Travel

In the late winter of 2006, I realized, on a train from somewhere between Freilassing and Rosenheim, after an interop in Salzburg leading up to IETF 65 in Dallas, that I was probably going to have to move to Central Europe. A bit more than twenty years later, I’m sitting on a Railjet on the way to Landeck – a train that did not exist at the time – waiting at the platform in Freilassing – an occurrence more frequent now that Germany is reaping the rewards of running its rail network as a Volkswagen ad for the past two decades. This gives me time to reflect a long week at IETF 126 in Vienna before I disappear into the mountains for a bit. In addition to joining the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society, on which more after I’ve understood the assignment, a couple of things of note happened that warrant talking about here. ...

It’s bad form to draw generalizations about a place and a people from a tiny little sample of experience. And my sample last week in Taipei, Taiwan, was particularly tiny: first, I was there for an IETF meeting which kept me inside the convention center for most of the week, which resembled nothing so much as every convention center I’ve ever been in. And the times I wasn’t kept in the convention center by work, I was kept inside otherwise by a persistent rain that wasn’t so much rain as simply dampness-as-atmosphere: I literally saw the sun for only fifteen minutes the entire week, and that while it was between the horizon and the cloud deck one morning. I stayed in bed. That said, here are a few notes on observations that came to mind while I was there. ...