...wo man sein Herz verliert...

The end

2007-08-14T21:13:00.000+02:00

[for English, scroll down]

Irgendwie habe ich mir noch nicht ganz realisiert, dass ich aus Heidelberg weg bin. Das heißt, ich weiß schon, dass ich nicht in Heidelberg bin, aber im Moment fühlt es, als wäre ich nicht wirklich zu Hause, sondern im Urlaub. Und obwohl ich schon früher aus Heidelberg weg war, im Urlaub, ist es diesmal anders: ich bin weg, und weiß nicht, wann ich zurückkommen werde. Und das gilt auch für die meisten meiner Heidelberger Freunde; sie haben sich wieder über die ganze Welt verbreitet (naja, hauptsächlich Europa und Nordamerika). Diese Gedanke verursacht Gefühle wie dieses (bitte runterscrollen), obwohl ich bezüglich der Beobachtung unter dem gleichen Link wahrscheinlich dieser Kategorie zugeordnet werden soll (A.: danke für deinen Text; er passt komplett).

Jetzt bin ich aber aus Heidelberg weg, und ist mein Austauschaufenthalt zu Ende. Dieses Weblog hat damit seinen Sinn mehr oder weniger verloren; die Leute daheim (ihr also) sind jetzt größtenteils wieder nahe genug, um regelmäßig mit ihnen sprechen zu können, und ich kann leider keine interessante Beobachtungen mehr aus dem Deutschen übermitteln. Also ist mit dieser Post auch das Weblog zu Ende. Vielleicht, dass ich auf einem anderen Weblog weiterschreiben werde, z.B. für meine ausländische Freunde (und um mein deutsches Schreiben zu üben); in dem Fall werde ich euch auch Bescheid sagen. Aber jetzt: Dank an allen Lesern, dass ihr es mit meinen Schreibereien ausgehalten habt, es war mir ein Vergnügen, sie zu schreiben.

[für Deutsch bitte hochscrollen]

I don't seem to have fully realised that I've left Heidelberg yet. Of course I know I'm not there, but whereever I am at the moment feels temporary, like a holiday. And although I've been away from Heidelberg before, it's different this time; I'm gone, and so are most of my Heidelberger friends. They have spread out over the world (well, Europe and North-America, mostly) again. The thought engenders this type (scroll down) of feelings in me, although I think I would fall into this category with regard to the observation under the first link (thanks to A. for providing ready-made text).

I have left Heidelberg, however, and my exchange is over. This deprives this weblog of its main raison d'être; the `people at home' (you, that is) are close enough again for me to be able to relate my adventures in person, and I don't have any interesting anecdotes from the German lands to tell you anymore. So, with this post, this weblog also ends. Maybe I will continue to write on another weblog, for my foreign friends (and also to practise my German); in that case I will let you know. But for now: thanks to all readers, for putting up with my ramblings; it was a pleasure to write them.

Update

2007-07-03T18:29:00.000+02:00

(for English, scroll down)

Da die letzte Post mehr als zwei Wochen alt ist, mal ein kleines Update. Klein, in dem Sinne, dass eigentlich keine große Sachen passiert sind in den letzten zwei Wochen. Die Chorproben sind jetzt länger und häufiger, da die Aufführungen fast da sind; die Bürokratie der Erasmus-Stipendien ist noch immer da, und hat einige neue (und sogar einige alte) Formulare von mir gefordert, die ich natürlich brav ausgefüllt und abgeschickt habe; ich habe gelernt, dass die Singularitäten von schwarzen Löchern zeitartig statt raumartig sind, und gesehen, dass die Gleichugen der QCD eigentlich länger sind, als ich sie gern hätte; und ich habe wieder eine Oper gesehen (La Traviata, die von meinem Freund Darryl zusammengefasst wurde mit den Worten 'sie stirbt am Ende...').

Das Wetter der letzten Wochen scheint eine Regelmäßigkeit, die ich schon vorher besprochen habe, fortzusetzen: die Saisons sind dieses Jahr zwei bis drei Monate zu früh. Hier zumindest: wir hatten während der letzten Wochen viel Regen, obwohl Heidelberg eine der trockneren Städten des Landes sein soll.

Zum Schluss: das Nachgeben der Motivation zum Studieren scheint nicht nur bei mir aufzutreten: es passiert immer öfter, dass Übungsaufgaben von keinem der Studenten gelöst werden. Ein Übungsgruppenleiter sagte dazu: 'Hat niemand das gelöst? Aber Jungs, was macht ihr dann den ganzen Tag?'

For those of you who don't like or understand German:

Seeing as the last post is more than two weeks old, it's time for a small update. Small, in the sense that no big things happened between two weeks ago and now. I've finalised (and partly redone) the bureaucracy around my Erasmus grant; choir rehearsals have continued and are becoming more frequent and longer now that the performances are approaching; I've learned about black holes and looked with some dismay at the length of the equations describing gauge theories, especially QCD; and I've seen another opera (La Traviata, aptly summarised by my friend Darryl with the words 'Sie stirbt am Ende...').

The weather of the last few weeks seems to continue a pattern I discussed earlier: the seasons seem to be about two to three months early, this year. At least here; we've had lots of rain during the last three weeks, in spite of the fact that Heidelberg is supposed to be one of the drier spots in the country.

To conclude: the lack of motivation to study I mentioned seems to be affecting other students as well: in the tutorials, more and more problems remain unsolved by students, leading one tutor to ask: 'Hat niemand das gelöst? Aber Jungs, was macht ihr dann den ganzen Tag?'

Demonstration

2007-06-17T15:00:00.000+02:00

About a week and a half ago, in Heiligendamm, there was a G8 summit, accompanied by the usual demonstrations, skirmishes between demonstrators and police, arrests, and other newsworthy stuff. Last Friday, it turned out that although the summit has long ended, the demonstrators and police are still going strong. On the Universitätsplatz, some people were braving the drizzle and handing out small leaflets complaining about the treatment of the demonstrators by the police, and calling for a human rights commision to be installed, whose duty it would be to check that the police abide by the laws they claim to uphold. I also got a leaflet, and looked at it, whereupon the person who gave it to me said: "I don't know what's in there, I'm just drinking beer [showed me his bottle] and handing out leaflets."
I went into a shop to buy something, and when I came out again, I found some fifteem policemen in pure green uniforms¹ idly standing by and watching a demonstration of about five people with signs around their necks (I unfortunately forgot to read them). I asked what was going on, and a lady standing next to me cheerily informed me that 'we were being checked'. As I did not have a Personalausweis with me, although foreigners should always have one at hand, I did not share her apparent feelings on this. It turned out, however, that only the participants in the demonstration were being checked, since they had not requested permission to proceed with this demonstration from the local authorities. The officer who told me this said: "It's no big deal, they can go on demonstrating, but we'll just take down their names." I stayed a while, to see whether anything would happen, but when after five minutes nothing noteworthy had taken place, I decided to go home.
On the whole, I felt this 'clash' was best described by the German word 'gemütlich'.

¹The German police wear green, but these uniforms were slightly different from the ones worn by the usual patrols. Maybe they were riot police...

Midterm fatigue

2007-06-17T14:27:00.000+02:00

At UC, people always used to (and probably still do) hail an approaching midterm break with comments like 'it's high time,' or something to that effect. Although I often shared this feeling, I could never help wondering what would happen without the break. The old and venerable Ruperto Carola¹, standing firm against such modern hupsafladder² as breaks in the middle of term (except if there is a real reason, such as Christmas), presented me with the chance to find out.
I don't know whether it is that I have become accustomed to being able to do nothing for at least one in eight weeks as a consequence of being pampered at school and in college, or that I am just lacking the inner fire that is required to push further the boundaries of human knowledge, or that I am just lazy, but I do notice a distinct drop in motivation, after nine weeks' going. I now need to tell myself to sit down and do my homework, even though the homework itself has not become more or less time-consuming, interesting, boring, or enlightening than it was at the beginning of term.
So, apparently, if this small sample (N = 1) can be taken as representative, the welcoming of the midterm breaks at UC was justified on my part.

¹Officially, the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.
²Dutch readers unfamiliar with the work of Marten Toonder: shame on you. Non-Dutch readers: hupsafladder is a Dutch word coined in the 1970s by Marten Toonder, a Dutch author whose work enjoys high popularity and quotation rates in my family, roughly meaning the opposite of 'old and venerable'.

Choir weekend

2007-06-11T22:57:00.000+02:00

Singing. Tired. Nice music. Party. Warm. Continually dry throat. In short: choir weekend (in June).
The usual ingredients were there: lots of singing; a party on Saturday evening; decidedly less than the optimal amount of sleep; doing the warming up an octave down on Sunday morning; etc...
Some things were different than last time: there was much less dancing at the party this time, and more talking outside, to avoid getting altogether dehydrated. The bass sectionals were in the chapel of the place where we were staying (something church-related), so the guy leading our sectional got to play the organ instead of the usual second- to third-rate keyboard also known as Gummiklavier. Which was nice: when we were falling asleep, he would just play the orchestra's part, with all four limbs, and we would quickly return to singing to make him stop :).
People seem to be more confident that the performances are going to be good. It's justified, I think: we know the music much better than last term at this point, and simply have less to learn in total. This piece is usually four-voiced, sometimes five; last term, we had something usually six-voiced, sometimes four, sometimes ten. And this time, people know the lyrics already.

Of course, some things were the same; as the conductor said: "Singen wir jetzt das Lied über den Dirigenten: `dieser Mensch hört nicht auf zu reden Lästerworte'..."

QED, at last

2007-06-07T18:40:00.000+02:00

After 3/4 academic year studying general principles of quantum field theories with examples from toy theories like φ⁴, we have finally come to quantum electrodynamics (and QCD and QFD), to the real world! Not that it looks very different, more real or something, but at least we are talking about electrons instead of undefined 'particles'. Again, not that electrons are that well-defined (elementary particles are still a bit of a mystery to me), but still, they make up much of our bodies, for example. And that makes the whole topic feel more 'real', in a sense. It's nice :).

More music

2007-06-05T14:18:00.000+02:00

Slightly delayed: I've seen the Wise Guys :). Last weekend, in Rennerod, which is located am Arsch der Welt, as I was told by a stranger on the Limburg am Lahn train station. Apparently, the German public transport system agrees: it took me the better part of the afternoon to get there by train and bus, and only two hours to get back by car. Interestingly, despite this unfavourable location, the audience consisted mainly of people not from Rennerod, if I remember the poll results¹ correctly.
The show was as good as usual, funny, well-sung, generally well-presented, with a nice mix of old and new songs. Unfortunately they again didn't sing Achtung! ich will tanzen; I've been hoping to see this one for three shows now, but hitherto in vain. The other slight drawback was that the audience was clapping the rhythms of most songs very enthousiastically, which made the songs themselves a little hard to hear at times. On the other hand, the audience's Schunkeln during this song was all the more real :), especially as it was a standing concert.

I have also seen Don Giovanni, which was refreshingly easy to follow, both story-wise and musically. On the other hand, it did at times seem to become just a comical series of very well-performed songs. It strongly reminded me of professor Kügle's² remark that Mozart effectively integrated the opera seria and opera buffa genres: most of Don Giovanni's scenes were obviously intended comically, whereas Donna Anna and consorts seemed to come from the standard early 18^th-century Italian opera.
On the whole, I felt that it was a very suitable opera for newbies like me, precisely due to this mixing of comical and serious genres, and the relative lightness of the music. There is probably much more to be found in there that I didn't notice yet, but it was nice to see nonetheless.

