Deleted scenes

When I arrived in October in Freiburg to my bare and empty bedroom, I got depressed. I mused glumly the way I muse glumly almost every time I move house: that my living standards have plummeted, and that my personal comfort has reached its all-time low. So my floormate Achim (who felt a bond with me because he'd visited New Zealand) took me to IKEA. We bought me a carpet and drawers and duvet and hangers. And curtains. Because I hated my curtainless blind-less windows and felt as if everyone was staring in at me. More precisely, we bought material and curtain-rings and a curtain-rod, and I sewed it in to curtains.

A month later, someone mentioned casually that the shutters on their window were stiff. I asked myself what shutters these were, and later examined my window more carefully. It turned out that I had window shutters too -- it was just that they were the clever German sort that roll down the outside when you twist a little stick on the inside, and I'd never even noticed them. They were wonderful. But I didn't want to look oafish. So I went sour-grapes, and let on that I'd spent the six hours sewing curtains not because I didn't know about the wonderful window shutters, but because I didn't like them.

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Over lunch one day in the university cafeteria, some of my classmates started laughing in a not-too-malevolent way about our differential geometry lecturer, who was Australian, and sometimes while lecturing twisted up his German words in little ways like pronouncing the German word "Mannigfaltigkeit" [English "manifold"] as "Mannifoldikeit". After they pointed it out to me, I started noticing it too. Then I started noticing the little half-giggle that went around the class each time it happened. (Deep down, Germans are proud of how difficult their language is.) Then, for camouflage, I started joining in occasionally too.

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I found myself in Rome one January Sunday morning, prying open a heavy door in a tall windowless wall of a big blocky building on a sidestreet, and discovering inside a Baroque church, just as a random website had promised me the night before. Moreover, it was a romantic decaying Baroque church, with sixth-century foundations and an interior by a famous seventeenth-century architect called Francesco Borromini and peeling gold-leaf curlicues all over the walls. And, moreover, it was a tiny romantic decaying Baroque church, just big enough for the twenty nuns who were seated hymn-singing at the front and the nine parishioners who eventually gathered for morning Mass and for us.

I found it fascinating, and beautiful, and also a little sad. The nuns were subdued, and their singing wavering; their faces were hard to read. Altogether I couldn't help thinking that nowadays being a nun -- or, at least, being a nun, and maintaining your belief in the importance of what you do, without the constant external reassurance you would have had from the calling five hundred years earlier (back when admiration for nuns was widespread and passionate, and convents were very prosperous) -- must be sometimes a difficult business.

After the service, one of the nuns stayed behind to show the old church to two little boys who'd been brought by their father.

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Late the last night of term, I was out in town with friends, and we were cold and decided to go hang out at one of their apartments. So we separated to go pick up our bicycles from where we'd parked them, and met up again in town centre. Then we all cycled out to Sarah's through the dark empty streets: fast and smooth and quiet and swerving round each other. Like geese in a flock. Or witches on broomsticks.

Limbo

Hong Kong airport has free wireless. I'm hanging round, arrived from Munich, leaving later for Auckland. I'm excited about going home, and I'm exhausted.

I don't know how I'll feel when I get home. Germany, with its delightful and demanding system of mathematical education, has taught me how to work -- or at least, one way of working -- and it's this: you simply clear your life of distractions, until there's nothing else to do. I'm looking forward to being back home in a land where I bother cooking properly, going for runs, seeing movies and concerts and talks, listening to schoolchildren debate, and a hundred other things. But will I be able to learn as much maths as I did in the last few months? I don't know, and at the moment I honestly don't care.

Germany's taught me other things too. I'm better at organising things -- travelling, and bureaucratic niceties, and random encounters with friends. It's taught me some German, unsurprisingly. I still don't speak or read it very well, but I can understand when people talk to me, and I can survive. It's taught me things about myself, or possibly just made me realise things I already knew:

• I like having, or at least find it easier to have, isolated friendships rather than big clumps of them.
• I like home comforts. Real travelling, where one wanders the desert with a passport and spare undies, I'd find difficult.
• I'm easily amused. I find most things interesting. (I think this is a good thing.)
  

It's been wonderful, and I'm grateful I went. But -- I think -- I'm also going to be grateful when I'm home.

