Approximately eight billion people have demanded a blow-by-blow account, so here it is.

The city

The Hague is a city of about four hundred thousand people. The center of town is dotted with embassies and, like most European cities, crisscrossed by narrow cobblestone streets and filled with churches and buildings twice as old as the nation that I’m a citizen of.

Because of severe jet lag, I didn’t have much time to check out the city. But The Hague is home to Escher in Het Palais (Escher in The Palace), a fabulous museum with three floors of work by that original M.C., the Dutch artist and “intuitive mathematician” Maurits Cornelis Escher. You’ve probably seen Escher’s work in books and posters, but you haven’t really experienced it until you’ve seen it up close. Among others, they have prints of Three Worlds, Puddle, Tetrahedral Planetoid, and his masterpiece Snakes, made just months before he died.

The beach district of Scheveningen is a summer tourist destination. I took a trip out there on the tram (by the way, all of The Netherlands has a unified public transit system). It felt like a cross between Santa Cruz and Kowloon, a beach, boardwalk, and pier, with a few casinos, expensive restaurants and hotels (including the beautiful Kurhaus), and a string of shopping malls. There were lots of people out, including surfers, a group of about thirty pit-bulls and their owners walking on the beach together, and some sort of motorcycle show. I’m sure it’s a nice spot to get away to when it’s not 0˚C with a wind chill of -4˚C¹.

The school

On Saturday I visited the school. Jan Willem Stas, the program director, and most of the current students were there to talk to. The typographers Erik van Blokland and Peter Verheul dispassionately listened to me present my portfolio and interviewed me. They conveyed no opinion either way about my work, and they were interviewing people all day long, so the best I can hope for is that I stood out a little bit. They are expecting about a hundred and twenty applications for a program that only takes eleven students each year, so the competition is steep.

I also met, briefly, Petr van Blokland, who teaches in the Graphic Design program at the school, and saw but did not get a chance to meet Paul van der Lans and Just van Rossum (yes, brother to Guido van Rossum), who also teach there.

I spent the rest of the time meeting and talking to the current students, and to a few of the other prospective students. My amateur typographic eye was extremely impressed with the quality of both the current and prospective students’ work. Several of the students had insightful, constructive criticism about my portfolio², which was exciting and humbling. All of the students spoke very highly of the program and the professors.

KABK is also an undergraduate art school, and the entire school was participating in the open day. I toured the art/science, graphic design, industrial design, fine art, letterpress, photography, textiles/fashion design, and interactive media departments. I was impressed by all of it; It looks like a great environment. The letterpress students were letting people select a font—a real font, from a drawer, made out of lead—and print their names on the press. All the current Type & Media students were quick to inform me, however, that I’d be so busy with the Type & Media program that I wouldn’t have time to do anything else. Kinda like the first year of the Linguistics Master’s at UC Santa Cruz.

They plan to tell people in March, but the current students said I shouldn’t expect hear back from them until April or May, and one of this year’s students didn’t find out he’d been accepted until June. One student said the Dutch are very lax about deadlines and bureaucracy. That sounds refreshingly different from the academic system in the States, where everything revolves around filling out the correct paperwork in triplicate using a blue or black ballpoint pen and having it postmarked by the appropriate deadline, and if you screw up, you have to wait until next year.

Everyone was blown away that I flew from California to Europe just for the open day, but if I hadn’t flown out I would be applying completely blindly without knowing much about the program, the school, or the city. And I now know that the competition for the program is extremely tough, which helps me to be realistic about my chances (i.e. not great). While I have lots of friends who have a passing interest in typography, and while I’ve corresponded with other typographers online, I’d never actually met anyone else face-to-face who’d designed a typeface before. That alone made the trip worth it.

1. that’s 25˚F, for those of you still not on the metric system
2. In fact, after I finish this blog post I’m going to go fix about a million problems with the Cyrillic lowercase in Haylurker. Thanks, Irina.

