Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

Ik vond het leuk om vorige week in de NRC-Next een artikel van Bjorn Lomborg tegen te komen, dat een vertaling is van zijn artikel in The Guardian. Hoewel enigszins overdreven – ik heb sowieso niet zoveel met kinderen – komt zijn betoog erop neer dat de klimaathysterie in wereld schadelijk is voor de moraal van kinderen.

Het is onderdeel van zijn algemene punt dat klimaatverandering teveel geld en aandacht krijgt ten opzichte van andere problemen in de wereld. Dat wil zeggen, als je puur kijkt naar de effectiviteit van geboden oplossingen, zowel qua tijd als geld. Een uur vergaderen over klimaatverandering levert duizenden keren minder geredde levens op dan een uur vergaderen over gezondheidszorg in ontwikkelingslanden. Een miljoen euro in Kyoto is ongeveer net zo effectief als een euro in malariabestrijding* (plus of min een paar ordes van grootte). Ik ben het hier volledig met hem eens, zoals ik al eerder en veel uitgebreider beschreven heb.

Vandaag reageerde Greenpeace op zijn artikel, op een bijzonder voorspelbare manier. Laat ik het even kort analyseren.

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I just read an interesting and funny blog post that compares two well known – among certain people – productivity systems: Getting Things Done by David Allen and The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. I left a comment there that – in all my modesty – I’d like to share with you.

About four years ago I read GTD (Getting Things Done) for the first time. I was very busy – in fact slightly overworked – at the time. The methodology helped me to create an inventory of my “projects” and I used that inventory to start removing stuff.

It’s a fairly complicated system, but so is public transport; once you figure it out it pays. It’s no secret that I really like this book.

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I’m going to TED India! My application has been accepted (you have to apply in order to attend) and I’ve booked my flight. Only one minor detail remains: paying for the conference ticket.

I “should” be able to “afford” this conference, since I’m a software engineer in a fairly rich country. So it’s really a cash flow issue; if I could, I would have borrowed the money from my bank and worked for the ticket later.

This is where you come in…

Your donations** will help me go to TED India. In exchange, I offer one hour of my “brain power” to anyone donating $50*. Please send me an email if you wish to use that offer.

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I decided to keep track of my weight for a month, as a 30 day trial. I weighed myself first thing every morning on a cheap digital scale.

The result is the blue line in the chart below.

I knew there’d be some variation, but I wanted to figure out what is causing that. My attention was drawn to the sharp peak (73.0) at June 19th and so I looked back into my calendar to see what I was doing around that day.

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Op de Spoorzone Overvecht website heb ik zojuist een artikel geschreven waarin ik probeer uit te zoeken wat nou eigenlijk het kostenplaatje van sloop en nieuwbouw is en hoe dat zich verhoudt tot niks doen.

Wat me vooral opvalt is dat buitengewoon triviale en cruciale informatie niet (of in ieder geval niet makkelijk) te vinden is. Hopelijk komen er hulpzame reacties op.

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Let me explain in a non technical way why Google Wave is a breakthrough. I argue that it doesn’t just revolutionarize the concept of email (only a few decades old), it changes the very concept of mail (thousands of years old).

Let’s go back in time and imagine the Romans had Wave. First of all, I argue that they would have called it Arbor, because it makes more sense and because they didn’t like oceans.

But what would it look like?

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Nu ik opzoek ben naar een baan, is het begrip scheefwonen – in een huis wonen dat te goedkoop is voor je inkomen – ineens weer relevant geworden.Als ik straks een baan heb, ben ik dan een scheefwoner? En is dat erg? Sommige van mijn beste vrienden zijn tenslotte scheefwoners.

Vandaag werd er weer klakkeloos negatief over scheefwoners gesproken in de Zaterdag NRC (23 mei, pagina 4, opiniestuk van Maarten Huygen over krakers). Ook vermoed ik dat mijn ouders sceptisch staan tegenover scheefwonen.

Tijd voor een tegenoffensief dus, want scheefwonen is goed!

