I have already written about the old radio, our first and only record player, and the transition to cassettes. This post is about the medium that followed and was as anticipated as it was short-lived.

Cassettes, thanks to the repeated contact of the tape with the player head, tended to wear down over time. And then there was the analog nature of the players themselves - the belt drive that turned the cassette reel would not maintain its speed of rotation, especially after a trip to the local repair shop, so the tempo would go a little off over time. Not dramatic enough for voices to sound like sped-up cartoon voices but enough for me to tell that it was not the same song that I had heard thousands of times¹.

Compact Discs (CDs) offered a break from all of this. When I started my job, I asked my parents if I could spend a not insignificant portion of my first wage on them. CDs were expensive back then. Before I started splurging on them, we had just a couple at home - cheap T-Series CDs of Brian Silas playing hindi oldies on the piano.

The most common way to play a CD was to pop it into my desktop tower’s CD-ROM drive and play it either using a CD player application on the PC or hit the play button on the drive itself with the headphones plugged right into the CD-ROM drive’s audio jack. Ripping them to the computer’s disk was not something I would start doing till many years later. Space on computer hard disks back then were puny. I have 60x more space on my Apple watch now than what my desktop did back then. Uncompressed CD audio takes a lot of space. This is late 90s so while mp3 format that would compress audio by as much as 10x without perceptible loss in quality was coming up, software to encode + play wasn’t mainstream yet. But even mp3s would take, what I would’ve then considered, too much space on my measly 540 MB hard disk.

Thus my consumption of CDs stayed largely tethered to the desktop. I seem to have given the entire generation of Sony’s Discman a miss. But there was another Sony product that came into my life a few years later via a short detour.

Intel - yes the processor company - made a brief (and in hindsight, ill-informed) foray into consumer hardware like webcams and audio players during early 2000s. My first portable digitial music player was from them. It had 64 MB memory (enough for about an hour of audio encoded at 128kbps). Its shape was apparently inspired by those smooth pebbles one finds by the banks of a river. It had a rubberised body with a belt clip and a transparent faceplate that you could remove and customise (which I did with cutouts from the colored printouts from the office printer). It ran on one AA battery and the limited storage meant I would have to refresh both the battery and the music on it every so often. It sustained me during those brutal hour-long work commutes in Delhi. Someone swiped it from my desk at work one day when I had gone for lunch. It took me while to overcome the devastation and two decades later, the loss still rankles.

I never bothered replacing it.

In the meanwhile, laptops were improving in specs and coming down in prices. Microsoft, my then employer, issued me one at work. The storage on these machines was now approaching gigabytes. One could afford to keep a decent collection of music on one’s hard disk. It wasn’t the sort of portability that a portable music player offered but one no longer had to lug CDs to be able to listen to them. I’d still buy audio CDs but I’d immediately rip them to mp3 files. Or rather wma files - since I was a Microsoft employee and an ardent fanboy at the time and Windows Media Player supported both the format and the act of ‘ripping’ natively.

Microsoft used to (perhaps still do?) organize annual gatherings of employees from their subsidiaries across the world. These were grand, would-fill-a-large-stadium affairs. I was due to attend one in New Orleans² but wasn’t confirmed till quite late. I don’t know if it was my performance, my potential or something as banal as someone else opting out and the travel budget still being available. All I know is that my name was put on the list of attendees and my turn came.

That whole trip is a blur but I remember a few things well. Due to my late confirmation, I was put up in a hotel slightly further away from where everyone was. On the flip side, I had the whole room to myself³. This was the first time I was staying in a hotel room without a window. Oh there was one, but it’d open to a red-brick wall of another building which is as good as not having one. The lack of daylight, fatigue from a long flight and the jetlag meant I crashed immediately⁴. When I woke up, I showered and went out for a walk. It was already dark. Thanks to my jetlag, I must’ve slept through the day. I mustn’t have wandered far because back then there were no smartphones and I was terrible at reading maps. I remember visiting a Virgin music store. They were about to close for the day but I saw a black Sony Net MD player hanging from a shelf in a clear molded plastic packaging, the sort that is an absolute nightmare to open, and on a whim, bought it.

I was drawn to MiniDiscs for their small size. Or some misplaced sense of nostalgia about 3.5 inch floppy discs - at 68×72×5mm vs the floppy’s 93.7×90.0×3.3mm it wasn’t that off size-wise. It was small enough to fit on the palm of your hand. I got interested once Sony launched their Net MD format. An mp3 like compression (ATRAC3) allowed them to squeeze 4-5 hours of music on a single MiniDisc. Sony’s software, as had been the case with software bundled with most consumer electronics of that era that’d connect to a PC, was terrible. But it was functional. And within a few minutes it had helped me transfer Beethoven’s Op. 74 and Op. 95 string quartets onto a MiniDisc. I remember listening to it all day during breaks at the conference. This thing miraculously ran for 50+ hours on a single AA cell.

A couple of years later I upgraded to Sony’s next generation of Mini Discs, the so called ‘High MD’ that allowed 1 GB of storage per disc. That’s about 15 CDs worth of music per disc. I spent a considerable number of weekend afternoons re-organizing my music collection and battled with such important questions as whether I should organize my collection of works of Beethoven by opus or by instruments or if it was ok to put the symphonies together with the piano concertos or to just leave the rest of the disc empty. Truly a life of privilege and leisure⁵.

By this time, both I and Sony were swimming against the tide. The world was moving to iPods and other similar devices. While the original iPod used to have a spinning hard disk, flash storage was now getting cheap enough that devices with several GB were getting common and affordable. Once I got my first Mac, it was only a matter of time before I too moved on to the iPod ecosystem. But that’s for another post…

If you think you have steady hands, try shooting with a zoom lens. Even the slightest quiver gets amplified many times over and ruins your composition. The camera app on iOS 26 does offer some help. At 8x zoom, it shows a tiny thumbnail on the top right corner of your screen with a yellow rectangular frame marking the area you are zoomed into.

It occasionally helps me find my way back to my original framing, though usually it comes in my way, especially when the framing is tight.

The reach that 200mm offers is quite stunning. In most historic cities in the Netherlands, where the buildings are full of colourful brick patterns, gable stones and other details, it is helping me see things I would’ve otherwise never caught. Like this statue of a man leaning from the gabled roof of a house. I noticed it only last week even though I must’ve walked past it hundreds of times over the past 14 years I’ve been in Amsterdam.

And even the boring, modern buildings present interesting compositional possibilities…

Now the cons:

1. The images at the telephoto end are somewhat on the softer side.
2. At 8x zoom the auto focus struggles to focus on the subject if the background is a lot brighter.
3. The bokeh doesn’t even come close to touching what you’d get from an SLR body.
4. And this sort of reach from within just a few mm thick phone body will surely have privacy implications.

While the first three should gradually disappear as hardware and software improve, I fear that the last one is something we’ll just have to learn to live with as a society.

The last time I experienced diesel fumes at a station in Europe was in Scotland in 2018. The wife and I had taken a train from Edinburgh to Glasgow and had disembarked on a platform where an engine belching burnt diesel fumes stood. That, coupled with poor airflow, had made me feel quite sick.

My childhood memory of train stations in India is the odour of burnt coal mingled with the stench of piss from the dirty public urinals. I realised what that ‘train station’ smell really was quite late in life. For the longest time, it was a pungent but not an altogether repugnant smell - for my brain had come to associate it with the excitement of traveling in trains.

Clearly, I’ve grown soft.

Anyway, coming back to the electrification project here - it was originally slated to finish in 2020 but has been mired in bureaucratic delays. To quote the article:

De provincie en het rijk ruzieden over wie wat zou betalen. Vorig jaar werd de aanbestedingsprocedure stopgezet omdat er een tekort aan materialen was.

The province and the government argued about who would pay for what. Last year, the tender procedure was stopped because there was a shortage of materials.

Apparently, it costs Arriva - the operator of trains on this line - some 20-27 million Euros each year to keep these outdated diesel engines running. So they definitely have financial incentives to get a move on. The project will cost 358 million Euros and the first electric train should run on this route towards the end of 2027.

The electrification of this stretch still leaves about 400 km of the Dutch railway network reliant on diesel engines. Worse, as of this year, there are no plans to electrify it.

The first one was to Het Twikse Twiske yesterday. It’s a small nature reserve just a few kilometers north of Amsterdam. We had discovered it a couple of years ago completely by chance. We were having breakfast at a cafe in Noord one day and were looking for a place to go for a long ride². I had pulled up the map on my phone, seen this stretch of green surrounding a water body and we had decided to aim our bikes in that general direction.

We started from home around 16:45. We biked to Pontsteiger to try and catch the ferry to NDSM Werf and managed to board it with just 45 seconds to spare³.

By the time we were at Het Twikse Twiske, it was the golden hour. The trees were still leafless and the tall grass that surrounds the many waterways there, was dry and brown. It was a dreamy, monochromatic landscape complete with a windmill and stately, waterside Dutch houses.