It’s important to understand that you’re putting yourself at significant risk every time you use a computer that’s not your own (and sometimes even when you’re using your own computer). The safest way to access the internet while traveling is to only use your own computer or smart phone. But budget travelers can’t always afford to carry a computer or a smart phone. The risk of theft of an expensive laptop or smart phone is much higher when traveling, especially when staying in shared rooms in hostels. And, as every backpacker knows, every single pound (or kilogram) you carry counts tenfold when you have to run a mile to catch a train. Traveling with your own, trusted internet device is often not feasible.

Another option is to just never go online while backpacking, but this often is not feasible either. The internet has become a tremendous source of tourist information plus an amazing tool to meet and coordinate with other travelers. And the long-term traveler must go online from time to time, to check their bank balances, pay off credit cards and mobile phone bills, and communicate with loved ones. The only alternative to this is the telephone, which requires staying up late or getting up early, and navigating an expensive and foreign telephone system.

All this adds up to the uncomfortable fact that you sometimes absolutely must get online in the next few days, and your options for doing so range from mildly to completely insecure.

The general idea is to first categorize your online activities by how secure they need to be, then, make an educated guess about the security of each computer you use, and use that as a guide for what you are willing to do online on that computer.

Step 1: Categorize your activities

Reading WikiTravel, finding hostels, or getting bus or train schedules doesn’t need a safe connection. If someone steals your password to a social network or CouchSurfing, the worst thing that can happen is that they use your account to say weird things to your friends, and you’ll have to reset your password or (worst-case) create a new account. Not that serious, in the great scheme of things. This, of course, assumes that you use different passwords for your different accounts, which is a good idea.

Checking your email needs to be a bit more secure, since with access to your email, anyone can impersonate you or steal your accounts on sites that use that email address. And lastly, making reservations with a credit card or logging in to your online banking are high risk, since with your credit card or bank details, you can be out of a chunk of money quickly.

Step 2: Categorize the available computer

Since I’ve never seen a single internet café running anything but Windows¹, and since I’ve seen only one youth hostel with Linux computers², I’ll only talk about judging the security of Windows computers.

The more professional internet cafés and hostel computers require you to log in, and usually you can tell if you’ve been logged in to a temporary, sandbox account, or if it’s the same account that every user gets logged into. If it’s the same account that every user uses, you’ll see personal files left on the desktop, in the trash, in the documents folder, and in the browser you’ll see browsing history and bookmarks and toolbars and plugins installed, etc, etc. If it’s a sand-boxed account, it should look like a pristine, clean install of Windows.

If it’s a Windows computer that you can just sit down at, don’t trust it. If there’s lots of random software visibly installed and files lying around, this means it hasn’t even been cleaned up recently. Use it to do research, but don’t type your passwords on it, and certainly don’t ever log in to online banking or type in your credit card details.

Sandbox accounts are much less likely to have malware installed, because only the owners/administrators, or someone who used an exploit to get administrator access, could have installed malware. If it’s sand-boxed, I generally feel ok logging in to my email, but I’m still wary about using it to log on to my online banking. In a pinch you could use Mint just to check bank balances, since it has read-only access to your financial information. Oftentimes I find myself making hostel reservations with my credit card on computers like this, but I’m never very happy about it.

Then there are places like EasyInternet, where users don’t have access to the filesystem, CD drive, or USB ports, you’re not allowed to download and run any programs, and where the entire Windows installation–not just the user account–appears to be wiped over the network each time the user is logged out. You can tell that the entire Windows OS is being wiped because the computer reboots as soon as you log out, and the startup process indicates that it’s booting over the network. These kinds of computers are the safest. These are the only places where I feel comfortable logging in to my online banking. There’s still a chance that someone administering the café is capturing your passwords, but there are probably only a few people who have enough authority to do so.