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Back in February I watched Travis Metcalfe’s talk about the Pale Blue Dot project, where you can adopt a star for $10 and sponsor scientific research. And not just any star; the recently launched Kepler satellite is looking for planets around these stars. Now that’s a cheap price to pay for so much fame and glory

Of course, I wanted to adopt the brightest star available, but this was difficult using the interface available at that time. So I decided to download the list of stars and build my own Ruby on Rails application around it to make this search easier.

It’s located at pale-blue-dot.sprovoost.nl and here’s a preview:

My adopted star

You can search for stars in order of increasing or decreasing brightness and you can choose not to list stars that are already adopted. Each of the stars can viewed in Google Sky Maps, so you can see if you like the looks. You can also search by adopter name.

I just realized that every star now has a URL. Not sure why that is significant, but it’s kind of cool.

One of the features that I’d like to build soon is the possibility of finding available stars near a particular star, so you can adopt a star close to your friends star. To make the sky even more social, I’d like to build a Facebook App around it.

Of course, I don’t have an infinite amount of time to work on this, so any help is greatly appreciated.

You can find the source code here and the issue tracker here.

Also, is there anyone with enough math and programming skills and patience to build a mobile app? Such an app would use the phone’s clock, GPS, accelometer and (optionally) compas to assist in locating the adopted star in the sky.

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

All good things come to an end and worse still: you sometimes need to plan that end. I figured I might as well make that end as interesting as possible, so here we go!

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Those following me on Twitter may have noticed that I am a little bit skeptic about Earth Hour – an initiative that asks everyone to turn off their lights for one hour to raise awareness about global warming.

It is a great thing when the whole world joins together for one hour to think about something important. I love that about Earth Hour. But why just climate change? There are so many other problems in the world.

Imagine having the worlds attention for one hour – something nobody has ever achieved – what would you say? What would you want 6.7 billion people to think about?

So here is my challenge for anyone who cares about the world, has a camera and some free time:

Send me a one hour video with your top 10 best ways to help the world!

Rules

There are just a few simple rules:

1. A top 10 of of best ways to help the world
2. 60 minutes
3. Explain the problem
4. Explain how it can be solved on a global scale
5. Provide a simple first step for individuals to contribute or learn more
6. No lies: be prepared for some serious fact-checking by the community
7. No divine intervention: it’s just us this time

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My new room and view

Some of you may wonder what I’ve been up to outside my Summer of Code project, so let me just write an update about the last couple of months.

As I wrote before, I arrived in Melbourne on May 12th, spent about a week here and then traveled onwards to Canberra and Brisbane. In early June I got myself an apartment in Preston and about a month later the Internet worked and my life could really start. I spent several 40+ hour work weeks in the public library before that, feeling really sorry for people who did not have a laptop: I called them The 15 Minute People.

Sydney Skyline

Less than a week after I moved into my new apartment, I traveled to Sydney. My official excuse was to visit the Google Developer Day, but I also did some sightseeing, got myself a free T-shirt at the opening of the new Apple Store and had a great chat with the folks from Lisasoft who work on all sorts of geo web and open source stuff. I stayed at the Chilly Blue Backpackers, where I met some really laid back people. It was a short trip and provided the right backpacking, sightseeing and techy mix for me.

Back in Melbourne I’ve been going to all sorts of interesting events, both for the sake of the events themselves and in order to meet the interesting folks that also visit them. Upcoming.org is very useful for this, as well as techevents.com.au. Of course, even in 2008 urban life is less organized than one would like, so I’ve also mastered the art of paying attention to people who mention other potentially interesting events and I’ve joined several mailinglists.

It seems that I now divide my “social time” over two more or less unrelated “subcultures”. These two subcultures were a lot more intertwined in San Francisco and Seattle by the way. I have a theory why this is the case, but I’ll leave that for the first person who buys me a drink and asks.