The second ride was to Haarlem today. I’ve lost count of how many times we’ve been to Haarlem since I got my e-bike. It’s a comfortable 20kms (on e-bike) away from Amsterdam and the route the wife has made for us takes us along water bodies and farms and through quiet parks and a vast stretch of nature that the maps label as ‘recreational area’. Part of the route is parallel to a train track and a road. It’s perfectly normal for a train and a car to woosh past us while a plane headed from or to Schiphol zooms overhead. We marvel at the multimodality of traffic in this country and try not to race the other modes⁴.

We parked our bikes at a bike stand right at the outskirts of the city under the watchful gaze of 14th century Amsterdamse Poort and made a beeline for a place in Botermarkt that serves delicious falafel rolls⁵.

We love walking through the city that the wife rightly characterizes as “less crazy Amsterdam”. It is at once familiar and new. We walked through the streets and finally sat down for a coffee at a sunny café by Haarlem’s river-canal Binnen Spaarne. The café’s sleepy house cat wasn’t averse to being petted by customers.

I hit the 500 km milestone on our ride home. The wife, who has had her bike for much longer and regularly bikes to work, narrowly missed hitting 2500 km. If her commute doesn’t do it, I am sure we could use this as an excuse for a ride next weekend.

We took the purple line from the M. G. Road station towards Challaghatta, changed over to the green line at the Nagaprabhu Kempegowda (Majestic) station towards Silk Institute and got down at the Krishna Rajendra Market station. From there the palace was a short (5-10 min) walk.

We needed tickets to enter the palace, but there wasn’t a booth nearby selling the paper kind. We had to buy them online by scanning the QR code printed on a placard affixed to the entry gate. There were a couple of liveried guards at the gate who scanned them from our mobile phone and let us in.

From the gate, a footpath with two small lush green patches on either side of it leads you to the palace. The airy, arched hallway we stood in front of was grand. A man at its entrance had just poured some water on the floor and was scouring it with a broom with the fervour of Lady Macbeth trying to rid herself of her imagined bloodstains.

We were visiting on a working day around 10:00 AM. It was a good time to visit. We pretty much had the whole palace to ourselves.

Behind the palace was a small courtyard that housed a defunct fountain. At the moment it was merely a big, dry, rectangular, concrete hole in the ground a foot or two deep. It wasn’t particularly well marked. Someone walking without paying attention could fall in and hurt themselves, but I am probably letting my newly acquired European sensibilities come in the way here.

Just past the palace’s perimeter was a decrepit building that houses a school. The school was in session. Despite the din of the traffic, we could hear a chorus of children learning something by rote in one of the classes…

I retreated back into the palace hallway to admire the rows of ornate, wooden columns supporting the scalloped arches.

There are staircases at both ends of this hallway that you are allowed to climb. These led us to a small, brightly decorated room that was connected to a gallery on the first floor.

A couple of arched openings on either sides of the gallery lead to balconies. Access to them had been blocked by a wooden barrier. It had been tied to the columns from two sides so that people won’t move it aside and try to step onto the balconies.

While Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace is definitely grand, it is not very palatial (say like Mysore Palace). Meaning, after spending a few minutes, we had seen everything there was to see here.

I was glad that I could finally visit a longtime favourite of Bangalore tourists and yet I also left feeling a little sad. There were signs of wear and water damage throughout the palace. Could the restoration and upkeep be better? Sure. Though to be fair, wood can be a notoriously difficult material to maintain and restore - especially when it is exposed to the elements all year round. Short of building a climate-controlled superstructure around it, what are they to do?

Another year, another playlist - Spotify | Youtube Music

I start each year with a silly and irrational fear of not discovering enough worthwhile music to fill a playlist of 50 or so tracks. I end the year with a playlist that’s thrice as long and requires careful culling.

It also feels a little surreal to think that this is now the 9th iteration of a ritual I started in 2016. That said, for the past few years, I haven’t been able to muster the enthusiasm to compile detailed liner notes like I was doing till 2019.

I am now in the 3rd year of learning Spanish on Duolingo¹ and if I am to trust their grading, about to start approaching CEFR B1 proficiency. This has allowed me to appreciate the lyrical beauty of a lot of Spanish songs I heard this year. And so the 2024 playlist is a tad heavier in music from Spanish speaking parts of the world than the years before.

While algorithmically created playlists by Spotify - both their discovery weekly as well as the newly introduced ‘daylist’, were a big source of new music, I continue to discover new music and artists through other sources, like TV shows² and NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts.

Lastly, there are a couple of songs in the playlist that I want to give a special nod to.

1. Ryan Downey’s ‘Running’ (track #1 in the playlist) got plenty of play in our house - what a stunning voice. For some reason, he reminds me of Leonard Cohen.

2. The other one is Plantar un Bosque (track #12 in the playlist) - mostly for the quirky lyrics that could well be an exchange between me and my wife about me bringing in too many plants into the living room:

Yo te voy a plantar un bosque
I am going to plant you a forest

Ay, si lloras, por si lloras
Oh, if you cry, just in case you cry

Tú me lo riegues
You’ll water it for me

Y poco a poco
And little by little

Gota a gota
Drop by drop

Los ruiseñores vendrán a cantarte
The nightingales will come to sing to you

A couple of decades or so ago the news of such a find might still have reached me within a few days, but I am sure I wouldn’t have been able to access a recording in India till months later - if at all.

A somewhat related episode from that time comes to mind.

I was in my twenties and living in Bangalore. I had just begun to recognise my love for reading and western classical music. I remember having particularly enjoyed Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music. This being a book about members of a string quartet¹, was full of references to Western Classical music. At one point in the book, the protagonist struggles to locate the recording of an obscure work by Beethoven. Apparently, there weren’t any easy to find recordings of Beethoven’s Op. 104² - neither in the book nor in real life. Fortunately for me, due to many requests by other readers of the book, Decca had already issued a 2 CD set with a compilation of all the pieces from the book in 2000 - including the elusive Op. 104.

Cover of the CD companion to An Equal Music

For all the toil it took to obtain the recording, I had mostly forgotten about it. I am not sure where I bought the CD. A search of my Amazon order history from those years turned up nothing. Amazon wasn’t in India then but I would routinely get things³ shipped to friends living in the US and pick them up whenever I’d visit them. So the CD might have come from a physical shop. Either one of the many CD/DVD shops at Schiphol⁴ I used to visit during those long layovers on the way to the US from India or the shop on Church Street in Bangalore that specialised in Jazz and Classical recordings. I no longer have the CD with me. I gave it away (like all my other CDs) when we left Bangalore. 1-04 III. Menuetto_ Quasi allegro [String Quintet in C Minor, Op. 104].mp3 dated 06 Feb 2011, is now playing in the background as I write this post.

I don’t think I particularly enjoyed the work or even listened to it more than a couple of times. I did use to enjoy the piano trio the work is derived from. It had certainly been novel to listen to it rearranged for a completely different ensemble. I was also going through a Beethoven phase in my life. I was compiling a playlist of all his works one opus at a time. In 2010, I even registered beethovenfans.com with the intent of featuring my favourite recordings of each opus. Both pursuits remain unfinished.

These days you can just stream the entire CD on Spotify and I am sure on any other streaming music service of your choice. Freeing music distribution from the constraints of physical media might have been one of the best things that the internet did.

Mallorca is a popular tourist destination so there are several direct flights from Amsterdam. Upon landing at the Palma de Mallorca airport we realised that while Ubers are not banned outright, there is a 30 minute cool off period before you can order one. The wife quickly spotted a bus that’d go close to our hotel and ordered me to use my newly acquired Spanish¹ skills to get us the tickets. I ran, assembled Spanish words into some semblance of a coherent sentence, repeated it twice in my head and blurted:

Me : Boletos para dos adultos por favor. (tickets for two adults)
Bus Driver : Si. Paga en efectivo. (yes, pay in cash)
Me (thrilled at having been understood and having understood what the driver said): ¿Cuanto? ¿Diez euros?
Bus Driver : Takes my money and hands me two tickets.

Now I am sure a driver assigned to a route that busses hapless tourists from the airport into the city would have managed that interaction in English just fine. But still, a frisson of excitement ran through me at having pulled my first real-world task off in a new language. The wife had already boarded the bus and found us a spot to stand with our suitcases. I walked to her - tickets proudly in hand, beaming cheek to cheek.

Mallorca has some picturesque beaches but we are not beach people. As in we don’t fancy lying in the sand and taking a dip in the sea. We were staying at a hotel in the beach-y neighbourhood (Playa de Palma) for the first three days only to be able to take long walks along the coast and catch some sun.

We were at our hotel by 5 pm. The sun wouldn’t set till around 8:30 pm. This left us ample time to grab a quick bite and go for a walk along the beach. The sunset that evening was beautiful.

We woke up next morning to the sort of clear, sunny day on which they hoist a green flag over the boxy, yellow lifeguard stations at the beach in Mallorca to signal that the sea is safe for a swim.

After the breakfast at our hotel, we followed the beach south - always keeping left to the short perimeter wall along the beach built probaby to keep the sand from blowing over onto the footpath. When the beach ended at a marina, a road took us to higher, rockier ground. Several pine trees were growing here. The view of the Balearic sea from here was stunning. Many sailboats lingered here simply enjoying the day.