¹They always conduct a small poll on the audience's geographical and age distributions and familiarity with their music.
²From Utrecht, taught the course on Western music history I took at UC which is the source for most of my amateur musicological ramblings ;p.

Badezimmertürschloss

2007-05-27T13:05:00.000+02:00

The lock of our bathroom door had not been functioning since December or so. We had told our landlord, Studentenwerk, and they had promised to send someone. And so they did, in February. Someone came, inspected our door, and concluded that the lock didn't function, probably on account of the door being bent. They said someone else would come, at some later date, and fix it.
When I came back, mid April, nothing had changed yet. Then, a month later, a note appeared on our door, saying that on the 25th of May, someone would come and actually fix the lock. Interestingly, by this time, the lock was functioning again. We attributed this to the warm weather, and decided to wait for the promised handyman nonetheless. And on the 25th, someone came, with a ruler, a screwdriver, and a new door. After some measuring and investigating of hinges, the problem turned out to be that our door was simply too small, so the lock just didn't hold.¹ Some more measuring and investigating of other hinges revealed that the new door he had been given was exactly the same size as the old one, but with different hinges. Mist.
The handyman implemented a temporary solution by putting some pieces of wood between the wall and the doorpost, and now the lock works. Studentenwerk promised that, at some later time, someone would come to replace this temporary solution with a more final one (silicone instead of bits of wood), which, to my surprise, happened the very next day (I wasn't there, but the silicone is there now).

The Hausmeister told me that some other people in this building, who had had similar complaints, had been much more insistent on seeing repairs done than we. He had, unfortunately, not been able to help them directly, because Studentenwerk doesn't own the building, but rents it. With a limited guarantee period, after the end of which Studentenwerk will be responsible for the state of the building. So they actually want us to complain when something is wrong, in order to be able to tell the owner of the building to do something about it, but not too much, since they ultimately can't do that much, either. Simplicity is still not the Germans' strongest point...

¹ The weather explanation was probably correct after all ;).

Impressions of an untrained opera visitor

2007-05-26T17:51:00.000+02:00

In another attempt at getting cultured, I've recently seen performances of Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor.

Random impressions:

I kept thinking that Cio-Cio-San's husband was Italian, given the facts that he sung in Italian, looked like an Italian, and at least behaved like a stereotypical one. But he was supposed to be an American naval officer visiting Japan.
After the bonze's scene, where he casts Cio-Cio-San out of the family, I kept hoping to see him back; his anger was impressive. He didn't come back, though; she remained outcast until she committed harakiri, which was the natural end of the opera.

Before going to Lucia di Lammermoor, I had been warned that bel canto opera could be a bit kitschy at times. And so it was. The story was of the calibre of The Castle of Otranto, but without the ghosts, and many of the arias seemed to be written solely for the purpose of showing off how high the sopranos and tenors could come. The phrase 'Disney for grown-ups' came to my mind a few times.¹ However, the nice thing about Disney is that the songs are usually well-written, especially if one ignores the lyrics; this held for the opera as well. At times, five soloists, the orchestra and the choir were all singing or playing simultaneously, but in such a way that the sound still made sense to me, and that I even liked it.
Lucia sang so well, that despite the fact that she was obviously showing off, I actually felt pity for her. I suppose that also says something about me², and perhaps about Donizetti's composing³. Enrico also sang very well, and he looked like an interesting combination of a Scottish laird and a grown-up former punk youth.
The staging showed a combination of technique and minimalism: on the one hand, there was a rotating stage with a pond that rose out of and sunk back into the floor, and on the other, the backsides of stage screens were used to symbolise what I interpreted as the walls of primitive Scottish castle chambers.

In general, I was surprised every time the audience started applauding in the middle of an act, but apparently this is common practice after well-known arias. I feel excused, since I neither knew those well-known arias, nor the opera visitors' etiquette. To me, it just looked like an interruption of the story; I would not start applauding in the middle of a play after a well-known monologue, either. Then again, in these operas, the drama often came second in the order of importance, at a safe distance behind the music. And the arias were impressive.
I have the idea that I'm slowly getting used to hearing operatic singing, in the sense that lots of vibrato does not disturb me like it used to anymore. It's nice: now I can devote my attention to other aspects of the performance, and those turn out to be generally pleasant :).

¹Of course, this was immediately followed by mental apologies to Donizetti for historical incorrectness: Disney is perhaps like modern bel canto opera for children.
²What it says about me is left as an exercise for the reader :p.
³Quasi quantum-physically, one could say that it says something about the entangled system consisting of Lucia's singing, Donizetti's composing, and me, but that the information about the individual constituting components cannot be retrieved...

Internet in Germany (3)

2007-05-19T17:15:00.000+02:00

Last week Friday, the wireless network part of my modem stopped working. I didn't notice, since I use a cable, but the people I'm sharing my connection with did notice. After having tried out everything that came to mind, I just went to my ISP, and told them what was wrong: internet access via cable was fine, but wireless just wouldn't work. They said 'the wireless part of your modem must be broken; you'll get a new one. It should be there in three days.' I was slightly surprised, given my earlier experiences in trying to get something done by them, but happily accepted.
I was even more surprised when indeed after three working days, but on a Saturday, I actually got my new modem. And when it turned out to work, and not take hours to get the network running again, I could hardly believe what was happening.
Apparently, their service just takes some time to get warmed up.

P.S.: Half an hour later, I already found myself getting used to the idea that these things run smoothly here as well. I'll just hope nothing will happen until August...

Smoelenboeken

2007-05-14T22:12:00.000+02:00

They seem to be popping up everywhere... Even without a strong innate tendency to sign up to this type of thing, my count is at three so far (the UC (alumni) version, the original, and the one for German university students), as many as I have e-mailaddresses¹, for example. And although I am not collecting e-mailaddresses, either, I do think having a few different ones can be very useful. Judging by the average content of, say, a wall post² on one of these things, their main purpose seems to be keeping people off their work, studies, or whatever other ostensibly useful activity they might undertake in their absence. They of course also serve their originally intended purpose (keeping track of/contact with geographically distant people), but as with many inventions, the intended and actual use seem to be two different, quite unrelated things.
However, being as I am caught in their webs now, I will just have to live with another continuous good resolution: not to waste too much time on them :). Always look on the bright side of life...

In any case: you know where to find me.

¹I must be honest here: I have more than three e-mailadresses. But only three which I check with a measure of regularity, and that is a better secundum comparationis here, I think.
²Loesje, if you're reading this: yours were brilliant :).

The Crüxshadows

2007-05-10T00:32:00.000+02:00

...are known for their interactive and lively shows. I had seen one, in Utrecht, two years ago, where the singer came to the stage through the crowd. Later, he sang standing on a barstool somewhere on the dancefloor, danced with people from the audience, and walked around the floor while singing. They also had two dancers (one of which was the tour manager) on stage, presenting a danced interpretation of the music.
Tonight, they were playing a club in Heidelberg, which had a rather small stage. This didn't turn out to be much of a problem: the singer just spent half of the time off-stage, in the crowd. At the end, he invited all those near the stage (including yours truly) to come on-stage and dance, and then the stage turned out to be bigger than thought :).
Apart from the singer and dancers, they have a Keyboardspielerin, a guitarist, and a violinist. The latter held her facial expression constant, neutral and concentrated during the entire show. This had a rather funny effect when the entire band was synchronously jumping up and down to the rhythm of the music: imagine a small girl, in an even smaller gothic outfit, with a minimalist electric violin, playing, with a concentrated look on her face, and jumping up and down.
Although the band is American, the singer, having lived in Germany for some time, bravely tried to do the presentation in German. With moderate success: the people definitely understood him, and appreciated the attempt. And didn't need much presentation: the show was good enough. This time, the dancers had made themselves to look quite alike: apart from wearing the same costume, the normally black-haired one was blonde as well today...
And then, of course, as is always the case with goth concerts, the audience itself was nice to look at as well :).

Studiengebühren

2007-05-07T17:04:00.000+02:00

This term, students at Heidelberg University have to pay tuition fees for the first time in history. Last term, this caused numerous protest actions, calls for boycotting, and other signs of discontentment. Apparently, the university administration did take these seriously to some degree: now, whenever a library extends its opening hours or some similar improvement is mentioned, it is phrased as 'thanks to the tuition fees you are paying, we can now offer you this service'.

Of course, students are still complaining, since the main problem area (shortage of teaching staff, especially in the humanities) has not yet seen any improvement. This is in part due to an interesting law, which says that the universities, being state-funded institutions, have to admit a certain number of students, based on their estimated capacity. So hiring extra staff means having to admit more students. I'm curious how and when this problem is going to be solved...

Concerts Capella Carolina

2007-05-04T22:29:00.000+02:00

For those who are planning to be around Heidelberg at the time: this semester, my choir's concerts will be:

on the 8th of July, in the Peterskirche, Heidelberg
on the 15th of July, in the Eglise Abbiatale, Ebersmunster (yes, France)

We will sing Mendelssohn's oratorio Paulus. Although it was written in the first half of the 19^th century, it often sounds quite Baroque to my unschooled ears. Fugues, relatively limited use of dynamics (at least in comparison to last semester's Rachmaninov), fairly fixed and standard ranges for the various voices, and accidentals only in places where they make for interesting chord progressions.
Still, it probably is relatively Romantic Baroque music; at one point, the conductor, dissatisfied with our timing of a fermata, told us: "That is a Romantic fermata, not a Baroque one!" meaning it should be longer...
At any rate, it's nice music. You're all warmly recommended to come and listen: I believe these concerts are actually going to be good. There is more attention for details than last semester, since the music is simpler and easier to sing (hardly any voice divisions, and an orchestra to keep the pitch for us). And it's going to be recorded, there is going to be an actual CD, which the choir board actually intend to sell to people :).

P.S.: To UC people: sorry for the pun in the title, but I just wanted Heidelberg to have a CCC as well :p.

Walpurgisnacht

2007-05-01T22:39:00.000+02:00

The night on which the witches celebrate the coming of the horned God with a dance on the Blocksberg. Closely related to the Celtic Beltane, the welcoming of the summer. In Heidelberg, it is celebrated in the Thingstätte on the Heiligenberg, with a huge night-long picnic party adorned by fire artists and folky music.
According to the local wiki, up to 15 000 people walk up the mountain every year. Most of those 15 000 bring things, to eat and drink, to sit on, to perform with or to put on if it gets cold, which makes it a very rich terrain for pickpockets and other small independent entrepreneurs. Again according to local statistics, about one in three people has something stolen.
Historically, it was a very interesting occasion. Beltane was clearly present, in the fire and the music and the night-long celebration. There is a Christian saint, Valpurga, who gave her name to the night, which fortuitously coincides with the Hexennacht, the night of the witches' dance on Blocksberg. On the modern side, the Thingstätte was built in the 1930s by the Nazis, with some supposedly old and pagan, Germanic, ideas and ideals. But best of all: it is the night before Labour Day, May 1, which is an official holiday in Germany, enabling people to suspend sleep and spend the night on the mountain. A combination of pagan summer-welcoming rituals, a Christian saint, a medieval witch-dance, a Nazi amphitheatre and a socialist holiday! Apparently, appropriation of holidays is not purely a thing of the missionary past...

Cosmology

2007-04-26T17:43:00.000+02:00

For those interested in astrophysics and cosmology: some comments on their scientific status from professor Bartelmann, who teaches the cosmology course I'm taking here.

