Slipped away

Friday evening...normally, two days of rest would follow, but in my case, there'll be only a lot more sightseeing :) Today was the day of the Tower! Or at least the evening of it... We walked around it, crossed the Thames via the Tower Bridge, and then sat in for a beer near the London Bridge tube station. You would not imagine how many girls are dressed like it was summer! You look at them, and even you get cold...But then again, you look at them a little longer, and it's hot again :) Crazy English people...
I promise I will sum these days a up in a little more detail later, but I have a lot of sleeping to do. I'm sure you can understand that part :) Also, tomorrow is party-day, so don't expect a quick entry. Sunday is museum day, we'll see how that goes and how much time I will have awake and doing nothing.
Oh yeah, and today my direct manager commented on one of my observations with the phrase "Great minds think alike" :) If that's not a praise, I don't know what else would be :)
Some new pics are up again, please bear with me on them...I don't have neither the tools, nor the knowledge for proper night photography. Some of the worst pictures are made during some of my best time...Go figure...

Anyhow. Sleep. You too. Well. Bye.
M.

We make the road by walking

I'm tired. Again. Or did I already tell you about that? :)
Today I started off my day with a tasty bagel, as English as I could make it :) Then I went off for my first training, which was about all the homegrown systems MS was using. Most parts were quite interesting, and of course all this information is very important for later work. After the training session I went for grocery shopping to Marks & Spencer :) I know, that's a clothes shop for all you girls out there, but here in London they also sell bread & butter :) I bought some sausages and spicey sauces for dinner - it was quite good, especially knowing my cooking skills :) Then I went out to find the Sherlock Holmes statue at Baker Street, but I've found a nice little pub instead, next to the London Business School :) I had a London Porter, no photo this time, but the beer was the first typical lukewarm British beer I had :) I have no idea if that was on purpose, but it definitely tasted bad :) Then, I took a doubledecker to Piccadilly, to see all the flashing ads, which were not so interesting, then I went over to Trafalgar Square, and then I took a short walk by the Thames to finally get on the tube and get home! It was long and tiring day, and I still have to do the dishes... But hey, there's tomorrow for that! :)
Bah, now I'm off to sleep it all off!
M.

At the end of the day

Today was without any sightseeing - I'm a bit too tired for that, hopefully I will sleep that off by tomorrow. Work was good again, I solved a few important problems and saw a few nice new things about how stuff goes in our team and projects. I'm getting the hang of it, I guess :) We tried out the local cantine for lunch today, which is somewhat special since you can only use your MS ID-card for payments. You have to top it up like a prepaid SIM-card to be able to purchase stuff with it, and after that it's very simple - you just put it in the card reader and it deducts the costs and displays your new balance. Even the chocolate vending machine share this principle in our building. This is quite comfortable, actually, but of course you have to pay attention to have enough money on your card when you plan to use it :)
For lunch I had some kind of fish with some spicy tomato sauce, potatoes and some other thing which I suppose were sweet potatoes, but since that is not at all native to the UK , it could have been something else. It looked like sweet potatoes, anyhow... and it tasted okay :) I also had a pomegranate/thisberry/thatberry smoothie, which was a lot less appealing... it had a lot of banana in it, which spoiled the whole thing for me. But it was funny that the ingredients showed how many pieces of each berry were used :) It was an okay meal, all in all, filling and fine. I also had a banana but that was not particularly good, it was not ripe enough.
Later this afternoon I was asked to look into a few problems which are semi-important but would look very nice when fixed for this weeks release - so with a little help I managed to find the right spots to correct and voilá, my work will go out to the NY traders as soon as they need it :)
After work I went shopping to the local TescoMetro (again). This is a lot smaller than the Tescos we have in Hungary, more like the usual supermarket. They have a lot of cashiers, though, and they have a single queue leading to all of them - in the end a loudspeaker announces which cashier is free, so basically the queue is only split up at the very last step. Seemingly the system works well and it's quite fast. It's not really possible to buy that many things in one go, but I think there are stores for the weekend shopping too nearby. I will have to check them out for more cheese varieties and anything nice and English :)
The main things I bought so far are some roast beef cold cuts (amazing!), cheddar, of course, orange/lemon/grapefruit jam, and of course a small bottle of Marmite :) This last one has a very strange flavour, but I like it... It's like eating creamy gravy :)
I also had to buy some household items to do my laundry and washing up - sadly this is quite costly and of course I won't use a whole box/can/bottle of anything in 3 weeks. I was thinking about buying tabs for the dishwasher machine, but I settled for the usual "manual" dishwashing liquid - it would take weeks to gather enough dirty dishes to justify using the dishwasher :)

