Sint Maarten / Saint Martin

Of course it would take me until the end of the year to finish writing a post about a trip I took back in July...

Anyway, last summer's visit to Sint Maarten / Saint Martin - the island is divided between The Netherlands and France, hence the two names - was a "family" affair in that myself, Corinne, Kirby, my mom, my brother and his wife all made the trip. Dad was originally supposed to go, too, but it was only after mom had made the reservation at the timeshare that he realized his passport had expired, and due to significant backlogs in passport processing he was unable to get a new one before the trip. (It was probably for the best, given his mobility issues; he would have had trouble with a lot of the excursions we ended up making.)

This was technically not my first trip to Sint Maarten; it was a port of call on our 2015 Eastern Caribbean cruise and we took a shore excursion to Maho Beach, which is arguably Sint Maarten's most famous tourist attraction, to watch planes land. However, I really didn't spend any time on the island itself, meeting its people or eating its food, until this trip.

While Sint Maarten is technically a semi-autonomous "constituent country" of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, it is culturally Anglo-Caribbean. Saint Martin, on the other hand, is an integral part of France (although English is spoken as much as French and dollars are accepted as readily as Euros). The cars (including my rental) even have standard French plates! This meant that this vacation technically represented my first trip to France, as well.

Neither side if the island is doing particularly well right now; on top of the effect that the pandemic is having on this island's tourist-dependent economy, there are still the lingering effects from Hurricane Irma, which devastated the island in 2017.

Here are some photos of the trip:

The pool area of our timeshare, with Dawn Beach in the distance. Although everything appears fine, if you take a close look at the building to the right you'll see some patches in the walls. It was damaged by Hurricane Irma and is still being repaired. As we traveled around the island we came across innumerable buildings that are still in disrepair, four years after Irma made landfall.  

The courthouse in Philipsburg, which is the capital of (Dutch) Sint Maarten.

Kirby pretends to ignite a (replica) cannon of the Dutch West Indies Company in Philipsburg. The company held the island's trade monopoly during the Dutch colonial era.

An (almost) empty beach in Philipsburg.

Pandemic and Irma in a nutshell: repairs are being made to the jetty in the foreground, while several cruise ships idled by COVID-19's shutdown of the cruise industry, including the Royal Caribbean Rhapsody of the Seas that we sailed on during our trip to Greece a few years ago, are docked at the cruise terminal in the background.

Fort St. Louis overlooks Marigot, the capital of the French side of the island. The fort was originally built in 1789.

A typical Street scene in Marigot, with stores and boutiques and cars with French plates. Driving on this island was an adventure. The roads were narrow and winding, with no left turn bays (which meant a lot of time stopped in traffic while somebody in front of you waited to turn) in . Most major intersections were roundabouts (which I personally don't mind); I only came across one traffic signal on the entire island. Finding parking could also be difficult at times.

Looking down at Marigot from Fort Saint Louis. Before the pandemic, a ferry ran between Marigot and the British island of Anguilla, which would have made for a fun day excursion. Alas...

Kirby poses with the Tricolore atop Fort Saint Louis.

Another (mostly) empty beach. This is Kim Sha beach in Simpson Bay, west of Philipsburg.

The sun sets over Simpson Bay.

Long Beach in Baie Longue. We stopped here on a catamaran excursion, which visited several beaches and snorkeling spots along the southern end of the island.

A view from the catamaran of some of the homes and resorts on Pelican Key, on the Dutch side of the island. 

A cluster of restaurants on Orient Bay, on the French side of the island. We did most of our dining on the French side of the island. The food was excellent! 

Princess Juliana Airport was heavily damaged by Hurricane Irma, and several years later only makeshift repairs have been completed. It was also extremely crowded. 

While we enjoyed the trip, this is the last time I am going to travel internationally until the Coronavirus pandemic is over.* It was a real hassle, and knowing what I know now (articles like this one would have helped me, had I found them ahead of time) I probably wouldn't have done it. The hoops we had to jump through - getting a COVID test within 72 hours of travel, filling out a form on Sint Maarten's website and waiting to receive authorization to travel, purchasing mandatory "COVID insurance” on that same website, printing everything out so that test results and travel authorizations could be verified both in Miami (where we flew out from) and at Princess Juliana, checking our temperature every morning and reporting it to Sint Maarten health authorities via a special website for tourists - were considerable, and a failure at any point would have doomed the trip. 

We also had to get tested in order to return to the United States, which our timeshare did, for $100 per person, utilizing a "doctor" using an in-home rapid test that miraculously showed everybody as being COVID-negative in a matter of minutes. American Airlines accepted the negative test document he gave all of us when we checked in to fly back home, but the process was shady as hell.