"Neither is a science in the traditional sense of the word, as no experiments are being conducted. One does not take a dust cloud, let it collapse into a star and observe when nuclear fusion begins. Nor does one repeat the Big Bang very often in laboratory settings to see how it generally works. Astronomy has the excuse of having very many stars to observe, and thus, assuming spacetime translation invariance, in a sense very often repeating the long-lasting experiment that constitutes a star's life, but cosmology has nothing to go by. Only one object to study, and both its temporal and spatial scales vastly larger than any that can be considered within human range."

Still, people do research on stars, and the universe, and the results seem to make sense, at least for a large part. Of course, the geocentric hypothesis also seems to make sense, for a large part. Only there we know where it doesn't anymore; dark matter, dark energy, and cosmological constants are still a lot more fuzzy in that respect.
Cosmology is one of the fields of research where I often start to wonder why one would go into it at all, except out of pure curiosity. The practical benefits of knowing that we are close to the dark energy-dominated epoch are hard to find, especially since 'close' means 'close on the cosmic time scale', which is about 10¹⁰ years (i.e., humankind will in all likelihood have eradicated itself before 'we' would actually enter this epoch).

The funny thing is that of the courses I'm taking here, so far, cosmology seems the most practical one. The reason for this is of course that it uses results from theories that are developed in the other courses, which are therefore much more mathematical, but it still feels refreshingly 'applied'.

Driving

2007-04-26T17:41:00.000+02:00

Having failed my first driving exam, on Friday the 13th (what should I have expected :p), I set out in search of a German ending to my Dutch driving education. I went to two driving schools, and found out that finishing here would be about two to three times as expensive as in Holland. So I'll do the latter, but only in September, since I've already spent quite enough time in Holland for being on exchange.

One of the driving schools was located in Neckargemünd, a town about the size of Bilthoven, but considered a city nonetheless; they even have a city gate¹. I went there to get information, but found an old-fashioned classroom instead, stuffed with students, tables, chairs, blackboards with miniature traffic signs, two motorcycles, tyres, a tv set with old-fashioned videoplayer, and an old-fashioned, white-haired, white-sideburned teacher. I told him I would like to know how things would proceed here, were I to make an attempt at obtaining a driver's licence, to which he responded by getting an extra chair and introducing me to the class as Gasthörer.
What followed was a long and slow lecture on the laws regarding drunk driving in Germany. One of the students was asked to come up to the front and write down on the blackboard what the teacher was telling the students to copy into their notes. She must have found the task a bit boring, since she started drawing all kinds of decorations, like cars, bicycles, pigs on skateboards and pedestrians waving with flags.
Apparently, this is standard in Germany: driving schools arrange your theoretical exam, and don't let you take it without the standard 14 hours of instruction. Apart from that, there are 12 mandatory hours of Sonderfahrten, lessons at night, on the highway or in unknown terrain. This is what would make it rather time- and money-consuming for me to retake my exam here: I'd still have to go through those 12 hours, and take another theory test. In spite of the fact that a Dutch driving licence does allow one to drive in Germany...

¹They have only one gate, on the upstream (= non-Heidelberg) side of town, which made me wonder wether I was observing silent evidence to historical bullying on the part of Heidelberg, or just the consequences of modern city-planning. Or something completely different.

Courses

2007-04-22T23:39:00.000+02:00

This semester, I'll be taking:

Quantum Field Theory II. Still taught by Professor Schmidt , for whom I will still be typing up lecture notes. Basically a continuation of last term's course (QFT I).
General Relativity. The professor teaching it seems to be taking a fairly theoretically minded approach, which might be good, but also means I will probably get more math than I like to work through.
Cosmology. This will, based on the first week, be my favourite course. It's more accessible than the other two, I like the topic better, the teacher is a good lecturer, and for a change, I could actually work through the first exercise sheet with relative ease :).

All three professors have the relaxed attitude towards testing I mentioned last term: 'Just hand in your solutions to the exercises, and if necessary, we can do a small oral exam at the end of term.'

Jetzt ist Sommer

2007-04-16T13:46:00.000+02:00

After a premature spring, summer, too, seems to have found a way to fool the climatological clock. Cycling to the university, at 9:00 in the morning, even the thought of taking a coat seemed ridiculous. Cycling home, at 11:30, I found that shadowy spots offered the most agreeable temperatures. Yesterday, the sun surprised me by going down around 20:15, which seemed quite inappropriate given the temperature.
Not that I'm complaining, mind you. The mountains around the city look lovely green, the Neckarwiesen are an incarnate invitation to procrastinate and the Neckar itself is simply beautiful in the sun, so life in Heidelberg seems good. I did mean the remark about the sunset being inappropriately early, though: if the day is hot, then the evening should be long enough to be enjoyed outside, and make up for the afternoon spent in siesta. This attitude also seems to be taken by the Spaniards in the Schlierbacher Schiff, who are talking of nothing but parties.

All in all, I'm getting the feeling that maybe winter has really been skipped. I wonder what that means for July...

P.S.: This message means I'm back in Heidelberg, safely, in one piece, and alive, but not kicking (although someone proposed I join some kind of fighting course in the university sports centre).

Easter

2007-04-09T14:51:00.000+02:00

Χριστοσ ανεστι!

A voice, the source sometimes hidden behind the iconostasis, intoning the gospels in Greek, from time to time answered by a choir. Children playing, talking, mostly unchecked by their parents. People, holding candles (long hair is dangerous!), walking in and out all the time. Some are talking, once or twice someone goes out in haste to answer a mobile phone call, some sing along with the choir.

The Greek Orthodox Easter celebration I attended last Saturday in Utrecht was a good example of the Orthodox tendency towards piety and ritual, as opposed to the Western (both Protestant and Catholic) culture of scholarship and interpretation. No sermon, no explanation, but rituals, processions, and an affirmation of faith. The act of kissing the gospels is more important than being present during the rest of the service, which consists mainly of recitation of said gospels. Indeed, the number of people inside the church dropped markedly after this ritual, so that when at the end the remaining faithful went forward to receive communion, I felt quite alone in the back.
Quite in line with this general approach, almost all of the service was in Greek, even though probably about as many of those present understood Dutch as understood Greek. Only the Creed and the Lord's prayer were repeated in Dutch, as these were to be spoken along by the community.

This celebration seemed to have more characteristics of a social gathering than the traditional Calvinist church service that is my benchmark. It was, of course, still a service, but in such a way that walking in and out, and even talking, albeit softly, did not seem disturbing. It left, I think, more space for individual approaches, and would be very suitable for the modern Dutch, if it were less easily identifiable as a ritual.

Update

2007-03-07T22:38:00.000+01:00

For those who keep checking this weblog, in spite of my more or less implicit warning that there would not be much to look for until my return to Heidelberg: a small update.
I'm enjoying nice half-holidays in and around Utrecht, doing nothing, sleeping in, learning to drive, going through the bureaucracy surrounding driving licences in Holland, typing up lecture notes for QFT, and visiting the good old UC campus slightly more often than anticipated :p.

At the moment, I am slogging through Prof. Schmidt's derivation of the Feynman rules for Φ⁴-theory, trying to decipher his handwriting and wondering at his page-numbering (91, 92, 92, 92a, 93, 94, 94a, 95, 96, 97a, 97a, 97b, 97, 98,...). Apart from the fact that this means that I still am about halfway with last semester's material, if you get my drift, it makes keeping all the pages in the proper order rather tedious.

My other more or less organised activity is, as mentioned, learning to drive. Which is going more or less as planned: no accidents yet, enough mistakes to give me the idea there is some point in taking lessons, but also enough progress. What did not seem to be going quite as planned was the bureaucracy. According to the Dutch rules, in order to obtain a driving licence, one needs to have been registered as living in Holland at least 185 of the 365 days preceding the request. I learnt this today, 7 March. And I officially left the country on 6 September. Which is 182 days ago, i.e. two days too many. None of the institutions I called was able to tell me why this is, or how I might get around this rule. Luckily, I found out myself (having been enrolled at a Dutch educational institution counts as well), and was able to convince the right person to send me the right form.
Dutch bureaucracy is, after all, not all that different from its German counterpart as the Dutch might think, based on their stereotypes.

On a more highstanding cultural note, I have seen 'The complete works of William Shakespeare (abridged)' performed by seven UC students. It was very well done, and very funny :); see here for a video of a performance by the Reduced Shakespeare Company.

Paulus

2007-02-09T14:10:00.000+01:00

Next semester, the Capella Carolina will be singing Mendelssohn's Paulus, which is probably a nice piece, although I don't know it. Yesterday I got a first impression during rehearsal: it's not a capella, which means easier pitch-keeping and more pauses, it's not as extreme in dynamics and range as Rachmaninoff's liturgy, which means easier singing, and it's in German, which means easier text-learning for most. So, it's a lot easier, which will mean more attention for details, more perfectionism, and probably better performances. But still: I want to sing more Rachmaninoff! And then they tell me that on February 25, they're going to sing the old programme again, and I'll be in a car learning to drive :(.

Oh well, I'm sure I'll learn to appreciate Paulus. What we sang yesterday reminded me somewhat of the Christmas carols we've been singing, as far as melodies (typical basslines) and text are concerned. It is of course a lot more 'advanced', with more rhythmical interplay between voices, more variation, etc.. Most people I've asked about it who knew it were very enthousiastic, and the prospect of actually having time to work on singing technique a little bit is also nice. The conductor said that everybody who is going to participate in the performances will get some sort of 'audition', to see what could be improved in their singing. He added: "Es tut kein Weh, und es gibt sogar manche Leute, die 40 Euro dafür zahlen würden..." :p.

End of term...

2007-02-09T13:54:00.000+01:00

...is a lot less stressful here than at UC, mostly because not all courses have exams here, and none have term papers. Still, the end always feels nice, since course-related obligations are lifted, if only temporarily. In this case, though, even that effect is weakened, as I will still be typing lecture notes for QFT for a while.

Today, I got my first Schein, i.e. certificate, for the statistical mechanics course I've been following. It stated my grade, my rank in the entire class, who had been teaching the course, what the grade was based on, how it was calculated (by rank, which I still think is a stupid system), and featured signatures of both teacher and tutor. What it did not mention, however, was the number of ECTS points it was worth. So I asked the secretary of the exchange students' contact person about it, who told me to ask the secretary of the institute, who phoned someone else, who said that we should just write the number of points on the certificate by hand. Apparently, Germans sometimes get tired of their bureaucracy as well...

My plans for the near future are as follows: this Sunday, I'm going back to Holland for a while. I will be around Utrecht, typing QFT lecture notes, bringing my dad's and my own administration up to date, and learning to drive, until at least the 14th of March, since I have my driving exam then. After that I don't know yet.

Choir - performances

2007-02-04T01:26:00.000+01:00

The performances went better than expected, although they were still not perfect. The audiences didn't seem to mind, though: on Saturday, a part of the audience even stood up, and on both evenings, the applause didn't end until the conductor sent us offstage, which was after taking ample time for bowing, making the soloists bow, and singing an encore (Тебе поем, we sing to Thee).
The dress rehearsal was originally planned to be on Friday, but that turned out to be a normal rehearsal. Then, the idea was to just sing through everything right before the first performance. We did, although even then the conductor interrupted at some points. For the basses, this 'dress rehearsal' went spectacularly bad, with people losing track at several points, resulting in very chaotic singing. Luckily, almost none of that was repeated during the performance: there was one spot where some people missed the rhythm, but that was it. Sunday was similar.
What was new to me was the dress code: suit, including tie. Now, those of you who have worn shirts and ties know that they tend to be rather tight around the neck. I never liked that at parties, but for singing it was very impractical. That, combined with the fact that I could not drink any water during the performance, resulted in a sore throat at the end (the whole programme was about an hour and a half, I believe). So, on Sunday, I did not close the upper button of the shirt, and wore the tie a bit more loosely, which went much better :).
Now, the project is finished, resulting in the usual slightly melancholic mood. Not nearly as strongly as other times, though, since the choir is not finished (in theatre projects I have participated in so far, the end of the project was also the end of the group). During the applause today, the conductor said: 'Rehearsal this Thursday, 20:00.' :).

