Die Hard Three

Does anyone here know if a non-underground train was proposed for the City of Ottawa’s light rail project? It would not surprise me in the least if it did not even occur to anyone that an elevated train could do the job and I think this has to do with the general perception of Canadian trains.

To explain what I mean, I will tell you a story.

When I was younger my dad used to take me fishing up the Ottawa Valley. There were two places we went to quite often. One was just outside of Pembroke and the other was a few kilometres past Deep River – birthplace of the atomic medical isotopes. What these places had in common was that they were both small rivers that were located right below railroad bridges that were part of Canada’s only transcontinental railway.

Once when I was about eight years old, we were out there fishing under one of those bridges (I can’t remember which), and I was having a very successful day. When I was a kid I *loved* fishing, similar to the way a regular person loves roller coasters or the Space Shuttle. So I was sitting there by the edge of the water, my bobber floating about half way across to the other side, I was staring at it intensely because I thought I had a bite (there was a current so it was hard to tell).

Then, all of a sudden there was a blast from an air horn that sounded like a cold war-era, nuclear-powered, air-raid siren and this massive freight train came barrelling down the tracks overhead. It was like I was at ground zero for the end of the world. I crapped my pants, jumped up, threw my rod away, and ran out of there as fast as I could. I thought that the bridge and train were going to come crashing down on top of me.

Yes, that’s right – a train made me crap my pants. I imagine most people have had similar experiences – Canadian trains are incredibly noisy and scary. There’s some sort of regulation in Canada that says any time a train crosses a road it has to blast that stupid horn. It’s no wonder no one wants to be within ten miles of one of those things, let alone next to the tracks.

As a Canadian-train-fearing Canadian it’s really strange to be in Germany. They have all these massive trains that travel at incredible speeds and they are all super quiet – even the freight trains. I must say, they sound almost pleasant. I’ve been a couple times to this restaurant near Hackeser Markt. An upscale place, the staff are super-friendly, they brew their own beer, and Jürgen Prochnow once stopped in there for lunch – it’s located just two blocks away from where they were filming a scene for the sequel to Das Boot – the direct-to-video “Der Zug”.

What I find so incredible about this place is that it’s located directly below four separate railway lines (two S-Bahn lines – eastbound / westbound and two Deutsche Bahn lines that service east / west Regional Bahn and ICE trains.) A train passes overhead at least every four minutes but no one in the restaurant even notices – it’s that quiet.

All of this leaves me wondering for how long the equivalent restaurant-underneath-a-Canadian-railroad would remain in business. Probably not very long, with the customers crapping their pants every five minutes and all.

Not very long, let me tell you. Not very long at all.

Yesterday I went to the Christmas Market and one of the booths had the exact same wood-burning three-level oven from the Weihnachtsmarkt in Leipzig. This tells me that it was not custom made and I bet, if one were so inclined, you could find these things for sale on the Internet and they probably won’t be that expensive. This guy was selling a different type of bread-cheese-meat thing.

Target date - Winterlude 2013. Who's in?

There was also a booth set up by my new favorite radio station – Berliner Rundfunk 91.4. They were promoting the Berlin Eisbären (hockey team) and they had set up mini-rink where one could try and shoot the puck through a goalie made of vinyl. I did poorly but the guy was nice and gave me a prize anyway.

Or was it "the goalie did well"?

I assembled two jigsaw puzzles during my stay in Berlin and I listened almost exclusively to this radio station while I puzzled. It was a very strange experience. German radio is exactly the same as what we have back home but with many major differences. I will list them for you now.

1. Often times they don’t play the whole song. Sometimes if the news is about to start they’ll play the first twenty seconds of a song and then just fade to the news. On of my friends out west says that one of the English radio stations in his town (he’s near an American military base) actually promotes that “we play the entire song”. I asked the dude at the hockey booth and he was surprised to learn that this occurs. I guess if you’ve only ever listened to German radio you wouldn’t be able to tell.

