shannon_a

FRANKFURT AIRPORT HOLIDAY INN.

3.30AM (CET). "Four Chords" goes off on my phone, and I stumble awake feeling like a poleaxed steer. It genuinely takes me a minute to figure out where I am and what's going on.

I lurch about, brushing my teeth and collecting my stuff together.

3.39AM (CET). "Four Chords" goes off again. This time I manage to figure out how to turn the alarm off rather than just snoozing it.

3.45AM (CET). I stumble out into the night. I'd gone back and forth for a while about whether to walk into Frankfurt Airport or take the train (my day pass from yesterday goes through to 5am). I finally came to a decision last night when I realized that the train ran to Terminal 1 and that KLM was in Terminal 2, which was also closer to the hotel.

I'd been somewhat nervous because of all the highways and complex multilane/multiroad intersections between the Holiday Inn and the airport, but a run through of Google Streetview last night convinced me it was OK.

Sure enough, and once I get to the other side of the highway, I can just follow the suitcase caravan, silhouetted against the light-polluted skies of night. Good thing, too, because when I get close to the Terminal, the path becomes increasingly less obvious. But finally I emerge into the bright faux-daytime of the terminal.

FRANKFURT AIRPORT.

4.00AM (CET). The displays tell me which desks ("positions") to go to, and eventually I find an empty line for KLM in front of empty positions. There's no one else here. I position myself there.

It's Hurry Up and Wait Time.

4.30AM (CET). A line has formed behind me, and meanwhile a few latecomers have appeared in the we're-rich/Priority line. Despite their late arrival, they'll get served first, which is how it works to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. Meanwhile, the Priority clerk has shown up, but no American exceptionalism for her: she does the work of setting up every single position before settling into the Priority desk.

4.45AM (CET). Two-thirds of the priority line has been served, and I think to myself, "If only the people in this plebeian line had worked harder to get up to see a clerk, then perhaps they also would be on their way to their gate."

And then in a wave the clerks for the rest of the positions show up. I am first of the plebeians. It's easy enough to get checked in, to bid adieu to my bag, and to get my boarding passes for all three planes. It's ridiculous that I had to get up at 3.30 to do this, but there wasn't a lot of option with Delta refusing to check me in beforehand. I'm not taking chances when there's half-a-world to traverse.

I would say, "Note to Self" that I should book with KLM next time in a situation like this, but Delta actually made it really hard to see that the initial flights were KLM's and not theirs: I didn't know for sure who had which flights until I got my boarding passes today.

5.00AM (CET). No "TSAPre" for me here. I actually note that my boarding passes list me as TSAPre for the second and third flights, but not the first one, which is wacky since the first one is (hopefully) the only one where I'll have to enter an airport. (Spoiler: not the case, but that lies far ahead, in America.)

There's actually no security line at 5am, but because I don't have a pre-clearance here in Europe, I have to use the naked-picture machine, and they apparently don't like the results, because I get felt up much more thoroughly than I would at an American airport. Maybe it's not even about the results, because they seem to be feeling up EVERYONE who trickles through at this very early point of the day.

And after that I wander down to my gate, which curiously has its sitting area behind a "secured" door. So I'm the first person to position myself in the chairs out in the hallway.

It's Hurry Up and Wait Time.

6.15AM (CET). The gate's desk opens. A huge group of people rush over to be serviced. Hello, don't you have seat assignments already? It's a little "hopper" flight from Frankfurt to Amsterdam, nothing to worry about. Is there something else you need to Karen at the desk?

(Maybe they just want to be able to get into the locked room with more seats, as passengers are now sprawled across about 50 yards of corridor around the gate. But they won't.)

6.20AM (CET). People now seem to be magnetically drawn to the gate area, to hover about even if they don't have a problem. They just stand there at attention, one hand on a rollerbag.

6.30AM (CET). Time to go! After they scan our boarding passes we very briefly see the fabled land of the secret seating room, but we just rush through it.

What is sadder than a roomful of chairs that are never used?

6.40AM (CET). Down, down we go, to my surprise onto the tarmac, and even more to my surprise into a bus! We all sit around there, acting like this is completely normal (and perhaps it is at Frankfurt).

6.45AM (CET). The bus initially heads straight away from the airport, which is unnerving, but then it takes a few turns and soon we're threading a labyrinth made out of airplanes. We eventually stop by one and everyone unloads into the cold Frankfurt morning. Most of them are bright enough to be wearing jackets and coats; not I. I try to act like I'm warm and don't care.

We then climb up a stairway to the airplane like it's 1965.

ON PLANE #1.

6.50AM (CET). My rowmate asks me to swap seats with her boyfriend, which moves my row 6 seat to a row 4 seat, a huge gain given the mad dash required in Amsterdam. (An hour and a half to transit the airport and clear Passport Control, which is probably fine on a Sunday morning, but nonetheless, I'm happy to get every advantage.)

