I’ve been in “so, how was your trip!” answering mode for the last week or so since we returned from our trip to Europe, and I realized that lots of the tiny details, the details that really shape a trip, get left out from the quick conversations that result. So there, for posterity, are 15 small highlights from our trip. They might never make it into a conversation, but together with hundreds of other tiny things, good and bad, they’re what really make a trip memorable.

Coffee at Munich Airport

We arrived, dog-tired after a flight to Philadelphia, a 5-hour layover, and an overnight flight, at Munich Airport early in the morning. We had some time to kill before our train to Basel, and so we found our way to the plaza outside Terminal 2 where we had coffee outside. It was just warm enough, and the sun was just in the right place to take the edge off. It didn’t cure our jet lag, but it sure helped.

Buying a Nintendo DSi Charger

For some reason you can’t use a North American Nintendo charger with a plug adapter in Europe. We bought a Euro-charger in the spring in Wolfsburg, but of course it went missing in the interim, so we had to find a replacement. Fortunately this was easy: across the street from the central train station in Munich is a Karstadt department store, and in the electronics section they had just what we needed (the store itself brought back memories of Eatons; I’d forgotten what a good department store was like).

A Ride Along Lake Constance

Our train trip from Munich to Basel consisted of a sleek ICE train from Munich to Ulm followed by a pokey regional train from Ulm to Basel. It was at least 25 degrees C on the regional train, and Catherine and Oliver conked out asleep soon after we boarded. I pulled out my [[Nokia N95]] to pass the time, and managed to cobble together a data solution from an old Vodafone SIM card with some credit left on it, enough to fire up Google Maps and realize that the train was passing along the shore of Lake Constance, which brought back memories of a very bizarre staging of The Ride Across Lake Constance I saw at The Union in Peterborough, Ontario in the late 1980s. I snapped a photo as Lake Constance whizzed by.

Supper at Gengis Khan Grill

When we checked in to our hotel in Saint Louis, just across the border from Basel in France, we asked the front desk clerk for a recommendation for a place to eat. She directed us to a French restaurant in a hotel on the next block, which turned out to be closed, rather than to the Gengis Khan Grill, which was right across the street. So we went to the Gengis Khan Grill. And had a great cook-it-yourself-at-the-table meal.

Waffles on the Sidewalk

After spending the afternoon at the Basel Paper Museum (a delight), we walked up the hill from the Rhein toward downtown Basel and stumbled across a restaurant holding some sort of special Christmas event on the sidewalk that involved selling waffles and apple cider and giving away crème caramel. Of course we stopped.

Coffee in Venice

Our friend Guy recommended a place for coffee near St. Marks in Venice, and gave the directions as follows:

From the San Zaccaria Vaperretto stop, turn left and walk up to the Pallazzo D. Prigioni (the building before the footbridge that looks onto the Bridge of Sighs). Hugging the right of the building, is an alleyway, just set back under the cloisters. Walk up there, about 200 metres, and about 30 metres before you hit the small square, it’s on your left. A small shopfront (no tables), with cakes in the window.

Miracle of miracle we were able to follow Guy’s directions (despite the Bridge of Sighs being obscured by scaffolding) and we enjoyed excellent coffee and pastries on a cold, damp late afternoon in Venice.

Venice to Ljubljana by Bus

It is rather difficult to get from Venice to Ljubljana: taking the train requires a long detour through Austria, there are no flights (and it would be absurd to fly, as it’s so close) and bus information is hard to come by. Fortunately I found Florentia Bus, a company with a Florence to Sofia (Bulgaria) run that stops both in Mestre (on the mainland at the end of the causeway to Venice) and Ljubljana.

Should you ever find yourself needing to catch this bus, here’s how to do it: first, buy your ticket online to save language and money confusion; next, take the train from Venice to Mestre (many times an hour; cheap); at the Mestre train station, exit and turn right, walking past the tiny bus station (where you might stop and pick up snacks) and onto Via Ca’ di Marcello; walk to the middle of the block, past the grocery store and the sketchy-looking industrial yard where you’ll find a tiny sign that says “International Buses.” You will not believe that this is where you are to catch the bus, but it is. Wait. The bus may be late. Be patient. Wait some more. Eventually, the bus arrives, you show your receipt, board, and enjoy the ride to Ljubljana with your new Bulgarian bus-mates.