Finally, two personal notes about future travel plans:

• First, I am not going to take my son on any more trips unless he has his own room with his own bed. His (oftentimes tiresome) teenage surliness aside, it really wasn't fair for him to have to sleep on the pull-out sofa in the living room, next to the kitchen where people woke up early to eat breakfast and talk. It interrupted his sleep and made him grouchy.

• Second, I am going to try to stick to a minimum of two weeks for vacation. This isn't always easy and calls for me to plan and reserve my vacation time carefully, but one-week vacations are simply too short. You don't feel like you've had any "time off." (To be sure, we did spend a couple of days visiting some of Corinne's friends in Florida before we flew on to Sint Maarten, so this vacation ended up being about a week and a half long. It still felt too short.)

Here's to hoping that there is a light at the end of the tunnel that is the current pandemic, and that everybody can have wonderful vacations in 2022. 

Happy New Year!

*Exclusively domestic travel for family vacations also makes sense, given my father's aforementioned mobility issues. When you travel domestically, you can expect most facilities - airports, hotels, museums, etc. - to abide by ADA regulations. Traveling internationally, you can't always expect such accommodations.

Amsterdam's reprieve from overtourism

 Frida Ghitis reflects upon an Amsterdam transformed by the pandemic:

There's an unfamiliar seriousness in the air. The city that routinely drew millions of visitors, some looking for high art, many simply wanting to smoke pot, has grown a bit quieter. The people, it appears to me, have become friendlier. The city seems more grounded -- and lovelier than ever.

My last pre-pandemic visit was in 2019. Amsterdamers were exasperated, then, drowning in a flood of tourists. That year, an unbelievable 21 million people visited what is a relatively small city of less than 900,000 people.

Some tourists have returned, but the raucous crowds that made it impossible to hold your path for more than a few seconds on a sliver of sidewalk are nowhere in sight. The sidewalk cafes are still full when it's not raining. They have more tables outside. The city is still lively. But you hear almost only Dutch, another noticeable change.

The narrow, cobble-stoned streets are still buzzing with bicycles, but the riders are almost all Dutch. Gone are the swarms of tourists in yellow or red-painted rental bikes, pedaling uneasily and stopping suddenly, disruptively, for snapshot of one of the distinctive 17th century Dutch houses lining the old canals.

One of the (few) positives of the COVID-19 pandemic is that "overtouristed" destinations such as Venice, Dubrovnik, Barcelona and Amsterdam were given a respite from the hordes of visitors and the negative effects they bring: the crowds, the garbage, the kitschy souvenir shops, the vacation rentals pushing out longtime residents. This pause in tourist activity has given these cities time to consider what they want their tourist economy to look like going forward:

While much of the travel industry has spent the last year focused on how to recover from the pandemic as quickly as possible, some of the world’s most tourism-dependent economies are reveling in the emptiness and pushing back on attempts to return to the status quo.

In response, many destinations are using the respite to advance tourism management rather than tourism marketing plans, with an emphasis on more local input and control.

The challenges are steep. And the efforts, in many cases, precede Covid-19. 

But the global travel shutdown over the past year provided a silver lining of sorts for the overtourism problems that were hitting crisis levels in popular hot spots just before the pandemic was declared in March.

“The opportunity right now is that it’s like we’ve had an escape valve,” said Jonathon Day, an associate professor in Purdue’s School of Hospitality and Tourism Management. “We were above or right at capacity in some of our destinations. … Now, we’ve got a moment to say, is the system working?”

If the movements are successful, experts say, they will reshape the tourism experience by focusing on attracting higher-quality tourism that is more interested in and sensitive to local culture and sustainability while bolstering local businesses and enhancing the visitor experience.

Undesirable tourist activity has been a long-running issue for Amsterdam; I blogged about a planned crackdown on marijuana- and prostitution-related tourism over a decade ago. Ghitis notes that the residents of the city are focused on combatting many of the same tourist-related negatives today:

This was a good destination for my first international trip in nearly 18 months. Pre-pandemic Amsterdam might have been a shock to the system. I'm not the only one who likes it like this. The residents of the city have been complaining for years that their quality of life was declining because of overtourism. Authorities are trying to see what they can salvage from one of the few good outcomes of the crisis. They want to restrict arrivals, keep tourists away from cannabis "coffee shops," and prevent them from overrunning the Wallen, the centuries' old neighborhood that is also home to Amsterdam's famed red light district.

Eventually, the pandemic will end and tourists will return. This new, more serious Amsterdam will become another one of the memories of this strange time. For now, walking along the iconic canals, recognizing the quiet, and seeing how much has changed, how even the people seem a little different, is part of what traveling is all about, a heightened sense of awareness, the unmistakable feeling of being alive, and the knowledge that the world is calling out with more places to visit. I can hardly wait! (And I have already made reservations.)

I'd like to make a (responsibly-planned) return trip to Amsterdam sometime in the future as well. But for now, I'm glad that residents are getting a chance to enjoy some relative peace in their own city.