Oh well... Wednesday is over, tomorrow's stories shall come tomorrow :) Never forget to check my photos in the Picasa album!

M.

New sensation

Today was the first day at MS here in London. The walk to my working place was quite nice, this business quarter is quite amazing with all these new and tall buildings.
I was the first one getting my ID card, seemingly the others just did not bother enough to ask what they should do to get theirs :) Kevin, my mentor - project manager (or Buddy, in MS lingo) arrived a bit late to get me to my desk. It's in a huge room with a lot of desks, there's place for about 200 people. Kevin was kind enough to help me find the local AmEx office to get some cash, and also he invited me for a tasty muffin and a coffee. He showed me around in the office, introduced me to zillions of people, and told me a few things about his position and how his team works. He's 30 at most, and he is a very friendly guy, and even he himself wants to dismiss any formalities - this seems quite general with the IT staff here. Basically everyone is encouraged to do whatever suits his own professional development best, and the actual project is almost just second in line behind that. This friendly atmosphere is also part of being an "Associate" of the Firm, not just an employee among thousands. So far I like this concept, though I am aware that this probably ain't the Holy Grail either :)
So back to my story ;) Lunch was again on Kevin, he took me and a Hungarian colleague from the MS graduate program to a new restaurant nearby - I had some very tasty pork cutlets, and Kevin also seemed to enjoy his fish meal. After lunch it was work and introductions again, and even though I faced a few problems which make my current seemingly very short assignment a lot longer than I expected, I don't feel uncomfortable with all this. I finished work at 6, went to the Tesco nearby to get something for dinner and breakfast, and then I joined two Hungarian colleagues for a small trip around the city. We took the Jubilee Line Underground to King's Cross & St. Pancras - the latter is an amazing red-brick building, I will have to go back in daylight later. Then we took a walk (and a beer) to Russell Square, and then a bus near the London Eye. I tried to take some pictures, but my camera is not that well suited for night photography. The Eye, the Parliament, the Big Ben - they are all very, very nice, again I will have to visit them in daylight. After this 2-3 hours long trip we took the Jubilee Line again to get home... all in all, it was very nice, I'm sure I will see a lot of beautiful things here :)
The traffic and the people are nothing special, not counting of course the traditional cabs and doubledeckers - which are of course all driving on the wrong side of the road :) Not so easy to get used to it, at each crossing I remind myself that I have to pay attention to this but concentrating on it makes it even more difficult :)
For the travels we used the so-called Oyster Card, which is basically a prepaid travelcard in London. On each trip you have to hold this card next to a proximity sensor - on buses the fare gets deducted immediately, on the underground you have to check out as well at the end of the trip so the fare gets calculated based on the zones you crossed. The system works pretty well, especially because the daily maximized cost is even lower than the price of a normal day ticket, so it's actually worth using it. Season tickets work more or less the same, but I don't think I would travel enough for say, weekly tickets to be worth their price.
Oh okay, I know this post is a bit mixed up, but it's late and I tried to squeeze in everything :)

Thanks for reading me!
M.

