I know, what you've really been waiting for is a panoramic photo of my flat.

Last night we went to architecture department party, which is supposed to be one of the events of the year. It was utter pants. Student parties here have this stupid, stupid system of buying beer credit tickets with cash at one desk, and then buying beer with the tickets at an adjacent desk. The drink was horrible, warm Rothausbrau pils, which is a terrible insult to German beer, warm vodka with no ice and Desperados, the inexplicably popular drink made with 'beer,sugar,flavourings (75% tequila), citric acid'. Or urine, to you and me. The beer ran out at 1am forcing me to try this horrific brew. I didn't finish it.

The other ridiculous thing is you pay 1.50 for a drink and 1 euro Pfand (deposit) on top. Even if you have drink in a disposable plastic glass. So people nick your glass if you put it down for a second to get themselves free beer, forcing everyone to dance holding glasses and bottles which is riduculous. There was nothing that could be called a queue for a bar, there were scrums at the rugby world cup that were less tightly packed. And Germans have absolutely no manners when they queue at a bar - maybe because they're used to table service in pubs. People are shouting at the barmaids, who are just students, the barmaids moan that they've been working three hours, people don't have sufficient beer tickets but refuse to leave the bar area anyway, wholesale theft of beer tickets goes on, enourmous amounts of unpaid-for Pfand is collected, and at the end of the evening you have to get in another scrum to reconvert your beer tickets to money. But of course there's no useful coins left, so you end up with a euro's worth of 5 cent pieces. Brilliant.

The music was another disaster. DJing was by a 5 man committee of nerds anxious to show each other tricks they could do with their laptops. For an hour, they played Spanish third-generation ska music, which would have Roland Alphonso spinning in his grave, then they moved on to some genuinely furchtbar German dance music. Here's how to make it: first, record the sound of a car factory or similar heavy industrial plant. Then record the sound of someone complaining about how bad it is to work there. Put this vocal track over the soundtrack, and release the single. This is terrible because there is great German dance music (anything on ladomat is worth a look), but no chance of them playing it last night. Uurgh. The party just never happened, maybe 30 people danced all night out of an overcrowded hall with maybe 500 people in. A terrible party. Not to say Potterow in Edinburgh on Wednesday nights is any better, but I guess I'd been lead to believe that this would be a good one..

Anyway, tonight Edu is making a big La Rioja dinner in his residence, which should help to ease away the pain..

As promised, pictures of the snowman cycle. Eduardo took these.

Edu has made a nice postcard from Karlsruhe.

Erfolg

Somewhat surprisingly, we came 2nd in the Flynn's pub quiz last night! The prize was a large quantity of Guinness. The pictures are from Ignacio's camera - there's a good one of the quiz team with Tina, one half of the quiz-setting duo.

The quiz was pretty tough. Did you know Honda is Japanese for 'large paddy field'? Well I know you did, but it's not exactly well known. Anyway, If we'd got that right we would have won. We were pretty satisfied with the Guinness though.

Behinderungen

Snowed again last night. The grit lorries and snowploughs seem to do a pretty good job, though there have been a few accidents on the ice. Meanwhile, just over the border in Alsace, no snow has been cleared, and the people working in our department who live there can't get in this morning.

Das Nibelungenlied

I went to an exhibition on the Nibelungenlied in the Schloss yesterday. The Nibelunglied, as you probably knew, is sort of the German equivalent of Beowulf (cue angry emails from anglo-saxon students), a long saga-poem in medieval German about various kings and their squires killing each other and fighting over thrones. The story was the basis for Richard Wagner's 4-part opera 'the ring cycle'. The exhibition was very busy, maybe because the whole lord of the rings thing is very popular over here. There was some very cool stuff in there, but there were way too many guided tours going on for my liking. They were all talking over each other and swarming around in big groups which got on my nerves a bit. What was very cool to see was the handwritten copy of the poem that was redsicovered in 1755 and sparked the renewal of interest in the saga, and in making modern translations of it. It's amazing to see the carefully written script and to imagine the one man who wrote the whole thing out.

