I don't watch much TV these days, so I cannot really claim an informed opinion, but here is instead a quote from Newton Minnow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the regulator for television in the US:

I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials -- many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

Minnow had just been appointed by President Kennedy, and he gave this speech in May 1961. How fortunate that things have improved since then.

I recently encountered two unexpected examples of location-based services that show how useful it can be if a service provider knows where you are when accessing his service (even though the whole concept has its scary aspects as well).

I am using a commercial VPN service (5 USD/month) now to jump over (or dig through) the Great Firewall, and as a side effect this makes my Internet access appear to be originating from the US or Europe. Now Google showed me a warning message about my account being accessed from an unlikely location, and advised my to change my password if I had nothing to do with this. Apparently, they keep track of your physical location (which can be determined relatively accurately from your IP address, unless you are using something like a VPN or proxy server) and if your point of access moves faster than a human being could, they generate the warning.

And yesterday, my sister and I received text messages to our mobile phones with Expo information shortly after we entered the Expo site. Your mobile phone operator obviously knows where you are (in urban areas within a few hundred meters), and they can use this information themselves or share it with partners to provide location-specific information.

The scary part is the ability to record and store this data, combine it with data from other sources to get an uncomfortably comprehensive profile, and share it with people you would rather not disclose your location to. But it sure is pretty darn useful.

The year is 2025. Man is returning to the moon, this time mostly to harvest Helium-3, fuel for the recently discovered fusion reactors that are about to completely revolutionise the energy sector. Lunar expeditions have become much more affordable using billionaire Julian Orley's space elevator. In order to convince investors to help him build another one, Orley invites a handful of the world's richest and most influential people to join him on a luxury trip to his hotel on the moon.

There are three acts to Schätzing's book. First, we are introduced to Julian Orley, his vast array of technological achievements, and the illustrious group that will follow him to the moon. The second part plays in Shanghai, where a British internet investigator and a young Chinese dissident stumble upon a dangerous conspiracy and have to fight off a psychotic professional killer. The final chapters see the catastrophe on the moon unravel and the lunar tourists are scrambling to avert as much as they can, unmask the traitors, and get back to Earth alive.

All in all an enjoyable read, and quite a page-turner for most of its 1320 (!) pages. Sometimes reminiscent of Michael Crichton, with a bit of Neal Stephenson thrown in, certainly more grounded than Dan Brown. I was disappointed by the last third, and I was put off a little by the frequent references to current (2000-2008) events, such as Barack Obama becoming president, Putin's handling of the Russian energy industry, or the financial crisis, none of which I think will have that much relevance fifteen years on. Of course, I greatly enjoyed the Shanghai angle, and appearances by Perry Rhodan and David Bowie are always welcome.

When I went to pick up my sister from Pudong International Airport (she will stay with us for five weeks, doing an internship at a hospital here), I took the Shanghai Transrapid. It was my third (and fourth) time on this magnetic levitation train, but the other times it did not travel at top speed, which fortunately it did today. 431 kmh, wow. The thirty kilometres trip only takes eight minutes.

There is a museum attached to the train station, which explains the history of (and predicts a bright future for) magnetic levitation trains. I suppose if this is going to happen, it has to happen in China. At least in Germany, where the technology was developed (it is a Siemens train), not a single route has been built, because of high construction costs and opposition of the communities along the track. Even here, a proposed extension of the current line towards Shanghai's other airport via the Expo site has met with a lot of resistance and been suspended. It does look like a 169 kilometres long inter-city connection to neighbouring Hangzhou is going to be built, though.

The museum also mentions that the train is equipped with decelerating glass, so that passengers can better admire the view outside the window. It seems to be shaped in a special curvature that distorts the sight in a way that makes objects outside appear to move less fast.

Whenever you buy something in China, you should get a tax receipt (发票, fa piao). These receipts are used by the tax authorities to calculate and collect sales taxes, and also by government agencies to track their expenses. Consumers are strongly encouraged to get fa piao with all their purchases, but since that would prevent the vendor from not paying sales tax, the shops are making this as difficult as they possibly can. First of all, the fa piao is not integrated into the regular sales receipt, you are not given it automatically, you have to ask for it separately, sometimes not at the cashier, but at a special service counter. Even if you ask for a fa piao, you will sometimes be offered some handwritten papers without official stamps instead. Or you will be asked to come back later because they are out of forms at the moment, or the manager who has to do it has gone out for lunch (we have had all of this happen).

