A picture from the Faschings parade with my language partner Lena on the far right and some of her PH friends, all covered in confetti from the parade.

Faschings is supposed to chase away the winter. Instead it's snowing again today. I've had more than enough cold weather.

The parade in Karlsruhe was ok, but not as good as the Braunschweig one. There were fewer sweets, and nobody was giving out bratwurst and beer like in Braunschweig. There was less drunkeness at the Karlsruhe parade too, but that was a good thing. Parents getting really plastered in front of young children makes me nervous. Generally, Karlsruhe was pretty sober all day by comparison to Braunschweig. The club underneath my house actually closed early, I guess nobody showed up.

Meanhwile, I went to a half decent faschings party near the PH. There were some good costumes, including a cyborg man with lots of flashing lights and various boys dressed up as girls. The DJ was rubbish again though. He kept playing 10 seconds of a song people liked, then pulling out the plug or something, 30 seconds silence followed by playing another track that nobody wanted to hear instead. The party scored points for accepting cash for beer though, instead of the stupid buy a raffle ticket, exchange it for beer system some other student parties have had. And 1 euro for a bottle of Beck's is pretty reasonable by party standards.

Ok, the parade seems to be starting directly outside my building. Blaring horns, people shouting "Hellau!".. time to go and join in I think..

FotoFotoFoto

Photos of Braunschweig are here. There's the usual problem of low winter sun and big contrast between light bits and shady bits. But they're pretty cool all the same.

Karlsruhe's Faschings Umzug is today - 250 000 people are expected according to the always optimistic SWR radio. I'm off there soon, must do some work first, so more Braunschweig commentary and Faschings digest tomorrow.

Oh - except there was an earthquake in Baden-Württemberg (the state where I live) yesterday - 5.1 on the Richter scale! Nobody was injured fortunately. There's a short report (in German) here.

Carnival

It's very much carnival season here. Today is Rosen Montag, and pretty much everyone in the department is taking the day off. If the Braunschweig carnival is anything to go by, they are probably all recovering from their hangovers. I've never seen so much hard liquor consumed in daylight hours, by teenagers, adults and pensioners in equal amounts. I got home quite late last night, so I haven't had time to sort out all the photos, but i brought four in today. We have: the castle in Braunschweig old town - almost all of the medieval old town was destroyed in 1944, but that which survived or was rebuilt is very pretty. Next, the Happy Rizzi Haus, I'd quite like to live there but unfortunately it's all offices, then Julia demonstrating her device for making Milchkaffee, and finally, a photo from the carnival parade. The main activity in the carnival is to try to catch sweeties and toys thrown by the people on the floats. The photo is a kind of 'action shot' of the process.

More tomorrow when I've got all the photos ready..

Off to Braunschweig for the weekend. Faschings has just started - it's carnival time. Got to run..

German band of the week is Tok Tok vs Soffy O. This is what Berlin is all about. Buy the album now. now!

How, exactly, do you expect the unexpected?

Today I did another thing I didn't expect to do whilst in Germany: giving a seminar on cockney rhyming slang to a group of teaching students. Bizarre. I'm clearly no authority on the subject, coming from the wrong part of London, but even with the dozen or so examples i could come up with, I managed to totally baffle everyone. I've never seen my class so confused. The class teacher really enjoyed it though, she got really into it. As I left the classroom after I'd finished, she said to her students, 'right class, now let's have a butchers at these handouts..'. A thoroughly surreal experience.

Had a good night out with my language partner last night. There are some nice pubs in Karlsruhe.

You might remember me explaining the problems Germany has been having with its new toll collection systems for the Autobahn - i talked about them on nov. 7th. Well now it's really gone pear-shaped -- the contract has been cancelled, all the money lost, the people who bought tracking boxes for their lorries have wasted their money, and the lawyers are moving in for the usual disgusting cash-in. Even worse, various states in germany have already started spending the money they were expecting to get, on new road improvements etc., and now they have been told they won't get the cash. It will be a minimum of two years before a replacement system comes on line. What a Blamage, as the radio stations are calling it. All because they couldn't bear to buy the Swiss system or the Austrian system, both of which are already running without problems.

Before you laugh too hard, remember this kind of thing happens in the UK all the time (e.g. 1, 2...)