The time has come

I've been saying goodbye to people.

I went cycling west the 20 km to the Rhine with my maths friend Clemens. It was a gloriously sunny day that looked like New Zealand February rather than German; the countryside was yellowed and very slightly rolling, with fields and apple orchards and vinyards and a couple of typically delicious villages. We hit the Rhine at the smallish old town of Breisach, puffed up a hill to its cathedral, and ate lunch looking out across the river to France. Then we lurched and bumped the steep cobblestoned way down.

I met my neighbour and fellow exchange student Alex on the trams, and elicited within moments both that she was sad to see me go and that she'd happily take all my furniture off my hands. So we spent much of the next day or so transferring carpet and curtains and chest of drawers and kitchen utensils down the stairs of my building and up the elevator of hers. My room's nearly emptied now.

I went out for lunch with my floormate Max. I went out for ice cream with my exchange student friends Alyssa and Vanessa. I ate cake with Elliot.

Emily I'm meeting for dinner now; her job is to keep me from dejection on my last night in Freiburg.

Through Bavaria

I went to Nuremberg for my second pilgrimage of the week. Five months was enough to enamour me with the German railway system, and I decided I simply had to trek to the Railway Museum in Nuremberg to see its baby pictures. I carpooled from Berlin to Nuremberg and crashed with a girl there, spending the evening chatting about organic groceries and quirky housekeeping neuroses. The next morning I went to see the former Nazi rally grounds south of the city -- they're enormous, they had a pastel mock-Colosseum, and lots of efficient historical plaques and photos, and were almost totally empty. Then I wandered the old town, which was impressive, because Nuremberg's the former semi-official capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and looks the part.

And then I went to the Railway Museum, and spent an hour in bliss. The best was the Hanover King Ernst August's early reaction: "I don't want any railways in the country! I don't want every cobbler and tailor to be able to travel as fast as I can!"

Later, I travelled south, and stayed some nights with Elisabeth and Hans, retired and living near Munich, random secondhand acquaintances turned friends. (And kind, and generous -- and I should mention that I've been continually amazed for the last few months at the welcomes I've received from friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, all over Europe.) We spent two days rolling through Munich by subway reading train ads to "Learn Wall Street English Fast!", and speeding over southern Bavaria by car, on autobahn through yellowy moor past tiny red-roofed villages with the Alps always in the distance.

We fulfilled another dear romantic once-thwarted wish of mine, and visited a medieval abbey, possibly once complete with long, damp passages, narrow cells and ruined chapel, all however now nicely kept up. There were (photocopies of) books on display dating from the ninth-century founding, faded twelfth-century reddish floorstones in the chapel, and a map somewhere showing the sizeable 20 km or so chunk of Bavaria south of Munich that used to belong to the abbey. It was impressive.

And we took a train up the highest mountain in Germany, saw a little Bavarian palace and a big Bavarian palace, watched the mechanical Munich town square clock strike, and visited the former concentration camp at Dachau, where political opponents of the Nazis and other inconvenient people were kept until 1945. This was also impressive, in a way -- huge and bleak. I read about horrible things in the museum until my mind was numb, and felt lost and couldn't form any coherent impression. As we left, I kept seeing the faces from the photographs on the people in the parking lot.

I heard about fifties Dachau from Hans, who went to school there. The place had disintegrated during the war; early on there was essentially no school building, and classes were held in local pubs.

I left on Sunday morning, and now I'm back in Freiburg, running errands and packing.

The world smiles with you

I eat my words. Or possibly my hat. Berlin's a much nicer place, in sunshine, than I gave it credit for. It has lots of glassy shiny colourful buildings, and it's that rare thing, a big city that's managed to create open spaces without having them look as if they were bulldozed clear yesterday in preparation for a parking lot to be built tomorrow. I slept in late this morning, then went undirectedly wandering, and saw all this and more.

It also has lots of neo-classical Victorian official buildings with svelte nymph-columns and Latin inscriptions along the lines of "Erected by King Frederick to the honour of Apollo and the Nine Muses". Berlin's the capital of the former Kingdom of Prussia, which meandered along in backwater obscurity for hundreds of years before becoming big in the eighteenth century. So its building burst was late compared to most German cities. Most oldey-buildings are erbaut 17- or 18-something, by the time when mischmasches of ancient religions were retro or appropriately regal rather than blasphemous.

