Willkomen in Deutschland
Posted in Deutschland, Travel on March 20th, 2009Here I am, now firmly entrenched in Germany. For those who weren’t already aware, I’ll be doing research at the Max Planck Insitut für Informatik in Saarbrücken, Deutschland. My host is Robert Strzodka.
The Journey
My entire travel consisted of twenty-two hours of planes, trains, and yes, even automobiles. It started with a ten hour flight from SFO to Heathrow. That went well enough, and then I got the wonderful experience of transferring from Terminal 3 in Heathrow to Terminal 5. After an hour, I made it, then took another half hour to find a phone card. After I gave America a call to tell everyone I was safe in London, I went to find some food. It was an airport, and I got what I payed (too much) for. I then sat down and realized how bad I smelled. I guess ten hours on a plane will do that to someone.
The rest of my travel wasn’t quite so bad. I had a short flight to Frankfurt, then a two hour train ride to Saarbrücken. Two of Robert’s students, Mohammed and Zhao, picked me up from the train station and took me to dinner at an Italian place. We got done eating around 22h30. At that point, Zhao drove me to the MPI guest house (my lodgings for the three months I’ll be here), showed me in, gave me the key, and let me sleep. I woke up thirteen hours later!
The Place
The place I’m staying at is pretty nice. Some pictures are below. Luckily it’s free as well. The MPI here has a lot of visitors, and thus they have a small guest house that is free for visitors.
A view from outside the place.
The kitchen is shared.
Notice how shallow the closets are. The racks go front-to-back, not side-to-side. I didn’t have a laundry basket yet.
A small TV and a decent-sized (but messy) bed.
I actually had to use the bookshelves for clothes. I really would’ve preferred to hang everything, oh well.
WUNDERBAR!
The City
Saarbrücken is a medium sized town, smaller than Reno, but definitely bigger than Davis. The style of the town is obviously more European than American. There are residences on top of shops, or more precisely, shops below residences. There’s a main train station with several platforms, a bus depot, and a light rail system. It will take a while to get used to public transportation I think. For example, buying bus passes instead of tanks of gas. And requiring about an hour to go five miles since one has to go to the bus stop, then wait for the bus, then wait on the bus. A metro would be better, but of course Saarbrücken is far too small for that.
Outlandish Goals
Many of you know that before I came here, I had the intention of traveling with every chance I got. Specifically to new countries and places I hadn’t been. Well, I still really want that, but I don’t think I’m going to get it. It turns out that travel around Europe without a train pass is freaking expensive, and taking trains from Saarbrücken isn’t really a possibility. It’s several hours to the Eastern border of Germany, and from there it’s many more hours to places of interest. I’d spend basically my entire time on trains. And even flying isn’t that much of a better option. I’m still looking at four hours of travel to get to the terminal at another airport. Sigh… damn me and my silly goals. But still, I want to conquer Scandinavia. I have plans for Copenhagen, if anyone wants to go to Oslo, Trondheim, Stockholm, or Helsinki, please let me know. And by wants to go, I mean wants to go with me, this Spring, before I go back to the US.