Berlin, Germany

Inside Berlin's main train station

After finishing up the 3-day conference in Hamburg, I took a weekend excursion to Berlin, which is a 1.5 hr trip via the nifty ICE train, which tops out at 240 km/hr and is buttery smooth. I stayed at St. Christopher’s Hostel, where I met an up-and-coming photographer from Alabama in the midst of her 7-week European tour. We explored Berlin together, visiting the traditional sites like the remains of the Berlin Wall at Potsdamer Platz and Brandenburg Gate, and engaging in traditional activites like drinking “dirty beer” and eating currywurst (see my tribute here).

The Berlin Wall, covered in gum

Brandenburg Gate

The Holocaust Memorial

We also taste-tested brandy at a posh department store, visited a not-so-Turkish Turkish neighorhood, viewed graffiti and artwork at a Burning Man-style artist enclave.

At the artist colony

Graffiti near the artist enclave

Urban cage soccer does exist! (in the "Turkish" neighborhood)

Two very bad Berlin bears

We tried to find out why U2 found the “Zoo Station” subway stop of Achtung Baby/Zoo TV fame so inspirational. There was nothing really special about the station, though we did see actual Trabant cars on the road (the diminutive Trabants were used as actual spotlights for U2’s Zoo TV concerts). While we're on Berlin rock allusions, Potsdamer Platz is former no-man's land where ex-Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters performed a massive version of The Wall in 1990 following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

In general, Berlin was not the most beautiful city in the world (far less attractive than Hamburg), but its dynamic history made it a worthwhile visit. As I had been warned by my German friends, you can’t really tell where the wall used to be – most of it has been torn down, and the few remains are pretty much put up for the tourists. They do have a line of cobblestones that marks the wall’s former path, but it’s hard to tell because most of the no-man’s land that the wall occupied is now being developed for either parks or intense commercial projects. There are huge shiny buildings springing up all over Potsdamer Platz, and the new main train station is absolutely stunning.

Outside the train station

After 5 days in Germany, I headed home to the Windy City. I left Berlin by train at the crack of dawn and flew from from Hamburg to London and then on to Chicago. Although Chicago is great, the laid-back lifestyle but stimulating environment of Europe definitely has me wondering why I didn’t do a postdoc there!

Tribute to Currywurst

Currywurst and fries, mmmm....

Currywurst is a traditional street food in German cities, especially Berlin. This "delicacy" is essentially a stale, fried sausage that is ground up before your eyes by a machine and then covered with a sauce that's a bad mix between BBQ sauce and ketchup. After you pay somewhere between 1.50 and 2 Euro's (we did a scientific survey), you are given a special plastic mini-fork and are instructed to put as much radioactive orange curry powder on your wurst as you desire.

My Berlin exploring buddy, Allison, convinced me that, in the spirit of new experiences and gastrointestinal tourism, we should try currywurst at Alexanderplatz. I made her go first. She fared alright, so then it was my turn.

My first bite of currywurst

It was pretty bad. I mean, I like sausage, I like curry, and I like BBQ sauce. But not really all together, ground up by a sketchy machine and served out of a shack. Thank goodness we had fries and a token bun, because I didn't have anything to drink at the time.

Anyway, currywurst stands are everywhere:

One of many currywurst stands. This one just has a good logo.

Currywurst is so part of the culture, you even see random signs about it posted in people's windows:

It's cute and spicy

Anyway, I still don't get currywurst, and I'll probably never eat it again. But I suffered no ill effects, it was an experience I will not soon forget.

Hamburg, Germany

Fireworks outside my hotel room in Hamburg

On Memorial Day, I flew to Hamburg, Germany to give a talk at a conference there. The University of Hamburg is starting up their own nanoscience institute (abbreviated as INCH, which defies their metric and scaling conventions), and the big daddy of European nanoscience had asked my graduate advisor to come give a talk. My advisor couldn’t make it, so I got to go pretend to be him in Germany.

I was a little nervous giving my talk, since all the other talks were by luminaries in nanoscience, but everything went smoothly and a lot of people told me I was “a good replacement.” I got to meet a lot of the big professors in the field as well as grad students and postdocs who worked at Hamburg. I also ran into some people I knew previously from my graduate research group and also some acquaintances from previous conferences. I got wined and dined as an “invited speaker” and went out on the town with various professors and grad students in gorgeous Hamburg. It was a tiring 3 days of traveling, preparing for my talk, and attending round-the-clock seminars, but it was well worth the trip to Europe.

Bye, bye, Berkeley... Hello, Chicago.

After 7 years in Berkeley and 11 years in California (4 at Stanford), I am moving to Chicago!

Following a year and a half of searching for a postdocs, I finally decided to take a job with Prof. Rustem Ismagilov at the University of Chicago. I visited in early March, decided in late March, went back to the Windy City to find an apartment in Early April, and am now picking up and moving to Chicago.

Rather than take the easy route and fly, I decided to road-trip it to Chi-Town in my super-faded red Toyota with my housemate Brian “Hot Rod” Rodde.

Brian and I bust out of Berkeley in my trusty Corolla

Before I left, I spent a week of furious packing and throwing away 11 years worth of stuff ranging including:

- my freshman chemistry notes
- cassette tape recordings featuring my high school friends speaking in Chinese
- my advertisements as a writing tutor, which featured endorsements by Britney Spears, Gerhard Casper, and George Clooney.

It was also a week of sad goodbyes. I have spent more time in Berkeley than any place other than my hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and I have lived in the same house for 6.5 years. It is weird to pick up and move so suddenly to a place so different from California. I guess we’ll see how the transition goes.