A few minutes later, the hatch closes, leading me to hope that we'll indeed make our scheduled 7am departure, likely the most critical element in whether I make my plane in Amsterdam, back to AMERICA.

7.15AM (CET). And finally, we're cleared to take off, a little late but not bad.

KLM's "city hopper" seats are really quite comfortable compared to the "island hopper" seats on Hawaiian. They're wide and have plenty of leg room and also comfortable leather. It makes me cross my fingers for the LONG flight on KLM.

So comfortable ...

7.30AM (CET). I wake up after 5 or 10 minutes of sleep feeling refreshed enough that I'm not going to sleep again on this flight. Will it be my only sleep for this bizarre day? We shall see ...
(Spoiler: I manage 5 minute maybe five or six times over the course of a day's travel.)

AMSTERDAM AIRPORT.

8.15AM (CET). I unload ... onto another bus. Darn it, there goes my two-row advantage (and some of my advantage of making sure I was very near the front of the plane).

8.25AM (CET). Passport control! The signs say 20-25 minutes. The line is long, but moving. This is all pretty typical for the few times I've been through Amsterdam.

8.30AM (CET). There is a total Karen right behind me. Unshockingly, she's from America. She complains about being forced to use self check-out machines at Albertson's. Then she goes on to something about Mexicans using self check-out machines, which I don't really understand, but I'm pretty sure is something racist. She complains about the auto-passport machines the Europeans use, not because they get to go much faster, but instead because THEY TAKE YOUR PICTURE. (Karen is apparently unaware that her Passport also includes a picture.)

There's a "short connection" lane, for people who are rushing, and I listen to them tick up the time. They will take departures of 9.20. 9.25. 9.30. 9.35. My departure is 9.50, so I'm not *quite* a short connection yet, when I leave that central lane behind for the last time, to head off to the Passport stampers.

Karen wonders if maybe she can use her BOARDING TIME as if it were a departure time, but her husband discourages her. It's the only time I hear him break into her constant monologue of complaints the whole time I'm in line.

8.55AM (CET). Finally, to the front! As I stand in line before the ALL PASSPORTS lane, there's a EUROPEAN PASSPORT lane to my right. Someone occasionally comes up to use it, but people from our line can also step it into if the agent is free and there are no waiting Europeans. Karen, talking to my back, keeps telling me that I should queue up in the line. Color me totally unsurprised that her entitlement doesn't allow her to understand that the Europeans have priority, and we only get to use that line IF IT'S CLEAR.

I totally ignore her. Karen hates that. I do eventually step into the European line when it's clear, however.

(And thank you for amusing me for thirty minutes with your overprivileged inanity, Karen.)

9.00AM (CET). When I get to my gate, which is a bit of a walk, there's already a queue for "Zones 1 to 2", which I am a part of. It's labeled "Sky Priority", which I guess means that I really did only have myself to blame for not being in the faster lane this morning at the Frankfurt Airport. I could totally have lifted myself by my bootstraps.

(From past experience, I thought my comfort seat on this second flight likely meant I qualified for Sky Priority, but I wasn't sure because none of my literature said so, likely again because I went through Delta, and the seat on my *first* [short] flight wasn't any kind of priority. So I minimized the possibility of discord on this very long day, knowing that if I was first in the plebeian line, I'd still be to my gate in plenty of time.)

At last, it's again Hurry Up and Wait Time. Though not for long. I wished I'd hurried 5-10 minutes less so that I could have grabbed something to eat. But I think I have two squares of good-ish chocolate in my backpack, which I dumped out of my fridge in Köln two days ago.

ON PLANE #2.

9.15AM (CET). I have a "premium comfort" seat for my flight from Europe to the US, which is a considerable step down from Business Class, but a considerable step up from Economy. We get "Refreshing Towels" to clean ourselves, but they come packaged and are COLD. Bleh.

Seriously, though, the seat's much nicer than I expected for the price, wide and with plenty of room, though there's a weird cyborg arm hanging down with a light. I constantly catch it out of the corner of my eye and feel like it's invading my personal space.

Ironically, I actually passed by my seat on the way in, figuring it was the first class lounge, and only doubled back when I saw I'd passed my number

It turns out that the seats do have one deficit: they recline enough that it's hard to get out of your row if the chairs in front of you are reclined. You have to do a weird diagonal walk. (Meanwhile, I'm sitting in another favorite location of mine: in front of the faux-bulkhead separating premium from economy, which means that I can recline my seat without worrying about inconveniencing someone behind me, and I DO. It's very comfortable, something that I would realize even moreso when I sadly have to transfer to Delta for the final leg of my journey.

9.50AM (CET). We do not take off. Word is that there is a "shortage of ground equipment", but that we should be taking off 10 minutes late or so. (Actual answer: 30.)