Choir

2007-01-31T23:51:00.000+01:00

Lots of singing these days: rehearsals tonight, tomorrow and Friday (dress rehearsal), and then performances on Saturday and Sunday. Rehearsals take more than three hours now, which is heavy training for my voice. But, so far, it has held out, and actually learned something :). We do also have some breaks, since the conductor keeps swearing at us, for breathing all at the same time, for not keeping pitch, for not knowing the pieces well enough, etc.. It's quite instructive, really: they don't teach you swearing in language courses...
I shouldn't complain, though: sometimes he says something positive, and most of the swearing is not at the basses. The altos come first, for contiually keeping their faces buried in their sheet music and not paying attention to his conducting. Then come the sopranos and tenors, for not keeping pitch and not singing lightly enough in the high ranges. If he addresses the basses, it is usually for simply singing something wrong, but this happens, on average, about once per rehearsal. So far, I was wondering whether that was because he considered us hopeless cases anyway, or because we were actually doing relatively well. But, in one of today's attempts at being nice, he said that when one stands far enough away, it sounds relatively passable, especially the basses.

Unfortunately (?), the performances will not be recorded, or at least not recorded with the purpose of publishing on CD. At tonight's rehearsal, someone asked whether they would, which caused the conductor to exclaim: 'Um Gottes Willen, nein!' He has a point, actually: the type of music is rather unusual for people who sing mainly German church music, the language is a problem, since people can't remember the text by meaning (cf. Japgrad, for UC choir people), and it's a capella, which is also unusual, so on the whole it would require more work to make it recordable.
But, on the whole, I very much enjoy the whole thing: the conductor's swearing is not only instructive but also funny, and I like the music. It also begins to sound roughly the way it should, and I think we'll be able to pull off good performances. For those who would like to come but can't: I have a recording by the St. Petersburg Chamber Choir of Rachmaninoff's liturgy, which is much better than anything we might hope to achieve, even with more time available.

Job

2007-01-30T15:08:00.000+01:00

Professor Schmidt has asked me if I would like to continue writing the script during part 2 of his course, next semester. So I'll have a job for the last four months of my stay here as well :).

Oh, and the winter has indeed disappeared again, as was predicted :(.

Winter!

2007-01-25T14:58:00.000+01:00

...well, snow. Heidelberg doesn't have the amounts reported by the Süddeutsche Zeitung: the traffic is not noticably affected. And no ice, of course, since all the water we have here flows to the Rhine, through the Neckar. But still, everything looks really nice and wintry, especially the mountainsides with bare trees.
The weather reports say it will disappear in a few days, as the cold will go back to Eastern Europe :(, but until that time, we can pretend we have winter here :).

Completely unrelated: the language school where I did a German course in September has asked me whether I'd be interested in teaching a beginner-level Dutch course. Which I'd be, of course, if I had time. However, I don't have time: I am very busy trying to keep/catch up with studying, rehearsing for the choir performance (this weekend in one week) and typing up lecture notes for QFT.
These few weeks there will probably be fewer posts than usual so far, since I will have less time to do interesting stuff, so less to write about, and less time to write.

Wissenschaftliche Hilfskraftanstellungsbürokratie

2007-01-24T10:50:00.000+01:00

"Ich gelobe, Verfassung und Recht zu achten und meine Dienstobliegenheiten gewissenhaft und uneigennützig zu erfüllen."

Yesterday, I finally got to sign the contract for my job. Before being able to do so, however, I had to state that I would fulfill the obligations I would be taking on conscientiously and without considering my own gain. I was asked to go to someone's office and read out the above sentence aloud. Having done so, I got a stamp and signature on the paper, signed it myself, and went back to the secretary's office, where I actually got the contract.
Apart from the Gelöbnis, they also made me sign a paper saying that I would respect the constitution and gave me a paper specifying the Dienstpflichten für Angestellte nach dem Bundesangestelltentarifvertrag (I love German word-glueing). And an extract from the criminal code, which tells me what will happen to me if I were to steal secret documents or violate the confidentiality of the spoken word, and more such things.

And all this is just for a wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft. They even explicitly state somewhere that the Gelöbnis does not mean I'm a civil servant now. I wonder what they make those people do...
Maybe I'm just biased because of the informal nature of the proceedings at UC, but it all seems a little overdone to me, even when taking into account that my contract is officially with the Land Baden-Württemberg. It also stands in rather sharp contrast to the light way my professor deals with the whole thing. And all the people in the instute, by the way.

But, I don't mind, as long as I get my money. I just call it an interesting cultural experience, and try to tell myself that Germany really is different from Holland after all...:p

Choir weekend

2007-01-14T19:24:00.000+01:00

Отче наш, иже еси на небесех...

Regardless of whether He exists, God has inspired people to write music of a seemingly unearthly beauty. I spent the better parts of Saturday and Sunday singing such music, as my choir had a rehearsal weekend. We went through the entirety of Rachmaninoff's Chrysostomos liturgy, about half of it for the first time, and although tiring, it was wonderful.
As befits a good rehearsal weekend, there was, apart from lots of singing, a party on Saturday evening, to activate other parts of the body than the throat. Enjoyable as this was, it did result in a slightly hungover feeling on Sunday morning, as rehearsals started at 9:00 in the morning. However, as this feeling was shared by the entire choir, it provided for a kind of bonding only found on similar occasions.
Surprisingly, the deep bass parts came out a lot better on Sunday morning than on Saturday evening :p. 'Deep' does fit the stereotype in this case: I've never seen any bass lines go as low as these Russian ones do. The low basses are at two instances required to sing a b flat... (which only two of us managed, and only on Sunday morning; in the afternoon it already proved impossible).

The performances will be in the first weekend of February, in a town somewhere near Heidelberg and in the Peterskirche in Heidelberg itself. The Peterskirche is the traditional university church, where university choirs usually have their performances.
Apart from Rachmaninoff's liturgy, adapted for concert performance, we will also sing parts from Tchaikovsky's all-night vigil and Cui's Magnificat. All Russian, all church music, all Romantic or late Romantic era. Anyone who'd happen to be in Heidelberg at the time is most warmly invited to come :).

Biological clock confusion

2007-01-09T14:15:00.000+01:00

To make up for the lack of warm water, we do have warm weather. Apart from the birds that I have seen flying in the wrong direction, and the flowers that are still, or already, blossoming, it also confuses me sometimes.
I seriously had the idea that it was March when cycling home today. The municipality workers were busy removing the dead wood from the Neckar shore, just like they always clear the ditches in Groenekan. In March. It's cloudy, windy and slightly rainy weather, some ten degrees centigrade. I notice a tacit assumption with myself that in a month or so, we're going to have warm days again. If it weren't for the calendar, I'd believe I had been hibernating for three months.
But although skipping a winter would be very interesting from a climatological point of view, I'd personally rather have a bit of cold from time to time, if it helps keeping Holland dry. Maybe we'll have something like last year, with deep frost in late March, and sunny summer two weeks later.

In conclusion: 'global warming is making climatology just a little more interesting than I like.'

A warm welcome

2007-01-08T13:05:00.000+01:00

An die Bewohner im Schlierbacher Schiff

Aus technischen Gründen ist die Heizung und Warmwasser am 8-9.1.2007 bis 13:00 ausgefallen. Wir bitten um Verständnis.

Hausmeister

Unfortunately, one always sees these notes after having tried to shower with cold water... Also unfortunately, there was no warm water this afternoon, either. And there still isn't, so he must have meant until tomorrow 13:00, rather than tomorrow until 13:00. Which strikes me as rather long for fixing a boiler, especially if it is one that provides 90 people with their warm water and heating.

Oh well... cold but clean water is still better than brown water¹ :p.

P.S.: Yes, I'm back in Heidelberg, and safely so, for those who were wondering. This time only for five weeks, though: I'm coming back to Utrecht on the 10th of February.

¹The state of affairs in Phwezi, Malawi, apparently.

Schöne Tage!

2006-12-24T17:16:00.000+01:00

Let's keep it simple: I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Slow system?

2006-12-22T02:29:00.000+01:00

I just found out that I'm working at UC. That is, there exists an e-mail address for a UC employee called O. Tieleman, different from my student address. This did not yet exist while I worked in College Hall, which was logical: the students working at the reception weren't actually full employees, and had one common address (the reception address).
Apparently, my data have finally made their way into the the university administration system, a procedure that must have started somewhere in the first half of 2006, when the payments to the reception students were being centralised. And now the system has decided to give me an e-mail address. They're not paying me anymore, though...
So, if you'd want to e-mail me on my solis account, take care to use the address 'at students dot uu dot nl', not 'at ucu dot uu dot nl', since I can't access the latter one.

Plans

2006-12-20T22:20:00.000+01:00

I have a ticket! I'm coming home on Saturday the 23rd of December, around 2 pm. I suppose that means I'll stop posting for a while, since I won't be in Heidelberg, and hence will not be able to tell you about my doings here.
I will be in Holland for two weeks, until the first weekend of January. Then I'll be in Heidelberg for about a month, and around the second weekend of February I'll come back to Holland again, to see a Shakespeare play, find out whether I've been following the right courses for my master's, and more such things.

So, see you (most of you) in a few days :).

Counterpoint

2006-12-18T15:43:00.000+01:00

I have unofficially been following a course in counterpoint composition for a few weeks now, to get the physics out of my head from time to time. Last Monday, there was an unexpected exam, which I decided to take, mainly out of curiosity.

So, I sat down, took a sheet and asked my neighbour for a pen, since mine, being a strict follower of Murphy's Law, was empty. Then, I looked at the sheet, which contained four cantus firmi and a number of empty staffs. Not completely understanding the assignment, I turned to my neighbour again, and she kindly explained to me what was to be done. We had to compose two- or three-voiced 'motets' (no longer than nine bars, nine notes in the cantus firmus), and if we wanted to have them back in time for singing them at Christmas, we had to mark our work with an 'X'.
I started to write, while next to me, a lively, albeit whispered, discussion arose between my neighbours over a few issues concerning note lengths and forbidden intervals in their work. The instructor, who was sitting all the way up front, was reading something, and did not appear to notice, or mind, or consider the option that students would discuss their work at all...

When handing in my work, I told the instructor I was not on the presence list, in order to save him a surprise when checking presence list against work handed in. He decided to add my name, with the comment that I was participating außer Konkurrenz, and that I had found my way to his course through a choir¹, which seemed a source of joy to the good man.

¹Darryl, my Canadian friend from the Capella Carolina, who has been promoted to Repetitor in order to allow him to play on the piano in the rehearsal room of the choir, took me along once.

Die Physikanten

2006-12-15T21:41:00.000+01:00

Christmas is pervading the city: on every bit of street broad enough to be considered for the title of 'square', there is a Weihnachtsmarkt. It also affects the university: the numbers of students attending tutorials and lectures are decreasing, while the number of tutorials and lectures being cancelled is increasing.

This week's physikalisches Kolloquium, usually a talk on some physics topic supposed to be understandable for a general physicists' audience, was a show similar to the Wetenschapsquiz as presented by Wim T. Schippers, with the difference that it focussed on physics. It was presented by a comic duo, called die Physikanten, a mix between Physiker and Praktikanten (interns). The duo consisted of a German 'Professor', announced by the other half, the Dutch assistant Herr Harry, as: 'Professor, doctor, doctor, Otto, Professor, ähm, entschuldige, Otto, doctor, Liebermann!' and by this time, the professor was on stage and looking somewhat impatiently for his assistant to finish and the show to begin.

