I suppose this is my last post. Unless of course I end up doing something very German-orientated within the next week, which is highly unlikely. I am back home in London, as you can probably tell by the title. London is as overwhelmingly London as ever. It’s grey, menacing and outrageously expensive. It’s also home and I love it. I met up with some friends the night before last, and was suprised to find someone charging me £3.60 for a pint of urine. Someone had even gone to the trouble of putting it in barrels and naming it “Stella Artois” (presumably it’s a question of marketing and it wouldn’t sell if they simpy admitted it was piss). The music was too loud in the pub. On the way there there was a heavy police presence outside the tube station. Across the road there was an equally heavy presence of black teenagers hanging around outside a newsagent staring them down. I moved on fast before things turned ugly.

Why do I love London? – in fact why do I even like it? I’m not sure; maybe it’s just because it’s addictive. Certainly because my friends are here and I missed them all back in Germany. My big theory though is that I suffer from a curiously British love of crapness. Most American readers will not understand this. They don’t see why you shouldn’t simply go through life aiming to be as beautiful and happy and make as much money as possible. “The persuit of happiness” is a constitutional right. My feeling though is that going through life expecting everything to be great may give you fantastic drive, but it must leave you curiously empty inside because you can only ever be disappointed when circumstances are any less than just right.

The British attitude seems far healthier. If you go through life expecting everything to be rather bad then you are completely unfussed by disappointments while silly little things like nice views and cups of tea make you happy. That’s why, although there’s so much wrong with London I still love it; it’s the myriad of little cool things every day, but also I love it because of the crapness rather than in spite of it! In the same way I loved Russia the only time I went. It was cold and dark, the tap water was poisonous, I was constantly hung-over, most of the people I talked to simply assumed I was mentally subnormal because I couldn’t speak Russian and replied “Nyet!” to any of my questions, but somehow it worked. Beers followed by quadruple vodkas, the fact that Russians can pickle anything, trenchworks dug into the streets making the place look like Stalingrad, 50p packs of cigarettes, the whole thing was amazing!

On the other hand Germany was amazing because it actually was amazing. Maybe I’m simply not used to that. Germany does so many things better. Beer, sausages, kebabs, cars, driving, public transport, Pfands, tapwater, prices, those cool windows that open both ways, cheap cigarettes and bars where you can smoke, friendliness, families, being students, alternativeness. I could very happily live in a German city, but I’d have to know I could come back to London occasionally. I don’t know why, but it’s home and I can’t cut it off.

What about the summer overall? I suppose in the narrowest possible sense I didn’t do that well for Rise. I failed to carry out any particularly ground-breaking research. I’ve already got my Masters sorted out back here in England. I have no intention of doing a PhD. I’m an EU citizen, so I wouldn’t be paying juicy North American fees even if I did do one. As far as I’m concerned though it was terrific. The only downsides that I can think of was the fact that the pay covered accomodation and food, but didn’t stretch far enough for travelling and nights out, so I ended up cleaning out my own bank account, and also the fact that Carrie disappeared back to the States way too early! – I blame that on San Diego State University and their outrageously long semesters though! Other than that everything was great. Lots of sunshine and beer and wonderfully cheap prices. The structure and the money of a job, but one without too much in the way of pressure and restrictions. A rail pass and the whole of Germany to explore every weekend. I’ve made new friends, really improved my German and although work was not always quite as involved as it could have been it was a bit of CV gold nevertheless! I’d really recommend this to anyone applying and I’d be interested to see if other European countries run similar schemes; now I’ve done Germany I’d be well up for finding the same thing in France or Spain or Italy next summer!

One piece of advice though, do try to learn some German before you come out. Your German doesn’t have to be good, but if you have a half-decent framework and just go out of your way to speak to people all the time you can really build on it in a couple of months, while if you arrive with just a phrasebook you will have to be very self-disciplined if you want to leave with anything more than phrase-book German. Try to get adopted by Germans as well. I only managed this in the last two or three weeks but it was really worth it. Preferably find Germans who don’t speak English as well. Working out how to say what you want to say fast with limited vocabulary is how you really learn a language. Of course you need the language lessons, but they are just the foundations which get you up to speed. They’re much the same as driving lessons, you need them, but they really don’t compare to the actual buzz of driving fast and fluently by yourself. Of course you can survive in Germany with little or no German; a lot of my fellow students in Dresden did, but the whole experience seems depressingly two dimensional. So in short, get to work, learn German, come to Germany. I haven’t worked out when I’m coming back yet, but I am.