A time-lapse journey through the canals of The Netherlands

A Dutch time-lapse photography company put this video on YouTube a few weeks ago, and it's the coolest thing I've seen all year. It's a birds-eye time-lapse video of a tugboat towing a barge with industrial equipment (perhaps for a refinery or something) along a series of canals from Rotterdam to Amsterdam. 

One of the structures being towed was 30 meters (almost 100 feet) high, so they placed a Canon 4k camera at the top of it. It took one picture every three seconds to produce the 11-minute timelapse you see here. Apparently, this journey took place in 2013, but the video was not able to be released until now. 

There's a map in the corner of the video that follows the path the tugboat and barge are taking through The Netherlands, but the day-long trip roughly goes like this: 

The barge starts in the early morning by crossing underneath Rotterdam's historic De Hef bridge (you can see the twin red towers of the Willemsbrug to the right) and then is towed down the Nieuwe Maas, past the A19 Motorway (0:30), and then up the Hollandse IJssel. It diverts to the Voorhaven at the outskirts of Gouda (2:00), enters the Julianasluis lock (2:10), and then travels up the Gouwe until it takes a left at the Oude Rijn (4:10). 

The barge then passes through the town of Alphen ann den Rijn and then takes a right into the Heimanswetering (4:40). It enters Braassememeer lake (5:10), reaches the Oude Weterring (5:25), and makes a right into the Ringvaart Haarlemmermeer (5:35). It passes by some of KLM's service hangars at Schiphol Airport (7:00) and enters Nieuwe Meer lake (7:45). It then spends some time parked in front of the A4 Motorway on the edge of Amsterdam (7:50 - 8:30) as night falls and the tugboat crew changes. 

After passing through the Nieuwe Meerslius lock (8:35), it enters the narrow Schinkel canal and passes through a shimmering Amsterdam at night, making its way along the Kostverlorenvaart until it reaches the Kattensloot (9:45). It appears to get caught at a bridge (10:05), but eventally makes it to the Westerkanaal (10:25) and enters The IJ - Amsterdam's waterfront - where the barge ends its journey. 

By my count, the barge passes through five vertical lift bridges, three swing bridges, one retractible bridge and 31 separate bascule bridges (I could be off by one or two). It also passes by at least three old Dutch windmills and countless new ones. 

I'm especially fascinated by the diversity of activity (industries, businesses and homes) along the canals, as well as the amount of boat traffic - both business and pleasure - that the canals carry.

If you're interested in seeing a more car-friendly version of a trip between Amsterdam and Rotterdam, YouTube's got you covered as well. 

Yet Another Olympic Wrapup

Another Olympiad is in the books, so it's time for (yet another) wrapup.

The 2018 Winter Olympics may have been held in PyeongChang, South Korea, but they absolutely belonged to Norway. The Scandinavian country of 5 million people utterly dominated the games with 39 total medals (including 14 golds). Germany came in second with 31 medals (14 golds), while Canada came in third with 29 medals (11 golds). The United States ended up with 4th place with 23 medals, including 9 golds.

This is the lowest medal haul for Team USA since 1998, and is reflective of what for at least the first half of the games was a poor performance by the Americans. Team USA did manage a late rally to at least make a respectable showing; that rally included, notably, USA's first-ever medal in womens cross county skiing, the womens hockey team besting Canada for the gold medal for the first time since 1998, and the US Curling Team's improbable comeback to win the county's first gold medal in the sport. And before we spend too much time criticizing Team USA for underachieving, it's worth remembering that, before the advent of the so-called "extreme sports," the United States pretty much sucked at the Winter Olympics. At the Winter Olympics in Calgary 30 years ago, for example, the United States won a grand total of 6 (!) medals.

The Netherlands came in sixth with 20 total medals, because speedskating. Rounding out the top ten were Sweden, South Korea, Switzerland, France and Austria.

Honorable mentions go to a handful of countries that don't usually figure in winter sports: Both Spain and New Zealand won two medals in PyeongChang, the first time either country has medaled since 1992. Hungary won their first medal since 1980 and their first gold medal ever in the Winter Olympics. Belgium won its first medal in twenty years, and little Liechtenstein won its first medal in 30 years.

Tina Weirather's bronze medal in the Womens Super-G, in fact, was enough to give Liechtenstein the highest number of medals per capita, according to this handy website, with one medal per (the beautiful - and expensive - Alpine principality's total population of) 37,531 inhabitants. Norway came in second, winning one medal per every 133,228 inhabitants, while Switzerland came in third, with one medal per every 552,465 inhabitants. The United States came in 24rd, winning one medal per every 13,974,731 inhabitants. Those rankings don't change significantly if you re-rank the medals by weight. Lichtenstein also tops the rankings of medals per GDP, simply because the microstate is ridiculously rich; Norway comes in second on that list as well, while Belarus comes in third and the United States comes in 25th.