London reporting in

It's almost midnight in a slightly different time zone than usual... Today in the morning I had a pair of presentations about how I should go about being a new employee, and at 2:20pm I left for the airport. There, I spent an hour in the business lounge - my first time ever :) It was not that special but they had free drinks and cookies. Afterwards I (and ~10 colleagues) boarded flight MA614 to London - my first business class travel ever :) It was quite nice, they took my coat, served nice wines and an amazingly rich meal - something I will have to make a photo of on my trip home. I had some assorted cheese, chicken with potatoes & stuff, some more spicier chicken and a tiramisu. Oh, and while I also helped the people sitting next to me to open their bag of mixed nuts (it was basically bolted shut...). They were an elderly couple, not my colleagues of course. They were visiting their son and his family in Budapest - they have a family tradition BTW, of marrying at the age of 37 and having the first child at 41 :) That would make the husband of the couple 82, and he was in a remarkably good health for his age ... he told me he learned to fly a plane before WW2 on the very same Gatwick airport we landed in London... :) They were very nice people, we had a good chat, so it was a good flight. On the airport after a loooooong walk on the corridors we got our bags and were awaited by a minibus, which took us to our apartments. It was not a quick process, and not without mistakes - I misread my address and tried to enter No.11 in a completely different building :) But eventually I got to my (really) own apartment, which is HUGE! At least as big as my flat at home... No problems so far, I have an internet connection as well, though it costs a lot of GBP... After settling I went out with 2 guys for a beer... my first pair of Guinesses in the UK! And now it's time for some pictures and a very good nights sleep :) I will get back to you very soon, so come back and read me :)

Pictures
Map


M.

Back in the World of Adventures!

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It's that time of year again, I'm going for a training trip with my new employer - this time I'll haunt the streets of London for a few weeks. So fasten your seatbelts, start up your RSS-reader engines, and join me on the joyride! :)

I'll be seeing you all!
M.

Goodbye Blue Sky

This is the last entry I am posting from the beautiful city of Berlin, Germany.
There might be one or two more about this coming weekend, but after that, it's over. Blogging was never really part of my toolset, it just made it easier for me to tell "everyone" how my time goes here in these far off lands. So now that I will meet "everyone" regularly again, the need is gone, and thus the update frequency will be most probably 0 posts every month :) But if I post anything, that will of course be something completely different.

Oh well, these were probably the best 5 months of my life, in one way or the other - thank you for allowing me to share my experiences with you. It was great while it lasted.

So long, goodbye!
M.

Pictures of an Exhibition

It would have been stylish to finish this in 50 posts :) But since this is the 51th, I have to find new goals in my life :)
So, yesterday evening I visited the Old National Gallery on the Museum Island, using the free entry on Thursdays for the second time. My main goal was to see a few Parisian impressionist pictures, as I by reading Van Gogh's biography by Irving Stone I really got in the mood of this style. I know, it's stupid to like paintings based on what's written about them :) But as Van Gogh met several of these guys during his days in Paris, and described the differences between and the typical style of each of them, I really wanted to see what he was talking about :) (The book is based on Vincent's letters to his brother Theo, so it's more or less okay to consider the words in the book his own words :) )
So. I've visited the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam before, and I am aware that I don't really like Vincent's style of painting, but I remember some pictures by contemporary painters that I liked. But now I needed a refresh of my memories :)
The museum itself is quite small, it took about 2 hours to see everything inside, including reading every label and studying every picture I've found interesting. Most of it is of course dedicated to German 19th century artists, with some amazingly detailed huge canvases, mostly on the royal family or some military-related event.
There are also some sculptures from that era, one of which really amazed me...It was exactly the same figure as one sculpture in the gardens of Sanssouci! Just this one was marble, and the other one was bronze. Here are the photos for comparison :)

So, now for the impressionists: there was only one room with their pictures, a few canvases from Manet, Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Renoir, and a few Rodin sculptures, including a copy or study of his most famous 'The Thinker'. The colours and painting style these people used is really amazing, some canvases have lines that could have been drawn by 5 year olds but colours that take a special mind to come up with. The painting I liked the most was 'Summer' by Renoir, it just looked so real and displayed that exact moment so well...An amazing picture, looks a lot better in real life than on this small image :)
I guess it would be better if I did not lack the words necessary to describe art... :) But still, this was a good visit. Tomorrow I will try to go to one modern art museum too, showing some Picasso and Munch canvases. I hope I will have the time on my last full day here.
M.

