Yesterday we did the whirlwind tour of Dresden with our tour guide, Michael. It’s really an awesome city–it’s easy to forget that “old” comes in much deeper shades here than in the US. We hit a few museums, reviewed the horror of the firebombing, looked at old things, etc. We did finally also upload our pictures since arrival, all available here. For example, here’s the view out of our flat’s window:

And here’s Michael and I enjoying our modestly sized beers in Dresden yesterday:

And here is an example of the fare available at the street festival:

We got into Dresden yesterday afternoon via the D-Bahn (a fast train system inside Germany and nearby countries). Cousin Michael met us at the platform and we took the tram and walked back to his place. The cool thing about Dresden at the moment is the Bunte Republik Neustadt festival, which as far as I can tell converts the entirety of the Neustadt (“new city”) section of dresden into one continuous party. Still no pics of our own, but here is someone elses to give you a bit of an idea:

You can see some more here. So we walked through some of the setup of the party, dumped our stuff at Michael’s flat, then hit the best biergarten we’ve been to so far by a long shot. It’s one of the three original breweries that have been here for hundreds of years, called Waldschloesschen. We ordered big beers (half a liter) but our waitress goaded Michael and I to upgrade to the 1 liter stein, which turned out to be a great way to kick off the night. The food was awesome… a giant roasted chunk of pig (I think a knuckle?), potatoes, and as always, cabbage. Then we walked through the now-blossoming party, put sick Leslie to bed, then had a couple of more beers out on the street as we looked to meet up with some of Michael’s friends. We did about midnight, and I called it a day and crashed back at his place.

Now I’m up, but no one else is, so I figured out how to get the wireless key for the network here and now I have sweet, sweet high-speed bliss. Maybe once Les wakes up I’ll try to get some few first pictures uploaded, assuming we brought the right cable with us.

Today is our third day in Berlin. Things are still pretty insane, so I won’t yet write much. Not even any good pictures to post. The flights were fine; I was lucky and got some sleep on the transatlantic leg (leslie couldn’t get a wink). We arrived, got the key to our cute little flat (and I do mean little… but what would we do with more space, having only three suitcases to live out of?), and started to wander around Mitte (the central district in Berlin) looking for my institute. We eventually, through our first successful foray into German speaking, found it, and I met the very kind staff who installed me in my office and started me through the labyrinth of paperwork that is German bureaucracy. We managed to stay up until almost 8pm on our “new day.”

Yesterday we spent the morning finding a grocery store and allergy medicine (something here gets to both of us), then I went in to the lab, figured out how to buy a train ticket to Dresden for the weekend, then came back and we managed to get a bank account so we could pay for DSL in our flat (that will take two weeks to be installed, so don’t expect to hear to much for us until then), and even got a pair of “handies,” which is what they call cellphones here in a bit of using-english-words-that-english-speakers-don’t action (another example: a tuxedo here is called “ein smoking). We repaired to our home base where leslie cooked up a darn good seared chicken with onions and tomatoes (cooking at home here is basically unheard of, but the kitchen is well-appointed), then got through another 30 minutes of a movie before collapsing.

Today I’m trying to catch up on email and prepare for a talk I’m giving tomorrow afternoon at the institute. I’ll try to get some photos of some kind up soon.

---

Comments

Bryan (other) — 2007-06-15 09:37:29

Wow you’ve had some big posts lately (married, berlin, etc). Keep them coming, I like hearing what how Germans use english bizarrely. You know about the french word “talkie-walkie”, thats a personal fav.

I like this blog idea, You’re so web 2.0, in fact you were web 2.0 when web 2.0 was still web 1.3

bryan — 2007-06-16 01:16:47

I like to think of myself as web 2.1–I have a system for user generated content but my users are too jaded to generate it.

Another big sigh of relief: on Thursday I gave my qualifying exam talk–and passed. The qual at Berkeley is a bit different from most places; it’s basically a proposal of your thesis topic in the form of a two-hour talk given to a committee of four professors, who pepper you with questions throughout, ostensibly to test your knowledge of the area and to confirm that your thesis topic is “good enough.” I’ve spent most of the last two weeks making the slides and otherwise preparing for the talk. Although in theory you can fail your qual (and be kicked out of the Ph.D. program), I’ve never heard of it happening. This is because your advisor really shouldn’t let you take your qual until he knows you’re ready to pass. In reality, the hardest part of the qual is getting four professors to all agree to be in the same place for two hours on your behalf.

Anyway, it went fine, which means my thesis topic (TETS!) has the stamp of approval and I’m officially ABD (all but dissertation). I wish I could say that’s the last loose end for the semester, but I’m currently working on the take-home final for my graduate theory class and optimistically polishing up the SGP paper for it’s final “camera ready” version. We don’t yet know whether it will be accepted (and hence whether a camera ready version will even be necessary), but because the deadline for submitting the camera ready version is right in the middle of my honeymoon, I think I’d rather hedge and do the work now.

Oh yeah… we got an apartment in Germany. It’s smack in the middle of everything, about 15 minutes on foot from WIAS where I’ll be working, and 500 feet from a major transportation hub. Literally the ‘B’ in Berlin:

It was only a matter of time. The newest addition to my console collection, the Wii, was mercilessly chipped this week, allowing me to boot “back-up” games on it as I can with the PS2 and the Xbox. The device that enabled it is called the “wiikey,” and we were able to install it in about 15 minutes with no headaches at all. I’ve been messing around with the new SSX and Trauma Center games, but I’m really looking forward to the new Mario game coming out in a week or so.

This weekend I rounded-out spring break with an overnight trip to Big Basin state park, a bit south of San Jose. I went with Jacob and some of his friends. I was told we would mostly be relaxing, but after we got there and set up camp, we promptly embarked on a 12-mile hike. Hiking is not my favorite activity but I was resigned to give it a shot with the group. It turned out to be tolerable, and there was even a nice waterfall toward the end of it:

Click on the picture to see a few more shots including a lizard and a huge banana slug. We rounded out the night with a fire and some sausages, and drove home early today.

Things will be pretty crazy this month as I work on a paper submission (due the 25th), and then they will just stay crazy until I wake up in Berlin in mid-June, married and probably moved out of Berkeley.