2. During the first six hours of listening it was the greatest radio station in the world and then things started to change. At the beginning they were playing a whole bunch of songs / artists I rarely or never hear and it was kinda refreshing

• Gordon Lightfoot – just one song, but still nice to hear some old school CanCon outside of the Great White North
• Eurythmics – many songs I’d never heard before
• Neil Diamond – some songs
• ABBA – non-ABBA Gold
• Zager and Evans – In The Year 2525. You have to hear this one
• Falco – not just Rock me Amadeus, he had another song
• Chris Rea – Driving Home of Christmas
• Lynn Anderson – Rose Garden (this one was on the Zodiac soundtrack and I loved that film)
• Roxette – SwedeCon!
• Phil Collins / “Genesis” – A few different songs (when’s the last time you heard “Land of Confusion” – it’s even more relevant today)

Then it started to get repetitive. Like very. That Zager and Evans song was one of the strangest ones and this was the first time in my life I’d ever heard it. I thought it might have been just a song they threw in there for fun. Nope, two days later there it was again. And then again the next day.

What was once special has now been lost.

3. My German is just good enough to understand about forty percent of what was being said during the news. If you have not heard, over the last couple weeks here in Berlin some Grinch has been dressing up like Santa Clause and visiting various Christmas Markets around the city and giving out free drinks laced with some sort of blood-vomit-inducing substance. When this story broke I did not know the German word for “poison” so I was at a loss for what was going on. A couple of days later one of my Berliner friends informed me of the situation.

In light of all this I’ve stopped my practice of accepting free samples at the Christmas markets.

I’ve been promising everyone that I’d be bringing a toilet with me to the airport and on the flight back to Canada.

On that note, I found out that the Baumarkt next to the giant Ikea (that’s bigger than the one in Ottawa) is having a sale: 20% off everything in the store. I think that’s pretty ambitious. Normally shops in Germany are only open a few Sundays throughout the year and when they are, it’s kind of an event. I’m expecting it to be a zoo. To make matters worse, I’m meeting a friend at the Hauptbahnhof at 15:11 and I want to get the VAT refund so I have to fill out all that paperwork at the checkout. This will take time.

I’ve only got two hours to do all this. For this special sale they’re only open from 13:00 to 18:00. I’m on the tram on my way to the store. It’s not too full and I’m hoping it’s going to be like this for the return trip. I brought work gloves with me from Canada for just such a situation. It’s calling for rain at some point this afternoon – the gloves will help.

Of course the Berlin public transportation system is way more effective than I thought it would be – I’m forty minutes early.

I exit the tram at the same time as another bargain-hunting Christmas shopper. Ulrike tells me all the stores in Berlin are open this Sunday – she’s going to the Ikea. I don’t want to wait in the rain so I go with her – Ikea opens their restaurant thirty minutes before the store proper.

They let us in at exactly 12:30 and we take the escalator upstairs. She grabs a juice and I take a beer. We chat until about 12:55 when it’s time for me to go. I want to be at the Baumarkt for 13:00 when the doors open – if I’m late all the toilets will be gone. A gaggle of shoppers are standing around the restaurant waiting for the Ikea to open. I look around: there’s a single escalator but it’s only going up. The only way out is… through the store – and they’re not letting anyone in… I’m trapped in the Ikea!

At *any* other time this would be awesome, but not today.

Three of the longest minutes of my life later they open it up and let the shoppers in. I rush down the stairs and take a shortcut to the exit but of course when I get there they have not yet opened these doors. So I’m stuck for a second time inside the Ikea!

Let us in!

No, let me out!

The ironing is just killing me.

Finally this lady shows up to open the door and I escape out into the rain. I dash across the parking lot to the Baumarkt. By a stroke of good luck the exact same clerk that helped me the last time is working today. She doesn’t speak a word of English so once again my German language proficiency and Pictionary skills are going to be put to the test.

