Conferences are Soooooo Much Better in Person. Zoom and Hybrid are a Different Event.

La Maison de la Chimie, Paris

At the beginning of June, I went to a Science and Diplomacy conference hosted by La Maison de la Chimie, Paris. I have written about the conference and some of the people I met there. 

In addition to listening to some fascinating presentations, the conference itself was like a demonstration of what is lost when conferences are on line or hybrid.  I may sound like a kid talking about his favorite parts of school, but it is really true that, for me, the best parts of the two-day conference were the lunches, the dinner, the coffee breaks, and the hallway.  

I really liked hearing Matthew Adamson talk about uranium mining as part of his presentation on Cold War weapons and resources.  During the break after his talk, we spoke about how resource maps influence industry, and how maps affect military strategy.

During lunch the next day, Adamson and I talked about his career path from grad student in Indiana and Paris, then professor in Budapest. Across from me was Fintan Hoey, a professor of history at Franklin University Switzerland. He is from Ireland, studies the modern of Japan particularly during the Cold War.  His best stories were about working in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland and learning the language of his region. 

I turned to my right at the same lunch and talked to Maritza Gomez about her presentation on an attempt by equatorial countries to claim their sovereign territory extended into space, at least as far as the orbits of geosynchronous satellites. She told me about her life in California, then studying in Germany and continuing her studies in Mexico.

Another hallway conversation was with John Krige. He spoke as part of the public panel on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the effects of Europe stopping all collaboration with Russian scientists just four days after the Russia started the war. Krige's presentation was clear and stark that the war will cause pain across Europe and the world. 

At the conference dinner I sat across from Nestor Herran, a professor of the history of science at The Sorbonne in Paris. We talked about his research in Cold War nuclear technology in Britain and elsewhere.  I told him I was a Cold War airman on a crew that did live-fire static test of Minuteman missiles and later a tank commander on the East-West German border, so had two different "ground-level" perspectives on the Cold War and the nuclear threat.  

After a while, Nestor said, "I am 50 years old and this is the first time I have had a long conversation with a career soldier."  We talked about how much the military is separate from the larger culture in countries with voluntary service and who serves in the military.  I could tell him I had not met a lot of historians of science in uniform.  

Apparently, I am very good at dinner because one of the conference organizers, Charlotte Abney Saloman, invited me to join her and her mom, who was visiting Paris, for dinner the evening the conference ended. 

I'm sure I will have to use Zoom in the future for book groups or other events where meeting in person is not possible.  But this conference showed me why people get together for conferences.  Zoom has no hallways, coffee breaks, or shared meals. 

                  

Medical Electronics Technician Travels the World, Retires to Denmark Boat Dock

The dock at Tues Naes, Denmark

The guesthouse where Cliff and I stayed in Tues Naes, had a washer-dryer, but the dryer wasn't working. We decided to drive to a laundromat, but then Cliff remembered a notice on the bulletin board of the boat dock where we had walked the day before. 

We went there and asked the Jan, the dock manager. When we only needed a dryer, he told us just to go ahead and use it, and offered us coffee. No charge for either. 

When the clothes were dry, I thanked Jan. He asked where we were from.  We started talking about travel. He had been all over the world as a technician for Varian, a medical electronics company. He told us about going to Benghazi, Libya, and sitting at the airport shaking on the night he left, hoping he would get out alive.

Of all the places he had been in the world, the place he went the most in the final years of his career was the place he liked the least:  Las Vegas.  He is a tall, lean, strong man with a very calm affect, but he became animated talking about Las Vegas.

"They set up a training program in Vegas," he said. "Then they made it permanent. Every few months I would have to go there. I would spend a week or a month. I worked 10 or 12 hours a day. After work, I would get food from a local Italian restaurant and eat in my room."

He was not interested in clubs or shows or casinos. "We were building equipment to cure cancer," he said. "The company would hand cards to all the employees so they could eat steak and lobster in the casinos and get less healthy." 

"Las Vegas takes water from everywhere," he said. "It's unnatural. It should not exist." 

Then a little ferry swung up to the dock. It had seats for eight passengers and a small outboard motor.  Jan said he had to do some work. We thanked him again and took the dry clothes back to the guesthouse.  

Cliff and I were laughing on the way back about Jan's description of Las Vegas.  Jan never actually said he liked Las Vegas more than Benghazi. It was clear he would never go to either again.