I also judge hostel computers to be more secure than internet cafés. Internet cafés are open to the general public, including locals who would have the time, and the motivation, to regularly visit the café, install malware, gather collected data. Hostel computers are generally just used by hostel visitors, which would mean a traveler installing malware would have much less time to install and troubleshoot the data-collection process, no chance to reinstall it when it gets removed, and they’d have to gather the collected data remotely. You still have to worry about a member of the hostel staff installing something malicious, but again, there’s fewer staff members, so a smaller chance that it’s been compromised.

If the computer has Firefox³ installed, I usually take that as an indication that they aren’t total morons about security. Even better if it’s set to the default browser. Installing Firefox yourself, and using it, protects you against malware in Internet Explorer, but not against malware installed on the system.

If you know anything about Windows, you could check the version of Windows it’s running and see how recently it’s had security updates installed, which would give you an even better idea how security conscious the administrators are.

Other tips

If you can’t get to a secure computer and absolutely must access your bank account, most ATMs will let you check your balance and make transfers (and watch out for ATM skimmers). And staying up late or getting up early to call your bank, while a hassle, is much better than finding yourself stuck in a foreign country with cancelled credit cards and not much cash.

Always make sure you’re using SSL. If your bank doesn’t use SSL, switch to one that does. Gmail and most of the other major email providers allow you to log in using SSL. Use it. Don’t make credit card reservations if the site doesn’t support SSL. And don’t do any of this if the browser on the computer you’re using doesn’t support SSL.

The last step in staying secure while traveling is to change all your passwords and pin numbers as soon as you are back at your home computer again. That way, if anything did leak, it’s rendered useless.

Those are my white-hat, benevolent-hacker notes about internet while traveling. Soon, I’ll post some true black-hat tales of hacking internet café to get free, or cheap, internet.

1. No love for Mac OS X.
2. High praise for Hostel Ruthensteiner, Vienna, Austria, running some sort of sand-boxed KDE, and where I felt almost as safe as on my home computer.
3. I’ve never seen Safari or Opera in the wild, and Chrome was released after my most recent trip.

I came up with this early in my most recent trip, somewhere in Turkey, and finally got the chance to make it. Read all about it and see a bigger version here, or get it on a poster, or on light and dark t-shirts.

Almost two months ago, I found myself in China, Hong Kong and Macao over the course of three days. I traveled by plane, boat and bus. I used three separate currencies. My passport was scrutinized three times. Where my friend lived in China, the villagers spoke a language incomprehensible to the people in the nearest big city, where they in turn spoke another language incomprehensible to the Mandarin speakers who run the country from Beijing, or the Cantonese-speaking majority in the south and Hong Kong. Yet these people are all said to speak “Chinese” and all legally live under the authority of the Chinese government.

Two days ago I crossed from Hungary into Slovakia, then Austria, and finally Germany, by train, car and plane. I used three currencies and encountered three languages, but didn’t see a single border official, passport control or customs officer. At one train station in a small town, I wasn’t even sure what country I was in — not until checking the prices on a dusty vending machine did I know to pull out my Slovakian koruna (to buy my daily ice cream, of course)

It’s hard to see how these two snippets of my trip are really so different; each border I cross seems more like an abstract line on a map in a bureaucrat’s office somewhere than anything of much substance. A nation, like a word, is really just a locally convenient but globally poor abstraction, defined slightly differently in different places by different people.

In both places, the borders are evaporating. Hong Kong and Macao’s “Special Administrative Regions” will be abolished in 2047 and 2049, respectively, ostensibly once the different adminstrative and political processes there have been synchronized. And crossing three borders inside Europe so easily is made possible by the expanding European Union, bringing with it a somewhat easier sort of synchronization.

The concept of a nation seems to be slowly being abandoned in this globalizing world. It will clearly take decades, if not centuries, and won’t be without disagreement, but perhaps it too is an abstraction that truly needs to be thrown out.

