Take walking shoes

I like walking, and I've always thought walking around a city as far as you can manage in a day is a good way to get a feel for it – I've tried this in just about every place I've visited over the years.

In San Francisco I arrived at 1pm, so carved a path down Nob Hill, through Market Street to the Ferry Building, up to the Coit Tower, down to Fisherman's Wharf, along the coast to Golden Gate Park, South to Haight/Ashbury and then back via Isotope Comics on Fell St. Coit Tower gives you a nice view over the city – here's looking towards the Ferry building:

.. and in the West I passed the splendidly mad Palace of Fine Arts, sadly surrounded by chain-link fence and signs soliciting donations to help save it:

The whole circuit, including long stops at various museums, restaurants and, er, to buy comic books, only took the afternoon, but it took in some pretty lengthy hills – especially ascending to Coit Tower from the East, and coming up North towards Haight from the shore. If I'd been wearing fancy shoes instead of a pair of battered New Balance my feet would have died.

You also get to stumble across interesting stuff that you wouldn't otherwise find, from huge signs:

to tiny ones:

Four wheels bad, two wheels good

I'd heard that it was easy to rent a bike in San Francisco – and having visited I can confirm that it'd be hard *not* to rent a bike in San Francisco. The tourist-trap that is Fisherman's Wharf (more later) is covered in huge bike rental stands with young men and women hollering for customers to BIKE THE BRIIIDGE in a way that seems likely only to put you off the idea.

Anyhow, on the second day – with the fog burning off and a few hours to kill – I picked up this Marin bike for $8 per hour. The brakes were a bit loose and the handlebars needed straightening (I got a few odd looks doing that), but hey – $8 per hour! Bargainous.

The journey to Golden Gate Park is easy thanks to a long cycle path that covers most of it, and heading across the bridge to Sausalito is a really easy ride – if you've ever ridden for more than an hour or so there are no hills that'll trouble you, and there are several lovely views. It surely beats the alternatives:

.. and even if you have no intention of crossing the bridge it's far quicker to ride to Golden Gate Park than to walk. Having left San Francisco rather late at 3pm I caught one of the last ferries of the day back across around the bay around two hours later to return the bike before its 7pm deadline, but if you set out in the morning you could explore far further around the headland and back.

Do go across the Golden Gate Bridge

There is, as you may have heard, a lot of fog in San Francisco. Quite often this completely obscures the Golden Gate Bridge – here's the view from around ten minutes before I crossed it:

And yet when on the bridge: sunshine!

The fog was still there of course, being whipped around the towers by the wind:

.. and it was pretty chilly, but the views were fantastic nonetheless. There's a scenic view point on the far side – if you cross on the West side of the bridge there's a path underneath (with steps – you'll need to be able to carry a bike comfortably to use it). In summer I'd recommend attempting to cross even if the fog does look a bit grim – just take suitable clothes for cold/wet weather.

Skirt around the tourist traps..

Fisherman's Wharf is, at dusk, kindof pretty:

.. and great for fans of illuminated signage:

By day, though, it's a bit of a dump – aside from the bike rental shops and a branch of In-N-Out burger there's not much that I'd want to see again, with piers dominated by craptastic novelty shops (including one selling pseudo-spiritual tat called "Enlightenment" – my irony gland committed suicide on the spot).

Similarly, here's Haight / Ashbury:

Yes, the corner is now what must surely be the world's most-photographed Ben & Jerry's. The only thing I'd recommend around there is a branch of KidRobot on Haight.

.. but do cross to Alcatraz

Besides crossing the bridge, the one really touristy thing I would recommend is visiting Alcatraz. I wasn't too interested in the idea of visiting the prison (reason 1: it's a prison, reason 2: it uses the dreaded audio tours) but bought a ticket because I thought the island and ferry crossing might be pretty.

As it turns out I was right on the pretty bit and wrong on the prison. You can cross every half-hour or so on one of these:

from which you get a great view of the island (notice how sunny it was by the time we were arriving – that's not Photoshop):

and then you get as much time as you like to explore the island, which is now mostly a bird sanctuary, and the surprisingly small prison block:

Even the audio tour, narrated by a number of ex-guards and convicts, is interesting, and I was intrigued by the many signs of the Indian Occupation, about which I knew pretty much nothing at all:

All in all, I'd thoroughly recommend it. Book in advance, though – the day I crossed most of the boats were filled up.

