USA! USA! USA!

Hi all,

I'm going to resurrect this blog to, as the title says, try to keep in touch with you. This is a two-way street, though, so please comment, or send me an email or telegram if you feel like it. Or send me a link to your blog.

I set off from Auckland on Wednesday evening, and arrived on Wednesday morning after a surprisingly restful flight, as I'd lucked two spare seats beside me, and I could fold all 3 seats out into a skycouch. It was pretty handy as a freebie, but I'm not sure if I'll cough up the extra $1800 you need to book one.

From the airport in San Francisco to Palo Alto, I'd decided to catch a shuttle because it was only $50 and promised door to door service in about an hour. Unfortunately, for me and my shuttle-mates, it was our driver's first day on the job, and did have the hang of the GPS yet. The waypoint optimisation was very clearly not working, and it also seemed to be set on "avoid highways unless they're taking you in the wrong direction". And our driver followed all its instructions (poorly) for the 2.5 h it took to drop me off (last).

Anyway, Wylie and Janet had left a key out for me and I followed their treasure hunt-like clues to the Garage Mahal. Wylie and Janet have been very welcoming, and have been great at giving me the lay of the land and loaning me bikes etc. I could happily stay here for longer, but I don't want to overstay my welcome.

Luckily, I've already found a flat and I'm moving in tomorrow. It's real close to uni, the train station and downtown Palo Alto, and the house is not so flash, so it's pretty affordable by Palo Alto standards. It's inhabited by 4 other guys, doing tech and medicine kind of stuff.

I'm moving in tomorrow, so need to pack my bags tonight so Janet can give me a lift with all my crud tomorrow morning.

Thanks for reading!

Adam

Hello

I should have known not to mention how warm the weather was in my last update... Minutes after my last post, two white kittens arrived in our flat, Friedrich and Wilhelm, and with them came the winter. For the last 3 weeks or so we haven't got above 0C. The temperature's been consistently below -10C, even below -20C. It hasn't snowed much, but when it did, it was really cold, so the snowflakes were like real snowflakes from a cartoon. Here's one I tried to take a photo of on my sleeve.

That day the kittens were allowed outside for the first time. Wilhelm (probably, we still can't really tell them apart) got stuck up a tree. I climbed halfway up the tree, Wilhelm climbed onto my head, then I climbed down to terra firma. I hope he appreciated it, and that he's not the one that's peeing on my bed when I leave my door open.

Anyway, last week the largest annual public film festival in the world started in Berlin. I'm trying to see as many films as practical. So far I've seen two amazing films. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is an American film about 9.11 and a boy trying to handle the death of his father. Film critics seem to think it's a cheap ploy to get awards, but I found it a really absorbing, honest, and uplifting film. I also managed to get tickets to one of the funniest movies I've ever watched - it was called Iron Sky and it's about nazis living on the moon. It was really clever, and despite the subject matter, there was not a single awkward moment for the audience. In Q&As afterwards, the producer mentioned that he did find it hard to get funding from Germany!

Instead of taking the train back to Potsdam on Sunday, we walked back over the frozen river. It was very cool, a real experience. It was not so cool that I didn't zip up my pocket and lost the tickets I had to 2 more movies this week. Doh!

My tickets are out there somewhere...

Anyway, hope you're all doing well. I love to hear what you're up to!

Adam

Hi from Germany

Hello everyone,

Here's a very late blog post. My updates are getting further and further apart. At the start of this blog, I decided to post an update every week. I apologised sometimes for having 2 weeks between posts! Last year, I made 3 updates in total.

But that's all gunna change this year, I'm gunna aim for monthly updates, I've written it in my diary, and even if nothing exciting has happened, I'll still post that.

So after a fantastic 3 weeks in NZ, catching up with friends, family, and sun, I survived the flight back and got over the jetlag by the time I had to go back to work. The shock in being back in the northern hemisphere was not quite as bad as I was expecting, maybe because this winter is a really warm one, there's pretty much been no snow or even many frosts. It's been over 0 C most days, which is fine by me. I can still ride my bike, whereas this time last year there was half a meter of snow on the ground still!

Nothing much has really happened in the last 2 weeks, I had a presentation a week after I got back, so was working pretty long that first week finishing enough experiments for the presentation (and they seemed to work, I think there's hope with this PhD thing!). Next week I have an awful "circadian" experiment, taking samples every 4 hours for 24h straight, but my supervisor will help out so I can get some sleep in between. Other highlights this year include doing my washing, deciding to adopt 2 white kittens in the flat, and my flatmate announcing she's pregnant! This house is going to be getting full, and we've already got 9 of us living here!

Anyway, hope you're all well, enjoy the end of summer in NZ, because it must be our turn up here very soon!

Adam

Prague II

Hi everyone,

I'd kind of forgotten about this blog, but I'm going to revive it a bit somehow. To start, I'd like to talk about my trip to Prague last weekend.

I visited Prague 1.5 years ago, you may remember that I was disappointed that the famous astronomical clock was out of order that time. I declared "I'll be back, astronomical clock!", so when my flatmate Abiah wanted to visit for her birthday, how could I say no?

