Finally…..

…the waiting’s over. After I don’t kow how many weeks I’ve decided to update my blog so that the rest of the world can catch up with what I’ve been up to. First of all: It’s spring and with spring came some changes. As you can see below, the rabbit moved in about two months ago.

There you go.

Then, flying season’s started and the easter weekend was awesome weatherwise, which we took advantage of and kicked off the cross country gliding season with one 370 and one 380 km flights. Not stellar, but not bad for April.

See here.

Also, even farther back in time, I spent one week flying in the Italian Alps, in Sondrio, to be exact. Basically, the weather was great the whole week that I was there, except for one day. In the gallery above, see some impressions of the Swiss and Italian mountains, as seen from up to 4600 m MSL.

Lots of activities, not a lot of coverage. That’s just because I’m too lazy to hack everything into my computer at the end of a busy day. All I know is that I’ll be sitting in planes most of this year, because I feel I have some catching up to do. Everything else just really isn’t that important 😉 Just kidding. Of course working my ass of on a 20 page thesis is important, and of course working in general is important, it’s just never as much fun as spending time flying;)

Another thing that matters is the band, and we’re getting ready to record our first songs right now, so I guess there’ll be news on that pretty soon. Actually I’m in two bands right now, one of which (Adjust The Sun, y’all) plays some Melodic Death Metal with Progressive influences and the other (Aeons Rest) plays – well….Rock. Imagine it like a blend of Stone Sour, Alter Bridge and Tool. Tool without the uneven time signatures.

So much for now, I’m out, stay tuned!

Get rabbit…

…for the ready! Ehm, whatever, anyway: Come this Friday, the waiting is over and my old, faithful Passat will be crushed to a handy piece of aluminum foil. After 5 years of high maintenance, it’s time to change to something less prone to breaking every once in a while.

More facts on Friday!

On French cars….

Well, a little add-on is required since I test-drove the new Mazda 2 Sport fit for fun edition today. At first I was sceptical if I would even fit into that little thingy, but I was more than pleasantly surprised by pretty much everything it had to offer. 86 hp, aluminum rims, sporty front and rear fenders and enough room for a driver, a co-pilot and – that is if you flip the rear seats – enough space to accomodate more than enough luggage. And/or beer. Plus, it handles pretty well. Overall, pretty neat.

The Mazda 2 Sport

Project Full Beard and the end of the semester…

Yeah, I never really was a friend of shaving. Neither did I ever really look good with a beard. Not that I ever tried growing it as long as to actually be able to call it that. But now that I’ve realized that – bearded or not – I don’t need to visually please anyone, because the semester’s over, it has become time to relaunch ‚project full beard‘. And I don’t care if anyone finds this interesting, I just thought it was something worth sharing since nothing much apart from that is going on in my life right now. The semester’s over, as mentioned above, the first two exams have been taken, I have (at least) two theses to write and spring’s a long way down the road. In March, I’m headed for Sondrio, Italy to do some alpine soaring and I’ve officially NOT registered for my pedagogy and psychology state exam, which means I’m taking it next year. So much for my tremendous progress college-wise.

The German government has come up with a nice little plan to motivate people to buy new cars. They call it „Abwrackprämie“ (wrecking bonus) – candidate for ‚word of the year‘. In short, it goes like this: If you own a car that is older than nine years, you’re paid 2.500 Euros if you put it to rest on a car graveyard (or send it to car heaven, to put it more euphemistically) and buy a new one. On top of that, if the new car you buy fulfills certain environmental requirements, you don’t have to pay taxes for two years. That means: it was never this cheap to buy a new car.

Here’s my personal favorite:

Peugeot 207

…..Peugeot gives you another 1000 bucks if you buy one of their cars.

’nother one?

Peugeot 207 in red

There’s just two problems I’m facing now: 1) Who’ll pay? I’m a poor student, I don’t have money of my own. Donations welcome! 😉 2) How am I going to transport everything that I used to be able to transport in my Passat in this little thing?

Time will tell….

Sorry to everyone who felt neglected during the last few months…

…most importantly to Meredith, who I hope isn’t too upset now that I’ve been such a jerk and never called. I actually talked to Mike on the phone not too long ago and told him to say hello to everyone…of course that’s no excuse for being mainly concerned with myself. A short summary of stuff that I’ve been up to lately:

1) Read and prepare tons of texts for college

2) Prepare and give two lessons in school – that sucked really badly, by the way…

3) Prepare my lesson for my club’s winter theory course

4) Attend several glider-related meetings

5) Find time to relax and not go insane

….and that was only the most important things I could think of right now.

Then there’s band rehearsals, trying to write music, discovering that my skills are too limited for the stuff I want to play…and so on.