There is also a vibrant market for second-hand (or outright fake) fa piao, which can be used to draw money from expense accounts or tax returns. This seems to be risky business, at least if you overstep the unspoken limits that seem to socially accepted: six people in Guangdong have been sentenced to death for multi-billion dollar tax fraud in 2002. But use of this kind of fa piao in moderation (even though it must definitely constitute tax fraud) is terribly wide-spread and hard to avoid. Cissy's massage parlor gives her receipts for food, dated last year. Since I doubt that massages are tax deductible anyway, this is probably not a problem for us. But our monthly rent entitles us to a significant tax rebate. Of course, our land lord does not want to pay income tax on the rent and will not issue fa piao. There is not much we can do about that (and I doubt that other land lords would be any different), other than accepting the food and transportation receipts he gives us instead.

There are other grey zones. The girls at Walmart always write "food" on the receipt, no matter what I really bought. I'd look like a complete fool (no problem with that), and waste everyone's time if I tried to ask them to separate out the non-food items. My modus operandi now is to only get fa piao for purchases that include at least some food, and discard the totally-non-food receipts.

Having spent all my life in Germany and Japan, I am much more comfortable with following the law to the letter, rather than navigating unwritten grey areas of interpretation, but these are compromises that I think you have to work out in order to not lose your mind/cool/temper in China.

Excerpt from Wikipedia's list of statistically superlative countries:

