Made it home safely. I left Changi Airport at 6 pm Singapore time on Sunday, and arrived in SFO at 8 pm PST. So that's about 17 hours' travel time, I think.
Since everyone put their windowshade down right after takeoff, I was in darkness the whole flight. So in a sense I missed a day. Kind of strange, but probably not as dislocating as having seven hours of daylight.
I'm in Kuala Lumpur International Airport, and I can't get online. There's supposed to be this cool wireless throughout the airport, but I can't get to it-- it requires a password.
Actually, it doesn't. But I was using DHCP to configure my IP address; I then changed it to BootP, and it got right on. (However, looking now at my network configuration, it claims to be using DHCP again.)
This is a very nice airport. No getting around it. Gigantic, spacious, and pretty pleasantly-designed.
It strikes me as odd that Malaysian Airlines ads feature stewardesses who look like carbon copies of the Singapore Air stewardesses, when this is a predominantly Muslim country. Actually it isn't odd at all, given that Singapore Air is probably what they aspire to be-- it's Sony to their Samsung. But it's an image that isn't very representative of the rest of the country.
Technorati Tags: airport, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
--and I've been up for a couple hours working. I tend to run on nerves on business trips, and this one is no different; combine that with the time difference, and it means I'm falling asleep at what for me are radically early times, and getting up before the crack of dawn.
Time for a shower.
[To the tune of Alanis Morissette, "Uninvited," from the album "City of Angels".]
I made it to the Concorde Hotel. I've got a surprisingly nice room-- it must be a slow day.
via flickr
I've also got a really terrific view of the Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah Mosque, also known as the Blue Mosque. It's one of the biggest in Southeast Asia.
via flickr
I think I'm in for the night. I had a pretty big lunch, so I'm not particularly hungry, but I am rather tired, so I think I'm going to have a shower, read over my plans for tomorrow's workshop, and then go to bed.
[To the tune of Peter Gabriel, "Red Rain," from the album "Shaking The Tree".]
Technorati Tags: architecture, Blue Mosque, Concorde Hotel, mosque, Shah Alam
I'm in a taxi, going from the Kuala Lumpur International Airport to my hotel in Shah Alam, which is-- actually, I have no idea how far away it is, except measured in money. It's about 60 ringgit to the hotel, which is a lot less than I expected it to be. I read about how to take the train to KL and then a bus or taxi to Shah Alam, but I'm tired and it's raining, so I wimped out.
Global brands run amok? Suzie Ormond and other American business books for sale in the KLIA bookstore... via flickr
I'm glad I did, because the taxi service here is pretty civilized and non-treatening. (One would hope that those two things are pretty much synonymous.) There aren't meters in the taxis, but before you get in the queue, you buy a ticket at a counter serviced by very nice ladies in head scarves. (Nearly everybody I've interacted with speaks quite good English; the only odd thing is that the accent reminds me of, of all things, Italian.) They tell you how much it'll cost to go where you want to go. Once you've paid, they print you a ticket; and you give it to the driver. Easy.
via flickr
Before I got to the taxi reservations stand, I stopped at an ATM and got some cash. It's pretty amazing to me that I can just go to an ATM and get money. It may be the case that I can now dispense with the whole ritual of going to the American Express office in downtown Palo Alto, or my local Wells Fargo branch if I'm better-organized, to get money. We'll see what the service charges are-- but given that Amex and other foreign exchange offices tend to charge a pretty hefty fee, I'll bet it's pretty competitive.
Kuala Lumpur airport is very new, and is filled with flat screen displays, many of which are playing a video featuring the Japanese architect who designed it, talking in that poetic, nearly incomprehensible voice people adopt when discussing vast corporate projects. "It is an airport is the forest, and the forest is in the airport," he intones, as we see a fisheye lens-distorted view of forest canopies, water features inside the main terminal, and then a slow-motion shot of a hummingbird.
"It is synergistic." Sun going down.
"Synergy is to live with contradictions." Low shot of businessman with Blackberry framed by Petrona Towers. Fisherman. Pilot and stewardess walking in slow-mo. "This is an essential attitude for the 21st century." As the kids today say, WTF?
The highway we're on is like the M5 or some other major freeway in Britain, though it's in better condition-- it looks pretty new. I guess it reminds me of England because people drive on the left side of the street here.
We're going about 120 km/h. It feels like we're doing about 80. And still, people are passing us on both sides.
I may need to do some reworking of my plan tomorrow, since Malaysian Airlines seems to have lost the supplies I brought for my workshop. I've been working on a really cool new online mapping tool; I may end of getting to use it a lot earlier than I expected.... As we like to say in the craft, the future often happens in unexpected ways. This may be one of them. A nice object lesson.