11.00AM (CET). Turns out my seat tray (which is one of those ones that lifts out of the arm) has a considerable slant to it. My tomato juice constantly tries to slide toward my row mate. Fun times.

11.40AM (CET). Food at last. Well, I mean other than the nuts earlier in the trip (not heated like in business class). In fact, it's probably better than I arrived on the plane hungry given they'll be constantly serving us food for the next half-a-day.

12.10PM (CET). What I had thought was a sobbing infant has begun screaming "I'll get you, I'll get you, I'll get you". It's somewhat disconcerting.

4.00PM (CET). My row mate has taken up sniffling as a new hobby, with a bit of coughing thrown in for variety. I'm regretting the unmasked eating and drinking earlier, but what else can you do on an 11-hour flight? (That's why I go ahead and get the ridiculous Business Class on the way out, so I can sit on my own and minimize the odds that I come down with something just as the workshop starts.)

5.00PM (CET). 11 hours is certainly enough time to learn to loathe everyone around you, such as the gentleman in front of me who THROWS himself back in his seat every time he moves, and has banged my computer any number of times as a result.

7.00PM (CET). The sun has been our constant companion today, at least once we lifted past the clouded skies of Amsterdam. We've got those fancy tintable windows that I also saw on United last year, and I've had my windows dimmed down to the next-to-last level much of the flight, so that I can see the sky but not blind myself or my (coughing) seat mate. But even at that level it's starting to get quite bright as we head toward 7pm CET, but which is likely 10am under us. (I think we're in the Pacific time zone by now: the maps shows us passing by the Yellowstone Caldera.)

7.30PM (CET). I opt to skip the final meal service of the day, both because I'm tired of eating (and I want to save room for Taco Bell in Lihue) and to avoid at least some of the danger of the mad cougher what coughs at midnight (and most other times).

8.00PM (CET). Another Karen has decided that it's OK to start jazzercizing in the aisle.

LOS ANGELES.

11.50AM (PDT). We land in LA and my phone and watch click over to PDT. It's not quite noon.

I always find long plane rides to be weird limbo-like experiences. But that's even more the case when flying back from Europe. Timewise, it's just a few hours since we lifted off on Amsterdam, but of course a whole day has gone by. Weird.

12.10PM (PDT). I am shocked by the long labyrinth we walk to get to Customs. It must be close to a mile. (By the end of the day I pass 5 miles of walking, with the biggest contributors being the walking at LAX and at the very start of the morning the walk down to the Frankfurt airport.)

I finally get to Customs and drop into the Global Entry line. Last year, at Seattle, it didn't work at all. This time, I go up to a machine, take off my mask and glasses, it TAKES MY PICTURE and ...

A woman at the front calls my name!

It doesn't even need my card any more. That's spooky!

12.25pm (PDT). I'm always put off by the need to get my checked bag and then check it back in when I arrive in the US. I mean, I remember they used to search you sometimes back in the '90s, but now you mostly just walk through the no-declarations archway and that's it. But it's a bit of stress as you have to figure out where to go to get your baggage back on the planes.

Still, I guess it's nice to see that your luggage made it to the US!

12.30pm (PDT). Oh right, weird backroom TSA because the United States doesn't trust the security checks in other countries. Even though my check in Frankfurt was much more extensive than the one in LAX. Good thing my third boarding pass says "TSAPre" on it. I mean, none of the backroom TSA lines are long, but it means that I get to keep my shoes on.

I do have to sit around a bit, though, after I try and smuggle in a bottle of water. (Total accident: I'd been accumulating plastic water bottles throughout my backpack across the previous two flights because I'd packed my good metal water bottle in my luggage, as I was afraid I'd otherwise lose track of it at some point in this long 24+ hour day.) Good job TSA folks, catching that dangerous water bottle overlooked by previous security checks! I mean the water bottle that actually came off of another, totally secure plane.

Anyway, back to square one: no water on me. I eventually buy some at Starbucks for $5. Also, a chocolate croissant. Mmmm.

12.45pm (PDT). It takes me just less than an hour gate to gate at LAX, most of that time spent walking.

It took me just more than an hour gate to gate at Amsterdam, most of that spent standing in line.

Is there some lesson here about Europe and the United States?

It's Hurry Up and Wait Time.

ON PLANE #3.

2.45pm (PDT). The Delta flight is definitely the least nice of my flights for the day. It's all just tinier and more cramped. I have two row mates for the first time, despite my Comfort+ seat, and there's a teeny single bathroom just a few rows ahead. The sound is also louder, though not as bad as that horrible Delta flight from Seattle last year.

Delta just wouldn't be high on my list of carriers if not for the fact that they seem to be the only airline running afternoon flights to Hawaii from the West Coast, allowing me to get from Europe in a single (extremely long) day.

So I'll keep hoping that Hawaiian actually gets those big planes they've been promising to allow direct flights to Europe.