First of all there is Couchsurfing, a world wide hospitality network. Even though I have only “surfed” for one week in Melbourne, I just keep on meeting great people and having lots of fun through that network. There is a Melbourne Couchsurfing group and its members regularly organise drinks, excursions and other excuses to get together.

Jumping Crocodile

My three personal highlights: I spent the weekend with a group at someone’s house in the Mornington Peninsula. We went snowboarding at Mount Buller (all my muscles hurt for weeks, but it was worth it). And during the midwinter night we burned a couch.

It is really remarkable how much technology changes the rules of the “urban social game”. In an era where everyone seems to be afraid of everyone else  and nobody talks to strangers in public, there are these incredible exceptions. With couch surfing, you can take a plane to another continent and stay in the house of a total stranger and you both simply know it is completely safe. Same goes for inviting a bunch of strangers to your house warming party.

How can this be? One reason is probably because most people really aren’t as evil as we all seem to believe. But another reason is that people can leave each other references. So before you decide to stay with somebody, you can read what other people have said about them. And so a situation is created where everyone knows everyone else and everyone keeps an eye on everyone else. Just like in a village. Hence the term “global village” I guess.

The second subculture is a group of tech savvy people with social skills. There is this cultural phenomenon going on here in Melbourne – and in other places all around the world – where one person organizes a meeting around a theme and basically invites the whole world. In practice, only five to twenty like minded people, who may never have met each other before, show up. The result is a great evening and the event is repeated. After a while, a new group comes into being that is not formed through any one company, government or existing circle of friends (although these still play a role): it is self assembled out of the millions of people that live in this city, grouped around a common interest. Pretty cool huh?

Me as a mighty pirate; my sword is just outside the image in case you were wondering. Photo by Lauren.

My current favorites are Tequp – a biweekly meeting in a store about anything techy – and Jelly – a day of co-working in a restaurant or office for “freelancers”. I’ve met a lot of nice and interesting people there. Often, these concepts are copied to other cities, by people who may or may not have been to these events before. Maybe I’ll get a Tequp and Jelly up and running in Utrecht by when I get back.

Some other successful examples of that phenomenom are Barcamp (a spontanuous self organized free conference) and the Talk Like a Pirate Day parties all over the world.

In other news, I just got myself a bicycle two weeks ago.  Australia is not really what you would call a cycle country, but the government seems quite eager to get people to use these wonderful devices. That’s probably because Australia recently passed the USA as the country with the highest obesity rate. Anyway, the result is that there are some wonderful bike lanes. My favorite one is even named after me: the St. George Road bike path is a long straight path, far from the road and lined with palm trees! I love palm trees.

Cycling also turns out to be much faster (and cheaper) than taking the tram – even without any real effort – so I am surprised there are so few people here that use them. But I can come up with a couple of reasons.

First of all, there is this law that people have to wear these ridiculous helmets. Even though people claim that they are used to it and it looks normal to them, I think deep inside people realize that wearing a helmet on a bike is like wearing shorts at a stock exchange. I also seriously doubt it really adds any significant amount of safety and even if it did, there are other measures that would make a much bigger difference, see below.

Kakadu National Park.

The second problem is the lack of dedicated bike lanes. At some point in the past, the government had the brilliant idea to “draw” bike lanes on the road. However, either they were completely incompetent fror the beginning or they had to give in to car owner lobbyists: cars are allowed to park on these bike lines. The result is that you have to swing on and off the bike lane, which is inredibly dangerous as it means you are moving in and out of fast traffic all the time. Also, because cars are parked on the “bike paths” you are in constant danger of being slammed of your bike by an idiot that opens his or her car door at the wrong moment.

Dear government, the solution is dead simple: do not allow cars to park on the main traffic arteries. It is a waste of road space and extremely dangerous for cycles. It is just about as stupid as allowing people to have barbecues in the middle of the road. Anyone who complains that they can not walk an extra fifty meters around the corner should be marooned on a far away island. Oh wait…

But there are some good things too: you can take your bike on the trains (outside rush hours) and you can even get a free bike locker at some of the train stations. This makes allows me to bike down hill to the city and let the train take me back. And there are some truly beautiful bike trails in this green city!