Thursday afternoon

I think I neglected this blog for too long :) I posted one backdated entry for 13.02. and also one for last Friday. These were of course written on their respective days, so not much cheating is included :)
This weekend was a good one, I had friends around and we had a good time in a few pubs around Berlin :) We visited and exhibition on the LOTR movies, which was just great, with all the details on the special effects used, the concept art, and all the clothes, masks and other gear from the movie. I spent a lot more time there than my friends, but they were kind enough to have a beer and wait for me while I was sucking up information :) In the evenings, we beat each other and everyone around in foosball, and well, had a lot of generic fun :)
Monday was just a slow day, Tuesday was a day of an IMAX Safari movie (the fishes were a lot better...), Wednesday was just sitting at home, Thursday is just the interim period between 2 projects at work and hopefully visiting a museum in the evening, and Friday will be my last working day Berlin. Want some heartache? I sure got a lot to spare of that...Saturday evening/night we'll have a farewell party, so at least it will be a glorious end :) I wonder how I'll get up Sunday morning to catch the plane :)

Ok, no more days to talk about! Off to work then :)
M.

Moving pictures

El laberinto del fauno - this was the movie I watched this evening. It's a Guillermo del Toro movie, who's probably not the most famous director around. The movie is not completely unlike The Fall, as both have a young girl as a heroine and both movies unfold as the girl dreams them up. The main difference is that the Labyrinth is a very, very dark movie, full of pain, hopelessness and despair. Some of the images are also quite disturbing, and I did not feel the need to include such scenes to keep the tension up. And of course the movie was in Spanish, with English subtitles (I was expecting German subtitles, now that would have been interesting :) ). I was glad to notice that I did not forget all my Spanish, but without the subs I would have been almost completely lost. Most sentences I was only able to reconstruct after reading the translation. I think the main problem with my Spanish understanding skills, that it takes a lot of time to consume a sentence - I guess I should improve this. Speaking and writing is a completely different matter, right now I am quite hopeless in this field :)
But anyhow, the movie was very good, with good acting again - I guess we'll hear the name of the young actress who played Ofelia in the movie (Ivana Baquero). The movie is nominated in 6 categories at this year's Academy Awards, it'll be interesting how many it gets and in categories. Of course at the time I'll post this entry, written on Friday evening, the Oscar ceremony will be already over.

(Update: Das Leben der Anderen got the Oscar for best foreign movie, and it deserved it, too. I think El Laberinto got one for best mask & special effects.)

Erm, my mind keeps wandering. I should rest before the coming tiring last-weekend-in-Berlin party :)
Take care,
M.

Music is my aeroplane

Well I figured I should just write a short entry on the week so far. Wednesday I went to the gig mentioned, PRR supporting Blackfield. PRR played the shorter show, since it was not "their" gig per say, but they were great nevertheless! Sadly they did not play "Nimos and Tambos", which is probably my favourite song, but they were very good. Strangely they played most of their tracks as a whole, not pause inbetween, so they did not get much applause between tracks :) I hope they did enjoy the show, too. Blackfield was also awesome, Steven Wilson is probably one of the few people I actually believe that making music can be a full-time job. He has like 5 different projects, and Porcupine Tree and Blackfield are both very successful in their respective genre. Their show was great, they played most of their songs, and also "Thank You" by Alanis Morissette. Sadly the tallest people in all Germany like this kind of music too, and they decided to stand in front of me :) The concert ended around midnight, and I managed to catch a train, and also a rain shower before I went to bed. So it was another good evening.
Tomorrow some friends come to visit for the weekend, that will definitely be fun.

And, on other news, my current status here in berlin, at my job is quite confusing. It most probable that I will leave next weekend, but I might get one week more. The former is like 99%, the latter is almost impossible. Maybe someone should make up her mind, eh, Mrs. Boss? :)

So...have a good weekend, y'all!
M.

Silence of the Berliners

I'm back, I'm fine, but not in the mood to write anything...I guess I will know in one or two days what will happen with me in the next month. And tomorrow is Pure Reason Revolution and Blackfield concert time!

So that's all for now.
M.