3pm (PDT). I am astounded how smoggy all of the LA area looks like as we take off. Smoke? Smog? Fog? I dunno, but it's not attractive.

3.15pm (PDT). Delta actually runs free snacks (chips and stuff) through the cabin, then drinks, before bringing out a scam cart of paid food (making it almost not a scam cart, because the "scam", which I think I saw for the first time on Hawaiian though it could have been United, involves getting people to buy food rather than waiting for the free stuff 30 minutes later).

But I hope you're not hungry, because chips, cookies, and granola is all that Delta thinks you "need" for a 6 hour flight. See above about them being a bargain-basement airline. I mean, not Southwestern or Spirit or anything.

4.55pm (PDT). Almost no one was masked on my European flights (other than moi). It's still a huge minority, but on this final, American flight a small percentage of people are. Not what I would have expected (but I did hear while in Europe that people there were acting like COVID wasn't a threat any more).

5.45pm (PDT). Hearing the constant wrapping and unwrapping os Subway sandwiches, I almost feel like I'm riding the bus rather than taking the airplane. If nothing else, Delta is a very different level of quality from KLM. So maybe it does feel like Spirit, but only in comparison.

LIHUE AIRPORT.

5.15pm (HST). We're almost 45 minutes early landing, so I suppose Delta does have that going for it (though really, they're probably not responsible for beneficial trade winds).

This last flight has been agony. I've been exhausted, but unable to sleep because of the uncomfortable seat. So I move back and forth between playing a stupid game, trying to read a comic, and just staring. Oh, I edit a bit too, but will reedit the whole chapter Monday morning, just in case.

Not even food to distract.

Nonetheless the 5+ hours whiz by and I'm thrilled to see the familiar Lihue airport.

5.30pm (HST). At the baggage claim. One monitor reads "Windows Media Player" and all the rest are black. In other words, nothing says what bags are arriving where. Fortunately, there are only two baggage carousels, so I just go stand by the one that starts up. And then the other one starts up and I have no idea where my bag will be. (Spoiler: it's at the carousel I don't choose, of course.)

Kimberly shows up, having been dropped off, which is nice.

And so we wait, trying to watch two baggage carousels simultaneously.

5.45pm (HST) [5.45am (CET). Homeward bound at last! Everyone has come to see me: my dad, Mary, and Kimberly.

There is of course a stop by Taco Bell on the way home.

Some things are worth extending a 26-hour day of travel.

We are done. I will be doing some traveling on Saturday, then all traveling on Sunday, so it pretty much feels like I'm on the way home.

I feel like the workshop ended well. Due to the bifurcation of one group, we ended up with eight papers in process, and everyone was still making enough progress that they were able to upload a current draft of their paper at the end of the day (https://github.com/WebOfTrustInfo/rwot12-cologne/blob/main/draft-documents/README.md). I think we're going to end up with some papers interesting & important for the continued evolution of decentralized identity on the internet. We had some issues with some groups being too small (including a group that ended up singleton) and some not having enough varied presence, which was ultimately a result of the workshop being smaller than our other recent endeavors, but I did my best to encourage even the small groups to take advantage of the larger community of experts we had available at the workshop, so I hope it will come out right.

Our goal is 3-5 papers (or other artifacts) minimum from any workshop, and our recent completion rate has been 50%. Given the challenges, I think 4 will be about right for this workshop, but it'd be lovely to see 5. (I mean it'd be lovely to see 8, even though I have to edit them all, but that's of course much less likely.)

We closed out at about 3.30 or so this afternoon, and I stuck around to get some final pictures and files in place. Since I opted to just keep my editor-in-chief hat on this year, I spent extra time trying to make our record of the event the best ever. I think I'll record that as a success and seriously consider maintaining this new focus in the future. I always supported a paper at previous workshops because it gave me sometime to do, but if I spend 60% of that time instead giving extra support to the workshop, it's just to the workshop's benefit, and I have soooo much of my own work going on that it's easy to fill the other 40%. (I edited one chapter of the Traveller manuscript and cleaned up the two maps associated with us, which will tell you how much free time I had after I'd done all the supportive work I wanted — which is to say a few hours.)

==

I know I spoke a number of times about how horrible the internet was in Köln (and Hürth), but I'm not sure I ever expressed the ubiquity of that horribleness.

I mean obviously I have scarcely any internet at my AirBnB. I'm lucky to be able to upload these text journals.

But that was true for everyone I talked to. Every hotel and AirBnB seemed to have at the least very slow internet. (I don't think most others were as entirely non-functional as mine.)

The facility that was kind enough to lend us (GREAT!) space for the workshop also had very slow internet, at least on their "GAST" network. Several times I set a handful of pictures to upload to our repo, and then walked away for 5 minutes.

And the data on the cell network was horrible too. It was often slow, to the point where pages (and maps!) wouldn't load. A few times I couldn't even buy train tickets through their app.

When that big conference was going on midweek, things were even worse!