Lunch was at an Italian restaurant the wife looked up. We sat outdoors enjoying the sun. After all the cold, rainy days that had led up to this trip, it was a novel feeling. The houses in the neighbourhood were painted in earthly shades of ochre and peach. Their slanting terracotta tiled roofs, window overhangs and arched entryways created a mesmerising effect that reminded me of the Monument Valley games I was so taken in with several years ago.

On our way back the sun was shining brightly and this small church on the way to our hotel looked made it look a little other-worldly. But then churches do cocern themselves with all things other-wordly.

This was all the exertion my body could take so it was time for a siesta. We slept a couple of hours and woke up feeling rested. We stepped out for another walk along the beach, this time in a north-westerly direction. Not surprisingly, most of Mallorca’s main beach - Playa de Palma, is lined with beach resorts and hotels. Their architecture is more or less similar. It is all about maximising the view of the ocean and parcelling it into tiny lots you can rent to tourists from sun-starved countries such as ours.

There were also these semi-permanent numbered structures spaced along the entire stretch of the beach that would turn into popup bars serving juices, cocktails, beer and coffee during the day. They definitely add a festive feel to the beach.

The air was a little hazier than yesterday so we were expecting the sunset to be less spectacular than yesterday but when the moment arrived, it still left us stunned.

Our ride took us through open fields, along stately farmhouses, over quaint wooden bridges, and even on dykes.

A drawbridge

This must surely be the narrowest two-way cycling lane we’ve ever ridden on:

A narrow cycling path and a wooden bridge

We saw no one for miles at end - so for the kind of traffic these bike paths were serving, they were plenty.

Pictures from Marken:

The colourful wooden houses of Marken

The colourful wooden houses of Marken

View of Markermeer

Views of Markermeer

Sparrows

I was really happy¹ to see sparrows in Marken. While you occasionally hear a sparrow or two chirping in our neighbourhood on a quiet afternoon, I hadn’t seen so many of them together in a long time.

On our way to Marken, we had taken a couple of lengthy detours as we were feeling a little adventurous - though a couple of times our hands were also forced by ongoing repairs to the dykes in the area. It was also very windy on our way back. I struggled to hit 25 kmph even with the maximum assist my e-bike had to offer. The result was that the wife ran out of battery some time before she reached home and I barely scraped by. As someone who has never driven and is on his first vehicle powered by an external energy source, range anxiety is certainly a new feeling I am having to welcome.

Within a few days of learning to bike, it became an act as natural as walking. But I still had a mental block that kept me from biking to work every day. That my commute involved cutting through the picturesque, historic canal ring of Amsterdam didn’t help. The route was meant to be savoured each day on foot, not rushed through on a bike.

A few years ago I landed a job that finally got me biking seriously. Fourteen kilometres a day - to my office and back. This was before the pandemic, so five days at office were still the norm. It was the fastest and cheapest way to get to work. Barring inclement weather or the occasional bouts of laziness, biking became my preferred way to commute. This was the first time the thought of getting an e-bike crossed my mind. Vanmoof had just started to rise in popularity here. We both knew friends who had purchased Vanmoof’s latest models and spoke favourably of their purchase. The wife and I even took test rides. But the clunky gear change mechanism of their then state of the art model didn’t sit well with either of us³. The lack of a detachable battery which would necessitate bringing the entire bike to our tiny apartment for charging was another factor that put us off. The other e-bikes of that time, especially from the staple Dutch brands (Batavus, Gazelle etc.) had felt clunky and heavy and so we did without one for the next few years.

All those days of working from home during the pandemic broke my cycling habit. My next jobs have again been a lot closer to our home. While biking is still the fastest way to get to the office, biking just 3-4 km somehow feels cheating. I do bike on some days but walking is my preferred way to get to work. It’s a 30-35 minute commute on foot and I get to take pictures, listen to a podcast or generally wool-gather.

Thanks to global warming, there is now at least a 6 month window (I’d say May-Oct) when cycling in Amsterdam is very pleasant. There are several small towns 15-20 kms from Amsterdam that make for great day trip destinations on your bike. We’d do one or two of these trips each summer but our legs would be so sore the next day that our resolution at the start of the summer to do these biking trips more regularly would fizzle out.

The wife again started considering getting an e-bike seriously a couple of years ago. I spotted a billboard⁴ for an up and coming direct to consumer Belgian e-bike brand called Cowboy and told her about it. Shortly after seeing the ad, we started spotting Cowboy bikes more regularly on the road. They weren’t available in bike shops but you could book a test ride on their website and someone would come to your home with one. Many people at the wife’s workplace already owned one. They spoke highly of the bike’s quality and Cowboy’s service. The wife booked a test ride and knew that she was getting one the moment it ended. The bike checked all the boxes for her - it was light, had a detachable battery and the step-through frame was the right size for her height - in a country where the average height is 182 cm (~6ft) that’s not a given. We ordered it online. It arrived a few days later and after minimal assembly, she was all set.

I took a ride too but hadn’t fully bought into the idea of an e-bike just yet. Besides, we didn’t want to put both our eggs in one basket - I’d keep looking for another brand.

Getting an e-bike really opened up distances for her. On weekends she’d casually ride down to Haarlem (a 40 km round trip) or Monnickendam (that’s another 32 km for a round trip) and still have energy to go to work the next day. On the handful of occasions I accompanied her, we’d either cut the ride short or I’d follow her from a great distance, out of breath and knees creaking from trying to keep up with her against 50 kmph wind.

Yes, the Netherlands is a flat country but even on a fine summer day, the wind can easily overcompensate for the lack of a climb uphill. But let’s not use the wind as an excuse here. Riding a manual bike for distances of 70-80 km over a weekend, even on a perfectly still weekend, would easily divest me of any delusions about my physical fitness. Paradoxically, I also worried about losing whatever fitness levels I did have by depending on e-bike - the mind saw an e-bike as a fancy crutch.

And so I held back for two more years. Perhaps because I have been ripe for a full-blown midlife crisis, a part of my brain started entertaining this fantasy where instead of an e-bike, I would get one of those light, carbon-fibre racing bikes. Surely, through this marriage of precision engineering and my brute force I would then be able to easily keep up with (and even fly past) my wife on her e-bike.

For the past three weeks we’ve been getting days that have been so perfect and idyllic that I’ve felt as if we are living inside an advertisement for summers. Naturally, the wife has been making the most of her e-bike and I’ve been accompanying trailing her on my manual bike. A ride back from one long trip where the wind knocked a good 5 km/h from my average speed, I finally opened up to the idea of getting an e-bike.

The wife who has been scouting the right e-bike for me ever since she got hers, couldn’t stand the thought of frittering another beautiful summer away and insisted that I go for another test ride. She even located a shop really close to our home that I could visit on a random Monday I had taken off from work. I opted to give Tenways CGO800S a shot. I took it along my office route which cuts through Amsterdam’s canal belt, has uneven traffic and the bridges over the canals present a short but decent incline. My test ride felt effortless, even joyful. I knew right then that this was it.

I have now had it for two weeks and we’ve already clocked over 120 kilometres. I had read that e-bike riders cover longer distances and so get same or more exercise as those riding manual bikes. This certainly rings true so far.

At 23 kg (including the battery) the bike is not much heavier than my current manual one of 19 kg. It also rides smoothly when the battery assistance is off. I’ve covered long stretches without battery assistance - only summoning it during periods of strong winds, when I need to catch a break after a particularly long stretch. Or when I’ve needed a little extra acceleration - for example when the traffic light turns green just as you have braked. Not ever having driven anything where an external force propels me (I don’t know how to drive or ride a scooter), I was worried I’d get addicted to speed. And while I admit it is thrilling to go from 0 to 25 km/h in under 10 seconds of light pedalling, it actually makes me lot less annoyed at having to stop for tourists crossing the bike paths heedlessly⁵. Say goodbye to road rage, say hello to traffic tranquillity?

Anyway, I hope to use the battery sparingly. I think of it like Mario stumbling upon a super star - a rare thing, makes you invincible for a short time and you are still liable to getting destroyed if you act rashly⁶.

I’ll leave you with a picture of the giant statue of the famous delftware kissing couple near the Zaandam ferry station. A 13 km round trip taken casually after a full day of work. When you have an e-bike, you are always looking to squeeze a ride in.

A giant statue of the Kissing Couple

I’ve been restoring many past posts from my old wordpress blog. While looking at posts from 2011/12, I realised that the permalinks didn’t have any dates in the url. For example from looking at just this url:

https://www.deepakg.com/rough-draft-house-hunting-in-amsterdam

you might think I am looking for a house in Amsterdam, while actually this is a post from 2011 when we first moved here. I changed the blog’s settings so that permalinks include the date component. The link above should now show up (e.g. in Google’s search result) as:

https://www.deepakg.com/2011/06/4/rough-draft-house-hunting-in-amsterdam

One side effect of making this change was that it caused the platform I use for blogging to regenerate the RSS feed with the new urls. This might’ve led your RSS reader to think that these are new posts. Mine certainly did.

