Today’s evidence:

• The front page of the Palo Alto Mercury News praises the AMGEN Tour of California bicycle race as having (and I quote) “more cowbell”.
• At the next table during dinner, a young man entertains his date with a detailed explanation of how he has his work mobile and home phone set up to forward calls to each other so that he only has to check one voicemail box. And then moves on to a explanation of Mean Time Before Failure, and how hard drives work. And she seems to be enjoying it.
• The local cafe has a list behind the counter, listing Things That Do Not Go In The Bin, which includes, as well as “recyclable plastics” and “drinking straws”, not only Chuck Norris but also Your Mom.

I feel like I have left the real world and am now living inside The Internet.

(it’s kinda cool.)

It’s amazing how quickly a place becomes home. I thought I’d feel relieved to visit Germany again, and not have to work quite so hard to understand what people are saying to me; and I was, don’t get me wrong. But whatever you say about the Swiss (and there’s a lot to say!), the broad smile and “Grüezi!” of the Air Berlin flight attendants, and the “uff wiedelueke” and “ade mitenand” after landing in Zürich was most pleasant. I like this place.

Of course, good things can’t last: as I write this I am packing my second suitcase in preparation for a flight to the USA in a few hours. Meanwhile, after having survived Siberian winds and ice in Berlin, the radio now reports of large storms in California, causing traffic delays and power outages around the Bay Area. Nothing is every easy!

I went to Paris last week. I have been delaying posting about it because (a) I wanted to wait for the photos to be developed, and (b) I have been writing a Masters Thesis, and if that doesn’t count as Better Things To Do then I don’t know what does. Regardless, the photos are now uploaded and the thesis can handle a few minutes’ break, so I shall pen a few lines to let everyone know I’m still alive.

The excuse for Paris was the 7th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, in particular the Gathering of Animated Lifelike Agents at which ERIC (remember him?) was competing. (Yes, he won a prize.)

The other attraction to the whole experience (apart from Paris itself of course) was the experience of the new high-speed ICE, which I took in both directions. Thundering across Northern France at 300+ km/h is rather an experience. Also an experience is having the power cut out on the way home as we cross the German/French border, leaving us stranded for two hours 5 km/h out of Saarbrücken. Almost home! even with Saarbrücken buses driving along the road next to the track … if you would only open the doors… But not to worry, we’ll just try rebooting the train from scratch, sorry folks, this means even the emergency lighting will go out, it’ll be pitch black for a while, please don’t panic.

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Oh, well, that didn’t work. Never mind, we’ll phone a train from Frankfurt to come and tow us into Saarbrücken. Sorry for the inconvenience. Szank yew for traffeling vis ze Deutsche Bahn.

Regardless, the way to Paris was uneventful (give or take 15 minutes’ delay leaving Saarbrücken …), and at 300+ km/h you really do have to pinch yourself to remind yourself that you really are in Paris already, not just dreaming of it after falling asleep on the train somewhere around Metz. I stayed in a wonderful hostel/hotel in Montmartre called the Montclair which I have no reservations about recommending, it was clean and cheap and everything you expect from a hostel. Montmarte itself - and of course all of Paris - was also lovely, particularly around sunset. But you can see the photos for yourself.

Since then I have been mainly writing away at this thesis. On Friday I went to Frankfurt to sort out some visa issues, and stayed overnight to see the AFL Grand Final at the Aussie Bar there, since the No Worries Australian Pub here in Saarbrücken had never heard of the AFL. (”Grand what?” “please tell me you are joking”) A nice change from all the other Geelong Grand Finals I’ve watched (to say the least…) I’m a bit far away from the festivities at home, but I’m wearing my vaguely blue-and-grey striped jumper proudly even if nobody here knows why it brings a grin to my face.

Anyway, I’d better head back to the grindstone, plus there’s an apartment to be cleaned and that rare commodity called sunshine outside, which might be worth taking advantage of before it disappears again.

I learnt today that when the rest of the world uses the phrase “lucked out”, they mean exactly the opposite of what Australians mean when they do. For verification, check The American-Australian Slang Dictionary, and compare the entries in The Free Dictionary and usingenglish.com with the Macquarie Dictionary Book of Slang (unfortunately not online):

luck-out
verb to run out of luck; to have bad luck.

So there you have it.