I have no idea how a whole modern European city could universally have such awful internet, but that really seemed to be the case here in Köln. I'm hoping things will be better in Frankfurt, and at my hotel there tomorrow, just to bring the frustration to an end.

(F., my friend in Frankfurt, says it'll be just as bad there because it's a German problem, but that the hotel should be fine since it's "airport people".)

==

After the workshop I as usual got a train that only went to Köln Sud (because Köln's currently broken railway network isn't running trains from Hürth to Köln West during the day for at least this week).

But I had a new destination: A GAME STORE

The walk there was great. I started to have some aching tendons or something yesterday, but I hit them with anti-inflammatories and they were 80% better today and so I enjoyed a walk through new neighborhoods, which included some nice old buildings and a big walking arcade caleld the Schildergasse. I was thrilled to see this district, so different from what I'd visited before.

The store is called "Brave New World", and it's a pretty great store. Two floors of board games (and a tiny room of RPGs), all stored with spine out and carefully alphabetized. The store is just slightly labyrinthine and the end result is an amazing amount of gaming. I don't think I've ever seen a board game store so well stocked (though I've visited some in other European countries that were close).

They had a lot of stuff in their RPG section that was pretty old, and perhaps I should have browsed longer there. But what I really wanted was a fun board game to remember this trip, so I picked up Iello's _Little Town_ and its _Artisans_ expansion. Not quite as unique as what I got in The Hague last year, but hopefully a fun game!

(I didn't pick it up entirely blind; it was a SdJ recommendation n 2020.)

==

And that was about it for the day.

Tomorrow my travel begins. I'm going to head out at 9am to catch a 10.15 train (and have enough time to walk to the Central Station if the trains aren't running from West, which now seems like an option after a week here). That should have me dropping off my luggage around 11.30 and into the city center of Frankfurt by 12.30 or so. I think I've figured out my train ticketing there (a little easier after a week in Köln), so I should be able to just go. I have plans to meet an old friend at a coffee shop at 16.00, and afterward head back to the hotel to see how early I can get to sleep for my 7am flight on Sunday. That should allow me 3 or 4 hours to see a bit of central Frankfurt, which is terrific.

TPAC 2023 occurred in Seville a week ago. It's a W3C meeting, which means that people are working closely together to advance projects, somewhat like we do here. There were more than a dozen cases of COVID that came out of it, including two of our planned workshop attendees, who couldn't attend as a result.

We talked about that a bit at the start of RWOT12, and someone asked, "What protocols did they have to stop the spread of COVID?" The response: pretty much the same as ours, which means that masks were not required or even encouraged, but that all attendees were sent home with testing kits to test at the beginning of each day (and not come in if they tested positive). The "pretty much the same as ours" should have been the warning sign. (In fact, the TPAC website actually claims they require masking, which is at odds with what I heard, but if that's true, they had much more stringent restrictions than we did, which would've been even more of a warning sign.)

So Monday I stayed masked up for the Poster Night opening ceremony of RWOT. I was literally the only one, but I knew that people had just been through a bunch of airports and train stations and that most of them hadn't taken COVID tests yet, so it seemed prudent.

But Tuesday I decided to trust the process. I mean, this is literally the rest of our lives. And if I was going to stay and eat our group dinner that night (and I did), then it would be ridiculous to mask the rest of the day. So, with no positive tests overnight, I trusted the process and worked without mask all day.

We had a positive test result this morning, so that seems a bit more foolish today. I mean, seriously, we can't stay masked up forever. I mask on public transit, which seems the most high-danger spot, and I masked on Monday when it seemed like there was more danger, but ...

Simultaneously there are virulent new variants out there (again!), COVID _has_ been surging, and I haven't had a booster in more than a year, with the new one just out in the last few days (weeks too late for this trip). But I'm still not sure how we live with this long-term, though I have a suspicion that there will be a younger generation that just shrugs their shoulders at it, which is apparently a prevalent attitude in Europe right now.

Anyway, the positive test result was apparently "weak", so hopefully that means we didn't have spread yesterday, not just because I don't want to see these people I've met and like get sick (or me!), but also because it'd be incredibly disruptive to a working conference to have more of our members go missing.

==

This morning, the trains were a mess when I got up to take the train in to Hürth for RWOT. My whole 10 minutes away by train plan has in fact been a bit more troublesome than I expected.

The first problem seems to be that for whatever reasons, German trains have gotten to be a mess over the last few years. So almost every train I've taken has been delayed a few minutes, but this morning that train I took in to Hürth was delayed 15 minutes.

The second problem seems to be that there's lost of construction going on, our local friends say both in response to the increasing problems with the trains and causing more of them. As a result of that, when I made my plans for this trip, I chose this apartment because there were three train lines running between Köln West and Hürth. Now one of the lines is skipping Köln West entirely, for (this is the best part) a detour that's scheduled for this week only.

