06/06/2000
So this covers the adventures of my trip to Aachen and back, and all
the fun had. The trip there was good - the trains were mostly
uneventful, although I have no idea where people get the idea that
European trains are on time. Someone once told me that you can set
your watch to European trains -- I'll buy it, if your watch is
accurate to +/- 30 minutes/day. Regardless, I made it without missing
a connection and was greeted by Alex and a group of her friends at
around 1:30am. After determining that no interesting bars or hangout
places were still open, we wandered back over to the Fachschaft (explained
below) and hung out for a while. As context for those not familiar,
Alexandra is a friend of mine from Austin. She was an exchange student
in the states for quite a long time and attended school at LBJ high
school while living with a friend of mine.
The late hour got to us before long, and Alex and I eventually decided
that bedtime was a good time. Thus, we hiked a fair ways back and got
to her apartment. Sleep was good but short, lasting from 3am to early, when
we got up for the morning trips to the chocolate.
Lindt-Sprügli has a chocolate factory right near where she lives,
so we went by there and another place and I picked up lots of
yummies. After taking those back home, we went on and met up with some
of her friends for lunch at a Mensa, or student cafeteria of RWTH. The meal was surprisingly
good, and reasonably priced. You got three choices that were color
coded -- one had fish, one was vegetarian, and one was something
else. I had the fish, but many of the students seemed to prefer the
vegetarian. (Of course, this may just be another example of the
less-is-more rule, which explains why those eating vegetarian meals on
airlines and the like tend to get a fresher meal, simply because fewer
of them are prepared and the picky vegetarians are more apt to
complain.)
This is a picture of Alex:
Earlier this morning I dealt with obtaining money in Deutschmarks,
which was nontrivial and involved trips to a couple of banks and such.
I didn't find any place that did cash advances on my Visa (check
card), so I ended up doing one on my mastercard (thus instantly
bringing a smile to the faces of MBNA shareholders
everywhere). However, my ATM card just arrived, so hopefully I'll be
able to use cash machines now like the rest of the world.
This is what I saw at ATM machines for a long time:
From there, we went and attended one of Alex's classes -- a graph theory
one. I have a picture I took in the class here somewhere. The material
was (not surprisingly) very similar to the stuff I saw in a class at Tech;
they were studying proofs of whether a graph is hamiltonian or not at the
time.
Seeing Clinton
At some point we ended up going to see Bill Clinton speak in Aachen,
as he received the International Charlemagne Prize for contributions
to world peace and European unity (whatever that means). Some 400
German polizei were reportedly around the area for security, and most
of them were visible. Folks were obvious
on all of the roofs, and the
manhole
covers around downtown were all sealed shut with some sort of special
tape.
To get into the downtown area where the ceremony was held you had to
go through one of those metal detector/frisking dances where the only
thing stopping you from getting a handgun in is your inability to
purchase and disassemble a decent ceramic gun. Regardless, I was
frisked enough to verify that my genitals were in fact genitals, and
not a gun. My extra AA batteries were also taken up (but returned up
on exit), and we had to drink some of the water we had on us. All
reasonable security measures, but nonetheless based on the "safe"
assumption that most big-time criminals are stupid enough to be
criminals.
The actual speaking was pretty neat -- of course, nothing terrible
memorable was said, but we listened for a little while anyways. Anti-Clinton
sentiment seemed to dominate anti-American, but most of the crowd
seemed genuinely interested in a positive way. A few people booed and
one or two chanted "Monica", but nothing terribly disruptive
happened. For the most part the crowd felt pro-American (to the extent
that you could expect people to be), although you get the feeling that
the Monica thing was covered pretty heavily in the news over here.
After boring of that, we found food and hung around. By this point, I had
a fairly decent fever and didn't feel too well, so I think we went back
home and I crashed for the night.
On Saturday, some of the Fachschaft members got together and
re-painted a room of theirs in the Informatik (computer science)
building that had been overrun by kids recently. I made it there
around lunchtime, and we all had yummy student-pizzas (basically,
two-topping personal pizzas). After that, we rented and watched two
movies in ChrisC's dorm room -- Chris had a VCR hooked up to a
computer with a TV card, which served as a nice home-theater
system. He also had several computers, most running FreeBSD, although one was an HP box
running HP-UX (which I think must have been forced upon him through
work).
Aachen has no river, so according to the students they compensate with
this little stream that runs through downtown. It's actually kind of
interesting, although I wasn't ever really able to figure out if it
accomplished anything besides moving some water from one place to another.
This is a nice shot of Alex's backyard from the apartment. We
bought a small watermelon and went outside with intentions of eating
it, although the nice weather and lack of sleep the night before got
the better of us and we ended up sleeping on the ground for the better
part of an hour. After that the watermelon was enjoyed, though.
Alex's desk.
A view of Alex's apartment from the street.
Lots of students go home for the weekends. These folks all used their
bikes and locked them up at this DeutscheBahn station. Aachen is a
very bike-friendly city, at least as it appeared to me. Most of the
students rode bikes, and they kept them locked up everywhere. One of
Alex's roommates was even kind enough to lend me his bike for the
weekend while he was gone, so I didn't have to walk that much.
The city of Aachen is experimenting with LED-based traffic lights.
A pretty
picture of downtown Aachen, and this is a cool statue. I think the statue is of Charlemagne, but I'm not
absolutely sure.
Nothing really much more for this page. As usual, the
raw pictures
are up in the directory.