If you find yourself needing to use the toilet while on-board the bus, you will not find it at the back of the bus, North American-style, but rather in the “basement” of the bus, entered from the side of the stairway that comes up in the middle of the bus. Please note that you are not allowed to pee standing up.

Breakfast at City Hotel, Ljubljana

When my father and I visited Ljubljana in 2004 it still had a vaguely post-communist air about the place, and the hotel we stayed in, while pleasant enough, felt more “Soviet-style apartment block” than “urban retreat.” Not so City Hotel, where we stayed this time: it oozes “designer hotel,” but it’s relatively cheap. And the best thing about it was the buffet breakfast, which was, bar none, the best hotel buffet breakfast I’ve ever encountered.

Sixt Car Rental

There are a lot of places to rent a car in Ljubljana. To be honest, I choose Sixt because I like the brand identity: bold, black and orange, sans serif. Turns out they also offer quick, friendly service and well-maintained cars. Our tiny Hyundai served us well, even on the Croatian highways with their 130 km/hour speed limit. The downtown Sixt counter is handily located at the end of the bus terminal. There was a small screw-up with billing – what should have been a pre-auth on my credit card was processed as a charge – but this was quickly cleared up by email after we returned home.

Great Aunt Manda

In 2004 my father and I visited my grandfather’s half-sister Manda and her husband at their farm in Dišnik, about an hour east of Zagreb. We planned to return on this trip, and it was only through a last-minute email from a Peruvian cousin that we learned that her husband had since died and she’s moved into a nursing home in nearby Marino Selo. Which is where we found her late one sunny afternoon. We had a good visit, although the language barrier – nobody in the place, including Manda, spoke and English and we no Croatian. As it turns out there’s a Canadian connection to the nursing home: it was funded, in part, by Kroum and Eva Pindoff, Canadians who founded the old Music World record store chain.

Barun Rukavina

At the history museum in Gospić – a town in central Croatia near where my grandfather was born – we found this engraving of Barun Ivan Rukavina from 1849.

Turska Kula

In Perušić, just up the road from Gospić and near Konjsko Brdo, my grandfather’s birthplace, is the Turska Kula, an old, old tower, high the hill overlooking the village, made of stone. We drove as close as we could and I ventured up the last bit alone, on foot, to capture the view. Here’s the Catholic church that holds the records of my grandfather and his family:

Ljubljana Castle

We had another morning in Ljubljana on our way back to Munich, after dropping off our car and before catching the train, so we took the funicular from the heart of old Ljubljana to the castle. Leaving Catherine-of-bad-knee down below visiting the museum, Oliver and I climbed the spiral staircase to the very top of the tallest tower in the castle and were rewarded the a commanding view of the city.

Deutsches Museum

The Deutsches Museum is the grandaddy of old-school science and technology museums; a sort of anti-Phaeno, filled with helicopters and printing presses and models of the universe. It’s wonderful in its own antediluvian way. We arrived, by chance, on a day when it was open only half a day, so we had to rush through in 3 hours, but paid no admission. For me there were two highlights: first, the cross-section of a Lufthansa jet, showing the seats, the luggage, the wings, the engines, and everything else in a way I’d never seen before:

The other highlight was in the technology section: a demonstration of how machines can distinguish different denominations of change where you could put in different coins and see the count happening before you. It was “guts exposed” science museumology at its best:

Sushi Sano

The last day of our trip, after leaving the Deutsches Museum, Oliver and I set off for a father-and-son lunch. Oliver was set on having sushi in Munich, and this was our last chance. Fortunately we found Sushi Sano nearby, a tiny sushi-and-noodles place with enough seats for about a dozen. All the seats were filled, so we took our sushi standing up. It was a great lunch.

