Thanksgiving dinner

It is not easy to find turkeys in Germany; in fact, I haven't seen one at supermarkets yet. But Glenda did. She made us a Thanksgiving feast last night, which was delicious.

Great Fire of London

Jocelyn learned her "Row, Row, Row your Boat" and her class performed the Great Fire of London. Glenda recorded the performance, and here is the 30-min long clip (approx. 60 MB).

First snow!

We went to visit a longtime friend near Heidelberg this afternoon. The snow started coming down as we were driving back on Autobahn A5 early in the evening. The kids were excited, but not the driver. After we got home, I snapped this picture from our bedroom window.

Mahlzeit !

Today I learned a German salutation that is usually used during lunch time: Mahlzeit. I was told that this word literally means a meal, but is used as a greeting during lunch time (even when there is no food in sight). I guess this is similar to the Chinese greeting "have you eaten yet?"

Technik Museum Speyer

Last weekend, we ventured off to Speyer to visit the Technik Museum and we had a blast! Since we weren't sure of how far the distance between the train station and the museum would be, we opted to lease a Stadtmobil for the afternoon.

We got there just in time for lunch so we decided to eat at the restaurant located inside of the museum. The restaurant had the standard fare for German cuisine - several types of schnitzels to choose from (prepared in different ways, of course) or würsts with french fries. The children were smart and opted for the pasta. Alan and I had the usual schnitzel...go with what you know, right? We should be able to write a schnitzel review for all of Southern Germany by the time we move back to the States.

After lunch, we went into the auto and train section. The children enjoyed climbing into some of the exhibits. The hands-on aspect of the displays was really what sets this museum apart. Here is a photo of Jocelyn pretending to be a train engineer.

After the kids got their fill of cars and trains, we went into the adjacent building to see the space exhibits. Most of the equipment on display were originally from Russia, like the Buran space shuttle in this picture.

Gabriel was fascinated by all the space suits and the models of the various space stations. Jocelyn was more interested in (and repulsed by) the exhibits that showed the freeze-dried astronaut food.

Afterwards, we went outside to look at the airplane exhibits. For these, you had to climb up several flights of stairs - to play up to that whole flight experience I suppose. We went up to the old Lufthansa plane that on display, which pretty much had everything you would see on any airplane.

We were also able to walk out onto one of the wings (reminded me of that old Twilight Zone episode where William Shatner saw a monster ripping things out of the airplane wing every time he looked out the window). It was completely gated for safety reasons, but it still offered a pretty spectacular view of the surrounding area. If you did not feel like walking down the steps to get back to the ground, you can just go down the slide. And that is exactly what Alan and Gabriel did - a few times. Jocelyn didn't want to try it at first, but couldn't help herself after seeing the boys have so much fun. I didn't do it - I had to watch our stuff and take the photos after all.

There were a couple of other planes that you could climb up to peruse, as well as a ship and a helicopter. There was also a submarine that Jocelyn refused to climb into. The boys went by themselves.

After we looked at all the exhibits, we went into the playground area. The playground was more like a mini amusement park. There was a small roller coaster type contraption, the Titanic ride (you sit in a small boat, which quickly descends down a steep slope and lands in a pool of water), a miniature driving course for junior speed demons and several other rides that the children were too young to try out.

All in all, the entire family had a great time. We went home as the evening started to set in. The children are eager to go to the Technik Museum in Sinsheim, though we will probably put that off until the springtime - when it is warmer.

A lecture series for graduate students

As a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab, I don't have to teach classes. But the UC Berkeley Physics Department would welcome proposals from Lab scientists to offer courses there. Although I have given a few guest lectures on my research to graduate students at UCB over the years, I have never given a series of say 10 lectures with a coherent theme.

Now that I am on sabbatical, I decided to do just that. I am giving a series of 10 graduate-level lectures on statistics and analysis techniques in experimental physics research here. I gave my first weekly lecture last week at the institute's seminar room. The room was filled to capacity! For my second lecture today, there were so many students that we had to move to a bigger room. I am not sure why the turn-out was so great (as there is no course credit for these lectures), but I hope that's because I am doing something right.

der Laptop ist kaputt!

The Apple Powerbook that I brought to Germany decided to go to sleep at random times. It turns out that this is due to a faulty temperature sensor under the trackpad, and many users have the same problem. There are no simple and free solutions, and none of them seem to cure the problem permanently.

My German host lab has graciously loaned me an Apple MacBook Pro. That's terrific. The only problem is the keyboard. The loaner has a German QWERTZ keyboard and the one on my old machine is a US QWERTY keyboard. I have now instructed the Mac operating system to treat the keyboard on the loaner as a QWERTY keyboard, which means it is cumbersome to type the seldom-used keys (as they don't get mapped to the same keys on the QWERTY layout).