But, not a big problem this morning, because I actually got the _previous_ train, which was a different line, but still one that took me to Hürth, so I was just a few minutes late. I'd have mostly missed breakfast if I had to wait for my train.

==

This was one of the main work days at the workshop, with everyone scribing hard on their papers. For a variety of reasons we didn't have any of our original board members there, but we fortunately did have producer Z., who is also one of our newer board members, so she led morning plenary and I helped out with some advice on where papers should be today.

And then I spent the day working on our media and our plenary records.

It felt like everyone was having a good day's work at the time, other than some natural concern when the COVID result got announced. But at the afternoon check-out we had I think two of our six groups saying they were having problems with their momentum and one that we'd expected to dissolve yesterday had mostly dissolved.

So tomorrow I need to see if any of the groups might be served with problem-solving (it'll depend on whether they want it or not).

==

The evening was supposed to be our "Mandatory Fun", where we go do stuff as a group. But, organization on it had already been wanting. We'd played around with an Eventbrite for a while, but ultimately just decided to do casual signups and even those were delayed.

This was our third "Mandatory Fun" and it's been hit-and-miss all three times. We try to give people choices what to do, but then some people just prefer to kick back (and giving people a break in the middle of a tough conference is part of the point), and it's hard to get commitments, and ... Some of the events inevitably dissolve at the last minutes, and this time it felt like many of them did. I think a city tour turned into a pub crawl and likely the river cruise happened and maybe the climbing did. But I'm not entirely sure because _everything_ sort of dissolved and there was no way to track the other groups.

I'd settled on the Chocolate Museum tour that we'd added at the last minute, but the other people interested in doing it wanted to do it as an adjunct to something else (mostly the river cruise, but also the city tour), and I was convinced that timing wouldn't work well.

So I ultimately decided to just do the Chocolate Museum on my own. Yeah, I probably should have hung out with people from the workshop, but most of them were doing lunch before their events, and I was even less enthused with that because of the COVID floating around, so a solo-evening it was.

==

I actually followed in the occasional footsteps of my beloved wife by saying, "If the train actually takes me home, maybe I'll just get home, but if I get one of those detour trains that skips Köln West" I'll go to the chocolate museum.

So I ended up taking a train that blew right by Köln West for no apparent reason and landed in Köln HBF, and from there I had a nice walk along the river to the Chocolate Museum.

==

The Chocolate Museum was fun.

It had a lot of stuff about how chocolate is actually made and what cocoa is and all that, which was terrific.

It had some pretty pointed discussion of poor earnings for cocoa farmers and discussion of sustainability, which surprised me in what I had thought would be a pure tourist museum.

(Overall, I don't understand how chocolate is as cheap as it is, given its narrow region of viability and how little cocoa is produced per tree.)

It had some great histories including more pointed discussions of the attacks on native civilizations in America, but also including long discussions of how it was served as a drink before the point where they could extract cocoa butter, and that there were ... I forget it they were called chocolate bars or chocolate houses or what ... but places that mainly served chocolate drinks back in the day. It felt like something out of an Alan Moore story, not reality.

There were also Lindt chocolate samples at the start and end of the tour, plus a world-famous chocolate fountain.

And a pretty terrific chocolate store at the end. Thank goodness there's nothing like that where I live.

Anyway, fun and I'm glad I did it.

==

Basically, when I'm coming home by train from RWOT I have three choices.

* Get a train that goes from Hürth to Köln Sud to Köln West, which is what I did on Monday, by luck.
* Get a train that goes from Hürth to Köln Sud, and not to Köln West, and get off at Köln Sud and walk, which is what I did yesterday, but I didn't love the early neighborhoods.
* Get a train that goes from Hürth to Köln Sud, and not to Köln West, and continue on to Köln HBf, and then switch to another train to loop back to Köln West, which is sort of what I did today, with a few hour detour out to the Chocolate Museum.

And I won't be doing that last one again, because the Köln HBF was a horrific mess. SOOO crowded with people (thank goodness I was wearing an N95). And just crazy masses of trains all delayed.

There were two different trains back to Köln West, one delayed by 20 minutes and then the next one by 5 or 10. So I ended up on the next one. Except two or three minutes before it was due, they suddenly changed the platform and so we all had to race down the stairs from the platform and up to another and race out to the train.

And we got in and it sat for another five minutes.

Remembering how bad the Amsterdam airport was when we were there last year, I'm suspecting the Köln HBF is the equivalent for a train station. Definitely no more transferring there. I'll either walk from Sud or just wait for a train that's not detoured.

==

When I got off the train at Köln West and headed back to my street, I found it absolutely JAMMED with techbros in suits. I remembered people had been talking about sky-high prices for hotel rooms on Wednesday only. (Meanwhile, other conference attendees were reporting it almost impossible to find tables at bars in central Köln.)