If you are a regular everyday person, Vitra is a company you’ve probably never heard of. Based in Weil am Rhein, Germany, it is a manufacturer of furniture for the office and home. Its products, generally licensed from prominent designers, are well-crafted and well-designed, and sometimes breathtaking.

The reason you’ve probably never heard of Vitra is that its products are also very, very expensive – like “$10,000 for a sofa” expensive – and thus beyond the reach of most.

Which is not to say you can’t covet, and perhaps the greatest expression of covetousness you can pay to Vitra is to visit their “campus” in Weil am Rhein: we’ll likely never own a Noguchi Free Form Sofa, but we can pretend.

Precisely because its products command such prices, Vitra has been able to indulge itself with a rather dreamy headquarters; that much of their factory burned down in 1981 provided an opportunity to re-imagine their campus, and to showcase the work of some of the world’s most interesting architects. And so a visit to Vitra affords an opportunity not only to sit on unattainable sofas, but also to experience the buildings of Frank Gehry, Álvaro Siza, Zaha Hadid, and Herzog & de Meuron.

Though in Germany, Weil am Rhein is really just a suburb of Basel, Switzerland, so within easy reach when you’re visiting that city. To get there by public transit we took the tram across the Rhein to Claraplatz and then caught bus No. 55 directly to the Vitra stop (you can’t miss it). From central Basel the entire trip is about 45 minutes.

Our first stop was the restaurant in VitraHais, the Herzog & de Meuron-designed showcase for Vitra’s home furnishings line.

The meal was quite tasty, the environs spectacular, and the price pleasantly cheaper than we’d have paid for lunch across the border in Switzerland.

Our next stop was across the way at the Vitra Design Museum; we happened to arrive just as the 1:00 p.m. architectural tour was leaving, and the happy coincidence of other English-speakers in the group meant the usually-in-German tour was being offered bilingually. We hadn’t planned to take the tour, but decided to not pass up the chance.

The tour guide was friendly and knowledgeable and the tour took us behind the factory gates and provided an introduction to each of the major buildings on the campus. It ran about 2 hours, and was the highlight of our visit.

Among the buildings we learned about were the Frank Gehry-designed factory building, the Jean Prouvé gasoline station and the Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome (the latter two more collectors items than an integral part of the factory campus, but interesting nonetheless):

By far and away the most interesting part of the tour was the Zaha Hadid fire station. Originally constructed to mitigate against further problems with the factory burning down, the life of the building as a fire station proper was short-lived, as the surrounding community built its own fire station two years after it opened in 1983. The building is empty now, which means that visitors on the tour are free to ramble all through it.

Oliver and I got to know Hadid’s work when we visited the fantastic Phaeno museum in Wolfsburg in the spring. There are obvious echoes of the fire station in Phaeno – the cast concrete, the angular forms that seem like they shouldn’t work in the physical world – and it was nice to get a chance to experience the fire station up close.

It’s a freaky building: our guide explained that one of the design goals was (somewhat inexplicably) to have the firefighters never feels completely at ease. It certainly achieves that goal: the lack of any privacy, the stark spaces, the confusing angles, mean that you can never really relax in the building.

The building is brilliant and disturbing and deeply, deeply interesting, and Vitra deserves credit for giving Hadid free reign to re-imagine what a fire station might look like and how it might fit together.

The tour finished in the partly-underground conference centre designed by Tadao Ando. Although built from stark concrete, it’s an oddly comforting building to be inside, filled with unexpected intimate spaces and interesting twists and turns.

With the tour finished, we were left to our own devices in our original destination, the Vitra Design Museum. The museum has no permanent collection, and thus shows a series of ad hoc exhibitions: during our visit the architectural models of Frank Gehry were on display (thus re-confirming our status Gehry groupies, a journey that’s taken us to the dancing building in Prague, the Guggenheim in Bilbao and to Experience Museum Project in Seattle).