Damaged people

There's not much to say about the beginning of this week. I finished the two things at work I've been busy with in the last month, and today I had a few hours almost free, as I had to wait for someone to check my work. These last 2 and a half weeks here will be very, very busy, but now I'm at least interested in what I'm doing. It's still not rocket science, but the complexity of my tasks is going the good way.
Today saw two things happening. One was me forgetting to pay at the cantine and just walking away with my tray :) I realized quite quickly, though, the one step of the process was left out, and it was all okay, but I got some strange looks :) The other thing is another new Hungarian colleague arriving. I was asked to show him around and tell him about stuff, and he managed to freak me out by the end of the day. I introduced him to one of the system administrators, who usually gives an introduction how the development enviroment we use works. So they agreed to have this presentation at 3pm. So, at 5 past 3 I checked on the new guy, and he was still in his office, so I kindly reminded him of his meeting. And when I next saw him, a bit after 4pm, I asked how the session went. Well, he told me that he could not find the room where he had to go, so he just went back to his office. Without saying a word about it. At this point he lost me, I don't think there would be any legal reasons to be such an idiot. It's amazing that when we got here the "old" Hungarian guys were all normal, we (probably) ain't too bad as well, and after us 90% of the people are just complete wackos :)
I hope this new guy won't need need much more help, since I don't really feel like I should waste my time on such an ignoramus.

Not much more to say...Tomorrow evening will be spent in pubs with German colleagues, it shall be fun and foosball all night long :)

That's all!
M.

Another day, another dollar

Wow, this Sunday was long! And it was very good, too! :) As I mentioned before, I woke up, looked at the snow, did my laundry, and was more than ready to start my day rolling. The first step was heading to a 'net café and forget to post my previous entry, so it has to be backdated :) Then, I got a Turkish börek, with cheese, to keep my tummy occupied until dinner, which I was sure will be very late. I ate half of it and got on the bus, heading to the Museum of Photography. The museum is dedicated to Helmut Newton, and funded by the Foundation named after late artist, thus one floor only has the items of Mr. Newton. It's a very good part of the exhibition, gives a good insight on how many beautiful naked models he had the chance to photograph :) He also did quite good portraits, some were on display too. The other part of the exhibition was entitled "Men, war and peace", which had pictures by James Nachtwey, who was there in every region the US had intervened in the last few decades, be it Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan or the Balkan, and took very sad and very shocking pictures. I did not really understand how David LaChapelle's extravagant and colourful portraits were related to the title, but I really liked how his flamboyant pictures contrasted the black and white and pale sadness Nachtwey's pictures emanated. LaChapelle made very complicated pictures, using very bizarre setups and figures - of which the best example would be "Xenophobia", showing a black and a white model, naked, with their heads mixed up, seemingly by cutting the head off and sewing it to the other body. Hey, I said it was bizarre :) The third exhibition was about cities of the world, by a French guy with a name one easily forgets (Raymond Depardon, I looked it up). He was sent out by a French foundation with a still and a moving picture camera to shoot pictures of everyday moments in various cities around the world, including but not limited to Berlin, New York, Moscow, Johannesburg, Shanghai and Rio de Janeiro. There were twelve cities, each with around a dozen of photos, and a 5 minute reel. The photos were nice, everyday life at it's best, but the short movies were more interesting. They had 12 big movie screens in one huge room, and the films were running on and on, all at the same time (sans sounds, of course). The artist usually chose a semi-crowded place (he must have had an easy job in Tokyo :) ) and just filmed people running around. He is a man, so he usually followed a nice face (ass, even) or two in every city. Bah, men, they are all the same :P :) Actually I was quite suprised that none of the movies showed the camera being ripped out of his grip and stuck up his ass :) I thought people liked it a lot less to be observed, but it might just be me. I did not stay to watch all the films though, as it was a bit cold in that huge room, so I left to have a coffee before the movie I was going to watch. Right now the 57th annual Berlinale, the Berlin Film Festival is taking place here, which actually is the first film festival I've ever been to :) I watched one of the smaller movies, smaller as in "not part of the main program". It was entitled "The Fall", a film by the Indian director Tarsem Singh, or just Tarsem, as he was credited. And, I must tell you, I expected this flick to be amazing, and it truly was! To sum it up, it's about a 5 year old Romanian girl, living in the US in the 1920s, who is in a hospital with a broken arm, and who meets a young actor who lost the will to live. The actor tells her the most amazing story ever, and the story unfolds visually as if it was taking place in the girl's imagination. The special effects are great, used very well, and only in the necessary amount, this movie truly is something for the big screen. Both characters and scenery change as in the wildest dreams, since it's just that: a wild dream, a child's imagination :) The movie keeps a good balance between smiles and tears, and even though it did not seem to hold a too deep meaning, it was one of the best I've seen recently. After the movie was over, there was a very short Q&A session with Tarsem, which was sadly cut even shorter since the next program was about to start. Still, Tarsem answered a few questions, and as his train of thought rolled on in every answer, it was easy to see why the movie had the flow it had. The most interesting thing in the event was the applause after the movie :) Not usual in your neighborhood cinema :) I guess it would be better if I had allocated more time on this event, but there's always another time, though sadly most probably another place, too.
So, after the movie, I took the longer route back home, just so I become hungry enough for dinner :) I made Sechuan turkey, which turned out quite good (I even dared to add a little honey to the meat, though I did not feel that in the taste...), and sipped a nice Californian Chardonnay with it. I don't think I would spend this much money on a wine at home, but here, the price range at the supermarket is quite narrow, what I consider quality wine is between 4 and 6 EURs. And while at home I at least have a slight idea what regions and grape types mean, here, I only see the colour difference between an Australian Shiraz and a Spanish Rioja.
Anyhow, this Chardonnay by the Gallo family is very good, very tasty, so a good choice :)
Well, to wrap it up...I just realised will only spend one more weekend here in Berlin...next weekend I must go home, work reasons, and then it's only one more left. I guess I just should let go of "Sic transit gloria mundi" and let "Carpe diem" take it's place...
I only hope I quoted the fitting parts from my French cookbook :P
Oh wow this was long. Bye!
M.