.. and do see the Museums

On Sunday I had only a few hours before heading for the airport, so I visited the museums around Market Street. If you're interested in photography, and documantary photography in particular, SFMOMA is unmissable. It also had some later Roy Lichtenstein works on show, and a rather lovely atrium:

Around the corner the Museum of Cartoon Art is also brilliant – when I visited it was dominated by an exhibition on Beetle Bailey (meh), but also included the original copies of the first Japanese Batman comic (bonus fact: in Japanese, Batman likes to use the expression われわれ! quite a bit, just like Kyon) and an amazing collection of feature strips from the golden era of newspaper cartoons – including an original Peanuts strip in its huge A3 original format. There's also a section dedicated to small press comics and a great bookshop – this, together with my visit to Isotope, turned out to be rather expensive for me.

Also interesting was the San Francisco Fire Department Museum, which is chock full of old hand- and steam-powered engines, photos and bits and bobs. Here's the front of one of the oldest engines there:

Pop in, gawk at the stuff, make a donation. It's worth the trip, and the Swedenborgian Church is just a few blocks away.

Eat at In-N-Out

This is an In-N-Out Double Double meal. Costs about £4:

Depressingly, its is better than any burger you'll find anywhere in the UK. Ever. And here's the secret menu. You're welcome.

Don't queue for the cable cars

Three of the old cable car routes are still running, more as a tourist attraction than any kind of useful public transport (for those see the BART and MUNI services, which are comprehensive). With only three lines there are a handful of terminus stations, and each one normally has a massive queue. It's certainly worth riding the cable car at least once – if you're standing on the side there's a great view:

.. but I found that jumping on at one of the many intermediary stops meant far less waiting around – just pick one a few stops into the line so somebody will have left the car to make room for you. Tickets are $5 a ride.

Drink the local beer

California is home to some great beers – Sierra Nevada, for example – and San Francisco has its own in the shape of Anchor Steam. Both are fantastic and available everywhere, and there are some other, smaller brews too (I quite liked Fat Tyre). If you like beer, it's a great place to sample loads. Apparently the Anchor Steam brewery runs tours, but these must be booked ages in advance. Also, if you're under, say, 35, then be sure to carry ID.

And finally, go visit

And that's about it. I brought my heart back to London, arteries slightly fuzzier than before thanks to the Double Double, but San Francisco certainly is a great place, and a far better city to explore on foot than, say, San Diego. If you're on a longer trip or tight budget you can see a few great parts of San Francisco in a few days, but a week would give you time to look around properly.

The event itself was in Mountain View, CA, but at 3pm the day before I found myself down the road in Palo Alto. Any web nerd knows that Google's based in Mountain View, and Mac fans know that the temple of Steve can be found in Cupertino (on Infinite Loop, no less), but Palo Alto is home to the grandaddy of all Silicon Valley locations: the (previously Xerox) PARC, home of Ethernet, GUI systems and more. Sadly PARC is some way south of where I was, so with no car – more on that later – and with only a few hours I walked into the town instead.

The centre of Palo Alto is a nice place to kill a few sunny hours, but I'm not sure you'd want to be kicking around there for much longer without something to do. Besides the restaurants, chain shops and boutiques there's an old cinema:

and in the square down the road a young woman was singing while people browsed a market full of posh foodstuffs. Priuses abound, and a Tesla (license plate: NUCULER) was pulling up. In short, Palo Alto is pretty much every west-coast stereotype you could call to mind. The only thing that stood out to me was the amazing Methodist church:

Sadly I couldn't get a photo inside – a service was taking place – but it's quite lovely, with those tiny windows filled with stained glass picking out coloured spots to illuminate the cavernous interior. Heading out into suburbia you pass lawn signs showing support for green energy, and posh residences complete with landscaped gardens and flags up for sale:

and beyond that to the North, the freeway and then the bay. And that was it – a flying visit to Palo Alto in just a few hours before the jet-lag killed me and I had to sleep. Oh, but what's on TV in Palo Alto? Mainly this, looping every few minutes:

I'd vote for the guy. The next day was all work, reporting from a Symantec press event in Mountain View, but on the Friday I moved up to San Francisco – more on that here.