Fountainbridge brewery to close

Edinburgh-based people might be interested to hear scottish and newcastle are closing their Fountainbridge brewery. Expect the site to turn into exhorbitantly priced luxury flats within a couple of years..

Return to München

Had a really good time with Mark in Munich this weekend. I like the city a lot.

Mark got in on Friday morning and our first move was a trip to the Vierortsbad, Karlsruhe's sauna baths. The ideal way to relax ahead of a good holiday weekend. It was very quiet being still during working hours. We ate a fine lunch at the Italian deli afterwards.

We got into Munich at half eleven Friday night, after a very smooth and comfortable train ride and appropriate anthropological research in the buffet car. They actually have beer on tap and real glasses in a German train, not half-warm cans of Heineken for ridiculous prices.

On Saturday we went to the Deutsches Museum. It's absolutely huge. There's no way you could really go round it in a day. Lots of people brought pack lunches and flasks of coffee to consume as they went round. We saw the Zuse Z3 which I thought was cool, the world's first programmable computer. It was made with relays instead of valves, for reliability. There were also lots of other huge old computers with mercury delay lines and other crazy technology in.

Other cool things in the museum were the aeroplanes, including a Wright brothers flyer, a replica of Baron von Richthofen's Fokker triplane, and a rocket-powered Messerschmidt plane that was used towards the end of WW2. They also had the Magdeburg Hemispheres, the apparatus used by Roentgen to discover X-rays, and an Enigma encryption machine.

Never mind that, what about the beer?

After the museum, we started in the Bratwurstherzl. This is a sausage and beer hall in the old town. You can order anything from 6 (beginner) to 12 (professional) Nürnberger sausages, which you then get on a heart-shaped plate with your choice of potato salad or sauerkraut. We both ordered 8. Meanwhile, the Bavarians on the next table were engaged in entertaining banter with the waiter about who was eating the most sausages. Really excellent food, goes down especially well with a light and refreshing Weissbier.

Following this, we came across a very friendly pub close to the Frauenkirche (the big cathedral with the distinctive twin clocktowers). It was packed out inside, and people were standing on the porch where they had tables, stools and heaters to keep the determined-to-drink-outside Bavarians happy. The Weissbeer here was cloister-brewed to a recipe from 1426 or something, and was first-rate. If you could start selling this in Britain, without the ridiculous price tag it attracts in the poncy London and Edinburgh bars which do sell it, you could make a fortune. I'd never drink Deuchar's IPA again.

Our next stop was Dürnbräu, in a small street just on the edge of old town called, helpfully, Dürnbräugasse. This is a small, initmate beer hall with a large, sociable centre table. We arrived just in time to get the last seats, they were turning people away afterwards. This is often a sign that you've stumbled into the right place. This proved to be the case as we were served with some excellent Schnapps for aperitif, followed by some of the very best beer of the weekend. And that's some damn fine beer. The Dunkel (dark beer) even came in a glass with a pewter flip-top lid. We ate dinner here too, high quality Wiener Schnitzel. A really good place.

On Sunday, we started by going to mass in the incredible rococo Asamkirche. The priest was on good form. His sermon was about the passage where Jesus tells the crowd that people who are poor now will be be rich in heaven, and people who cry now will laugh in heaven, and vice-versa. He said; "does this mean we shouldn't laugh here on earth? That we shouldn't laugh in church? No! In fact, I don't think we laugh here enough! Here's one about the time I was in the seminary: this famous cardinal was coming to visit, you see, it was just before lent, and.." then he proceeded to tell a long gag about one of the other trainee priests not recognising the cardinal, thinking he was also a trainee priest, and saying something along the lines of 'so I've heard this big-time charlie cardinal that's coming really thinks he's God' - the cardinal didn't take it too well. The 70 year old Asamkirche priest was clearly still laughing about it. He was a good guy.

After mass we were just in time to get to the Augustiner Grossgaststätten for Weisswurst before the theoretical midday deadline. It was really good. It reminded me (and Mark) a little of extremely good quality haggis.