We finished our visit to Vitra back where we started, in VitraHaus, experiencing the unattainable furniture. Although each of the buildings at Vitra is interesting, VitraHaus is perhaps the most impressive and most functional: its soaring, light-filled spaces are a perfect showcase for Vitra’s products.

We finished up with a quick run through the Design Museum gift shop (filled with slightly-more-attainable smaller items) and then it was off into the twilight to catch the bus back to Basel.

The writing is on the wall for del.icio.us, so, as a preemptive move, I grabbed the 2,193 bookmarks I’ve put there since June 23, 2005. I’m reluctant to join the rush to Pinboard as a replacement, as the “issue” here is not Yahoo! but rather the entire notion of lazily outsourcing data management to companies with an ephemeral approach to infrastructure.

The “social” part of del.icio.us never really took off for me – Olle and Luisa were the only deliciousians that I leveraged the service with – so I’m considering simply importing my bookmarks to become, well, bookmarks, but inside the browser. Not sure with the performance implications for browser start-up and operation are on Firefox and Chrome, but a little experimenting should show whether there’s any down-side to this.

My next project is to consider whether outsourcing my photo management to Flickr, another Yahoo! property, is a wise move. It’s a worry I’ve had for a long time, one that flared during the discussions of a Microsoft takeover, and one I need to return to. In theory I should be able to cobble together a Drupal solution that does everything except replicate the “social” of Flickr (of which I have taken advantage), but even with innovations like CCK and Image Cache, Drupal image management is still an only partly-baked pie. But maybe I need to get into the kitchen.

Update: I’ve also been able to get my bookmarks as an XML file from  https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all.

While our trip to Europe over the last few weeks had many purposes – vacation, education, family history research – the real reason for the trip, at least for me, was an excuse to visit Tipoteca Italiana, in Cornuda, Italy, a “Museo del Carattere e della Tipografia,”  or “typeface and printing museum.”

Ever since I’d first read of Tipoteca, it seemed to me that it might be the greatest place on earth, at least from a letterpress perspective, and I’d been quietly plotting a way of getting there ever since. I was not disappointed.

How to get to Tipoteca

From our home base, an apartment in Venice, Oliver and I set off early one morning two weeks ago – as it happened, a particularly wet morning in Venice – for the train to Cornuda. The Trenitalia website was very useful in helping me find a direct train from Venice: train no. 11106 leaves Venice at 7:44 and arrives in Cornuda at 8:57 without a need to change trains. We bought tickets from the machines in the station (easy, and in English; helpful to have coins) and hopped on the train with plenty of time to spare.

From the station in Cornuda it’s a quick 20 minute walk to Tipoteca: just walk south – back the way the train came – until the main road, a T-junction, and turn left and walk through the commercial/residential area until you come to the Via Canapificio, just before the road crosses the canal. Turn right, and you’ll find Tipoteca about 200 metres along the road on your left.

We arrived to find several gaggles of middle school students ready to start their tours of the museum and hand-on time in the workshops, but the museum’s director, Sandro Berra, helpfully took time away from the students to welcome us, get us oriented, and lay out a suggested program for our visit.

The Tipoteca “Hands On” Philosophy

If you are a typophile and are interested in letterpress printing and its past, present and future, Tipoteca is like a visit to a sort of printing Graceland: type and presses of the letterpress era are its sole focus, and they have an amazing collection of both.

What’s more, you’re allowed to touch everything. I can’t stress enough how absolutely amazing this aspect of Tipoteca is: there are no museum-style “velvet ropes” protecting the equipment. You can climb right underneath the Linotype machines, turn the flywheel on all the presses, open all the drawers of type and pick it all up and feel it. 