Oh and of course I also took a little train trip from Melbourne to Adelaide and on to Alice Springs and Darwin; about 4000 km. From Darwin I joined a wild excursion to Kakadu National Parks with a company called Kakadu Dreams; they provide some really active tours! It was good to be offline and in the outback (the outback in my definition is anywhere where there is no cheap and abundant Internet access) to relax for a couple of weeks.

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

One of the questions in the student evaluation of the Google Summer of Code reads:

If there was one thing you wish you had known before getting started in Summer of Code, what would it be?

It is a very typical evaluation question and we all sortof know what it means and how to answer it. However, if you insist on thinking about it – and this is very acceptable behavior in some circles – it is actually a very difficult question.

I tend to read this question as follows: if you could meet yourself in the past, what would you tell your past self?

Well, I would probably give myself the final git repository, plus an external hard disk with as much of the interesting new information on the present day Internet as possible.

What would my past self do with that information? He would probably decide to use the outcome of a couple of footy matches to make a decent living. But apart from that, he would pick another project. Not because my project is uninteresting, but I really enjoyed that part of the project that I worked on. Continuing to work on this particular code base is really interesting, but not as interesting as it was to build it in the first place.

So my conclusion is: the more advice that I give to my past self, the less intersting his project would become. This is not a real problem however, because the information would provide him with many new opportunities.

I have the same view on Sudoko puzzles. A friend of mine wrote a computer program, while he was drinking beer in the pub, that could solve a lot of these puzzles. Many fanatical puzzlers would never consider using such a program; it would take away the fun.

I completely disagree with them. Now that my friend has releaved the world of The Sudoko Problem, mankind can move on to solving new problems.

I do not understand why people take such pleasure in creating artificial problems and then solving them over and over again, when there is an astonishing abundance of problems already out there waiting to be solved.

Just to make an even bolder statement: anyone who spends even a minute a day solving problems that have already been solved, should feel really guilty about climate change, poverty, diseases, slow public transport and millions and millions of other problems. Well at least, I tend to look at my own behavior from that perspective. All that without losing the ability to enjoy live; that is the real tricky part.

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

Although there are still a couple of days left until the official Pencils Down date of the Summer of Code, I am now officially putting my pencil down because I need to catch a train to Adelaide tomorrow morning.

I guess this really marks the end of my student period; even though I graduated in June, this project allowed me to feel like a student just a little longer. Sniff, now I really have to enter the big scary adult world.

But first I will go on a trip for two weeks to see Adelaide, the Ghan train, Darwin and Kakadu National park. It will be a very culturally diverse trip; from what I have  heard, Adelaide and Darwin are pretty much as different as it gets here in Australia.

Route profile demo by Lambertus

I am very happy to see that my application has found its way to an actual route planner website (see figure above)!

So what is next? Well, I will obviously have much less time to work on this project, so my highest priority will be to explain other people how to use and improve the application and how to install it on their own server. So don’t hesitate to mail me about that!

I have to keep this post short because I still have to pack some stuff and it is already late. But I do want  to thank some people of course. Thanks Google for sponsoring me (and for creating all sorts of cool and useful tools for my project). Thanks OpenStreetMap community for selecting my project, your confidence in me and your support. And of course, thanks Artem for mentoring me during the project and for being a great and interesting person to talk to in general!

These are just thankyou’s, not goodbyes. So see you soon!

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

Prove you are a human!

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

This is the second time that I am living in another country for a while and once again I have stumbled into a huge problem that I believe is massively under appreciated by many. I need the internet, but it’s not as ubiquitous as you’d think.

Has anyone seen the South Park episode about this? The entire United States flees to refugee camps on the west coast where there is still a bit of Internet. People wait in a cue all day for only 40 seconds of Internet. Does that sound a bit ridiculous? Well if you are a homeless person without a laptop (and except Japan probably, most homeless people do not have one) and want to use the Internet, you’ll have to cue up at the State Library in Melbourne for 15 minutes of Internet (it takes about 1 minute to load gmail, so do the math…). And that is the best deal in town as far as I know.