I also liked the captions on the exhibits written for children. The German was a lot easier.

Random

A geographically correct map of the London tube.

Currying favour

Eduardo and Ignacio came round last night for a curry making lesson. I'm not the best qualified curry chef in England by some considerable distance, but in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. So Edu will be searching Logroño for garam masala when he gets back. After Edu goes, Ignacio and I are planning a trip to Amsterdam. There's a sleeper train that goes up there, or we might hire a car again. Anyone recommend a hostel? As few novelty-pot-smoking college kids as possible, please..

Still snowing.

Der Schnäppchenjäger

In Germany, there used to be a law only allowing shops to have a sale (i.e. a period with lots of goods reduced in price) in January up until the last Monday. The rest of the year, tough, no sales. So the last Monday in January, was traditionally a massive scrum shopping day. It happened yesterday for the last time, since the law has been repealed due to European Union pressure. So the day of the Schnäppchenjäger is no more. That's a shame, because that's a fun word to say. No one knows exactly what will happen now, on the radio this morning they were talking about some shops doing crazy new things like sales every third Tuesday or something. But that sounds pretty unlikely to me. So many shops in Germany are part of Europe-wide chains that they will probably just follow whatever sales their other branches in different countries are doing, and the rest of the shops will fall roughly into line.

Still snowing. Eduardo and I made a snowman at lunchtime. When I built a snowman with Megan on Saturday night, we came back half an hour later to find that some jealous person had thrown it into the fountain. So this time, to deprive him of the pleasure, we threw our snowman into the (frozen) lake ourselves. Pictures tomorrow..

Snow! lots of snow. Schloss gardens full of snow, will have to take my camera there tomorrow. It's quite hard to admire it while staying upright on a bike. They don't salt the paths in the gardens for some reason.

You can see snow from the Karlsruhe webcam on top of a student residence. There's no webcam in the Schloss gardens though as far as I can tell, which is a shame. Snow is forecast for all through the week as well, so I'll be graduating from building Schneemänner to Iglus by the weekend.

The BBC are always first with the important European stories:

Germany's football chiefs want longer half-time breaks so that fans can sink more beer and scoff more sausages.
The Bundesliga has asked football's governing body, Fifa, for the interval to last 20 rather than 15 minutes.
Bayer Leverkusen's Wolfgang Hozhaeuser said: "We find that 15 minutes to get to bratwurst or drink vendors isn't always enough"

Full story

Calw, where Megan and I went on Saturday, is a very pretty town. It's in the northern Schwarzwald about an hour by (slow) train from here, and was where the German writer Herman Hesse was born and grew up. They have a museum dedicated to him now, which I liked. It had a good balance between the writer's life and his writing. This was helped by the fact that he wrote more than 30 000 letters, so they were able to use his own writing to describe the things that he did and saw. At the end of the exhibition, they have a reading room. It's stocked up full of his books, including collections of letters, poems and reviews. There are copies of some of them in English, French, Spanish, Chinese and other languages.

Hesse spent some time undergoing psychoanalysis. His main analyst was a pupil of Jung's, and at one point he got to meet Jung and talk to him about his problems. In a letter he described how at the end of the conversation, Jung had very carefully told him not to spend so much time studying and reading, and to get out more.

The Maitre d'Hotel in Calw was a greek chap who didn't speak a great deal of German, and no English. He was a very nice guy. He welcomed us very enthusiastically when we arrived, and when we came in for dinner on Saturday night, even more enthusatically. Before the meal, he brought three glasses of ouzo to the table to toast to international friendship. After we ate, he brought three glasses of a dark Italian liqueur and made a toast to Megan. All on the house, of course. An exemplary hotelier. And the moussaka was excellent.

It snowed on Saturday night, which was perfect. We made a good sized snowman. The hotel staff also ran out into the snow to chuck snowballs around. They were probably on the ouzo as well. The village looked beautiful in the snow, especially the statue of the writer on the old bridge. All the pictures are here.