This equipment, after all, was built to made to be used over and over and over again: it’s robust enough to be handled, and to truly understand to physicality of printing in the letterpress era demands that the equipment be handled. How else can you understand how a pantograph works, for example, until you’ve had a chance to take one for a ride:

Type Casting: Monotype

We began our tour of Tipoteca in the Monotype room. The Monotype system for casting metal type involves typing text on a keyboard which makes holes in a paper tape – similar in spirit to the way that computer punch cards worked:

The roll of paper tape is then transferred to a casting machine where it’s mechanically “read” by the machine, and takes molten lead and turns it into justified lines of type:

It’s an amazingly complicated system; just changing typefaces requires changing half a dozen parts across two machines. But the result is equally amazing, and what’s interesting about the Monotype system contrasted to the Linotype system is that what a Monotype casting machine spits out is actual moveable metal type – individual cast letters – not solid cast lines of type. This means, among other things, that correcting errors is much easier (you don’t need to re-cast the entire line of type to correct a single error) and also that you can use a Monotype caster to cast fonts of type for hand-setting.

Type Casting: Linotype and Ludlow

The next room over houses Tipoteca’s extensive collection of Linotype and Ludlow gear. While the Monotype system involves casting justified lines of individual letters, Linotype and Ludlow machines cast solid lines of type. It’s a different approach to the type-casting challenge, and a wildly successful one that transformed printing.

Like Monotype machines, Linotype and Ludlow machines are fantastically complex and to see one in operation puts you in awe of what mechanical technology can be mustered to achieve (I got a chance to see an Intertype machine operating while visiting Don Black Linecasting last spring and shot a short video that gives a taste of this).

Tipoteca has a fine collection of Linotype, Intertype (a “clone”) and Ludlow machines from various generations, like this one:

And because, like everything else at Tipoteca, you can get right up close to all these machines a poke and prod them, you can get a sense for how they fit together, and get right up close to all the neat details:

Engraving Music

The section of Tipoteca that taught me the most was the small music engraving display, which included all the tools needed to engrave and print sheet music. Although there was a brief period in which sheet music was set with moveable type, by and large, until the digital era, all sheet music was produced by master engravers who, in essence, “carved” the music into lead sheets from which it was then printed, in much the same way as a artistic printmaker would make art.

In the small theatre on the second floor of the museum there’s an excellent video that illustrates this process in action and I recommend you watch it to get a complete understanding for what an art this is (this YouTube video is a good introduction too).

Type Design and Engraving

The second floor of Tipoteca is devoted entirely to the art of type design and engraving, another area that I knew little about. While this area of the museum is, of necessity given the fragility of the items on view, not “hands on,” the artifacts on display are interesting nonetheless, and do a good job of conveying the path from design to metal. Starting with large hand-drawn masters:

Large-scale metal masters are produced:

From these masters a pantograph is used to create a punch (which is “positive,” just like the final metal type), from the punch a matrix is created (which is a “mold”) and from the matrix you can cast the actual type. Here’s the three parts of this process side-by-side:

The Letterpress Garage

Although they don’t actually call it a “garage,” that’s what this room filled with fully operational letterpresses reminds me of:

There are examples in the collection of all sorts of presses, from tiny table-top platen presses like the one I have to huge room-filling presses that can produce newspaper-sized prints. There are Gutenberg-era presses and thoroughly modern presses and you can touch them, run them, spin them, and get a real feel for their mechanics.

Type Collection

Almost every room of Tipoteca’s building as a wall or two filled with type cabinets, which house their substantial collection of wood and metal type. At the risk of repeating myself, I’ll mention again that the drawers are all open and accessible to the public, meaning that you can do things like this:

The letter V has been cut into on both sides at some point to aid in kerning it – allowing letters on one side or the other to “tuck underneath” it to allow the letter spacing to appear more natural.

The collection of wood type is particularly impressive, and includes well-organized specimens of a huge range of faces:

The Workshop

While I loved all of Tipoteca, my absolute favourite part of our visit was the workshop where Oliver and I were lucky enough to get slotted between the visits of two classes of students.

It’s a nice little letterpress shop optimized for school workshops and each student is invited to take a composing stick and a drawer of type and set a two-line quote or phrase which they’re then guided through the process of putting onto a Vandercook proof press for printing onto a blank portion of a comic newspaper produced by Tipoteca about type and printing. Oliver’s quote was:

I came across the ocean to see the world of type.

