Draft Magazine has an article in this month’s issue, “The Beer Drinker’s Layover” that outlines the microbrew selection in restaurants at various airports around the US. Many of the airports feature local breweries and selections on tap, increasing the attraction and local feel of an airport to it’s environs.

The sad part is at the top of their list of Airports to Avoid is Detroit Metropolitan Airport (DTW). Michigan has a large, varied, and tasty selection of microbrews. There are over 53 brewpubs and microbreweries in the state, and 18 in the immediate airport vicinity. It’s a shame that no restaurants in the regional airport highlight this selection by offering it on tap. You can, however vist the “Guinness Pub”, “Grey Goose Martini Bar”, or “Jose Cuervo Tequileria”. Not quite local selections.

While I don’t live in Michigan anymore, I do tend to fly through DTW quite a bit and would definitely welcome being greeted with my local favorites. Something like an Huxell Best Bitter from Arbor Brewing Company in Ann Arbor , French River Red Ale from Lily’s Seafood in Royal Oak ,or the very unique and well named Kentucky Breakfast Bourbon Aged Stout from Founders Brewing Company in Grand Rapids .

Note: the breweries above are marked up with hCards - however, not aware if there is an hBeer (perhaps hProduct?) markup.

The Magazine

If you haven’t seen it before, Draft is a bi-monthly magazine that covers the dramatically increasing micro- and local-beer scene and business. It’s kind of the Conde Nast Traveler for beer. What was most surprising was that I discovered at my family’s house addressed to my younger sister. I’m quite envious indeed.

As part of some continuing work with clients and heading to the OGC Technical Committee meeting to wrap up the OGC Web Services KML initiative (OWS-5 Agile Geography) - taking a very quick trip to Ann Arbor (2 days) and St. Louis for 3 days.

Stopping in Ann Arbor was really great. It’s the first city I’ve lived in long term that wasn’t attached to my attending school. When visiting my other alma maters I am primarily faced with nostalgia, but disconnect since all my acquaintances were transient like me and I know few people remaining in the town.

Ann Arbor, however, is like coming home. By contrast to my previous residences, as I wrote before I was fortunate to connect into a great community that is thriving here. Within an hour of sitting in a coffee shop I serendipitously connect with two great people - and had meetings, coffee, or hop tastings with many others. It’s great to be able to so quickly feel comfortable when traveling. I’ve understood one of the primary reasons of chains like Starbucks or Subway is to be familiar to travelers as they find themselves in otherwise unknown locales.

One goal of local search of user-generated is to give outsiders a view into the local life. However, they haven’t yet been able to breach the feeling of familiarity and reward that comes with visiting an old favorite restaurant or brew.

While our plans are still undecided for the future - it’s a great comfort to know I can stop into a great town like Ann Arbor and feel so welcome.

It’s been several weeks since I came back from China and I’ve been pondering all my experiences and exposures I received while traveling the huge country.

The common piece of information cited by people when talking about China is the sheer number of people. This is a fact and well covered. What isn’t easily conveyed is the affect the density and volume of this number of people has on the behaviors, mentality, and lives of the citizens of China. This is a country where there really are a hundred people behind you ready to take your job, or even several of them to do your one job. Individuals have to be tenacious and you have to get what you want. And this isn’t in a malicious or bad way. I wonder if it’s almost necessary for such a dense population to function.

It’s an organized chaos. The streets are very similar to what a westerner would expect, however there are probably 2-4 times as many vehicles and pedestrians on this street. That means that drivers abiding lanes, waiting to turn, and semblence of nominal laws would completely clog the system. Instead, vehicles are really only restricted by the curbs (mostly) and not hitting one another. In fact, in 3 weeks I didn’t see a single accident, which I found amazing. Crossing the road is like playing a game of Frogger, except that you’re the frog.

The pollution also has a deep impact on the populace. I didn’t have trouble breathing, but that was a common complaint by others. Instead, I felt pangs of light deficiency. For 3 weeks we never had a clear view of the horizon. Looking up the sky would be poking through with blue, and the sun would be a bright, but very discernable, disk - signaling a “clear” day. However, even flying over areas of the country there was rarely a break in the smog to see the landscape. This is also attributable to the extremely dry weather they’ve had that would otherwise “wash” the air. An obvious demonstration of why they’re working hard on making rain before the Olympics this summer.