Several smartphones later, though, I've found that there are plenty of good learning tools – for the iPhone and iPod Touch I particularly like CodeFromTokyo's Japanese Dictionary, which has JLPT kanji decks with stroke order and the option to create vocabulary lists. What it's not so good for, though, is if you want to learn non-dictionary forms of verbs such as the ます and て forms.

Since moving to an Android smartphone, though, I've discovered Anki. It's a great open-source flashcard application for various platforms, including Windows and Android (I use Ankidroid). You can create custom decks on a PC, copy them to the phone's memory card and learn on the train, and it handles hiragana, katakana and kanji with no problems.

And so, having created some Anki decks for my own use, I thought I might as well share them online for anyone else who might find them useful. I'll add more to this page in future as I make them.

Basic Japanese Verbs 1

This deck has English verbs on one side, and the ます forms of Japanese verbs on the other in hiragana (no kanji). It covers most of the basic words used in the first half of Minna no Nihongo or Japanese for Busy People.

It includes かいます, あいます, かえります, かきます, ききます, いきます, のみます, よみます, あけます, しめます, たべます, みます, きます, します, つけます, けします, おしえます, とります, もってきます, いいます, みせます, とめます, まちます, まがります, かします, とどけます and もちます.

Click here to download this deck.

Basic Japanese Adjectives 1

This deck contains 20 or so basic い and な adjectives found in Japanese for Busy People 1. The front of the card is English, the back is Japanese in hiragana, in the form you might apply immediately before a noun (so たかい for い and きれいな for な adjectives).

It includes: あたらしい, おもしろい, きれいな, たかい, あまい, たのしい, いい, しんせつな, わるい, ちいさい, ちかい, ひまな, むずかしい, つまらない, おいしい, やさしい, べんりな, つめたい, とおい, おおきい, ゆうめいな, からい, さむい, にぎやかな,あつい, ふるい and やすい.

Click here to download this deck.

NEW: Travel verbs and nouns recap

This one's designed for Lesson 19 in JFBP1, and covers the verbs and nouns needed for describing travel plans. Verb cards are included in two forms: English to ーます form  and ーます form to ーて form.

Verbs included: のります、おります、でます、つきます、かかります、あるきます・

Also includes どうやって、どのぐらい and an assortment of travel nouns (でんしゃ、バス etc).

Click here to download this deck.

Spotted an error? Any questions, comments, or suggestions please drop me a line – details here.

But with that all dealt with I had three hours or so to see Vienna itself. Fortunately we were put up right in the middle of the city, at the rather posh Do and Co hotel, so I was able to stroll in a kind of circle around the town centre without wasting any time getting there in the first place.

The centre is dominated by the cathedral – huge, covered in scaffolding and with a remarkable roof that appears to have been made out of coloured Lego bricks. Past that, there are the usual shopping streets, stuffed full of horrible Mozart-themed tat shops and guarded by giant bears:

.. but then a block or so further and you hit the rather grand architecture. Incredibly grand buildings are to Vienna as fried chicken shops are to South London – one around every corner, and soon blending into one despite having actually quite different facades.

In fact, there are so many staggering bits of old architecture that people don't really seem to care – somebody was so nonplussed by this building and the statue in front of it that they saw fit to dump a huge ugly industrial generator there.

Note also the piles of snow: it was bitterly cold. Freezing slowly to death I headed further to Parliament and the Museums Quarter, which includes several apparently excellent art galleries placed around one square:

.. but it was cold, empty and desolate, and most of the galleries in the modern art museum were closed for rehanging. Not quite what I was hoping for.

Fortunately, there's one area in which Vienna can be guaranteed to excel: coffee and cake. Three of us took a trip to Café Central, apparently a favourite of Leon Trotsky, and stuffed down some of this:

And then it was time for the rush back to the airport, full of caffeine and cream, and a long time spent circling about London waiting for a landing slot at Heathrow. All in all, an interesting place – but if I ever go back I'll try to do so in summer and with time to check out the palaces properly. More photos here.

1) Tsujiki

Yes, the fish market. Every guidebook will tell you to go here, and the good ones will tell you to go early in the morning while you're still suffering from the kind of jetlag that makes a 4am start seem natural rather than ungodly. Get there at 5am and fight straight through to the tuna auctions at the back, then take a walk around while trying not to get killed by the motorised carts that whiz around. The size of the market and the variety of fish on offer is genuinely breathtaking – although that may also have something to do with the heady stench of dead fish and petrol fumes.