Which looks like this when set:

And like this on the Vandercook:

And like this when Oliver was learning how to operate the Vandercook:

And like this once printed:

My favourite moment at Tipoteca was when the pressman, who spoke no English, communicated to us the joy of breaking in a lower-case letter “w” for the first time: he pointed at its inkless surface and said “emotion!” and I knew exactly what he was talking about.

Saying Good-bye

With a quick tour of the museum’s library – something that deserves another trip all its own, I think – we were ready to head off and Tipoteca was ready to close for the day. Sandro apologized that he was unable to take us to lunch as he was otherwise engaged, but he offered to drive us to a pizza place up the road and, to boot, to have one of his printers come and pick us up and drive us to the the train station. We accepted his tremendous generosity with thanks, had a fantastic pizza for lunch, and made it to the train back to Venice just in time.

Our visit to Tipoteca was the highlight of our trip for me, and it may be the best museum I’ve ever visited, both for its collection and for its philosophy. I highly recommend you visit if you share my peculiar passions.

Regular readers will know that I’m something of a “making sure my cell phone works when I’m traveling” fanatic. This is partly a very real concern, so I can be reached to help address any technical issues that come up at the office, and partly a fabrication that lets me experiment with different approaches to doing so.

When it comes to getting your unlocked GSM phone working away from home, there are two main approaches you can take: buy a local country-specific prepaid SIM card, or buy a multi-country prepaid SIM that’s purpose-built for travelers.

Country-Specific SIMs

Country-specific SIMs have the benefit of being cheaper to get (there’s often no up-front cost at all), cheaper to use, and more useful if you need data as well as voice. They’re generally easy to find – any electronics store usually has a wide range, or you can purchase them directly from mobile providers’ shops – and the only challenge is decrypting the information about how to use and recharge them, which is often in a non-English language. Country-specific SIMs are best when you’re traveling in a single country for a longer period of time: they generally offer very attractive rates in-country and very non-attractive rates calling across borders.

I’ve used country-specific SIMs in Portugal, Croatia, Denmark and France and have had a generally positive experience once I’ve figured out the basics of recharging, checking balance, using data and so on.

Multi-Country SIMs

Multi-country SIMs, by contrast, generally involve a higher up-front cost and a higher per-minute cost, but if you’re traveling to multiple countries you can generally save time and money with these because you don’t need to source a country-specific SIM for each country you visit, you can give out a single number to the folks back home, and the per-minute cost, although higher, is generally less than calling country-to-country with a country-specific SIM.

My first multi-country SIM was from United Mobile, and I bought it at the post office in Geneva, Switzerland when I was in the city for the Lift conference in 2006. It served me well for several trips, in-coming calls were generally free (depending on the country) and it was easy to recharge on the web. Like many multi-country SIMs, it was a “call-back” SIM, meaning that you dialed a call as you normally would, waited, and then received an incoming call connecting you with the number you originally called; this is a little cumbersome, but it generally works as advertised.

Eventually United Mobile went out of business, my number went dead, and I went back to using country-specific SIMs for a while.

For our trip this fall, however, I decided to look into a multi-country SIM again, as our trip was taking us to Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia and I wanted a simple solution.

Telestial Passport US SIM

The Telestial Passport US SIM seemed perfect for my task. The up-front cost of $29 was relatively low, the per-minute costs were reasonable, incoming calls are free in all the countries we were visiting, it provides a U.S. as well a U.K. number, and it was possible to use prepaid data to boot.

I ordered the card from Telestial’s Toronto office the week before we left and it arrived via FedEx two days later. It included complete documentation as well as instructions on how to login to an online service to recharge, check balance, see call history and, interestingly, to set up an automatic travel journal that, much like Google Latitude, lets you leave digital breadcrumbs to trace your travels.

Before we left I set our home phone to call-forward to the office phone, and set my extension on the Asterisk-based office phone system to give callers the option of transferring to the U.S. number attached to the SIM card (calls to the U.S. number incur a 19 cents/minute surcharge, but the total cost of the transferred call worked out better this way than transferring to the U.K. number).