This time I’m getting the mini-cistern – it’s small enough to fit on the plane without having to go over-sized luggage. I also decide to pick up a window. I did all the measurements and weights and everything is within spec. I have a per-item budget of

• one hundred and fifty-eight linear centimeters (about sixty-two inches)
• twenty three kilograms (fifty pounds)

The window is

• 11 kg (13 kg under)
• 60 x 80 x 10 = 150 (8 cm under)

The cistern

• 11 kg (13 kg under)
• 82 x 51 x 16 = 149 (9 cm under)

There is another problem – I can only take one item with me. The clerk tells me I can buy the window today (and get the discount) and then pick it up tomorrow. This is good – they open at 10:00 and I’m having lunch with a friend at 12:30. But I’m just delaying the problem. When Tuesday morning rolls around I’m going to have to get both items to the airport somehow.

To defeat this I’m simply going to take the window to the airport before Tuesday morning. If I can make it out of the Baumarkt by 10:30 on Monday I should be able to do all this before my lunch date. This will be the ultimate test of the Berlin public transportation system. Their web site says an hour forty with twenty minutes at the airport. We’ll see.

The cistern box has been opened so we take a few minutes to go through all the stuff to make sure everything is there. It is and we pack everything up, grab the window, and head for the bathroom scales for a final weight verification. We’re good – everything is within spec.

All there.

I manage to get everything I need, cistern, window, handle, actuator plate, and two of an item that does not have an English-language name (Kühlschrankschleppscharnier). I also sign up for the VAT refund. Total time is just under an hour.

I head out into the rain to catch the tram. It’s just after 14:00 and I have to be at the Huptbahnoff to meet my buddy in sixty-eight minutes.

Would you mind taking a picture of me and my toilet?

I manage to make it home, drop everything off and get out the door again in only forty minutes. By the time I make it to the S-Bahn I realize I’m going to be about six minutes late. I message my buddy and he informs me that he’s coming on tomorrow. I check the email and find out he’s absolutely right.

So my friend in the Netherlands that had the baby, she was telling me that it was a non-standard birth. The baby was aimed in the wrong direction so she had to have a c-section. Everyone is fine but it’s pretty amazing that if this had been in the not-too-distant past there’s a good chance that both mother and baby could have died.

When I was a kid I used to wonder why I was so fortunate to have been born in a nice, safe, first-world country, in the good half of the twentieth century. I remember my parents took us to see Gandhi in the cinema when I was ten years old. It was usually after incidents like this that I would become most thankful for my good luck. I was told beforehand that the film it was based on a true story and it was a pretty violent for a ten year old.

See the problem was, when I was a kid I thought that there was someone (God) who was responsible for distributing people’s souls when they are born. I thought there was a chance I could have been born in India in the year 1053 (for example).

Slowly the Canadian education system and entertainment industry managed to chip away at all the misconceptions in my brain. I think the soul-distribution one died in my grade eleven eleven biology class. There are two others worth mentioning.

The first was that gravity is not caused by the Earth’s rotation, it’s caused by its mass. For this one I blame the makers of the movie Moonraker – I seem to remember that they lost gravity in the space station when it stopped spinning. The Earth spins. Seemed logical enough.

The other time was when I was four my dad went to Chicago for a business trip. I was told he was going to another country and I had no idea what country was. My only frame of reference was this globe we had –  someone had pointed to a place on this globe and said “we live here” so I thought when he said he was going to another country that he was actually going to another planet. True story.

I wonder if kids these days are as dumb as I was or has TV and the Internet made them all smarted.

I want to go to there

I blame the jigsaw puzzles. But I’ve also been traveling. Recently I went out to the west of Germany to see some friends. It was a very successful trip; I managed to visit with eleven different humans. Deutsche Bahn was very helpful too. I love traveling by train. Civilized.

During this trip I got to visit with two couples (that’s four people) and what’s special about all this is: I was the one that introduced them to each other (not the couples to each other but each member of the couple to the other member).

And the bake sale to raise money for the carwash has been cancelled because of confusion.