What the guidebook won't tell you: Tokyo's subway lines don't actually start up early enough to get you here by 5am. We managed to get there by 5.30 and caught some of the tuna auctions, but if I were to do it again I'd get a cab there a bit earlier.

Photos: lots, here.

2) Shinjuku

Thanks in part to a certain massively overrated movie, Shibuya has come to signify the neon heart of Tokyo for many westerners. While it is all very impressive and worth seeing, given the choice between spending two hours wandering around Shibuya at night gawking at neon or doing the same in Shinjuku, I'd pick the latter in a heartbeat. Surrounding the frankly enormous Shinjuku Station, it sprawls out in every direction in a maze of neon signs, electronics stores, bookstores, department stores, tiny restaurants, pachinko, arcades and general chaos. The effect of walking around for a few hours after dark is a bit like being bludgeoned around the head with the world biggest, sparlkiest, loudest novelty Pokemon hammer (that is to say, brilliant).

With Shinjuku station connecting the JR lines (including the Yamanote), Tokyo Metro subways, Toei subways (Oedo line) and even the private Odakyu lines, it's also a great place to stay. We stayed in the Sunroute Plaza Shinjuku – a chain hotel that was cheapish, scrupulously clean and generally nice.

What the guidebook won't tell you: A good guidebook should mention that, with so many commuters passing through the Shinjuku area every evening, there are loads of cheap restaurants serving the usual counter-style food (katsu, don, curry, etc etc). This makes it a good place to eat for just a few hundred yen. What they don't mention is that the many ticket restaurants, where you order and pay at a machine, make life easy even for the kanji-illiterate. Oh, and there are some excellent ramen places, too.

It's also worth mentioning that Shinjuku has to be one of the biggest, most sprawling and confusing stations in the world, with about a million floors and exits, so don't ever make plans that require navigating it quickly.

Photos: a few by day, and lots by night.

3) Meiji Jingu Gyoen

The biggest and most important temple in Tokyo is probably the Yasukuni Shrine, but Yasukuni is also politically contentious – partly due to its enshrinement of over 1,000 convicted war criminals, and partly due to the Yushukan, a museum that presents a revisionist interpretation of the second world war. Both are the subject of fierce controversy within Japan. If neither dissuades you from visiting I hear it's impressive, but I decided not to attend.

Whether or not you visit Yasukini, however, the Meiji Jingu is well worth a visit. It's dedicated to the Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken, and contains everything you'd expect from a Shinto temple on a massive scale, with unfeasibly huge and particularly beautiful Torri. On your way in, however, keep an eye to the left..

What the guidebook won't tell you: .. because otherwise you might not notice the entrance to the Gyoen. This formal garden, apparently "constructed according to the design of Emperor Meiji himself in order to give recreation to Empress Shoken", is beautiful and almost impossibly calm considering it's only a few miles from Harajuku JR station. Huge swathes are dedicated to special iris gardens, sadly not in bloom when I attended. It costs 100Y or so to enter.

Photos: here.

3) Odaiba

This man-made island is culturally about as far from the Meiji Jingu Gyoen as you can get. Guidebooks don't make much of it, and you can see why – there's a Disney-ish air to the place, all artificiality and crass commercialism – but it is, in many respects, fascinating. Go to take a look around huge, themed shopping malls such as Aqua City, then see the Statue of Liberty or even the (temporary, huge) giant Gundam robot. Odaiba also provides a great view across the bay.

What the guidebook won't tell you: Aqua City holds both the Sega Joypolis – an arcade of mindboggling size that's worth seeing even if you do have to pay to enter – and a smaller arcade dedicated to old arcade games (Namco, Taito etc) that's a must for video game geeks. Manga/anime fans should also look out for the Jump Shop.

Photos: many, including giant robots, here.

5) The Ghibli Museum, Mikata

Those who have not heard of Studio Ghibli should click here, buy a lot of DVDs, watch them, then return here. If you have seen the films, you'll want to visit this museum, located in Mikata, in the western suburbs – and in which case you'll need to buy a ticket months in advance (see below).