China	Largest rice producer, output of 182,042,000 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest wheat producer, output of 109.9 million metric tons	Agriculture	2007
China	Largest fruit and vegetable producer, output of 506,634,000 tons	Agriculture	2004
China	Largest apple producer, output of 26,065,500 tons	Agriculture	2006
China	Largest garlic producer, output of 12,088,000 tons	Agriculture	2008
China	Largest pear and quince producer, output of 11,537,000 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest tangerine producer, output of 14,152,000 tons	Agriculture	2007
China	Largest peach and nectarine producer, output of 6,030,000 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest plum and sloe producer, output of 4,635,500 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest persimmon producer, output of 1,987,000 tons	Agriculture	2006
China	Largest tomato producer, output of 32,540,040 tons	Agriculture	2006
China	Largest watermelon producer, output of 69,315,000 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest chestnut producer, output of 825,000 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest walnut producer, output of 499,070 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest peanut producer, output of 13,090,000 tons	Agriculture	2008
China	Largest eggplant producer, output of 18,033,000 tons	Agriculture	2008
China	Largest carrot and turnip producer, output of 8,395,500 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest potato producer, output of 70 million metric tons	Agriculture	2006
China	Largest cabbage producer, output of 36,335,000 tons	Agriculture	2008
China	Largest cauliflowers and broccoli producer, output of 8,585,000 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest spinach producer, output of 11,011,000 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest lettuce and chicory producer, output of 11,005,000 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest asparagus producer, output of 5,906,000 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest onion and shallot producer, output of 17,793,000 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest cucumber and gherkin producer, output of 26,000,000 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest fish producer, output of 49,467,275 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest aquatic plants producer, output of 11,163,675 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest honey producer, output of 298,000 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest mushroom and truffle producer, output of 1,410,540 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest cotton producer, output of 11,400,000 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest silk producer, output of 290,003 tons	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest rapeseed producer, output of 10.3 million metric tons	Agriculture	2007
China	Largest tea producer, output of 1,183,502 million tons	Agriculture	2007
China	Largest tobacco producer, output of 2,298,800 tons	Agriculture	2000
China	Largest livestock of domestic sheep, 157,900,000 heads	Agriculture	2004
China	Largest livestock of domestic pig, 488,800,000 heads	Agriculture	2005
China	Largest livestock of mules, 4,194,000 heads	Agriculture	2003
China	Largest livestock of donkeys, 8,499,000 heads	Agriculture	2003
China	Largest livestock of horses, 8,088,000 heads	Agriculture	2003
China	Largest rice consumer, 135 million metric tons per year	Consumption	2004
China	Largest car market, 13.64 million vehicles	Consumption Transport	2009
China	Largest population, 1,315,844,000	Demographics	2006
China	Largest labour force, 807,700,000	Demographics Economy	2008
China	Largest renewable energy producer, 576.1 TW·h per year	Energy	2006
China	Largest hydroelectricity producer, 585.2 TW·h per year	Energy	2007
China	Largest coal producer, 2,536.7 million tons	Energy Industry	2007
China	Largest wind turbine producer	Energy Industry	2009
China	Largest solar panel producer	Energy Industry	2009
China	Most carbon dioxide emissions, 6,103,493,000 metric tons	Environment	2006
China	Largest forex reserves, $2,273,000,000,000	Finance	2009
China	Largest exporter, $1,200,000,000,000	Finance	2009
China	Highest current account balance, $371,833,000,000	Finance	2007
China	Highest elevation above the sea level, 8,848 m (29,029 ft) at Mount Everest (shared with Nepal)	Geography	2009
China	Longest land border length, 22,117 km (22,147 km if Hong Kong and Macao, the two special administrative regions are counted)	Geography	2009
China	Most countries bordered, 14 (16 if Hong Kong and Macao, the two special administrative regions are counted), the same number as with Russia	Geography	2009
China	Largest gold producer, 276 tonnes	Industry	2007
China	Largest aluminium producer, 5,896,000 tons	Industry	2006
China	Largest antimony producer, 126,000 tons	Industry	2005
China	Largest arsenic producer	Industry	2006
China	Largest bismuth producer, 1,900 tons	Industry	2006
China	Largest cadmium producer, 3,000 tons	Industry	2005
China	Largest cement producer, 1,038,000,000 tons	Industry	2005
China	Largest fluorite producer, 3,000,000 tons	Industry	2006
China	Largest iron producer, 588,000,000 tons	Industry	2006
China	Largest manganese producer, 6,000,000 tons	Industry	2006
China	Largest mercury producer, 1,150 tons	Industry	2005
China	Largest mica producer, 89,000 tons	Industry	2005
China	Largest steel producer, 500,500,000 tons	Industry	2008
China	Largest strontium producer, 700,000 tons	Industry	2005
China	Largest tin producer, 120,000 tons	Industry	2005
China	Largest tin reserves, 1,700,000 tons	Industry	2006
China	Largest tungsten producer, 46,900 tons	Industry	2005
China	Largest zinc producer, 2,600,000 tons	Industry	2006
China	Largest motor vehicle producer, 13,790,000 vehicles	Industry Transport	2009
China	Largest army by number of active troops, 2.25 million troops	Military	2005
China	Largest police force, 1,780,000 officers	Military	2010
China	Most frigates in operation, 49	Military
China	Best performance at women's badminton Uber Cup, 11 times winner	Sports	2009
China	Best performance at World Badminton Championships, 43 gold medals won	Sports	2009
China	Best performance at World Amateur Go Championship, 18 wins	Sports	2009
China	Best performance at World Table Tennis Championships, 35 team wins	Sports	2009
China	Best performance at World Weightlifting Championships (women), 314 gold medals, 423 total medals	Sports	2007
China	Leading surveillance society (Endemic surveillance society)	Surveillance	2007
China	Most internet users, 298,000,000	Technology	2009
China	Most main line phones, 368,000,000	Technology	2006
China	Most mobile cellular phones, 703,000,000	Technology	2009
China	Largest total length of waterways, 110,000 km	Transport	2008
China	Largest total length of high-speed railways, 6,003 km	Transport	2009

There is quite a bit of green, and also (in the form of artificial lakes and pools) blue, between the buildings in our Orient City Garden, and with that come animals.

Not so long ago, keeping pet dogs was uncommon in China, even frowned upon as decadent, but it has recently gained popularity, not in a small part as a status symbol. The resident poodles, chihuahuas and terriers are all well-fed, well-bred, well-groomed, well-trained, and well-behaved. Kai refers to some of them as pandas. The same cannot be said of the scrawny wild cats, who get out of your way as fast as they can, and will only suffer conversation from afar. Thanks to all the standing, open water there are also fish (probably very important for Feng Shui), frogs (never seen, but always heard), and unfortunately a lot of mosquitoes that somehow always make it into the house at night.

South Africa - Mexico. Korea - Greece. Germany - Serbia. Germany - England. Paraguay - Japan. Netherlands - Brazil. Argentina - Germany. All at reasonable times in the evening. But the remaining four matches are all at 2:30 in the morning. Time-shifting is possible, with CCTV-5 showing repeats all through the day, but pointless.

