schlecht...

Yes, a bad day is a bad day. I have been looking forward to see ballet Romeo and Juliet (music by Prokofiev, of course!) tonight, as this is one of my favorite piece of music of all time, and this is how the day goes:

Frustration with doing laundry - yes, I had been delaying this forever, and going to a foreign laundromat for the first time isn't the speediest affair in the world. Then in the rush to eat dinner so that I could make to the ballet on time, I discovered, unpleasantly, that my rice went bad in the refrigerator - so no dinner.

By the time I'm about to run out of the door, I realize that I'm out of money - exactly, less than 5 euros. Thanks to the DAAD's great organization (nothing against DAAD of course, since I'm very thankful - no sarcasm here - that I'm here in Germany), I never receive the internship/scholarship payment as of now, almost a month since I arrived, and I had been borrowing from my boss piecemeal amounts of money - I certainly don't go and ask for a fortune! And my wallet goes flat right at the time I need it.


Whenever one is out of cash, the American instinct says, CREDIT CARD! But unfortunately, American credit cards are not accepted; but how about debit card? ATM machines? No, no, no! I have only a paltry sum left in my bank account, and even after I decided to take whatever I can take from my account, the ATM machine is closed. Yes, this is Karlsruhe, where most shops are closed after 8pm and on Sundays.

Just about when I was going to try my luck and beg for admission with my 5 euros (since the ticket for students is not much above that), there is pouring rain outside - by bike or by foot, there is no way I can get the theater in 4 minutes without making a huge mess.

And, yes, the rain almost stopped about 15 minutes after the ballet suppose to start.

Dark Energy and Dark Matter

The nice (aka hot and humid) weather does not preclude the fact that it was a fairly ordinary working day for me today, reading some more on ROOT and getting my mind wrapped around the showers after showers of cosmic ray particles. My first excursion into Emacs was somewhat bumpy, but I'm still hoping for some day when I can dash around Emacs with lightening speed -- with the keyboard, no mouse.

In the afternoon there was a seminar talk on dark matter and dark energy by a guy whose name, unfortunately, I did not get because I was a little late to the seminar. I had to say I was very fascinated. Some people I talked to after the seminar seem not very much attracted to the amount of equations and theories in the talk (which, after all, is all we can deal with dark energy and dark matter at this point, since experimental approaches so far provide just observations and conjectures, not explanations, as I understand), but I personally like the equations very much, especially all the mathematical terminologies that seem to sneak in from time to time (compact spaces, hmm...). It was the first time I heard about dark energy and dark matter from someone who really seem to know the topic (even though, of course, Prof. Adam Riess at Hopkins is famous for his work on this topic), and I admit I'm lost most of the time - but that really did not prevent me from liking it!

The Streets of Karlsruhe

A few days ago I said:

At the first glance, Karlsruhe is hardly impressive: it’s neither old enough (built in the 18th century) to have the picturesque castles, etc. from the older times, and nor it is new enough to have modern and sleek looking architecture.

But I stand corrected. The city of Karlsruhe can be such a wonderfully picturesque place - when I walk beyond the part where I live (Südstadt) and beyond the confines of "traditional" tourist places. During my walk to the south-west part of the city, I was constantly delighted by the variety of buildings on all kinds of streets, large or small. It is such a nice change of scene from the American style, newer clusters of houses, where the same pattern is repeated from house to house, from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Karlstraße, a major street	A small street off Südenstraße
Roonstraße	another small street
Kriegsstraße, a major street

The streets of Karlsruhe in general are quite different than their Baltimore counterparts. While bikes in Baltimore (and perhaps American cities in general) are seldom a major ingredient of street culture, here in Karlsruhe (and seems to be the same throughout Germany as I heard) bikes are a fixed part of the cityscape, including dedicated bike lanes (see picture), bike rakes everywhere often with many bikes parked, and signs for bike riders everywhere, and the biking population comes from people from old to young, men and women, children and babies with their mothers. Biking is fairly convenient and useful, especially considering the colossal price for gasoline, but the public transportation here also is very convenient.

The major vehicle for public transportation at Karlsruhe is the Tram, which runs on tracks and are somewhat like subways except not underground. The Tram track runs between two directions on major roads, or just in the middle of the road at Kaiserstraße, where no cars are allowed since it's a major shopping street; the Tram could be somewhat dangerous if one is not aware of them (I almost ran into one once!). I really wish that the Tram could be underground, as I'd prefer less noise and less cables (which the Tram runs from) between me and the sky...