The museum itself is an entirely Japanese-only affair save for a single leaflet in English, but as it's targeted at kids this isn't really a problem – even if you can't read a word, there's lots to enjoy. As well as the exhibits on the making of Ghibli animations (all very hands-on, with flipbooks etc) and the reference material used (photos of European towns taken when designing the look of Kiki's Delivery Service, for example) there's a bookshop, a cafe and, best of all, a giant (as in life-sized) cat bus for small kids to play on while their older siblings and adults watch enviously. The grounds and the museum building are beautiful, and each visitor also gets to see a Ghibli film created solely for the museum in its own cinema – there are a few, and what you see is random, but ours was really rather charming.

What the guidebook won't tell you: Fortunately some friends warned us that tickets sell out months in advance, and with a very limited number released at any one time. To buy tickets in the UK, visit the My Bus travel agency – it's in the basement of the Mitsukoshi department store on Regent Street (tel 020 7976 1191). Passports are needed to prove that you're not a Japanese citizen attempting to jump the queue for tickets released in Japan. We purchased ours three months in advance. Also, the museum has a limited capacity and no timed-ticket system for international tickets – so show up early to save having to wait around outside.

Photos: are not allowed inside the museum, but a few of the outside are here.

6) Meguro

An odd one, this, but stick with me: one afternoon I found myself in Ebisu outside an annoyingly closed beer museum, so with two hours to kill I took a walk. I got totally, utterly lost, ended up in Meguro and was thoroughly glad I did.

Meguro isn't at all touristy, although it does play home to a castle-shaped love hotel, the biggest and scariest wedding shop you've ever seen, a rather beautiful shrine dedicated to the victims of a great fire and, apparently, the Curl Up Cafe cat cafe (didn't see this myself). It's worth visiting for an hour or so, though, to see a bit of everyday Tokyo life outside the neon-craziness of Shinjuku and the other central areas – it's full of coffee shops, pachinko parlours and people just getting on with stuff. Be prepared to be stared at a little more than usual.

What the guidebook won't tell you: Pretty much anything at all. I think mine mentioned the Meguro Gajoen, which is indeed worth seeing.

Photos: a few here.

7) The Shinkansen

If you go to Japan, get a Shinkansen at some point. If you have the time, I'd say Kyoto would be a good destination – we didn't, so we went to Hakone for the Onsen (see #8) – but the journey is, in this case, as important as the destination. Why so good? Well:

1. They are as fast as bloody hell. Or possibly much faster. When the really fast services fly past in bad weather you can actually see a shockwave push the rain out of the way in front of them. Zwoosh.
2. Despite this, the train runs so smoothly it could be gliding on ice.
3. They are so punctual that the average deviation from the timetable, averaged over 160,000 trips, is around six seconds. Six fucking seconds. In a country that gets regularly whunked by earthquakes.
4. People don't talk on the sodding mobile phone on Japanese trains.

Or to put it another way: ride a Shinkansen and the utter shitness of all other trains, everywhere in the world, becomes abundantly clear. This is how rail transport should work.

What the guidebook won't tell you: This isn't Shinkansen related, but it is to do with trains: when you arrive at Narita, buy the N'EX and Suica special deal. This gets you the fast service into Tokyo, plus an Oyster-style card that works on all JR and subway (Toei and Tokyo Metro) lines in the city, at a discount.

Photos: see inside the Shinkansen here and here.

8) Onsen

I don't have a photo of this one, for reasons that will become obvious: onsen are Japanese hot spring baths. In order to partake of a traditional one you'll have to leave Tokyo; we headed to Hakone, near Mt Fuji. Some can be used for a fee, while many are reserved for the guests of a particular hotel or ryokan (traditional inn). We stayed in a ryokan with its own onsen – I'd recommend this, although it is very expensive by budget-travel standards. Look for outdoor onsen with a view if the weather's good.

However you get to an onsen, though, you'll come out feeling either invigorated, broiled or both. I was sceptical, but it's absolutely worth trying: cooking slowly in a hot pond while looking out over the mountains and forests of Japan at 7am is a fantastic way to start the day.

What the guidebook won't tell you: Onsen etiquette is pretty complicated. At the end of the day, however, it boils down to something like this: make sure you go in the right onsen (learn the kanji for Male and Female, or just ask someone), get completely naked leaving your clothes in the ante-chamber, wash yourself thoroughly while sitting on a bucket type thing that'll be provided, then get in the bath and cook. I've heard that "modesty towels" are a must, but I didn't see a single person bothering with this – instead small towels were used solely for brow-mopping.