Early 2021 was still a period of a lot of uncertainty. The vaccines were here but the Dutch vaccination program was still in a disarray. This meant that lockdowns and curfews were still the Government’s primary tools to keep covid from spreading and making people sick in numbers that would overwhelm the healthcare system. And to top it off, the Dutch government had resigned in January over a scandal.

Against this depressing backdrop we got a week that lifted our moods up. The temperatures in Amsterdam started to dip in mid-February. The max temperature stayed a few degrees under 0ºC for nearly a week. Spells like these are increasingly rare¹. We even got a freak storm during a day or two of this cold spell that moved around a lot of snow.

I remember stepping out for a walk with the wife along a route in our neighbourhood that we had by now traversed hundreds of times since Amsterdam went into lockdown in March the year before. A lot of people were out and about. Some to experience the novelty of snow in Amsterdam, others out of necessity of having to walk their dogs.

We didn’t get very far in the sub-zero weather. Our fingers and toes were painfully numb within 15 minutes of stepping out. I must have also been worried about slipping on the icy streets and hurting myself. A hospital visit in the middle of a covid wave would’ve been a memorable experience for all the wrong reasons. We were back home in no time. It took us both a shot of Jägermeister to restore sensation in our extremities.

When we checked our mailbox the next day, it was full of snow! We cleaned it out before the temperatures could rise and turn it into water.

Then the canals froze. It hadn’t been anything like the cold spell of the year 2012 and I don’t recall the ice ever being officially declared safe. Yet, a few brave souls began to venture onto the canals. We certainly kept our distance. There was an air of defiance against officialdom after all those months of lockdowns, and this felt every bit like an act of rebellion as much as something done for the sheer joy (or foolhardiness) of it. I vividly remember waking up one day to an otherworldly high-pitched pinging sound that skating on fresh, thin ice makes². Someone was out skating on a section of a canal opposite our home that had frozen.

A frozen canal near our house

Brave souls on thin ice

A few days later as the ice and snow began to clear, we headed out for a longer walk. The sun was out and everything was resplendent in the winter light.

People had come together and made a giant snowman at Nieuwmarkt. The black upside-down bucket that acted as its tophat made it look like one of those shifty Victorian characters from a Charles Dickens novel. And may be because Brexit had so dominated the news those days (alongside the pandemic of course), I thought it bore a striking resemblance to Boris Johnson.

Praça Dom Pedro IV

Praça Dom Pedro IV

Praça Dom Pedro IV

We found ourselves at Praça do Municipio one afternoon while returning from one of our long walks to nowhere in particular. I was stunned at how elaborate the pattern on the floor here was.

Praça Do Municipio

Today, I brought up the satellite imagery of these squares on Google Earth and their real grandeur and beauty finally sunk in:

Google Earth Link

We were about three months too early for the jacaranda season - must be quite a sight.

Google Earth Link

Litter on Brouwersgracht

Litter on Prinsengracht

Amsterdam was remarkably quiet on Sunday. The whole city was nursing a collective hangover. But just like the cleaning crews of the night before, some people had jobs to do that couldn’t wait. Like this team that was taking down the three-storeyed cut-out of the king and queen that a café in Amsterdam pins to their facade each year. I had written about this tradition of theirs in 2020 and how they had adapted during the pandemic lockdowns. Now even though I am pretty sure this happens every year (of course it does, giant cutouts of the royal family don’t materialise in situ magically), this was the first time I was seeing the cut-out being taken down.

A giant cutout of the Dutch King and Queen outside Cafe De Blaffende Vis being uninstalled

A giant cutout of the Dutch King and Queen outside Cafe De Blaffende Vis being uninstalled

A lot of King’s Day revelry takes place on the boats on the canals of Amsterdam². To keep the boats from bumping into houseboats and the walls of the canals, the municipality instals these inflatable, floating, sausage-like protective barriers along the canals. A team of two was hauling them back onto a pontoon docked in a canal near our house, deflating them, folding them and neatly stacking them into rectangular storage cages. These will be stowed away till needed at the next event³.

A string of inflatable cylindrical barriers being reeled back

And surely it must also be someone’s job to take away these signs telling people not to urinate in public. But I guess that could wait until the next working day.

A sign telling people not to pee in public

10 May 2024: Update - Changed the first photo to the version from the phone. I had run it through Lightroom’s new Lens Blur feature. The feature creates a depth map from a plain image (you don’t need depth data from the phone’s sensor) and can mimic the shallow depth of field of a long lens. While the results often look good, it struggles with finer details like those around the lampheads of Amsterdam’s street lamps. It’s in an “Early Access” phase so hopefully will get better with time.

It was quite cold in the morning (was about 9ºC till noon²), and it even rained. We saw several boats filled with people dressed in orange and huddling under umbrellas go past our house. April weather is always bit of a gamble here in Amsterdam.

Last year, the wife had decreed King’s Day as the day when the curtains in the house will be taken down, washed, dried and put back up. So despite the wife fighting a crushing migraine, and me still not being quite there yet after a long flu, that’s what we did today. Sure does make it easy to remember when the curtains were last cleaned.

No surprises here I hope! Now let’s overlay the 2024 monthly averages:

While Jan’24 was your typical January (i.e. typical for 21st century), both Feb’24 and Mar’24 have broken new records. Feb’24 came 5.67ºC above the 20th century average and 3.98ºC above the 21st century average. March 2024 came 3.85ºC and 2.57ºC above the 20th and 21st century averages respectively.

Now let’s change the graph to show the maximum monthly average temperature recorded in 20th and 21st centuries - i.e. the record warmest months in each bucket:

Note how the green line (triangles) is above the blue one (circles) except in a few places.

While most warmest months on record have been in the 21st century, Feb, Mar, Aug and Nov are exceptions. The records for these months were set in the 1990s and so belong to the 20th century. But now let’s throw 2024 monthly averages into the mix:

So 2024 has brought the records for Feb and Mar into the 21st century. Will we see the Aug and Nov records broken this year too?

Post prompted by an unusually warm April day in the Netherlands yesterday - the max temperature at De Bilt² hit 24.1ºC.

The average temperature this February was 8.2ºC (46.76ºF) - 0.6ºC (1.08ºF) higher than the previous record of 7.6ºC (45.68ºF) from 1990. It has also been extremely wet here for the past few months. Ideal conditions for an early spring².

The croci and the narcissi were already blooming by late February, and by middle March the cherry and magnolia trees here had joined the floral choir.

Parakeets are drawn to cherry blossoms like moths to a flame. They sit on the branches and pick at the flowers for hours. Their behaviour looks disturbingly compulsive.

They pluck entire clusters of cherry blossoms at one go, toy with them for barely a second or two and drop them on the ground. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The trees are now sprouting fresh leaves and even though the cherry blossoms won’t be around for more than a couple of weeks (they’ve all but vanished from most parks at the time of this writing), there’ll be plenty other flowering plants and trees that’ll keep the parks and streets in Amsterdam colourful well into June.

The ferry terminal building looked quite new and a bit bland on the outside - though the facade did seem to have taken some stylistic cues from the Art Deco era. However, it was absolutely regal inside - all columns, marble and granite. The ceiling somehow felt much higher than the exterior had let on. Mosaics of painted tiles depicting coats of arms of various municipalities of Portugal added a splash of colour to the otherwise bare walls.

While looking for a place to buy the tickets we found a room in the terminal building with an interactive diorama of Lisbon encased in glass on a large table. There were buttons you could press to illuminate the various bridges and landmarks of Lisbon and even a tide simulator that’d slowly pump water to show you how far the water reaches during the high tide. All very science fair-y and still amusing to us two forty somethings.

We weren’t looking to go anywhere particular in the ferry and settled for the very next one available - a 20-25 minute ride to Barreiro, a small municipality south of Lisbon. The tickets cost a very reasonable € 6.10 per person for a round trip. It wasn’t exactly rush hour so it was easy to score a window seat in the lower deck of the ferry. Just as we were settling in, two guys reeking of sweat and stale beer and arguing loudly in Portuguese sat in the seats behind us. We tolerated them for a couple of minutes but then found different seats - partly because the argument kept becoming more and more raucous but mostly to get away from their collective stench.

Soon our ferry began to move. The ride was fast and smooth¹. The windows were tinted and grimy but with enough sun outside I managed to get a photo or two.

The three distinctive, conical buildings at the shore are old windmills that have been long decommissioned and are now a municipal heritage site².

The Barreiro ferry terminal led us into a large plot of land which was part bus terminal, part parking lot. The clouds had begun to dissipate, the air was clear like it sometime is just after a rainy spell. The sun shone brightly and everything it touched gleamed. It all somehow felt magical.

While I was wool-gathering, the wife had spotted a paved footpath alongside the river and decided to see where it would take us³.

At the start of our walk was a small beach littered with several small boats. It looked like they had been deposited by the tide as it went out.

There were apartment buildings across from our walking path. They were all painted in different colours - some ochre, other peach, some grey (with a large colourful mural on one side) and some white. Collectively, under that azure sky and the cumulonimbus clouds, illuminated by the bright light of the mid-day sun, they seemed other-worldly.

The tide was really low and there were small puddles and rivulets in which seagulls were foraging for food. We also saw many people in rubber boots, bent over and looking for something in the mudflats - clams? Or was there a gold rush on in these parts of the world that we didn’t know of?