Part of the motivation for the varied destinations on this trip was to push this process in new directions. Even Greece, which I ended up skipping for various reasons, was chosen partly because they use yet another alphabet there. My typeface instigated by Chinese, Zenith, is little more than a gimmick, but it’s a good one. And then Turkey totally surprised me with a powerful, bold, high x-height, sans-serif face. Upon arriving in Hungary, I was suprised to find that the as-yet-untitled Turkish face fits here very well.

I’ll be digitizing these new faces when I get back.

Bulgaria, the first Cyrillic-using place that I’ve traveled, really threw me for a loop. After pages and pages of sketches, nothing has materialized yet, and it might never.

My fascination with Cyrillic is really a flip side of the East’s fascination with English, or even the West’s fascination with Chinese or Japanese tattoos. A different, mysterious set of symbols that can produce sounds in a person’s head, just like your alphabet can, is fascinating, at least until you learn it well enough for its operation to become unconscious.

Luckily there are more alphabets, and countries, to visit, and to learn.

There’s not much on my mind… I am more or less living between yesterday and two or three days from now.  I don’t worry about life back home. All my belongings fit in an airplane carry-on bag. If anything sucks, I just leave the hostel or the city or the museum or the room or stop talking to the people who suck and do something else. I take pictures of things that I think look cool, and draw pictures when there’s a quiet moment.

Sometimes I meet cool people and hang out with them. Other times I’m all by myself and only speak when I stumble through a few phrases of the local language. Sometimes there’s a fantastic place to eat for cheap, other times food is yogurt and bread from the corner store.

Oh, and I eat ice cream every day.

And then you get on a bus and ride hundreds of miles through sunflower fields to end up somewhere else. The feeling fades, but the realization that your repertoire of words is woefully limited lingers.

Some would guess the United States, but Turkey fits the bill too. In many ways Turkey felt more like home than anywhere else I’ve ever been. I miss it already.

Even though I sound like a bloody yank saying it, Turkey is fucking awesome (only Americans say “awesome”).

Now I’m in Sofia, Bulgaria. It sure as hell isn’t Turkey. They checked my passport five times at the border. I don’t know what the EU is thinking. They let in Romania and Bulgaria, and not Turkey? Hell, the EU should be trying to get its member states to be allowed to join Turkey.

I was on an overnight bus to Cappadocia during the second. At one of the bus stops, three young men got on the bus and flipped through the channels on the bus television, and the pointedly got off the bus once they’d determined that they couldn’t watch the celebration on board. The festivities were broadcast over the radio, and when they were over, the entire bus broke into cheers and the driver honked his horn at the darkened desert road.

The third was not a happy night. The crew of the boat I was traveling on lay anchor in the small coastal town of Kaş and took all the passengers to a rooftop terrace to watch the event on television. Although there were some high points (which the townspeople celebrated with fireworks) ultimately the night ended very sadly, and the crowds gathered on the streets dissipated slowly. The crew escorted us back to our boat in near-silence and us tourists, as easily affected by sad sentiments as good, went to bed early.

The celebrations themselves are called “games,” and consist of eleven Turkish men kicking a “ball” into a net called a ”goal.” Right now, all of the countries in Europe are graciously indulging Turkey in its religious celebrations by sending “teams” of their own to compete. The faith itself is called “football” (and in the U.S. it’s sometimes called “soccer”). You might have heard of it¹.

Each game is a part of a larger holiday season called the “Euro Cup.” Turkey was not expected to win as many games as it did and make it this far into the holiday season. The first and second games were tied up until the very end, when the Turkish team scored with just seconds remaining. The third Turkey lost to Germany in the last moments.

Turkey will play Russia for third place in the coming days, and I expect it to be every bit as exciting as the previous games.

1. Islam is another religion which is also practiced in Turkey, or so I’ve heard. There have been, however, no exciting Islamic games or festivals here since I’ve been here.

It’s very hard to let things happen as they will, while keeping a journal for friends back home. From here on out, this log will have to be more a series of communicades from the other side – keeping track of everything is too much of an anchor for me right now.