Everywhere in Berlin -- particularly the centre of the former East Berlin -- is under construction. Some of the construction defies belief -- they want to build a new main-Berlin-Palace! To mimic the glorious old eighteenth-century one! Which was bulldozed by the DDR fifty years ago while perfectly intact to make space for some sort of government building, which was itself bulldozed a few years ago to erase all memory of the deed! And they're repainting the inside of the Marienkirche (the oldest still-used church in Berlin)! but when I was there today, the whitewashed-but-unpainted walls were being rehung with pictures! I don't understand much, but the sheer energy's nice.

I forgot to mention that yesterday I went to inspect our men in Berlin, otherwise known as the New Zealand Embassy. It's a carpeted office on the third floor of an office building somewhere south of the centre. It's staffed largely by enthusiastic Germans, it has two pictures of Helen Clark on the wall, it has multi-month-old North and Souths and a view out to Checkpoint Charlie. And I went to see the archaeological remnants of Troy, dug up in Turkey a hundred years ago by a German businessman and smuggled to Berlin before their discovery was announced. This was clearly either the source of, or a successful application of, the principle that possession is the fastest nine-tenths of the law. Troy consisted mostly of clay pots, it seems. Now we know what was in Helen's dowry.

To Nuremberg this afternoon, and Munich tomorrow.

Ich bin kein Berliner

In accordance with my newly-ratified policy on foreign travel, I checked in at the youth hostel on arrival in Göttingen, then headed out into the nearby woods to go hiking.

The newly-ratified policy has developed gradually over the last few months, starting when I realised on one of my weekend trips that despite my continuing Europe-seeing excitement, I was starting to have gorgeous-old-building-ennui. It's just not possible to keep finding everything wonderful for six straight months, especially when you're as ignorant of historical and technical details as I am. So, to properly enjoy my last week of travels, I've issued to myself the following proclamation:

• first, that I'm here to enjoy myself, and needn't Make The Most Of Every Moment or see uncongenial sights -- so I can go on pretty but insignificant backhill hikes, curl up early at night with a novel, and avoid Museums of Natural History without guilt
  
• second, that I'm here to educate myself -- so I can follow what Lonely Planet calls "the lemming routine" without shame, and go on tours or take the audioguide rather than always relying on imagination or intuition or independent thought

When I go home, I promise I'll never again sneer at tourists who are clueless or ignorant or can't speak the language. Really, perhaps it's best to go travelling to a place of which you know absolutely nothing beforehand. At any rate your net gain in knowledge is certainly thereby maximised.

Anway, the policy's working well. The hills in Göttingen are very nice -- gently sloping, and with mini-farms on the nearer edges rented by eco-keen city-slickers -- and the old earth fortifications round the town, where I wandered later that night, are pretty cool. I got home, and went to bed, and slept for a very long time.


The next day, yesterday, I took the train to Berlin, where I've been since. It's exciting; it really does feel like a big city; but it feels drab enough that I wouldn't want to live here. Perhaps it's inevitable for a town famous for wars and workaholic princes, totalitarianism and techno. I don't know. Maybe it's just the winter rain.

It's very good for me, though. I've seen a dozen classes of German schoolchildren, presumably on educational trips to the capital. I feel exactly the same. And really, after five months of bluffing my way through conversations with Germans on history and politics (which happen often, because Germans really like talking about history and politics), I'm grateful for an excuse to find out things like what the German parliament does, how so many Jews ended up in Germany, why the Berlin Wall was put up in the first place. I'm particularly ignorant of the Cold War -- I suspect, somehow, that this is standard for New Zealanders my age -- and it's been nice filling in whole "here be dragons" segments of my mental historical map.


My mathematical tour of Europe continues. In Göttingen -- whose main, perhaps only, claim to fame is as the home of a university that for a long time housed all the best mathematicians in Europe -- I saw a plaque to Riemann's former lodgements, in a boxy apartment overhanging a cut-price clothing store. Later I made a little pilgrimage out to the grave of Carl Friedrich Gauss. In Berlin this afternoon, in a spectacular Hohenzollern palace, I saw a picture of Bessel. He was labelled as an astronomer, and carrying a clock. Clearly the assumption that mathematicians are "er, those guys that deal with numbers" is of very long standing.

