Nota Bene

I was in London only a month ago – but, since if you’re tired of London, you’re tired of life‘, I was back in the UK capital just the other day!…

And – just as I prefer it – we arrived with plenty of time to spare before our business program was set to start, so, naturally – first things first – walkies time!…

Handily, our hotel was in the center of the city – a stone’s throw from the River Thames and not far from Buckingham Palace – so off we set for some London side-street strolling. But before we’d hardly gotten started, suddenly…

…Hold on… I think I recognize that building. Yes, it’s the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, where – precisely (!) 10 years ago (November 2011) – I took part in the London Cyberspace Conference, after having been personally invited by the then-foreign secretary, William Hague!

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Thirty kilometers south of Kronotskoye Lake there’s another pair of Kamchatkan pearls of volcanism – Uzon caldera and the Valley of Geysers. Both objects are thoroughly marvelous, and if you fly by helicopter from Kronotsky, en route you get amazing sights throughout the full flight:

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Northern Kamchatka – done!

Time to slither further down the peninsula to its bottom end, where there are just as many outstanding volcanisms as in the north – if not more…

First stop – another spectacularly splendid volcano: Kizimen, situated some 70 kilometers south of Tolbachik. Austere in appearance; climbing it… no thank you, I’d rather not risk it. For example, here she is in March 2013:

Steep sides, and lots of fumaroles at the top where special protective clothing and gas masks would be needed.

Read on…

As you’ll probably know, I get myself to all sorts of exhibitions and events. Naturally most have an IT flavor. For example, there’s Hanover’s CeBIT (RIP); Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (where I was in June of this year); Interop in Japan; the industrial Hannover Messe and Innoprom in Ekaterinburg; the Chinese World Internet Conference; assorted regional get-togethers; the exclusive WEF conference-exhibition event in Davos; INTERPOL-World, and even modern art in an exhibition format sometimes.

So, yes – I visit plenty of exhibitions, knowing the ones I frequent inside-out. However, there’s one type of exhibition I didn’t know much about, for I’d never been to one. I’d always heard about them down the years, but never had a taste for myself. I’m talking about world’s fairs, aka world expos. There’s a reeeaaal long tradition of them, starting out in 1791 (!) in Prague, through 1900 in Paris, 2010 in Shanghai, to 2020 2021 in Dubai – where I happen to be writing this from. And yes – you’ve guessed it, now I know what the deal is with these world expos. And if you don’t already know the deal yourself, you will do by the time you reach the end of this post!…

What exactly is a world expo?…

Read on…

Unlike most folks, I was lucky enough to be traveling again recently (jabbed, boosted, masked and social distancing, of course:) – this time to Dubai, one of my fave places on the planet, to which I normally get to at least once a year (during non-covid times). This year’s visit, however, was a little different…

First impressions upon arriving: another empty airport, just like others I’ve been in recently.

Second impressions: yikes – more deserted emptiness. A city seemingly half-alive – a bit like Barcelona in June of this year.

Third impression: actually, it’s not all bad; for example, going from the airport’s Terminal 1 to the business reception/meeting zone, I had a full long carriage on the monorail to myself! ->

And there were only one or two folks in the next carriage too…

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One of the unique natural phenomena of mid-Kamchatka is Severniy Proriv – Northern Fissure – a site where, as a result of a ‘fissure’, or crack, which formed during the 1975-76 big eruption of Tolbachik, three symmetrical cones of volcanic slag were left behind.

Such fissures are a rather rare volcanic phenomenon, but this one was predicted by volcanologists based on their constant observations of seismic activity around these parts in the mid-seventies: in 1975 the frequency of earthquakes around Tolbachik sharply increased – which meant that somewhere nearby there was lava bubbling up nearer and nearer the earth’s surface. So an expedition of volcanologists was dispatched there, who were lucky enough to observe the eruption from the very start. As a result this eruption was very well-documented and on the internet there’s a mass of information about it – admittedly, mostly in Russian. Today, the three cones formed by the Severniy Proriv – now collectively called Severniy Proriv (are you keeping up?:) – are still there, and they’re three mega-beauts:

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Last week, I was in the unusual out-of-the-ordinary European country called Liechtenstein. It’s a tiny nation state – and also a super-successful one. It has a population of just ~40,000, while the working population is… also around 40,000! How that works out is by ~51% of the working population commuting daily from Austria, Switzerland and Germany. Goodness!

Here’s the view from my room. Behind the hotel – the Alps (along the border with Austria); while these mountains in the photo are the Swiss Alps:

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It wasn’t all sad down in Turkey. It was also amazing. Plenty…

First amazement: it turns out that in Turkey there are around 150 ancient theaters! Some well-preserved; others – less so. I really didn’t know just how keen the locals here were millennia ago when it came to theater-going. Well now I do…

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Onward – down the volcanic spine of the Kamchatka peninsula…

Next stop volcano – Tolbachik, similarly A-list just like Klyuschevskaya Sopka, Avachinsky (near Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky), and Khodutka and Ilynsky in the south. I’ve been all around it, up and down and across it on five occasions, and it’s always one of two things – OMG-beautiful, or an OMG-ruthlessly harsh experience (due to the weather). It’s like… Russian roulette – will you actually see Tolbachik in all its grandiose glory, or will you see… not much besides fog and rain (aka – Kamchatkan mirages), and fairly freeze while you’re at it.

I’ve been to the very top of Tolbachik tree times out of my five visits, but more on that later. For now, some photos of this distinctive, magnificent, monumental volcano:

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Flying around in a helicopter is always a pleasure; flying around in a helicopter in the fall – along a shoreline, in clement weather – that pleasure is multiplied several-fold. And that includes down in sunny Turkey…

Oh my glorious!

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