On Sunday we went to Baden-Baden and visited the Friedrichsbad, the old Romano-Irish bath. We opted for the full on German bath experience, which includes a vigorous all-over soap and brush massage from an enourmous masseur. There are 16 stages to the bath, inlcuding mineral steam rooms, warm and hot dry air rooms, showers, a whirlpool, mineral baths at different temperatures and a cold plunge pool. At the end is the quiet room, which is a warm, soft lit domed chamber with 20 or so high beds inside. The attendant lays a fresh sheet on the hard bed, and you climb on. Then he wraps the sheepskin blanket around you to make a sort of cocoon, and you stay there for maybe 45 minutes. It's fantastic. The time passes really fast, and your mind is empty but awake. I felt really good after the bath. I recommend it highly. It's expensive-ish but essential.

Eduardo is leaving next Monday. The preparation for his leaving parties is beginning. It's going to be dull here in this office once he's gone.

As predicted, we finished nowhere in the Flynn's pub quiz last night. One of the questions was: what's the next number in the series 4,6,34,426. What kind of a question is that? Eduardo, who's doing a maths PhD, wanted to write 'given any finite sequence of numbers, there are an infinite number of ways of defining the series and extending it' and then putting a proof on the back of the sheet. I persuaded him that this was not a percentage move, and we guessed 42. Of course the correct answer is 5 thousand and something. You multiply the last number by 14 and subtract 50. Wha?

One of my favourite things about Germany is Schwarzwaldschinken - Black Forest ham. It's dark coloured, usually sliced very thin and is heavily cold-smoked using wood from the Black Forest. It has a strong flavour, and is not quite as salty as Parma ham. Mmm - lecker. Must buy some more tonight before Megan gets here.

I like this story of a 30-year-old cambridgeshire accountant being called up to play for the Turks and Caicos Islands in a world cup qualifier. I also like the fact that the BBC coverage includes a link to the Sunday league that his team play in, just in case you want to really research the story..

Bob Mould has a weblog. How wild is that? And so does Mr T Experience frontman Doctor Frank, where he describes playing for a major radio station:

"It was kind of like the first time I ever got undressed in front of a woman, the main difference being that, this time, I didn't get kicked off the bus."

Got a new linux machine in the office today. The dark days of Solaris are over. I might even be able to run my PhD program on this machine, not yet though as the version of Bison (moo) is too old for the parser of the theorem prover that I use.

Warning: incoming rant...
German customer service is extraordinarily bad. I mean in Britain it's pretty lousy, but in Karlsruhe, forget about it. In the last few days I've bought a cruet set, a pair of trousers, and an alteration to said pair of trousers, and each time I was treated as if I was personally robbing the cashier of her life savings rather than handing over some of my own hard-earned. You almost want to laugh sometimes, they're so pointedly unfriendly it's like dealing with 6 year olds. There are exceptions of course, but not many, and a lot of these are foreigners, e.g. the Italians in the deli or the eponymous Wok Man in his noodle bar. I can see why there are so many automated machines, e.g. for stamps, cigarettes, the sauna baths, train and tram tickets. It's because nobody wants to deal with the bloody cashiers.

Ok, end of rant. Off to the bilingual pub quiz tonight for another humiliating defeat.

Went to Eduardo's place for dinner last night. Had some fine Rioja wine, in a bottle with no label that Edu bought from an old man who lives in a little house making wine. He does everything himself by hand, and just sells the wine from his house apparently. It was very good. Like drinking magic potion.

After dinner we visited another hall where the bar was open. They had lots of pub games including pool, table football, darts and.. table tennis? Bizarre. You kept bumping into the pool players while you were trying to hit the ball. Anyway, I was soon reminded I am no good at table tennis. I did win the darts though, after about 5 turns in the madhouse.

A couple of Chema's photos from Nuernberg: the Glühwein shot and the sausage shot

Unlocked my brother's old phone using a code from unlock123. Cost 5 quid, but that's a lot less than a new phone. Of course paying for this information is ludicrous, the UK mobile watchdog apparently declared that unlocking phones must be legal recently, and in a decently ordered world they would have also released public domain software to give you the codes. Or at least released the algorithms.