  

When a Plan (or a Bone) Breaks, My Mind is Alive with 'What's Next?"

Yesterday, I checked in for a flight from Paris to Rome, started my train trip to the airport, and got a message saying the flight was cancelled. "No further information is available at this time."  

I got off the train at the next stop and mapped a trip to Gare de Lyon the station where trains leave Paris toward the Alps and Italy.  I checked several possibilities, then made reservations for what I hope is the most reliable option.  

It's not that I want my plans to fall apart, but when it happens, I feel and odd kind of joy.  Once plans are made, travel is passive. Sit on the plane or train until the destination.  But when plans fall apart, I can go into action.  My mind races with possibilities.  I look at weather, news reports, and feel exhilarated when a new plan comes together.   In this case, staying in Paris would get me to Turin, Italy, by noon, and Rome by 8pm.  I got a cheap hotel near the train station and left Paris at 6:46am.  

Part of my happiness when I redo broken plans is experience. I have done this a lot, so I know what to expect. But I still have to deal with the situation as it is. It's like broken bones in that way. Each broken bone hurts like Hell, but by the 40th broken bone, I knew how the recovery would go and was excited about the surgery--it makes the healing process faster.  

Part of it is also something I looked for in all of my kids and in soldiers I was in charge of: How would they respond to injury? Two of my kids got angry when they got hurt. They wanted to get back in the game or the race.  The other four wanted to heal up and re-evaluate.  

I am now on a train to Turin. I got an email from Air France this morning offering me a different flight. It was a connecting flight through Luxembourg. With all the flight cancellations, that option would give me two more chances to have a flight not take off, and possibly be in Luxembourg looking for a way to get to Rome through Switzerland.  

Profound Moments from Visiting Countries for the First Time

 

The sky at 1am in Bodo, Norway.

On this trip I traveled to  or through eight countries. Three are my favorite destinations in the world: France, Germany and Italy. Two I just passed through: Turkey and Sweden. Three I visited for the first time: Denmark, Norway and the Vatican. In each of the countries I was in for the first time, I had an experience that only being in that place could give me. 

In Bodo, Norway, I was above the Arctic Circle.  At 1am, when the sun is due north in the northern hemisphere during Daylight Savings Time, I was walking around Bodo. I took the picture above of the cloudy sky with the sun shining in from due north.  I have known this to be true since I first understood Earth's orbit, but seeing it made me irrationally happy.  The sun really was visible due north!  

In Denmark my friend Cliff and I visited Panzer Museum East southwest of Copenhagen.  On the way to Denmark a few days before, we visited Deutsches PanzerMuseum north of Hannover.  That museum, like most military museum, celebrates the weapons of that country. The museum in Denmark does not. The collection of hundreds of tanks, trucks, armored vehicles, missiles, aircraft, cannon, medical equipment, engines, radar systems and other equipment is Soviet-made. 

The museum is designed to be a warning: If the Soviets had invaded Western Europe, these vehicles would have been attacking our country. In a chilling update of the collection, the vehicles that Putin's Russia is using to invade Ukraine are tagged in the display. Nowhere in the museum is any vehicle or equipment ever used by the Army of Denmark.

Also in Denmark, I learned about very different burial practices common in both Denmark and Germany.  Headstones and burial plots are rented for 25 or 50 years.  Then someone gets the space.  I wrote about that here.

The third country I visited was the Vatican.  Like Monaco, San Marino, Andorra, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein, it is a city state, a member of the United Nations with its own government, but the size of a city.  Over the past fifteen hundred years the Vatican has had vastly different levels of power. Its current status as an independent state was granted by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in 1931.  

Before visiting the Vatican, I read a lot about the Catholic Church in Germany. Before and during the trip I was The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler  by David I. Kertzer.  The book is based on Vatican archives opened in 2020 that detail long-hidden history of Pope XII with Hitler and Mussolini.  

I took a train to the Vatican and rode a bike to  St. Peters Square. I walked into the vast plaza and was overwhelmed with sadness.  'To keep this you let all the Jews die,' was what I thought as I walked looking up at the statues and the fountain. Everything about the place screamed temporal power. This was a place of riches and political influence.  

I left and went back to Rome, which was another revelation for me. No amount of reading or maps prepared me for how small the area was that encompassed the Palatine Hill, the Colosseum, the Capital, markets, baths, temples, circuses, all in a relatively small space.  

Travel to a new place is its own reward.  