Saturday bloody Saturday

Friday evening was nothing special, it was just too cold to move out, and I kinda enjoyed the first evening of the week alone. It was just the usual TV-shows-and-a-tea-evening. And the weekend also started as usual, I went to shop for whatever I'm going to eat during the weekend, and I tried to get a replacement for my lost sweater. Well, they have pretty ugly stuff on sale at Karstadt, so the replacement project will have to wait a while. I don't consider the morning wasted, per say, but I did spend a lot of time on things that were not really necessary. The plan for the afternoon was visiting the Dalí exhibition, so I headed for East Berlin again. 20 years ago this would have been a lot more exciting adventure :) The exhibition was nothing special, sadly, only 50 or so lithographies were on display, and only one single painting. The pictures on exhibit were good, though, they got the "Mad Genius" message through, but still, it was a lot less than I expected it to be. But since these prints were made in series by the man himself, if I had a few thousand euros to spare, I could have an original Dalí at home :) After the exhibition I hurried home, I had to get dinner ready and eaten quickly, so I can get to the last Neal Morse gig on time. So I just ate up stuff that was still in the fridge, and headed for Terra Incognita...Really, the "venue" was pretty far away, and hidden well behind a lot of communism-era 10 story houses. The "church" the concert was held in was just another small building, nothing church-like in it's appearance. Luckily, there was a guy smoking in front of the building, and as he saw me not finding my way, he was kind enough to show me where I wanted to go :) And the gig... Most probably not only the last worship gig Neal had in Berlin, but also the last I ever went to. Yes, he played his rock songs in an awesome way again (what a tremendous acoustic guitar solo!!), but this event was even weirder from the atheist POV than the one before. The church was one youth church, and it was the "let's stand up and raise our hands to the air and shout HALLELUJAH!"-kind :) The "worship" part of the gig was a lot longer than the one before, and the people there really seemed to get that feeling. Neal had a few good and really funny stories to tell, played his songs (waaaay too few of the rock ones, sadly), and then came the crazy part. I think he called it a "prayer", but it seemed more like a healing ritual to me :) In fact, I felt like an anthropologist finding and examining a strange tribe in the jungle :) The people stood in a circle and howled and cried and sang, to ask for the healing of a little girl, as far as I was able to tell. I did not want to seem impolite and leave, or even sit down, but all this was very incomfortable. I am very glad to have seen Neal Morse live, but I will try and pretend not to have seen him act "silly" :)
But well, it was not that bad, all in all, and it was at least not cold in the church :) Sadly it was on the way home and while waiting for the tram - and it was only like -2C! The cold wind only made it worse, though. So I got home, went to bed, and today I woke up to see snow covering everything again :) But now, I think my laundry is finished, so I'll just go and get them, and leave you to do more important stuff than reading me :)

M.