Note: Due to privacy concerns I’m going to simply call them Couple A and Couple B. I don’t mind posting my shenanigans all over the Internet but I try to keep the exposure of everyone else to a minimum.

Couple A were introduced to each other when I visited New Zealand in October 2005. He was a friend from when we worked at Nortel and she was one of my German friends from the GI in Ottawa. They were both living in Auckland and I was in Australia for work, so I figured I’d drop by and say hello.

Couple B were both friends from Ottawa. He was from out east, working in the nation’s capital and she was from the Netherlands on a two-year contract. I think it was April 2006 when they met.

Note: English is a confusing language. If I’m telling a story and I say “he was a friend from Ottawa” this could be interpreted as “he was a friend” as in “we are no longer friends”. What I mean to say “he was a friend from Ottawa and we are still friends to this day”. I’m going to just keep everything in the past tense for my own sanity.

So Couple B got married in April in the Netherlands (civil ceremony) of which I was able to participate. They had a second proper wedding with family in Iceland in June. And they had a baby born in September of this year.

Couple A got married in Germany at the beginning of July and this was followed by a second wedding in Canada in October. And they are going to have a baby in January sometime.

There’s some crazy parallels here.

and apparently multiple weddings are all the rage these days.

What gets my mind racing about all this, is that I’m responsible for these babies existing. Well, maybe “responsible” is not the right word. Let’s try: without me these exact babies do not exist. I think that’s pretty cool. I’ve helped contribute to the success of the project while having done the absolute minimum amount of work.

And because they all live in Europe I won’t get to see them very often, but the kids will always remember me. Their parents will tell them, “This is our friend Jason. He introduced us to each other”. Kids are pretty smart. Once they’re a few years old they’ll come to the realization that if a time-traveling robot from the future wanted to prevent their birth, I would be a legitimate target for that robot.

That’s some built-in respect right there.

Respect.

So it’s crunch time for toilet transportation. I’ve got visitors coming this weekend and I’m leaving on Tuesday. This does not leave much time to get my toilets in order. This morning I woke up just before noon. After a quick shower I packed my gear and was on my way to the Obi to get me my German toilet. My plan was thus

1. with these boxes I got from the supermarket
2. take the tram to the Obi – walk one hundred metres to the M10, change at Landsberger Allee, jump on the M4, then walk to the Obi (also one hundred metres).
3. pick up the toilet, make sure the boxes fit, buy some tape, bring everything back home (in the reverse of step two)
4. pack it up good and tight
5. walk it over to the DHL store – about three minutes toiletless walk from my place, maybe four with
6. ship toilet

Boxes, top and bottom

Today was a lesson in adaptability. Things did not go according to plan.

1. it was snow raining the whole day. I’ve been in country for over three months and it’s rained only five time. Today was the worst. I wanted to do this around noon when the trams would be less busy. With the crappy weather, everyone was packed into the streetcars – no one wants to bike on a day like today. Too dangerous.

Rain

2. I got to the Obi and there was a DHL guy making some deliveries. I asked him if there was a depot location close by. I thought that maybe I could do the whole thing right there. He told me there’s one that was a five-minute walk away. Nice.

3. I thought of first buying the toilet and then going searching for the DHL store but that seemed much worse than doing a sortie to map out the distances. The weather was really miserable and I wanted to minimize my time outside. My getting lost carrying a toilet around the streets of Berlin would make a great blog post, but not today.

4. DHL store was two hundred and sixty paces from the Obi – right where the guy said it was – about a five-minute walk. They only take cash so I had to find a bank machine. There’s also a weight restriction of twenty kilograms or the price jumps a lot closer to the why-are-you-doing-this-to-save-five-dollars category. I did a practice run last week and bathroom scale from the store said fifteen.

5. Cash acquired, I made my way back to the Obi. I found some duct tape – eleven euros – what a rip off. The same thing in Canada would have been less than five. I also got a blanket for three euros – protect the toilet!

6. I tested it out and the the boxes fit. Next, I bought all the stuff – total cost is only forty-two euros.

7. At the Obi just after the checkout they have a station where people can pack up the toilets they want to ship to Canada. I took full advantage of this service.

