Thursday, March 11, 2010

Interlude: London and Italy

It didn’t make much sense to travel back from London to Edinburgh on Thursday evening only to fly out on Tuesday to Italy to give a talk at the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Technical Committee meeting in Frascati. Instead, I decided to meet up with friends in London on Thursday evening, do tourist things in London on Friday and fly out to Rome on Saturday morning.

I stayed on for an extra day at the Devonport House hotel in a personal capacity, and since I was starting at Greenwich went for a wander through Greenwich Market and into the Royal Park. One of the culinary highlights of the trip was an excellent Ethiopian veggie carry-out lunch in a plastic box from one of the market stalls: chick peas, potatoes, carrots that I could see, with chilli, lime pickle and other less identifiable spices. I ate that walking through the park going up the hill to the Royal Observatory.

After that I went hunting locally for a travel keyboard and mouse. My venerable HP TC1100 convertible tablet was always destined to have keyboard trouble given the complicated converting hinge mechanism, but it and its predecessor almost-identical Compaq model had in fact survived quite happily since 2003 until recently. On this trip the keyboard died completely. Unfortunately nothing was available locally, so I ended up going to the huge shopping centre that lies beneath Canary Wharf to try and find something suitable. Since I was in tourist mode anyway, this was combined with lots of rubber-necking up at One Canada Place and the other bombastic 80s towers about there, which was all quite fun since it was a beautiful sunny day. It took forever to find Curry’s Digital, since the maps show the three stacked shopping levels as if they were adjacent streets in the same plane rather than on top of each other. The nearest thing they had was a smallish Logitech desktop keyboard that fits in my backpack and has done the job. (Handwriting recognition is fine for short phrases but tedious on long text).

Off then to Gatwick airport. I had asked Julie, who does EDINA’s travel organising, for an airport hotel, and she had booked me into the Yotel, which turns out to be physically inside the South Terminal (down in the lift beside the Costa coffee shop), which is great. The compromise is that they offer “cabins” rather than rooms, with just enough space for a single bunk bed, a drop-down table, a folding camp stool hung on the door, a shower and basin, with eerie low-level purple lighting, and booked by the hour! The effect being aimed at is a luxurious, super-first class, flat-bed aircraft seat plus shower (A380-style) or a ship’s cabin, rather than a hotel room, and it works quite well. Breakfast is bookable from the “galley”.

The upshot was just a short walk to my 0650 flight and away. Easyjet go to Rome Fiumicino so in to Termini station on the Leonardo Express (about 30 minutes) then change for Frascati, avoiding the various pickpockets, con artists and other dodgy characters who hang around Termini waiting to pounce on tourists. It’s only another 30 minutes on the train to Frascati and a taxi to the hotel. Because this part of the trip was non-work I splashed out for a very nice converted palazzo out of town, built by a Cardinal in the 1580s, where you can sit around reading a magazine in the great hall looking at the original frescos. Occasionally a guided tour party wanders past! Dinner there on Sunday was matchingly excellent, then off down-market on Monday to a cheaper, motel-style place I had chosen for the OGC conference! My colleague Chris Higgins arrived on Monday evening so we had a beer in the hotel bar before turning in.

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