It's apparently all due to DMEXCO, the Digital Marketing Exposition & Conference, which is today and tomorrow.

I literally had to push my way through techbro marketers to get into my apartment building.

(Masked once I saw the milling crowds blocking the sidewalks.)

And the bar downstairs is blasting the loudest it has the whole visit, not even fully drowned by the previously soundproof windows. And shaking the building.

Hoping this is a one-night bacchanal

==

Halfway there.

I've continued to be somewhat low momentum, so this morning I decided to meander, to try and get to know the local neighborhood that I get lost in. I headed west and found, as so often seems to be the case, that the neighborhood deteriorated as it neared the train tracks. Then I crossed over, and soon was back in that ring of parks. Past them I found a business district and then looping back, across the main road from where my apartment is, I found another residential neighborhood, except where our residential neighborhood has commercial businesses in most of the ground floors, this one was pure residential. It seemed much nicer. It even had its own park, heavy with trees.

I returned home with a sandwich and after eating that was ready to head out again. This time, I had a goal: THE TIERGARTEN. And it was a GARTEN that really honestly had TIER.

It was in a park called the Stadtwald which was a few miles west. Which meant back to the bikes.

So I again took the opportunity to meander. I went back to that ring of parks and this time began to head counterclockwise (on bike). A few blocks on (and up another slight hill that was tough on the heavy Call a Bike), I passed by the university. It was less amazing than I'd hoped: pretty modern buildings overall, albeit with lots of open glades (and sports fields). Past it I swung west and biked through more neighborhoods. Past the university hospital, there were some nice suburban looking tree-filled neighborhoods, but then it was back to urban storefronts, which I ran along until I got to the Stadtwald.

The Stadtwald was totally worth visiting. It's the most foresty park that I've seen since I got here, with lots of tree-lined trails. The Tiergarten was fun too. They advertised having some hundreds of animals, but that almost entirely meant goats and geese. But the goats seemed nice and there was actually quite a variety of geese, a few of which were quite beautiful and didn't look entirely evil like most geese. There were also two highland cattle, which were one of the things I really wanted to see. They didn't get as close as I'd like, but were pretty cool.

So, trip to the foresty and animal-filled park totally successful.

Dinner was sushi at a local Vietnamese restaurant(!) that I'd spotted on my first trip out to my AirB&B. Then, it was the train into Hürth.

I'd fortunately spent part of my time at home this morning figuring out train tickets. I discovered that a weekly (_wochen_) pass between Köln and Hürth was cheaper than the six round trips I'm likely to take. Better, it takes the stress off of constantly having to buy tickets just in time and making sure I hit the right train. And, I also got my train ticket back to Frankfurt for Saturday, and it turns out it was half the price of last week's ticket when I got it in advance, there's just big price gouging if you get it same day (but that was the only reasonable thing to do after coming off of a trans-Atlantic plane on Friday.)

Anyway, the main event in Hürth:

Rebooting the Web of Trust (RWOT) started tonight. That's of course my reason for being here in Germany. Tonight was Poster Night, which is our current methodology for everyone to introduce their topics. It was done a bit different this year (that's often the case from workshop to workshop, until we eventually settle on something that we think really works).

This time around, Erica led off with our rules, making the Poster Night a much more coherent part of the overall workshop, and then we did a warm-up exercise where we gathered into groups of six and each talked about what brought us here and/or our paper and other issues. Afterward, everyone wandered around and read all the posters (mostly abstracts printed up from the papers).

It felt pretty successful to me because the warm-up exercise got the communication going and so the poster session effortlessly moved into conversation about the posters (well, hopefully, but even more likely it was conversation on topics of use to the conference).

It looks like we've got about two dozen people, which is our smallest in quite a while, but hopefully it can be an advantage and let us be more focused.

I just barely caught a train back to Köln, which is good because they're pretty irregular in the later evening, with a sequence of three trains around the top of the hour, and then a gap of 30 minutes at the bottom.

And I fortunately figured out where the switches are to turn on the lights in the hallway of the apartment building (spoiler: their everywhere, it's just the idea of having to turn on the hallway lights is totally alien to me), which is good because otherwise it literally would have been pitch-black.

Tomorrow, the real work begins, and I'm experimenting with a new role for myself of itinerant writer and editor during the event, giving all the groups a boost (rather than supporting as a participant).

But I still can't get my apartment cool even though the temperature dropped to the mid-70s today. It's a heat sink. Hopefully by the time I get to bed because last night I was up at 5am because I was hot.

Running a day behind on these because of events. (I didn't feel like writing much other than an initial memory of Lucy when I got here on Friday and Kimberly had to have Lucy put to sleep that same morning, out in Hawaii.)

In fact, I wasn't really that thrilled to go out and do stuff yesterday. I've been lounging about my apartment more than I usually would each of these last two mornings. But I knew I needed to get out and SEE STUFF, because I likely won't ever be in Köln again, and I'd regret it if I didn't. So I opted to go see a museum or two yesterday, as that seemed easy, and something that didn't require much thought.