There's a car brand here called Proton, which I 've never heard of. I wonder if it's a rebranded Hyundai, or something Chinese, or does Malaysia actually make its own cars? These feel like Korean or Japanese cars-- the detailing is pretty good, the materials are decent... I'll have to check that out.
Before I got on the plane in Penang, when my energy level and spirits were at their low ebb, I watched about 20 minutes of The Bourne Ultimatum. There's something about watching Matt Damon beat, blow up, and crash through stuff that's energizing and reassuring. Jason Bourne knows how to travel. In fact, he hardly does anything else in those movies.
[To the tune of The Doors, "The End," from the album "The Doors".]
Technorati Tags: airport, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, travel
I'm at the airport, waiting for my flight to Kuala Lumpur. It's late afternoon here, but my body is divided: part of me agrees that the sun is headed toward sundown, and will get there in a few hours, while another part of me thinks it's really the middle of the night (as it is back in California).
It's one of those psychological times when you'd much rather be at home, rather than in an airport terminal-- a space that demonstrates the amazing uniformity of global commerce and the power of international transport conventions to shape the way places are organized, and yet for all its familiarity remains resolutely alien.
I've spent more time in airports than a lot of people, and I think as I travel more, I'm finding them less appealing: the uniform array of mass luxury goods (is there an airport that doesn't have a Mont Blanc shop?), the fact that I'm often tired and a bit stressed in them, and the knowledge that I'm only in them to be somewhere else, are all starting to generate an allergic reaction. Not that I'll quit flying; but maybe I'll get more thoughtful and selective about it.
[To the tune of Paul Simon, "Further To Fly," from the album "The Rhythm of the Saints".]
One of the more popular items for sale in the open-air stalls in Batu Ferringhi are DVDs-- mainly of Japanese and American movies (Nim's Island and the new Horton are both available), but I was struck at how many TV shows are also available.
via flickr
[To the tune of Nuspirit Helsinki, "Verano Porteno," from the album "Astor Piazzolla Remixed".]
Pleasant breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Though oddly, they play Brazilian-inflected light jazz at breakfast: I ate my eggs and tandori sausage (really!) to the tune of "Corcovado," "Se Danco Samba," "The Girl from Ipanema," and the theme from "Sandpiper" for good measure.
What a world....
[To the tune of Céu, "Roda (Bombay Dub Orchestra's Grateful Dub Radio Mix)," from the album "Roda (Bombay Dub Orchestra's Grateful Dub Radio Mix)".]
Technorati Tags: Malaysia, Park Royal Hotel, Penang, travel
I'm up early, as I haven't really adjusted enough to the local time to replicate my usual slothful ways.
I had a workshop yesterday with scientists and other people from USM, one of Malaysia's big science-oriented universities. It was a pretty good time: it was an interesting cross-section of people and backgrounds, there were a few usefully orthogonal thinkers, and I learned a lot.
The obligatory group picture, via flickr
Today I'm spending the day at USM and its new science city, then will head on to Kuala Lumpur and thence to Shah Alam. Thursday I've got another workshop at UiTM, and Friday I'll be at Cyberjaya and Putrajaya.
The Park Royal Hotel is pretty good, even though the main building looks like it was designed in the 1950s by a delegation of architecture students from the Leningrad Institute of Dialectical Tourism Studies.
via flickr
However, the rooms are quite pleasant. (Notice the disc on the ceiling that points to Mecca.)
via flickr
The first night I was here, I wimped out and went to the hotel restaurant; last night, I ventured out and had some food from one of the twenty thousand food stalls that are all around Batu Ferringhi.
via flickr
I'll go down to breakfast in a little while. The breakfast buffet here is okay but not outstanding-- but when you get to eat with a view of the ocean, nothing's really too bad.
via flickr
[To the tune of Radiohead, "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," from the album "In Rainbows".]
Technorati Tags: food, Malaysia, Park Royal Hotel, Penang, scienceX2, travel
Trip photoset now up!
I'm a research director at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Silicon Valley. I'm also an Associate Fellow at Oxford University's Saïd Business School, and a Senior Research Scholar in the Science Technology and Society program at Stanford University.
At the Institute, I work on the future of science and technology. In my free time I'm working on a book on the end of cyberspace. More details are available in my c.v. (PDF). My first book, Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions, was published by Stanford University Press in 2002.
I also keep up-to-date profiles on LinkedIn and Facebook.
The banner is from a picture taken by Anthony Townsend, while we were walking along Raday Utca in Budapest, Hungary, October 2007.
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