 

Ukrainian Family in a German Monastery

 

Sergey, Maria and I at a monastery guesthouse 

When Cliff and I returned to Darmstadt from Denmark we met a family of refugees from Ukraine who are staying in a guesthouse at the monastery.  Sergey and Maria and their seven children between six months and thirteen years old are living in a house at the edge of the property. 

While we drank coffee together on the patio, the seven kids popped in and out of the house.  The oldest girl brought the baby out to see mom, then the oldest boy scooped the baby up and disappeared into the house.  

Sergey is Ukrainian, from Kyiv. Maria is Russian, from Moscow. Sergey speaks Ukrainian and Russian. Maria speaks Russian, English, and Ukrainian. They marked their 15th wedding anniversary on March 31st with their whole family in a car driving toward the border to seek asylum in the west.  Maria and Sergey lived in Sevastopol in Crimea, so they have been in an area of Russian occupation since 2014.  

When the Russians invaded, the fighting was not near their home, but missiles fired from Russian ships blasted over their city.  Maria talked about trying to tell the kids it would be okay, but after a month, they decided to leave. After a long journey, they made it to Darmstadt and the Land of Kanaan monastery.

Several times over the past five years, I have stayed in the guesthouse where Sergey and Maria and their family are now staying.  It was built for several men, usually visiting volunteers. There are several small rooms, a kitchen and a common room and two bathrooms with showers.  It was always so quiet. It was funny and delightful to see kids zooming in and out, running and riding bikes.

I am very glad to see another family safe from the war Russia inflicted on Ukraine and the democratic world.

A Thousand-Year-Old Church in Denmark and What I Learned about Burial

 

Just after we crested a small hill on a drive in Denmark, this beautiful Church was 500 meters ahead. My friend Cliff and I stopped to take a picture of what turned out to be a thousand-year-old Church of a type very common in Denmark. It is called Sorbymargle Kirke.  

Just after we stopped, the caretaker, Carina Rasmussen, drove up and offered to let us see the inside of the Church.  The design, long and narrow, is replicated across the country in Church large and small.  

There were very old drawings on the wall.  

But the real revelation was the graveyard.  I had seen another Church the day before with an immaculate garden cemetery.  This one is lovely.

Do you see what's missing?  I didn't. But it was not until we visited another Church where I saw old headstones in what could have been a granite recycling bin that I got the story on what's missing--old headstones.  In America, graveyards are the biggest problem faced by people who design roads and bridges and housing projects. We bury people in durable caskets. People here are buried in biodegradable caskets. The plot is a 25 or 50 year rental. By then, the current occupant is part of the soil and someone else moves in.  

The headstones get recycled as stone.  

The graveyards stay small and clean. there are no cracked, faded, broken 300-year-old headstones.  

One of the wonderful things about travel is seeing culture in a way you never could except on the ground in the place you are visiting.  And in this case, getting the answer to a question I never knew to ask.

Danish Ferry Crewman Who Worked in Thule Greenland and Served with Elite British Regiment

 

On Wednesday, I waited on the dock in Elsinor, Denmark, to board a ferry to Sweden.  A member of the crew walked up and asked if I was just waiting or boarding the ferry that was leaving in two minutes.  I said I was waiting for the next one to meet up with my friend who was a foot passenger.  I told him I was going to Sweden just to ride my bike. 

We started talking about travel. Then about the military. He was in the Danish Army in the 90s and served with the elite British Army cavalry reconnaissance unit known as the Life Guards.  He had seen my armor tattoo and showed me the Life Guards tattoo on his shoulder.

Then he said he worked for a year on the American Air Base in Thule, Greenland. He still had the THULE identification tag on his key ring.  He was there between 2008 and 2009, about the time I left for Iraq. We made a couple of jokes about differences in climate between the two bases.  I told him I have an uncle who was assigned to Thule in 1972, around the same time I first enlisted. Martin said with a huge smile, "I wasn't even a dirty thought back then!"   

Martin said his job on the ferry didn't pay much, but he really liked his co-workers and the work. I told him that was my goal in work, to be with great co-workers and do a job I liked.  We talked about how different travel is now compared to before the 9-11 attacks. But for both of us travel is worth whatever hassles come with it.  We both prefer trains, ships and cars to flying.  

After we talked, Martin continued went to work loading the ferry. I was delighted to find it was the ferry "Hamlet" within sight of Elsinor Castle.