On another note: Best. Pun. Ever.

… his name is Eric, and I’ve been spending all day, every day with him the last few months:

Hot:
spring weather
longer days
no more exams
looking for PhD positions

Not:
painting the apartment
out-of-focus photographs
writing seminar summaries
broken CD-ROM drives
not updating a blog for months

Meanwhile, spoken Dutch makes me giggle. Dertien minuten later liet de aanvaller zijn tweede doelpunt aantekene. *giggle*

… and that’s all I’m going to say on that topic.

Questions by juventus:

1. Why the Saarland? Have they got something we don’t (like that Aussie-themed restaurant)?
Ah, well, hem. Many reasons. They include: I wanted to do postgrad and/or research. I wanted to travel. I wanted to live somewhere other than Melbourne. I speak German. Uni-des-Saarlandes have lots of research groups in areas that interest me, including the automated debugging work of the software engineering group, and the intelligent user interfaces group at DFKI (the German research centre for Artificial Intelligence). Uni-des-Saarlandes have the Max-Planck-Institut for Computer Science on campus, and they offer scholarships. (No scholarship means Martin can’t afford to travel.) The Ormond Choir visited Saarbrücken last tour, so I got to visit the university and talk to some people there. So, many reasons.

2. What have you been up to, of late, in the Saarland (ran into any of the Total Vocal (grr) troupe? Visited said restaurant - what’s the deep fried wombat nose like?)? When do you start studying?
Haven’t found Total Vocal yet. Have walked past said restaurant, but I haven’t dared enter. They use a curious variation of the Australian flag which replaces the Union Jack with the Boxing Kangaroo. They’re using the typical German blindness for clashing colours to display an Australian republicanism. Heh.

I start studying yesterday. Subject selections don’t have to be finalised until next week or so, so at the moment “studying” consists of attending as many lectures as possible so I can decide which ones I want to do. Of course, not all subjects are equal: there’s “lectures” and “seminars”, and the number of credit points varies depending on how advanced the subject is, and how much work it’s supposed to require. And I need to put together a semester that has enough credit points, but also the right number of points in “Basic”, “Advanced”, “Specialised”, etc. So I’m not so much studying as getting my head around the German uni system. No lectures today, not because I have no lectures on Wednesday, but because the lecturer for the subject that could have started today had a paper due this week, so the subject starts next Wed. Heh.

3. How’s the apartment hunt going?
Hmm, ’tis interesting. I’m looking at heaps of apartments at the moment, mostly share apartments with randoms. This is because in Germany apartments aren’t “single” or “double” or… (meaning one or two or… bedrooms, a kitchen, a lounge, perhaps a balcony), they’re “one room” or “two room” or… (meaning literally one or two or … rooms, containing perhaps two hotplates and a sink, and barely space for a bed and a desk). And I can’t survive on just a hotplate for a kitchen Besides, living in a share house with randoms might help me meet people here. And I’m already in a slightly adventurous mood, having travelled halfway across the world on my own, so I should probably take advantage of that before I lapse back into my normal shy-of-strangers self. (J, stop laughing. :-P)

4. What’s in your CD player at the moment… bitch? :p (I’m in a mood.)
Nothing, bitch! In fact, my CDs stayed at home. Luggage weight restrictions and all that. And of course, in a couple of hours’ (okay, weeks) continuous work, the music is all on my iPod anyway. Which is about half as big as a single CD. So if the question was really “what’s coming out your speakers at the moment”, then the answer is “Fats Waller: Handful of Keys” (some random “best-of” album).

5. You are going to see Architecture in Helsinki when the reach your shores, aren’t you? (BTW, that’s less a question & more of a statement.)
Statement, well, yes, indeedy. I want to go visit Luxembourg anyway

For those confuzzled, here’s the meme:
1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions of a somewhat questionable nature.
3. Update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
4. Include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Just some random disconnected thoughts, because I’m still jetlagged.

Being on a University LAN is blindingly fast Internet compared to Australian commercial ADSL. Weee!

The guesthouse apartments are quite nice, they consist of a large room with double bed and huge desk and lots of space and TV and sideboard and etc, plus a bathroom, plus a corridor joining the two (and containing more wardrobe space and a mirror). They’re named after people. Mine is named after Wassily Kandinsky. It also has a little sign on the door saying “Herr Strauss”. Cool.