Not having a phone is bad. I went out with Eduardo and his brother (who's visiting) on Friday night, and had a great time, but I couldn't find out where they were on Saturday night and so missed a good night out.. grr.. anyway, normal service has now resumed.

My viva is on March 5th.

Yesterday, I tried to get some jeans in the sales. It seems in Karlsruhe, everyone is at least 4 inches taller than me. Anyway, just before Christmas my pepper grinder broke, and as luck would have it, I found, reduced in the sale, the smallest ever German-made ruthlessly efficient salt and pepper grinders. Ideal for the travelling gourmet. There's a picture of them, together with a beer bottle top as a size reference, here.

Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, has long been one of my least favourite people. Today he surpassed himself, claiming that female football players should wear skimpier kit in order to increase the appeal of the game, "They could, for example, have tighter shorts.". I quite like the riposte from the Fulham manager, "Ten years ago we did play in tighter shorts. Nobody paid attention then."
The full story on BBC sport.

Baden-Baden - a few photos I've been meaning to put up.

Also, added a couple of photos of the Italian deli and some other stuff to the Karlsruhe photo page.

Aachen and Luxembourg The photos are up, but it was a wet and gloomy day so they're not spectacular. Also, you weren't allowed to take pictures inside the Aachen treasury, which is where the real action was. There is more medieval gold than you can possibly imagine, but the really mind-blowing thing is the number of relics. Not content with building a giant gold forearm to exhibit Charlemagne's forearm bone, and a giant gold bust of Charlemagne that contains his skull, there are also spectacular gold reliquaries containing: some of John the Baptist's hair, some of St. Stephen's spine, some wood from the cross, a thorn from the crown of thorns, some of the spounge Jesus drank vinegar from, a nail from the cross, some of the rope used to scourge Jesus before his trial, the dress mary wore while giving birth to Jesus, and sundry other pieces from various saints. It's completely nuts. You can just imagine Martin Luther shouting "No! Stop! Enough!". Genuinely weird.

We went to the 11:30 mass in Aachen cathedral which was nice, the cathedral seemed like a small chapel compared to Cologne the previous day, but the ostentatiously roman stylings were cool and the whole place was very beautiful. Again, the pictures I took don't really capture it, but that's the way it goes with cathedrals.

After a snack we drove into Belgium (past the Spa-Francochamps racing circuit) and on into Luxembourg. The first thing you see in Luxembourg is about 17 petrol stations in a row. The tax is much lower, so everyone drives over the border to fill up. Next are the supermarkets and perfumeries - for similar reasons. Then the country is basically very quiet, rolling farmland and small villages. The city of Luxembourg is on a sort of rocky outcrop, with spectacular bridges across the gorge. The centre of town is all pedestrian zone, and has a nice, relaxed, civilised and European feel to it. You could walk right up to the president's front door, there are no police outside or anything. We had some good Belgian beer in an excellent little cafe (called chiggeri, check it out if you're in town), and then headed home. Filthy weather on the drive back, and it's been raining ever since. Che pioggia, as I said to the ladies in Da Serio this morning (probably wrongly..)

Unfortunately, at some point in the weekend my mobile telephone and I parted company on mutually incovenient terms. Grr. If anyone out there just upgraded and has an old handset they don't need, I'd be happy to take it off your hands..
update Turns out my brother had an old handset which Dad is going to send me, so it's all ok..

Ausflug Went to Cologne, Aachen and Luxembourg this weekend with Eduardo, Ignacio and Steffi. I only have the pictures from Cologne ready today. Tourism in Köln is dominated by the Cathedral (or Dom) and the museums. The cathedral was only slightly damaged in the bombing, which when you see what happened to the rest of Cologne is some kind of miracle. Most of the other old churches had to be rebuilt from scratch, and feel eerily empty. The Dom itself is huge and spectacular - the pictures I took don't do it justice, but it's hard to capture the sense of history and wonder you have inside with a couple of photos. There was some sort of church there from 800AD, then they built the large cathedral over several hundred years, starting from when a skiled Milanese businessman sold the archbishop of Cologne the "bones of the Magi" in 1200ish.

