Am back at home in England. Good to be here, but looking forward to getting back. Will post more inc. pictures from the Italian deli when I get back, 6th Jan.

Went to Baden-Baden at the weekend. Very pretty, but didn't have time for a bath, you need three hours free. I'll definitely be back there in January though. I did try the water, hard to drink at 67 degrees C, and very very salty indeed. There's a sign saying not to drink more then 400ml a day. Yeah no kidding.

The supposed capture of saddam has allowed the German radio to use the word "Doppelganger" a lot. Apparently, 1 in 3 Germans under the age of 25 believes the 2001 attacks on NY/Washington were carried out by the CIA. Then again, it was someone on the BBC who said that, so you can never be sure..

Sausuage of the week is Thüringer bratwurst. There's a stall selling them in the Karlsruhe Weinachtsmarkt. I recommend the 'spezial' - with onions, ketchup and mayo.

Went to a party at the teacher training college last night. There were no tickets left when we got there, and my tandem partner and her friends already had tickets, but I managed to sneak in through a combination of pretending not to speak any German to the bouncer, and then a ridiculous hand-to-hand transferral of the entry stamp. Very entertaining. The place was absolutley rammed, nose-damagingly rammed I thought, though I managed to escpae without injury this time. Unlike the Uni. Karlsruhe parties I've been to, this one was at least 90% natives. The music was.. well, schlimm is probably the best German word for it, but I had a good time thanks to the excellent immediate company and general good feeling of knowing my thesis will be handed in in a few days.

Snow all gone. Very cold.

snow! snow snowdy SNOW! SNOW! Not living on some pokey little island any more, this is real central european early December SNOW!

I've been working on my thesis for 10 hours a day for the last 7 days. Fortunately, it's quite a lot better now than it was a week ago.

Top thesis writing related songs:

• 1. Blue Orchids - Work
  
• 2. Hotel X - Work Song
  
• 3. Jim Hendrix Experience - The Burning of the Midnight Lamp
  
• 4. Er..
  
• 5. That's it.
  

I haven't drunk any beer since Munich. Have drunk quite a lot of coffee though.

Added a few more pictures to the Karlsruhe collection.

Brought the Munich photos in. I have to get back to work now..

Uploaded the photos from Nürnberg. There are some good ones. The Munich ones will have to wait til tomorrow.

Our weekend in Nürnberg and Munich was fantastic. It was good not to think about my thesis for 48 hours.

I have some great photos, but have not had time to sort them out yet. I brought just 4 with me to work today: Nürnberg viewed from the castle, the toy guitars on one of the stalls in the Christkindlesmarkt, me and my Spanish friends drinking Glühwein in Marienplatz in Munich, and a late night illicit visit to the Munich Olympic stadium. I'll hopefully have the rest ready for tomorrow.

Nürnberg - the city is really beautiful, which is all the more amazing when you see pictures of what it looked like after the war. The hostel we stayed in had a book of photos - practically every old building was reduced to rubble. Most of the main old churches have been completely restored, and some around the edges of town left in ruins. One of them, I think it was St. Sebald's, had a cross that came from one of the towers on the old Coventry cathedral inside as part of a peace exhibition, which was nice. You can't really take good photos of the inside of these places, or at least I can't manage it with my camera, but there was really incredible art and architecture to see. One notable thing was that even in the protestant churches, they have still preserved very carefully all the statues and paintings from pre-reformation times. No Oliver Cromwell around to burn them all.

Christkindlesmarkt The Nürnberg Christmas market is also beautiful. It's huge, it's centred on the old town market square but also extends all over the old part of town, with stalls for toys, ornaments, books, sweets, sausages, Glühwein, slippers, and carousels for children and stalls with displays of model railways.. it's just great. You can watch all these little kids walking round pointing at things with wide open mouths, it really gets you in the mood for Christmas. And it's the total antithesis of big town Christmas shopping, with crowds and stressed out people and unfriendly, tired staff. Instead, everyone is relaxed and is taking their time, stopping to drink Glühwein and talk to their friends, and the stallholders are all friendly because they are trying to sell their own stuff. The atmosphere is really nice.

München Munich is also a really beautiful city. Some of the churches in the old town are absolutely stunning. There's a small church with a beautiful interior called the Damenstiftkirche, and another with a packed rococo interior that is really breathtaking, called the Asamkirche. The architecture of the old town generally is very grand but tasteful - when I put up the photos tomorrow, dear reader, you can judge for yourself.