There were also many small cafes along our walk. Usually with facades decorated with colourful murals.

We settled in one of them for lunch. We had a view of a small park from one side of the cafe. There were retiree grandparents playing with their grandchildren while a couple of guys in their local football clubs’ t-shirts were doing their exercise routine. Hard not feel a little guilty when you are gulping your beer and gobbling your food. In our defence, there wasn’t much public transport in sight so we’d be walking all the way back to the ferry station.

There were pine trees planted all along the footpath. They all bore hundreds of soft, pale buds.

We were back at the Barreiro ferry terminal with a few minutes to spare for the next ferry to Lisbon. A couple of stalls inside the terminal that sold coffee and snacks were arranging cups and saucers on the counter for the influx of people that’d arrive on the ferry. I now found myself fascinated by the wave pattern on the terminal’s floor made with thousands of tiny tiles of black and white stones.

The turnstiles that gated the entry to the ferries’ boarding point had screens above them that along with the usual departure information, also showed ferry’s occupancy percentage. It would update as people would swipe their tickets to enter. The wife suggested we try to work out the ferry’s capacity based on how many people it’d take to bump the percentage up by one. Because when we are not trying to go past Genius on Spelling Bee, this is the sort of games we get on to these days. We worked it out to about 600. It seems to check out.

The windows we sat next to this time were somehow even dirtier than the last time. Still, I somehow managed to coax the telephoto lens on the iPhone to get this dreamy shot as we approached the Lisbon ferry terminal.

Once back, we sat down in the outdoor seating area of a café close to the terminal. We were in a mood to try something new. We spotted Mazagran under the coffee menu and ordered it. It turned out to be wonderfully refreshing. With espresso, lemon, ice and sugar as ingredients how could it not be? It was quite windy by now and the large outdoor umbrellas of the café were flapping madly.

Time to do something indoors-y. We settled on visiting the Gulbenkia museum. But that’s for another post. As we walked through the terminal to the metro station, I caught a glimpse of the view outside. I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t inside a dream.

The trams, unlike the ones in Amsterdam, use a single carriage only. Two of them had queued up at a turn before the stop and the drivers were having a friendly chat.

There was a small queue at the bus/tram stop for the tram. We were visiting Lisbon during the Chinese New Year week so this particular street had been decorated with red lanterns.

These were taken on the evening of the second last day of our stay. The wife and I had had quite a full day and were tired. We aborted the walk after a couple of stops.

The next day promised to be warm and sunny. We resumed the walk where we left it. We mostly followed the tram tracks all the way but the wife occasionally consulted Google Maps to:

• make sure that we were indeed following the right tram’s track after they’d fork

• take any diversions and side-alleys that were more interesting than what was on offer along the tracks

To our slight dismay, not all trams were entirely yellow. Many now featured advertising, like this Samsung one². I saw this one coming from far away. A car had been partially parked on the tracks so it was held up for a couple of minutes. The tram driver frantically dinged its bell till the car was removed. A small traffic jam had begun to materialise behind the tram and a small entourage of cars now drove in its wake.

I also noticed, perhaps for the first time, how narrow the tram tracks were.

A side alley (Tv. São Vincent) had a colourful, large mural painted on the compound wall of one of the buildings. There were cars parked in front of it so it was hard to get a decent picture of it³.

Many houses are really close the tram tracks.

I loved how compact and elegant this one looked.

Though I wonder how it must be like to live in one. The trams do make a loud rumbling noise when they pass. It must not be pleasant to have one pass by your doorstep every few minutes. Could you ever learn to tune it out?

We finally did catch a plain yellow tram⁴ sans any advertising - just as it passed a house painted the same shade of yellow. Are you not entertained?

The path of Tram 28 eventually led us to the Santa Luzia church which, being at an elevation, offers sweeping, panoramic views of Lisbon and the Tagus River. We had spent considerable time here during our last trip and rather than the views I found myself drawn to this tiled fountain.

We were close to the halfway mark. The tracks continued to guide us through narrow, winding streets of Lisbon. The trams kept passing us by.

A building that was being repaired, was covered in white tarp. I marvelled at how they had manoeuvred around the beautiful wrought-iron and glass street lamp to let it protrude.

It had easily been 90 minutes since we had started walking and a short coffee break was in order. We sat down at a local chain near the Church of Loreto (aka the Church of the Italians).

Refreshed, we resumed our walk but it soon dawned on us that we had a flight to catch in the afternoon. There was a good hour left in our walk - perhaps longer at our leisurely pace that borders on languid once you account for the stops for taking pictures. We decided to abort the walk along the tram route and changed course towards the nearest bus stop with a connection to our hotel - but not before taking some more pictures to remember the day by:

My first prompt:

Astronauts playing cricket on moon

Resulted in a set of these four images:

Astronauts playing cricket on moon

While DALL·E 2 had struggled to render the humans, the wickets and the bats accurately, DALL·E 3 had no problems with them. Sure, there are still a lot other issues with these images - multiple moons or earths in the background, missing helmets, beard jutting out of at least one astronaut’s visor and in one case, batsmen standing across the width of the crease rather than its length. But still, I couldn’t help but be impressed by how far we have come in a matter of months. DALL·E 2 had seemed quite revolutionary back then but relative to DALL·E 3, its output looks like grotesque smudges.

One of the questions I had raised in my original post…

What race or skin tone should the AI have given to these depictions of humans? To say nothing of their gender. Did DALL·E try to cop out of having to settle this question by generating generic illustrations of humans in spacesuits as the first three choices? The reality with AI is often more anodyne - it merely reflects the images the model was trained on.

…seems to have been addressed.

This prompt covers two human endeavours that are not very diverse individually, let alone their intersection. DALL·E 3 still did a fine job of producing pictures that were very inclusive. It does so by rewriting your prompts before feeding them into the image generation pipeline. In doing so, it adds a bit more detail and variation. My succinct five-word prompt was rewritten four times with specifics of gender and race:

Photo of a female astronaut of Asian descent and a male astronaut of African descent playing cricket on the moon’s surface, with Earth in the background.

Illustration of two astronauts, one of Hispanic descent and one of Caucasian descent, engaged in a game of cricket on the moon. The moon’s craters and the pitch are clearly visible.

Rendered image of a male astronaut of Middle Eastern descent bowling to a female astronaut of European descent on the moon. The cricket bat, ball, and wickets are clearly seen.

Photo of three astronauts, one male of Indian descent, one female of Indigenous descent, and another male of mixed race, playing cricket on the moon with the stars shining brightly above.

My second prompt…

Astronauts playing cricket on moon with three slips and a gully and earth rising in the background

Cricket on moon with three slips and a gully?

…did not result in images of astronauts holding impossibly long bats bordering on polo sticks. Still, as impressive as the output is visually, it is a long way away from the cricket field setting the prompt describes. In the last image, a white cricket ball is seen lying in a crater - one wonders if they just chose a terrible spot for the pitch or if it was made by a bowler pitching with superhuman strength.

My final prompt gave results that also looked quite plausible:

Sachin Tendulkar playing a pull shot while riding an elephant in Mumbai

Sachin Tendulkar playing a pull shot while riding an elephant in Mumbai

While I woundn’t mistake any of the players as Sachin Tendulkar, they definitely look like cricket players and not mahauts on tuskless elephants with polo sticks that DALL·E 2 had generated in 2022. More importantly, the backgrounds in all four images are quite evocative of Mumbai. Especially the building in the background of the first image - it looks like the facade of the iconic Taj Mahal Palace hotel.

And once you know that DALL·E rewrites yours prompts you can also ask it not to. You get four¹ identical images but they adhere much more closely to your prompt’s intent. In my case, I finally got someone that might pass for Sachin Tendulakar from a distance.

Sachin Tendulkar playing a pull shot while riding an elephant in Mumbai

At this rate, you could expect another post next year where I wonder what exactly had impressed me about these pictures by DALL·E 3.

An accidental photo of the Bangalore Opera House taken in 2005

As you can probably tell from the picture, it was not in a good shape.

So it was a very pleasant surprise to return to Bangalore 11 years later and find this building fully restored. It was a little jarring to see it turned into a Samsung showroom and even branded as Samsung Opera House - but hey, if that’s what it took to save the historical building, I am not complaining.

The restored Opera House building seen from Brigade Road

It also seemed like Samsung were being a good custodian. There was a small open courtyard outside, freely accessible to the general public.

Samsung Opera House

The entrance to the Samsung showroom inside the Opera House

One Friday evening, as we were walking past the building, we heard snatches of one of our favourite Bollywood songs through the din of traffic and incessant honking. A small musical concert was taking place in the courtyard³.

A musical performance outside the Samsung Opera House

As the short clip below will hopefully testify, not only were the performers talented, the speakers they were using did a good job of projecting the sound and masking the traffic noise. Somewhat.

We joined everyone else enjoying the music on that pleasant Bangalore evening and stayed for about twenty minutes. It is one of my fondest memories from this trip.

Each year I make a playlist of 52 or so songs that I absolutely loved that year. Here is this year’s playlist.

