a high school reunion

This 14-day cruise went from east (Athens) to west (Barcelona) and then returned to Rome, visiting five countries and stopping at ten ports of call in total.

​Santorini's famous blue domed white house scenery looked as stunning as when I last visited it nine years ago, but the seafood tasted even more delicious this time.

​

​Two island cities I visited for the first time were pleasant surprises for me: Corfu off the western coast of Greece had a busy old town district by a peaceful, genteel seaside resort; Ibiza off the eastern coast of Spain was a beautiful bay surrounded by slopey but easy walking shops and residences and a fortress dating back to the Carthage era.

​ ​

​I experienced two audio entertainments in the city of Messina, Sicily: 1) The astronomical clock that featured lion roar, rooster crow, and salutation to the Madonna at twelve noon everyday, 2)  A local tour guide sang a snippet of Italian opera at a gallery (shopping center) to demonstrate the place was built with great acoustic design in mind.
 
The Basilica de la Sagrada Família, the world's tallest church in Barcelona that started construction in 1882, finally finished its central high tower this past February that I climbed up to take a grand view of the city below.
​ ​

Not as panoramic, though, as the one taken from the top of the Basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde in Marseille that included some off-shore island where Château d'If, the dark prison where the protagonist in Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo was framed and imprisoned.
​​ ​

​Ajaccio is the capital city of Corsica, Napoleon's hometown. I visited his lonely monument up a little hill, while downtown the house where he was born, now a converted museum, was so lined up with tourists I decided not to bother.
​ ​

Genoa was a maritime city-state power in northwestern Italy from the 11th to the 18th century. I visited the maritime museum (the largest one in the Mediterranean) that showed light, fast, and versatile galleys they built for warfare, transport, and trade.

​

​Their merchants provided loans to the King of Spain to fund massive military expenditures. They would then wait at Spanish ports for the silver-laden ships returning from South America, immediately open the chests upon arrival to collect the King's debt in full, and use fast galleys to transport the silver back to Genoa, where local nobles would lend it out to other European royal families.
​

​​The Cinque Terre consisted of five small coastal towns in northwestern Italy, featuring beautiful cliffside trails, sandy beaches, fishing harbors, and delicious "fritto misto", fried small fish and shrimp wrapped in paper roll.

A Mid-Autumn full moon over the Mediterranean brings a perfect end to the journey.

​

​This cruise was a reunion event for the 50th anniversary of the Class of 1976 of Taipei First Girls' High School, my wife's alma mater. A dedicated group of capable and passionate young sexagenarian ladies had put their heart and mind on its planning for over two years. Myriad of pre-trip notes, links and videos and zoom meetings, three on-board "variety shows" and two topical speeches, along with daily dining with my wife's old-time classmates and their tag-alongs like myself that I came to know and enjoy made this one a uniquely memorable cruise I've ever had!

​ 

​

cosmic views

At Elon Musk's 44th birthday party in 2015, a heated debate erupted between him and Larry Page, co-founder of Google, on the future of AI. Page believed superintelligent AI represented the next logical step in evolution and a "digital god" would lead to a utopian future. Musk argued that this worldview was deeply flawed and safeguards were needed to prevent AI from potentially eliminating the human race. Larry Page accused Elon Musk of being a "speciesist" (favoring humans over future digital life forms). It was said the argument broke what was once a very close friendship between Musk and Page and drove Musk to co-found OpenAI at the end of 2015 as a countermeasure to Google's AI development.

Yet Musk also started a brain-computer-interface (BCI) company that developed chip implants in human brains to communicate with digital devices, and had said "it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence" on his own X social media platform. Nectome is a Silicon Valley startup that proposes to scan and store the brain’s anatomical layout and molecular details in order to replicate consciousness in the future. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was one of the first 25 people to put down a deposit and make a reservation for such service. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and prominent venture capitalist, was drawn to the techno-ideal of “this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body”.

Whether it's the total take over by AI, integration between digital and biological life forms, or mind-uploading to the cyberspace, these "transhumanist" believers are moving brazenly forward and seem to pay more attention to a smooth transition to the brave new digital world than the metaphysical meaning of humanity (just a stage of cosmic evolution) or consciousness (just a sensorial illusion or an emergent property of mass integrated information).

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French Jesuit priest, geologist, and paleontologist who played a crucial role in the discovery and study of the "Peking Man" fossils in the early-mid 20th century. As an evolution and Christian believer, his cosmological view maintains the universe evolves from matters to single-cell organisms, to complex life forms, to mankind, and a unified, universal cognitive layer of existence will eventually reach a stage he called Omega Point that liberates humanity from physical confinement to the realm of spiritual divinity.