For a final news-tidbit -- I, too, have a hat! It was sourced on the weekend in a secondhand shop in the Freiburg old town. It's tweed and buckety, a little silly-looking . . . but of course nonetheless rather fetching.

Good cop, bad cop

Before I left for Germany, somebody warned me that the professors would be distant and scary and never speak a word. I heard the story of Albert Einstein, who made a lifelong enemy of his one by addressing him as "Herr Weber" rather than "Herr Professor Weber". And to some extent it's true. But there's a hidden counterbalance, to which I shall pay tribute today:

every course comes equipped with a tutor.

And this is not the nonentity sort of tutor that I myself have been in Auckland, who from the grand heights of one-semester-further-along-the-mathematical-spectrum gets paid small wages to grade calculus exercises and deflect some of the silly questions away from the lecturers.

Nah, these are gold-hearted black-belted mathematical ninjas.In their other incarnation as students, they're usually occupied writing a thesis for their Diplom or Doktorat. They know their stuff, and they're beautiful, beautiful people. They call us "du" rather than "Sie". They organise field trips, they take whole classes out to end-of-semester afternoon teas. Their eyes fill with tears when there's something we don't understand.

(In case you ever read this, dear representation theory tutor, maybe I'll just mention that . . . well, the exam I wrote this morning . . . er . . . well, it'd benefit from your characteristic generosity.)

Silly questions

I'm a little tired. Stupid things I've asked today:

[to a tutor] "How many pages should we write on the exam?"

[to a guy from China] "So, do you have any brothers or sisters?"

[to myself] "Hey, where am I?" (Germany? Reeeally?)


(later, addendum) Oh, and I got told my first German dirty joke! Though, characteristically I guess, it was neither particularly dirty nor much of a joke. Details on request.

Pullbacks and frozen peas

I've spent this weekend studying for a differential geometry exam.

Differential geometry's the mathematical equivalent of the TV dinner. It was invented one afternoon by some disillusioned engineer or physicist, who got bored doing her 47th messy multivariable calculus computation of the week, and told herself that there had to be a better way of doing things. So she rewrote all the calculus into lots and lots of meaningless abstract symbols, and spent ten years doing every conceivable convoluted computation on the meaningless symbols for once and for all. Then she settled down happily on the couch, knowing that for the rest of her life she'd only have to defrost her pre-computed meaningless-symbol solutions and not actually cook new ones herself.

(There is a problem with this approach, though. The engineer realised it a few years later, prematurely aged and trying unsuccessfully one day to get her mental microwave to do its reheating stuff. All this high-falutin' time-saving mathematical technology is kind of complicated, and once you forget how the meaningless symbols work, you're back to the chopping board again.)

Anyway, my exam tomorrow is on the convoluted mechanics of differential geometry -- the 129 pages just before the engineer sits down to her first TV dinner -- and may well be both difficult and dull. But every computation I do tomorrow is another 388 that no one else will ever have to. And for this, you should all be very grateful.

Conversations IV (Special Waitangi Day Edition)

The day before yesterday, I started musing: on Wednesday it would be February 6, and I would be all aloooooone. And a little bit homesick, and yet what could I do? I couldn't have a cricket match, because no one here knew how to play. I couldn't eat pavlova, because it'd start arguments with Australians. I couldn't throw mud at the Prime Minister, because it wouldn't be very nice.

And then inspiration came.

And so I collected together some floormates, and we made chocolate fish.


They were pink and sweet and very sticky. As confectionery went, there was certainly room for improvement -- but as exotica, they were excellent. I left some at home, took some to uni, and fielded questions.

Hans: Does one wish someone a "Happy Waitangi Day"? "Merry"? "Congratulations on the occasion of"?

My floormate Lena: What are your exciting New Zealand Day traditions?

My classmate Clemens: What are we celebrating? The signing of a humane and revolutionarily civilised colonisation treaty that was later repeatedly broken? why, how very interesting.

My classmate Leander: What are your national songs like? Can you sing one? Please?