And now that all the hassle is finally coming to a pause, the holiday season starts and I’ll have to run around town and buy Christmas gifts, send emails and cards (naa, just emails…) and hope that it’s all over soon. I friggin‘ hate Christmas…Everyone’s trying to show their generosity by donating to charity while the rest of the year they don’t give a rat’s ass if there are poor disabled children dying of some unknown and/or uncurable disease in some orphan’s home in Nigeria… The good thing about this time of year is that there’s mulled wine in abundance and by tactically placing the Christmas market close to college, the town has given valuable excuses to students to show up drunk to class. Not that I would ever attend class after the consumption of alcoholic beverages. Or consume alcolholic beverages before going to class.

Whatever happens in the next few days – which will most likely be Christmas shopping insanity – I’ll keep ya updated. And maybe I’ll even find the time to call.

Go Phillies !!!!!

Yeeeah, they did it! Geez, I’m proud of the Phils, even though I don’t know anything about Baseball in general or the Phillies in particular. Only thing I know- they won the world series, the last time that happened was in 1980 and all Philly is going nuts at the moment. Judging by the emails I’ve been getting, there won’t be anything useful to do with you guys over in RA for the next few days. Thank god it’s weekend.

That, and Halloween (I’m expecting dumb German trick-or-treaters any minute, who haven’t really understood the concept of tricking-or-treating, since it’s pretty darn useless to beg for treats, then move on with nothing in hands and NOT playing a trick….it’s obvious that Halloween has no tradition here).

That said, I hope that everything’s going well over in PA and that the celebrations will be AWESOME! Wish I was there – I’m at least wearing my Phillies shirt tonight – REPRESENT!!! Also: When’s one of you guys coming over to Germany again? I need more Tastykakes and some more stuff that I can’t really get here – like Dr.Pepper 😉

And to round up this entry with something dull and boring: I need to write an exposé for one of my seminars, along with an outline of two horrendously pointless texts. But then, I’m off to Jon’s party. And boy, have we got one hell of a present for you.

Peace out, bitches!

….as you may have noticed…

…there is a change in layout to marvel at on this page. Instead of the Philadelphia skyline as seen from the Schuylkill Expressway, you are now looking at a panorama of the ‚Altstädter Kirchenplatz‘ in Erlangen. This has to do with the fact that I am now back in Erlangen and after two weeks of getting everything back in place (most of all my sense of day and night), there’s nothing really new to mention. The town still looks the same, the people I’ve met up to this point haven’t changed and it seems that time might just as well have been suspended for seven months in Erlangen while it went at a faster pace elsewhere. It’s really hard to think back on half a year of new impressions, new encounters and life-changing experiences when you come back to just the same old dull crap and all that you’ve seen seems to be overshadowed by this uncanny reluctancy to evolve. But before I get too philosophical, let’s look at the good things: I’m back in the arms of mother S, and apparently, I’m being missed somewhere…Just admit it, there’s simply no cooler person than myself 😀

Meanwhile, school has started again and it already seems that all my good intentions (study more, harder and more efficient) were only intentions and not implementable in everyday college life. I’m already now way behind in my reading assignments and I’m taking way too many classes. Some will have to be postponed to a later semester because with all the other stuff I’m up to – working, playing music, working in the shop at the airfield in winter, preparing my lesson for the winter gliding theory course etc. pp. – there’s not really time to devote enough attention to ALL the classes I wanted to take. We’ll see how it works out, latest in January, when I’m drowning in work for my term papers.

Oh and by the way: M, you need to update your blog more often…you don’t want me to get outta touch, do ya? Anyway, I’m off to the library now, I need to get a grip on all this reading material somehow.

Peace, I’m out.

The old world…

Finally, a week after getting back, I now find the time to write something. As you all may know, I arrived back home a week ago on Saturday and spent pretty much the whole of the week recovering from the after-effects of my jet lag, seeing all kinds of people and taking care of a few university-related stuff. So, I didn’t really have time to sit down and elaborate about my thoughts. I am dead tired today, so this won’t be a long entry either, but this week should offer some spare time for me to really post something that’s more worth your while. Also, I hope that you guys over in America aren’t upset that I didn’t call on Thursday, like I had promised on Tuesday. But weren’t you on that site visit anyway? Whatever, I’m sure I’ll get around to both calling and writing something this week. And now I’m off to bed.

Have a great rest of the Sunday!

Props to whom props are due….

As you may know, my time here in the US is running out. I have exactly four days left until flight LH427 takes me back home – or at least to the place where I happen to live. For seven months, this was my home away from home. And that’s where all the people come into play who make it feel like home for me. Now if that wasn’t a great introduction 😉

First and foremost, I need to thank everyone who contributed to my awesome farewell lunch on Friday and the totally unexpected gift. That totally blew me away and I would once again like to thank everyone involved and especially whoever came up with the idea….(M?)