The pack station and the gear.

8. It took about ten minutes to wrap everything up.

Blanket

Lots of tape.

9. The finishing touch was to add a couple of handles to make transportation a little easier. Man I hope this thing is not broken when it gets to Ottawa.

What's your handle, good buddy?

10. The walk to the DHL store was without incident. It was snow-raining even harder and I was worried that the toilet will be damaged by the water.

11. At the store the clerks were pretty humourless. That is until I told them what was in the box (they asked if it contained any explosives or firearms). We weighed the package and it came in at….

The scale!

That was close / 1969, what a good year.

12. I filled out the appropriate paperwork and the toilet was sent on its way. Sixty-eight euros for shipping.

Total non-recoverable cost:

68 shipping
28 toilet
8 duct tape
————-
104 Euros.

Exchange-rate wise I did well by waiting until late to do this. Compared to the Loonie, right now the Euro is in the toilet (pun intend).

Let’s see how this turns out. Next up – windows!

Then read on!

So during my visit to Leipzig I happened upon one of those medieval Christmas Markets you’ve heard so much about. It was about 13:00 and I had not eaten anything since about 17:00 the previous day. Needless to say I was hungry. It was a beautiful day, picture perfect if you will. I was upset that I had decided against bringing my sunglasses (why bother, it’s almost Christmas) but at the same time I was delighted that I needed them (was a beautiful sunny day). I wandered about the different booths, stalls, huts, and yurts searching for the one great meal to fill my tummy. I mean stomach. Gut. Crap factory.

Anyway, I noticed that one of the businesses had quite a large number of people partaking in the eating of the food that was being sold by this business. I had never seen anything like it before. It was bread, with cheese and bacon. Here’s a picture for your eyes.

Ever

I was sold. Lots of people were buying and it looked delicious. What more does one need in making a decision of this magnitude? I found a beer, purchased one of the ham-bread-cheese things and it was the greatest day of my life.

The people working at the booth noticed my inability to formulate even the simplest, grammatically correct German sentence and asked me where I was from. Turns out that both of the employees I ended up talking to had spent many months in Canada.

Did you know that out west Taco Bell is called Taco Time? Well neither did I.

Their English being excellent, I spent the next hour getting as much information as I possibly could about these ham-bread-cheese things. I know a winning idea when I see one that’s demonstrably doing better than all the similar ideas that are surrounding it. I could probably write about twenty-five hundred words about this but I’m late as it is. To speed things up I’m going to replace words with pictures and point form.

– the ham-bread-cheese things are made and baked on site
– one employee makes the dough

Making the dough...

– another employee puts everything together (the dough, cheese, ham) and places the assembled merchandise on the tray

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

– two employees are selling
– one is working the oven

Into the oven

– there are about thirty per tray
– 10% of the ham-bread-cheese things are made meatless
– the meatless ones have an X carved into the top of the bread to distinguish them from the non-meatless ones
– they are cooked in a custom-built wood-burning oven (figure about ten large for each oven)

The oven

Wood-burning

– each oven has three separate compartments (coolest at the top, hottest at the bottom)
– each compartment has room for two trays (upper and lower level)

Levels

– the trays are cooked from top to bottom
– the tray with the uncooked ham-bread-cheese things are placed in the top and they work their way down and they emerge from the lowest (hottest oven compartment) to be served to the customers
– each tray spends about eight minutes in each compartment (four upper and four lower)
– in the upper position the tops are cooked
– in the lower level the bottoms
– when the tray is moved between levels it is rotated one hundred and eighty degrees – this is to ensure a uniform cooking
– before being devoured by the customers each ham-bread-cheese thing is adorned with a dollop of sour cream and sprinkled with chives
– by having chambers with different temperature they must be able to cook them faster or something. Does anyone out there know how long it takes to bake bread in a normal oven?

Check it!

