A reminder

I have spent the last few weeks back in the United States. The visit has reminded me a lot of what I’m missing by moving overseas—conversations with friends and families, direct contact with collaborators, and the familiar sights and sounds of home.

At the same time, I realize that there’s a lot that I really don’t mind missing out on—urban sprawl, McMansions, the American media corps, the “convenience” lifestyle, and so on. It’s definitely a struggle at times to get by as a stranger in a strange land, but it’s a tradeoff that I’ve been willing to make, and even more so now that I’ve had a chance to compare what I’m missing firsthand.

Seen and heard

Some random things encountered yesterday, that I doubt I would have seen back home:

• A young child—certainly not more than 10 years old, and probably not even that old—walking around the neighborhood without any parental supervision. While not common in the US, it’s certainly quite common here; children barely bigger than their backpacks appear to walk to elementary school on their own (either individually or in gaggles) with startling regularity.
• Outside a store here, a dog was attached to a leash and sitting quite peacefully. However, what was bizarre about it was that the leash was not attached to anything; it was merely lying on the ground. It was an incredibly well-behaved dog not to react to its surroundings and all the passers-by.
• A Hungarian Mormon missionary. This I found to be incredibly amusing, although I can’t really say why. I guess I just find the concept intriguing. It’s not really a shock that there are Mormon missionaries going to Hungary (after all, I don’t think a Hungarian would spontaneously convert to Mormonism). On the other hand, what actually prompted such a conversion, and how it would lead to a Hungarian learning fairly passable English and German and tromping around the streets of Aachen to extol the virtues of the LDS is certainly worth considering. (The whole encounter was rather thought-provoking, actually; I’ll post more about it some other time.)

On finding good help

One of the challenges of academia in Europe appears to be the inverse of the problem in the US: how to support an army of minions graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. In the US, finding good help is relatively easy compared to finding means of paying for them; in Europe, it appears it’s much easier to find the funding than to find the employees.

Or maybe I shouldn’t say it’s hard to find people—it’s just hard to find the right people. For a recent position I advertised, I’ve received applications from all sorts of people, including a bunch who would, on paper, appear to be entirely unsuitable for such a position. (For instance, why would someone working for more than two decades as a staff scientist want to accept a temporary post-doctoral position?) It rather boggles the mind.

As for who I ended up hiring, I’ve decided to take one post-doctoral fellow and one student. The search for a postdoc was fortunately quite easy; an extremely qualified candidate whose “degrees of separation” was only 1 applied relatively quickly, and no one else really compared well with that. (Experience as an experimentalist, and familiarity with the MD software we’re using, also helped.)

The graduate student search was much more involved, surprisingly. Most of the candidates came in with essentially no experience in the field. This is true of all the finalists, too, but they all had experience with computational science. Unfortunately, two of the candidates unintentionally hurt their chances during the application process, in rather different ways. leaving only one candidate without a serious black mark left in the running. It’s rather unfortunate that I had to make a decision through elimination rather than through a positive selection, but sometimes, you have to take what’s handed to you and make the most of it.

Oy. A long time it's been

Since last I gave this blog some attention. I have to admit that time has a way of sneaking by when I’m not paying active attention to what I’m doing; I definitely have a nasty tendency to let things slip by, and that’s not really my intention here. On the other hand, there is always the concern of sharing too much information: when exactly does my desire to share the details with my life interfere with my desire for privacy, as well as the rights of others to privacy? It’s a fine line to walk, but I figure I will find a way to bridge the gap.

The start of a very long day.

Writing from on-board an ICE train from Aachen to Frankfurt (original source Brussels), I am currently beginning the first leg of a trip to San Francisco. What surprises me is that even though there’s a nine-hour time difference, the flight is only eleven hours long. This means that, by the clock, I will get to San Francisco just two hours after taking off from Frankfurt. The downside of this is that today will be a 33-hour day. (This also leaves me wondering two more things:

• exactly how far north the great circle route between Frankfurt and San Francisco really is, and
• when everybody jokes about wishing for a longer day, would this be an approved way of getting it?)

As for the ICE trains, they’re a rather interesting way to travel between cities in Germany. They’re the equivalent of the Amtrak and Acela trains in the US, but with better customer service and reliability. The “reservation system” is a little different as well. You can get a reserved seat, but it’s not reserved by name--only by starting and ending points. You get a seat designation with your ticket, but there’s no guarantee that someone else won’t have taken your seat by the time you find it!

Just attended my first faculty meeting

To say it was a bizarre experience is putting it mildly. Three hours of technical (administrative) conversations and discussions. And did I mention it was all “auf Deutsch?” To say that I only got a fraction of it is puting it mildly. I seemed to get a sense of the major theme of the discussion, but to say I got all the ins and outs would be a flat-out lie. I recognized many words in isolation, but absorbing whole sentences in context? Not so much.

I suspect that this will be what I will need to use as my yardstick for determining my progress with the German language. The more of that meeting I understand, the better off I’ll be. (No real surprise there, I suppose.)