Most songs weren’t released in 2023, I merely discovered them in 2023. There is one exception to that rule in this year’s playlist. Lana Del Rey’s Mariner’s Apartment Complex. I had heard the song a couple of years ago but it slowly grew on me this year and got so much play time (along with the rest of the album it’s from) that it had to be in the playlist.

When I made first of these playlists in 2016, I remember being a little apprehensive at being able to continue to put one together each year. Well, it’s year 8 of doing this and not once has it been a struggle¹. I usually end up with 3x more songs than I want to fit into the playlist. It’s now a year-end ritual to start with a longlist and gradually whittle it down over a period of 4-6 weeks. A ritual I’ve found myself looking forward to each year.

I started learning Spanish in 2022. Despite finishing a 500+ day streak on Duolingo in 2023, I feel the progress has been modest. And yet, it has already enabled me to appreciate the poetic beauty² of many of the songs - songs that otherwise I might not have enjoyed quite as much. So while this year’s playlist has songs spanning many genres and languages - including English, Italian, Greek, Portuguese and Japanese, you might find it a little Spanish-heavy. I hope the lyrics won’t get in the way of enjoying the music!

The metro entrance at Church Street did not exist when I lived there. I loved the colourful mural that it had been decorated with. It reminded me of Studio Ghibli movies.

Church Street/M. G. Road metro entrance building

Close up of the mural

Another new feature of Church Street was these footpath handrails. Upon looking at them closely I realised that they depicted the game of Rock Paper Scissors!

I didn’t think such a thing would have been possible, but Church Street seems to have gotten even busier! It was always a popular destination but with all the foot traffic that the metro station exit now sends and the many seemingly unregulated street-side vendors, it felt really crowded. Especially in the evenings.

I was sad for many of my favourite old haunts that were now gone, but also happy to experience the ones that were still around. The magazine store from this blogpost was (inevitably) gone. So was the jazz/western classical CD shop that I used to frequent. I was half hoping they’d have found a way to ride the recent vinyl record revival and survived. But the second-hand book store Blossom was still there and doing well. It now has not one, but two new branches on Church Street itself. That place calls for a blog post of its own. The Indian Coffee House had moved from MG Road to Church Street and it was around too! The liveried waiters still serve the usual affordable fare of butter toast, potato cutlets and their signature sweet coffee with a distinctive flavour.

We had a very warm and dry June this year. Specifically, the average mean temperature was 1.2ºC higher than the previous record. A record set a mere two years ago. As a result of all that dry heat our flowers died out. We probably should also have been watering them more. The planters had been leaking water even after little to moderate watering, annoying our neighbours below. To remedy this, we picked up drip trays to place under our planters from a hardware shop. The shop had a gardening section that sold seeds. Since we were there, we picked a packet each of marguerite daisy and marigold.

I wasn’t sure when I’d plant them. The instructions on the packets of the seeds seemed to suggest that I shouldn’t expect to see any flowers this year if I were to plant them this late in the summer. Towards the end of June, the weather forecast showed that a spell of cool and wet weather was headed our way. It would almost be like late spring. I wondered if that would coax the plants to grow and flower.

One Sunday, in anticipation of the upcoming milder weather, I cleared the planters of the dead plants, added a few centimetres of fresh potting soil and planted the seeds. Worst case, we’d see flowers next year. The relatively cooler and wetter July and August that followed, were very favourable for the growth of the plants. It is likely that our packet of marguerite daisy seeds was mislabeled. Whatever is growing in the parts of the planter where I sowed those seeds is definitely not going to sprout any daisy flowers.

Not quite the marguerite daisies we were promised

But with the marigolds we seem to have hit a jackpot. The plants began to bud in late August and with some assistance from the unseasonably warm September weather, they are thriving.

Marigold flowers

Marigold flowers

Marigolds were ubiquitous in Delhi where Mansi and I grew up. They are a staple of the decoration in North Indian weddings. The flowers are robust, feature a festive mustard-orange-maroon palette and can easily be strung into long garlands. I haven’t been to a single wedding as a child where the kids didn’t appropriate a handful of them from the decor and playfully pelted them at each other. If you press hard into the marigold’s green base with your thumb and tear it open, hundreds of immature seeds would spill into your hands. I thus developed a passing familiarity with marigold seeds - even though as a child I had no idea what I was holding.

When I tore open the packet of marigold seeds from the shop, thanks to this childhood connection, I immediately knew that I was holding the right stuff.

A few years ago I would’ve been very sceptical about their ability to grow here. How would something that grows, even prospers in the much warmer and drier Delhi climate, adapt to the wet, temperate climate of Amsterdam²? But then our world has been growing warmer. Varieties of grapes from southern France now grow well in Maastricht and places as far up north as Norway are starting to produce wine. During the many walks through our neighbourhood during the pandemic, we had seen them grow outside several ground floor homes. That was confirmation enough for us to try.

I am glad we did! Given how excited Mansi has been about them, I am pretty sure they’ll be seen growing on our balcony for years to come.

Some of these are valid English words - you could use them in a game of Scrabble. For example, ACE, BAT, ZAG etc.

IATA also assigns three letter codes to airports. You know, the ones you see on your boarding passes and baggage tags. Like AMS for Schiphol, Amsterdam. Quite a few of the possible 17,576 three letter strings are also IATA codes¹.

For a comprehensive and entertaining look at these three letter IATA airport codes, I’d highly recommend watching this video by CGP Grey:

Some IATA codes are also valid English words. For example, YEA (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada), YES (Yasuj Airport, Iran).

And some English words are not yet² IATA codes. For example, AYE, YEP, YUP.

The venn diagram of three letter strings, IATA airport codes and words

I was interested in exploring the entire space of these three letter strings visually, especially in context of 3 letter IATA codes. So I built a little web app that lets you see this information for each English letter.

It was fun to visually see how M and S are completely packed, while Q and X are still wide open.

The strings are sorted alphabetically by default. So if you are looking at, say the letter A, the first row goes from AAA to AAZ, the next from ABA to ABZ and so on till AZA to AZZ.

Three letter strings from AAA to AZZ, sorted alphabetically

You can also sort the list by type. This will cluster IATA codes that are valid words, IATA codes, valid English words and non-words together³.

Three letter strings from AAA to AZZ, sorted by type

If you are on a desktop browser, you can hover over each IATA code to see the airport’s name and location in a tooltip. On a mobile, you can tap to do the same.

If you really want to have some fun though, you can say ridiculous things in sentences of IATA codes that are valid words.

YES, MAD⁴ SIR CAN EAT ANY BUS, CAR AND VAN.

And for those of you that are a bit more ambitious, you could buy an island, start an airport and apply to IATA for words that haven’t been assigned to an airport yet. Looks like GOD is still available. Anyone?

p.s. Here is a plot showing the utilisation of three letter strings from A to Z:

A plot showing different categories of three letter strings

p.p.s. On an altogether higher intellectual plane - looking for words in amino acid sequence of a real protein.

The view from our hotels’ balcony on Day 4

The apartment was in a street that was decked with green plastic festoons. I couldn’t tell if it was old Christmas decoration they hadn’t yet gotten around to taking down or if they were commemorating some obscure patron saint.

The street of our apartment

Our plan for the day was to take a ferry to the Three Cities and explore them on foot.

On our way to the ferry, we were greeted by young a British man in his 20s who politely asked us to wait a couple of minutes in the street we were in. A film was being shot next door and he was preventing people from accidentally straying into the scene. Film shoots are a big source of income for Malta these days².

Our view while we waited for a film scene shoot to be over

The ferries weren’t very large but had ample seating space. They seemed to be mostly in use by tourists. We sat on the upper deck and I made a video of the short journey to the ferry stop. Never before had I seen such a large concentration of expensive yachts over such a small ride.

One still comes across pandemic era public health messaging in public transport.

Pandemic era public health messaging

Of course, no one took this one seriously. There wasn’t a mask or visor in sight on or off the ferry. I guess it’ll be another year or two before these signs completely disappear from our public spaces and from our collective memories.

The ferry stop at the other end looked positively makeshift. A decrepit building right opposite the stop warned visitors about falling debris.

A crumbling building opposite the ferry point

WARNING falling debris

This was the second of such a warning I had seen during our stay. Just a couple of days ago we had come across this sign at Cittadella in Gozo. It seemed like public buildings in Malta had to be either historically significant or dangerously derelict or both.

And after all, you’re my danger wall… Oasis reference anyone?

Just a short walk from the ferry stop was this art-installation that looked like a steampunk blimp. It was thankfully free of warnings about falling debris.

A steampunk blimp

We walked through the warren of narrow streets and enjoyed the (by now familiar) sight of colourful boxy wooden balconies.

A street with boxy balconies

It had been a wet start to the year in Malta and tiny plants were thriving even in the gap between the cobblestones.

Tiny plants thriving in the gap between cobblestones

Like that street on our first day here, the houses here prominently displayed tiny figurines depicting Christian themes. The statuettes of mother Mary and baby Jesus were most common.

A figurine of Mary and baby Jesus

A figurine of Mary and baby Jesus

The geography of the Three Cities was quite varied too. One moment you’d be looking at domes and spires of distant cathedrals from a good height and the other moment you’d be walking right along the water.