Unidentified model theory classmate: So, how do you spell this . . . er . . . Vy-tay-ni?

Emily: What is this pink thing you're giving me made of? Oh -- marshmallow, really? . . . I'd never have guessed.

It was fun while it lasted.


But now the chocolate fish are all gone.

Rosenmontag

"What's the German word for 'parade'?" I asked my floormate Max.


"Parade," he replied.

Witch Sabbath

The guy across the aisle from me last night on the train was wearing a bear costume. It was brown, and fuzzy all over; he was eating a pretzel, and his friend next to him was just wearing normal army-corps uniform. 'Twould have felt surreal, except that the train was packed full, and half the other people on it were dressed as eighteenth-century sailors or fleecy goggly-eyed pink things. It was Hexensabbat ("Witch-Sabbath"), and we were heading into the Black Forest to celebrate.

"Carnival"'s got quite a precise meaning in Germany: it's the few weeks and days just before Lent starts when people do silly things in an organised fashion to let off steam before the forty days of boredom. It's highly regional; round here it's called "Fasnacht" and I'm told the highlight in Freiburg is a parade tomorrow which I'll be making certain to attend. Twenty minutes away by train, in 20,000-inhabitant Waldkirch, where I was yesterday, people spend the nicht of February 2 costumed and drinking and burning a straw witch in the town square. German Wikipedia claims it's the local version of a Celtic festival called Imbolc. (The American version is Groundhog Day.)

At any rate, it sure beat Halloween. Well, New Zealand Halloween, at least. It was nice to see a crowd-together-and-make-merry festival that attracted equal parts families, elderly couples and packs of drunk students.

I missed the witch-burning, but the place was still crowded by the time I got there. I felt a little left out costumeless, though I've no idea where they all came from (does every German have a Carnival costume somewhere in his wardrobe for annual use?) It seemed to be a matter of pride to be part of as big a group as possible of people all costumed identically -- a group of friends would all be dressed as bumblebees, or New York policemen, or the aforementioned fleecy goggle-eyed pink things (the girls in that group also had yellow miniskirts with bright blue flowers). Default costume (that adopted by the middle-aged men) was devil ears and a pitchfork.

Admittedly, lots of that pulsing carnival atmosphere was thanks to German power-pop boomboxed all through the square. Every booze-selling stall, of course, had a vested interest in making people feel as festive as possible while in its immediate vicinity, and so each one was blasting its own noise; sometimes in between two stalls I'd get the weird wavy effect of hearing both. Sample track: this song, known as "Reiß die Hütte Ab" ("Smash Down the Cabin"), which I've since discovered has a cult following of German teenagers who post montages of collapsing structures (Galloping Gertie, the World Trade Centre) to the internet with it as soundtrack.

I came home and learned about Weyl groups for a while before going to bed. I've been speed-learning Lie theory for a little while, and though it's very beautiful I'm frustrated by the need to go faster and faster. This is the course I decided to take out of optimism, despite being woefully underprepared; the unwritten soundtrack of this blog of exciting European adventures has been Lie theory steadily and mercilessly leaving me behind. (That, and me mixing my metaphors, of course.) To catch up, I've read fifty pages of the stuff in the last week. Progress sounds great, until you realise that I've another eighty, plus other material, to cover before the exam ("Klausur") Friday after this.

Wish me luck! And, sometime when I get home, ask me to tell you about maximal tori. You'll like them.

When in Rome

I'm in Rome, and I feel like I'm in a giant playground: it's exciting, it's unruly, it's full of strangers, and it makes me feel very small. The first three I expected. But the sheer size I really didn't. Rome's geographically no bigger or smaller than other European capitals, I guess -- but the hills are huge and steep, and the buildings are enormous to compete. So, I'm starting to realise things like

• the Trevi Fountain is big enough for serious bathers
• the Pope's proclaimed from a balcony because the watchers underneath are far away
• the decorative Spanish Steps are in fact meant as a useful means of scaling a big hill
• the Colosseum is aptly named

Excitement and unruliness come mainly from minor hazards. So many cars, so many motorcycles -- after well-planned bicycle-friendly Germany, the traffic's quite a shock. At red lights the motorcycles (when they deign to obey them) rank up like horses at a race start. So much litter, so much peeling paint, so much broken pavement and dodgy asphalt, so many neon tourist shops. I guess a city that survives on its joie de vivre alone makes a few practical sacrifices.