Auf Wiedersehen!

I’ve decided to write this week’s blog a day early.  Tomorrow I have to explain my work to my PhD student, so I don’t know how much time I’ll have for writing, while the day after I’m off to Berlin Schönefeld to catch the plane home.  Also writing this allows me to take a break from copying and pasting excel graphs into the mamoth report which I’m preparing of all my work to date.  As I may or may not have explained I’m testing devices which measure the height of the water surface in a wave tank.  I suppose my general conclusion is that the ultrasound works except with big waves, the resistor-based probe which we knew worked works, the capacitor based probe doesn’t work very well, the pressure sensor is kaputt, and if all else fails you can film everything and then simply go through it frame by frame.  I’ve decided that the report is going to run to at least 20 pages though, to make my results look far more complicated than this!

This last weekend, as you can probably tell from the title, was spent in Prague.  This was not a particularly fun or illuminating visit because I barely had any cash.  For people going to Prague I would give the following advice: Firstly, the train ticket from the Czech border to Prague costs €20.50 or something if bought on the German side of the border but the train back from Prague to the German border however only costs 251Kc (or about €10).  You could probably save further money by buying a ticket only as far as Decin (with little v’s on the e and the c) from the German side and then buying a ticket onwards from Decin to Prague.  If I had know about the price discrepancy on Saturday evening I would probably have had a nicer and far more relaxed time, as it was I spent my time counting pennies and wondering if I’d have to hitchhike.  Secondly “Miss Sophie’s” in the guidebook is the best youth hostel I’ve ever been to, but they do rip you off.  The guide said that it cost 400Kc, but they charged me 590Kc (some rubbish about high season).  If I’d known I’d have gone to a fleepit for about 350Kc, then bought 10 beers for the difference and got royally drunk instead.  As it was I spent the evening skulking round the old city chain-smoking because it was about the only thing I could afford to do.  I did get given a free flyer for a strip-club though, but that wasn’t much consolation.  Thirdly the bureaux-de-change in the station don’t give good rates, but you’d be better off changing your cash there than in Wenceslas square, where you’ll get robbed blind, and fourthly fast-food is bad but cheap, so you’re not going to starve.  You can buy greasy potato cakes or greasy, phallic looking hotdogs for something around 20Kc (80 cents) each.  The hotdogs really were suspect though; the type where they skewer the bun on a pole, shove in half of the cheapest frankfurter they can find, then squirt ketchup into the gap between frankfurter and bun, which then wells up out of the bun-orifice, making the whole thing look like some sort of nasty bedroom accident.  Tasty.

Hotdogs aside though Prague is beautiful, the two pints of Czech beer which I could actually afford tasted great, and I plan to head back when I have more time and money and maybe someone to go with.  I failed to get into any museums (due to lack of cash), but I did take nice touristy photos of the outsides of everything, which I haven’t yet uploaded onto the computer, so bad luck, you can’t see them.

Instead I will leave you with a completely underwhelming picture of some laboratory equipment.  For those of you crazy enough to be wondering the small round thing in the middle is the ultrasound and the other 3 devices are resistance-based-wave-measurers, of which only the red one actually gives reliable results!

Anyways, bye until next week, when I will no doubt be writing a “Wow!  I’m home!  How strange!” sort of article from back in London.

This last week I didn’t do any travelling. Partially it was to give you, dear readers, a deeper and more incisive insight into life in a large and thriving German city, rather than producing just another travel based article, which is more or less what I and everyone else who writes for this blog seem to do every week. (Having said that though I think I wrote a particularly illuminating piece on Dresden’s public transport system a few weeks ago. I would heartily advise you to check it out…). Mostly however this new found recalcitrance was due to a number of more mundane reasons, generally speaking I was tired and running out of cash and I just wanted to settle down for a bit. In fact thinking of cash I now have the princely sum of 13 pounds left in the bank, fortunately my PhD guy is paying me cash in hand and there’s enough in my wallet to be going on with. If I get robbed though I’ll be living off pasta until he pays me again on Monday!

Anyway, enough of that, Dresden is cool, and Dresden had a Stadtfest going on all last weekend. I went on Friday and Saturday, but not Sunday, because I was generally burning through loads of money on things like overpriced beer, hotdogs, candyfloss, ferris-wheel rides, glühwein, dubious looking fried prawns on a stick, and at one stage €4 worth of shots in a shooting competition, which only won me a bottle of disgusting coca-cola, beer mix drink. Having said that I’d already seen away about 7 beers at the time, so how I managed to hit anything (or why I was even given an air-rifle in the first place) is quite beyond me!