Then they did many nice tricks, including an electric lamp consisting of two forks and a gherkin, a small 'boat' floating in the air, a turning flame of a few metres high, 'unfinished water' consisting of oxygen and hydrogen mixed in proper amounts, and the standard method for closing cardboard boxes applied to humans... and then sent the audience home: 'Now, we are going to perform an experiment with your kinetic energy: you can go home!'

Advent singing

2006-12-09T20:04:00.000+01:00

The Capella Carolina traditionally sings Christmas carols on the street in the Advent season, and collects money for good causes. Considering the options I had for spending my Saturday afternoon, the chief of which were

doing homework I'm a bit behind on,
converting Prof. Schmidt's notes on covariant field equations and their quantization into Latex-legible text,
or singing Christmas carols,

I decided the last one was by far the most attractive. So, I went to the rehearsal, sang through some seven short Christmas carols in German and English, and followed the choir to the street, feeling quite uncertain about having to sing these songs in front of random people.

It turned out to be quite okay: we sang through the whole repertoire three times, and collected some 80 euros for a school in Armenia. The audience was quite varied, as to be expected on the street: some people walked past us without noticing, some passed between choir and conductor without noticing, some stopped to listen, and some joined in and sang along as far as they knew the songs :).

After the third time of singing through everything, I felt I knew the songs quite a bit better than at the beginning, and I also felt quite cold, having stood outside for an hour and a half. Since the latter held true for most of us, we concluded the afternoon on the Weihnachtsmarkt with a cup of Glühwein.
It was a nice afternoon :).

And then there was internet...

2006-12-06T21:11:00.000+01:00

In the beginning, there was a room, and it was empty, except for a bed, a desk, a bedside table, a closet and a cupboard. And then I moved into the room, and filled it with my books, my clothes, my music instruments, my compter and other trash. And for a time it was good.
But then I was aware of a wish to be connected with the world outside my room. And I gave thought to this problem, and decided that there must be internet. So I said: 'Let there be internet!' But nothing happened. And then I went to an internet provider, and in return for a promise to pay a certain amount of money every month, the internet provider said: 'Let there be internet!' But still nothing happened. And I waited for a month and a half, and went to the provider many times, and said: 'You have promised that there would be internet, but behold, there is no internet.' And the internet provider's employees said 'Let there be internet,' and they said it to Telekom, and to their boss, and to everyone to whom it seemed to make sense to say this, and then, after a month and a half, my flatmate happened to catch a technician who had just connected someone else, and made him connect my room, too.
And then there was internet, and I saw that it was good.

Job

2006-12-01T17:44:00.000+01:00

I have a job :). And one that seems almost ideal, provided I will indeed have internet in my room. I have to process Professor Schmidt's notes on QFT into a generally legible version, called Skript, and will get paid for it :).
First, I had offered to proofread what someone else would produce, but then I ended up also correcting it, which took quite some time. And then the other guy quit, and I got the job. Which means I will be spending a little more time on it, hopefully understand it a little better, and get paid quite a lot more...
The first chapter is ready (high time, too, given that in class, we're at chapter six by now), and can be found here. Corrections are welcome :p.

Rausch

2006-11-29T16:21:00.000+01:00

I found this in the Rhein-Neckar Zeitung, 'het lokale sufferdje', which I receive unrequestedly at random times:

Rausch nicht mehr strafmildernd

i.e., being drunk is no longer an excuse for breaking the law. What? No longer? No, indeed, no longer. Which indeed seems to imply that hitherto, it was... Of course I am not a lawyer, and I don't know anything about German law at all, but logic tells me that either, there must have been a very funny law in force, or the parliament has nothing better to do than passing pointless laws...
The latter option is interesting in face of the fact that at present, Germany is being ruled by the große Koalition, consisting of the two natural opponents SPD and CDU, which according to the public opinion is not doing much in general, and makes a mess of what it is doing.

Internet in Germany (2)

2006-11-29T16:18:00.000+01:00

The procedure continues as follows:
The next day, the provider calls you again, saying that they have received a call from the monopolist company: the rescheduled date, in one week's time, is too early, they can't make it. It will be in two weeks after all. And indeed, a few days later, you receive a letter from the provider, informing you that the earlier appointment unfortunately did not work out as planned, but that, in order for the connection to work, someone really needs to come and install the whole thing, and that hence, a new date has been scheduled, which is about a week from the time at which you receive the letter. You appreciate their informativeness, although you think quietly by yourself that a little less information in exchange for a little more speed and efficiency would not be a bad deal.

Interesting note: the provider sends its letters through another company than the good old Deutsche Post, which was the reason the first letters were delayed rather severely. This time, however, the other company seems to have found my mailbox: the most recent letter was not delivered by DP. This was not the only change: the lid, which normally closes the mailbox, was sticking out, like a letter that didn't completely fit into the mailbox.
Apparently, the other company's mailmen are new to the job and, having figured out how to deliver letters to mailboxes without name (but with number), are now working on the next step: delivering mail to mailboxes without taking out the door first...
(It was quite easy to put it back in, I found to my relief.)

RHS

2006-11-28T15:53:00.000+01:00

It's just a jump to the left
And then a step to the right...

(Rocky Horror Show - Time Warp)

Those of you who don't know the Rocky Horror Picture Show: do something about it.¹ Those who do: the live version is even more fun :). It is being staged at the Städtische Bühne in Heidelberg, which is where I saw it. (For those who are coming to Heidelberg in the near future and want to see it as well: it is running at least until the end of the year.)

Before the show, someone gave me a paper bag containing some rice, a flashlight, an old newspaper and some toilet paper, the purpose of which was a little mysterious to me. Then, during the wedding scene in the beginning of the show, the entire audience was showered in rice... The newspaper turned out to be intended for use during the rain scene, following Janet's attempt at remaining dry, and in retrospect I am glad that water pistols weren't included. (Apparently, the RHS has a tradition of audience participation, which does include water pistols.)

Most of the spoken text has been translated into German, which gives some funny effects and loses some jokes, but on the whole is not as disturbing as translations often are. The songs are still in English.
The part of the Criminologist works out better in German, at least to my foreign ears, because of the aptitude of the language to dry, generally boring, amtliche, texts; also in this range, it is better than English :p. The nicest effect of the translation occurs when Frank addresses Dr. Everett Scott:

"Dr. Scott, oder sollte ich lieber Dr. von Scott sagen?"

In one word: Geil!²

P.S.: If you don't know the show, I can imagine this post doesn't make too much sense... ignore it, watch the film, or come and see it here :).

¹Unless you can't stand transsexuals, even if parodied.
¹Means 'cool' in German, but has the same origin as the Dutch word.

Internet in Germany

2006-11-23T13:11:00.000+01:00

It works as follows:

First, you go to several providers, and find out that apparently the best deal, even if you only want an internet connection, is something involving internet and telephone, costing about 50 euros a month, with a connection of 6 Mbit/s, i.e. 600 kb/s. Rather disappointed, you decide to do it anyway, and share the connection with a few people in your dorm to keep it manageable.
Then, you sign a contract, and hear that within two weeks, someone, from another company, as that company apparently owns the cable network, should come to install the whole thing in your room. You wait for two weeks, but nothing happens; no promised letters with exact date and time, no username and password, no technicians, nothing. You go back to the shop and ask what has gone wrong, and you hear that the next day, the technician should come; the letters have been delayed a bit but should also be there in a matter of one or two days.
The next day, no-one shows up, and still no letters. You go back to the shop, and ask again; they tell you that, apparently, something went wrong, and you will get a new date and time for the technician to come. You indeed get this date, in a letter, a week later, when also the old letters arrive; the new date is still a week later, all in all a month after signing the contract.
The day comes, but the technician doesn't. Calling the provider again to complain results in them starting an 'emergency procedure': someone should come in two or three days. Of course still no-one comes, or calls, or gives any sign of life, let alone of connection. You go back once more, to ask how this procedure is supposed to function if the people still aren't coming.
Then, to your great surprise, you find a note in your mailbox, from the monopolist cable-owning company, four days after the appointed date and time, saying that someone was there, but unfortunately could not reach you by phone or in person. Not that you have received any calls; you have not even been notified that someone would come at all. You call the company, and ask what this means; they tell you they didn't know anyone was coming, either, since the technician is employed by the monopolist.
They say that you have to call their customer service, through which you will be able to make an appointment with a technician of their own. Slightly surprised that now, they do appear to have technicians, you call the customer service, and they tell you to contact your landlord, because something in your room is still missing. You contact the landlord, who says that this particular item is provided by the provider. You call the provider again, and they suddenly inform you that a visit by a technician is scheduled in two weeks' time.
Rather angry by now, you go to the shop and tell them to do something about this. The people in the shop, who by now are getting tired of the whole episode as well, do their best, but don't get anything done at the moment. They promise to keep working on it, and later that day, you get a call from someone else in the company, saying that the appointment has been rescheduled to a week earlier, so in one week's time.

... and that's the point to which I've gotten in the procedure; I'm curious how it will continue. I always thought of Germany as an overly civilised and organised country, where the maxim 'pacta sunt servanda' is holy. But apparently, that belongs to the old-fashioned Germany, and not to the new, fresh, modern country where people have internet access...

Excellence...

2006-11-16T16:21:00.000+01:00

Wir sind hier, wir sind laut, weil man uns die Bildung klaut!

The students' associations of the humanities departments organised a demonstration against what they called the Ausverkauf der Geisteswissenschaften, i.e. the selling out of the humanities. The main issue seemed to be the personnel shortage, the nicest expression of this being an empty chair with a sign saying 'Leerstuhl Portugesisch'¹. Some other issues were also mixed in, however: there was one sign saying 'Eine Welt mit Bush und ohne Rumänisch sieht schwarz aus', and another complaining about the upcoming tuition fees (those are new to Heidelberg).

Much of this is related to the Excellenzinitiative, which, roughly speaking, comes down to a redivision of the state support for the universities: some 'excellent' ones will be selected, which will then receive more money. Since the total amount of money available to the state does, of course, not change, this money will be taken from other universities, as far as I have understood it. Now the rectorate of Heidelberg university has decided that the best chances to be selected are in boosting the natural science departments, with the consequence that the humanities and social sciences budgets have been cut. Rather heavily, as it seems: a teacher in the French department told me the number of employees had decreased by 30% in the last three years, because of constant budget cuts.

I joined the demonstration, partly out of curiosity, partly to replace some friends of mine who would have gone, had they not gotten into sudden trouble with their landlord, and of course partly because I don't agree with the policy of the rectorate.
The demonstration itself was not very exciting, apart from being a demonstration; there were a few police officers walking along, although I must say I don't think they did so out of conviction, and there were several 'waves', which was new to me as a demonstration phenomenon: everybody squats, and then stands up in an ordered fashion, giving the traditional wave effect.

One other nice sign that was carried along:

Überfüllte Hörsäle:
Ich kam, ich sah, ich ging

(Overfilled lecture rooms: I came, I saw, I went)

¹The German word leer means 'empty', whereas Lehrstuhl means 'chair' in the sense of 'professor's position'.

Political physics?

2006-11-16T11:16:00.000+01:00

Warning: theoretical physics jargon follows.