Having a phone proved its worth several times over the trip. It let Catherine and I stay in touch in Venice (I put an old German Vodafone SIM in her phone with enough balance left on it to allow her to send a receive text messages), it let me coordinate visits to relatives in Croatia, helped us locate our hotel from the highway in Zagreb and got us out of a jam when we ended up under a highway underpass in Munich looking for a circus that turned out to be several kilometers away. It also allowed me to work with [[Johnny]] back here at the home office to solve a technical issue that came up when we were in Basel.

How much did it cost me?

But this luxury didn’t come cheap, mostly because I over-indulged on the data side. In total I burned through $125 in charges over the 14 days we were away, or about $9 a day on average. These charges broke down like this:

Charge Type	$US Charged
SMS Messages Sent	$11.00
Outbound Voice Calls	$16.94
Inbound Voice Calls	$7.03
Data in Switzerland	$7.76
Data in Italy	$26.60
Data in Slovenia	$21.00
Data in Croatia	$35.00

Data Charges

The prepaid data service that comes with the SIM is billed by the megabyte with the stipulation that “minimum charge is for 100KB and usage is charged in increments of 10KB.” This seems reasonable until you see how it works in practice.

In Slovenia, for example, my entire data usage took place in during a 34 minute window during which I only transferred 150KB of data in total, for which the nominal rate is $15/megabyte. You would think that the rate I was charged should have been about a dollar. Instead I was billed $21.00 because my 34 minutes of usage was broken down into 14 “sessions” of 10-20 KB each charged a $1.50.

So what looked like a reasonable $15/megabyte ended up being, effectively, $143/megabyte because of the way it was billed.

So, in other words, data isn’t such a good deal with the Passport SIM.

The other issue with data is that, as is explained up front, “you may need to select a different network from the network on which you make and receive calls.” For my Nokia N95 this meant, in practice, that I had to switch from “automatic” to “manual” operator selection, then manually select the right operator for data, use the data, and then switch back. This was not only cumbersome, but didn’t seem to work 100% of the time.

Voice and SMS

On the voice side things worked pretty well as advertised. There were two instances in Munich where, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, the phone simply wouldn’t allow me to make an outbound call. But otherwise I was able to make and receive calls to and front Europe, Canada and the U.S. without problems.

SMS text messages were a little less reliable: I could send text messages without problems and every message I sent was received. But I couldn’t always receive text messages: Catherine’s German Vodafone SIM, for example, could send me an SMS only some of the time, and a Croatian relative could never manage to get an SMS through to me, even though she could call me by voice without issue (she called her mobile operator in Croatia and was told that some sort of inter-operator agreement to allow for this was missing).

Travel Journal

The “travel journal” feature, which is opt-in, was kind of cool (you can see the journal that was created here and see the map of my travels here, in both cases because I opted to make mine public; you can also set it to private or to password-protected). While it wasn’t of particular use to me, and while I didn’t use its blog-like features, I can see how this might be attractive to others (and, if nothing else, it drives home the notion that mobile operators, and, by extension, the police, can track you using your phone).

Would I use a Passport SIM again?

Would I use the Telestial Passport SIM again? For voice, yes: it’s simple, cheap and works as advertised. I wouldn’t want to rely on the SMS features given my experiences, and I’d avoid data entirely because of the cost.

We landed back in Charlottetown late of Friday afternoon after an arduous but uneventful trip from Munich (9 hour flight to Philadelphia, 5 hour layover, 2 hour flight to Halifax, overnight in Halifax, drive home to Charlottetown). We’re slowing getting ourselves back into our home time zone, although Oliver woke up at 4:00 a.m. this morning so he obviously didn’t get the memo.

Lots to tell about our adventures in the days to come; stay tuned. In the meantime, I rebuilt the router that connects this site to the world; I think everything’s working correctly, but if you can’t see this page, then something is wrong (oops, there’s a paradox there).

Caught a bus in a dark alley in Mestre — the land-side of Venice — and 4 hours later we were in Ljubljana with 4 inched of snow on the ground.