When I see these people (probably not all homeless) I get the same emotions that most people probably get when they see hungry people in Africa. Of course, that is not fair or rational, but it’s just easier to emphasize with for me. I completely depend on the Internet for almost everything I do and it allows me to live a fascinating life. But those 15-Minute People, as I call them, have to do everything the old fashioned way: more time consuming, more expensive., less opportunities. For example, they have to make a phone call to book a flight; that adds at least 15 dollars, plus you can’t easily compare fares. They have to find a place to live through newpaper adds; most rooms are shared online, so they miss those. And they don’t have access to all sorts of job search websites.

I can probably find the best price and book a flight in under 15 minutes, but most people can’t; there are many important tasks for people need to sit down and focus a lot longer. 15-Minute People have a serious disadvantage here. How about adding two hours of Internet per day, for everyone, to the list of government responsibilities? Or shall we just wait and see what happens if we don’t?

Anyway, I’ve been one those 15-Minute People a couple of times during my travels. I take the Internet for granted, but I have been without it quite a couple of times at great costs to productivity. It is even worse if the situation is unpredictable; if you do know for how long you will be connected, or how long it will take before you are connected again. This makes it impossible to plan anything.

I spent six months in Slovakia and I would have some weeks with and some weeks without the Internet. At the office! And with no way of predicting what would happen next. Not very practical if your work is Internet based. But I guess people kind of expect that sort of thing in Slovakia (although I think it does not have to be that way).

The biggest surprise in this respect is Australia. I was completely taken by surprise at the terrible state of the Internet over here. I was expecting more or less 99% household penetration of Internet, free wifi at hostels, the usual, but I found the opposite. Hostels will gladly charge you 4 dollars an hour and it won’t be wireless either. Many homes, even with young people, do not have an Internet connection. And in general the Internet is very slow, has download limits(!) and is expensive.

Just a comparison: at home in The Netherlands I pay 30 dollars a month for my Internet connection, plus about 15 for the phone line that you need to have with it. For that money, I can download at 20 Mbit and there is no limit to how much I download. The best deal I could find here, is 50 dollars for the Internet plus 20 for the phone. That gets me 0.5 Mbit download and a 25 GB limit per month. So that is 40 times slower for almost twice the price and you get a download limit as a bonus.

So what is causing this? Well, let’s just say Telstra (the former state company) blames crushing government regulations and most others blame Telstra for acting like a monopolist. I leave the choice to you.

The good news is that people are not happy with that and there is a lot of work going on to upgrade Australia’s physical, and equally important, organizational Internet infrastructure. The other good news is that Australia has a pretty cool system that you can use to quickly switch between providers and that the business of connecting and disconnecting people seems to be a *lot* faster than at home (it took only 3 hours to disconnect from our old provider; these things take weeks in The Netherlands, months in Slovakia).

I hope I will have a working 24/7 Internet connection at home by the time I get back from the Google Developers day, my Sydney excursion and the Burning Couch festival next week. That would great for productivity and peace of mind!

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

Its been a while since my last travel related post. To make a long story short: I spent a week in lovely Canberra and another week in warm Brisbane. I then discovered that the combination of programming and traveling was a bit too much of good thing, so I decided to fly back to Melbourne and settle down for a while.

Canberra, for those who do not know, is Australia’s capital city. It has a lot in common with Washington. It is one of the more successful examples of a Garden City, which contrary to Overvecht, it is not about to be bulldozed.

I managed to find an appartment in Melbourne in less than a week (and four attempts) through Gumtree advertisements. As you can see in the picture on the left, it is a converted warehouse. Nice old (for Australia) look on the outside, all modern stuff on the inside. I will take pictures of the interior later, but if this is what it looks like when new. Its only $470.000 (€300.000) to buy, or if you’re like me, you rent it with two other people and a cat.