Going out the the country-side was an amazing trip. 10 minutes on a bicycle and you go from “small town” of 600,000 people to farmlands and rice-fields bordering the beautiful Yulong river. You can walk through villages that probably haven’t changed in hundreds of years, except perhaps to get television. There are landmarks scattered around that would be entire theme parks in the United States, but in China served their original purposes to the local people today. The Dragon Bridge from 1400 AD that is still the only crossing for miles - or the Tang wall that guarded against armies about 1500 years ago and now just serves to separate some fields.

Hello, Bamboo?

I didn’t know what the term “hawking” really meant, and felt like, until I came to China. Combine the large population of available, cheap, workers, with the acquired knowledge and capability to manufacture, and people in cities looking for jobs and money, and you have an insanely overwhelming market of goods available at every corner. You’re constantly bombarded with shop owners, stalls, men on the street luring you into tailors, bags, and whatnot to sell. From these people you are a walking wallet and our favorite phrase became “Bu yao!” (don’t want)

Imagine if email spam were people. That is what it is like. At one market I was looking at a pair of shoes, but decided that though the price was right (approx. $4) I didn’t really like them. As I turned to walk away there were 8 other vendors behind me holding out either the exact same shoe for 1/2 the price, or a comparable shoe. If you show the slightest interest in something, it immediately turns into a bargaining game. They may even cry, throw a tantrum, complain that they are going out of business - but you can expect to pay 1/10th (yes, 10%) of what the original price was. They’ll seem incredibly hurt, but when you hand over the money, they immediately smile again and ask “do you want some scrolls?”

The pervasiveness of the market was succinctly demonstrated as I was biking along the Yulong river. The popular thing to do along the river is to hire a bamboo boat and a local to pole you up and down the river. Being the winter, tourist low season, there were swarms of boat owners and locals trying to sell a boat ride. They know they can get your attention by saying “Hello!” very clearly and then whatever it is they are selling.

So when leaving the village I rode past a small group of childen who were laughing and skipping past me, and upon seeing me shouted “Hello! Bamboo?” and then continuing to run and skip along down the next street - the phrase perfectly mimicking their parents offers of a ride, but in this case it was the only english words these children knew and to them it was a common greeting. (though I imagine their parents had very clearly explained about us westerners)

When in 中国…

Corrie and I took some mandarin classes and plastered various bits of our apartment with signs denoting the Mandarin (and Pinyin for pronunciation) words for the items or ideas. I think knowing a little bit of mandarin made a big difference on our trip. In the cities, you can pass with English, especially cities like Beijing that are recommending 400 words and phrases that every cab driver should know for preparing for Olympic tourists - but even then English isn’t strong or prevalent. China, I imagine, has the same problem that American’s do - it’s such a big country that there rarely is an opportunity to practice a foreign language. So while you may learn English in school for years, they will probably not have ever, or not often, spoken with a native English speaker. There were many times that our Mandarin was as good or better than the English of the person we were talking with.

Also, knowing some Mandarin just made the entire experience a lot more fun. Our pronunciation definitely needs a lot of work, but the people were typically very understanding, and were excited that we knew and spoke some of the language. My vocabulary doubled in the 3 weeks I was there and we’re definitely planning on maintaing and extending our knowledge of the language. Just need to find a local culture group.

China is a country that is outgrowing itself and trying to figure out how to live in a modern world. They produce 3-million engineers a year (compared to the US’s 100,000 engineers a year) but it’s a commonly accepted fact that the currently common Confucian style learning system promotes memorization over analysis and interpretation, so the workforce typically lacks ingenuity. There are more people than jobs, and businesses are required to hire a number of employees based on the square footage of their buildings. This leads to idle workers who have little more responsibility than greeting or looking busy.

I’m looking forward to more trips to China - I will have to increase my Mandarin skills so not to get teased by my pronunciations. Thanks to my old friend Sam (and to Facebook for letting me know that she lived where I was traveling to) for 3 days of “local life” in Nanjing. I passed on the turtle soup and duck brains.

Mapufacture Map of my trip

While traveling for a couple of weeks around China I have been posting notes, and a “Travel Stream” over at my travel blog. It’s primarily for my own travel journal of where I’ve been and thoughts along the way. It includes “meanwhiles”, which are the flickr/twitter/etc. posts inserted in between the actual blog posts. That way even if I’m just putting up quick notes (tumblog style) or photos, they still show up in the blog stream.