The traffic here seems well organized, although the cars seem to be less yielding toward pedestrians - or maybe it is just the impression of someone like me who is very much pampered by the absolute priorty of pedestrians over cars in the US. The pedestrians here do mostly follow the traffic signs, which interestingly exists on both directions on the same road and are not always synchronized. The buttons for pedestrians are there for almost all crosswalk (and they do work!), unlike those in the US which are found only from time to time and most of times seem to be non-functional.

Internet, finally!

1At last I think I'm fully qualified as a creature of the 21th century: having internet alone is enough to make me light-heartedly happy (sigh...). But otherwise Sunday morning is for listening to the incessant church bells, cooking a decent lunch, and chasing flies out of my room -- the shops, of course, are all closed.

A sunny day...

Today is at last a sunny and warm (above 20 °C warm, I mean...) day, but the sunniness did not last long - by the late afternoon it even started drizzling. I revisited Kaiserstraße with all the shops open; then my mood goes like the weather, down:

There is a piano shop on Kaiserstraße, and after I tried the pianos--Bechstein and Steinway and other brands unknown to me (and all expensive)--then left the shop, I was feeling quite downcast. It is true that I'm already settled down and felt quite comfortable with everyday routines such as buying groceries, walking around in the city, going to work, etc., and the feeling of waking up in the middle of a dream, puzzled by the unfamiliar surrounding, and not knowing where I am comes less and less often, but the piano brings me back to a week ago while I'm in the US (I can't believe that it is not yet one week since I arrived in Germany!). It is so strange that I'm in a foreign land (for the second time in my life) with a language that I hardly speak, with a culture that I'll still trying meticulously not to offend, and with a lifestyle so unlike what I had before (no more homeworks, problem sets, nothing, nichts, nada, only going to work on weekdays...). And needless to say, I miss my piano...

The Karlsruhe Schloss

Yesterday and today are holidays, so instead of going to work, I stayed home in the mornings (mostly either sleeping or in the state between asleep and awake), then went out and inspected Karlsruhe, like a good citizen.

At the first glance, Karlsruhe is hardly impressive: it’s neither old enough (built in the 18^th century) to have the picturesque castles, etc. from the older times, and nor it is new enough to have modern and sleek looking architecture. Yesterday it was cloudy and chilly, and since it’s an official holiday, all shops are closed except some eating places and very few people were on the streets – all of these certainly don’t make Karlsruhe any prettier than it can be!

But when I came near the Schloss, the Karlsruhe castle, the scene changed quite dramatically. Karlsruhe’s claim to fame as a tourist city (which it is not, compared to the other more famous cities in Germany) is the Schloss, which is located in the center of the city where some 32 streets meet and extend racially like the sun’s rays (see a map here!), and the Schloss is literally the namesake of the city: Karlsruhe = the rest place of Karl (Karl Wilhelm, Margrav von Baden).

There are some constructions going on, which seems to be the common landscape for many tourist sites, but the Schloss is extraordinary nevertheless – it is certainly beyond my imagination how any family could live in such a magnificent palace. There were quite sizable number of people there, and the museum in the Schloss is open, despite the fact that yesterday was a holiday.

The street in front of the Schloss,Kaiserstraße, is a major shopping location with variety of shops and the rather annoying Tram (the subway of Karlsruhe, but not underground) in the middle of the street, but both times I was there, the shops were closed – yesterday because of the holiday, today because it was after 8pm. One of the most inconvenient things I found in Karlsruhe is that most shops close at 8pm, with a few exceptions, which are open only for 2 more hours; since it is only starting to get dark at 9pm at this time of the year, the closing time seems quite unreasonable to someone like me who is more energetic during the night than during the day, and I certainly had never been to an American mall where the shops closes at 8pm!

Tonight I stayed out late because I wanted to see the Schloss and the city in the night (…and in the lights). There are still people near the Schloss and the Marktplatz, but as I walked south to where I live, the number of people on the streets was getting fewer and fewer, and the Baltimorean in me started to feel uneasy, even though I have been told that walking on the streets at night alone is not a big no-no as it is in Baltimore and the streets are fairly well-lit. But of course I arrived at my lodging place unscathed.