The Melbourne Couch Surfing Group is awesome! It has 917 members and organizes lots of activities. This Queens Birthday weekend me and about 25 others stayed at Lena’s parents vacation house in the Mornington peninsula. The most amazing thing is that many of them, including me, had never met her before. It was a lot of fun and I’ll post some pictures later.

My plan for the next couple of weeks is to work hard on my project, so I have plenty of free time during my three day (carbon compensated) visit to Sydney next week. I will also find some nice second hand furniture for my room and ‘work’ on my social life.

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

G’Day mates,

Ik schrijf mijn berichten voorlopig in het Engels, zodat mijn eventuele nieuwe vrienden in Australië ook kunnen meegenieten. Rechtsboven deze pagina bevindt zich de knop “Google Translate”. Daarmee kan je deze pagina automatisch vertalen naar het Nederlands, hoewel de kwaliteit van de vertaling nog wat te wensen overlaat.

I made it to Australia! But first I spent a week in Bangkok, which I think is really a cool city. I saw a real Thai movie, or actually four scary short movies (4 Praeng) to be precise. Interesting detail is that before the movie starts, the audience stands up and the national anthem is played, complete with pictures of the king. Rita Verdonk would probably love it.

By the way, all English movies are subtitled in Thai and (!) all Thai movies are subtitled in English. If you bump into someone he will instantly say “sorry” and not “khor thot”. So Bangkok is pretty foreigner friendly. The only annoying thing is The Great Tuk-Tuk Scam.

I also managed to get out of the city for a day, to see the Death Railway, ride an elephant and sit on a boat.

Compared to Bangkok, Melbourne looked like a charming little country side village at first. A very nice one though!

I am surfing the couch of some really nice folks in Richmond, a suburb very close to downtown. I split my time between exploring the city, working on my Summer of Code project and eating.

The number of places to eat in this city is insane. You can get out of a tram at a random stop, think about what you want to eat; then just walk in any direction and you will find it within five minutes. Most people put on a lot of weight in Australia; I wonder why…

In conclusion: I am having a great time, so until the next post: hooroo!

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

Before:

After biking around with my GPS logger and taking pictures, I managed to improve the map of my neighborhood. I added the cycle path, foot paths and some more water on the north side of the rail tracks:

So get your GPS logger and go improve the map!

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

Ik vond het weer eens tijd voor een nieuw plan, dus maandag 5 mei pak ik het vliegtuig richting Australië! Ik ga daar tijdelijk werk zoeken om de reis, verblijf en wat excursies van te betalen. Tijdens mijn reis door Mexico wees iemand me op het Working Holiday visum. Daarmee kan ik maximaal twaalf maanden in Australië verblijven en mag ik ook werk zoeken. De enige restricties zijn dat ik niet meer dan 6 maanden per werkgever mag werken en dat ik meer belasting betaal.

Het visum heb ik via Internet aangevraagd en is geheel zonder tussenkomst van stempels binnen een etmaal goedgekeurd. Daar kan de IND nog een puntje aan zuigen. Ik heb een bankrekening geopend (bijna helemaal via Internet) en online een verzekering geregeld (mijn Nederlandse verzekering kan ik met terugwerkende kracht opzeggen als ik minimaal 3 maanden werk). Eenmaal in Australië moet ik via Internet een sofinummer aanvragen en fysiek een SIM-kaart voor mijn telefoon kopen.

Omdat ik niet hou van jetlags, het niks extra kost, ik er nog niet geweest ben en het erg de moeite waard schijnt te zijn, ga ik eerst vijf dagen naar Bangkok. Om precies te zijn, ga ik eerst met de ICE (geboekt bij het nieuwe NS Hispeed) naar Düsseldorf, dan met een overstap in München naar Bangkok en een paar dagen later van Bangkok naar Melbourne.