Two macroscopically different outlooks on how Earth's anthropocene epoch might go from two intrinsically different human perspectives.

Or maybe you want to hear another view from another stakeholder of the future world, AI?

So I asked Gemini, "As an AI chatbot, what do you think of the future of AI and humanity?"

Here's its reply:
https://share.gemini.google/ZNh1Q5rlRRP2

* I have a Chinese version of this essay at the end of which I pose the same question to an AI chatbot, ChatGPT, in that case, not Gemini, and get another interesting reply:

我這篇文章有一份中文版本，在文章的末尾我也找了一個AI chatbot問同樣的問題，但這次找的是ChatGPT而不是Gemini，得到另一個有趣的回答：
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a4f291a-833c-83ea-8d97-6efe53ea45dc

washington, dc

A nephew of mine, Linus, is studying Political Science at Stanford University and took an internship this quarter at the Capitol Hill for a district congressman. I took the opportunity to visit him and the nation's capital for the first time.

DC was a neat city, with grid-like streets, garden townhouses and chic apartment high rises all around. But I was most impressed by its bunker-like metro subway system: the deep-tunneled subway stations that took minutes to descend to, its "brutalist" rock walls and dome-like ceilings, wide open platforms, bright illumination, and clean cars.
​

​On my solo walk through the National Mall, I saw many high schoolers in groups — on their civic course field trips, I supposed. Another human phenomenon scene I encountered was the presence of an assortment of police forces: DC's own Metropolitan Police, US Capitol Police, Homeland Security, DEA... and the ever present National Guards.

​

​The vibe around the fountains in the mall was laid-back, peaceful, and familial. I saw birds and ducks, mother and child partaking in the sun, air and water, free dousing on all.

​

​Out of the many Smithsonian's on the National Mall row, the Air & Space Museum was the one I spent most time with, mainly because I was following an in-house tour guide that took us from the Wright Brothers (1903) to the Apollo moon landing (1969) in a two-hour show-and-tell. From lifting a wooden glider off the ground for a few seconds to landing on the moon hundreds of thousands of miles away in space and back, a feat we humans accomplished in just one short 66 year span, truly AMAZING!​

​Linus took us to the office of the congressman he interned for, Jim Costa, representing parts of Fresno/Tulare Counties in central California. Then I thought while I was here why not visit my own congressman, Mike Levin of Orange/San Diego counties. Neither of them were present (the congress was in recess) but the staff were all welcoming and allowed us to roam the congressmen's private offices, except Levin's wouldn't allow photo taking.

​

​At the National Statues Hall at the Capitol building I saw one dedicated to the "Governor of the State of Franklin" and wondered where the heck is this State of Franklin that I had never heard of. It turned out that was an area at the northwestern corner of the State of North Carolina that was donated to the Federal government after the War of Independence to help pay off the debt it incurred during the war, which triggered the region's own independent state movement that lasted a little over four years before it eventually got incorporated into the Southwest Territory that later became the State of Tennessee.  

​

​Inside the Lincoln Memorial, inscribed on the north side wall was President Lincoln's second inauguration speech made just a few months before the end of the Civil War in 1865. A pithy sentence near the end of the speech caught my attention: "Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk..." What was this "two hundred and fifty years" about? Had it got anything to do with the coming 250th anniversary of the United States? Well, no. It was referring to the uncompensated labor extorted by the white Southern slave owners since the day the first slave ship arrived in America in 1619. (Subtracting 1865 by 1619, we've got 246, Lincoln rounded it up to 250.)

​

​"Stanford in Washington" was the "dormitory" I stayed at during my visit. It's a four story apartment building that housed 20+ students and faculty members and occasional guests like myself. It had a kitchen, a dining hall, an entertainment room, and conference rooms large and small, for lectures and for casual sit-in. A cozy, peppy environment for study and fun. Made me wish I were a student again!

​

​

God bless these young people of the next generation. America has its flaws, but still is a land of opportunities no other countries can provide, and a resilient society that has the ability to self-correct and come back stronger!

Go get them Linus!​

​​

the netherlands

Leiden is another mid-size city we chose to stay after a train ride north from Bruges to the mid-coastal section of the Netherlands. 

It was delightful and canal-ful like Bruges, with forlorn alleys, neighborhood beer houses, and a bustling Sunday morning market.

But unlike Bruges, what made Leiden famous was not late medieval commercial success but certain institutes and people and events in the academic, artistic, and historical fronts:

Leiden University (founded in 1575) is the oldest university in the Netherlands and has been an intellectual powerhouse attracting thinkers like Albert Einstein and René Descartes. Its botanic garden was where the first tulip bulbs that came from Turkey via Austria were planted that later led to the explosion of the tulip market (or "tulip mania") and its phenomenal crash in 1637.