Professor Nachtmann, who teaches the theoretical part of a course on the Standard Model, discussing the Lagrangian density of the free Dirac field:

"We can add a phase factor to ψ, which we can choose freely, since it is unobservable. However, we can see from the definition of the Lagrangian density that it has to be the same at all points in space(time); here, in America, and on the other side of the moon. Now this is of course highly undesirable: a theory where we could choose this factor freely at every point in space would be much nicer, since we wouldn't have to care what the Americans do."

Then he went on to show that the Lagrangian density for coupled photon and free Dirac fields does allow a position-dependent phase factor... For those who are interested in the physics: lecture slides can be found here.

P.S.: I'm curious how many of those who have read this understood the joke (to me it seems understandable with relatively basic physics/math knowledge, but I might be mistaken), and how many of those liked it...:p

Köln

2006-11-10T17:45:00.000+01:00

Doch weil in Köln jeder Zweite vergisst,
Dass nicht das ganze Jahr Karnaval ist...

(Wise Guys - Schunkeln)

The akademische Auslandsamt organises excursions for exchange students. Last Saturday, 11-11, there was one to Köln. I decided to go, not suspecting anything, just curious what the city that is home to the Wise Guys would look like. Then someone told me that on 11-11, carnaval starts there, which reminded me of the above quote, given that I had always been told that carnaval is in February¹. Given the Rhineland's reputation for partying, and Köln's special status in the Rhineland (undisputed leader), I was expecting to see a colourful city.

I did.

In the centre, literally everybody was wearing some sort of costume. In spite of the cloudy, rainy and cold weather, the streets were filled the entire day. I have seen devils, Gevatter Tod, navy sailors, Supermen and -women, People's Army officers, bears, monks, pigs, cavepeople, police officers in blue suits, police officers in green suits (those were the real ones), witches, Sumo wrestlers, tigres, people clad in beer cans, male nuns, pregnant nuns, Captain Jack Sparrow, and many more, including many of the possible combinations of the above.
There was a guide with the excursion, who tried to give some sort of city tour, but even in the more quiet places, he was often hard to hear because of the background noise. In squares, phone calls were impossible, and people were holding hands in trains in order not to lose each other. Since we didn't know this trick at first, and failed to adopt it later, we did lose each other, a number of times (hence the attempts at phone calls).

The tour guide at some point told us that the alcohol consumption, as we could see, was 'well, high' at carnaval. We could see this indeed: there were many people with bottles, and, in fact, many bottles in general, even without people. There were places where we had to wade through glass shards, and in one place we saw one possible origin of these shards: some people were at variance, on some topic that didn't become clear to us passers-by, and were throwing bottles at each other to resolve the conflict; the bottles were not always empty. Also, at some point, we were addressed by a few people in costumes with bottles, who, upon hearing that we came from Heidelberg, told us: 'Wenn ihr ein Paar Bierchen trinkt, und dann hier mitfeiern kommt, könnt ihr das richtige Köln erfahren.' In the end, we did not, however true the statement seemed.²
Many of the people with bottles were already quite suitably refreshed³, and in spite of the rather noticable and increased presence of the police, many used the street as a public urinoir. All the publicly accessible toilets (i.e. in bars and such) were indeed very full; most of the men's toilets were actually filled mainly by women.

As the afternoon wore on, the number of costumes on the streets decreased slightly, which was accompanied by an increase in the number of orphaned bottles. I expect this was due in part to the fact that it became a bit rainier and colder, but also because many of those wearing costumes had been on the streets since the previous night. So, if I would happen to go back to Köln, I would try to do so on the evening of 10-11. Also, I can advise everybody who enjoys people in funny costumes to go and see carnaval in Köln at least once in their life.

P.S.: I also saw the Dom, the symbol of Köln, which is impressive indeed. Apart from that, the main attractions in the city are the people and shops and museums and conferences and such; the Altstadt was largely (90%) destroyed in WWII. It has been restored, but does not quite have the same atmosphere of a real old Altstadt, as far as I could see it.

¹I have also learned why carnaval starts on 11-11 (at 11:11, to be precise): it is the day on which the Eleventh Commandment becomes effective. The Eleventh Commandment supersedes the previous ten, and revokes them.
²Small correction: the advice about drinking beer was followed by some of my friends, but it probably would have been regardless of being given.
³One of the nicer English euphemisms I have heard; it means 'drunk'.

MathPhysRom

2006-11-10T17:44:00.000+01:00

Treffen sich ein Mathematiker, ein Physiker und eine Romanistin...

This was on the posters announcing a party organised by the student associations for maths/physics and romance languages. I found it rather funny, and said so to a girl from my choir, who studies Spanish and English. She agreed, but said that it was true as well, quoting gender ratios of 1 to 30 in her classes. Apparently, the traditionality of German universities is not limited to the use of old words such as Kommilitone and habits such as akademisches Klatschen, but also extends to the gender divisions between various fields of study.
I have indeed noticed a clear difference, but nowhere near 1 to 30, at any rate in my classes (three physics and one maths). Also, when I went to the party with this girl from the choir and a few friends of hers, those friends were mainly Romanisten, i.e. male romance language students.
The party itself was what I suppose the UC Beach Party must be like, except for the fact that it was at the beginning, rather than the end of term/year. Crowded, music of moderate quality (I noticed many poor covers of originally nice songs) with the exception of the accidental Nirvana song, a bit too loud to be able to talk to each other, etc.. I don't think I'll be going to many of those, but now I've at least seen why :).

Othello

2006-11-06T17:32:00.000+01:00

...has a remarkably Caucasian physiognomy for a Moor, in spite of his black skin. And he sings well. At least, according to Verdi's opera version of the story.

There seems to be some truth in the myth of the German Bildungsideal and the notion that the government should foster said ideal. Yesterday evening, I went to a staging of Verdi's Otello in the Nationaltheater Mannheim. Going to operas is not something I used to do very often until now, given that they are normally quite expensive. In this case, however, I was happily surprised to find that, with student discount and for the back row, the tickets were a mere 5,50 euros apiece. It sounds a bit ridiculous to me... a live opera cheaper than a film in a movie theatre? Not that I'm complaining, though; a short look at the performance agenda makes it even very likely that I'll come back there :).
Now, I must renounce my Dutchness a bit and say that the most important thing was of course the opera, which I liked: orchestral and choral parts were overwhelming, as they should be with Verdi, and of course the soloists' singing was astounding; sometimes even a bit too astounding for my taste.
Interestingly, the programme booklet offered the libretto only in German. I suppose this means that

either, the German opera audience is assumed not to understand Italian anyway, which would make including the original libretto a futile exercise
or, perhaps more likely, the organisation assumes the audience can't figure out the singing even with libretto, and hence just offers a version that is easier to understand

But, in conclusion: long live Germany, the land of art and culture :).

Rome

2006-11-01T21:56:00.000+01:00

...is not strictly Heidelberg, so maybe it does not belong on this weblog, but it is nonetheless nice :p. To quote Reinhard, das kann man alles ruhig so lassen. It has a number of Heidelberg's qualities, but then in greater measure: nice old buildings (some so old that they have become ruins, or puintuinen), somewhat anarchistic traffic proceedings (in Heidelberg, this is limited to pedestrians and cyclists; in Rome, everyone joins); also it is in general bigger.
For those who are wondering how I came to this subject: last weekend, there was a family meeting, in Rome. My sister, younger brother and dad came from the Netherlands, my other brother from Switzerland (although his usual residence is in Canada) and I from Germany, for 'a meeting on neutral territory' in Rome. We have experienced claustrophobia on the stairs to the summit of the San Pietro, which are built into the walls of the dome, we have awed at the unparallelled art of the Renaissance masters who decorated the papal rooms and Vatican museums, wondered how the popes managed to live in such rooms, without a single quiet empty spot on the walls and ceilings, we have walked around the many vie and piazze and noticed that the Dutch are always easy to find by looking twenty centimetres above the average head height, and enjoyed the warm 'autumn', if one may call it that (there is a law in Rome forbidding people to turn on the heating before the fifteenth of November...). Also, to add a bit of human oddity, I have caught a cold over there.
In conclusion, it was nice. Now, I have to get back to studying, which can be nice, but always has the drawback of obligation to it.

German professors

2006-10-25T20:44:00.000+02:00

The professor teaching QFT, Herr Schmidt, told me that I should not worry about ECTS credits and other nonsense like that. When I asked him how many credits I could get for his course, he said: "Twelve, I believe... the maximum we can get out of it, at any rate." :)
There is a tutorial accompanying his course, but the exercises are not graded. I asked a fellow student how I would get my grade, and she said that that was up to Herr Schmidt, which meant I should not worry... :) again. He really seems to enjoy showing those silly grade- and prestation-focussed people from abroad that the good old German system, where all that nonsense does not exist, is really better. And, assuming that his students are interested in what he can tell them, he is right. I like it this way; I'll study anyway, and don't have to worry about grades too much. The possible disadvantage of this system is of course that the students may have too much choice: they have to decide on their own what is interesting, worthwhile and useful to study. But then again, there are many knowledgeable people who can help in this matter.
In short: if you're interested in the material, this system works much nicer than the Dutch or English systems; if you just need a diploma, the other options are better.

The professors teaching the Standard Model course, an experimentalist and a theorist, seem to have similar attitudes. When I asked if the homework exercises were to be graded, they said: "Well, no, we weren't planning on doing that. If you need a grade, we'll arrange some kind of small test at the end of term."
Of the four courses I will stick with, this is one of the nicer ones. I finally get to learn something about 'real-life' experiments¹, and I get to re-read the Introduction to the Standard Model of particle physics which has been standing on my shelf for two years now, and this time I even understand it, to some degree :). The theorist is a good lecturer, equipped with the typical sense of humour (a falling pen was called a 'classical experiment in scattering', and after setting ℏ = c = 1, he also wanted to set π = 1, but decided that would get too messy...).

I also tried one lecture on tensor analysis, but decided not to repeat that. The professor, who evidently knew a lot about the subject, unfortunately did not speak too clearly. Since he spoke German (math courses are all in German, graduate physics courses mostly in English), that meant I sometimes didn't quite catch what he was saying. Now, usually, one can solve this problem by referring to the blackboard, especially in mathematics, which is, after all, a language of its own. In this case, however, that was not really a solution, because, let us say, his handwriting was really one of a kind. '≥' looked like '∧|', k looked like h, '∞' and 'ω' were quite indistinguishable, and so on. And, most importantly, even when I could decode the acoustic signal of the lecture into German morphemes and words, I often did not have the vaguest notion what it actually meant. Also, I didn't see anything I could recognise as a tensor during the whole lecture. In conclusion, I could not see the benefits of attending the rest of the lectures, while I certainly saw the disadvantages (frustration, wasting time, etc.), and hence decided it would be best not to go back.

¹One may question how much particle physics experiments, where big accelerators using enormous amounts of energy are used to detect minute particles that are interacting at rates where 10^-20 seconds is considered t = ∞, have to do with real life, but still. It's different from the theoretical world populated by free particles and ideal gases.

New address

2006-10-18T17:30:00.000+02:00

As I said, I have a new room now, and so, my third and hopefully final address in Heidelberg:

Schlierbacher Landstraße 9-13, Briefkaste 0.7.2
69118 Heidelberg
Germany

The room is as expected, a little smaller than the previous one, but not much. As far as the room itself is concerned, the main difference is that instead of empty shelves, I now have empty walls. Not completely empty, though: I did bring a few posters and pictures. Further, there are no fridge and wash basin in the room: they're shared now. As I said, there is a kitchen, and a living room, which also fulfills the function of 'corridor'.
I am living in a 3-er WG, a three-room unit. One room is still empty, the other is occupied by an Italian guy called Fabio, who seems to be a nice person. Most of the people living in the Schlierbacher Schiff seem to be exchange students; in my neighbouring units, there don't seem to be any Germans. So far I've met people from China, Hungary, Italy, Belgium (Antwerp: we can speak Dutch :)) and Switzerland. Oh, yes, I have met one or two Germans who live in the same building, but they're a clear minority.