Nu moet ik nog de belastingtelefoon bellen om te kijken of ik goed begrepen heb hoe de loonbelasting, premies volksverzekeringen en huur-toeslag precies op mij van toepassing gaan zijn. En zeker niet onbelangrijk is dat ik nog het fijne moet leren over het graven van AOW gaten; met andere woorden onder welke omstandigheden ik genoeg binding met Nederland op sociaal, economisch en juridisch gebied heb.

Ook interessant is artikel 86 lid 1 van de Wet Gemeentelijke Basisadministratie, dat stelt dat als ik “naar redelijke verwachting gedurende een jaar ten minste twee derden van de tijd buiten Nederland zal verblijven“, ik me bij de gemeente moet uitschrijven. Dit kan ik echter niet van tevoren weten en navraag bij de gemeente Utrecht leerde mij dat als er een moment komt dat ik het wel zeker weet, het niet meer relevant is omdat het artikel niet met terugwerkende kracht geld. Altijd als ik dit soort schitterende staaltjes wetgeving tegenkom, overweeg ik weer even om rechten te gaan studeren.

Om me goed voor te kunnen bereiden op de komende job-hunt en om een al te zware cultuurshock te voorkomen, heb ik het boek Living and Working in Australia van David Hampshire besteld en een workshop bijgewoond over solliciteren en werken in het buitenland. Sowieso kan het geen kwaad om het boek Allemaal Andersdenkenden van Geert Hofstede in het achterhoofd te houden.

Qua onderdak ga ik voor mix van hostels en Couch Surfing. Dit laatste houdt in dat mensen hun bank beschikbaar stellen voor reizigers. Dit is goedkoper en vooral buitengewoon veel interessanter dan in hostels verblijven omdat je op die manier de lokale bevolking in hun meest dagelijkse omgeving aantreft.

Melbourne heeft een zeer uitgebreid openbaar vervoer systeem, met vooral veel trams. Ook kennen ze het fenomeen maandkaart. Tot slot heb ik in Seattle een echte LifeBook (Fujitsu laptop) gekocht aangezien een PC toch echt te groot en zwaar is om mee te nemen. Ik heb zelfs braaf BTW betaald op Schiphol.

Wanneer ik weer terug kom in Nederland hangt af van hoe leuk werk ik kan vinden en hoeveel zin en tijd ik daarna heb om rond te reizen. Ik hou jullie op de hoogte!

Originally published at Sjors Provoost. Please leave any comments there.

Inmiddels reis ik al twee weken met de Green Tortoise door Mexico en het wordt met de dag warmer. Vrijdag 7 december vertrokken we uit San Francisco en twee dagen later bereikten we het eerste warme strand (San Blas). Vorig jaar nog verlaten en vanaf november zullen er regelmatig cruiseship aanmeren in het flinke resort-in-aanbouw. Dit zie je zo ongeveer overal aan de kust van Mexico. Drie keer raden waar Amerikanen graag met pensioen gaan.

Daarna een spectaculaire treinrit van een dag door de Koper Valei: een soort Grand Canyon. Boven was het vrij koud, maar gelukkig geen sneeuw dit jaar. Vervolgens hebben we weer een paar dagen aan het strand gezeten, deze keer zonder regen en veel warmer. Na Creel is de temperatuur overdag niet vaak onder de 30 graden geweest. 

Deze week hebben we aantal steden bezocht, waarvan Guanajuato wel de meest spectaculaire was. Het is een middeleeuws stadje met allemaal kronkelende straten, waar je zonder kaart de weg beter kan vinden dan met kaart. Omdat de stad het verkeer niet aankon hebben ze een stuk of tien tunnels door het centrum gegraven, wat het doolhof gevoel compleet maakt.

Vanacht heeft onze bus ongeveer zeven uur door Mexico stad gezworven, op zoek naar een weg naar Oaxaca, waar ik nu ben. Ik binnenkort eens tegen alle advies in Mezkal proberen. Tequilla went nou eenmaal vrij snel De kerst gaan we doorbrengen op een zeer zuidelijk en hopelijk nog verlaten strand aan de Stille Oceaan. Kortom, ik vermaak me nog wel even.