Personal journal

It is the first time I have been staying in a place with pop < 5000 and to speak with Feynman, there is a "plenty of space at the bottom", it is an interesting community - I enjoyed the atmosphere at the European Football Championship where significant parts of the village were assembled at the Hofkerb house. Now many people in the village is busy with farming (in particular, it is cherry picking season and the wheat gets harvested). The really nice wine (Riesling, Portugieser, St Laurent to name a few) of course is still under production.

I'll be off for a vacation for two weeks in among places the first time visit Zittau (between Czechia and Poland), to peek into an organon course ca 09-16 July. (Not I will be the participant.)

Time passes quickly ...

Once I became a bit more familiar with Nagoya, the project (as expected) ended and I had to return to Klein-Winternheim. The week before Easter I took off on a Seishun 18 kippu (the Japanese multiday equivalent of Schoenes Wochenende) and walked a bit in the Kiso Valley (Gifu/Nagano), by train passed Matsumoto and Hakuba (Nagano, a lot of snow there), Itoigawa (mountains + sea), visited a Chinese-speaking friend in Kaga (Ishikawa), and from Nagoya went home via Beijing (where I had some very good jiaozi at a friend and his family, incidentally Chinese-speaking too but that is a less noteworthy attribute in Beijing than in Kaga perhaps ...). Other highlights in Japan were the Tokyo/Spring 2008, the Tokugawa Art Museum (visited twice ...) and the Hokusai exhibition at Nagoya Art Museum, a nice lecture on solar cells in the German-Japanese society, and dear NBUG thanks for the soobetsukai with shiro. If you want to have German food in Nagoya, the Pilsen is not bad. As always, some more personal details are omitted here for privacy. BTW, recommended for anyone in Nagoya in August 2008: Open Source Conference Nagoya Sat 09 August 2008, 10:00-17:00 in the Nagaya Shiritsu Daigaku (I don't know whether it already has a web page). Now it's back to Klein-Winternheim (snow here) and back to work.

Resolution over new year (after having seen many old friends): communicate a bit more often (at least more often than every 10 years). Let's give the nanoblog program a try. Before raising too high expectations: this will remain low-frequency and short (but hopefully slightly more often than every 10 years, maybe one time a month or a quarter).

The obvious topic is a report on the travel over Japanese New Year ... The itinerary I did over the Japanese Shogatsu Yasumi was Nagoya - Hiroshima - Shimonoseki - Qingdao - Xian - Yangxian - Hanzhong - Guangyuan - Chengdu - Shanghai - Kobe - Osaka - Nagoya, ok some of these were very short stops ...

I saw many interesting persons in many places, both unknown before and known before (thanks to everyone in Sichuan, but also in Qingdao and Shanghai ...). Without wanting to go into to personal details, let's say (I mean that in a positive way) that the 10 years I had been out of China suddenly felt a lot less than that.

With the places it was different: arriving in Chengdu the bus driver announced Chengdu now had 13 million inhabitants (o.k. some of this was done by adding small suburbs that had previously been out of the city area), and with pride I must say that I did not recognize the city very much, so much has changed. A very minor random encounter on the road, but I like to put down it here was with a couple working in the Qingling mountain preservation area, they have done a quite good job at preserving the panda (and, as a Sichuan Univ professor later told me, also the Qingling crane).

On the Japanese side of things, it was nice to see a bit the more Mediterranian vegetation of South Japan, whereas visiting the Hiroshima Genbaku Koen (nuclear explosion memorial park) deep in a cold December night (one is alone at that time) gives some more eerie feelings about the fragility of the human condition ...

It is the first time I saw much real water in Asia (China had always been inside) and while I had been swimming some times in autumn on some Japanese sites all this was rather short. - Given the sometimes strenuous official relation between China and Japan, it was a very nice experience to go the way via ships (although I seem to have caught a bit of a cold one the retour way): one meets Chinese of all sorts who like Japan and Japanese of all sorts who like China.