University

2006-10-13T10:46:00.000+02:00

Heidelberg University, or, actually, Ruperto Carola, or the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, is the oldest university in Germany. Indeed, it has a number of traditionalist features:

At the end of a lecture, students applaud by knocking with their knuckles on the tables; it is called akademisches Klatschen. So far, I had only seen this in a film whose story took place at the end of the 19th century :p.
In the natural sciences departments, the ECTS system has not really been adopted yet. In the physics department, it is there, but because of those funny exchange students who need ECTS credits for their home universities. In the mathematics department, it is completely absent. This morning, I asked the president of the examination committee, who should know such things if anyone does, how many credits I could get for a course, and he told me to ask the people in Utrecht.
The professor teaching QFT looks and talks very much like a traditional German 19^th-century professor. He seems to be a very nice person, though, and a good teacher.
At the introduction talk to the new students, the rector addressed them as Kommilitoninnen und Kommilitonen, i.e. fellow fighters (in both genders).

The quantum field theory course will, unfortunately, be in English. After speaking two sentences in German, the professor switched to English wiz a strong Zherman akzent, saying that the issue of the language had to be solved. He asked who did not speak German and absolutely wanted the course to be held in English; two hands were raised. He asked who absolutely wanted the course to be held in German; about ten hands were raised. He then concluded the issue by saying that he'd start in English and see how that went...

My courses so far are interesting, and seem to be at about the right level. Of course I don't know if that will continue to be the case, but at least today I could follow what was being said. I visited one lecture on differential topology and, as I mentioned, one on quantum field theory. I liked both of these, and think I will keep following them, if I can sort out my timetable properly. (Yes, the good old clashes occur here as well...) Tomorrow I will try one on the standard model of particle physics and one on statistical physics; Friday I will try one on tensor analysis, and then over the weekend I'll decide which ones I will in the end keep following :p.

Capella Carolina

2006-10-13T09:32:00.000+02:00

The Capella Carolina, the choir of the Internationale Studienzentrum, is a very nice choir. And they're singing nice music this semester: Orthodox church music by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff (such as the latter's Тебе поем (Tebye poyem), for those of you who were in the UC choir in my first year). As you may have understood by now, I joined them :).
Yesterday, at the end of the rehearsal, the conductor asked who could come to an extra rehearsal on Monday. Unsuspecting, and glad for the extra chance to practice, I raised my hand, along with a few others. The conductor asked those who had raised their hands to stay, to discuss something, as I understood it. Next, I found myself singing:

An Heidelberg, the unofficial university hymn
Tie a yellow ribbon round the ole oak tree, also recorded by the Wise Guys
Only you, which I will not comment on due to a lack of inspiration
Always look on the bright side of life :)

I enjoyed this as well, although it was not completely clear to me why we were singing these songs. Until I heard we'd be performing them. Monday. Rehearsal 8:00 (!), performance 9:15. At the welcoming ceremony for the new first year students.

Right. Well, it'll be okay, the songs are not that hard and most of the others know them already. But still, it is a little quicker than I'm used to. In general, the rehearsals are somewhat more intensive than I was used to: we are just supposed to sing, with all four voices, luckily with piano, but from sheet. Then of course the individual voices get their time, as far as the conductor thinks this necessary. But, there are many good singers there, so I have something to hold on to, and it seems to work. So I will just take it as a learning opportunity :).
The people are very nice, and mainly German. It is actually in this choir that I met the first German students here, which is interesting, given that it was one of the places where I had thought to meet other international students :p.

Lucky

2006-10-08T17:04:00.000+02:00

The Auslandsamt found me a room in a Studentenwerk-wohnheim :). I had previously been told that this was as good as impossible, because of the student housing shortage in Heidelberg, but apparently it is possible. This time, it's on the East side of the city, about five minutes cycling from the Altstadt, in the Schlierbacher Schiff, which is unfortunately not a real ship, but still very close to the Neckar. Apart from the (usual) absence of internet, it is very nice:

it is in a slightly-smaller-than-UC-size Wohngruppe, i.e. unit or flat
it has a kitchen, and a good one (for UC standards, at least): a four-plate stove and an oven
the room itself is about 13 sq. m.

In general, the whole interior of the building is quite reminiscent of UC. So, maybe my nostalgia has biased me in favour of this room, but I will take it nonetheless. So, you will soon see another report about a new room :).
The unfortunate part is that last week, I have made a number of friends on the SRH campus. I believe there are some ten or fifteen exchange students there, most of which I know by now, and most of which are nette Leute. But then again, nothing in Heidelberg is very far away, especially by bike, so that is not a real drawback.

Random fact of the day: about half the exchange students I meet here seem to be Italian. But they're nice as well :).

Further campus impressions

2006-10-04T16:18:00.000+02:00

The mensa on the SRH campus has a number of disadvantages in comparison to the UC Dining Hall. I know, this will sound incredible to the people who are 'enjoying' Dining Hall food every day, but in my opinion, there is no other conclusion possible:

the celebrated rule that you can eat as much as you like of the 'basic' side dishes, like fries or pasta, does not apply here
dinner is between 17:00 and 18:45 on Monday through Thursday, and till 18:00 on Fridays and in weekends
dinner is, as far as quantity and type of food is concerned, about as much as a solid afternoon snack
the main meal of the day is lunch, served between 11:40 and 13:20, and I have class every weekday between 11:00 and 13:00, and not on campus; i.e. I will miss lunch five days a week
you have to bring your own cup (!?)

Of course the advantage is that the available food is on average of a better quality than in DH, especially the warm meals.

The campus, I found out, is not purely a university campus. There are also many people doing some kind of berufliche Ausbildung, i.e. professional training, and other variants of non-university education. Looking back on these first few days, I cannot resist feeling that my previous room was, as a whole, nicer. Here the room is fine, but the environment and overall conditions could be better. The campus makes me nostalgically long for the UC campus, and I can't even lock myself up in my room because I can't cook, without a kitchen :p.
But, now that the holidays are over and even Reunification Day (3rd of October) has passed, 'normal' students are returning to the campus, which helps at least to make me feel less out of place here. And I have found a number of nice foreign students, so now we can complain together, which is always more fun than alone :).
Whether I will want to stay on this campus I still don't know. But, what I also don't know is whether I will be able to get a different room. So, what I do know: at least for the time being I'll have to stay here, and maybe I'll find out it's actually quite nice...

P.S.: Sorry for this somewhat pessimistic post, and don't worry: I'm fine :).

New room - first impression

2006-10-01T19:40:00.000+02:00

Welcome to the SRH campus, home to the rich and paranoid... (Paraphrased on Firefly, Trash)

Somehow the quote seems fitting, even though it is not a floating island... it is a private university campus, which means it is expensive to study here. My room is huge, at least in comparison to the previous one, which was a Studentenwerk-room, i.e. for normal university students. It has a refridgerator (even though there is no kitchen) a wash basin, lots of cupboard storage room, a bathroom to be shared with only one other room, a locker with lock to store valuables, electrically operated vitrages on the outside, and a vacuum cleaner (yes, private, no joke). Bedding is provided, as well as two towels; there are two chairs and a double desk. In short, when I entered the first time, I thought it was a double room, but then I saw only one (single) bed, and concluded the inevitable.
When I went around the floor to ask about internet and wireless networks, I found three people at home, with some twenty rooms on this floor. One of them told me that I'd have to arrange an internet connection myself, get a contract somewhere. He suggested T-mobile, where one gets a DSL-flatrate and a telephone for 50 euros a month Not very expensive, given the service they offer, he thought. When I asked him if I could possibly share his connection, with every intention of also sharing the costs, he said no. He couldn't know what I'd be downloading, and since it was his connection, he might be prosecuted, which was a risk he rather avoided. As you may notice from the tone of voice, I was slightly disappointed at this reaction.
Purely positive: the room has a wonderful view, and three windows to enjoy it through. It is therefore also bright, which is nice, and helps to make it feel large. I am looking straight at the Neckar, which flows towards me from the city, and on the background are the mountains where it comes from. Well, I can't really describe it; I'll post a picture sometime soon.

So, in conclusion: if anybody wants to come and visit, they are more than welcome, and if the group is not too large, everybody can stay in my room. There also is a youth hostel, on the other side of the Neckar, on the edge of the Neuenheimer Feld, the local Uithof.

Ruf doch mal an...

2006-10-01T19:39:00.000+02:00

...oder schreib mir 'ne Karte,
weißt ihr nicht wie sehr ich auf ein Lebenszeichen warte?

(Wise Guys - Ruf doch mal an)

Yes, indeed, I have an address:

Olivier Tieleman
Maria-Probst-Straße 3, Zimmer 802
69123 Heidelberg

Schick mir 'ne Mail, und 'ne SMS dahinter,
Ich bin voll erreichbar, Frühling, Sommer, Herbst und Winter

My old e-mail address (the one at students.uu.nl) still works, and will continue to do so while I'm here...

Ruf doch mal an, ich sag' es ihr ganz deutlich,
Ist es auch ein ferngespräch, die Telekom, die freut sich

... and a phone:

+ 49 (0) 160 9386 1243

(Please take the songtext as seriously as you like :).)

Heidelberger Herbst

2006-09-30T18:28:00.000+02:00

Saturday morning, my attempt at sleeping in was foiled by what appeared to be two fanfares. I am not completely sure there were two, since the one seemed to consist only of percussion, while the other featured only brass; this suggests that they were different sections of the same band. However, since they seemed to be playing in blissful ignorance of each other's existence for most of the time, I could not altogether get rid of the impression that they were two separate entities.
I was rather annoyed at this unexpected beginning of the day. I felt I had not been warned properly; my only reason to suspect something was that I had heard there would be a flea market. It turned out that it was not just a flea market, but a complete Straßenfest, something similar to Dutch Queen's Day, called Heidelberger Herbst. It involved the usual crowded streets (cycling the Hauptstraße was now not only legal but also practically impossible), stands with people selling all kinds of things, but mostly jewellery and food, various stages of varying sizes with bands playing music of various genres, and increased presence of police and ambulances. One ambulance was actually trying to make its way through the crowded Haupstraße with its blue flashing lights on, but luckily without the sirene, since it was progressing only slightly faster than walking speed.
The Heidelberg municipal website could have warned me, it turned out. According to the section on the Heidelberger Herbst, it is a yearly happening, which turns the pedestrian zone in the Altstadt into a large market and festival terrain on the last Saturday of September. This was the case indeed, and the epicentre of the activities seemed to be around the Universitätsplatz, which is indeed in the centre of the Altstadt. What struck me there was the effort to make it look like a medieval market: a number of stands had been built, such as a Taverne, and there were many (medieval) market entertainment acts, such as jugglers and bands playing medieval music (I won't vouch for authenticity, but it sounded nice), and many stands selling the kind of 'medieval' clothing and jewellery worn by goths, LARPers, and the like.
Throughout the day, the weather was quite summer-like: sunny, warm and only a few clouds to be seen. 'Nice autumn festival,' I thought, but in the evening, the weather joined in as well. When I was in my room, reading, I noticed lightning, and shortly after came thunder, and then rain. I went out, expecting empty streets and people packing up their stands and going home, but to my surprise, it was still about as crowded as in the afternoon. Apparently the Heidelbergers didn't want to let the rain interfere with their festival... healthy attitude :).