I had a going away barbecue with my labmates in Alivisatos Nation, the Mathies microfab, my soccer team, some Stanford friends, my landlords, and my housemates.

Haitao feeding me a yam.

On Friday, April 27, Brian and I set off for Chicago on I-80. We made it over the Sierras through Lake Tahoe, survived the desolate wasteland that is Nevada, and are bunking down in Wendover, Utah on the border with Nevada.. After that, we powered through Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, and then Illinois. I am now safe and sound in Chicago, able to post the pictures from my road trip below. Enjoy.

The Great and Hazy Salt Lake, Utah

Windmills in Wyoming

Wyoming terrain that bored Brian

No more corn in Nebraska

A storm in the rearview, and only Chicago ahead of us

Europe pictures uploaded

So back in Berkeley, I'm working on finding a job and finishing up some papers.

In the meantime, I have posted pictures from my Europe trip (with some contributions from Audrey). I've backposted them to the appropriate dates, so check the January 2007 and December 2006 archives on the right-hand side bar.

Switzerland to Home

Going home...

I am back in Berkeley now, after a magnificent 10-day tour through Europe.

After Italy, we spent the night in a very clean and typically German YHA hostel. The next morning, we hopped on the ferry back to Romanshorn, Switzerland, and then took the train to Lucerne, a stunning city on a lake bordered by scenic mountains. During this brief stop in Lucerne, the girls took advantage of the great scenery by shopping indoors at american stores.

After lucerne, we took a scenic train ride through the mountains to Interlaken, where we bedded down at the Backpackers Villa hostel and a pair of smelly (but friendly) roommates. On 1/4, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to snowboard in the Swiss mountains. The snow actually wasn't all that great, due to Europe's record high temperatures this winter. In some cases, some of the snow had just covered the ground a week ago, most of the snow was icy, and rocks and grass were still visible in parts. Nonetheless, the scenery was amazing, with Mt. Eiger and the Jungfraujoch (German for "really big mountain with really expensive train ride") and their numerous glaciers overlooking the ski resort in Grindelwald.

Audrey and P, not avid skiiers, took the train to Montreaux to check out the castle and Swiss Riviera. We reunited that night and shared our pictures on the train ride back to Zurich. The next day (1/5) we hopped on our flight back to JFK, where Audrey and I continued back to California on our marathon 24-hour travel days. I got back to SFO at around midnight on 1/5, sans luggage, but happy to be home nonetheless.

Interlaken

Snowboarding near Interlaken

On our last full day in Switzerland, I went snowboarding in Grindelwald while the girls took off in search of a castle in Montreaux. The snow in the mountains wasn't great, due to the record high temperatures in Europe this winter, but there was snow, which wasn't the case a week before. It was pretty icy and patchy, and it started snowing and gusting into near-white-out conditions at the top of the mountain. The ski resort did offer great views of Mt. Eiger and its glaciers.

White out at the top of the mountain

The view of the glacier on Mt. Eiger

Me and my glacier

On the ski lift

P in the castle dungeon at Montreaux

P working her makeovermagic on Emory in the hostel

Emory's new 'do

Lucerne and beyond

Lucerne, Switzerland

After getting back from Italy and spending the night in Friedrichshafen, we took the train to Interlaken, stopping off in Lucerne for a couple hours. Lucerne is a gorgeous city on a lake surrounded by views of some of the most famous mountains in Switzerland. Audrey and Patricia, of course, took advantage of this scenery to shop indoors at American stores. I should note, though, that some of the pictures here and in other posts are from Audrey, since the laptop that I uploaded my pictures onto got fried.

One of Lucerne's famous covered wooden bridges

From Lucerne, we took a scenic train ride through the mountains to Interlaken.

Patricia's missing out on all the scenery!

Sunset through the clouds near Interlaken

She's awake!

Florence, Italy

Hello from Florence, Italy! After hiking in the hills around Zurich on 12/29, we took a train up to St. Gallen, Switzerland on 12/30 to check out the cathedral and abbey library, which has books dating back to 800 A.D. We then took a ferry across foggy Lake Constanz to Friedrichschafen, Germany, where we caught a dirt cheap flight to Pisa, Italy. The RyanAir flight was every bit as low budget as you would expect for a $80 round trip ticket, but Italy proved to be well worth the hassle. We took an hour-long train ride to Florence, where we are staying for 3 nights.

On New Years Eve, we saw a bazillion majestic cathedrals and hit the Uffizi to see its famed Renaissance art collection, with a special exhibit on Leonardo di Caprio, er, da Vinci.

At night, the streets were packed with New Years revelers and people setting off random fireworks. We watched the fireworks from a bridge on the river Arno.

On New Years Day, we took a train ride to beautiful Siena and enjoyed the view of medieval architechture and wine country... and more cathedrals and museums.

Today (1/2) is our last day in Italy. We head back to Friedrichshafen, GER and bed down for the night. Tomorrow, we wil take the ferry and a train to central Switzerland (Interlaken) via Lucerne.

Siena

From the Campo in Siena, Italy

On New Year's Day, we took the train through the beautiful Tuscan countryside to Siena. At first, the streets were abandoned, as would be expected on New Year's Day, but it was still kind of creepy to have just the tourists scouring around in a post-apocalyptic way. Eventually, we found the bustling city center and all was right in the world.

P and a lonely Christmas tree

In Siena, kids and pigeons are mortal enemies

Another Duomo

Audrey sittin' tall

Wow, what a great photo op!