Using GeoPress, I can add locations through the web interface, but I’ve also added in-body location tagging, such as including GEOPRESS_LOCATION or geo:lat= and geo:lon= to set the location. This makes it easy for me to use an offline editor like Ecto, or even Wordpress’ email a post capability to easily post to my blog without necessarily having to login and use the web interface. I was hoping to have an N810, complete with built-in GPS, to take along, but unfortunately the developer discount codes aren’t working yet, so I was stuck with my N800 and an old iBook.

It’s getting easier to create a travelog enroute by utilizing a number of tools and then aggregate these together. Another great example is the BBC’s Bangladesh River Boat trip that uploaded GPS tracks, photos, twitters. For some reason, the potentially very useful Plazes doesn’t really fit into my workflow and I don’t find it very easy to update my locations quickly. Perhaps I need to investigate the API and make a simple offline widget for building up a set of travelled locations that can sync when I get back online.

More thoughts on China and travel soon.

Kia Ora!

After much traipsing about the world, I finally made it back from the wonderful, wild world of New Zealand.

Let me state first, and foremost, you must go. There is little doubt why Lord of the Rings was filmed there. The landscape is simply stunning, the people are friendly, the native Maori culture is engaging, I have a new appreciation and fascination with birds (yay Weka!), and the beers are amenable when you can find a brewpub (the wines are already well known).

Some Advice for the Traveler

A couple of bits of advice: go a little off-season, like March. “High Season” isn’t Disney{land, world}, but it’s still a little more difficult to find some accommodations/reservations. Apparently March is an excellent time: still warm, calm weather, and the baby seal pups are just becoming curious and exploratory and are fun to play with.

Rent a camper-van, one of those mini-van conversions with a bed and little cook area. This will allow you to camp besides streams, in the mountains, picnic with astonishing views, but still allow you to navigate the roadways and stay in better accommodations every once in awhile.

Prepare thyself for some exciting driving. The roads are almost all two-lane, incredibly windy (think looking over a cliff less than a foot away), narrow, and on the wrong-damn-side. And that’s just the highways (because they’re paved). But everything is very well labeled/signed, but take along a GPS-system too, just to make sure you’re going the right way.

Don’t eat Vegemite - it’s something that was made in times of dire need, which we don’t live in, so don’t eat it. Munch on something like cute cuddly lamb instead for goodness sake.

But what did you do?

All said, we drove more than 2700 miles through (deep-breath): Auckland, Waitakere Ranges, Nikau Caves, Whangarei, Matopeka, Russel, Kauri Forests, Poor Knights Island, Rotorua, Taupo, Tongariro National Park, Wellington, Picton, Renwick, Nelson, Motueka, Abel Tasman National Park, Hokitika, Fox Glacier, Te Anau, Milford Sound, Invercargill, the Caitlins, Dunedin, Oamaru, and Christchurch.

The great part about driving around a country like New Zealand is the ability to stop and enjoy the view or tramp through the woods whenever the fancy strikes you. For us, this was quite often. As a rule of thumb we added 20% travel time during any of our trips for these stops.

On the road IT

Each night I spent probably about 30 minutes dealing with “data management” - downloading GPS tracks, pictures, annotating, journal entry. There really must be a better way to manage this much data, especially en route, but also not be overwhelmed with it on return. I’ve found that internet access on travel is unreliable. Even when it is available it can be expensive, and restricted to a kiosk-type machine without any ability to upload your own data through them.

The photos are available on my Flickr page. I still need to go through an geotag them, as I was having problems geotagging the EXIF of RAW images using some of the automation techniques. I’ve also put up a blog of the travels in the GeoPress demo blog at http://location.highearthorbit.com/travel.

Over the next week I’ll be cleaning up more photos, and uploading the megabytes of tracklogs I’ve accumulated to OpenStreetMap in order to hopefully kick off interest in the project in New Zealand (or at least to other OSMers traveling to NZ)

Unfortunately, due to traveling through Wellington on New Years Day, I didn’t get to meet up with some of NZ’s finest mappers, ProjectX Technologies (developers of ZoomIn), or Mark Zeman (developer of TripperMap).

It was a tremendous endeavor that really introduced us to a lot and was thoroughly enjoyable, if a little fast paced. After just 3 weeks in New Zealand we spent 2 days whirlwind through Seoul, South Korea, and then back to Washington, DC via San Francisco, and a long 10 hour drive back to Michigan.

More to come…

I have some rather exciting announcements to share, but as it’s late, and I’m all kinds of jet-lagged/worn out, I’ll post about it later.