Re: Prague

Edward Lewis wrote:
> I will attest to Prague being survivable.  I have been there once 
> already and suffered no ill effects and was not robbed.  I.e., don't panic.
...
> At 14:52 -0500 3/6/07...:
> ...
> > Under the entry for taxis from the airport they say "Warning:
> > Prague's taxi drivers ...

When the IETF started having the meetings outside the U.S., there seemed to be 
two basic reasons.  One was to adjust the burden of attendee travel, with a 
slight shift towards more fairness for attendees from outside the U.S.  The 
other was to have our presence in the locale serve to encourage improvements 
to the local infrastructure.
The former is obviously still valid.  By and large, the latter hasn't been for 
a number of years. So it really is not reasonable for us to go to places that 
have poor Internet services, except that I'm one of those folk who think that 
having to go through a meeting venue learning curve for installing and 
debugging the net makes our meeting more fragile than it should be.  But even 
that issue has gotten far less risky around the world, even for first-time 
IETF presence.
But it occurs to me that there is an additional benefit that has been lurking, 
and I think it just surfaced:  We kind folk from the U.S. tend to have very 
little understanding of what is "normal" elsewhere in the world.  Even those 
of us with real travel experience often are so sheltered in those trips, or 
narrow in our venues, we have no serious basis for appreciating what to worry 
about, and what to merely be cautious about.
A month before the Paris IETF, I was in Paris, at the same convention center, 
and had my wallet stolen as I was leaving the Metro.  First such experience. 
Very traumatizing.  But I'm hard-pressed to view Paris as more dangerous than 
any large U.S. city.  And Amsterdam has public signs warning of pick-pockets. 
 Should we avoid it, too?  My Paris trauma came at the end of a fabulous day, 
and although during IETF week, I had a bit of a tremor when I had to use the 
same metro station, it was, still, the same, wonderful Paris of the travel books.
Frankly, I have the same worries about Prague as John. I have read the same 
sorts of cautions that he has and must admit that seeing such cautions show up 
in a Frommer's is pretty unusual.
So, I fully intend to be on guard.  (And I am staying at a place that will 
require serious use of the transit system.)
But, then, that's the lesson:  Some places are seriously dangerous.  We should 
stay away from them.  Some merely warrant caution.  And most places that 
American's worry about are no worse than most cities in the U.S.  Just different.
Yes, it can be a challenge to find credible ways to distinguish between the 
two, but it's clear that the otherwise review of published reports is not 
sufficient.
d/
--

  Dave Crocker
  Brandenburg InternetWorking
  bbiw.net

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
Ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf