A Day with Saskia, an evening in Köln, and the Nachtzug to Praha!

Wednesday night I met up with Saskia in Aachen. We had fresh pasta for dinner and then watched her uncle perform a terrific two-man comedy at a small local theater. It was tricky to understand German acting, but I think I got about half the jokes.


I spent the night at Saskia's house and had salmon and tomato omelets for breakfast. Yum! We went back to Aachen and visited the Lindt chocolate factory, where I bought an entire kilogram of high-quality German chocolate for 3.50 Euro!! After that, we bummed around cafes and bakeries downtown, dodging rain showers until about 2:00 when I took the train to Köln (Cologne). I had problems buying my ticket because my bank locked down my credit card after my trip to Paris. (I'd only told them I'd be using the card in Germany). Saskia was awesome and bought the ticket for me and lent me 100 Euro for the trip. What a sweetheart!

Köln is lovely! The cathedral is astoundingly huge and I climbed all the way to the top. I tried to visit the Chocolate Museum, but they closed just as I walked in the door. Choco-Nazis. Instead, I went to a concert with the Köln Philharmonic Orchestra that was broadcast live over WDR (German national radio station). Very nice!

I think I've finally figured out how to photograph stained glass.



The night train was uncomfortable, but now I'm in Prague! More later!

More memories from Paris

Last night I remembered a few more little things from Paris.

The first thing Jonathan and I did was visit a small cafe that looked like something straight from the 1920s. (Jonathan said he sometimes sees movies being filmed there). There was a notice in the window, which Jonathan translated thus: (please imagine a sexy French accent)

"Ah! Someone's cat is missing. It is a small cat. It's name is Lu-Lu, and it is the sort of cat you can hold to your face and snuggle with your nose. It has white fur."

Later, when our beer was served....

"My boss always says 'American beer is like the piss of a cat' .... but of course, he wasn't talking about a cat like Lu-Lu. This is a mean American cat that pisses on your shoes. Not a white cat like Lu-Lu."

I also remembered the name of one of the Italian painters I particularly liked: Giuseppe Arcimboldo. He did these really creative portraits composed of natural objects. This series was my favorite:









I also liked Pompeo Batoni.


Here's a picture of the Thalys high-speed train I took from Paris to Aachen.


My birthday cake! A "Bombe Chocolate", the richest chocolate cake I have ever tasted. I don't know what it was exactly, but it tasted like dark Lindt chocolate mixed in rich chocolate pudding, spread over a bed of milk chocolate on a piece of dense vanilla pound cake, and dusted with coca powder. De-lish-us!

Paris and my 23rd birthday!

June 6th I turned 23, and what better way to celebrate than take a train to Paris? I was particularly lucky, since the 6th - 10th were public holidays in Germany! So that afternoon, I boarded a Thalys high-speed train to Paris from Aachen. Three hours later I was in the City of Light.


My friend Jonathan Kalafatis met me at the station. Jonathan and I were neighbors in the Donaldson Brown Graduate dorms at Virginia Tech and had a weekly ritual of watching LOST together. Good times!


Jonathan took me first to a small cafe for some fine French beer (very light and nutty). Afterwards we took a small walking tour of the neighborhood, including the magnificent Basilique du Sacré Coeur. There was a guy on the steps, totally drunk, who was singing "I must stop Vodka!" over and over in French. I felt very much that I was in Paris.


I spent most of the next day at the Louvre (Jonathan had to work). This was such an amazing experience! The Louvre is HUGE! It's like a maze, but at every dead end and wrong turn you experience priceless artworks from around the world. I particularly loved both the French and Italian galleries, though I'm not sure what I liked better: the Italian paintings or the Italian sculpture. Perhaps my favorite piece was Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss by Antonio Canova, but all the paintings from the Italian masters were so vibrant that they seemed to glow. Once, I had been looking at a portrait of a beautiful Italian woman when I glanced over to see a woman in the gallery. My immediate thought was "Is she OK? She looks sick!". At second glance I could see she was healthy and even attractive, but she looked sick compared to the fantastic glow of the portrait's skin.


Napoleon's dining room. Almost big enough for my family!


Everyone's seen this picture before. I found this one in Napoleon's apartments.


Proof-positive that they had Walkmans in the 18th century.


After the Louvre, I bought a map of the city from a small souvenir shop and took a walk up to the Arc de Triomphe. You can go to the top for 8 Euro, but there was so much fog I didn't bother.


From the Arc, I took a 40min walk along the Seine river to the Cathedral Notre-Dam. This was absolutely amazing, though actually smaller than some of the other cathedrals I've visited (Aachen, Berliner Dom, and St. Paul's felt larger, though Westminster might have been smaller). There was a mass in progress, and strangely, they didn't throw out the tourists. That was fine by me, because I got to hear some gorgeous music and smell the incense. The robes, stain glass, and ethereal hymns felt very holy and awe-inspiring.