Ecuador entered the Winter Olympics for the first time, with a single athlete: cross-country skier Klaus Jungbluth came in 112th (out of 116th) in the Mens 15-Kilometer Freestyle, beating out the famous Shirtless Tongan by two spots. Despite finishing poorly, Ecuador can now claim as many medals in the Winter Olympics as Chile or Argentina (both of who have at least some winter sports infrastructure): zero.

Finally, a follow up from my previous post, wherein I actually gave some praise to NBC's Olympics coverage. Apparently, I'm not the only person who thinks they did better job this time around. It's enough to make Vox's Todd VanDerWerff at least somewhat optimistic about 2020:

None of this suggests that NBC is off the hook forever. The 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo will have many of the same benefits of the 2018 Games, especially when it comes to an advantageous time differential with the US. But the Summer Olympics, where the US is generally more likely to sit atop or near the top of the medal count, often lead NBC to chase its own worst impulses of relentlessly pushing predetermined narratives. (It also won’t help that the Summer Games often schedule major events — especially in track and field — for the cooler evening hours, which will be the early morning in most of the US.) 

But I’m choosing to let the 2018 Olympics give me hope that NBC is finally addressing some of its most persistent criticisms. The network still has a long way to go, and it has to stop assuming that the best way to tell human stories at the games is via packaged profiles straight out of Dateline, rather than letting those human stories unfold in the midst of the competition itself. But maybe the network is moving in the right direction at long last. We’ll find out in two and a half years.

On to Tokyo...

The summer 2015 Eastern Caribbean Adventure

A little over a year ago, my parents, Kirby and myself took a trip to Puerto Rico and a handful of island nations in the Eastern Caribbean. After I returned, I began writing the following entry, but never completed it, and essentially forgot all about it. A few weeks ago, when I started thinking about writing about my summer 2016 trip to Europe, I realized that I never posted anything about my previous summer's adventure.

I thought about finishing this entry and postdating it to last summer as a retroblog. I also thought about just hitting the "delete" button and forgetting all about it. In the end, I decided to just finish it and post it today, because even though the trip is over a year old at this point, it was still a lot of fun and is definitely worth sharing. Besides, here's nothing here that's particularly dated: the things we visited and the sights we saw are all still there.

The trip consisted of a week on Royal Caribbean's Adventure of the Seas (which sails to the Leeward Islands out of San Juan), followed by a week at a timeshare in the Isla Verde area of San Juan, Puerto Rico. We got there via United's nonstop service from IAH to San Juan.

The Adventure of the Seas is part of Royal Caribbean's Voyager Class of vessels, and was the largest cruise ship in the world when it* was launched in 2001. Even though I know there are now bigger and better cruise ships out there, I was still pretty impressed by it (this was only the second time in my life that I had ever been on a cruise, and the previous cruise had been aboard a ship that was much older and smaller).

The Royal Promenade down the center of the ship contains stores, bars and restaurants. The food and service aboard the ship were top-notch, and drinks, while pricey, were not outrageously expensive. On-board wifi, on the other hand, was ridiculously costly. We took advantage of free wifi at restaurants and bars in our ports of call.

The four of us opted for "official" royal Caribbean Shore excursions at each port. Some travelers prefer not to use in-house shore excursions because of cost or inflexibility, but we had no complaints with any of ours.

Our first port of call was Philipsburg, on the Dutch-administered south side of the island of Saint Martin (the north side of the island is administered by France). One of St. Maarten's better known attractions is Maho Beach, located directly at the end of the runway for Princess Juliana Airport. Our tour boat anchored right off the beach, so we could snorkel, drink and relax when we weren't watching the planes pass next to us. The Delta flight in the picture above was coming in from JFK.

Here's a video I took of a KLM 747 from Amsterdam on final approach. Pretty impressive. If you go to St. Maarten, I highly recommend our operator, Airport Adventure SXM. They were very friendly and helpful.

As I noted in my original list of countries I've visited, I've now been to three out of the four "constituent countries" of the Netherlands. (You're next, Curaçao!)

Unfortunately, we did not have time to visit the French side of the island. Maybe next time...

Our second port of call was St. Kitts and Nevis, which is the smallest independent nation in North America. Here, we rode the St. Kitts Scenic Railway, which is a tourist train operating on a rail line that used to be used for transporting sugar cane.

The scenery from the train is very picturesque, and it didn't hurt that they provided us with plenty of rum punch and traditional snacks during our journey. This is the only active railway in the West Indies.

This is the remnant of an old sugar cane refinery on St. Kitts. The cone-shaped building on the left was a windmill and the smokestack is on the right. The island of St. Kitts is dotted with these ruins. However, sugar production is no longer a profitable industry for St. Kitts, and the economy is being diversified into other sectors such as tourism.