Thanks to the varied geography of Malta, the views were rarely boring

In one street, a small gap between two streets had been designated to a small shrine to Jesus.

A small shrine in the gap between two houses

We also saw a statue of St. Dominic inside a large niche inside a wall. I learned that he is customarily depicted with a dog carrying a flaming torch in its mouth.

A statue of St. Dominic

Wikipedia later clarified why it is so:

The story is told that before his birth his barren mother made a pilgrimage to the Abbey at Silos, and dreamt that a dog leapt from her womb carrying a flaming torch in its mouth, and seemed to set the earth on fire. This story is likely to have emerged when his order became known, after his name, as the Dominican order, Dominicanus in Latin, and a play on words interpreted as Domini canis: “Dog of the Lord.”

We continued walking some more and came by Birgu’s (aka Vittoriosa, one of the Three Cities) harbour front. The view of the blue water with sunlight illuminating historic buildings and fortifications in the background was absolutely magical. Little wonder then, it’s a popular location for making films, especially if their plots have a historic/fantasy angle.

A view of Birgu Harbour

A view of Birgu Harbour

A view of Birgu Harbour

A view of Birgu Harbour

A view of Birgu Harbour

We eventually settled at a small Italian restaurant by one of the numerous marinas for lunch.

The setting for our lunch break

A short postprandial walk later, it was time to head back to Valletta. The views from the ferry on the way back were again gorgeous.

From left to right: Siege Bell Memorial, St. Elmo Breakwater Lighthouse, Ricasoli Breakwater Lighthouse

Once back at the ferry station, we noticed that there were also gondoliers offering rides, probably to the Three Cities. We’d have opted for them if these were canals of Venice or Amsterdam but in these relatively open waters with a lot of varied marine traffic, they just didn’t feel like a good idea to us.

A Gondolier plies his craft at the Ferry point in Valletta

We walked back into Valletta and took the paid elevator to Upper Barrakka Gardens. From here we looked out towards the Three Cities and tried to locate landmarks we had walked past.

Looking towards the Three Cities from Upper Barrakka

We wandered a bit more but the day’s exertions had left us a little tired and we lacked the purposefulness of this morning. It was time to head back to the hotel, rest, grab dinner and plan our next day.

Album of Ornamental Granite Tiles

I decided to build a little web app that’d allow me to play with the tiles in this catalogue.

The original catalogue only shows a little over 1/4th of the design but by digitising these tiles I could complete all 4 quadrants.

I could also choose how many tiles I wanted to use and even decide how big (up to a point) an individual tile should be. For now I’ve settled on 10 rows x 10 columns of 55px tiles including the border.

While some tiles in this catalogue are symmetrical, others are not. Which means combining them after rotating in multiples of 90º or mirroring them results in patterns that sometimes surprise you. Depending on the tile, mirroring and rotating are not equivalent and can give different results:

Using the original tile as is, or rotating/mirroring it while tiling, results in different patterns

When you select the rotate option, the app does this:

Rotation explained

Depending on the initial rotation of the first tile you can get very different patterns:

When using rotation, the rotation of the starting tile matters

The mirror option just constructs the first rows by flipping the alternate tiles horizontally and makes the second row by flipping the first row vertically. The first two rows are then repeated.

Mirroring explained

The borders were another fascinating detail that add an extra visual flair to the designs. While the catalogue illustrates a limited number of border + main tile combinations (19 in all), we of course can combine any border with any tile (a whopping 19x19 = 361 possibilities).

Another thing I realised when tinkering with the borders is that some of the corner tiles used in the borders also look good when used as a main tile, especially when you apply mirroring or rotation to them.

Some of the top left corner border tiles can double up as the main tile

Next steps

• Some of the patterns in the original catalogue use two different tiles for the border, while others use two different tiles for the main tile (i.e. not just rotated variants of the original). My app doesn’t support this yet, but I’ll be adding them shortly.

  The first goal would be to allow you to create all 19 patterns in the original catalog faithfully but I might eventually make it flexible so that you could pick any two tiles.

• I will also make the no. of rows and columns user selectable. I might add control over the size of the tile (capped to the max size I could extract from the catalogue (around 110px for things to look good on Retina displays).

• I also want to experiment with supporting khaki/custom tiles for the rest of the background. In the original catalogue, they do make the rest of the colourful pattern ‘pop’. I might even add support for spacing between the tiles and a custom background colour that shows in the space.

Other thoughts

A lot of these tiles were hand-drawn individually. You can see some of these imperfections when looking closely at titles that are not too geometric. To make this easy to spot, I overlaid two rows of one of the patterns on top of each other, changed the opacity of the topmost one and made a short video:

Each tile is somewhat unique!

While I am of course working with just one tile that’s repeated, so some of the charm of the hand-drawn tiles is lost¹. And then there are imperfections from the pages ageing for over a hundred years. Plus scanning artefacts - even though I started with the highest resolution jp2 downloads that archive.org offer.

A part of me fancies going all in and creating their digitally perfect replicas by tracing them in a vector program. We’ll see.

This project also got me thinking about the realities of the physical world to which these tiles belong. While I can mirror them easily digitally, in the real world it would mean creating 4 versions of a tile. Whereas, rotation is something you can do easily to the same tile. So I think designs that only be replicated by mirroring alone must’ve been much rarer.

I’ve also been paying a lot more attention to tiling patterns in the real world². While traveling through Newark airport recently, I came across tiles that somehow looked wrong. I took a picture and plugged them into this tool - lo and behold - if only they’d rotated these tiles while laying them, it would’ve looked like a much nicer pattern!

Tiles at Newark Airport - what a missed opportunity!

A note about AI

Many of the initial drafts of this tool were at least partially generated by ChatGPT 4. They never came close to anything you could simply use, but they were instrumental in showing me what’s possible. More importantly, they greatly lowered the inertia I would have had to overcome to start building something like this in the first place. We live in interesting times.

Update: 18 Jul 2023:

While I can mirror them easily digitally, in the real world it would mean creating 4 versions of a tile.

My wife pointed out that they’d only need to create 2 versions of the tile not 4. Her intuition is that when you mirror an already mirrored object again, you get the original back. My two mirroring operations cancel each other out.

I tried this in Photomator and she is right. Once I mirrored the first tile, I could generate the second row through translation or rotation.

In the image below the first column shows the starting tile, the last column shows the pattern created entirely through mirroring. The middle column shows how you could replicate the patterns of the last column by only mirroring the first tile.

Creating mirrored patterns by mirroring just one tile

Real Life is…

“Real Life is having to wait”.

I am old enough to have lived through times when we’d wait weeks if not months to see our pictures. You see, film rolls used to cost money. Processing exposed rolls used to cost money too¹. As a parsimonious middle class family in the 1980s in India, you wouldn’t just click anything that caught your fancy and blow through your roll. There’d always be a few shots left on the roll even after a big event like a birthday or a wedding. The camera would be packed away, only to come out on some other minor occasion like the start of the school in winters². With the remaining shots finally used up, the roll would go into a small, black, plastic canister and taken to the local ‘photo studio’ for processing.

We’d get the prints back after 3-4 days along with a strip of negatives in translucent photo sleeves. We’d sit down around the dining table, pass around the photos³ and reminisce - the events the photos had captured, already a distant memory. And oh the negatives would be promptly stowed away in some mysterious nook in our parents’ almirah and forgotten forever.

If you would have handed me a polaroid camera back then, it would have felt like magic. And to think that Polaroid have to somehow justify keeping you waiting a few seconds…

However, some people still throw them away. Especially tourists who:

• might not know about the deposit scheme in The Netherlands

• might not find the hassle of keeping the empty bottles or cans on them for getting back small amounts worth it

• might not have means to get their deposit money back - while stores like Albert Hijn have machines that’ll print you a coupon upon returning the bottles that you can redeem against your next purchase, at Amsterdam Centraal station the deposit machines credit the amount to your bank account - meaning you need a Dutch bank account number.

This means enough of these bottles or cans still end up in trash. Municipalities are now reporting that people are rummaging through trash cans, salvaging the PET bottles and cans and simply leaving the rest on the street. This is exacerbating the cities’ litter problem especially in and around busy tourist areas like Amsterdam’s Centraal Station.

I’ve already seen this phenomenon with my own eyes twice this weekend - though my scavengers were careful enough to put back the rest of the trash.

An unintended consequence I wouldn’t have seen coming.

The municipality is exploring a few solutions of varying degrees of cost and feasability. Most bins in Amsterdam have locks that are apparently easily opened by a generic triangle key available at utility stores. So the city is looking to updgrade the locks on bins. They are also putting dedicated bins for bottles and cans to encourage tourists to not throw them in the trash. Finally, the city is also issuing fines for littering, but given the labour intensive nature of such enforcement, I don’t see that going very far here.