In other news I also went to the DDR museum in Pirna. Pirna is just down the S-bahn from Dresden, but very much “the countryside” compared to Dresden. The inhabitants all seemed to have been taking a short rest crashing their tractors/livestock molestation, the entire town was full of NPD posters, no-one actually knew where the museum was except for a rather slow girl who pointed under a railway arch and said something unintelligible in Sächsisch, and finally a man I met in a pub after 20 minutes of searching (he was the only man in this particular pub who didn’t have a handlebar moustache!) In fact one old lady simply shouted “Nichts!” at me when I asked, so presumably she’d been screwed over by the Stasi at some point, or perhaps she simply didn’t like my face. Anyway when I finally got there (head out along the road coming away from the railway on the station side of the old town, left at the traffic lights, right about 50m after that and then 1km down the road opposite the sports centre/water park), it was completely empty, and so amazingly retro I wasn’t sure if it was cool or creepy (I think a bit of both). Lots of waxworks in pioneer uniforms/Vopo uniforms/ubiquitous flowery dresses, flowery curtains, flowery carpets. A room full of crap east German electrical goods which people across the Warsaw pact would probably have saved for years to buy. Trabis, Wurtzburgs, pictures of Honecker, propaganda posters, comemorative figurines and matchboxes and model Interflug planes. It is the last word in DDR kitsch and is spread over 2 slightly disconcerting floors – I’d strongly advise anyone in the area to go, particularly if the attendance is normally as low as when I was there, because it will probably go bust soon. No mention of the Stasi though, or any general bad stuff. I suppose Germany has been on the giving and receiving end of too much bad stuff to want to think about it all the time, maybe also the people running the museum are a bunch of nostalgia nutters.

Thinking of this while I was at the Stadtfest I was having a drunk conversation with a German guy (I’ve finally been adopted by a group of Germans – very exciting!) who was saying how beautiful the buildings along the river looked, at which point I said it was really terrible that we’d bombed it all, and flattened such a beautiful city for no reason. He just replied “Nee, das ist aber Geschichte” and changed the subject.

As you can probably guess from the title I went to Strasbourg last weekend. Strasbourg is in the far east of France on the German border and very beautiful. It is also quite a distance from Dresden! To begin with this involved a five hour train journey from Dresden to Frankfurt. At Frankfurt I stopped to have a cigarette, which was rather stupid because I missed my connection. This then meant an hour long wait before catching the train to Karlsruhe and then the TGV to Strasbourg. I went for a wander and sat outside drinking an overpriced beer at an ice cream stall watching some sort of football promotion thing with loud music and passsers by invited to take shots at an inflatable goal. Once again I was struck by the differences between the west and the east. There are the obvious differences; the eastern Ampelmänner, the accents, but then there’s a general feeling that you’re in a slightly different country as well, rather like say, crossing between England and Scotland. I got a bit of a song by The Doors stuck in my head where Jim Morrison sings “The West is the best”, in strange slow voice which makes the line sound like a mantra that he’s trying to convince himself with rather than a statement of fact. I felt the same; maybe it is, if you repeat it often enough, but I still like Dresden. Frankfurt is an international, strangely generic western European city, while Dresden is somehow more “gemütlich”, and couldn’t be anywhere but Germany. Frankfurt is faster and louder and has shiny skyscrapers, but there’s something about the station which makes one think that, barring the signs in German, one could equally well be at Gare du Nord in Paris or Kings Cross in London.

The journey continued and I finally found myself in Strasbourg, having paid an extra thirty something Euros because the TGV conductor refused to accept my Deutsche Bahn pass (logical I suppose given that I was now in the hands of the Societé Nationale des Chemins de Fer, but quite annoying though, because for most of the journey I was still in Germany). Strasbourg station consists of a nice, 19th century stone building which some joker surrounded in a glass bubble for no apparent reason. Presumably the EU had cash to burn at the time! After starting my journey before 10 in the morning, I had finally arrived at about 8:30 in the evening, grumpy and thirsty and having missed my trains and been ripped off by the SNCF. However having bought myself some water in fast grumpy French I crashed out on the grass by the station where a jazz band was playing and gradually calmed down, so that when the fair Carrie arrived half an hour later I was actually in quite a good mood!