Hofbrauhaus This is where you really get to grips with Munich. It's a tourist trap to an extent, an enourmous beer cellar with large benches and tables and 1-litre glasses as standard and beer brewed on the premises. Really good stuff, plenty of Bavarian singing and thumping the table and waving your glass in the air. The other guys on our table were all very friendly too, 5 Germans and a Swiss. Though there were a lot of tourists there, they all seemed to be German tourists, mostly with organised package tours and tired looking tour guides trying to convince them to stop drinking and come back to the bus. The guy next to us was from Cologne, he'd flown down for the football game the previous day and was getting seriously into the Bavarian way of doing things. All the singing and the waitresses costumes were pretty daft, but it was great to be in a place where you could actually see hundreds of Germans enjoying themselves! You don't see it a lot in Karlsruhe. I felt about 3 times better about Germany when we left the place, somewhat unsteadily, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

In the guidebook Eduardo read that Bavarians drink 1700 litres of beer each every year! We didn't believe it at the time, but by the time we left the Hofbrauhaus, we believed it. In fact, we didn't just believe it, we knew it to be true.

Am in a hostel in Nuremberg. The city looks great, but we unfortunately just went to the worst pub in Germany. Bad beer and lots of large obnoxious American kids. The Christmas market looks good though, will hit that tomorrow..

Saw Fiona on her way through last night. She's finished her Calculemus visit to Saarbrücken and is driving down to look at Switzerland for a few days before going home. We went to a brew-pub place where they serve unfiltered Pilsner. Very traditional. A lot better than the stuff the main Karlsruhe brewery, Hopefner, make. Theirs is more like B*dw*iser or something. The other local brewery, Moninger, is much better.

Was good to get out for a bit. Have been working most evenings on my thesis. It's going ok but I am getting tired of working on it.

Yesterday, for some reason I was charged with acquiring fresh coffee beans for our department machine. In the local style, instead of saying 'could you pick up some coffee on the way in tomorrow, here's a fiver', I was given the address and phone number of a single espresso beans boutique, and instructed to buy 2 kilos of 'paradiso' blend and nothing else. For this I had to shell out €48, which I thought was a bit steep. However, I was won over when the secretary gave me a bottle of Swedish liqueur for my troubles. Of course they pay the money too, though they do everything by electronic transfer here, which I don't quite trust for some reason.

In Germany they still have this thing we used to have in the UK where you can only get your cash out for free from certain banks. It's very irritating. The charge for getting money from another bank is something truly ridiculous like €4.

Went for lunch with my boss here today. We haven't spoken all that much since I arrived, because I've been busy writing up and he's been busy writing EU grant proposals. It was a good lunch. He has plenty of ideas for new research.

This weekend I was mostly working, though I went cycling yesterday in the forest. It's a bit sad there now, 90% of the trees are deciduous and all the leaves are gone. It feels sort of Christmassy though. They've just pruned some of the pine trees (only 25 chopping days til Christmas) and there are lots of pine cuttings around that people were collecting, presumably to take home for Christmas decorations.

It's just me and chapter 10 in the department this afternoon.

Did a little Christmas shopping this morning. I tried to pay for a €35 bill with my EC card (that's like a Switch card in the UK), and the lady said I needed my passport - huh? I'd sooner carry 35 Euros in cash around with me than my passport, if it got nicked it would be a huge hassle to get replaced, and it would probably cost at least 35 Euros anyway. They would have accepted a driving license, but not one without a photo on. I still have one of the old British paper ones. So, in the end she just accepted my card anyway, since it was Saturday and there was a big queue, but she gave me a bit of a lecture about it. I think I'll stick to the folding stuff in future.

I had a coffee at a department store espresso bar. I was served by this chap who clearly felt he was in his ideal job. He was maybe 60, and looked like a bit like Grandpa out of the Munsters, with an ancient and ill-fitting waistcoat and bow tie and thinly gold-capped teeth. He told me he liked his job because he met people from everywhere. He said he got one impression of people of a certain nationality from television, then a completely different one when they actually came and talked to him at his coffee bar. Sounds obvious, but I agreed it's unfortunately very easy to forget. It was nice to speak to him after copping an earful from the cashier about my passport, or lack thereof. The coffee was good, too.

It seems England have won something. I'm pleased. There has been a lot of coverage on the BBC world service, but (obviously) no mention on German radio - imagine if the handball world cup was being played, and you were trying to get news of it on the BBC. It's pretty much the equivalent.

Went to Eduardo's Spanish 'Fiesta' at his student residence last night. it was good, some good spanish food and not quite so great drinks (red wine and coca cola? why do people drink that?). Student parties don't change much moving from Britain to Germany. A particularly nice touch at this one was to use a burnt cork to draw moustaches on everyone to make them look 'Spanish'. No photos though unfortunately..