Since landing in İstanbul two and a half weeks ago, I’ve swum in two seas and walked on two continents, traveled hundreds of miles by train, bus, scooter and boat, slept in a cave, a treehouse, and a yacht, broken the law at least three times (and gotten away with it), and only gotten mildly sunburnt once.

The walking style here couldn’t be more different from other big cities. In places like New York, people are always moving fast & purposefully, in a straight line. Here — and I’ve confirmed this impression with other travelers — pedestrians are masters of aimless wandering. There’s a lot of looking to the left while meandering to the right, walking extremely slow, and stopping and turning in the middle of a crowd, charting a new course without regard for any obstacles. Everyone seems peacefully relaxed, or maybe just transfixed by the endless parade of things they could be purchasing.

When it’s raining, freakishly tall people like myself have to watch out for the tips of meandering umbrellas.

When my friend and I got here, we stayed two nights in a four-star hotel in Kowloon that he’d booked at nearly half price on the tubes. When they unsurprisingly refused to extend the same rate to us for another night, I stupidly insisted, against his advice, on booking an ultra-budget room in one of the “hostels” in Chungking Mansions.

Chunking Mansions (and the slightly nicer Mirador Mansions), would have been better named Chunking Private Housing Projects. They are massive buildings. The ground two or three floors are cramped shopping malls, selling everything from knockoff iPhones, DVDs, watches, handbags, and all manner of Indian and Pakistani food. The knock-off iPhones are particularly amusing. I watched one salesman repeatedly try to use the multi-touch interface, with no luck since it clearly wasn’t running the iPhone OS. Another knock-off was labeled “HiPhone” on the back, and a third was labeled “iPhone” in Arial, a sin El Jobso would never condone.

Above these mall floors rise six or eight towers, each served by two tiny elevators. There is always a five or ten minute line to get on, and you’ll share an elevator with building residents, mostly African, Pakistani, Middle Eastern, or Indian.

The “hostels” in this building make even the worst hostels in Europe seem palatial. They are run-down fire-traps, and you’re lucky if you get a room with a window. I met an unlucky traveler who got bed-bug bites in one.

Like New York, everything here is open late. Starbucks, McDonalds, Seven-Eleven, Haagen Dazs, and Ben & Jerrys, as well as all the local brands, are open at least until one or two am. Bars close whenever they feel like, and there’s a 24-hour supermarket across the street from my new hostel (a halfway decent affair on Hong Kong Island proper).

I allowed too much time in Hong Kong — I’ve long since seen most of the touristy stuff. Sunday I went to the Dragon Boat Race festival on the southeast town of Stanley (and Stanley Market). Victoria Peak (complete with mountaintop shopping mall) offered great walks and views. The I.M. Pei Bank of China and the HSBC building, the two famous buildings, are right next door to each other (and to several shopping malls). The Science Museum, although mostly for children, offered some great math puzzles and optical illusions on the top floor. It also had some prints from the Turkish artist Istvan Orosz, who may be the closest thing M.C. Escher has to an artistic heir (not counting the hyper-commercial Victor Vasarley). And, bonus, I was able to avoid the thunderstorm that day by walking to the Science Museum through a series of malls and covered mall-to-mall walkways.

The hostel on Lantau, a mostly unpopulated island near the airport, is no longer in daily operation, so my plan to spend a day in the woods before my umpteen-hour flight to Istanbul (which is running a pleasant 18 degrees cooler than Hong Kong’s 88 today), is shot.

Malls get old quick. I think I’ll go buy some Chairman Mao light-up cigarette lighters now.

But the knock-off brands are funnier. I’m sure you’re aware of the brands “AEBRCOIEMBR & FIGTH,” and “TMMOY HFLIGRE,” and, today, I saw the famous Japanese brand Sanrio’s feline mascot we all know and love, flanked by the label “KELTO HIT LI.”