Power

Well, the eminent plasma physics theorist Amnon Fruchtman has let me borrow his power adapter that is compatible with my laptop so I had a bit of time to post an update on my trip.

Heidelberg was very lovely, and the view from my hotel room was much improved over Frankfurt:

The view from the castle was even better:


After that was a quick trip to Karlsruhe, where my talk went quite well. We had a banquet last night at a palace in Schwetzingen. In order to enhance the experience, the tour buses were driven through time portals developed at the Forschungszentrum fur Zeitphysik Karlsruhe.

Here's a picture (from left to right) of my advisor John Scharer, the aforementioned hero Amnon Fruchtman, and yours truly:

Well, one last round of talks here at Karlsruhe and then it is on to a high-speed ICE train to Berlin. Stay tuned for further updates...

Ach!

Well, the reason I haven't updated this blog much is that due to a power surge my laptop power supply got blown out. It's a Dell so of course there's no way to find a proper replacement until I return to the US. I'll try to post something at some point with some computer.

Deutsch Komodie

I watched a bit more German TV. True to form there was a half-hour news report on sex shops and a sex toy manufacturer. Also, I'm pretty sure this guy is best described as Germany's answer to Carlos Mencia.

Tag 2: Frankfurt (updated)

I got a bit of sleep, about 5 hours, but I got up at 3:30 am and couldn't get back to sleep. I took a crazy early shower and went out to get fluids. I wasn't being fair to the view from my hotel room, if you look straight up instead of straight down you would see

Last night I ate at a pretty good, but expensive, Thai restaurant. I spoke entirely in German to the Thai waitstaff and I'm pretty sure they couldn't tell I was American. I'm sure I couldn't fool someone whose first language was German, though. I know I'm going to sound like a provincial moron saying this, but I always get a kick out of hearing Asian people speaking Western languages other than English. When I went to Costa Rica a few years ago I heard Chinese-accented Spanish, now I've heard Thai-accented German. So many linguistic layers...

Okay, I'm going to see if Fruestuck (breakfast) is happening downstairs in the hotel. I went past earlier and some poor woman was standing outside waiting for the reception/dining area to open.

(update)

Turns out the woman worked for the hotel and was there to serve breakfast, so that turned out fine. I decided to walk around Frankfurt instead of deal with the rail system since it wasn't that far from my hotel to the Altstadt (Old City). Here's a few pictures of that


This is a jewelry store (I think). An exclamation mark in front of a word in computer programming often is a negating symbol, i.e. !funny means "not funny." Therefore I have to conclude that the owners of this store are "not schmucks." I went to the Deutsches Filmmuseum shown here

The special exhibit was on anime so that was nice to save some money not having to get a ticket for that. One of the coolest things I saw in the regular exhibit was this handbill

I'll post more later, the Wi-Fi (pronounced 'vee-fee') is cutting out continually.

Deustchland: Tag 1

Day one of my journey is sort of over. Really, instead of "day" it should be called "amorphous day-like period of time in which the sun plays torture games with my mind." I'm referring of course to jet lag. As expected I got absolutely no sleep on the overnight flight. I really can't sleep in vehicles.

The journey started out on public transit in Madison, one bus to catch another bus, this one that went all the way to Chicago O'Hare. Three hours later the plane took off for London. I flew Virgin Atlantic and I have to say it was a really pleasant trip, I was about 8 hours in flight. Heathrow was of course under construction, but it was relatively painless to catch the quick connection to Frankfurt. Frankfurt airport was also under construction. One thing that is great about airports is that typically you get off the plane and then a herd of passengers wanders tunnel after tunnel and somehow eventually ends up exactly where they are supposed to be.

By the time I figured out how to buy a train ticket to get into town, I had been up for a full 24 hours. I found my hotel without too much fuss. It is basically what I expected, a very tiny room with a bathroom down the hall (which I briefly locked myself into). That's what you get for 45 euros a night in the middle of a major European city. And this is the view that comes with it

The room and the bathroom are very clean though, which is apparently a hallmark of all German hotels, regardless of price. I took a 2 hour nap, and I'm going to try to make it the rest of the way and go to sleep at a proper hour to get on the local schedule. I turned on the TV to see what I could find. Much to my horror, "According to Jim" (to which my blog title has absolutely no relation) was on, dubbed in German of course. Who let this crap beyond the US borders? I always hoped it was just a secret national shame that the show existed, but now I know that the world is all too aware of what our culture has wrought. Luckily, "Die Simpsons" were playing on another channel, which makes me feel much better.

Finally, given my lack of sleep and exposure to an international panaloply of viruses, place your bets in the comments as to a) when I will get sick, b) what will the symptoms be, and c) how much of my trip it will ruin. The winner gets a postcard.

Wilkommen

Welcome to my new personal blog, friends, family and chance visitors stumbling in drunk from the World Wide Web. I mostly launched this thing to blog about my trip to Germany. I doubt seriously the blog will survive beyond that, but so what, right?