Am thinking about whether to watch the rugby tomorrow morning. An Irish pub is opening early to show it. I think I slightly favour staying in bed.

Saw the football in the Irish pub last night, with Eduardo and a couple of German guys. It was kind of sad, first we watched Norway get gubbed (which made Eduardo happy), then Scotland going 3-0 down, then at half-time in that game we switched to watch Wales being outmanoeuvred in Cardiff. We didn't see any of the game that produced the big shock, Latvia beating Turkey on aggregate.

A lady came into the Irish pub and tried to order pizza, thinking the Irish tricolore was the Italian flag. The landlord said she was about the 30th person to do that since he opened last year.

The pictures from Hamburg. Some of them are a little dark, blame a mixture of me and the weather. There are none from the red light district I'm afraid, I decided not to take my camera on that gig. It was probably the right decision...

Beer of the week is certainly Jever, specifically their pilsner which is dry and contains a little more hops that most German beer. Very nice. It's Friesian, like the cow, i.e. it comes from the north part of Germany close to Denmark. I tried it first on Sunday night in Hamburg, but they also sell it in the best supermarket in Germany, which is conveniently situated about 5 minutes by bike from my flat.

In German, you can use the same word (gelegen) for 'convenient' and 'situated'. So the Supermarkt ist gelegen gelegen.

Litigious society In Germany, the Krankenkasse (health insurance) companies are generally facing a cash crisis, so one thing they are very keen on is suing other people to claim money for treatment. I had to fill in a form explaining to them how I broke my nose, and then they've been trying to reach me here at the office to speak to me about it. Today I was in when they called, and I had to explain that I hadn't taken the guy's name who had bumped into me, principally because although he was being a bit daft I didn't really think it was his fault. It also didn't occur to me, I certainly wouldn't think about doing it in Britain. Anyway, she accepted my explanation in the end, though I could tell she was a bit disappointed. I'm quite relieved, I didn't fancy having to foot the bill myself or go through a court hearing or something.

Hamburg is a great city. I had a very good weekend hanging out with San, Tina and Heinz, and taking in the town. I took some pictures, so I'll write more when I've put them up, hopefully tomorrow.

Nachtzug The night train was ok, I got some reasonable sleep and it was quite comfortable. There's a huge bar wagon where some people choose to spend the night rather than actually sleeping. When I got to my sleeping car, a huge German woman was fast asleep on three pillows on the bunk opposite. It became clear that one of these was my pillow. I had to steal one from the next compartment, but I felt ok about that since Karlsruhe is the last stop before the long overnight haul, so nobody else would be needing it.. They come round and wake you up at Hamburg to make sure you don't miss your stop which is nice. Unless you wanted to get off at Hannover, 2 hours earlier.

Reeperbahn The famous red light district in Hamburg is justifiably famous, I can assure you. It's huge, crazy, loud, full and pretty funny. We were there at about 2:30am, and it seemed to be just about in full swing. We went into a dance bar (not a strip bar - I mean the customers dance) at what turned out to be just the right time; when we arrived, it was just full, but when we finished our beer, everyone was leaving. It was unusual for (what I've seen of) Germany as it was full of people of totally different ages and styles, all dancing together and mucking around and having a good time. We also saw some very seedy looking places, a grim looking 'British Pub' that I wouldn't go in if you paid me, a specialist condom shop and, right in the middle, a large police station. A truly unique place, full of tourists but still well worth seeing.

No time to post much today, have been trying to finish chapter 8. And 9.

Worked out how to get RealPlayer through the firewall today, so I can listen to John Peel in the office

Inshallah off to Hamburg tonight...

Had a long, long conversation with a retired lady in the Italian deli this morning. She obviously didn't have much to do with her day. I kept trying to leave for work, but then she would ask me about where I worked etc. She had been to London in 1960, and had lots to say about it, things she did and didn't like, and her daughter and granddaughters who live there now. She was nice though.

Got the night train tickets, so Friday night I spend in a Liegewagen with 5 sleeping Germans. Hopefully sleeping anyway. There's a separate bar, so hopefully it'll be quiet in the sleeping wagen. Then Saturday morning I arrive in Hamburg just in time for breakfast. Should be good, I'm looking forward to it. If it works out well I might take the night train somewhere else. They go to Amsterdam and Vienna.