So I made another hike down to the Rhine, and this time headed south. There was some type of soccer(?) festival going on in a little plaza south of the Cathedral, and while I circled it, some girls asked to take a picture with me while wearing my hat. A scavenger hunt or something? I dunno, but I obliged. And then continuing south a bit I hit the Wallraf-Richardz Museum, my initial goal.

The Wallraf-Richardz is a historic art museum, with three floors dedicated to the Medieval times, Baroque art, and the 19th century. My main goal was the 19th century, but the Medieval floor was so well curated that it totally won me over. The didactics did such great jobs of explaining context that I read through them all (and looked at the art a bit too). There were great bits like: how the earliest art was religious religious totems/iconography, some of them even used for worship (some of them even with instructions for worship); how lapis lazuli and goldleaf began being used not to elevate the work but rather to represent what the artists felt was the already-elevated source material; how medieval art discovered backgrounds through import of styles from the Netherlands; and a lot more. Sadly, those same curators didn't seem involved with the Baroque floor, so I went through that faster, then I spent more time with the 19th century and again enjoyed the curation as we gradually went out doors, then met the impressionists, then met the three German impressionists. As in Prague, I really liked seeing how impressionism had visited other shores.

From there I briefly headed out the Heumarkt, yet another public square. There was _another_ big protest going on here. It took me a while to figure out what was going on (as most of the signs were in German) but I finally realized that it was a forced-birth demonstration (pro-Leben) with some homophobia thrown in as a side dish (because gay couples can't have children on their own, as far as I could tell). And there was a counterprotest too, which was at least as large. (https://www.indonewyork.com/politics/cologne-hundreds-at-demonstrations-against-abortion-use-of-batons-h95714.html) As I watched the marching handmaidens and saw the counterprotests growing louder and louder in their counter-chants and booing, I realized that I had no idea if something like this might erupt into violence in Cologne, so I beat feet. (I haven't seen any reports that it did.)

Wow, two huge demonstrations in two days. That's not something you see in Hawaii. (Even in Berkeley I would have been surprised by two protests of that size two days in a row.)

I walked along some nice plazas on the Rhine back to the Bahnhofsvorplatz. I just adore all the public spaces in Cologne. There was even a little running water feature that a lot of kids were immersing themselves in, with their parents and families about.

And then it was over to the Ludwig Museum, which is the modern art museum, and thus the perfect complement to the historic art museum.

I started out on the ground floor, and it was full of the stuff that gives modern art a bad name. A sink built out of wood with a coiled firehose nearby. A working set of pistons of some sort made into a perpetual circle. Some piles of dirt and a "machine" of peacock feathers. Bleachers filled with mannequins. I was not enthused.

But then I went up to the second floor, and that's where the art that I actually cared about began. There was an amazing exhibit on Ukrainian artwork from the 1900s through 1930s. It was rather pointed, talking about how there was this great outgrowth of modernist art, and then it was crushed by the USSR in 1930-something when they decreed Soviet Realism as the only acceptable art style and murdered a lot of artists.

Then, after a variety of different art styles (this museum was unfortunately poorly curated compared to the Wallraf-Richardz, with no clear throughline and the didactics often positioned AFTER the artwork, but the descriptions of the different art styles were much better than I've seen at most modern-art museums), we got to the stuff I'd really come to see. There was some Picasso, and although I'm not usually a fan of Picasso, I was won over by his painted objects (plates, vases, etc) and a wonderful weird sculpture, and even some of his paintings. There were just a few pieces of Dali and Magritte and a few other favorites. I almost missed the pop art (again, because of that poor curation/organization), which was one of the things I'd specifically wanted to see. But it wasn't amazing, other than a huge display that talked about the normalization of war in America. And there was Roy Lichtenstein. I'm always a little sad to see Lichtenstein in a museum as I consider him a thief, as he didn't even attribute the comic book artists that he traced. (See https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/apr/09/new-allegations-of-plagiarism-against-roy-lichtenstein, Lichtenstein claimed he wasn't a plagiarist because his works were higher "quality" than the comic books he copied.) But it was a joy to see a few Warhol and others.

The day went by in a blur because I'd hung out in my apartment until about 10 before spending 5 hours or so at museums.

And then I had a bad night's sleep, waking up at 1am and feeling very awake, and waking up every hour or two after that. I tried to open the windows at 1am, since I think the heat is contributing to my poor sleep, but the bar was still partying on, so they were eventually closed again.

And now it's another late day. But I'm planning to bike down to a garden and the river and some other stuff northward.

I hope I can manage an earlier schedule in the next day or two, since the workshop is starting tomorrow, though not until the evening. (The whole point of these days at the start is to reorient my schedule to Europe time, and that's been hard this time for various reasons.)