Of all the islands we visited during our cruise, St. Kitts appeared to be the least developed. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; there's something to be said for a country that doesn't have a single traffic light!

Our third stop was Antigua, the larger of the two islands that comprise the nation of Antigua and Barbuda. We took a bus tour of the island and stopped at many scenic overlooks, including this vista of English Harbour from Shirley Heights.

My father surveys some of the buildings at Nelson's Dockyard, which was named after Lord Horatio Nelson (the hero of the Battle of Trafalgar). This was a key Caribbean base for the British Royal Navy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It keeps its British charm to this day, right down to the red phone booth in the background.

Our fourth port of call was the beautiful and lush volcanic island of St. Lucia. This is a view of Marigot Bay, which is just south of the island's capital city of Castries. The island was the object of back-and-forth fighting between France and Great Britain for centuries, which is why most of the island's place names are French even though the island's official language is English.

This is a picture of St. Lucia's iconic Pitons - Gros Piton in the back and Petit Piton in the front - with the town of Soufrière in the foreground. Traveling from the capital of Castries to Soufrière required a lengthy bus ride over winding mountain roads, but the scenery was worth the trip. In Soufrière, we also toured a delightful botanical garden as well as the Caribbean's only drive-in volcanic crater.

Our fifth and final stop was Barbados. Unlike the other islands of volcanic origin we visited, Barbados is a coral island. Therefore, its terrain is gentle and rolling, rather than mountainous, and is heavily cultivated. Barbados also appeared to be the most economically-developed of all the islands we visited.

One of our stops during our bus tour of Barbados was Orchid World, with its impressive gardens full of - you guessed it - orchids. We also made a stop at the Sunbury Plantation House, where we dined on Bajan snacks and drinks.

Barbados is famous for its rum, and Chesterfield Browne is one of the "faces" of Mount Gay Rum. Here he poses for my camera at the distillery's visitor center in the capital city of Bridgetown while he prepares a rum tasting for my group. I did the rum tasting tour with a few Royal Caribbean employees who were on shore leave, which was kind of fun.

One thing that was really cool about the cruise was that, with the exception of St. Maarten, every island we visited was its own independent nation. While there are a lot of similarities between St. Kitts, Antigua, St. Lucia and Barbados - language, currency, a fanatical devotion to cricket, even the Queen as the nominal head of state - each has its own unique culture and characteristics, and it's fun to say that we truly visited a different country every day of our cruise.

After we returned to San Juan, we disembarked from the ship and made our way to a timeshare along the Isla Verde beach near San Juan. We only spent one day at the beach, however; there were just so many other things to see and do in Puerto Rico!


El Yunque is the only tropical rainforest in the US Forest Service system, and is an easy drive from San Juan. This view of the forest was taken from atop the Yokahu Tower within the forest.

The forest has a nice visitors center and many hiking trails, where the lush beauty of El Yunque can be observed up close.

This is the red-painted San Juan Gate, which leads into the walled Spanish colonial city of Old San Juan.


Kirby sits atop a wall overlooking the courtyard of San Felipe del Morro fortress on the northwestern tip of Old San Juan. The Spanish used this fortification to defend San Juan from British and Dutch attacks until 1898, when it was taken over by the US military. During World War II it was used to keep watch for German U-Boats. Today, the fortress is operated by the National Park Service.


A rusty old cannon peers through an embrasure cut into San Felipe del Morro's walls. Behind the parapet is the top of one of the distinctive guard towers, or garitas, that dot the walls of Old San Juan and its fortifications.


A couple of hours to the east of San Juan is the Camuy River Cave Park. The caves were formed by the underground Camuy River. Due to low light levels, the above picture simply does not to justice to the massive Cueva Clara chamber, with its stalactites, stalagmites and other cave features.



Not far from the Camuy Caves is the massive Arecibo Observatory. Although popularly associated with searches for extraterrestrial life (through projects such as the Arecibo Message and its appearance in TV shows such as The X Files and movies such as Contact), much of the research conducted by this radio telescope centers on radio astronomy and atmospheric research. 

Puerto Rico Highway 22 is technically part of the Interstate Highway System, although it is not signed as such. It's designed to interstate standards, with the exception that the highway signs are in Spanish rather than English and are marked in kilometers rather than miles. The speed limits, however, are all marked in miles, which might be confusing. The big yellow vehicle to the left is a "zipper"machine that moves the movable barrier between the inside lanes of the highway during rush hour, so that the peak direction gets an extra lane.

We actually sent a couple of days exploring Old San Juan. The colonial city, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site as well as on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places, is very picturesque, with colorful colonial buildings and narrow cobblestone streets. Bars, restaurants, art galleries, boutique hotels and jewelry stores are among the businesses found within Old San Juan.