And strangers? I can't remember a city in which the locals are less in evidence. Tourists are everywhere, even in winter. We (that is, I, and Emily and my Australian friend Alyssa) are staying in the sort of dirt-cheap garish cheerful crowded under-25s backpacker hole that I haven't even been able to find in Germany or the Benelux -- a pity, really, because, well, it's so cheap. But there are certainly no Italians staying there, and I'm not counting the people that sell me museum tickets or stop me on the street to invite me in for some Genuine Italian Cuisine as locals either. I've seen a few packs of Italian teenagers wandering the streets, jeansed and booted; a couple of pairs of Italian men arguing loudly in front of gorgeous palazzi; a row of street vendors outside the Vatican pack up their wares and run off in ten seconds flat at the rumour of an arriving police car. But it's probably partly my own fault. I want to see classical Rome and Renaissance Rome and baroque Rome; the rest is passing under my nose.

Weekday winter mornings are definitely the time to see the Vatican. We got there before ten today, when the lines were minimal and the priests and nuns were visible. Security in was low. Security where it mattered -- that is, when a Swiss guard in yellow and blue leggings politely stopped me from going in a forbidden door -- was somewhat better. (And the Swiss guard was actually Swiss -- as I realised only some minutes later, when it occurred to me that he'd asked in German if I spoke Italian and then in English if I spoke French.) St Peter's Basilica was lovely, and, of course, big. The gardens were lovely, but closed to the public. Then we went into the Vatican Museums.

These had a fantastic collection of ancient Roman sculpture, organized by subject: three cherubs shouldering urns, four boys with swords, two men saluting. I admired them for a while, then went inside. And inside they turned out to contain all sorts of marvellous things that I'd known about without ever really realising they were in the Vatican. Like, er, the Sistine Chapel. And also an entire apartment painted by Raphael, full of half-familiar stories: a saint freed from prison; a pious youth growing old; Constantine converting to Christianity; Euclid doing geometry . . . .

That, and coffee and gelato, kept me going for the day.

Some evangelism

I wrote an email this morning.

TO: The Hon. Judith Tizard, MP for Auckland Central
SUBJECT: Plastic bag tax

Dear Judith,

As a University of Auckland student on exchange this semester in Germany, one of the first things that struck me about life here was that supermarkets don't provide plastic bags. It was inconvenient the first few times, when I'd forget to bring my own cloth bag and have to waddle my overladen way home. Then I got used to it -- it's really not that hard to deal with -- and now, knowing what plastic bags do to the environment, I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'll be back in Auckland next month, and intend to carry on the anti-bag habit I picked up here. I heard about a New Zealand group (www.bagtax.org.nz) of people with similar feelings, who are calling for a plastic bag tax in New Zealand. I think it would be a great idea. I hope you do too -- it'd be wonderful to have it implemented.

Sincerely,
...

And they'd sing, and they'd sing . . .

Early this evening I was lingering late in the maths building, which was quiet, and dark, and had almost emptied for the weekend. And then suddenly I heard singing -- three or four voices, perfectly together, perfectly in harmony. I went exploring, and tracked it as far as a closed door, and listened for a while, and then went back to work.

Half an hour later, the singing stopped. A couple of girls and a couple of guys emerged -- one or two of them I knew by sight -- and ran downstairs, whistling.

It wasn't the first time I'd heard of a university with a sweet little maths-department a capella group. But my mind started wandering, and I thought back to the large and excellent village choir I'd heard in 2000-inhabitant St. Märgen just before Christmas. Then I remembered that at least a couple of the not-too-many people I know well here sing in small semi-organised choirs -- one of them I discovered one day during a particularly boring differential geometry class, quietly skimming the score and (Russian) words for a new song. And then I thought of the brilliant YouTube video of a University of Mannheim lecture hall breaking into song:



and of buskers in the Freiburg town centre, and realised -- well, that I was altogether very impressed with the local grassroots choir action.

Germany's known for its proliferation of superb music schools and orchestras, or so I'm told. But it seems that the national enthusiasm that supports them starts deep down.