The loaner also uses an Intel processor, which is different from the PowerPC processor in my old machine. This means I can't simply copy most programs (particularly the ones that I wrote for research) without re-compiling and linking (read: a lot of work). But this is something I would have to do if I am to get a new Apple laptop.

Popularity of the current US administration

I did not know about this hoax proclaiming the end of the Iraq war until a German colleague walked into my office with the fake NY Times paper today.

The war is very unpopular in Germany, and the US president's approval rating amongst Europeans is probably even lower than his abysmal numbers back home. Let's look forward to a fresh start with the new administration in a couple of months.

Row, row, row your boat

Jocelyn will participate at her school's Great Fire of London performance later this month. Here is a song that she needs to learn:

Row, row, row your boat
Quickly down the Thames
"Fire, fire", shout the maid
We are so afraid.

Row, row, row your boat
Quickly down the Thames
Our house is burning down
We are very sad.

Row, row, row your boat
Quickly down the Thames
Luckily we aren't dead
That would be too bad.

Eh? Rowing does not sound merry any more.

The plan for Christmas break

Glenda and I finally decided: we are going to Paris for the Christmas break. There are TGV (train à grande vitesse) train services between Karlsruhe and Paris. The journey is just a tad over 3 hours on Europe's fastest train. We booked our train tickets and hotel. We got DB's special pricing for the train tickets; however, the hotels are not cheap in Paris! But hey, we will be spending New Year's Eve in Paris and perhaps counting down at Champs-Elysees (although the more likely scenario would be the kids asleep while Glenda and I watch the count down on TV in the hotel room).

Bonn (Day 4): Akademisches Kunstmuseum, StadtMuseum Bonn, return

This was our final day in Bonn. We checked out at the hotel in the morning, left the luggage there and went to the Akademisches Kunstmuseum at Bonn University. This museum has a large antiquities collection. We were surprised by how much the kids enjoyed looking at old Greco-Roman artifacts. But kids are kids...they wanted to spend some time at the playground near the museum afterwards. Here they are at the see-saw.

After a hearty German lunch (Glenda will write a blog entry on this later), we decided to visit the StadtMuseum. We learned a lot about life in the city of Bonn. There are pictures and artifacts on the Holocaust, the devastation of the city after WWII, JFK's visit and the Cold War era. I was hoping that I could read more German to get better understanding of the materials as they are mostly in German. Robert Schumann spent his last years in Bonn, and the StadtMuseum is part of the Schumann network. It is using a virtual portal to commemorate the work this great German composer.

While most of the stores were closed yesterday, all of the stores were open today (yes, on a Sunday, which was unusual as all German shops are usually closed on Sundays)! There were so many people in central Bonn that it was a battle for me to get back to the hotel to pick up our luggage. After another battle to the train station, we took the train to Mainz where we transfered to another regional train to Karlsruhe. We were lucky to have boarded the regional train early, as it was completely packed with no standing room to spare (some passengers could not even get on)!

Overall, it was a great trip.

Bonn (Day 3): Expressionism and Deutsches Museum Bonn

After another frühstück (featuring the same variety of cold cuts as yesterday) we walked to August Macke Haus. We were surprised by how few people there were in the town center. Here you see Jocelyn in front of the old city hall around 10 AM. We later found out that it was a public holiday (All Saints' Day). Although Starbucks would not open until noon, museums were open by 11 AM. The expressionist August Macke spent his most productive years in Bonn. August Macke Haus, where he used to live, is now a museum. Jocelyn took keen interests in some of the art shown there, and urged us to buy her paint for her own drawings upon our return to Karlsruhe.

In the afternoon, we went to Deutsches Museum Bonn, where exhibits of German scientific research and technology in the post-war years are displayed. There are a number of displays on Nobel Prize winning discoveries, such as the Mössbauer effect and ion trapping. Gabriel was particularly interested in magnetic levitation. Why? He was trying to understand how mag-lev trains work. Gabriel also spent a lot of time trying to understand how friction is reduced in magnetic bearings through a very good hands-on display in the museum. Meanwhile, Jocelyn was intrigued by a display on how to locate kidney stones and then blasting them with shock waves. Here is a picture of Gabriel playing with the mag-lev train hands-on display in the museum and another one of the kids in front of the Transrapid 06 mag-lev prototype train. I am sure they are looking forward to visiting the Deutsches Museum in München next year.

Continuing with the theme of Japanese cuisine for dinner (in Bonn!), we went to Ichiban Noodle Bar, the sister restaurant of Ichiban Sushi Bar where we had dinner last night. The ramen was good.