  I took this video from atop Fort San Cristobal, another former Spanish fortification and current Nation Park property on the northeast of Old San Juan.You can see San Felipe del Morro in the distance, as well as Old San Juan, the Puerto Rico Capitol Building, and some of the high rises of modern San Juan.

Puerto Rico was facing a host of crushing economic problems when we visited, and those problems have only gotten worse in the year since we took our trip. The island is straining under a massive $72 billion debt load, the island's economy is shrinking, and it it is hemorrhaging population as Puerto Ricans make their way to the US mainland in search of better jobs and quality of life. The summer we visited the island was also being ravaged by a drought; several restaurants that we visited gave us bottled water to drink because water rationing meant that they had no water service that particular day. (The drought situation seems to be better now.) Furthermore, tourism is the lifeblood of the Puerto Rican economy, and there seemed to be a lot of concern about improved relations with Cuba and the possibility that tourists will begin visiting that island instead of Puerto Rico because it is cheaper. All in all, it's a very sad fate to what is otherwise a very beautiful island.

With all that said, it was a great trip and one that I had been meaning to take for a long time. The week at sea + week at a timeshare combination worked out very well for us (especially since my parents collect timeshares like some people collect stamps and can easily exchange them for places like where we stayed in Isla Verde) and we'll probably do it again on future adventures.

*I do not subscribe to the ridiculous and archaic practice of using feminine pronouns like "she" or "her" when referring to maritime vessels. Cruise ships are inanimate objects that do not possess gender.

A word about MH17

Commercial aviation disasters always disturb me, but I am especially horrified and haunted by the incident involving MH17, the Malaysian airliner carrying 298 people - 2/3rds of them Dutch citizens - that was shot down over Eastern Ukraine last Thursday.

Horrified, because hundreds of innocent people minding their own business on a flight between Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur were slaughtered due to a conflict they had nothing to do with.

Haunted, because I have flown over that part of Ukraine several times before, during my travels to and from Dubai. In fact, the most direct route between IAH and DXB goes right over this area of conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Try it yourself on a globe or on Google Earth.

At the time I was making all those trips to Dubai and back, Eastern Ukraine was not embroiled in the conflict that it is today. But my flights took me over other areas of strife, such as Georgia, Transnistria, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and of course, Iraq. I remember well the many times I stared out my airplane window as I flew over those areas, aware of the tension and outright violence occurring thousands of feet below but blithely assuming that those fighting would not have the wherewithal or desire to shoot down a third-party commercial airliner flying thirty-five thousand feet overhead.

As last Thursday's horror proves, however, that blithe assumption was wrong. And MH17 could have been any flight. Including, at another time or under another circumstance, my own.

My heart goes out to the families and friends of the victims of those whose lives were claimed by this barbaric attack, and I hope that the thugs responsible for this catastrophe are one day brought to justice.

Random post-Olympic thoughts

For all the hand-wringing about the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia - fears of terrorism and rampant homophobia, horror stories about stray dogs being murdered en masse or hotel rooms without doorknobs or potable water - the games themselves were pretty uneventful.  Even the doping and judging scandals required of every Olympic Games were relatively muted. I even went the entire two weeks without bothering to write about NBC's lousy Olympics coverage, which is a first for me. 

A few thoughts about the final medal count:

Norway's winter athletics prowess is amazing. This is a nation of just over five million people. More people live in the Houston metropolitan area than live in that entire country. Yet Norway came in third in the overall medal count with 26 medals, including 11 golds. I did the math and determined that that is one medal per approximately 198 thousand Norwegians. The United States, by comparison, won one medal per 11.3 million Americans, while Russia won one medal per every 4.3 million Russians, Canada won one medal for every 1.4 million Canadians, and China won one medal per every 150 million Chinese. I know Norwegians love their winter sports, but that is a remarkable statistic.

Other nations with low medal-to-population ratios include Slovenia (one medal per every  257 thousand people), Austria (one medal per every 479 thousand people) and Latvia (one medal per every 500 thousand people).

The Netherlands, on the other hand, had the most efficient participating athletes. The Dutch team consisted of 41 athletes and won 24 medals. That's 1.7 athletes per medal; Norway, by comparison, had 5.2 athletes per medal, while Russia had 7.0 athletes per medal and the United States had 8.2 athletes per medal.

Speaking of The Netherlands, has any country dominated a Winter Olympics sport as thoroughly as they dominated speedskating? Conversely, has any team in the history of the Winter Olympics ever won so many medals in spite of being so one-dimensional? Of their 24 medals, which was good enough for fifth place in the overall medal count, 23 of them were won in speedskating (they won 64% of the medals awarded in that sport; the United States, on the other hand, won 0%) Their one other medal? Short track skating.

