Pictures from a foggy day in Amsterdam

On foggy days, some quarters of Amsterdam remind you of fairy tales while others feel like you are wandering through a post apocalyptic dystopia. Some pictures from a cold, foggy day last week that try to capture both ends of the spectrum and something in between:

Cycle parking

St. Nicholas Basilica

December 22, 2018

London Redux

More pictures from the trip to London.

December 6, 2018

London

From time to time, Pathé Tuchinski in Amsterdam screens plays live from the UK. A recent production of King Lear, with Ian McKellen in the lead role, left us wanting more. It just so happens that Royal Shakespeare Company were staging a production of Macbeth at the Barbican and that was excuse enough for us to plan a trip to London.

Some observations and pictures from the trip in no particular order:

This was the first time we were flying to the Gatwick Airport. Getting to the city center involves a train ride from the Gatwick Airport railway station. We were a bit taken aback by how crowded the station and the platforms were. The trains were packed too - not quite Tokyo rush-hour full - but close enough. The first day of our trip happened to coincide with a protest march in London demanding a “people’s vote” against Brexit. Guardian reports that over 600.000 people took part. That was the reason for the rush and the unusual number of placards per capita.

The announcements at the station kept reminding us to report any suspicious person, object or activity. They ended it with this catchy alliteration: See it. Say it. Sorted. At one of the newly renovated stations, the gate read: Reimagined. Renovated. Reopened. or some combination of three R words with similar import. A sparkling water advertisement at a bus stop read: Beautifully Balanced Bubbles. Is there a new law in UK that requires all copy to be distilled down to a pithy three word alliteration?

The traffic in London seemed a bit out of hand this year. The meagre number of electric cars I saw was quite dismaying too.

Having lived in Amsterdam, I find the lack of proper cycling infrastructure in cities like London quite baffling. It isn’t stopping a few brave souls from trying to cycle though. I had my heart in mouth each time I’d see a cyclist sharing the road with cars, lorries and double decker buses. Some rudimentary laning for cyclists is beginning to take shape in some parts of London but it all seems put together in a very desultory way.

Cyclists and a vintage car wait at a crossing

That said, public transport in London in simply amazing. The network of buses and metro¹ must surely be one of the best in the world. And it’s definitely cheaper than here in Amsterdam. While we have a couple of Oyster public transport cards we always carry on our visits to the UK, we were surprised to find that our contactless Dutch bank cards worked as transport cards in metro, rail and buses. The charges would be debited from our accounts in Euros the next day. Though on a couple of occasions I had trouble swiping in with one of my cards and the wife with one of hers. So on the whole, as a foreign visitor, it’s still worth having an Oyster card on hand.

Another thing that baffles me about a city the size and density of London is the number of ongoing large construction projects in the city center and beyond². In central London, glass and metal skyscrapers already loom over streets comprised of squatter, more historic buildings.

Construction cranes

Skyscrapers looming over streets

Skyscrapers looming over a street

The old and the not so new

In some of those streets, I felt a little claustrophobic.

Claustrophobic

Came across some incredible graffiti across London, especially at Brick Lane. This one could be a commentary on global warming, or simply an endorsement of the curry restaurant next door:

Head on fire

Entry to most museums in London is free. We allotted a good chunk of our time to them on this visit. One lazy evening at the hotel, BBC was showing a documentary of some celebrity from the 1970s who had climbed Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. We had tuned into it and soon I had fallen asleep. On emerging from National Gallery, thanks to remembered fragments of footage from the documentary, Nelson’s Column seemed to loom even higher.

Nelson’s Column and Trafalgar Square

We enjoyed the production of Macbeth we were here for³. All the Shakespeare productions I’ve seen in the last three years, tend to dress the cast in present-day costumes. They also make use of present-day props. They don’t carry this all the way through. For example, Macbeth might wear a camouflage military jacket, but he’d still fight with a sword. I find this jarring. The wife isn’t as bothered. She reminded me that the setting of many Shakespearean plays, predates their first performance by several centuries. So the ‘original’ costumes were 17-th century British impression of an era several hundred years before, i.e. quite anachronistic to begin with. And if we wanted to uphold the original performances as the gold standard, women wouldn’t be cast. She has a point.

Shakespeare

Even in this age of selfies, people occasionally ask you to take a picture of them with their cellphone. There is something quintessentailly quaint and human about it that I find endearing. Anyway, this old couple who stopped me to take a picture of them on London Bridge, had their iPhone set to take picture in Live mode⁴. Which means all my prompts to smile were duly recorded along with the pictures. Strangers you ask to take your pictures, cease to exist the moments after they’ve handed you your phone or camera back. In this instance, my voice will travel with them and become a part of their holiday album.

We left London on an afternoon on a working day. With no scheduled protest marches or morning rush hour traffic, the stations exuded an air of leisurely calm. Even the train announcements sounded like commentary for a test match headed for a certain draw about to break for tea on the 5th day.

