days I was watching some short movies about Copenhagen, it must be a wonderful city, especially for cyclists. I started to wonder … I know many cities, which are proud to have a high modal split (percentage of ways in a cities made by a special kind of transportation, like car, public transportation, walking, cycling, …) for cycling and walking. And those cities are glowing from their public spaces and cultural life. Do you know any cities which are proud to have a high percentage of car use? I don’t know any, because they usually are stuck with traffic. So municipalities, go out, build bicycle lanes and take the space from the roads, not the pedestrians. You can only win cultural life and happy inhabitants!

Oh, and please do something against bicycle robbery … my second bike got stolen last week, while I was having a small dinner and a short beer in a restaurant.


Brave cyclist suffering from municipality
Curvy and narrow roads … only nice in the mountains.
Bicycle lane or parking spaces?

Posted in Cycling, Erasmus, Politix | No Comments »