Anyways Strasbourg was very cool. Carrie was excited that she could finally understand what was happening, thanks to a Canadian education which taught very good French. (Are foreign languages actually taught in the US? – except for Brendan, one of the Rise guys in Dresden, who has now left, I don’t think I’ve heard an American who speaks a foreign language convincingly all summer – Please prove me wrong guys!). Meanwhile I was amazingly happy because of all the delicious food. I didn’t have a single non amazing meal in Strasbourg. If you were wondering I ate as follows: Steak frites for supper on the first night, yummy coffee and sticky buns Saturday morning (which makes me wonder, why is coffee in Germany so crap? It’s more or less lightly flavoured water, unless you’re willing to pay €2.50 or something insane for an expresso) Tarte Flambé for lunch (a sort of Flemish pizza, with no tomato sauce but lots of sour cream instead, delicious, but strangely unfilling). Amazing Italian Pizza for supper, coffee and Pain-au-chocolat for breakfast on Sunday and then crevettes poêlés followed by some fish in Provencal sauce for lunch. Then I had to head home to Dresden, which was very annoying, because I was just getting into it!

I avoided the Alsatian speciality (Alsatian as in the province of Alsace, in which Strasbourg lies, not as in German Shepherd dogs, silly!) of Choucroute garni (garnished sauerkraut). It never seemed to cost less than €14, and while the servings looked gigantic I was pretty convinced that you could get the same thing in Germany for half the price. Which brings me on to my only complaint; goodness France is expensive! The meals were all about €20 + per head (although that includes wine, and they were really worth it), while drinks in bars were anything from €5 to €10, which is a little cheaper than Paris, but still daylight robbery by German or even English standards! All in all I ended up spending way more than I’d intended.

As far as sight-seeing is concerned we checked out the cathedral, which is very impressive and has a cool clock, and the European parliament, which was very unimpressive and didn’t even have a cool clock (see pictures). It’s basically a large round glass building in an industrial estate in the middle of no-where. Because it was Saturday it was actually locked up – which to me seems bizarre; surely at the very least there’d be a few minor burocrats in writing laws for next week? or maybe guided tours or something, but as the home of the most important Pan-European organisation it just seemed rather dead and parocial.

The EU Parliament (it was closed)

Other than that we spent our time wandering round and generally seeing stuff. Neither of us had a guidebook so I’m sure there are lots of very important yet somehow fatuous sights and museums that we didn’t see, but it was just fun being and soaking up the atmosphere. Strasbourg has loads of lovely old buildings, especially in Petite France and the place is wonderfully hyper French (amusingly too, given that it has spent large chunks of time as part of Germany). My main impression was just how lovely it was being “on holiday” in another country. The only bad side (apart from the prices) was that it was all over so soon. Added to that for the first time ever German railway efficiency broke down and there were multiple late trains on the way home, with me eventually getting back into bed in Dresden at about 1:30 in the morning. This all combined to make me rather pissed off, so I spent Monday in a deep sulk. No France, no Carrie (who was back in Aachen), no more French food, it was raining and, for the first time, there were no trams because the trusty number 4 to Laubegast had broken down. Just to rub it in I went to the Mensa and they were serving pork and potatoes.

Since then I’ve recovered my mood. I’ve started going to the other Mensa which is cool and emphatically un-Soviet and you can eat pizza and sushi every day if you want. I was even given some cool new work (trying to get the instruments to give funny readings by putting loads of salt in the water). Unfortunately Carrie is off home though, but that is the nature of limited summer placements and transatlantic travel and stuff. Oh well.

Anyways, Tschüss bis next week, and try to find a song called “Strasbourg” by The Rakes on youtube, which got stuck in my head all weekend and harks back to Germany’s darker but arguably more glamourous Cold War past. The openning lyrics go: “I’ll meet you in West Germany/October 1983/I knew that freedom was a lie/and your husband was a spy”

As I said at the end of the last post a funny looking man arrived in my office and told me he was locking the laboratory, I thus failed to write anything about the more interesting part of my last fortnight here, namely Berlin.

Berlin is unique really. If you arrive in Berlin try to get a train that stops at the Hauptbahnhof, because once you’ve gone up 5 flights of escalators and borded a double-decker train that runs under a glass ceiling on a bridge over a 3 storey shopping mall your mind will be in a suitably warped state which will allow you to experience the rest of Berlin without too much confusion. From the Hauptbahnhof I took the train to the Ostbahnhof, to find my hostel. The Ostbahnhof is in East Berlin, and you can tell. I saw my first two punks on the way out, then walked through some wasteland to the Berlin wall, tagged along the wall til I came to a bridge which looked like a castle, took a left past a sex shop and a gay karioke bar, went over the S-bahn track and hung another left for the youth hostel. There was a tramp asleep in the bus stop, only a few cars in the streets (presumably the rest had been stolen) but lots and lots of graffiti. The youth hostel itself was on a corner opposite an asian brothel and as an added bonus I got a cheery wave from two joint smoking skinheads who were sitting on a balcony nearby with a sex-doll propped up on the chair next to them.

