Hallo! Wie gehts?
Greetings from Aachen, Germany! We are well and are having a fun time here. It’s been almost a month since I arrived here and Krista recently got back from Uganda where she spent 10 days touring with Mark and Kerri (our Seattle/Canadian friends now living here). Things have been busy but good! Germany thus far has been a fine adventure, full of both fun and confusion, and work is keeping be quite busy. Krista has just started German lessons and is looking forward to getting set up and going here as well. A few first impressions of live here: Zeppelins!I’ve always thought that I’d see more dirigibles in Germany and so it was that last Friday night when we settled onto Mark and Kerri’s deck to enjoy the warm evening with a beer that I spotted my first German Zeppelin. Good old Graf von Zeppelin would have been proud! Who knows what it was doing, perhaps a family just out for an evening drive? At some point I hope to get my Zeppelin licence and then the fun here really shifts into high gear. A toast to the zeppelin!
More rubber stamps than you can share a bunny at
This is truly the land of the rubber stamp. I have had a few appointments with the “folks in forms and records” to get registered here in Germany; the sheer abundance of rubber stamps in action here is amazing. Somehow rubber stamps have survived into the computer age and like a family of Canadian Geese in a city pond, improbably they are thriving and frightening children daily with their ill tempered squawking. Some bureaucratic functionary will spend 20 minutes asking you senselessly detailed questions, hunt-and-peck for a few minutes typing 20 characters into a computer - stopping sometimes for up to a minute to intensely examine something on the screen as if never seen before - only to suddenly turn to a paper form and slam it with two or three rubber stamps in rapid succession. Approved! Alle is klaar! Move on! Next! Someone in the ink-blotter business here must be making a killing.
More bunnies in shops than you can shake a rubber stamp at
Easter was big here. The windup seems to have been going on for a while; not surprising I guess for a city with a Lindt chocolate factory (think of them as the chocolate Easter bunny people - http://www.lindt.de/), nevertheless the scale of the Easter enthusiasm was staggering. Each store, large and small, featured high quality bunny displays of all kinds. Bunnies in overalls with wheelbarrows, bunnies sitting on chairs smoking pipes, bunnies several feet tall, waving their regards to passers by. Aachen likes Easter; even the Starbucks folks got into an act and gave me a hardboiled white Starbucks egg with their green logo imprinted when I stopped in on Easter Sunday for a mocha; weird but nice. I am told festivity is a general theme here; Christmas is supposed to be very well-dressed up, winter carnival is big, and in the summer when they have the Aachen horse show there is a citywide competition for the best decorated storefront.
Biking to Holland
We biked to Maastricht (the Netherlands) last weekend; it took about 2 hours to get there from Aachen. There is definitely something novel and entertaining about biking into a different country, you feel like you are in some cycling version of the Sound of Music escaping into a new land, a definite sense of purpose sets into your cycling, even when you no particular goals. The four of us headed out there, had lunch, walked around the city (pleasant), had some ice-cream and biked another 2 hours back to Aachen in time for the evening. It was a fun trip!
Finding an apartment
Odd thing about Germans: When they move, they move everything. It is very difficult to find a non-hotel apartment that is not stripped clean. No cabinets. No light fixtures (people will often unwire the light fixtures, or at the very least leave with the bulbs removed – think “the Grinch that Stole Christmas stripping the Christmas tree from Whoville” ). No kitchen appliances. No kitchen sink. Yes, they take the kitchen sink with them when they move apartments. Also, there is an almost surgical quality to the state in which things are left. I’ve looked at apartments that are immaculate, I mean perfectly spotless, and the residents, not even the landlord, but the people living there on their on initiative are assuring me “and of course the whole apartment will be stripped down, cleaned and painted.” I’ve even gone though apartments that are busy having walls knocked down and changed around to prepare for renting it out to new people, e.g. “And imagine that your kitchen will go right there.”…You might expect this for houses or 10 year leases of 5 bedroom apartments but this if for your average 2 bedroom apartments. Whacko! Moreover, everyone seems to realize this is odd and exclusively German. When talking about this they will readily state that the Austrians or even the Italians are not this way. Germany is Germany. Regardless, tomorrow we sign a lease for an apartment and take ownership of our first German kitchen (we negotiated buying it as part of the apartment rental agreement). The apartment is quite nice and quite reasonably priced (particularly coming from London ;-) even accounting for the kitchen purchase! Starting May 1st we’ll be open for business and expecting visitors, come pay us a visit. WorkWork is good. There is a lot of it! We are now 12 people here working at Microsoft EMIC (European Microsoft Innovation Centre). The place really has the air of a start-up, mixed oddly with a research group – a mixture of frantic set-up work and long term big research project planning. Set-up work is proceeding at an almost frantic pace as we get involved in European research projects and at the same time work to try to build a team. It is a lot of fun and I fear I am spending too much time there. I am looking forward to getting to the point where the set-up work has been finished and most of my time will be devoted to research projects. I’m our “mobile devices” research guy, which suits my interests well.
Life in Aachen
Aachen is a great town for walking around and doing the café thing. Lots of outdoor seating on cobblestone streets, lots of people wandering the streets during the day and in the evening, lots of bicycles! On day two here Kerri took me bicycle shopping and I am now traveling around town everywhere on 2 wheels and a set of front rock-shocks. Pretty much every day I bike to work through the old town and up a bit north, 20 minutes in total. Krista got kitted up her mountain bike last weekend (right after coming back from Uganda) and is now also bouncing around the cobblestone streets. Summer here is going to be a great time. I have been here almost a month and it seems hardly a week! To sum up, things here are going well! We’re getting settled in and are looking forward to doing a lot of travel around Europe in the coming months. Work is very busy, but interesting. It’s great to be having an adventure in a new place but also at the same time to be with some old friends again! Hope you are well and hope to see you sometime soon in Aachen!
Cheers! -ivo
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