Shortly after arriving in Shanghai, I saw the trailer for this spy thriller in the subway, and of course immediately decided that this would warrant my first trip to the cinema here. Back at home, I was shocked to find no trailer on Apple's site and hardly any information about it on IMDb, not even a poster. John Cusack, Gong Li, Chow Yun-Fat, Ken Watanabe, David Morse, and Franka Potente, produced by the Weinstein Company, apparently already finished two years ago and sitting on the shelves ever since. Last week world premiere at the Shanghai film festival, releases this year in selected European and East Asian markets, but still no US release date. No idea why, I cannot see anything wrong with this picture.

7 points (only the fifteenth vote on IMDb !)

Today is the fifth day of the fifth month in the lunar calendar, and that makes it a major holiday, the Duanwu Festival, also known as the Dragon Boat Festival.

Duanwu commemorates Qu Yuan, a famous Chinese scholar, who was expelled from the royal court after conspiracy charges made up by jealous officials, and later drowned himself in the Milo River. To deter the fish from eating his body, the townsfolk decided to make zongzi rice dumplings and throw them into the water.

To make a Wednesday holiday into a long weekend, Monday and Tuesday have also been declared holidays. While many countries have such a rule, the Chinese are doing it wrong, though: To compensate for the two extra holidays, Saturday and Sunday were turned into working days instead.

Yesterday we went to the Expo, which is the focus of public attention here in Shanghai these days. The weather was overcast, that being both unfortunate (because the riverfront views that the various pavilions were designed to present turned out to be mostly grey), and good (because it kept the temperature down at a pleasant level).

I'd love to say that after Hanover and Aichi, this makes three in a row, but as the Expo History Exhibition taught us, there was also Zaragoza 2008 (and there will be Yeosu 2012 before Milan 2015).

As could be expected, the major pavilions had prohibitively long lines in front of them. I did not see any of the helpful signs with the three digit minutes you'd have to wait like they had in Aichi, but it seemed like they would not have shown significantly different numbers. That we were able to get into a number of other pavilions was mostly thanks to Kai and the special express queues for wheelchairs and baby cars. The other great advantage of bringing him along was the interest he generated with the Chinese visitors, who at one point even lined up to take pictures with him.

Quick rundown of the pavilions we saw: Pacific Pavilion with all these tiny island states (populations less than 50.000, highest mountain five metres above sea level), African Pavilion (with a drum performance, Kai loves drum performances), the Denmark Pavilion (with Copenhagen harbour's original Little Mermaid on loan inside), the Monaco Pavilion (terrible opening movie, should have taken inspiration from the San Marino Pavilion), the Turkish Pavilion (with at least three attached kebab restaurants), the Czech Pavilion (with everyone's favourite children's animations), the North Korean Pavilion (a Paradise for the People, or so they claim) right next to the Iranian Pavilion, the Belgian Pavilion (which was closed for the day, with someone important given interviews there, but you could still buy waffles, chocolate, and pommes frittes), and a couple others who I have no record of because their stamp for the Expo passport was broken or otherwise missing.

We obviously did not see even close to everything, but since the Expo is still going on through October and really just around the corner from our house, we will probably go a few more times. I am also hoping for a spectacular closing ceremony, as we have missed the opening fireworks (where they made a point being bigger than the one the Beijing Olympic Games had) by just a few weeks.

After a long time, finally another Perl project, so here you go:

Perl has a range operator to help iterating over index ranges.

foreach ( 1 .. 10 ) { 
    # do something
}

foreach ($start .. $finish) {
	# do something
}

# get the last three array elements
# negative array indices are another of the 1001 reasons
my @array_slice = @array[ -3 .. -1];

Many languages have that, but Perl's version has a little extra magic to also work with letters, and not just numbers:

$ perl -le 'foreach ("F97" .. "G05"){ print }';
F97
F98
F99
G00
G01
G02
G03
G04
G05

In scalar context, the range operator works as a boolean bi-stable flip-flop, with some extra special magic thrown in if constant values are present, but that is getting a bit too arcane to be considered a great feature. I am not even going to try to explain it here, the Perl Monks have an article about it.