I love how easy it is now to visit London. I hope that Brexit doesn’t cause UK to erect bureaucratic hurdles that make it harder for people from continental Europe to visit. That said, I am not counting on the free of charge mobile roaming between EU and UK to continue working after Brexit.

November 18, 2018

Autumn Light

It’s been an unusually warm and sunny Autumn in Amsterdam. Still, the shortness of the days is now quite noticeable. The sun stays quite low in the sky. The light seems to take on a different texture. The shadows are somehow more pronounced. Anything that the sunlight touches feels ablaze.

November 10, 2018

A personal history of video games

I still vividly remember the first time I saw a video game. I was in grade 6 or 7 when the whole class of 40 or so pupils was ushered into the newly built computer lab. We had to take our shoes off before entering the room - purportedly to keep the lab dust free. The only place I had seen with many shoes outside before was a temple. There were some 10-15 computers, mostly PC-XTs, on tables arranged in a U-shape. The machines had no hard disks. Two teachers started at each end of the U and loaded DOS and a game called Bricks on our computers using 5¹⁄₄ inch floppy disks. We sat three to a computer. One person took charge of moving the pedal left, one for moving it right and one for releasing the ball.

Other games I remember from that era:

Alley Cat

Alley Cat

Bouncing Babies

Bouncing Babies

Paratroopers

Paratroopers

All played on the radium-green or ember glow of monochrome monitors.

Most neighbourhoods in Delhi had a video library (or “video parlour” as these establishments were colloquially referred to). India’s middle class was still nascent. Most households didn’t have a colour TV, let alone a video cassette player. So these libraries would lend you not only the movies, but also the video player. You’d stand outside the store, browse through a catalog of usually handwritten pages bound in a file or a notebook, see if they still had a player available for rent, and ask them to deliver it to your home. It was common to have relatives over for a movie night on Saturday. The guys (always two, one to drive the scooter the other to hold the video player) from the video library would come in at the designated time, install the video player and leave¹. They’d come back in the morning to collect the player, video cassettes and their payment.

As the middle class grew in affluence, colour TVs and video cassette players found their way into Indian homes². The video libraries still rented the video players, but it was now mostly a video cassette lending business. Even the local grocery stores would try to supplement their income by keeping a small stock of popular films. One of these enterprising neighbourhood video libraries got hold of an Atari console and hooked it up to a TV inside their shop. For a mere 50 paise, you could go in, sit on a chair and play a game till your video game character used up all its lives. At night, they’d rent the console out for a princely sum of 15 Rupees.

I didn’t have a religious upbringing but on the nights we’d rent the console, I’d be praying hard to a favourite God or two from the Hindu pantheon to prevent power cuts³. The console would have two controls so my sister and I would play against each other for games that’s allow it - like Boxing, or take turns for games that wouldn’t - like River Raid.

My mom would briefly join us, but was usually more content to watch us play. Dad would be mostly unimpressed about the whole affair and would just retire to bed as usual. We weren’t allowed to stay up past 1:00 AM. Waking up early is looked at as being more virtuous in Indian culture than staying up late. I’d set an alarm for 5:00 AM, get up, brush my teeth and play till the duo from the video library would show up to collect their wares.

I still remember that Atari cartridges had physical switches (jumpers?) that you’d toggle to change the game. The instructions were sparse and there was no Internet to guide you, but most games were simple and you’d figure them out by trial and error. Some games that I still remember:

Boxing (and the top-down view of the boxers!)

Boxing

River Raid

River Raid

Frogger

Frogger

Eventually the video libraries graduated to the Nintendo console. Coming from Atari this was a much more colourful and intricate world. It was like watching an animation film and being in control of it. At 30 Rupees for a night, it was also twice as expensive to rent as the Atari console. In the beginning, a cartridge had just one game. I remember the cartridges as being bigger and heavier. I remember how warm they’d be when they’d come out of the console. But most of all, I remember how sore my thumbs would be the next day from all the jabbing at the buttons of the controllers. The first time we rented one, we got two cartridges: Mario Brothers and Contra. We must’ve played Mario 75% of the time⁴.

This was the time when the first video game arcades with coin operated machines started springing up in our neighbourhood. My Dad took me to one where I was more than happy to watch other kids play. Kung-Fu Master and Zippy Race were a favourite for many days.

We’d still occasionally rent the Nintendo console from the video library. Other than the next versions of Mario and Contra, the fare now included a multi-game cartridge with on-screen game selection. Excite Bike and Circus were our favourite from this time. The consoles, like video players before them, eventually became affordable. The arcades started to wind down. My parents were (rightfully) concerned about time spent in front of the TV and our studies suffering, so even if we could afford it, we never got one.

