Adactio: Journal—Long day’s journey into Brighton

Long day’s journey into Brighton

I spent what I thought would be my last few hours in Berlin wandering around Schloss Charlottenburg with Jessica, walking in the footsteps of Leibniz. There was scant of evidence of the master’s presence in the house of his student, Sophie Charlotte, but the setting still lent itself to imagining him trying to build his calculus ratiocinator, all the while hampered by the ongoing task of researching the family tree of the blue-blooded nitwits whose pictures still fill the walls of the palace.

After that we made our way to Schönefeld airport, accompanied by Stephanie. It was only once we got there that she realised she was at the wrong airport. Nothing a quick taxi ride couldn’t fix.

Jessica and myself were at the right airport but we clearly chose the wrong airline. Our EasyJet flight was delayed by five hours. But eventually we made it back to England and, after an expensive but comfortable taxi ride (because the train situation was hopeless) we arrived back in Brighton.

I enjoyed my time in Berlin although the Web 2.0 Expo was very much the mixed bag I thought it would be: some excellent presentations coupled with some dull keynotes. Still, it was a good opportunity to catch up with some good friends. I was keeping tracking of other good friends on Twitter: some of them were in Boston for the W3C Tech Plenary; more were in New York for the Future Of Web Design. It was a busy week for conferences. Even if I could master the art of bilocation, I’d still have a tough time deciding whether I’d want to be a fly on the wall at the CSS working group, listening to Malarkey interview Zeldman or reading a story about Roy Orbison in clingfilm to thousand puzzled Europeans.

Sunday, November 11th, 2007 12:25am

Tagged with berlin web2expo dopplr:trip=38012