David and Lili's World Tour

Europe

October 2007 - Madrid, London, Holland, Prague, Italy, Vatican, Geneva, Portugal

We started in Madrid, and then London, where Lili used to live. We met Bastiaan in Amsterdam and went with him to Den Bosch. Then we visited Irene on our way to Prague, where we met my step-mother Patricia for a trek to Rome. We stopped in Venice. In Florence we rented a car and toured Tuscany. In Rome we visited Davide. When Patricia flew home, Lili and I took a train to Geneva, where we stayed with Mariano. Finally, we went to Portugal. In Morocco we plan to meet more friends in another tightly-scheduled rendezvous. Wow.

The best way to see Europe is like this, visiting friends on a "couch tour." (The way to make European friends is by backpacking elsewhere.) It is far less expensive and more interesting. We stay in hotels only in places like Venice, a place that really lived up to the hype. I'm glad I got to see it before it gets consumed by rising seas. Speaking of cities threatened by global warming, it was nice to see Amsterdam again, a beautiful place.

Speaking of global warming, I was happy to see Al Gore win the Nobel Peace Prize in support of climate-change science. Everyone should see his movie, An Inconvenient Truth. (Americans: also see Sicko.) Speaking of science, I think that the vast majority of humanity doesn't really understand how it works. My contention is that organized religions have been undercutting science for centuries, because if the fact of evolution is true then the Adam and Eve myth is not true, and thus the Bible and the Koran are not the word of God. Vatican City, the Pope's lair, is a great example of the vast power that science directly threatens with inconvenient truths. So false controversies are created and misinformation is spread, both against evolution (by churches) and against climate change (by polluting industries). I was happy to see the Nobel Peace Prize given to promote Science. Religion has proven itself incapable of solving the Earth's urgent problems, but Science has a fighting chance. You wouldn't be reading this if the scientific method didn't work.

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