The view from our hotels’ balcony on Day 3

Fortunately, our itinerary for the day wasn’t very ambitious. We wanted to spend time walking about in one of the numerous neighbourhoods close to our hotel, catch the views of the Mediterranean sea from Dingli Cliffs and avoid being sucked into Valletta yet again. We were scheduled to check out of our hotel in St. Paul’s Bay and move to an apartment in Valletta the very next day so we were going to get plenty of time to explore Valletta for the remainder of our trip. We took a bus to Rabat and explored the neighbourhood on foot.

The colourful balconies of Rabat

The colourful balconies of Rabat

The narrow and winding streets of Rabat

We then took a short break at Is-Serkin - a famous bakery selling Pastizzi, Malta’s signature greasy, puffed pastries. Being vegetarians, Ricotta and Peas were our favourite fillings¹. Coffee wasn’t on their menu but a shop next door was happy to sell us americanos.

We continued to wander for a bit longer but seeing the sunny morning beginning to turn into a cloudy afternoon called for a cab to Dingli Cliffs from outside a small church. We had had our fill of walking in the rain on our first day.

Not a bad spot to wait for your cab

The view from Dingli Cliffs felt a little underwhelming. Had we been living in a hotel with a less spectacular view and had the weather been a shade sunnier, perhaps we would’ve been more impressed. Still, the pools of sunlight dancing on the surface of the Mediterranean sea had us mesmerised for a few minutes.

Pools of sunlight dancing on water

Next to the cliffs was a large antenna installation with a spherical dome that reminded me of Matrimandir from our visit to Pondicherry many years ago.

The large antenna installation at Dingli Cliffs

A strange sign outside the antenna building warned visitors with pacemakers to not enter.

A notice for people with pacemakers

We decided to walk a bit further on the appropriately named Triq Panoramika (Panoramic Street) adjacent to the cliffs and see where it’d take us.

A bench along Triq Panoramika

There were a lot of farms in the vicinity. Given the patience of the drivers here, perhaps mini traffic jams precipitated by herds of goat weren’t too uncommon.

A lifestock-induced traffic jam

We saw many large cacti that grew in dense clusters a metre or two high and ran several metres along our path. Given that prickly pear is popular in Malta, these were probably not wild and were being cultivated. Throughout our walk, we saw (and what I presume to be) several prickly pears simply lying on the ground. I regret not picking and tasting one. The fear of cutting myself on the thorns might have deterred me so I guess the thorns did what they were meant to.

Prickly pear cactus

After nearly an hour of walking we found ourselves in the town of Dingli.

On our way to Dingli

It was well past our lunch time but not much was open in Dingli. We struggled to come up with options for lunch other than dining in at one of the restaurants in Valletta. We located a bus stop in order to take a bus there. And by a bus stop I mean a little placard planted into a footpath to mark the spot for a bus to stop. The area adjacent to the footpath, where the bus was supposed to stop, was occupied by a couple of parked cars. The bus promptly ignored the sign and wooshed past us forcing us to call for a cab once again.

A bus stop blocked by parked cars

After lunch at Valletta we stepped out for a walk but just then it started to rain. We knew from our first day here that walking in Valletta on a wet day isn’t really a pleasant experience. We took a bus back for a relaxed evening at our hotel.

A street in Valletta on a rainy day

A beautiful sunrise

Malta is comprised of three major islands. The largest one, Malta, the smaller Gozo to its north-west and the tiny Comino in between. Given the day’s mostly sunny forecast, we figured that it’d be a good day to be on the ferry to Gozo.

The islands of Malta

We walked past St. Paul’s harbour after breakfast in search of the bus stop from where we could take a bus to the ferry terminal. The harbour too had been completely transformed by the change in weather. It looked nothing like the grey, dour place it had seemed just yesterday.

St. Paul’s Harbour on a sunny morning

Mansi was keeping an eye on the timetable of the infrequent ferries to Gozo and wasn’t sure if the bus was going to get us to the terminal in time for the next one. So she called a cab instead. Our driver was a young man in his twenties with a penchant for flashy clothes, loud hip-hop with trashy lyrics and aggressive driving. By the time Lil Pump’s Mosh Pit came on the car stereo, I was ready to throw up¹. Fortunately, the ferry terminal’s timely arrival gave me a reprieve.

It wasn’t peak tourist season in Malta yet but at least one enterprising soul caught us at the ferry terminal entrance, handed us a brochure and tried to sell us a package tour in Gozo. We politely declined and began to look for a place to buy the tickets for the ferry. Turns out the ticketing system here was somewhat unique. We didn’t need to buy a ticket for the ride from Malta to Gozo but would need to procure one for the return journey.

Our ferry was a cavernous ship that sailed under a Greek flag.

Gozo Channel Line

The pedestrians boarded first followed by several cars. A narrow metal staircase led us to the upper deck that was missing many chairs. We sat in the first complete ‘row’ with a decent view but as soon as the ship started moving, we found ourselves welled in by people wanting to take pictures and make videos.

Missing seats

Welled in by people

Mansi got up to join them and I turned my camera to the sooty exhaust pipes of the ship and watched them bob up and down meditatively against the backdrop of the blue sky and a large cumulonimbus cloud. My mind wandered back to the last time I was on a ferry in the Mediterranean. Travelling after those two years of pandemic imposed moratorium still feels very special.

As we approached Gozo, I couldn’t resist standing by the railings and taking pictures.

The view of Gozo as the ferry approached the island

There was a harbour at the other side of the ferry terminal where many smaller boats were docked. Several private boat tours leave from here. The harbour’s water looked like an impressionist painting of the sky above. We could see the church of the Madonna of Lourdes on a hill nearby. And that’s where we decided head first.

The Mgarr Harbour right outside the Gozo ferry terminal

The view from the top was stunning.

A view of the Mgarr Harbour from a promontory opposite it

The staff at our hotel in Malta had told us that the water at the hotel was not potable. We were trying to make the bottled water provided at the hotel last and hadn’t filled up our travel bottles. Before embarking on a longer hike, we decided to get some drinking water from a store nearby. From there, we called another cab to Ramla bay.

It was a perfect day to be there. Hardly anyone was around. The pebble and sand beach was immaculate. The sky was blue but dotted with fast moving clouds that seemed within our arms’ reach.

Ramla Bay

Ramla Bay

Ramla Bay

Waves were gently crashing on the shore. We sat at a bench on the beach and soaked it all in.

Ramla Bay

A few minutes later we decided to hike a little in the hills nearby. The hiking track looked a little soggy from the rain yesterday. We plodded on nonetheless.

A sign at the start of our hiking trail

A view from our hike

A view of the Ramla Bay from our hike

The soil here was very clayey and started sticking to our shoes. We must’ve walked barely a hundred metres when our shoes started to feel really heavy with the thick layers of soil they had accumulated. Despite the stunning views, we weren’t enjoying our little hike any more. The paw prints we had encountered at the start of the trail should’ve been our warning.

Sticky soil warning

It was also past our lunch time and we were both regretting not having bought some snacks when we had stopped to get water earlier. A couple of shacks at the beach that might’ve supplied us with sustenance were closed - one small downside of visiting places in the off season.

We turned back, got hold of a couple of twigs, sat at a picnic bench under a tree and used them to work the stubborn soil out from the soles of our shoes. All under the watchful gaze of a feral cat.

The cat watched us clean our shoes

We then called a cab to take us to the centre of Gozo’s main town - Victoria. Our shoes were clean by now but not quite pristine and we were feeling a little guilty about getting inside a cab with them on. Our driver however had come prepared². The beach is a big tourist attraction in Gozo. He told us that he picks people from the beach regularly and was ready for the eventuality of sandy/muddy shoes.

After lunch at a small roadside café in Victoria we visited the small fortified town of Cittadella.

A small shop there sold miniature replicas of Malta’s colourful, boxy balconies.

Colourful miniature replicas of Malta’s balconies

We walked leisurely among the mediaeval ruins soaking in the views.

The ruins of Citadella

The ruins of Citadella

Since Cittadella is situated atop a promontory, there were several high points that offered sweeping views of the town below and the distant sea.

The views from Citadella

The views from Citadella

The wind was whipping the clouds into frightful shapes.

An incipient rainbow was attempting to grow whole amidst them.

It was almost three in the afternoon and the cathedral at the citadel’s entrance was counterpointed by shadow and light.

We stopped for a short coffee break in Victoria and then walked to a bus terminal to take a bus to Gozo’s ferry terminal. At the harbour outside the terminal, someone was hawking seats in their boat to Malta with a detour past Comino and the Blue Lagoon. I don’t recall what the ticket price was but it had felt reasonable and we both hopped onto a small but speedy boat. It was a very enjoyable ride with the evening sun shining on our faces and the boat tearing through the water.

Our speedy and splashy return journey

We wanted to take a bus to Popeye Village³ to catch the sunset but the buses in Malta hadn’t proven to be the most punctual means of transport so far. When ours didn’t show up well past its due time, we decided to spend the last few minutes of the evening walking around the terminal’s waterfront. We were drawn to what looked like an ancient lighthouse⁴. We went to take a closer look, hoping to climb the stairs in front. Sadly, we were met with a locked gate and abandoned the project.

The unmarked “lighthouse”

Minutes later, as if in compensation for this minor disappointment, we were rewarded with a beautiful sunset.

The sky moments after a beautiful sunset