Hymn For A Heathen

Monday, Tuesday, nothing really happened. Monday I got here without problems, Tuesday we shared a bit of pálinka with the German colleagues, that's it. They are a nice bunch, as it turned out, and luckily my Hungarian colleague, who got to have his desk in a room with Germans does a good job in getting acquainted with them. Which is also good for me.
But the event of the week so far was something completely different; yesterday evening's Neal Morse concert. This guy has a very strange background: he was the frontman of one of the best modern progressive rock groups, Spock's Beard, but then he became a "born again" Christian, and released a few solo albums afterwards. Some of his work is worship music, which I'm neither familiar, nor comfortable with, but he released 3 top notch rock albums too (and the 4th one comes end of this month...). So all in all, he makes great rock music, and for some reason he has a soft spot for Germany, so he has a few gigs here each year. Like now. But. These are not "average" rock gigs, but he does solo acoustic shows in churches. So yesterday evening I voluntarily went to church, to see the man live for the first time :) Well. The music he plays is awesome, even though he plays alone on a single guitar or keyboard. And we were like 30 people in the audience. I did not use the chance for a meet-and-greet (but there are 3 more gigs here this week, all free entry, so... :) ), but he was there conversing with people in the crowd and such. The music part was really great, but I did not like the worship part at all. I'm really not familiar with all this, and it just seems like a show to me - even though Neal probably meant all the prayers and teaching just the way he said them. I can easily relate to the merry tone in his religiously themed lyrics, but I am definitely not experiencing the same stuff he does when he performs them.
So, all in all, it was a strange evening, but worth my time. The only problem I had was with the heating, or rather the lack of it, in the church. It was effin freezing by the end of the show...I hope the other churches he performs in are warmer :) I guess I'll skip tonight's show, but I'll be there on the last one on Saturday, that's certain. Friday, I'm not sure yet.

Well, that's all...be well, and eat your veggies!
M.

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Quite a few things have happened since I last blogged about anything. We went out to Wednesdays ago with colleagues, both Hungarian and German, and had a good party at a place with a foosball table and later at a place with some good music. The evening was a lot of fun, a lot of German talking experience, and all of this cost me only a lost sweater :) Strangely enough the music place only had and entry fee for people under 27, which I don't really understand the reasons of. But the crowd was not to old this way either, so this strange policy did not cause any problems.
On the Friday of the same week we visited the local Planetarium for a show about Einstein and his theorems, but that was neither very interesting nor did it tell us engineers any thing too new. The show was worth it's price, but not a dime more. Later we checked out a foosball place called Wiener Blut, or Viennese Blood, which was quite fun, we did not even play as bad as I think I would. Okay, we lost all games against the local people, but only by a small margin :)
The weekend I had visitors again, and I was lucky enough to get the keys to the apartment of one Hungarian colleague, so Dad and my brother had a proper bed to sleep on. We visited every single interesting thing in the city, including a few places (e.g. the Reichstag or the TV tower) which I did not check out yet. The weather could have been better, the rain chased us in the IMAX movie one evening, but all in all it was a very good weekend. I had a few problems with taking Monday free, but strangely enough the only boss who was quite angry about it was the one who had the least to do with it :P
This last week was very, very tiring, I had a few 10+ hours workdays, and I was tired enough to have the wrong flight home booked. Luckily it did not take too much effort to correct this mistake and I got home and had the chance to sleep a bit, finally.
So this was the very condensed summary of these last almost two weeks. And now, let my last month in Berlin begin...*sigh*...
M.

Polly wants a cracker...NOT!