Got my first payslip today. The total tax: 47%. That includes such gems as €50 a month 'church tax' and €98 a month to pay my bit towards the bill for Germany's 5 million unemployed. I feel myself drifting towards the right wing even now.. I worked out that in the UK, after income tax and NI,I would take home €850 more per month. Clearly these kinds of comparisons are somewhat artificial, but I will try to remember this when I'm working in Britain and think I'm being taxed too much..

Ok, money moaning finished. Tonight I'm going to try to get some tickets for a night train from Karlsruhe to Hamburg on Friday night. I have to stay for my German class Friday evening, and I'll miss the last fast train, so the night train looks like the best option. I bought a German railcard on Sunday, which will hopefully make it a bit cheaper (I'm not sure if it's valid for Nachtzugs). I'm quite looking forward to it, there's something quite cool about night trains. I have to get to Hamburg to meet San Yuan, a Taiwanese friend who's in Europe for a conference.

Some pictures from the weekend: first, Durlach, a little village on the edge of Karlsruhe that has now become a commuter town. The centre of the town is still very pretty though, and has some original buildings which escaped the fate of Karlsruhe's old town, i.e. being reduced to rubble in the war. The light wasn't very good on Saturday so I didn't take many pictures.

Second, Heidelberg, which Fiona and I visited on Sunday. It was sunny and unseasonably warm - we had lunch sitting outside. The town was full of tourists, many of them American soldiers from a NATO base nearby. In the evening, it seemed like the whole town had come into the central area to window shop, despite everything being closed on a Sunday. One shop that was open was a Chirstmas shop, selling scary looking little model Santas and avant-garde nativity figures. I bought an advent calendar with a picture of some very fightened looking shepherds painted from an angel's-eye-view. They have a Christmas market starting on the 26th November, so I might well go back then to buy some pressies.

Thanks to Megan, my bike now has an additional safety device.

Added the missing Rhein pictures and put up some pictures of the forest in the north of Karlsruhe. NB - the latter are likely to be interesting only if you like pictures of trees.

Had a great weekend, cycled to Durlach on Saturday, went out with Eduardo and two Bulgarian girls on Saturday night and then took a train to Heidelberg on Sunday where I met up with Fiona. Heidelberg is very pretty, at least in the old town area, and we had a nice day walking round the castle and eating apple strudel.

Saturday night was particulary cool because the four of us had no common language to speak. One Bulgarian spoke Bulgarian, German and English, the other Bulgarian girl just Bulgarian and French, Eduardo speaks Spanish, French and English and me English and poor French and German. So I ended up speaking a mixture of three languages, we had a very nice time but it was sort of exhausting as well.

Got to do a lot of work this week so better get on with it...

Some slightly random pictures from our trip to the Rhein a couple of weeks ago. There's a nice group photo missing, I'll try and add it tomorrow.

Far more interesting than my banal witterings is my sister Jenny's weblog, which aside form having a cool name, also includes the texts from her univeristy radio programs about life in the Middle East, e.g.

...as I came to know more Syrians, a common, wildly romantic streak became evident. This romance is embedded in Arab culture, going back before the time of Islam to the ancient Arabic love poetry, which many modern Syrians, including taxi drivers, shopkeepers and students, know off by heart. This beautiful and passionate writing may be described in two parts according to the Cornell Library:
a) a fleeting glimpse of the beloved's face on a deserted campsite, allowing one just enough time to compare her eyes to those of a cow; followed by
b) a hair-raising ride on one's camel with one's tribe to try to forget how beautiful she is.

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.

The banadges of are off my nose. So now I have German shoes, a German jacket and a German nose. It's not a bad job, you can tell it's been broken if you know where to look, but it won't cause little children to scream and run away or anything. No more so than before anyway. The HNO Arzt I saw this morning was a really good chap. He told me he worked in North Wales for a year. Still, he spoke German to me which was nice. He said I spoke good German, which is a first - probably because I've had a lot of practice at explaining how my nose got broken.

Weather beautiful again today. It was warm enough at lunch time to sit in front of the Schloss and watch leaves fall. A lot of people had the same idea.

There isn't a Starbucks in Karlsruhe, but there are about a dozen outlets of German coffee shop barons Tchibo. They sell the usual [thing]acino coffee, but also have a selection of household items such as saucepans, pillows, socks. This seemed kind of weird, until I realised it's basically a ploy to get around the restrictive opening hours here. Cafes can stay open as late as they like, but a housewares shop has to be closed early, until recently it was something ridiculous like 5pm but over the summer that was changed to 8pm. A lot of shops still close early, usually about 5 minutes before I arrive, but I'm glad I wasn't here when everything closed at 5.