You're standing on the art

We went to the Pinakothek after that for some modern art. It's free on Sundays which is nice as, in addition to personal financial savings, it leads to a much friendlier crowd inside in my opinion. One mishap was that one newly acquired piece involved a lot of frisbees, one of which was on the floor. People kept treading on it and setting off an alarm, all day. As well as junk there was a lot of good stuff, some rooms full of strangely placed pieces of wool which I liked and a good collection of Picasso, Klee, Magritte, Braque - all the usual suspects. There's a design section too, but that wasn't all that great. There were a few excellent pieces, but some sub-Ikea furniture as well which was a bit dull to look at. It was another huge museum, and we were again knackered by the time we had looked around.

After coffee we looked in several of the grand old churches in Munich before returning to the stand-outside-under-heatlamp pub near the Frauenkirche for a few Weissbeers for the journey home. Having retrieved our gear from the left luggage lockers, we made the train home with about 0 seconds to spare, the guard was actually yelling at us (and several other people) to get a move on. When they say 18:43 train in this country, they really do mean 18:43. We made it though and the journey was again very relaxed and easy. A really nice weekend. And a good city.

Finished nowhere in the quiz last night. It was fun though, Ignacio brought along two girls, one Russian and one American, and Carlos came down as well. We had a good time debating the answers, but ultimately made all the wrong decisions.

Booked a 1-star hotel in Munich for the weekend. Mark is coming to visit. The hotel receptionist spoke perfect English, in fact from her accent she must have spent some considerable time somewhere near York I'd say, but she only realised I was English when she asked for my nationality. Apparently, my accent doesn't sound at all English. It sounds definitely eastern European. This isn't a complement in Germany. I've heard people moaning that a lot of the 'repatriated' Germans who moved back to Germany from parts of the old soviet union etc. speak really awful German. Telling me I sound eastern european is all part of the magic of German customer service..

Anyway, one place the service can be a lot better is in the beer halls of München, it's a strict no-Hofbräuhaus rule this time, as we aim to visit some of the more unusual and less tourist-infested places. The daytime plan is to visit the Deutsches Museum, which has lots of exhibits from famous science experiments, and the replica (built by the original inventor) of the world's first computer.

Got the referee reports from EPSRC about my post-doc proposal. They are generally positive, but not without some criticism. We have 7 days to write a 1-page response that gets presented, along with the referee reports, to the final selection panel. Without having seen the quality of the other proposals, it's very hard to estimate my chances. Roughly speaking, since this is the second round of the process, we need to finish in the top half. Having read the reports, I'm now even more convinced that it's good work and should be funded. Fingers crossed. Decision day is March 12th.

Il tempo

It snowed again last night, though it's turning to rain now. Ugh. The novelty of snow has worn off. I want Frühling.

Club

As you may or may not know, my flat in Karlsruhe is directly above a nightclub. One of the oldest, longest running nightclubs in Karlsruhe in fact. This might have been expected to lead to a few sleepless nights, since it was open every night until 5am, but thanks to some enourmous stroke of fortune, it closed for renovation a few days after I arrived, and has been closed ever since. However, refurbishment work has now begun in earnest, and there's the lovely sound of hammer drills to be heard every morning from 8am. This is, I think, worse than the sound of the club. It opens for a 'mega Faschings party' in a week or so. Faschings is German for 'pancake day', though they don't eat any pancakes and instead dress up as clowns and things and have a party. They'll be open for five nights in a row, then they're closing for more refurbishment, so it sounds like people will be dancing amidst the cement sacks and fallen plaster. Nutcases.

Ein Polar Tief bringt kalter Luft zu uns. Winter's back, in other words. Icy north wind and bursts of stinging rain. Trying to warm up by looking at pictures of Genova.

My talk on Friday went ok. In Germany, instead of clapping, you bang your knuckles on the table at the end of a talk to masochistically signal appreciation. Very strange.

The Schloss gardens has red squirrels. I want to take a picture of one, but they seem to know whether I've brought my camera or not. When I bring it along, there are none to be seen, but when, like this morning, I forget it, they are all over the place jumping around and posing on birdtables a bit like that old advert for crunchy nut bars.

There are also lots of mountains molehills in the Schloss gardens today, that weren't there yesterday. It must be mole season.

It's really warm here considering it's February - people are sitting around on the grass, working outside, etc. It's maybe 15 or 16 degrees. However, snow is forecast again for Sunday. This will coma as a nasty surprise to all the crocuses that have come up in the Scholss gardens.