Following this sort of introduction (think the bit in Euro-Trip when they arrive in Bratislava) I then spent the next couple of hours freaking out. Carrie would be arriving in a few hours and I was half sure that she’d slap me and then jump on the next train out, maybe stopping just long enough to call the police. This seemed all the more likely when I remembered that I’d done the booking and convinced her it was a nice place. However I conquered my fear and went exploring in Kreuzberg across the river, and I started to be converted. Kreuzberg is heavily Turkish, and heavily graffitied, and snobby West Berliners will tell you to keep the hell away, but it’s also the nicest place ever. Lovely tree-lined streets in the sunshine, amazing food; lovely houmous and proper Turkish coffee which I hadn’t had since Turkey, and yummy cheap pizza, and Indian restaurants everywhere that actually look good. Added to this the area is packed with übercool bars and some of the most insane people you will ever see. In fact one of them really was insane and followed us down the street making funny noises, but that’s beside the point.

After Kreuzberg I headed into the centre of Berlin, and was standing on a Soviet war memorial; 20 foot statue of a soldier, 2 Howitzers, a couple of T-34 tanks, Stalinist columns comemorating the Hero-infantry, Hero-tankists, Hero-engineers, Hero-pilots and probably Hero-dog handlers for all I know (my Russian isn’t that good) – basically a classic bit of Russian bad-taste, when my friend Julika rang me. I originally know Julika from back in London, but she moved to Berlin and has been living there for one and a half years. We then met up (me, her and Carrie, who’d just arrived) at the Ostbahnhof, and headed over to the Berlin wall, where we had beers at a beach-bar on some sand on a beautiful spot by the river Elbe in the shadow of the Wall (in what, until 2 years after I was born, had been the ‘death zone’), admired the evening sunshine and listened as Julika talked about how hard it is to get thin English cigarette filters in Germany.

After that it was back to the hostel. Carrie was cool about it, thank goodness, and I even overheard her telling her mum that I was an English Gentleman on the phone later! We went out for pizza, and drinks, and some more drinks, and at about 2 met a group of locals who told us all about Panorama gay bar, whis is open non-stop from Thursday til Sunday, has a blanket ban on anyone taking cameras inside, and normally only gets going around 4! Unfortunately we were knackered and didn’t make it.

Saturday was sightseeing, and we ticked off most of them. In the evening we met Helena (a fellow RISE student with me in Dresden), and her friend Ellie, who is studying German and doing her year abroad at the moment. Ellie was staying in what she called ‘nice Kreuzberg’, in that it was still cool, but didn’t look post-appocalyptic. Surrealness followed as we chilled out, drank Pimms (don’t know where she found it), listened to Berlin’s Radio Eins (the presenter was so stoned that I was waiting for him to pass out and collapse on the mixing desk, and was wondering what sound that would make), as well as Berlin’s local rap-hero Peter Fox, and of course the mighty “Toten Hosen” (which means ‘Dead Trousers’ in English). The “Toten Hosen” are a German rock band originally from Düsseldorf. In fact at one point they actually sponsored the Dusseldorf football team, who were in major financial trouble, and who then ended up playing the entire season with the Toten Hosen skull-motif on their shirts! The Toten Hosen have also written a song entirely about how they hate Bayern Munich. How cool is that! Anyway after that we headed off to a club. This club turned out to be a very gnarly heavy metal club two hours away in the suburbs, where we arrived exhausted at about 3. We still had a great time, Carrie made the mistake of dressing up nicely to go clubbing in Berlin, and got funny looks from several heavily tattooed lesbian couples!

After that we got home in the light, slept a bit, checked out the Fernsehturm, went to the Ampleman shop and then went home, feeling tired and happy.

I suppose the amazing thing about Berlin is that it has the history it has, yet hasn’t been overwhelmed by it. It’s not Venice or some nice old English town with a castle, it’s one of the coolest cities in Europe, I suspect that this is because of the history, not in spite of it. Because the present has to fight so hard to make itself heard above the past, the city as a whole is so much more intense. If your city has been smashed by thousand-bomber raids, over-run by two and a half million Russians with automatic weapons, split four ways, cut in two by a wall, supplied only by air for about a year and then finally, gloriously and surreally reunified and made the undivided capital of an undivided Germany, all within living memory, then what seems impossible in another city seems like a perfectly good idea here!