We went on a scouting exhibition to IKEA today, mostly to see what they have, and also to get a few smaller things. As it turns out, they have a great many wonderful things, and apparently all of Shanghai is of the same opinion: It was terribly crowded. When we visited IKEA in Tokyo, it was similarly packed, but I thought that was due to the Tokyo store having opened only a few weeks before. It seems that maybe this is just what happens with fashionable and affordable European furniture outlets in East Asian metropoleis.

We came back with two huge coffee cups, plastic boxes Samla and Vessla, Komplement storage components, the milk-frother Produkt, Elly tea towels, the blue plastic tray Varsam, the cutlery tray Rationell Variera, IKEA 365+ spice jars (are they running out of names?), and wooden toy Mula (I hope that Kai does not read this before his birthday).

Last weekend we moved into our new tenth-floor apartment in Shanghai. It has three bed rooms (one converted to house my office and Cissy's exercise machine), two bath rooms, a kitchen, a living-dining room, and an enclosed balcony. It was already fully furnished, mostly with the sort of dark and heavy wooden fittings that seem to be popular here.

The apartment is located in a compound called Orient City Garden, in Pudong, quite close to the Expo site. And while we are no longer living on top of a shopping mall, across the street are a Walmart, a subway station, and a children's hospital.

Before moving in, we stayed with Cissy's parents for about two weeks, where we also reunited with our boxes from Japan and half of our boxes from Singapore (the other half is still on a boat somewhere). My mother-in-law was instrumental in the move, from finding the apartment in the first place, to having a friend with a van help get the boxes over, to giving the house a thorough spring cleaning with the help of another friend, whom she also engaged to come over for three hours six times a week to keep it tidy.

There is also a big kindergarden in the compound, but I want to send Kai to a German or International school, so that I can communicate with the teachers as well. The German school is an hour away, but there is an International kindergarden just one subway stop from here. We hope that we can enroll Kai for the summer school there, starting in July. Before that, he will spend most of the day with his grandmother.

Part Ten: The Nameless Lady who adorns our bathroom door has been around longer than we have.

After two weeks in Shanghai, here is what works and what does not:

Backblaze

Works. My online offsite backup solution.

Blogspot.com

Blocked.

Dropbox

Blocked. I was using Dropbox to exchange design documents with business partners, but there are other ways.

Drop.io

Works. I use drop.io to share pictures of Kai. Since it allows anonymous content uploads, it seems to be a candidate for blocking, though.

Facebook

Blocked. I am not on Facebook, but Cissy is.

Google App Engine

Mostly works. The apps themselves work, as do the administration tools. But the name server responsible for custom domain names (instead of x.appspot.com) is inaccessible.

Google Groups

Blocked. But works in SSL mode. HTTP packet inspection?

Google Mail

Works.

Google Search

Works. A bit unexpected after the recent developments. Is served out of Hong Kong.

Hotspotshield.com

Blocked. A commercial VPN service to protect your connections when using public WiFi networks (and to watch Hulu outside of the US).

iTunes Store

Works.

Mac Software Update

Works.

Podcasts

Partially blocked. I have not been able to get to the latest episodes of Filmspotting, and Chaos Radio Express. This is probably collateral damage due to hosting providers. Others (such as the TWiT network, NPR, or Tagesschau) work fine.

Skype

Works. Conference calls are essential for my freelance work. We knew it would work because Cissy has been making video calls to her parents from Tokyo and Singapore.

Steam

Works. I was able to install Steam, create an account, download and play Portal. Great game.

Tor

Severely blocked. As a tool to thwart Internet censorship and traffic tracking, this is obviously not wanted here. The project site is blocked (I could install off a mirror), as are most (all?) the publicly listed router nodes. It should be possible to still access the network using unlisted bridge nodes, but I could make that work just once (long enough to tweet).

Twitter

Blocked. Identi.ca as well.

Wenxue City

Blocked. A popular Chinese-language news and forum site (and Cissy's start page in Firefox).

Wikipedia

Works.

Youtube

Blocked.

Wikipedia has a more comprehensive list.

The Internet was supposed to bring about micropayments, online money which could easily be sent from anyone to anyone, at transaction costs so low that sending as little as a cent would be feasible. This has not really happened so far, the closest is probably PayPal, but that is geared more towards bigger payments. This week, I came across two interesting services, each addressing a particular niche in this market.