The weather at the moment is weird. On Wednesday it was brilliantly sunny. Yesterday was nice too, and at night the wind started to blow in whooshing big gusts. I felt it, cycling home, and with my Christchurch-trained instincts assumed it'd be dry and hot for the next few days. Then it started to hail . . . .

Germans' opinions on the general situation vary. Someone said joyfully, it's spring! But someone else gloomily predicted a relapse.

Flights and mountains

A floormate greeted me this morning by asking if I'd "heard about Edmund Hillary".

I had, indeed. Everyone else in Germany had heard too; it was front-page news.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine called him "one of the greatest adventurers of the twentieth century", and added:

In New Zealand, where Hillary was revered as a national hero, people reacted with distress to the news of his death.

"He's on your money, too, right?" asked Hans. "Yes," I said, rather proudly. Of course I don't want to give Germans the impression that New Zealand goes in for apotheosis -- but by all accounts he was a wonderful man.

Moving from the international news on to the very very local, I had my first experience with the famous European low-cost air carriers this week: I booked a weekend trip for late January on Ryanair. As I'd been warned, the original FIVE-EURO FLIGHT!! steadily accumulated extra charges for return trip and taxes and baggage and check-in, finishing at 80 € on the actual credit card bill. Still, it costs more than that for a trip home from Auckland to Christchurch.

And where am I going on this 80 €?

Rome.

Murdering the time

It's 3 am on a weeknight. But when you're friends with Emily and Matthew, sleep becomes a random and unscheduled pastime, and when you have an old friend to stay for a week and a half, your to-do list tends to grow merrily unattended. Fortunately, I'm energetic and stubborn enough these days that telling myself "you can't go to bed until you've done X properly" produces good work rather than an infinite insomniac loop.

Princeton Simon left for Princeton on Sunday morning, leaving ice cream and a representation theory texbook behind to console me. Before Helene and I met Oxford Simon (down for another day's visit) for dinner yesterday, we killed time for half an hour by hanging out in the maths common room at uni. The maths common room is a nice little place -- there's no equivalent tiny room at Auckland squished full of blackboards and posters and sagging couches and a coffee machine, just for the use of the undergrads. It's also always full of people, so I avoid it when I'm not with friends -- my German's not yet up to large groups of strangers. I can still sort of listen in to the chat, though.

Anyway, I'd never been there in the evening before, and was delighted to find that at about six pm it's full of maths students happily loitering and swapping their plans for Monday evening, just like the schoolyard at middle school after class finished for the day. The nicest part of the common-room crowd -- eat your heart out, supposedly-egalitarian New Zealand! -- was the total lack of hierarchy. Little first-years (well, they're still mostly older than me, but . . . .) didn't get in the least ignored, and a postdoc and a lecturer were there too, chatting totally casually with the undergrads about who they were going dancing with that evening.

A woman from an investment bank sent me an email last week, and I replied today. Selling out? No. Curious? Yes.

Book of the yours

(Guest post by Simon. The writer of this blog likes anonymity -- yes, so much that she reserves it here only for herself. Her name has therefore been censored.)

Hello folks and world, slip into a pair of skin tight leather pants, slap on a wispily high Tcherman accent and clip a stainless steel mug full of Schwarzwalder kirschwasser (like vodka, but the lady on the front of the bottle has bowling-ball sized cherries covering her hat) onto your belt as I have done to hear exciting stories of wandermoglichkeiten! Freiburg is a smart little city covering an area of roughly one Guelph, which is defined as the area of land one man can plow with three drunk oxen on an overcast day. I have spent a lot of the past week on the floor of XXX's room, which is large for something hostelish although her residence doesn't have a big communal area. No lazy evenings together in front of the television for these students... The walls appear to be made of a mixture of plaster and Swiss meusli. We spent today in Basel, a charming quiet city frontin' the Rhine, and having had enough nutritious museums we decided to goof off a bit, going to see a huge collection of teddy bears and puppets and dolls and muppets. The model houses were astonishing, you could find just about any shop you could think of, except for possibly assorted small arms. We crossed two of the borders that wander through the city, the German/Swiss leaving the train station and the Swiss/French in town. We weren't stopped at all, there was just a police whare with a roof extending over the road, and suddenly all the signs and TV were in French. The people even looked more aloof! It was cool to be able to have the following exchange: "How about we buy some real swiss chocoloate from that shop?" "Nah, let's go to France first." For some reason XXX was mad keen on looking around a drug company, as Basel is full of them and is responsible for LSD and antidepressants (I suspect living in Basel in the winter would benefit from one of them), but they turned us away as comercially infeisable and containing insufficient quantities of tallow. But we did see a very impressive smokestack.