Cologne was an old roman town, and you can see roman ruins in various places, excavated under the cathedral and some of the other churches. The displays weren't all that great though and they didn't really make it easy to picture what the buidlings might have actually have been like.

The modern art museum was a lot of fun, though i thought they'd chosen kind of unwisely from the very recent stuff. The Max Ernst I took a picture of was probably my favourite, though there were some really excellent Picasso pieces as well.

Kölsch Cologne has its own variety of beer, called Kölsch, a sort of dry, quite bitter, and not so fizzy pilsner. It's served in small glasses, because when it gets warm and loses its head it's not considered drinkable. It's quite ok, though having to order another every 3 mouthfulls is inconvenient, particularly given the very offhand and inattentive service we got everywhere in Cologne. After one drink in a bar with an automatic accordian-playing doll that was driving us nuts, we went to a famousish jazz pub on the Buttermarkt. It was lots of fun in there. The band was a lot of old gents playing sort of ragtime or trad jazz numbers, and a few people were dancing, including an entertaining old chap who snagged Steffi on her way to the ladies and made her dance for the rest of the song.

Hostel Backpacker hostels are amazingly well equipped these days compared to when I went interrailing, they all have bars and internet access and the like. Ours was well up to scratch, though of course it had its quirky guests, such as the Chinese chap on the first night who started rummaging through our food and eventually opened a tin of fish before we pointed out it was our stuff. Of course we let him have the fish, then the next day he gave us a pear in a bizarre little ceremony in the bedroom. On Saturday night I was harrangued by a Kiwi on two subjects: first, that no more people should move to New Zealand as it is full, and that people should stop dropping cigarette ends on the street since they end up in the sea. Naturally I had no disagreements with him about this, but that didn't stop him giving me the full monte about it. Eventually I skillfully steered him onto the subject of The Datsuns, a band from NZ that he fortunately also liked, and things became more amicable.

I'll stick up the pictures from Aachen (featuring the tomb of Chalemagne, another spectacular cathedral, and other rainy town photos) and Luxembourg (inc. a man who maches up and down all day, a statue of a horse and the second british shop of the weekend) tomorrow.

In cologne. cathedral very cool. ludwigsmuseum (the modern art gallery) also very cool. stumbled across an impressively authentic english shop, selling multi flavour crisps and english beer. bizarre.

ok, time for a beer..

Things back in Karlsruhe are good. I feel much more at home now than when I first arrived, and it doesn't really seem like a strange place anymore.

We're hoping to arrange a last minute trip to Cologne for the weekend, which would be great. I went there when I was 16 and really loved it, particularly the amazing cathedral. Expect a page full of photos on Monday, though looking outside, the light probably won't be great.

Went back to the Italian Deli this morning, lots of buon anno nuovo and all that, and gave Carmela and Lucia the photo of them that I took before I went home. I'll upload it as soon as I get a minute. It made them laugh a lot. Coffee still good.

Had some Weißwurst round at Edu's last night. According to Steffi, our Bavarian friend, in Bayern it's in some sense illegal to eat Weißwurst after midday. Huh? Perhaps they have a special sausage police to enforce this. I hope so.

Also enjoying Bruce's weblog from Japan.

After a 13 hour journey and 7 changes of vehicle, i finally arrived at about 2 in the morning back in karlsruhe. I've never been so happy to see the Karlsruhe station sign. The plane had to divert to Strasbourg because of fog, but it was already two hours late and Strasbourg airport was closing, there were no buses to town or anything. Ryanair were laying on a bus to Baden-Baden airport, but they had no idea how long it would be, and I didn't have any way of getting to Karlsruhe from Baden-Baden, so I took a cab to Strasbourg station, then the last S-bahn to Offenburg, and just made the last train north from Switzerland with about a minute to spare. I arrived in Karlsruhe at about 1:40am. My bike was still there though, thank God.