Apologies for not writing last week but nothing of real note actually happened.  My brother visited me the weekend before last and we walked round Dresden and looked at stuff, and it rained constantly, and we had some rather nice lunches, and I introduced him to my favourite bar (Unfassbar in the Neustadt), which he found highly depressing, and made me promise not to take him back there again.  Personally I love the cheap drinks, crap 80s music, smoky atmosphere and barman with a huge handlebar moustache, but I think it creeped him out.  I also discovered a nice pub in Laubegast and we found that the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden is not particularly interesting.  They had an exhibition on work, with sod all in the way of actual exhibits (except for, strangely enough, €1M in bank-notes behind a glass screen), just lots of videos of people describing completely mundane things, like when they wake up in the morning.  It wasn’t even absurd enough to be humourous, and I wondered if the whole thing was supposed to be ironic, because people had to put in work to make an exhibition about work, so even though the exhibition didn’t work in the sense that it was crap, it was a product of people’s work, so it WAS work, transcending if you would the traditional boundaries between artwork and the exhibitions that hold art and instead making the exhibition a piece of (as I’ve said, shoddily executed) artwork in itself.  …or something.  Anyway I’m beginning to suspect that this was actually a single monolithic slice of post modern art so fiendish in its conception that no-one has even noticed it!   Or maybe it was just crap.

This last weekend was much more exciting though, a trip to Berlin.  Due to leaving booking to the last minute I ended up booking rooms in Friedrichshain on the border of Kreuzberg, in an area that was, er, interesting.  Unfortunately though a funny looking man has come in and wants to turf me out because they are locking up the labs at TU Dresden at the moment, so I’m going to have to write about it tomorrow instead.

It’s Thursday afternoon back in Dresden, and my experiments are finally beginning to give results (although not particularly good ones yet!). The sun is shining and I rode into work today on my bike (the journey took three quarters of an hour and was annoyingly hot). I got back from the Rise meeting in Heidelberg on Sunday evening, having stopped off for lunch in Frankfurt.

Heidelberg was amazingly good fun. Unfortunately to get there in time for registration/free lunch we had to wake up at 5 AM, so we all arrived tired and confused at Dresden Hauptbahnhoff before 6, changed at Leipzig, changed again at Frankfurt, got on the world’s slowest train to Heidelberg, joined a gigantic group of fellow Rise students at the bus stop, squished into the bus and finally made it to the youth hostel in time. At least we got the free lunch though!

Barring a trip to New York when I was really young, I’ve never been to America, or really met Americans in large groups, so the whole thing was a bit of a culture shock! I would need to check the mailing list, but I think we had people from pretty much every state. I have weird flashback memories of a short Hawaiian with a pony-tail insisting that America technically hadn’t fought any wars since WW2 (Vietnam apparently a police action), a dude in a 3 piece suit with a skateboard telling me what types of drugs are supposed to be the most common in Berlin, Lisa the Long-Islander telling me that it was actually pronounced Long-guy-land, a Californian telling everyone he gets drunk with his friends and then tunes into the UK parliament channel on satellite because it’s so funny, and massive cheers from the Idaho contingent when in the opening lecture when the lady from the American embassy said that “in ten years you could be anywhere from a large company in London to a farm in Idaho”. With hindsight I should have cheered when she said London, but that would probably have been un-British.

On top of that there were the people from elsewhere; Diego from Peru who told me that they were trying to arm the students on the Campus at the Christian University of Texas, a load of Québécois teaching me to swear in French-Canadian, Dan from Gabon who actually spoke proper French (this started an arguement with the Québécois who insisted that they did, and French French had been corrupted somehow), and Carrie the Canadian-Californian who I managed to crack up at the inauguration speach in the rather beautiful Old Hall of Heidelberg University, when two consecutive speakers described the Rise exchange as a “Vin vin situvation”.

On Friday we all went off to visit German companies – I ended up in the group that went to Boehringer pharmaceuticals (the 2nd biggest Pharma company in Germany, with 41,000 employees, an annual turnover of around 10 billion Euros, with an über cool soft-rock backing track to their corporate video and a really good lunch). I stopped studying chemistry when I was 16 so most of the processes went completely over my head, but there were lots of shiny machines and networks of pipes carrying nitrogen and pressurised steam and stuff throughout the plant and a massive corporate entrance hall to the main building (it must have been about 7 storeys, with balconies everywhere), which my friend Arjun and I agreed would be the perfect setting for the final showdown in a James Bond film; henchmen in boiler-suits falling screaming off the balconies, loads of explosions, and James Bond swinging across the middle on a rope, shooting people as he goes.