Had a 1.5 hour research group meeting this morning - very tedious as it was mostly things that have absolutely nothing to do with me. I'm finally getting the chance to give a research talk to the group this afternoon though, must get back to preparing that..

Quiz

Ignacio, Eike and I came 3rd in the Flynn's quiz last night, winning a bottle of finest Catalunyan cava. Top question: of which country is the Court of the Tynwald the parliament? Fortunately, I had been reading an article about the Isle of Man on the BBC website a couple of weeks ago. I'd quite like to visit the island. Anyway, that's where we blew away the competition. Well, except for the people who came first and second...

Baden

I went to the Karlsruhe sauna baths again last night. No particular reason, but for 10 Euros, it's as cheap as a night in the pub, and makes you feel better afterwards. It was much busier this time as I went after work - it's open until 22:30 - in the mixed period. Lots of married couples come together as well as groups of women. The difference between men and women in a sauna is, in my limited experience, the women talk to each other and the men don't. Despite being quite busy, you didn't really have to queue for anything except occasionally for the showers. However, watching naked Germans queue up patiently to douse themselves with ice-cold water from a bucket suspended 2m in the air is actually kind of fun. The anthropological equivalent of a visit to the Brandenburg gate.

Added some Schloss gardens in the snow pictures to the page of Karlsruhe photos.

Also a photo of Ignacio and Eduardo eating curry. Edu is holding a card where he wrote down the recipe.

Down the Deli

At the Italian deli this morning, I met the same retired German lady that I mentioned in November, and had another chat with her. The cool thing was, this time I could understand 90% of what she said, and even make some passable replies. It was a much better conversation. So now I feel good about my German. However, Italian is a different issue. The girl I was hoping to blag some free lessons off of has stopped coming to the German classes, like a lot of the undergrads as they have exams quite soon. I need to find another Lehrerin..

Eduardo - are you reading this? Did you get home ok?

So one slightly embarassing moment at Edu's leaving party was when some chap asked me if I had been to the architecture party, and what I'd thought of it. I gave him a blunt summary of what I wrote below. Then it turned out that he'd been in charge of organising it - d'oh. I felt very bad. I was involved in organinsing a big graduation party a long time ago ('98? ugh), and various things didn't work out as great as we'd hoped, principally due to the weather the day before, but due to our own inexperience as well. Afterwards, lots of people told me they'd had a great time, but if somebody had told me they'd hated it, I would have been extremely pissed off.

Anyway, I spent half an hour carefully backtracking and sympathising with the problems of wayward security staff and the rest of it. D'oh. Must think before opening loud mouth. The guy who'd worked on the party turned out to be a really good bloke, and we talked about some good German music that we both would have ideally had played that night for some time. I seem to remember giving him my Handynummer, hopefully he'll get in touch.

'atom' feed

Those keenly in tune with the weblogging zeitgeist may be interested in the atom-feed from this weblog, a bit like RSS. It works with the bloglines newsreader apparently - if you use that, you can subscribe to my blog here.

The farewell party for Eduardo was a good one, attended by every Spanish-speaking student in Karlsruhe and many more people besides. Edu and Ignacio made about 200 Spanish omlettes, which were supplemented by the 300 omlettes other people brought, containing every combination of mushrooms, vegetables, herbs, chorizo,.. we drank prosecco, rioja wine, french wine, sorbeto, before moving into the bar for dancing and tequila. At this point, your correspondent's memory becomes a little hazy, and though there are photos, they are unlikely to appear on this webpage in anything but a carefully edited form

Saturday was appropriately restful, then on Sunday Edu, Ignacio and I had lunch in their residence before taking a little cycling trip in the Stadtwald. They have a path called the Gedichtspfad (poetry path) where poems by famous German authors are nailed up to the trees. Some of them are very good. They also have trees with faces carved into them, and to add to the magic-forest effect, I saw a couple of deer.

After the requisite amount of horsing around, we had a last drink in the Vogelbräu pub before I said goodbye to Eduardo. By now he should be in London, where he's changing planes to fly home. It was sad. As well as giving me the flat he'd found, helping me move furniture into my flat when I arrived, coming with me to the hospital the day I had the operation and sleeping on the floor of my flat the next night, Edu was good company every day in the office. It's now very conspicuously empty here.

A couple more photos from Ignacio: a spectacular fountain in Aachen and street artists in Köln.