Which leads me to my personal props section, which I have promised to do for a long time but now finally get to do.

Let’s start with Kate, because she was actually the person enabling me to come here in the first place. Unfortunately, I did not have the pleasure working under her for the whole period of my internship. I thank you for giving me this possibility and for the knowledge I was able to gain, not only on the ‚regulatory professional‘ level 🙂 You always took the time to explain if something wasn’t clear (and I guess at the beginning that was quite a lot), and you always provided me with demanding tasks.

Probably, I was one of the few interns who had two managers over the course of his internship. Thanks Mike, I now have to walk to your office instead of just leaning over the cube wall if I need something;) No, seriously. Thanks for always patiently answering all my stupid questions, for letting me work on parts of the complaint process, for giving me the challenge of trying to figure out how to extract reliable information from the ‚random number generator‘ – and, of course, thanks for granting me the extra month over here!!! I guess we’ll just postpone the Kobe-steak dinner to some point when you’re over in Germany again.

Now to my favorite co-worker Meredith. Apart from making me get spoons, fill water bottles and pick up folders from the floor, you did so much more for me. Like waiting until one month before the official end of my internship to set me up for a date;) Also, I think most of our lunchbreaks would have been pretty lame without you (and your talent in choosing always the most appropriate conversational topics).

Then there’s Harald, aka Uncle Bad Touch. Thank you for always being able to lower the standard for any conversation, whatever the topic may be! Spaß beiseite, it was a pleasure working next to you and occasionally being able to switch to German. Some jokes just don’t translate into English (and vice versa)! Also, our consensus about the German ‚Spießbürgertum‘ is probably the best indicator that I should in fact move here.

Of course, I can’t go away without mentioning Joe, who introduced me to American specialties such as the meatloaf. Thank you for sharing some of your tremendous experience, both work related and private.

….and of course, thanks to all the other people I’ve had the pleasure meeting and working with!!!!!

Also, today we had a great farewell breakfast for Richie (another German – but not an intern – who will leave shortly) and me at the office, of which I’ve taken some photos. Thanks Mike for the very touching speech!

Pure awesomeness. I skipped lunch because I was so full.

An evening with….

Sometimes, you wonder what the odds are in things that happen to you. And yesterday I wondered a lot. I announced in my previous entry that there was an Opeth gig coming up at the Trocadero in Philadelphia. So we went there yesterday and after…well….enduring the two opening acts on the elevated tier area of the theater (the Troc obviously used to serve as a theater, judging from the interior), we ventured to the balcony bar on the first floor level and stood around for a while before we were going to move on to the downstairs pit area. Suddenly a bunch of people walk past us, headed for the VIP lounge area to the side of the stage. I thought: ‚Hey, that one guy looked familiar‘ … next thing you know, 5 minutes after that happened, a guy walks up to me and says something like: ‚Cool T-Shirt, was a hell of a show‘ – I was wearing my „Progressive Nation 2008“ tour t-shirt. Then he adds: ‚Did you see Mike Portnoy is here?‘ – And then it struck me: the guy who looked so familiar WAS in fact Mike Portnoy, drummer of the world’s best band, DREAM THEATER.

Now, it’s not a secret that MP is an Opeth fan – Opeth played on the Progressive Nation tour, and Mikael Akerfeldt did a guest appearance on Dream Theater’s last album Systematic Chaos (the spoken section in ‚Repentance‘). Also, Mike and Mikael did a video log for the Progressive Nation tour, where they discussed their affection for Prog Rock, the beginnings of their musical career and how they came to be fans of each other’s bands. Of course, both bands are signed with Roadrunner Records.

So far, so good. Witnessing Opeth live was again a great experience. The sound was mixed very well, the songs they played spanned a time from the ’96 album ‚Morningrise‘ to the 2008 record ‚Watershed‘ and even some more mellow tunes from ‚Damnation‘ made it into the set (only one, for that matter – ‚Hope Leaves‘). Singer and guitarist Mikael Akerfeldt’s announcements in between songs were short and meaningful, as usual.

After the show, we were just about to exit the building when Mike Portnoy crossed our path once again – only that this time, I yelled „Hey, Mike!“ – so he turns around, sees my shirt, says hello, shakes my hand and agrees to have a picture taken with me 🙂

So here it is…the proof that I met one of the greatest drummers in rock history, one of the most creative songwriters of our time and simply one of the most influential figures in modern rock music.

Of course, everyone was in a hurry and I didn’t get to ask any questions or appropriately express what meaning DT’s music has for me – but I’m sure he got that I’m a fan. Thanks Mike!