Other than this we managed to get in lots of pub visiting (in the interests of further appreciation of the German culture), a lovely supper at the Rote Ochse organised by Rise, a tour of the town and the castle (again organised by Rise), where Heidelberg’s “frat boys” were pointed out to us – some of the students still live in 19th Century fraternities and wear cool hats. (Somehow I get the feeling that unlike their US counterparts they probably don’t drink beer out of red plastic cups and carry out amusing stunts involving inflatable women). We also paid a visit to the castle in the evening, eliciting a quote from Carrie which really wouldn’t look good if I wrote it down here, and on my last night I laccidentally lost all of my friends then got lost halfway up a mountain. I did manage to see the Heidelberg fireworks though, which were very impressive.

I got back to Dresden very much more tired than I’d set out (late nights, early mornings, people snoring), but much happier. My time in Heidelberg really was amazing and I look forward to visiting other German cities. Thanks very much Rise!

Apologies for the somewhat sub-par blog which I produced last week. Since then I have got to see more of Dresden besides the tram-routes and am very impressed by it all. As I said, I am living out in east Dresden at the end of tram line 4. Our house is right by the river Elbe, and there is a cycle lane along the Elbe all the way to the city centre. Unfortunately I have a very small girl’s bicycle which it is impossible to go fast on and the weather is also somewhat strange; generally there’s hot, beautiful sunshine until about 4 or 5 in the afternoon, then a massive thunderstorm, and then the weather stays overcast and drizzly for the rest of the evening, so I am wary about riding to work in case I have to go back through driving rain and haven’t been for as many bike rides as I’d want. The bicycle lane gives one a much better idea of the city than anything else. One rides through medows all the way, across the river there is the massive DDR era Fernsehturm near our house and then after it these beautiful palaces which were presumably built in the 18th/19th century. On my side across the meadows you can see the strata of the city. First of all there are the outer suburbs, which are a mixture of old and new houses where I live, then the inner suburbs, which consist of long 4-5 storey blocks of flats knocked up quick by the Russians after the war, which all seem to look exactly the same and go on for ever. Then the black spires of central Dresden appear over the rooves and trees, and the flats become taller, more handsome buildings built after reunification, before finally one passes under a pair of bridges (one of which has a fake sand beach by it, complete with parasols and a bar, for no particular reason), and arrives in the city centre, with a steam-boat wharf by the river and the fortress wall of the old town on the landward side, which has the art gallery and the curch spires rising above it and horse-drawn tourist carts sometimes sallying out of the gates. It’s all made far more beautiful by the sunshine and by the numerous Biergartens along the route. My favourite is the Trollgarten about a mile in from our house which serves delicious beer, sausages, icecream and also soljanka soup, which I love and have never seen outside Russia before, so I rather like breaking up the journey to fit in a beer and a soup.

I spent the whole of the last weekend doing very little and generally taking in the amazing sunshine, amazing beer and amazing food. I seem to be smoking and drinking far too much but this is due to all of the beer gardens rather than any particular desire to clog up the National Health Service back in Britain. I had been planning on going to Salzburg with the other Rise students but mislaid my Deutschebahn pass and was told that the trip out alone would go through the whole night and cost €100 with no bed, so declined the offer. In the end I’m so happy I just stayed because I got to recharge my batteries and rest my brain, which after my week-long burn around Europe, followed by the end of term festivities at Cambridge, followed by Glastonbury festival (where at one point I had to persuade a bunch of people on acid not to burn down my tent!), were beginning to go to pieces.

So much for the place, but what about the people? East Germany and east Germans are wonderfully quirky. You can still by Vita Cola in shops (which was brewed as the socialist answer to Coca Cola back in the Cold War and tastes suprisingly good) likewise Sreewald Gurken, which disappeared off the map in “Goodbye Lenin” have made a comeback, and everyone smokes f6 cigarettes with short filters which are another hangover from former east Germany. The local people are friendly, but the säxisch (saxon) dialect is pretty incomprehensible, which isn’t helping my decent but not particularly correct German get any better. Instead of counting “eins, zwei, drei” they say “ääns, zwo, drää” then instead of “zwanzig, dreizig, vierzig” they say “zwantsch, dräätsch, viertsch”. On top of this “nu” means “yes”, while “nüür” can mean “no”, so someone will say “nunu” to you, which sounds pretty much the same as “no no”, but actually means “yes yes”. Apparently when Obama visited they printed out a load of “Yes we can!” T-shirts, which instead of saying “ja, wir können!” said “nu, mir gönn!” which is correct in säxisch! Also I’ve heard ‘Bort, as in Abort for Toilette and mashed potato here is Kartoffelmus, rather than Kartoffelpüree which it is in the rest of Germany.

