Vienna’s good idea

While organising the details of our trip to Vienna and Prague next week, I discovered that not only is there an airport check-in facility in the centre of Vienna with a fast rail link to the airport, but that passengers can buy a two-part ticket that provides a taxi from the check-in facility to the hotel of their choice. Similarly passengers can be picked up at the hotel for the return trip to the airport. What a great idea. Vienna has an excellent public transport system, but how much easier to have a taxi ready with no hassle about fares or wondering if the driver is taking you to your hotel via Salzburg. Tickets can be bought on-line and printed off  before you  leave home. Fingers crossed that this marvellous system works well next week!

Quiz

Today we kick off a week of celebrations for a certain victory, by a certain person, over a certain country.

Who was the person?

Which country was defeated?

When did it happen?

As a clue here is the poster advertising the celebrations and plastered all  over Orléans.

The Neolithic Age

I find the process of civilisation fascinating. As far as we know modern man, homo sapiens arrived on the planet, 200, 000 years ago. He evolved out of homo erectus.

Then we have the old stone age for some 190,000 years of the 200,000 years that we have have existed. Yes for most of our time on this planet we have been chipping flints, not blogging. Every now and then we would come up with a better shaped flint and shout eureka. I guess we were like the tribes in the Amazon. Really advanced animals, not much more. Can you imagine, people like us put up with that type of existence for eons.

Then 10,000 years ago something extraordinary happened the neolithic age arrived. Maybe our latest flints were so good we killed off all the game, and maybe we were eating better and bred faster. Or maybe we just got clever. Anyway this was the tipping point. Mankind learnt farming, could keep sheep and grow wheat. Suddenly we are talking about the cradle of civilisation, Mesopotamia. Egypt and China followed shortly after.  Villages came along and then 5000 years ago came towns.We discovered metal working, bronze then iron. Writing was 7000 years ago, legal systems, architecture, urban planning, aqueducts and by the time you get to the Greeks 2500 years ago people were doing such abstract things as measuring the circumference of the earth and creating works of art that have never been bettered. Wow what a rush after all those years of stagnation in just 7500 years we had done civilisation. Then for 1500 years we stagnated again, even went backwards. Finally another 500 year rush and here we are blogging.

I just find it stupendous. Who could have ever predicted that on this planet with roaming dinosaurs, jumping insects suddenly human civilisation would crop up. I guess at the cosmic level we are just like a large ants’ nest, but it doesn’t feel like that.

What I can’t get out of my system is what the hell were we doing in that first 190, 000 years. Yes that is 95 times the time elapsed between the birth of christ and today.Why did we just sit back and chip stones and run after mamouths when we had the intellectual capacity to be an Einstein?  Or maybe we didn’t.