Anyway, Tchibo are slowly taking over Germany. A week or so ago I heard on the radio they had bought the cosmetics company Nivea. How that fits into their plan for world domination I'm not quite sure, but if it means wider availability of soothing aftershave balm, count me in.

Ok, time to catch up on a few things.

The Operation

Having the operation was quite an experience. It was a serious crash course in medical German for one thing. I also got to experience the German healthcare system, which I think is ranked second best in Europe. It's pretty good. I was on a ward with just two other people, and there was an urn for free tea and coffee just outside. If you pressed the button for a nurse, one would come pretty fast, but they did have a habit of promising to do something, and then never coming back, which happens a lot in the NHS too. It took ages to actually leave, since there was only one doctor left in the evening and she was called to assist in an emergency operation. Eventually she came and passed me fit to fly the next day, then I had to wait another half hour before a nurse could come to take the tap out of my arm that they'd use to put the anaesthetic and the drip in. I was glad to see the back of that, it didn't hurt but it makes you feel odd to have something sticking out of your veins.

Today I got a letter from my health insurance company asking me to describe the accident so they can decide if they want to sue somebody..

Bank So Postbank finally sent me a card one month after I opened my account. They have machines here that you put your card in, and then they print you off a statement, without you having to type your PIN in. So, if you find a card on the street and want to decide if it's worth nicking, it's very convenient. However, they don't really seem to have debit cards here, so a stolen card is not as useful as you might think. Instead they have a strange electronic cash payment system. You take some money out of your account, charge it to your card (the same card), and then you can pay from that cash in shops etc. It strikes me as very inconvenient, you have to go back to a cash machine to charge your card (so you might as well just get some money out) and you then have to remember how much money is in your account and how much money is on your card. There's also no danger of getting any credit interest when you move the money to your card, not that you seem to get any while it's in your account either. Once you have the money on your card, it's more secure though, since when you pay you must enter your PIN, which is harder to get right than a signature.

Ryanair Germans haven't got used to budget airlines yet. The flight back here was 90% Germans, and they formed a slightly disorderly queue in front of the boarding gate about half an hour before the plane we were going to take had even touched down. Clearly the prospect of having to find your own seat is still causing some concern. They all took ages choosing where to sit, despite it only being a one hour flight in the dark, and ages stowing their hand luggage, causing the flight to take ages to get ready. This was in contrast to the easyjet flight from Edinburgh to Stanstead, where nobody even stood up until the flight was called and then they boarded up the front and rear steps at considerable speed.

I'm sure this naivete won't last. There is a German budget airline operating out of Cologne now, and they will probably come up with some ruthlessly efficient way of reducing turnaround time before you know it.

I was the only passenger on the bus back from the airport to Karlsruhe, which meant I got to talk to the driver about Ryanair, Edinburgh, Germany and the latest revelations about Princess Diana. I had to feign interest in this, since I didn't know how to politely say I didn't give a damn about Princess Diana, and I don't even know what this butler chap has been saying about her. When I got back to Karlsruhe, I couldn't see my bike, and thought it might have been half inched, but it turned out that while I was away about 200 leaves had fallen on it from the tree next to where I locked it up. They had camouflaged it against the leafy background. There are now leaves stuck in the bearings, the chain, the dynamo, the mudguards.. it looks like I just drove through a tree.

Clothes I bought some clothes today, exactly the same kinds of things that I would buy at home, but inexplicably I now look German. I am being assimilated.

Am back in Karlsruhe, but am v.busy with grant proposal. Will write more later.

Have been paid and got bank card. Bought some shoes on the way to work - my old ones had large holes in the bottom.

Got an appointment to see the HNO doctor tomorrow, should get the bandages etc. on the nose removed. About time too. I've started staring back.

Laura's wedding was great, in a beautiful old Scottish manor house owned by the Gladstones (as in Victorian prime minister Gladstone). The groom and his mates, whom I'd never met, seemed like top people. They were mostly from Dundee or thereabouts and were friendly and funny. Was very good to see a bunch of my Cambridge mates too. The food was absolutey stunning, there was plenty of the local whisky, distilled about a mile down the road, and some excellent singing in the bus on the way home. Everyone was very well looked after and the unanimous verdict was it had been a very fine wedding.

Hopefully going to the Pear Tree pub quiz tonight.

Good football manager quote, this one from Dave Jones, currently boss at Wolves, after this weekend's game:

"It's fair to say the crowd booed them off at half-time and then I booed them into the dressing room."

(from BBC sport. Wolves lost 2-0 to Boro, which is a lot better than Palace managed, but we'll say no more about that..)