– they open at eleven AM
– the close at nine PM
– they only accept cash
– they only sell one product – no drinks, no crepes, no nothing
– there are three ovens
– the eight employees work thirteen hour shifts (from open to close)
– the employer supplies the costumes
– these kids are paid about seven euros per hour
– it cost about ten grand to host the booth for four weeks in the market
– it takes about sixty minutes to assemble and cook one tray
– because these ham-bread-cheese things are only available at the Christmas and Easter markets, there’s a sense of urgency and occasion. If one was able to buy them all year round there would be way less demand
– everyone knows that sandwiches that are made with fresh-baked bread are really delicious but with these things you can see that it came out of the oven not three minutes earlier. This is hard to resist
– and everything is hot and the bread is cooked just right – not to crispy, not too doughy – just right
– on a busy Saturday these guys go for eleven hours, full on, double rainbow
– and they’re only three euros fifty each

Let’s look a the numbers

Expenses

Revenues

Profit

This dude knows what he’s doing. These are conservative estimates and with a cash business he can probably skim without the man finding out.

I also like that it’s not trivial for someone to copy him. There are dozens of Gluhwein and Wurst and crepe vendors – because they’re relatively easy to set up. But this guy’s enterprise is expensive in money (initial investment in hardware is about a hundred grand I bet) and also time (it takes a while to perfect the whole process and to make a good product that everyone wants). On a busy Saturday he’s got one guy running two ovens with three compartments (two levels each) that’s twelve trays with thirty things each. At three fiddy a pop you’re looking at over twelve hundred euros of merchandise (retail value). He’s also got to stoke the fire and back up the other oven. It’s not rocket science but you need a dependable system or it will fall apart fast.

I watched these guys for an hour on a Thursday afternoon and it would take between five and ten minutes to sell one tray. The guy working the oven told me on a busy Saturday they are full on – it goes non-stop for eleven hours.

Just awesome.

I got to meet Christopher Hitchens once and recalling the encounter always makes me smile.

In September 2007 I attended the Atheist Alliance International conference in Washington DC. On the first night I managed to talk to Hitch for a bit. I had wanted to share with him an amusing anecdote that involved one of his books.

The previous week I had been reading his biography of Thomas Paine on the bus on the way to work. There was a passage that quoted the ancient Greek poet Archilochus “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. Well that very morning, when I got to work and sat down at my desk, I looked out the window and ten feet in front of me there was a fox fighting a groundhog. I’d never even seen a fox in the wild before let alone one fighting another animal. Having read the quote from Hitch’s book just forty minutes earlier made the whole situation even more surreal.

I was expecting a brief discussion about the meaning of the quote but after telling him the story Hitch simply exclaimed, “My God man! Where do you work?” A second later he was called to the podium to speak. We didn’t get to finish the conversation and even today I sometimes find myself reflecting on the meaning of the metaphor. Incidentally, the groundhog won the fight (or more accurately – didn’t lose).

He wasn’t always right, but I always learned something from reading his stuff. I will miss Christopher Hitchens.

This is my first non-Berlin visit into the former DDR. I have one day left on my rail pass so I thought I would use it to check out the “east”. I’m pretty sure Leipzig is going to be like Berlin – I’ve heard it’s got a similar vibe. But I’ve only got a few hours and most of these are going to be spent at the various Weihnachtsmarkts looking at all the neat things. Still, I think a few hours is enough time to claim I’ve visited the city.

So I arrive just after twelve. On the train sitting next to me is a musician. He was impressed that I was able to correctly guess his position in the orchestra from only his case. I told him that my musician girlfriend makes fun of violas all the time and he laughs. He tells me that the violists are considered to be the dumb blonds of the orchestra. I caution him to not say things he can’t take back. Also, the woman sitting across from us is blond and she would probably find it offensive to be compared to a violist. Maybe she doesn’t understand English cause she just keeps reading her newspaper without looking up.

How did the violist hurt her belly button?

Our discussion drifts to world politics (of course). Guy (pronounced “guy”) is from Israel. He hopes that someone can come up with a clever solution to the problems with Iran. I’m with him on that.