At least one make-shift arcade in our neighbourhood (a dingy little room above a radio repair shop accessed by a narrow staircase) laboured on. During school summer vacation, I’d be allowed a small allowance to spend on playing video games and I’d spend practically all of it on Adventure Island.

By this time, most kids had mastered the games and could finish them without their on-screen character losing lives. Arcades like this one, had to install timer circuits. For 50 paise, you could play for 10 minutes. If you lost your lives before the time, the game ended as usual, but if you did not, you’d need to fork 50 paise for another 10 minute of play.⁵.

During early 90s, I wasn’t aware of any video game arcades in our neighbourhood. A slightly up-market neighbourhood nearby; which I’d visit to study at a friend’s house, still had one. They had upgraded their machines to SNES so I got to experience the next generation of video game graphics through Street Fighter and Final Fight.

Since about 1995, whatever little gaming I’ve done, I’ve done on a PC (and lately on an iPhone). To write about my favourite games from this time would take a post of its own.

Those days of rented game consoles, and visiting arcades feel so distant that they could’ve been someone else’s life. What got me recounting those days was a recent visit to a Virtual Reality gaming arcade in Amsterdam.

Within a minute of wearing the VR headset, my mind adjusted to the new reality and forgot the world outside. The first demo involved taking an elevator to the top floor of a high-rise and walking on a narrow plank. To accentuate the illusion, the employees at the arcade place a wooden plank in front of you - they needn’t have bothered. When I fell off the edge of the plank, I bent on my knees to brace for the fall. Morpheus’s words from The Matrix had never rung so true before: “Your mind makes it real”⁶.

There were other games too - perhaps it’d be more appropriate to refer to them as other worlds that my mind momentarily inhabited. In one you’d use a jet pack to fly and douse fires on the roofs of high rises, in another you are an Elf archer, defending your hold against hordes of marauding trolls and orcs. They’d occasionally throw a spear or axe your way, which you’d dodge by moving out of its way. While the games were played with two controller “sticks” - one in each hand - the act of moving your entire body to some end, say to dodge something thrown at you, made the virtual worlds seem all the more real. I ended the session with the VR version of a 2001 game I used to play on PC - Serious Sam. Despite the relatively low quality (by today’s standards) of graphics those worlds had felt utterly real even 17 years ago. To be placed inside the same world more than a decade and a half later felt exhilarating!

I am quite convinced that VR will touch many areas of our future lives. While gaming and entertainment are leading the charge, I now feel that the VR meeting demos we’ve been seeing online will be the next to go mainstream, especially in scenarios where members of your team are spread across different locations. And I can probably not even imagine the applications that the next generation that grows up on VR will dream of.⁷

What a time to be alive.

October 7, 2018

A very warm July

Like many parts of the world this summer, The Netherlands saw temperatures break old records and set new ones. I plotted the historical temperature data for July for the Schiphol weather station and was quite surprised to see how off this year has been:

Historical July temperatures

And to think that just earlier this year, it go so cold that many canals froze and some even thought we would get The Elfstedentocht. While below freezing temperatures during winters aren’t rare in Amsterdam, sustained maximum temperatures below zero that would cause canals to freeze, certainly are.

A frozen canal in Amsterdam

It rains so often here that patches of dry yellow grass are a rare sight in Amsterdam. Not this year. A colleague from Italy remarked that the landscape right outside our office resembled more a place he’d expect to see in Southern Italy than somewhere in Amsterdam.

A field of dead, yellow grass

The media here had descibed this year’s summer as:

Echte zomer maar niet Nederlandse zomer - Real summer, but not Dutch summer

A country that has prepared and continues to prepare for rising sea-levels, heavy rains and flooding, suddenly found itself confronting a severe drought. While we personally didn’t face any water rationing in Amsterdam, many parts of the country introduced measures like irrigation bans. Dykes that are usually damp, were dry and had to undergo emergency repairs. It would certainly be ironical if parts of the country were flooded because of a drought.

Amsterdam buildings don’t cope well with heat. It was uncomfortably warm at work and at home. On the hottest day of the year, even some bridges were jammed shut.

There were many days this July when there were no clouds in the sky. Not even contrails. Couple this with the Northern summer sun that shines for close to 17 hours and you get blindingly bright skies that give me headaches. There was one positive side to this though. Most celestial phenomena - from meteor showers to eclipses - go unobserved in Amsterdam because it’s overcast. The sky stayed clear for the ‘blood moon’ eclipse..

Blood Moon Eclipse

Fortunately, the cold, wet days that I so cherish (but anyone who grew up here seems to despise) are back and I’ve been a touch overexcited.

Clouds!

Clouds!

It has rained pretty much all day yesterday. We’ll need a few more days like this if we are to make up for the shortfall over a normal year (as of today, still 286mm short):

Source: KNMI

p.s. My favourite summer-related news: the heatwave revealed sites where ramparts of old castles or ancient fortification ditches once stood.

August 26, 2018