The United States, for its part, did okay, ending up with 28 medals in spite of generally disappointing results in ice skating and speed skating. This was good for second place in the overall medal count, including nine golds. Twelve of those medals were in freestyle skiing and snowboarding events, however, which leads one to wonder how well Team USA would have done if these "extreme" sports had not been recently added to the Olympics.

On the other hand, what happened to Germany's Olympic team? Since reunifying in 1990, Germany has competed in seven winter Olympics and until now has proven itself to be a wintertime powerhouse: in the six previous Olympics, Germany averaged 29 medals per games and never ended up lower than third in the overall medal standings. In Sochi, the Germans ended up with a total of 19 medals and only 6th in the standings.

Am I the only person who finds it surprising that neither Chile nor Argentina has ever won a single medal in the Winter Olympics? Both nations have multiple high-quality winter sports facilities in the Andes, which attract winter athletes from the rest of the world who want to train and practice during the northern hemisphere summer/southern hemisphere winter. Neither country has been able to convert this resource into Olympic performance, however. Australia, on the other hand, came away with three medals from these games, in spite of the fact that there are no winter sports facilities of any type in that country; it rarely snows Down Under.

The biggest non-sports story of the games was probably the incident where the protest band Pussy Riot was attacked by Cossacks with horsewhips while trying to film a music video. Only in Russia.

Finally: is it just me, or has the novelty of the Jamaican boblsed team worn off?

For more thoughts on the final count, see USA Today's For The Win blog.

Curtains for the Red Light District?

It looks like Amsterdam is about to pull the plug on its famous (or, perhaps more accurately, infamous) Red Light District:

Arguing that too many brothels and sex bars are linked to criminality, the authorities plan to all but erase the Red Light District. If the plan goes through, the peep shows, sex shops and prostitute windows that line the small alleys and canals will have to go, giving way to galleries, boutiques and upscale restaurants and bars. Goodbye to the big neon signs advertising every possible form of sexual indulgence.
Amsterdam without the Red Light District? Wouldn't that be like Paris without the Eiffel Tower? Amsterdam's mayor, Job Cohen, and his aldermen have demonstrated little nostalgia for the district, which has been the world's most famous home of sexual permissiveness since the 15th century. They first unveiled the plan to close it in December; last month they revoked the licenses of two widely known sex venues, the Casa Rosso and the Banana Bar. The next step is to buy out the real estate owners. Last fall the city struck a deal with a powerful brothel owner, Charles Geerts (known as "Fat Charlie"), to buy 20 buildings.

This reminds me of some of the conversations I had with people here in Houston a couple of years ago when I mentioned to them that I was traveling through Amsterdam on my way to Dubai: "You have a long layover in Amsterdam? Cool! Are you going to go to a coffeeshop and smoke some pot? Are you going to go to the Red Light District and find a whore?"

Well, no: those are not things I would have any interest in doing (aside from the fact that coming into contact with illegal drugs before traveling to Dubai is a very, very bad idea). But it did reinforce a perception that Amsterdam has developed an international reputation as some sort of wild, drug-and-sex-crazed hippie utopia. And that reputation is undeserved.

Amsterdam is a truly delightful city, with its charming architecture and picturesque canals, its bicycles and its trams, its quiet cafes and multi-ethnic dining options, its museums and its squares. The coffeeshops and the brothels might be part of its charm, and they certainly say something about the legendary tolerant and liberal attitude of the Dutch.

But when the pot and the prostitutes themselves begin to define the city - and, for that matter, the Netherlands as a whole - in the eyes of the rest of the world, something unfortunate happens. A caricature of the Netherlands emerges, one which reduces the country to little more than an anything-goes emporium of drugs and sex. The country that literally reclaimed itself from the sea, the country that gave us Van Gogh and Rembrandt, the country that originally settled what is now New York City, the country that gave us one of the most heart-rending narratives of Nazi brutality is all but forgotten as Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands become regarded by outsiders as little more than a destination for sex and drugs.

Little wonder, then, that Dutch authorities have started to crack down:

But here those anxieties are exacerbated by alarm over the international crime organizations that have infiltrated the country's prostitution and drug trades, the increasing prevalence of trafficking in women and children across its borders, and dismay over the Netherlands' image as an international tourist destination for drugs and sexual debauchery.

"There is an uneasiness about globalization that the Dutch don't have control over their own country anymore," said James C. Kennedy, professor of contemporary history at the Free University of Amsterdam. "There is a more conservative mood in the country that is interested in setting limits and making sure things don't get out of hand."

[...]

(Amsterdam city councilmember Frank) de Wolf said he is fed up with the planeloads of British thrill-seekers who take cheap flights to Amsterdam each Friday evening for weekend binges of sex, drugs and alcohol in his city's red-light district, where scantily clad prostitutes stand behind plate-glass windows beckoning to potential customers.

