Brighter weather and travels

Spring is springing, work is chugging along, and my travels are beginning to escalate as we head into my second summer living in Gothenburg. I have to say "living" in Gothenburg, because it seems like I won't be spending a whole lot of time here during the summer with all of my vacation and conference plans, but hopefully there will still be opportunities to enjoy the city, the weather, and the coast during the nicest part of the year here.

Today we have about 13 hours of sunlight, which is truly a glorious feeling after the nadir of 5-ish hours per day in the peak of winter. Temperatures seem to be hitting the positive numbers on the celsius scale on a daily basis, and it almost feels like I should be going outside in a t-shirt (until I remember that I tried that and it is still way too cold for such attire). Anyway, I've taken a couple of short trips since my last post, so I thought I'd make some short written accounts for posterity and whatnot. Photos have been added to the album from the last post.

A few weeks ago, I went to my first conference that involved presenting my work from Sweden (see the 3 January post), which was located in Bochum, Germany.  Where?  Bochum.  It's a relatively small college-y town in the industrial area of western Germany, near Essen and not far from Cologne and Dusseldorf. Since I had heard more of the latter two cities, I decided to spend a day in each to explore. The first stop was Cologne (Köln for all you Deutschlanders out there), which I visited for 7-ish hours on my way from the Frankfurt airport to Bochum. The main attraction there is a giant cathedral, which is quite impressive and apparently took about 630 years to build. If you think about the history of the U.S., 630 years is more than two and a half of that. From there, I went by train to Bochum, where I stayed and conferenced for three and a half days. Three of my colleagues from Chalmers were also there for different parts of the conference (two came for the first two days and a third came for the last two days), and I presented my paper on Wednesday, which I think went well. Bochum was actually a really nice town, with some cool areas for shopping and going out to eat and drink, and we went out one of the nights with some people from the conference. The conference and accompanying activities occupied the majority of the time there - the first night we went to a design museum in Essen, the second night to a mining museum in Bochum, and the third on a city tour of Dusseldorf. The day after the conference, I spent some hours in Dusseldorf touring around before flying back to Gothenburg. Apparently Dusseldorf and Cologne have somewhat of a city-sibling rivalry going on, which is interesting - both are located on the Rheine river and are centers for fashion, art, shopping, and Karnival celebrations, but they have different beer specialties (Kölsch in Cologne and Alt in Dusseldorf), rival football teams, and they sort of compete as the cultural center of the North Rhine-Westphalia state. Both had a street called Hohe Straße (High Street, for my former roomies back in Ann Arbor), which made me feel somewhat at home, so I'm not going to pick sides here.

My second recent trip was back to Norway for another ski weekend - this time for cross-country skiing. I had never done this before, but it was surprisingly not too difficult and rather enjoyable. This was with the same group that I went to Hafjell with (see the 25 February post), but this time we went to someplace in the middle-of-nowhere Norway rather than a resort mountain. Literally, the directions we were given for the drive from Oslo was something like "take this road until you are no longer in civilization, and then turn left three times". We actually thought we were out of "civilization" about an hour prior to what the direction-provider intended, but we eventually figured it out somehow and made it to the cabin. The cabin belonged to one of the girls in the group, and it didn't have electricity or running water, so we had to keep the fire going for heat (it got down to around -20 C at night) and fill some tanks with water from a pump every morning for all of the water-requiring activities. On Saturday we took a ski trip through the beautiful, snowy landscape, the destination of which was the top of a hill with a nice overlook. On the way back, we stopped and made a fire in the snow (didn't know that could be done) and cooked hot dogs for lunch. On Sunday before we left the cabin, we shoveled about a meter's worth of snow off the roof, which took the eight of us about 2 hours to complete. That was a LOT of snow, but fortunately the sun was shining and it was a beautiful day, and at the end we got to jump off the roof into all the snow we had dumped on the ground. Afterward, we made our way back to civilization and home.

I have a new batch of traveling coming up, which will take me to Berlin for a workshop in a little over a week, followed immediately by a week in Singapore for a conference, and then I'll have a couple of months in Gothenburg before midsummer and the next whirlwind of voyages. I'm looking forward to it all, and I'll do my best to keep the blog updated!

Glad påsk (Happy Easter)!
Steven