Oh well, off to Heidelberg first thing Thursday morning, so I am hoping that I can meet my fellow Risebloggers, and also hear people speaking proper German (although I’m sure that Dresdeners will insist that they speak proper German and that the Wessies don’t have a clue!).

Bis später!

I’ve finally arrived at my placement, which means that from now on my blogs should actually have something relevant to say. Dresden is a beautiful city on the Elbe with a population of 350 000 (I was told this by a man outside a pub so I may be wrong), and I am working at the Technische Universität Dresden, which has been around for 175 years. My day starts at 7:30 when I wake up and try to scrounge breakfast off my housemates (I haven’t yet bought any food). At about 8:30 I leave the house with my housemate Rob and we catch tram No. 4 into town. (An alternative route would be tram No. 6 into the town centre, but due to rush hour traffic this takes longer). At about 8:45 we reach the VW factory where we change onto tram No. 10, we reach Dresden Hauptbahnhoff at about 9:05 (technically we should be in work at 9:00, but I’m not very good at waking up). We then catch any Southbound bus and get off 2 stops later at the TU Dresden. We could also walk, but it’s generally quicker by bus. We stop for lunch at 11:30 (I know, strangely early, but strangely comforting that you only have about 2 hours of work in the morning), and leave work at 5 in the evening. So far work is interesting and I have also been exploring the bars of the new town (you can smoke inside some of them, which is rather nice). I have also eaten lots of chocolate cake. I have included a picture of tram No. 4 courtesy of http://www.trampicturebook.de/, although I think the picture is a bit old because the trams are mostly more modern looking than this now.

I’m writing this blog from an internet cafe in Amsterdam, having just returned from 2 days in Germany, alas I have as yet failed to make it as far as Dresden, where I have my placement, due to some truely woeful lack of checking my e-mails, but I’ve at least made it to the Fatherland, so my blog is slowly gaining much needed relevance!

Having finally finished my projects (my turbocharger ended up performing slightly less well than expected – in fact less well than a blank metal sheet, which was really quite bad!) I jumped in the car, stayed the night at home and was on the 9:30 ferry to Calais the next day, I then spent 3 days in Paris for heading off to the beautiful German town of Siegen to stay with a friend who is a student there. Unfortunately I badly misjudged the size of Belgium, and thinking that I’d make it by 5:00, only actually arrived at 9:30 at night. No matter. Parties at the University of Siegen only start to get going at about this time, and by the end of the evening I had introduced everyone to the drinking game “Ring of Fire” with some rather messy results. The next day I attended a meeting at the Uni to discuss the plot development and underlying themes of the TV series Lost (I kid you not!) This further revealed the gaps in my German and I am now determined to study very hard before I get to Germany. After that we went on a tour of Siegen (taking in two castles, a bunker, lots of shopping streets and a Mongolian restaurant which should apparently only be visited by those with strong stomachs!) That night there was an open air concert at the Uni and I have fond memories of bopping in the rain to a song with where the audience response was “kaffee und ziiiggaaarreetteen!” The next morning I got in the car and found my way here, through torrential rainstorms along the Autobahn and some heavy traffic around Utrecht in Holland.

It was only a small trip but I am now looking forward to my summer in Germany so much more! I love the German way of doing things; in England buying a big German car is a sign of having a mid-life crisis, while in Germany you buy one because you don’t really see why you should take Autobahns at anything less than 250km/h. At the festival at Siegen you got sausages for 1 Euro, beer for 1.50 Euros and 50 centimes back if you returned your beer bottle! – A very good idea for actually getting people to tidy up after themselves and also so lovely and cheap! The morning after the party when I arrived, my friend was actually up hoovering the flat, rather than letting everything fester for a few weeks English style. There were 4 types of recycling bin in the kitchen. You can’t find a shop selling cigarettes in the evening but you can buy them from vending machines by the side of the road. There was a guy at the party whose name was Bender. Nowhere but Germany!

Just about to run out of credit here at the internet cafe but once again, so excited about summer, and I will write next week, although then I will be back in England…