Jonathan comes from Normandy, so that night he introduced me to some good ol' fashioned Normandy food. Dinner was a massive "salad" of two fried eggs, about 1/2lb of three kinds of ham, lots of goose liver and some goose meat, all piled on about half a cup of romaine lettuce and served in a gigantic wooden bowl with chopped apples and oil for dressing. It was delicious, but quite impossible to finish (Jonathan had his down 15min before I was halfway through). That evening we met one of Jonathan's lovely lady friends (a coworker) at a local travel-themed jazz cafe (lots of antique bikes and suitcases). Jonathan's friend spoke perfect British English and our first conversation went something like this:

Me: Your English is excellent! You have a very nice British accent.
Her: Thank you. I studied in Briton for two years.
Me: That's great!
Her: Yes. You have a very nice American accent.
*pause*
Her: I hate American accents.

A few minutes later she said my accent was tolerable, and we got along very well. We three sat on an indoor balcony over the band, drinking corona and discussing how we would save the world.


The next day was another work day for Jonathan so I was on my own again. I hadn't visited the Eiffel Tower yesterday because of the fog, and today wasn't any better, but it was my last chance. At 8:00 I sent some post cards and set off in the morning gloom for the famous symbol of Paris.


The tower was quite impressive, and it was really funny to see all the fat American, Italian, and German tourists standing in line for hours to use the elevator, while I happily climbed the stairs after a 5 minute wait. On the way up, I met a terrific pair of Germans from Munich (Linda and Mathias) who were celebrating Mathias' 12th birthday. We immediately became good friends and spent the rest of the day together, speaking German the whole day.


After the tower, I went with my new German friends to Les Invalides, to visit the sarcophagus of Napoleon Bonaparte. While Les Invalides is nice, it's really not prepared for tourists who can't speak French. (Well naturally, the grave sites of American leaders are not prepared for tourists who can't speek English, so what did I expect?) We spent 6 Euro a piece to get in and see the sarcophagus, but couldn't really appreciate any of the exhibits without a translator. Oh well.


The next stop was infinitely better, and definitely my favorite place after the Louvre: Les Carrières de Paris, The Catacombs of Paris! Here we found enormous piles of human bones in gigantic rows. It was a little like a supermarket for human bones -- aisles and aisles of bones stacked 4-feet high. In many places the skulls were arranged in patterns: hearts, faces, symbols, and geometric patterns. You could get right up in the bones, touch them, pick them up, whatever (as long as you were discrete). I found three skulls which were perfectly tuned for a little drum-beat action. Mathias was very impressed and wanted me to play again, using two leg bones for drum sticks. I deferred to the approaching security guard and declined my encore request.



I put my camera inside one of the skulls to take this picture looking out through the eye sockets.


Chillen' out with the bones.

After the Catacombs, Linda and Mathias headed back to their apartment and I went to borrow a suit from Jonathan, because we were headed to the opera! Unfortunately, my subway car broke down on the way to the show and we missed our chance for last-minute tickets. To salve our disappointment, we went in search of a nice place for dinner and wound up at a small restaurant strategically opposite one of Jonathan's favorite dessert bakeries. I had a lovely three-course meal: goat cheese wrapped in sweet crepes, grilled perch, and chocolate creme and espresso for dessert. Afterward, we bought a "Bombe Chocolate" from the dessert bakery and took it back to Jonathan's place where we watched the season finale for LOST season 3. It was a fantastic evening and a perfect conclusion to my Parisian vacation.

Weekend with Saskia

I spent last weekend with my good old friend Saskia Triesscheijn (Zas-kia Tree-shine). We were neighbors in the graduate dorms at Virginia Tech last year, but after her graduation she went back to Germany and it was hard to keep in touch. She's a heptathlete (200m/800m run, 100m hurdles, shot put, javelin throw, high jump, and long jump) training for the Olympic games, and fortunately her sports club is only a few kilometers from Jülich! We visited Aachen for a day and took a look inside the Hohe Domkirche, a gorgeous old cathedral. They had several supposed holy relics on display there, including the diaper of Jesus (Holy crap! Sorry, had to say it...). The relics only come out every 7 years so we were lucky.

Sunday Saskia had a competition in high jump, shot put, and 1000m relay. Her goal was to improve her high jump so we were very excited when she scored a personal record of 1.80m! While she did the hard work, I was busy meeting cool people: Shiela (sprinter who was fluent in five languages and conversational in three more), and Eugene (decathlete who wasn't born; he was carved). It was a lingual adventure since you didn't know if the person you greeted to would answer in English, German, or Dutch.



In Aachen, I finally found a power adapter for my camera so I can get some pictures of Jülich!

Forschungszentrum Jülich

The research center at Jülich is really impressive. I'm working with Daniel Becker on time stamp syncronization for highly-scalable post-mortem performance analysis, and it looks to be exciting! They have two major computers here: an IBM p690 cluster with 1312 Power4+ CPUs and an IBM BlueGene/L 8192 PowerPC 440 CPUs. There's also a data center with three 670 TeraByte tape silos and tons of other goodies. There's a nuclear reactor somewhere on campus, but it's being decommissioned. There's also a particle accelerator and major medical research equipment.