Photos: of the onsen? Er, no. Photos of the ryokan and beautiful Hakone are here.

9) Eat until your body complains, and then some more

If you don't like Japanese food then Tokyo is, funnily enough, not a good place to visit. If you do, then it's obviously time to get stuck in. We ate one formal dinner at the ryokan (above), then largely concentrated on the "great cheap food" variety: sushi, katsu, don, noodles of every shape and size, gyoza, yakitori and so on. Oh, and ramen. You can buy passable ramen in London, but nothing I've had anywhere else compares with the real stuff in Tokyo. And the grilled fish is also great. And there's good beer. And shochu.

What the guidebook won't tell you: Ordering can be tricky when menus are in kanji, but knowing the words for one, two, this one and that one can get you a very long way on most menus, especially when many cheaper restaurants include images of set meals. Also, try giru – cold soba noodles that you slurp through a small container of soy-ish broth. I'd never heard of them before, and they're great.

Photos: Not really, no. I was too busy stuffing my face.

10) Fuji-San

No trip to Japan would be complete without seeing the iconic Mr Fuji, right? Er, probably – except we failed on this count. Part of the reason for heading out to Hakone was to see Fuji from one of the many viewing points in the area, but sadly we were foiled by thick clouds at every turn. Hope you have better luck.

What the guidebook won't tell you: That even in the middle of summer it gets incredibly cloudy up in the mountains around Owakudani. Although, to be fair, we should have guessed.

Photos: fail.

And that's it. It's not a complete account by any means, but I hope this might prove at least vaguely useful to somebody. We'll be going back as soon as possible – next time to hopefully include Kyoto and a glimpse of that mountain – and I'll update this with any new information as and when I can.

I spent Tuesday rushing to France and back on the Eurostar, attending a Dell press conference at Versailles. About three hours in I spotted this plaque: it turns out the hotel ballroom was used to draft the famous Treaty – now it's a site for business meetings.

At the end of the afternoon a few of us had an hour spare, so we went around the corner to the palace. It's predictably spectacular:

.. and the gardens are something else:

.. but sadly we had no time to do any more than take a quick glance around. At 7pm it was back in a taxi, back to the Gare du Nord, back on the Eurostar and back to London. Eighteen hours, about 1,000km, three press conferences, one interview, two news stories, three glasses of wine underneath the channel and twelve photos here. Not bad for one day.

First, the show. It's as large as everyone says: around 30 halls, each about so big:

.. so you walk for miles and miles each day back and forth. Inside each hall there are around 200 booths. Finding the one you need is a nightmare – often it pays to get a view from above, if possible:

.. and work-wise, the show went well. Everyone's there, and once you get inside the booths and out of public view there's some fantastic new stuff planned for the next year or so, some of it secret for the time being. Outside it's a deranged mix of exhibitors (many), businesses (many), press (a few) and the public (amazingly, loads – not entirely sure why). So, the Cebit show scores 8/10. No holiday, but it does what it's there to do.

And what of Hannover? Well, it's quite nice: fairly small, but with a nice central district and some beautiful places in the old town. Get away from the "Irish" pubs, for example, and you can find little places like this:

Sadly I can't even vaguely remember what that bar's called, but you'll find it a stone's throw from the old church. Hannover itself picks up 7/10: if going as a tourist them head to Berlin instead, but it's quite nice.

So, what went wrong? Well, apart from nearly decapitating myself, the one key thing I learned is this: if going to Hannover, first purchase a map. And, preferably, a car to go with it, as the transit system is totally, utterly baffling. We spent hours standing on train platforms, in the cold, waiting for a train with that sinking feeling that comes from being entirely unsure whether it's even going to take you in the right direction:

In fact, during three days in Hannover we managed to get on the wrong train entirely (some stations, we found, had no maps, and the platforms do not list intermediate stops), the right train only to find that it was turned around and sent back the way we'd come (I was shamefully pleased that we weren't the only people caught out by this), a train that turned out to be a tram and then went underground (WTF?) and trains that, for some reason, were not covered by our tickets (not an ICE train – we knew about those, at least).