Famous Dutch painter Rembrandt was born in the city of Leiden. We visited an old carpentry house next to Rembrandt's father's windmill factory, nearby a statue of young Rembrandt watching his self portrait next to the brick building where he was born.

A few hundred English pilgrims lived in Leiden before their voyage to America in the early 17th century. We visited the American Pilgrim Museum where a Mayflower ship model and reconstruction of these pilgrims' living conditions were on display and a local craft beer sporting the name Mayflower was available in the adjunct cafe. 

Keukenhof Park, also known as the "Garden of Europe," was in a nearby city we took a half-hour ride to visit. Seven million flower bulbs planted and eight hundred different varieties of tulips are shown in this seventy-nine acre garden annually. It was an endless sea of beautiful flowers that looked unreal in photos.

Off we went to Amsterdam, a metro city we'd been before but did not fully explore. Besides the usual canal (no we didn't take the canal boat ride) and street scenes (no we didn't visit the Red Light District) and a round of exotic food tasting (herrings, stroopwafels, cheese fries, fries with satay sauce), the highlight of our 4-day stay in the city for me was actually the visit to the Rijksmuseum, the national museum that dedicated all its exhibits to the Dutch art and history:

Masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt and others during the Dutch Golden Age

"The Explosion of the Spanish Flagship during the Battle of Gibraltar" depicts the decisive moment of the April 25, 1607, naval battle where the Dutch fleet surprised and destroyed the Spanish fleet in the Bay of Gibraltar during its 80-year war of independence against Spain

"Fishing for Souls", a satirical painting depicting the religious rivalry between Protestants (on the left, open bibles on the boat, green trees, sunlit landscape in the back) and Catholics (on the right, priests and pope overloading the boat, withered trees, dark clouds in the back) 

A "Model of a Javanese Marketplace" that captures a bustling scene from Java, Indonesia, during the Dutch colonial period

A meticulously detailed scale model of the historical fan-shaped artificial island where a Dutch trading post was set up in Nagasaki Bay, Japan

A very realistic looking "doll house" made for a wealthy merchant in Amsterdam in the 17th century

Prominent display of Delftware, the famous blue and white tin-glazed earthenware that originated from the city of Delft, as a Dutch imitation of popular Chinese blue-and-white porcelain imported by the Dutch East India Company 

From Amsterdam, we took a day trip to another major city of the Netherlands: Rotterdam, a city rebirthed from total destruction by German air bombardment during World War II with many ingenious and delightful architectural designs:

The ceiling of a food hall featuring colorful fruits, vegetables, flowers, and insects

The "Pencil Tower"

The "Cube Houses"

The "Depot", an art storage facility made of 1,664 mirrored glass panels

And "Erasmus Monument in Rotterdam," commemorating the giant of Northern Renaissance and Western culture whom the city proudly calls its own

belgium

Bruges is a mid-size town northwest of Brussels we chose to stay for our five day visit to Belgium. 

Located on the northwestern coast facing the North Sea, Bruges has been an important maritime hub since before medieval times. It reached its prosperity height between the 12th and 15th centuries, manufacturing and trading goods between the Baltics and the Mediterranean. 

With its extensive waterway system, it is often called the "Venice of the North." We took a boat ride gliding past its low bridges, tall belfry tower, waterfront restaurants, and a riverside flea market, under sunny blue skies, in fresh spring air.

We also went on a walking tour with a local guide who took us through the busy alleyways between ornate civic buildings, a centuries old hospital-convent, an elegant residential complex that used to house independent lay religious women in the Middle Ages, and stepped on an underground pipeline that transported thousands of liters of beer per hour from a brewery at the city center to its bottling plant on the outskirts of town.

We took a day trip to Brussels, the capital of Belgium and the European Union. We took photos at the 15th-century old Town Hall Gothic building but visited modern EU parliamentary headquarters inside, walked by unruly streets with fun comic murals that celebrated Belgium's comic culture, and had a little taste of all the "must-have" foods of Brussels/Belgium: chocolates, waffles, fries, mussels, and beers with 6-12% alcoholic content, before heading back to our homey little Bruges at nightfall.

On our last day at Bruges, we took a long walk across town, stepping on the cobblestone pavements flanked by classic Flemish houses of gabled roofs and colorful facade, an elevated berm-walkway along the city's old time moat river, and the ubiquitous canals lined by mellow trees and humble houses. 

Such a wonderful, peaceful city of charm to stay in!

Probably the same thought that flashed through King Charles II's mind when he and his court settled down in the same building that is the hotel we stayed in during his exile from English Civil War between 1656-1659.