I love meeting people from different parts of the world – especially Israel. Fascinating country. I think their requirement for mandatory military service is an excellent idea. I’m not too keen not the military part but I think each country should have some sort of service requirement for each of its citizens.

You too ladies! This is not just for the guys 🙂

This way everyone can have something to talk about at parties.

Party goer: What did you do for your service?

Me: Oh, I stayed in Ottawa and ran the Zamboni in one of the city parks.

Party goer: Is a “Zamboni” what I think it is?

Me: Yes. Yes it is.

Party talk aside, I think Canada could benefit from some sort of common-experience situation for all of our citizens. You see, under my you-have-to-take-a-year-off-and-do-something-for-your-country system everyone would have to serve. Youth would do theirs around the age of eighteen (after high school). New Canadians would be required to do their year before they get their citizenship. There would be a wide range of options but all would involve working in a team.

And I’m not kidding about everyone having to do this. That certificate from your doctor doesn’t mean anything to me. We’ll set you up with a video link and you’re going to read Harry Potter to orphans and old folks in five and a half timezones every day before bedtime.

Canada has a half timezone.

And I would mix up the teams – you’re not allowed to work with your friends (we’ll check Facebook). One of the goals of this exercise is to put you in contact with people you would normally not associate with. One of the theoretical requirements of a functioning democracy is an informed public, yet many of us don’t know a lot about the different types of people in our own country. It’s normal to hang around with people that have the same interests and socioeconomic status – and that’s cool. But many of the polices our politicians promote during election season have the greatest impact on people who are not us. It would be useful if everyone was able to put a hu-mon face to the things our government is going to do.

This is all related to my main issue with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It’s mostly good except I think there should be a section on Responsibilities. If you want to enjoy the wonderfulness that is Canada, you have to chip in your buck-o-five.

You know what, this is all really complicated. It’s probably best if you go watch Starship Troopers.

So I’m having some more visitors this weekend. This means I have to clean my apartment. Sometimes back in Ottawa I’ll host a party or something to force me to clean the house. It usually works. My friends that are visiting this weekend have let me stay at their place a number of times when I’ve visited Mannheim. I’m happy that I’ll get to return their hospitality.

And do we have a fun weekend planned! On Saturday we’re going to meet up with some other friends for breakfast/lunch. Then it’s off to a museum in the afternoon. And in the evening, this is the best part. We’re going to play Puerto Rico!

For those of you who are not aware (which I assume is all of you) board games have changed since the days of Risk, Checkers, Gallipolopoly, and The Game of Lent. All of these games used dice, which inserted a random component that could greatly influence the outcome. Or they had a static board which resulted in repetitive play. New board games have gotten way more interesting because it’s all about strategy.

Take Puerto Rico for example.

A round has as many phases as there are player in the game. During each “round” a player selects one of the following roles:

• The Trader (trader phase – selling goods)
• The Craftsman (craftsman phase – production of goods)
• The Builder (builder phase – build buildings)
• The Mayor (mayor phase – arrival of new colonists)
• The Settler (settler phase – place a new plantation on the island)
• The Captain (captain phase – shipping of goods)
• The Prospectors (do nothing)

To ensure an equal distribution of the different phases, if a role is not selected, some currency is placed on it to make it more attractive during the next round. If this was a dice-based game you could have ten rounds where no one is the trader and this could really make the game suck.

Another thing that is great is how the games ends:

• There are no more colonists or
• All the victory points are used up or
• One of the player’s islands has no more space to build buildings.

The point of this is that the game does not end with someone winning. The game ends after some resource is depleted, and *then* you find out who won. This is huge departure from all the games of your youth. One of the things that makes Risk boring is that by the end it’s usually just one large army hacking away at a smaller one. It takes forever to play, it’s obvious who’s won, and the other players have nothing to do but talk about the weather for the last forty minutes.

Puerto Rico is truly a fantastic game.

A game of Puerto Rico