It's not every day

That you get to take part in a workshop held in a fortress. I recently attended a workshop in a town called Würzburg; the workshop was held in the Festung Marianberg. The facility is the site of what used to be a fortress; the outsides of the buildings--as well as the cobblestone paving--clearly have the well-worn look of structures that have been around for centuries; on the other hand, the insides look like they’ve been recently renovated, and the furniture thankfully was a far cry from that of medieval times.

Euros and cents

One of the more mind-boggling aspects of life in Germany is the banking system--and how relatively open everything is. It’s rather surprising, actually, given how closely guarded privacy is, how liberal people are with respect to giving away financial information. Pretty much all payments are handled using wire transfers, which means you have to provide your account and routing number. It’s not that you don’t do this in the US as well (after all, it’s on every check that you write), but it’s not quite as blatantly obvious that you’re doing so.

In addition, there’s something odd about not needing to use PIN numbers at an ATM machine--it’s very disturbing, at least to someone who has become used to typing ever-longer PINs and passphrases.

But again, given how much German law is geared toward privacy, it’s surprising how much life is actually getting in the way of keeping things private.

The pause between movements

I attended my second concert in Aachen tonight. (My first was during one of my two interviews for the position I’ve just taken.) It was an up-and-coming quartet, one of those quartets invariably named after the first violinist.

A lot of thoughts ran through my head as I watched them perform the fifteenth quartets by both Beethoven and Schubert. Some observations were purely musical, as the quartet struggled mightily with the Beethoven but flew nearly effortlessly through the Schubert. My take on this is that the late quartets and sonatas are to Beethoven what the late song cycles (Winterreise and Schwanengesang) are to Schubert: impossibly personal works that have become universally beloved. However, because there is so much of their composers in them–their struggles and fears, loves and hopes, faith and frustration–that it requires that the performers have lived the works.

There is so much more to this music that is completely lost simply by playing it through. It’s one of the reasons why I resisted doing Winterreise for a recital I gave as a graduate student. I knew I could handle the tongue-trippingly large amount of German, and the range really wouldn’t have been a problem. However, my lack of experience in the world–having only been a child and living in the ivory tower for the better part of a decade–was significant enough that I didn’t think I could connect with the piece in a way that would allow me to do it justice. While for the audience it might have been a great recital to hear, I don’t believe that I would want to have just gone out their to sing the notes. I wouldn’t have done justice to Schubert’s legacy if I had.

Other thoughts were somewhat more random and fleeting:

• This might have been the first time I’ve ever heard a string quartet in which the violist was the most naturally expressive member of the quartet. The violinists and cellist were too busy emoting, and I think to an extent this came across in the performance, as things got rather ragged. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the fast movement of the Beethoven, where I think things nearly got completely unglued.
• I’ve never heard more collective throat-clearing after a movement than I did in this concert. Practically every movement, and especially the long opening movement of the Schubert, was followed by a rather spectacular bout of expectoration. It got to the point where it was downright funny. I was certainly laughing, and I know the people sitting around me were laughing, too. (Even though I don’t speak that much German yet, I can still recognize ein lachenden Mann when I hear one.)
• Whoever said that classical music was dying out is probably mistaken. A good chunk of the respectable audience (for 6:00 on a Sunday evening) were students and young adults.
• Has no one attempted to arrange the slow movement of the Beethoven for a cappella chorus, like Barber’s “Agnus Dei?” (Perhaps it’s just a matter of finding the right words.)

But getting back to the title of this post–what of “the pause between movements.” As I mentioned above, at this particular concert, it was quite disruptive. In a way, that is being mirrored in my real life, with a very turbulent transition between the last movement (my life in New Mexico) and the next (my life here in Germany). I hope that it is just a momentary thing, and that I–like a good musician–can put that behind me, and just move on without letting it get to me.        

The hour draws on

It’s been a while since I’ve posted last. There are lots of things going on in my life at the moment. It feels like I’m working three jobs at once: finishing my current job, getting up to speed on the new job, and planning another move.

Of these three, the one that’s causing me the most concern is planning the move. Part of this is because the last two moves have been so utterly chaotic: I didn’t have time to plan, so the basic strategy ended up being “throw everything into a box and ship it to the next town.” However, given the complexity and challenge of my next move–including downsizing from a house back down to an apartment–there is just no way I can let that happen again.

So, I’ve spent the last few weeks systematically going through everything I own to ensure that I am dispensing with anything that I don’t really need. This has been a relatively tough process, as I have had to force myself to throw away a number of things that, under other circumstances, I would have probably kept. But, as I mentioned above, I can’t really afford to be overly sentimental or nostalgic, so the trash pile grew larger than it normally would. It’s also guided the process of cleaning out my office. It’s been quite successful, and has actually reduced the number of boxes I’m taking from work. I would have thought I needed a dozen boxes to clean out the office–after all, it took about eighteen boxes to move out of my office at work when I left MIT–but this time, I’ve managed to get it down to about six or seven.

Now the last major task is to clear all the unwanted junk out of my house, a task I hope to have completed by tomorrow afternoon!

What's for dinner?

My take on couscous: sautéed carrots and celery, steamed green beans (fresh or frozen), topped with tomatoes, grilled chicken, black pepper, and grated cheese. Fast and tasty: a hard-to-beat combo.