miscellaneous round up, vague title

a) apologies for not updating. a blogger for guardian.co.uk says its really annoying when bloggers apologize for not updating, since nobody else cares about your blog OCD other than yourself. fair point, but i think i have a few readers who pop in here by typing in the address rather than an RSS feed (in fact, the majority of my readers), so an apology is in order.

b) recent trip 1: dresden, prague, and krakow. a post is useless without pictures, so ill hold off.

c) recent trip 2: london, bristol, and london stansted airport where i was forced to spend the night. more details to follow with visuals

d) research. how annoying that its all coming together at the last minute. still, i should be glad that its coming together at all, all the doctoral students i know needed to extend another year (basically, other fellowships) and many of the young grantees just sort of gave up on their research after grad school acceptances rolled in. others tried, but had failed results for the whole year (frustrating, but i think that comes with the territory with the physical sciences).

e) interviews. i recently interviewed two pretty prominent people in energy (a journalist an an academic). both interviews went really well - im always touched when older, more established, and above all, BUSY professionals take time out for mentoring younger people. the journalist offered any of the resources of his publication (if i need articles, access to any journals, etc.), and the academic offered to read my paper and give me feedback. i was going to ask him anyway, but i was pleasantly surprised that he offered before i could mention it. what struck me about both is that they regarded me as an equal expert on energy issues (perhaps because of the questions i was asking?), and the journalist, someone published on the front page of the WSJ (in an industry where its either page A1 or nothing) said that he would use me as a resource point. wow...

f) i am running a slight fever.

g) i just ate half a bag of caramels from the uk. lame.

h) wireless technology. the wave of the future, especially in developing countries. my friend whom i visited in bristol had one of these 'third world cell phones' so naturally i tested it. not as in making phone calls or typing text messages, but i tested its "splash proof durability" by pouring beer and water on both sides of the phone, and then using the phone to scrape the rest of the liquid off the table. result: the phone WILL die. havent heard back from him whether drying out the phone worked though. silence makes me assume the worst, however. perhaps market reseachers should do more research like me (floods anyone?).

i) illegal alien. instead of a census in germany, they have simple REGISTRATION. whenever you move to a new city, you register with the local government office. for foreigners, this is separate from the visa office. again, purely local level. when you move from one city to another, then the new city requests your file from the old, and so the government can keep track of how many people live there.

when i first came to berlin, i moved here from marburg, a cute little city in central germany where i did a language course. in berlin, i found out today, i put my US address as my "previous address" which means i disrupted the whole system - my file was never sent to berlin, and marburg thinks i still live there. this would normally not be a problem since my registration in berlin was successful, but now that i want to extend my stay in order to work for InWent for a few months, they dont have my file in berlin. it should be simple enough to solve, but i have to kind of hurry - if they "close" my file then im illegally here in germany (or something, i didnt quite understand the consequences, other than the fact that it would be a big headache to sort things out). blah.

j) time to go GROCERY SHOPPING.

k) my german language learning has ebbed and flowed this year. the first six months i was extra motivated and studied vocabulary on the subway religiously. then i plateaued, mostly because its difficult to balance two languages* but in the last six weeks ive been learning pretty quickly and my comprehension has gottena a lot better (mostly due to an intern at the think tank where i do my research, who would explain words i didnt understand in german, rather than translating) so i think im going to register for an official assessment of my german (last i checked, i was a B2, but the road to the next level is a pretty long one, especially for text production) to give me proper motivation to study.

*for example, today my interview with the academic, who is german, was conducted in english. i didnt know he was german and the institute that i found him through was an english-language one, so i made my intial contact in english. today i offered to do the interview in german, but he said he wanted to practice his english. it actually ended up being better for me since the line kept breaking, and i didnt have to ask him to repeat as much since i could better piece together his sentences in english, but its a pretty good example of how english penetrates my life here even when i dont want it to.