"Amsterdam has a reputation that you can do everything here," de Wolf said. "That's not the way I want people to look at Amsterdam."

Those same concerns have prompted some cities to bar tourists from their marijuana and hashish shops. Some localities now require patrons of the shops to show Dutch identity cards to gain entry, and a new nationwide law forbids the sale of alcohol in shops that sell pot and hash. Some lawmakers have proposed requiring the shops to warn their customers about the dangers of cannabis, mimicking the warning labels on tobacco and alcohol products.

Ivo Opstelten, the mayor of Rotterdam, the second-largest Dutch city, announced this month that he will close all marijuana shops within 250 yards of a school -- nearly half of the city's 62 shops.

This crackdown, it would appear, is now extending to Amsterdam's Red Light District. Speaking personally, I would hate to see the Red Light District disappear completely; for all its sleaze, I do believe it is one of the things that makes Amsterdam unique, if only marginally. But for Dutch authorities who are intent on reclaiming their country's image, it might be a small price to pay.

Half a world a way? Not quite...

According to this interesting tool on an Indonesian tourism website, the straight-line distance between Houston, Texas and Dubai, United Arab Emirates is 8,181 miles.

So, when I told people in Houston before I left that I would be traveling halfway around the world for business, I wasn't being completely accurate.

The earth's average circumference is about 24,881.3 miles (I say "average" because the earth is not perfectly round; some measurements have a slightly different circumference than others, for example the circumference along the equator is 25,046.9 miles). That means that, to technically be on "the other side of the world" from Houston, I'd have to be half the earth's average circumference, 12,440.6 miles away. So, I'd have another 4,260 miles to go before I'd be completely halfway around the world from Houston.

But back in the late 80s, when I spent my summers in Ecuador and my friend Colin was living in Malaysia, the two of us were pretty damn close to being exactly on the other side of the world from one another. The straight line distance from Kuala Lumpur to Quito is 12,223 miles: merely 300 miles short of half the earth's circumference at the equator (which both cities are very close to).

How's that for some useless personal trivia!

Anyway, even though I don't have to truly travel halfway around the world to get back to Houston, Friday's trip is sure going to feel like it. Six hours from here to Amsterdam, another nine and a half hours from Amsterdam to Houston, and a four-hour layover in Amsterdam on top of that. I'm not looking forward to the journey, but I am looking forward to coming home.

This will probably be my last post from this trip to Dubai. I expect to in Houston Friday afternoon local time and be there for just over two weeks before coming back here.

Made it...

I'm now at my hotel in Dubai, where it is about 12:30 in the morning local time. The trip was long and exhausting, but it wasn't horrible by any means. The added security measures in the United States meant that lines at the ticket counters were longer (because everybody was checking items they used to be able to carry on such as make-up and toothpaste) but the security screening lines were shorter (because there were fewer carry-on items to be scanned).

My flight from Houston to Amsterdam was on time and relatively free of turbulence. It’s gotten to the point that, even though I can’t sleep on these trans-Atlantic flights, I can at least put on my headphones and “zone out” such that I lose track of time and the trip seems shorter than it actually is.

Because I had a good six hours to kill between flights in Amsterdam, I decided to do a little bit of sightseeing. I left the terminal, purchased a train ticket at the NS counter at the front of the airport, and traveled to Haarlem, where I walked around, took pictures and sat at a café on the edge of Haarlem's market plaza, sipping a soft drink and taking in the delightful Dutch street activity and architecture. I really like the Netherlands. It’s a lovely country in its scale and composition and the people are friendly.

After a couple of hours in Haarlem, I made my way back to Schiphol Airport, grabbed a bite to eat, and waited for my flight to Dubai to depart. Since the last time I flew here, KLM was upgraded their equipment on the AMS-DXB route and now uses modern and spacious (relatively speaking, of course; they still try to cram as many seats as they can into the aircraft) Boeing 777s. The nice thing about the 777 is that every seat has its own TV monitor and you can watch what you want when you want. Once again, the flight was on time and the trip was smooth. Once again, I had no luck getting any sleep but was successful in "zoning out" such that the time passed quickly.

No hassles once I landed in Dubai; I went through passport control, collected my bags, strolled through customs and found a driver from my hotel waiting for me. This hotel is right down the street from the airport terminal and is rather nice with the exception that this internet connection I'm using isn't free; needless to say, I'll probably not be using it too often. My room has a view that overlooks the interchange of Airport Road and Al Garhoud Road; I also have a perfect view of DXB's runway so I can watch planes take off and land. I don't think this is serendipitious; I think the office manager here in Dubai remembered that I am a commercial aviation geek and specifically requested this room for me!

Anyway, it's time to get some sleep. I do need to make it into the office at a reasonable time tomorrow morning (although I doubt they expect to see me at 8 am sharp, given my late arrival), it's going to be a busy day.