Went to a party at Eduardo's residence last night to celebrate finishing my post-doc proposal. Just the small matter of my PhD to do now... Eduardo lives in a 12 story student house which would not look out of place in the worst parts of Croydon or Sighthill. Inside, it's like something out of the DDR, there is lots of exposed concrete which people have splashed random bright paint on, wires hanging out of the walls, the lift smells awful and opens straight into the kitchen rather than into a hallway... it's all a little odd. I started the evening by catching a little of the MTV music awards from Edinburgh, which looked absolutely dreadful, and then we went down to the bar. It was dark, smoky and cheap. The music included some ridiculous German drinking song which made all the boys get on the dance floor and link arms and sing along. Frightening stuff. Despite this, and the insalubrious surroundings, it was a nice evening. It was interesting to see a student residence here, it's in many ways the same as Churchill House in Edinburgh, except that instead of everyone speaking bad English, everyone is speaking bad German.

Cycling without hands It seems like just before I arrived here, German men discovered that it is possible to ride a bike without having your hands on the handlebars. Now they are obsessed with it, and feel they must show everyone this wonderful new trick. They ride all over the place with their hands in their pockets and stupid smug expressions. Yeah, well, anyone can do it in the Schloss gardens, let's see you try it on the six-lane aptly-named Kriegstraße...

Toll Collect German pride recently took a knock here, when the delivery date arrived for a government-commissioned system for tracking lorries on the autobahn using satellites. The Swiss apparently already have such a system working, but it would have been unacceptable to buy theirs, so instead a consortium involving Daimler Benz and Deutsche Telecom (I think, sue me if I'm wrong) was set up to build a new system. The German government was so confident of success, they took the old system of toll collection out of service on the day the new system was supposed to come on line. But of course it wasn't ready, and still isn't, causing the government to lose millions of pounds a day. It turns out there's no provision in the contract for late delivery compensation either, though a deal has apparently now been thrashed out. Yesterday, in Der Spiegel, I read a survey asking people who they thought was to blame. The majority blamed the government, perhaps for agreeing an unrealistic contract of for switching of the old system. Few people wanted to blame the big German firms. I think when this happens in the UK, e.g. with the air-traffic control system that was very late, we all blame the company straight away.

DB The German railway is not what it used to be. The idea of perfectly punctual trains is now a thing of the past, though people are very reluctant to let go of the idea. For example, when you buy a ticket that involves changing trains somewhere, ten minutes is allowed for you to make your connection. But trains are now frequently more than ten minutes late, which means you miss your connection, and then end up hours late, even though the delay on the line was only a few minutes. They could change the timetables to allow for more slippage, but nobody wants to do this, as then they would have to admit the trains don't run on time any more.

Apparently, according to my friend Anusch, DB put a clock in a station showing in total how late the departing trains were, the idea being to counter the growing public opinion that the trains were all running late. But it turned out to be too embarrassing, the trains were running much later than they thought, so they took the clock down.