The first one is MYC4.com, a Danish company that provides a marketplace for microcredit loans to African countries. The loans are in the range between a few hundred and a few thousand euros, and go to individuals (mostly shop owners) in Africa. The loans are collectively financed by MYC4 members, who in an auction bid for part of the loan, with shares starting from five euro at an interest rate of their choosing. The bids with the lowest interest rates and enough combined amount are used to pay out the loan.

The second one was just endorsed by my favourite newspaper to help pay the bill for their online edition: Flattr (the Web 2.0 compatible name is a combination of to flatter and flat-rate) is a Swedish micro-donation service, currently still in an invite-only beta. It works just like digg, in that you put a button on your content, for people who like it to click on. The difference is that when they click, they send you some money. Flattr members allocate a monthly budget they want to spend (which can be as low as two euro), and at the end of the month this budget is divided equally among their clicks.

One of my all time favourite novels is Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and last week I stumbled (thanks to Boing Boing) across a 1956 radio play, narrated by Huxley himself. It is just an hour long, and a very nice production, so there is really no reason not to listen to it.

This dystopian vision of the future still rings true, especially since we seem to be moving towards it faster than Huxley originally envisioned: When the book was published in 1932, he set his story six hundred years in the future. Twenty-five years later in introducing the radio play, he revised this to two hundred years. I wonder what he'd have to say now that another fifty years have passed.

We went to visit the Friedberg castle gardens, which have been recently reopened to the public after undergoing extensive reconstruction. The city is rightly proud of the result, and there are guided tours to be had about the history of the building and garden. Unfortunately, storm Xynthia has torn off the top of the castle's landmark tower in February, somewhat spoiling the view. The castle garden currently also hosts an exhibition of photographs about the visit of Tsar Alexander II and his family, who stayed at the castle for three months in 1910.

The last Russian Tsar Nicolas II met his future wife Alix, Princess of Hesse and by Rhine, when he was sixteen and she was twelve and the couple got married ten years later, even though both families had originally had other plans for them. They first had four daughters before Tsarevich Alexei was born. Unfortunately, Alix carried the curse of the European Royal Houses, hemophilia, into the family, a condition that was generally fatal at the time. The constant worries over her son's health led not only to desperate measures, such as the introduction of the mystic Rasputin to the St.Petersburg court, but also to a poor health of her own, which to improve the family decided to spend a summer at the spa resort of Bad Nauheim. Proper accommodation was found in Alix's brother's (Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig) summer residence, the castle in neighboring Friedberg (this sort of arrangement seems to be a tradition with the two towns; when Elvis Presley was stationed in Friedberg he took up residence at a hotel in Bad Nauheim).

The period of European history from about 1850 up to the First World War was either not covered in my history classes at school, or I completely forgot about it. But since Cissy is extremely interested in this era (especially as it concerns the various royal families), I am catching up with it now. This is a lot of fun, because these events occurred not all that long ago, and sometimes geographically just around the corner. Many of the protagonists are just one generation removed from celebrities that are still with us, there is a lot of authentic material such as photos, letters, and newspaper articles, people spoke languages still being used today, and they already used trains, cars, planes, and electricity back then, so that their lifestyle is also closer to us than that of, say, a Roman general.

The photo exhibition in the castle garden includes many pictures of the three boys; Tsarevich Alexei, and the Grand Duke's sons Georg and Ludwig. This is somewhat tragic, as both of their families would meet disaster during the following years. Alexei and his whole family (including his sister Anastasia) were murdered by the Bolshevik revolution in 1918 (which led to the Russian Orthodox Church declaring them saints in 2000). And shortly after the Grand Duke's death in 1937, a plane carrying Georg and almost the whole family to Ludwig's wedding in London crashed in Belgium, killing everyone on board. Ludwig's marriage would remain childless.

Our time in Singapore is up. We handed over our Boon Lay apartment today at two, and an hour later the next tenants already moved in. I am writing this from Changi Airport, where we are about to board a flight to Frankfurt. We will stay for two weeks in Europe, before moving east again to Shanghai. Cissy is combining the European vacation with two business trips to Oslo and Copenhagen, but Kai and me will just stay at my parents' house and relax.

Singapore has certainly been very good to us, and I hope that we can make it back here one day.