Overnight at the crazily modern City Hotel and then picked up a rental car from Sixt and drove over the snowy mountains to balmy Croatia. First destination was Slavonski Brod, in the east, where a chance email last week from a Rukavina with a son named Oliver was enough to pull us in. We had a wonderful afternoon (The Other Oliver had purchased two of all of his favourite sweets, one for each Oliver) and learned much about modern Croatia.

Today we are in search of my grandfather’s sister Manda; she has moved into a nursing home since my father and I were here in 2004 and we know from our Peruvian cousin roughly where this is. Later in the day we’re off to my grandfather’s hone town to find another aunt and perhaps to find the home where he was born. There are at least 2 Canadian expats there, so we may have some help.

Monday it’s up to Zagreb and Tuesday to Munich.

What greeted us at the end of the street here in Venice this moring, high tide time in Venice:

Our street itself was dry, and the worst of it for our walk to the train station was hoisting Oliver into my arms and walking through about 10 metres of ankle-deep water, otherwise we saw a lot of knee-deep water on side-streets as we walked, and ended up on the raised platforms that are put out for flood tides on busy streets for a few blocks.

Catherine left the house 60 minutes later and what was ankle-deep water for us was knee-deep water for her and she had to wait half an hour until the water subsided enough to make her way.

Venice is sinking.

Networking on borrowed time, and with no apostrophes, so here is the prose poetry version of our trip to Europe so far: sunny drive to Halifax, painless pre-clear of US customs, US Airways to Philadelphia on time and pleasant, 4 hour layover made less seeming so by the myriad distractions of PHL. US Airways to Munich on time and pleasant (I watched Cyrus, which I recommend… Catherine watched The Jones, Sorcerers Apprentice and Grownups, none of which she recommends) and we even got a bit of sleep.

Arrived Munich bright and early Saturday morning (very nice, spacious airport) and had coffee outside, despite frigid temperatures. Caught train downtown and found Oliver a Nintendo DS euro-charger (our second) at Karstadt. Caught the train to Ulm (sleek ICE train) and then from there the train to Basel (non-sleek milk run with 30 degree cabin but stunning views of Lake Constance that made up for it).

Arrived Basel in a snowstorm so caught a taxi to the wrong city instead of walking (it turns out that many surrounding communities have a “Basel Street”). Found right city with help of patient taxi driver (Saint Louis) and delighted in our location 50 feet from the Swiss-French border. Hungry and tired so walked across the street and had Mongolian grill, which was filling and exciting because the “grill” was on the table between us.

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday in Basel. Paper Museum was great and interactive and everything I ever dreamed it would be: made paper, set type, printed, sealed, quill-pen-wrote. Christmas Market an unexpected highlight: ate two suppers there just because it was cheap and fun and of wide variety (raclette, fondue, pizza, crepes, and lots and lots of mulled wine). Vitra Design Museum, across the Rhine in Germany but an easy 20 minute bus ride, was just absolutely amazing: picture an IKEA, but without all the cheap disposable stuff, and located in buildings designed by the great architects of the world (Gerhy, Hadid, Siza, Herzog & de Meuron). The Hadid fire station was, perhaps, the most interesting building I have ever been inside. (Hint if you visit: take the 2 hour architectural tour - very, very worthwhile).

We split up today: Catherine and Oliver to the Kunstmuseum Basel for the art, me to the public library to slave over work at 6 CHF an hour using their Internet terminals to solve technical issues back home (equal parts annoying and thrilling; technical issues were solved, so ultimately satisfying).

Flew easyJet from Basel to Venice after supper tonight (quick and painless; a nice trend this trip), took a 30-minute water bus ride to the stop nearest our rental apartment and were met by the owner at the dock. Chilly 5-minute walk to the apartment, a once-over of all the systems, and we were on our own. Catherine and Oliver put laundry in and went to sleep right away, but I could not contain myself so I took a walk through the streets and bridges from here to the train station just to get the feel (hint: mind blown).

Venice for three days, then on to Croatia via Ljubljana for the weekend.