I was on a holiday in the Cinque Terre in Italy with my wife a few years ago. Because of a rainy day we decided to take a train to Genua and visit some museums. At the maritime museum I randomly met an Italian coworker/coauthor from my research institute in Germany, who was visiting his family in his hometown with his wife.

Edward Teller is just the kind of scientist you need to build civil engineering projects out of doomsday devices.

The people over at NCD must be getting raging hardons just from seeing this.

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Driving in Paris is crazy as hell, and I did drive a lot in European cities. Although the worst I’ve ever been to has to be Bucharest. People drive hyper-crazy in Romania.

Na Ghent and Brugges are lovely. Brussels is kinda meh but not superbad.

Swedes told me that Malmö is a rough and ugly city before I went there. And honestly it was a fairly average coastal city that did not seem rough at all. Also had some beautiful spots.

Also tons of great indian restaurants and some intersting traditionally english foods to try.

Public transit seemed relatively safe to me, when I was there 2 years ago. The Amalfi coast is no that great though. Rather go to Naples, use a day for small boat trip to either Capri or Ischia, one day to take the commuter train to Herculaneum. After that take the train from Naples to Salerno, which is a good bit less touristy and ceaper than the real Amalfi coast. Perhaps take a boat from Salerno to look at the Amalfi coast from the sea (more beautiful that way anyway) or enjoye some of the beaches that are reachable with public transit nearby. In Salerno you can also take a train or Bus to Paestum, which is a UNESCO world heritage site has some greek temples from 600 BC.

For driving tunnels in the Alps are the worst. The Gotthard tunnel or the Karawanken tunnel on the first days of the vacation period were the worst traffic I have ever seen.

I paid 20€ for a Pizza Margherita in Oslo once. In some very rich places you can feel like a tourist from a developing country even if you are from a less-rich high-income country yourself.

I’d say Romania is actually relatively safe crime-wise for tourists. Comms services are better than in my homecountry (always had 4G on my last trip to Romania even in rural places in the mountains, while I sometimes do not have any signal in German high-speed trains between two large cities). Dangerous widlife is actually an issue. Lot’s of bears, wolfes, snakes, etc. Also bad tourist infrastructure in really rural places.

git commit -m “Zoomer/alpha humor acronym database extended with new entry for scnr”

My wife an I were on a Roadtrip from Germany to Poland for a holiday and did go to a lot of beautiful places. But Zakopane is stuck in my mind as the most touristy place I did ever go to. The High Tatra mountains are still beautiful but we had to wait in line to even enter the hiking trails. And on the trails it was just hundreds of people trying to make photos without other people in the background.