P.S.: Pictures will follow.

Cycling in Heidelberg

2006-09-27T20:32:00.000+02:00

Like all Dutch people in diaspora (such as this specimen, which by now, however, has returned to native soil), I must devote some space to the phenomenon of cycling in foreign lands.

Heidelberg is a cyclists' city, apparently, in German terms. And, true, there are many bicycles, again, in German terms. It's quite like home, in that respect, except for overwhelming dominance of mountainbikes. But then again, we have mountains here...
The main difference is that there are hardly any cycling lanes. Elsewhere, this might have undesirable consequences from the cyclist's point of view, but here I find it surprisingly refreshing: the effect is that cyclists are considered a mixture between pedestrians and automobilists, having the advantages of both but the disadvantages of neither. Traffic Supermunchkin! So they use the sidewalk, or the pavement, as they see fit, and it is all quite accepted. Wonderful! As some of you may have noted, I never had a very high regard for traffic rules, and now I get to live this out in full :). For those of you who do care: the rules, which apparently exist, are, according to my local sources¹, about the same as in the Netherlands.

Some people do seem to mind, though. Yesterday evening, I was cycling through the Hauptstraße, where this is officially not allowed, and was suddenly forced to make a rather sharp turn to avoid collision with a pedestrian. This was nothing new, but to my surprise, the pedestrian jumped in front of me and forced me to stop by grabbing my arm. This certainly was new. The pedestrian continued to explain to me that cycling was not allowed in the Hauptstraße, but did so in a dialect so far, and still, unknown to me. So, it took me the first few sentences to figure out that the man was not speaking Finnish, actual German ('proper', in the sense of Hochdeutsch, I wouldn't dare call it...). Of course I need not tell you that all this while, cyclists were passing by us at the usual frequency. In the end, I understood one sentence well enough to give a logical answer, and went on my way.

¹For those who know them: Leo and Fry, the brothers Jonas.

Commenting / new room

2006-09-25T14:47:00.000+02:00

I have enabled anonymous comments. I must confess I hadn't looked at the comments menu before, but now you can all comment to your heart's content. Unfortunately there seems not to be a way of restricting anonymous comments to human posters, so I'll just try this and see what happens. If internet advertising company computers will appear to find my news very interesting, I'll have to restrict posting to members, but wie dan leeft, die dan zorgt.

I have also heard that in my new room, where I'll be moving next week, the promised WLAN is not yet available. And the person I asked did not know when it would be, so I'll just have to arrange that myself. I will arrange something, since I am getting a little tired of having to go out to look up something on the internet, and not having it in the evening or in weekends, etc..
Apart from the apparent total absence of living room/kitchen-like spaces in the dorms on the campus, it seems to be very much like UC indeed, only half as expensive. Which is somewhat surprising, since it is a private university campus. But, no complaints: mensa and room and sports programme together cost 360 euros per month. Only I have no choice but to take the whole package. But, I can move out when I like, although I have to say so four weeks in advance; that's a difference with UC. And might be positive, if I would happen to find something nice... but first I'll see what it's like on that campus.

Revolution!

2006-09-23T17:40:00.000+02:00

Thursday (21-9) evening, I went out with a few people from the language course, to say goodbye to Adrian, our Hungarian classmate. He is going back home, to Budapest, to join the street protests against the present government.
He told me that most intellectuals in Hungary usually vote for Fidesz, the right-wing party. I assumed that meant liberal, but, surprisingly, it is the conservative party. It turned out that Fidesz is simply the least corrupt big party, and that its conservatism looks much like the liberal socialism of, for example, GroenLinks in the Netherlands. We didn't get into details, but I got the impression that had he been Dutch, Adrian would have voted GL, or something similar. Interesting world, politics ;).

Landed / bureaucracy

2006-09-23T16:48:00.000+02:00

I feel quite settled, as it is now. Apart from a room and a language course, I now have such things as a bicycle, which counts as a primary life requirement for a Dutch person like myself, and internet access, which also counts as such, even for non-Dutch people...
Friedemann, son of my dad's friend Reinhard, and I both wanted a second-hand bicycle, and therefore set out to buy them. Having found a shop with reasonable prices, and both having found a bycicle in there, Friedemann managed to get a discount of 10 euro's per person, in return for a promise that he'd tell everyone that it was a nice shop ;).
I also have internet access, as mentioned in another post, and even a German bank account. I have found out that paying with debit card, as I was very much used to at home, is not that widespread as a practise here. Also, here they use a signature as identification, rather than a PIN-code. Which of course does not speed up the whole procedure, since it means you have to wait for the receipt to be printed, etc. Which in turn explains why people don't use it that much over here.

I have fulfilled all the bureaucratic requirements for living and studying in Heidelberg for a year, and I managed to do all of them on one day :). I had prepared myself for a day or more of walking from one bureaucratic institution to another, with Kafka's Schloß somewhere in the back of my mind. I had read that I needed to get an exemption from the health insurance obligation, which I would need for my immatriculation, which I would need for my bank account. Now my problem was that I wanted to get a local public health insurance, since it was cheaper than my Dutch one. So there was a very nice circle: I needed a bank account for my insurance, which I needed for my immatriculation, which I needed for my bank account, etc.. But everything turned out to be quite fine: at the bank they didn't even ask if I was a student, but just gave me a student's account, and then the rest came quite easily.
The only nasty surprise was that I could not end or suspend my Dutch health insurance, because it apparently comes with being enrolled in a Dutch university and getting stufi... So I had to quit the German insurance again :(.

Language course

2006-09-22T19:33:00.000+02:00

Monday 11-9: I found a language course! That is, I found several, but one of those actually had the right conditions for me to enter. I found a few that would start in October, at various institutes, and I found one that was full, at the Internationale Studienzentrum, and I found one that had started one week ago and still had place left, at the Heidelberger Pädagogium.
I had to do an Einstufungstest, which meant they wanted to know how good my German was. Having completed that, I was told I would be placed in the Oberstufe, i.e. the highest level of the three. The lady who did the placing wondered where I had learned my German, and asked me how long I had already been in Germany. When I said 'three days', she looked rather surprised, and complimented me on my pronunciation :).

The next day, being Tuesday 12 September, I had my first class, and found the following:

The teacher, Herr Heim, fits my stereotype about German teachers relatively well
- He knows lots of things about linguistics, speaks English, Spanish and French and reads Italian; a deutschgründliche Ausbildung, in short
- Very careful Hochdeutsch pronunciation
- Looks quite serious
- What doesn't quite fit is that he isn't authoritarian at all, even seems a little insecure
The other students are from Taiwan (1), Ukraine (1), Hungary (1), Italy (1) and Spain (2). As far as I can see, they are nette Leute, nice people :).
Relief: my German is certainly not the worst of the class, but not the best either. At least, Claudia (Italian) and Shu-ming (Taiwanese) know their grammer better than I do.

The language course is every morning from 9 to 12:30 or thereabouts, which is good. It makes sure that I do something at least every day, and leaves the afternoon for doing nothing, reading up on physics, cycling around town, doing bureaucracy, doing homework, etc.. The only slight problem is that many university offices are only open between 10 and 12 a.m....

Die schönste Stadt der Welt

2006-09-22T16:38:00.000+02:00

Wise Guys - Die Nachrichten:

"Der Bundestag beschloß in knapp zwei Jahren, von Berlin, endgültig, mit Pack und Sack, nach Bonn zurückzuziehen. Der Umzug wird nicht beleuchtet, doch er dient 'nem guten Zwecke: die schönste Stadt der Welt..."

...ist ja Heidelberg am Neckar.

(People who don't know the Wise Guys: never mind...)

Heidelberg feels like the ideal university city. Small enough to be 'gezellig', old enough to have beautiful old buildings, small streets, and the general 'packed' old city centre atmosphere, and it has a good university as well. And a river, on which people even sail :).
On the north shore of the Neckar are the Neckarwiesen, the Neckar meadows, which are quite reminiscent of the grass around the UC campus squad, only larger, and with a river in front of it. They make the idea of studying until the end of July a bit more attractive, although I am still of the opinion that the Heidelbergers are just late with their summer. (Still no signs of autumn, for example. Not that I'm complaining, though :).)

My room for September is in the middle of the Altstadt, practically at the Hauptstrasse, in a Studentenwohnheim¹. It is relatively small, for UC standards at least, i.e. some 10-12 square metres, but has rather large closets to compensate. The view from my window is nice, full of old red roofs, like the view from the hallway window opposite my door (pictures will follow). The room does unfortunately not have internet, or at least none that I can use. But, all in all, I am satisfied with this room, at least for a month.
There are other people living on the same floor: one from France, two from China, one from Germany and one from Georgia (the one in the Caucasus). So far, they seem nice people, although I have not had very intensive contact with them. The Frenchman, called Pierre, has kindly shown me the internet room in the university library, which is gleich um die Ecke, and even shared his account with me. The two Chinese people, called Zheng and Xu, I believe ('Xu's name' is hard to transcribe) have allowed me to use their computers in my search for solutions to my internet problems, but that is more or less the limit of the contact, apart from 'business-like' contacts about who is to keep the floor clean during which week and such.
I said 'floor', rather than 'flat' or 'unit', since that idea does not yet seem to have taken root here. There is a kitchen, granted, but it is fairly minimal (think UC-kitchen, but then only the room needed for the kitchen, so about 4 sq. m.), and lacks the usual attachment of a living room. That is a drawback. It is a consequence, I think, of the fact that here, students mostly eat in a mensa and use their rooms only for sleeping and studying. There is one such mensa, two minutes walking from my room, and I must say that I see why one would eat there. It has the social function of UC's Dining Hall, and the food is quite good. And, even better, it has a nice patio, with grass in the middle, trees around that, and tables around those. And it also has wireless internet...

All in all, my room and its immediate neighbourhood are not bad. This makes me all the more curious how my new room will be. The story is as follows: Heidelberg, being a small city with a big university, has a large shortage of student rooms. Large meaning the following: there are about 4 000 rooms available in student dorms, and the university has about 26 000 students. The university is not the only higher education institute in the city; all in all there are about 50 000 student places in Heidelberg's higher education sector. So, I am happy that the Akademische Auslandsamt has found me a room, from October onwards. And also one for September, but that's not the same room. The new one is in the West of the city, on a private university campus, and has, if I can believe the information on this campus' website, no kitchen, but to compensate it does have internet, and a mensa. In other words: one more year of UC-like living :). Except for the fact that I'll be studying elsewhere.

¹ A German-French interpreter once told me that the German language is much more specific, with the result that translating from German to French meant leaving out information, and translating the other way meant specifying more things. I think this also holds for other languages than French, of which this noun is an excellent demonstration; I would consider it quite obvious that in a student house, students live...

Title

2006-09-22T16:37:00.000+02:00

Before I came here, I have been warned some three or four times, by different people, completely independently of each other, that I might lose my heart over here. I didn't quite know what those warnings were referring to, but apparently Heidelberg and the losing of hearts go together. Later, when I was trying to think of a title for my weblog, I realised that I was quite beginning to see why these two go together, and hence decided on this title.

For those of you who haven't heard of me for the past two weeks and would like to know what I've been up to: the following few posts will be devoted to that. Those who have heard from me know what to skip.
For those of you who are not that fluent in German, Dutch or English: my apologies. I mean, I will most probably frequently mix German, or Dutch, into my English, or even quote shorts bits unmixed. If you want to a translation (into whichever language of the three), comment, or e-mail or so.

Oh, and the title means '...where one loses one's heart...'.