The key words this trip were; sun, cold beer, tourists, amazing architecture. My flatmate Mirko spent 6 months studying in Prague, so he knew all the tourist sights, and was a great tour guide. We basically spent the weekend walking the streets, admiring the sights, stopping when it got too hot for some beer and Czech cuisine. The tipping proved to be a bit of a challenge, I think we managed to offend every waiter we encountered, by tipping too much, too little, paying with discontinued banknotes, only ordering drinks in a restaurant, and paying 10x too little at one place.

The gang in front of the cathedral thing.

When we weren't eating, we checked out the big castle, the smaller castle, the bridge, and the ASTRONOMICAL CLOCK!!! We were there at quarter to 12, and there were already 1000 people waiting for it to chime. I have to say, when the moment finally arrived, and all the puppets started doing their things, it was a little underwhelming. But anyway, been there, done that. Tick.

Me and the clock.

That was basically Prague, we caught a train back on Sunday evening (with broken air conditioning, no seat reservation, and halfway they halved the size of the train because of malfunctioning breaks - but they didn't halve the number of people in the train). Good times!

The train was rather full.

Hope all of you are well, I love hearing what you're up to.

Adam

Christmas in Romania

So again its been much too long between posts. Sorry!

But anyway, it was great to catch up with many of you in November, only far too short. It was a bit of a shock coming back to the middle of one of the coldest winters in Europe for quite a few years (that's also what they said about last winter, but). We had a few weeks when the temperature hovered around -15 C - and quite a bit of snow too. It's warmed up now (a balmy 10 C today!), and only a few piles of snow remain. The other day, after a week of -10 C, so the ground was really cold, it started raining really lightly about 8am. As soon as the rain hit the ground, it froze solid instantly. So 8 it was a normal morning, by 8.30 every surface in Potsdam was covered with a few millimetres of the slipperiest ice I've ever seen. Cars were abandoned on the street where they stopped (a few dozen metres from where they started breaking), buses gave up and had smoko. One woman on the news fell over and broke her arm, so decided to go home because it was too dangerous, and on the way home, she fell over and broke her other arm. Ow! It thawed a bit by about 11, and most people could get to work.

But I'm getting distracted here, I'm meant to be talking about Romania. Me and my flatmate (from America USA) decided that as we were both not going home for Xmas, we should go somewhere a bit exotic, not just chill out in Potsdam. After a bit of deliberating we decided on Romania. People ask "why Romania?" and I reply "why not?". Then they often say that it's a horrible country, full of stray dogs, poverty, vampires, and bad roads. We ignored them (maybe because we'd booked tickets already) and went with an open mind (because the guide book I ordered on Amazon didn't arrive in time).

Well, we tried to go! Lots of snow all over Europe had thrown the airports into chaos. We checked if our flight to Munich was on time the night before we were meant to leave, to be greeted with a red "cancelled". Lufthansa had, I reckon, taken their phone off the hook so we found a train that would arrive in Munich 3h before our connecting flight to Bucharest. It was a 10h night train, so we had to pack really quickly and run to the train station, were we found it was 20min delayed, then 30min, then 40min, then I realised I forgot my passport! I found a taxi and asked him to speed to my flat, where I found my passport in about 15 seconds, and jumped back into the taxi so fast I broke the button on my pants! Racing back to the train station, I got a txt from Abiah saying the train was another 20min delayed. Phew! The train arrived, got a bed, woke up in the morning to the announcement that they were 2.5h delayed. Called Lufthansa (they were by now answering their phone), they booked us on a flight in the afternoon. Yay! Then they called back to say they only got one of us a ticket on that flight, the second ticket was snapped up by someone else while they booked the first one. At the airport we lined up for an hour or so and somehow both got boarding passes, and made in the Romania!

Romania in pictures:

Typical Bucharest cityscape.

An old fortress we visited. It was pretty run-down, but they'd repaired bits of it and had gift shops in these bits.

Brasov "Hollywood" sign on the hill above the cathedral.

Christmas dinner in the hostel. Note the 2.5L bottles of beer which cost less than $2!

Stray puppies!

The view from Dracula's castle.

After far too few days in Bucharest, our flight to Munich was an hour delayed, so of course we (just!!!) missed our connection in Munich. It was the last flight of the day, so we got put up in a hotel for the night. Got up at something like 5 the next morning, and made it to Berlin. Yay! We were joking that the only thing that could still go wrong is that they could lose our bags... And yup, you guessed it, as everyone else collects their bags and leaves, we are left by an empty luggage carousel. By the time we report them missing, I've well and truly missed my train to Czech Republic - but I'm gunna have to make that holiday a different story.

So in summary, Romania was awesome! I really like the people, the countryside is absolutely spectacular (must be mindblowing in summer), and the cities are no uglier than so many others. I definitely got the feeling that the people remember very vividly when life wasn't so good, so although they're still not living in luxury by our standards, they appreciate everything they have. And Lufthansa found our bags after 2 weeks!

Thanks for reading, I'd love to hear about your Christmases and stuff!