I had my first taste of the Black Forest the day before. Ah, you like the ambiguity there? You're thinking, "does that mean he went for a walk in the woods, or tasted some yummy cake, or perhaps even stepped in some cake or ate some pine scented air freshener?" Well, it was both! (The normal ones, I mean. XXX gave me rather a lot of Schwarzvodka kirschwald...) We went tramping with a friend of hers from Auckland, also called Simon, presumably so that if one of us got hurt or lost in the woods she would have one left. It was beautiful and dark and steep, with the trees enveloping the slopes like a spiny cloak, just like I had imagined from fairytales. We followed alongside deer and wildcat tracks, and even found snow in the higher reaches. We half walked, half ski'd going downhill, and came out where someone was logging and were greeted by a refreshing pine scent. I had to dig deep, getting by for five hours on a (solid, half oak, half bread) German sandwich, an apple and a few lesser breads, and by half past seven when dinner finally arrived at a cheap pasta restaurant I was undaunted by the sight of a bowl of bologhnese that could have filled a kid's bike helmet. The Schwarzenegger Kirschthingy happened in between, while we were showing Simon around Freiburg. It was surprisingly light, and I probably should have lingered over it a bit more but I was sooo hungry...

The two days before that were quite lazy, a rest after four days of travel finishing with new year's celebrations with friends of XXX in Freiburg. It was the new year's I've always wanted, spent with drunk people you can have fun with without knowing, learning dance steps and trying on each other's accents, and passing midnight just above roof level on a hillside packed with revellers while the city went nuts letting off fireworks. I've never seen a display covering such a huge area, it was like watching a sea under the moonlight except much, much sparklier. The feeling of wide-eyed togetherness with everyone there was lovely. Almost everyone, actually - I could have done without the people letting off bangers everywhere, especially right were you were going to walk. We started searching for a friend we had gone to the hill with at half past midnight, pushing our way through jubilant unaware crowds up and down the various levels while I got more and more anxious about finding him, and the bursting firecrackers and charred skyrockets littering the ground gave it a strange battleground feel.

And the rest of the travel? It was done near Koblenz, based in a little town on the Rhine called Boppard where we stayed with a genuine German metalworker called Axel with a old sportscar whose back seat wasn't designed for people with legs and his wife, Inne, who ran a tanning and nail salon. We know this because our guest room was also her workplace, and I did a quick double take when I saw the room for the first time with it's single bed and tanning bed and thinking "They're not expecting one of us to sleep in that thing, are they? They're not expecing BOTH of us to sleep on that thing, are they?" Every coloured accessory in the house was blue, apart from the glittery silver toilet seat, and while Christoph and Werner's bathroom had an anatomically correct sign indicating that men shoud sit while peeing, our hostess bought it up (not at all awkwardly) in conversation. We didn't do much in Boppard apart from go to their little christmas market, which gave me my fill of foliksh German music which people gently shifted their weight to. We had a kind of eggnog and lots of junk food and I sung along enthusiastically and grinned at the wooden stalls and pretty lights, and then we went for a walk along the Rhine (I climbed the fence and touched it, so there). The next morning we visited Marksburg castle, which was highly authentic and gave a very strong impression of how drab life was even for nobles 800 years ago. They were also very short - the four poster bed was roughly a metre and a half long.

Of course, Germany wouldn't be the same without it's food, designed to thicken the arteries aganst the winter cold. We've tried making spetzle and cooking sausages, but we weren't sure how successful we were - I felt like I was frying a salami. Chocolate, mulled wine (which can be bought from Ikea! Maybe they use it to stain furniture), a shop in town that sells nothing but gummi bears... the old American "dirt, sugar and palm oil" isn't going to be the same.

And I finally lived my dream and bought a fedora! My angular face finally has something to ballance it.