I needn’t have worried about missing the people-diversity of Melbourne. Saarbrücken is a university town, and is also near the border with France and Luxembourg and near Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands (and, well, for any Australian definition of “near”, it’s near Spain and Poland too, but anyway…). And so there’s a wide variety of people, skin colours, languages, clothing walking down the street. It’s very cool.

It’s cold. The snow has all thawed away, and the lake that they were apparently ice skating on a few weeks ago is all liquid again now, but the thermometer definitely is pointing to brrrr. The rain, interrupted by periods of beautiful sunshine, is remarkably Melbourne.

For a town that according to that infallible source of facts, Wikipedia, has less population than Geelong, the CBD-y shopping-y bit of town is huge, has enormous variety and choice, and is humming with people on a random Monday afternoon. All of which makes Martin happy. I found an asian grocer (admittedly, only one, but I was afraid there might be zero), and they stock woks for €6.99. I shall purchase one once I have found slightly more permanent accomodation. Also, it is nice to see book- and music-stores with an actual variety of stock, not just heaps and heaps of copies of the latest chart toppers. Also nice to see is H & M, for all my european-fashion, australian-budget clothing needs (how nice to have those two concepts coincide!), and Saturn, for discount electrical: particularly useful at that horrid moment when I realise that my ethernet cables are not in the suitcase, but in one of the boxes I mailed last week. Not sure which. (€4.99 later, problem solved.)

I have leet guess-the-correct-german-phone-number skillz. The email my “buddy” sent me containing her mobile and home phone numbers, to call her on when I arrived at the station, contained 2 (that’s 100%) incorrect numbers. Luckily the error was “too many digits” rather than “wrong digits”, so after one “er, no, don’t know what you’re talking about, bugger off” (sorry mate, just a wrong number, happens to the best of us!) and lots of “the number you have dialled is not valid”, I finally found my buddy. Big grin.

A few things I need to get used to in Germany: Cars drive on the other side of the road. Before you say “well, duh”, yes, I have worked this out at some point during my last few visits to Europe. But you still get caught out occasionally, with a “hey, nobody’s driving that car!” moment, or finding yourself waiting on the wrong side of the road for the bus. Oops. Also, Tobacco is everywhere. Not just that everybody is smoking, but that there’s vending machines on street corners, and ads on billboards. You don’t appreciate how nice Australia’s ban on _advertising_ is until you don’t have it any more! Speaking of advertising, the other thing that I need to get used to is the enormous amount of boobs and bum that Europeans consider appropriate for public billboards. Um er.

For those of you whom I have previously told about my two official “babysitters”, I have learnt today that the correct (if not necessarily official) term is “mummy”. That’s what the older students call them. Speaking of older students, the lingua franca seems to be English. (In fact, the lingua franca around the MPI seems to be English, although at the Mensa [food hall] for lunch, I overheard English, German, French, Japanese, etc…) And of the 6 or 7 students I met today, 2 were male. (not counting me). Which is about the opposite of what I would have expected in a computer science faculty. Good to see that somewhere in the world, things are different.

The noticeboards in the faculty and the institute are groaning with the weight of “apartment for rent”, “flatmate wanted”, “bike for sale”, etc ads. I should rip off some phone numbers and hit the tellyfones, once I’m a bit more settled.

And now I’m going to munch on my dinner - a “Döner kebap” from town. Because I haven’t picked up my “starter kit” yet, so cooking would be somewhat difficult. Thinking of cooking, maybe I won’t wait until I’ve found a more permanent place before picking up one of those woks…

I promise to edit some of these thoughts into something slightly more readable tomorrow. I should also add some photos of my surroundings, since I bought a slightly capable webcam for precisely that purpose. Possibly that might produce something worth emailing to all those people who told me they refuse to read blogs so could I email them anything I write here. Hmmm.

Particularly, but not restricted to:

this shirt…

and this shirt…

and very especially, this waistcoat, and this coat…

ooooooooh!!!!!!

In other other news, I have done with 440, it’s over, done, finis, etc. This means I have time to do things like blog about Mr. Darcy, and also means I probably deserve to open the bottle of champagne I’ve been keeping set aside for just this occasion. Anyone who reads this and feels like they would like to help me with this, pipe up so we can arrange a good time