Well, travel and flying is always an experience. Time between my last entry and now was spent as usual, no virtual rainforests should be cut down for the reason of archiving those events. But today...I got to the airport early as always, and the gate was changed 3 times in 10 minutes, we were basically just running up and down in the airport :) And while I was waiting for boarding to begin, I was trying to phrase a polite mail of complaint to the operators of the airport, as I noted that the security checks were quite sloppy - airport personnel was checked at the gates, but they were free to go in spite of the gate *BEEP*ing. At Berlin-Tegel, for example, also the personnel is carefully checked, and well, that's the way it should be. So anyhow, I was thinking about this subject, and was interrupted by some girls who asked me if I wanted to fill out a "How satisfied are you with the airport" form :) Hell I did. So now they know :P
Then, we got on the bus that took us to our plane, which was operated by Augsburg Airways (nice historical reference :) ), and was the first turbo-prop plane I've ever flown with. It was a Dash 8 Q400, where the Q stands for "quiet due to installation of the Active Noise and Vibration Suppression (ANVS) system designed to reduce cabin noise and vibration levels to nearly those of jet airliners", which translates to "feels just like the inside of a coctail shaker". The other problem was that we did not get a sandwich for breakfast, but chocolate crackers. They were good, but too little, too late :) And the plane was of course slow like a paralyzed snail, so we were just able to catch our connecting flight. All in all, that part of the trip was pretty bad :) The other leg went just fine, got me to work, where I'll try to sleep stay awake for an hour or two more.

For dinner I will try the sandwich maker I brought with, I hope it tastes good :P Or that at least the sandwiches will.
Take care,
M.

A Hard Day's Day(s)

Catching the minibus to the airport at 4:50 am was just the beginning. The flight, which should have taken off at 7:10 was stranded at BUD for 45 minutes, because the weather was quite foggy in MUC. At least we got an extra orange juice during the wait. Our connecting flight was only 20 minutes late, at least that was written on the board, but the take off only happened like 30 minutes later, again, because of the fog. When I looked out the window while we were on the runway, I did not even see the wing of the plane. That's a reassuring sight, I must tell you :) Going a few hundred kmh with virtually no visibility is definitely a lot of fun :) The layer of fog was only like 10 meters thich though, and the weather was fine and sunny above :) Strangely enough basically only the Munich Airport (name after the late Franz Josef Strauß, minister-president of Bavaria) and it's surroundings were still covered with fog whe we were already airborne, which is either very unlucky or a very bad choice of place for an airport.
So anyhow, the journey ended well, we had a good lunch (lasagne and canelloni at the usual Italian restaurant), and a very exhausting day of bugfixing for me after. I had a good dinner, and just chilled out in the evening for a few hours watching Desperate Housewives, Dead Like Me and reading Good Omens. Terry Pratchett + Neil Gaiman = tons of fun. My colleague, who stayed here for the weekend to get visited by his family borrowed my camera for the weekend, and after work he dropped in to return it, he was quite satisfied with it. I might have convinced him to buy a Kodak :)
Today...Maybe even worse than Monday? :) Crazy bugs, crazier fixes, but it's more or less over for today. Oh yeah, and I guess I did not even mention that on Friday there was not ticket waiting for me at the airport, as promised, so it took a few minutes to sort everything out for my trip home. These last 3 days were not that good for work :)
One good thing might be that I was asked if it would be okay to work on a project in March from here...We'll see how that turns out :)

Well, enough of me for today!
M.

The way to a man's heart...

Yesterday was just one like all the other days. We did play a few games of pool and foosball after work, though, and ate a great Turkish dürüm again. So it was fun. No real reason to blog about it, though :)
But I had a reason to start this entry : Passendale cheese. (The web page is in French, but you can also check it out in Dutch :) ) Passendale is a Belgian cheese company, and they make the greatest cheese I've tasted here until now. Their product is so rich in flavour, it's quite surprising, and still, it does not dominate with it's taste, but perfectly complements the taste of any of the sandwiches I used it for. I have no idea where it is sold in other countries, but I'm lucky enough to have a shop nearby that sells them :)
Oh yeah, the other thing is Rote Grütze, which stands for "Red Groats". It's just fruit with vanilla sauce, but it's very tasty, the ingredients make a perfect combination. That's another thing not to be found in Hungary, that's for sure...
I hope you are hungry now :) Bon appetit!
M.