The center is completely hidden deep in a forest near Jülich. I think it must have been a military institution when it was founded, because it's so hidden and there are military warehouses and old equipment scattered throughout the neighborhood. It's a really cool place to work.

Orientation in Budapest!

Whew! It's been a long time since I was able to post anything, so I hope I can remember it all...


Bye bye Berlin...


The CESRI orientation in Budapest was certainly one of the highlights of my life. May 20th I survived a terrifying cab ride from the airport to the Fortuna "Botel", a boat turned hotel, on the Danube river. Every room is named after a famous mariner (I had Fabian Bellingshausen) and to use the shower you have to stand in the toilet (almost). There was a free English newspaper in the room with the welcoming headline "Hungary's dire domestic rap situation!". I felt right at home. By 7:30 nine of ten of the CESRI fellows had arrived and we went to dinner with Chris and Agi, our orientation hosts. Dinner included bone marrow on toast.


Buda on the banks of the Danube river.



Our first day included a walking tour with Jeff. Jeff is an immediately-likable history PhD student and professional tour guide with a clip and sardonic manor. He showed us the principle churches and interesting statues on the Pest side only, because we didn't have time to visit Buda. Lunch was in a strangely hip cafe, and the waiter gave me a weird look for ordering apple juice with my fish.


The group!


Flags of the EU, Budapest, and Hungary




For dinner the first day we went to Bor la Bor, a wine-lovers heaven ("Bor" is Hungarian for "wine"). We ate cock testicles and drank to our hearts content and our head's dismay. The 3km night-walk to the hotel was stunning, documented here thanks to Eric's invention of the Trashpod.


The Chain Bridge and the Royal Palace. Probably my favorite photo of the week.


The CESRI office is near this building, the Hungarian Academy of Science. We visited on the second day, but really didn't see much. Our tour guide was obsessed with showing us portraits of the university founders, so we spent an hour looking at wild Hungarian facial hair.


Our visit to the Eötvos Loraand University was considerably more fun. The labs were all a dingy dentist-chair green and frighteningly "eastern". These white bricks are made of lead to protect the researchers from nuclear radiation from this miniature reactor. Cool.



That night we had front-row seats to a concert at the Hungarian Opera House. This was the greatest concert I have ever attended, and the highest-point of the orientation. The conductor was a crazy old Asian guy with a fantastically expressive face. Sometimes he even growled at the orchestra. They played "The Firebird" and at intermission we had desert wine on the Opera House balcony. Fantastic!



On the third day we got up at 5:00AM to catch a train to Bratislava. We spent the day there with the Fulbright commission and took a wild tour with a half-crazed pro-socialist guide. Bratislava is kinda touristy and after Budapest wasn't much of anything. Still, I bought a cool Bratislavan mug!


The Royal Hotel of Bratislava, along with the "National Tree".

Our last day in Budapest we went to the Széchenyi Bath, the largest medicinal bath in Europe. It wish I had some pictures, but cameras were, obviously, not welcome. There were hot baths, cold baths, sulphur baths, and a whole series of spas and saunas. They had a row of baths kept at an exact posted temperature and three fantastic out-door pools. My favorite was to go in the sauna for about 8 minutes and then jump in the ice bath and rub ice cubes on my forehead. Sounds crazy, but you've got to try it!


Bettina after the baths. You can see the energizing effect.


Our last dinner in Budapest was on a tour boat on the Danube. The champagne was lovely and we presented Chris and Agi with a bottle of Uniqum and some flowers.


A group dinner on our own. Post!

East Side Gallery, KaDeWe

Today was really chill. I spent the morning cleaning Ute's house and doing laundry. In the afternoon I went to the East Side Gallery, the largest remaining portion of the Berlin Wall. It was slightly disappointing, because all the original art has long since been defaced out of existence, and many of the restorations are going to. It's not at all like you see in the pictures, but it was still interesting because of it's historical significance.




After the Wall, I successfully found KaDeWe. Wow oh wow oh wow. Think shopping mall squared plus European flair times seven floors. I spent several hours on the Gourmet Floor, sampling chocolate, tasting wine, and enjoying the sights and smells. There is a shop for every possible food item: fish, pork and beef, fruit and vegetables, cheese, pasta, chocolate, wine, olives, peppers, tea and coffee, and even ketchup and salad dressing. The best part is that at most of the shops you can have something cooked fresh right there. The smell was absolutely astoundingly amazing. I had traditional German food for dinner. I don't know what I ordered, I just asked the lady what her favorite dinner was and she brought me this:

It was really really good, but very salty. I spent another few Euro on a "Chocolate Coffee": an espresso stirred into a melted chocolate bar and served with a tiny but extremely strong chocolate square. It was delicious.