And all this on top of at least 2 hours of train travel per day because we had to come in the (reasonably nearby) town of Celle, which was similarly devoid of rail maps. Compare this to Berlin, for example, where the complicated transport system (S-Bahn, U-Bahn, trams and buses all overlapping) is cheap and easy to navigate. Hannover scores 2/10 in the "getting around without a car" category.

So all in all, last week was a mixed bag. Good show, nice city, godawful trains – oh, and really, really bad coffee. Still after four days, it was time to leave:

.. and I can't tell you how good it is to be back in London. I may not complain about SouthEastern Railways ever again.

.. you could find this charming room, and me inside it. One conference keynote plus one interview plus one photo plus one comment from Greenpeace (and after factoring in about ten cups of coffee) you have one news story, and so before flying back out on Thursday I had time to check out the city. And here it is:

It's all rather pretty, actually, with cobbled streets, trams everywhere and fountains. Fountains that, for some inexplicable reason, are all covered by pointy wooden hats, as if to protect them from the rain (because, as we all know, fountains and water don't mix). And then there's the Fuggerei:

The Fuggeri was founded in 1516 by the Fugger family who, being both breathtakingly rich and Catholic, wanted to keep in God's good books and were able to blow vast sums on doing so. They did this by building a whole city district, comprising of really rather nice homes, and renting them out for a tiny fee – plus three prayers a day – to poor, Catholic residents of the city. It's still running today, funded by tourism (4 euros to enter), the Fugger family and, to some very small extent, the rent (just 98 euro cents per resident per year).

So, once you've seen the social housing and the Fujitsu factory, what else is there in Augsburg in November? Not much. The worst thing would be this fellow, staring out of a hunting shop window:

And the best thing? That'd be the cake:

If you like cake, you will like Augsburg. We found dozens of cake shops, including the one above, whose cake counter must have been almost 100m long. Hedgehog shaped cakes, cherry cakes, fruit cakes, cream cakes.. it's all a bit bewildering. So, we ate cake. And drank coffee. And bought more cake. And all very nice it was too. And then to the airport, through a slightly demented security check that took exception to my camera, and home.

So, Augsburg. Worth flying there? Not really. Worth a couple of hours if you happen to be nearby? Sure. Is that a glowing recommendation? I suppose not.

Travel certainly rates as one of the most pleasant surprises of my job: before joining Dennis as a Staff Writer I had no idea that magazine work would ever require a passport. As it is, I've done plenty of mundane travel around the UK – exploring the glamour of Sutton Coldfield, for example – but I've also been lucky enough to visit China, Korea, Singapore, the US and most of Western Europe over the past six or so years.

The downside of travelling for work is that, no matter how wonderful it is to get to places that I could never otherwise afford to visit, these trips are never holidays. For one thing, Helen's not there. And of course there's work to be done – never fun when jet lag is scrambling your brain backwards, for example, and you're trying desperately to plug credit card details into a completely incomprehensible foreign website to buy wireless internet access to send your emails.

And of course there's seldom any free time. Sometimes we get half a day or so off if the job runs for several days, and in Singapore our six-day schedule allowed a whole day to roam the city, but I flew in and out of China in 24 hours – there wasn't a free minute to look beyond the hotel, let alone explore the town. I'm still glad of the opportunity to see new places, but I can see why someone might want to pack it in for a year and travel the world properly.

And so tomorrow, if all goes to plan, I'm off to California. The first three days should be as usual: about 16 hours of travel to get there then two days of press conferences, interviews and, hopefully, some interesting news to write up. Rather than starting my fourth day in a mad dash to the airport, though, I'm picking up a hire car – I've delayed my return for a few days in the hope of actually seeing the America that lurks beyond the city limits, and which to date I've entirely missed out on (although having just read this I'll be sticking religiously to the speed limit, so who knows how far I'll get). Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but I'd expect a deluge of shoddily taken Flickr photos in a week or so.

.. and all I got were these lousy photos. And a news story about antivirus software, which was really the point of the exercise, but never let the truth get in the way of a bad pun.

Anyhow, I went for a walk, got lost, took photos, somehow found my bearings again and made it back to the hotel for the press conference, which was something of a relief.

On an only vaguely related note, I've tweaked the WordPress template to make it play nicely with Flickr pictures (which are 500px wide by default). Looks OK to me, but please let me know if I done broked it.