Photos from Germany

Here are some photos from my trip to Belgium and Germany last month.

A gate in the treasure room of the Belfry of Brugge.

The moon over a building in Brugge.

There are secret courtyards dotted throughout Berlin. Mo, our host in Berlin, took us to one that was the urban canvas of artists. We found this giant mechanical bat, which sprang to roaring and whistling life once we fed it a euro coin.

The Jewish Museum in Berlin. The museum space has no windows except for these slits through the metal walls.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The square columns of the memorial ‘are designed to produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason’. Having walked amongst the looming columns while rain drizzled down, I can say that the architects and engineers managed to create the atmosphere they were aiming for.

The Neptune Fountain in Berlin.

Rooftop statues in Dresden.

In Leipzing, Damjan managed to get a water bell to resonate by running his hands back and forth on the handles. The water shimmied too.

This comes from the Marriage Carousel in Nuremburg, which represents ‘marriage from the first stages of ardent love via exhausting struggles, and right through to the death bed’.

German cities are dotted with public bicycles, managed by Deutsch Bahn. You need to call a phone number in order to get a particular bike unlocked. I only ever saw one person riding a DB bike. I wonder if the bikes are used much?

The very impressive, very Gothic Dom in Cologne/Koln.

And here is on the inside, full of tourists who defy the rules in the hope that they can somehow light the awesome space with their puny flashes. I hate dumb tourists.

Girl renewed

Today, I restocked on the things that make me a girl. I met up with Bettina, who I studied with last year. We very efficiently traipsed down Oxford Street and Kilburn’s high street, and I emerged with two new pairs of shoes, two pairs of tights, foundation and matching brush, and hair conditioner.

I don’t often go shopping for non-food. It’s not that I don’t like it; there’s just some inertia to overcome.

Pangea Day

Today, I volunteered at Pangea Day, ‘a global event bringing the world together through film’. I surveyed people about how they travelled to the London event. We will use this information to work out the carbon footprint of Pangea Day in London and Los Angeles.

The films were great, really thoughtful and often funny. The hosts and speakers were a little bit too earnest for my taste. My favourite part of the evening was at the very end, when percussionists all around the world played to the same rhythm. We had video feeds with drummers from USA, Rwanda, Egypt, India, and other places, as well as Planet Drum live on stage in London. I was dancing on our picnic rug.

Watch all the films here. One of my favourites is Elevator Music. My friend George recommends More, which I didn’t get to see because I was surveying people.





Tube tally

Last week, wracked by neck pain, the only thing I could do was sit on a couch and count Tube stations. Damjan had said that he thought there were around 200. This, in my opinion, was a gross overestimate.

To prove it, I got out an Underground map and started crossing them off. I took bets. My vote was for 112 stations. Neo guessed 100. Damian was more ambitious at 140.

I took a broad view of what a ‘station’ was. Anything on the Tube map was fair game, so I ended up counting stations on the Overground and Docklands Light Rail, as well as those on the temporarily closed East London line. I excluded the recently decomissioned Shoreditch station and included the new station at Heathrow Terminal 5.

Very quickly, the tally steamed past our paltry estimates. Even Damjan’s ‘gross overestimate’ was left in the dust trail of my black pen, as shown below.


The answer is… 344! To me it seems like a massive number. Who would have thought?

Ember

I lit a match to light up our gas stove and, lightning fast, something was spat out from the match onto on my bare arm.

‘Ooooow!’ I thought, as I frantically shook off the glowing spots. The spots floated to the kitchen floor where they burned for half a second longer, then died.

I waited for the stinging to stop and when it didn’t, I splashed cold water on my arm. There is now a tiny shallow burn bubble on my left upper arm.

Shift happens

A very, very thought provoking video about the information age in which we live — Shift happens. Watch it. I like the first half best. The predictions of the future near the end of the video are a bit fuzzier. If you don’t want to think too much, then enjoy the music.

Eventuate

I sent an email to a project manager outside my team, copying in my boss and others working on this project.

Ten seconds later, both my managers are guffawing and pointing at me.

‘Eventuate?!’ they laughed. ‘Joan, you’ve got to stop making up words! This isn’t the first time…’

‘Wha–?’ I started.

They were in hysterics because I had written: ‘The team believes this is the cautious approach because they cannot be sure that the political push towards a low emissions zone will eventuate.’

Other teamates soon joined my managers in mocking me.

‘It’s a real word!’ I protested. ‘I’ll show you!’

Alarmed, I typed ‘eventuate’ into my Dictionary.com search engine, and it came up:

e·ven·tu·ate
–verb (used without object), -at·ed, -at·ing.

  1. to have issue; result.
  2. to be the issue or outcome; come about.

[Origin: 1780–90; Americanism; < L éventu(s) event + -ate1]

‘Oh!’ I said, chagrined. ‘Oh dear. It’s an Americanism! I didn’t know.’

Luckily, the person I had emailed was visiting from San Francisco. She, at least, would understand my message.

Pain in the neck

My neck started hurting on the weekend and by today, I couldn’t move my head at all without it hurting a lot. Pain was accompanied by numbness, tingling and a headache.

After lunch, Anna from our team walked me over to the accident and emergency department of the hospital. I was lucky to be there on a Tuesday afternoon because I had a short two hour wait. If I had come on a Friday night, I probably would have waited four hours. On Friday nights, I imagine the A&E department is full of drunks and people wounded in fights.

The doctor x-rayed me and asked me to push/pull/lift various limbs. After looking at my x-rays, he said that there didn’t seem to be anything wrong. I had probably slept in an awkward position and the pain should go away in a few days.

He gave me painkillers, which help a lot.

Extroverted blind beavers

Last night, I joined a pub quiz team called ‘Extroverted blind beavers’. I am very bad at pub quizzes. It would not be honest to blame it on me being an Australian in a UK pub.

When I do have an answer, though, it’s to questions that few others can answer. I have random pockets of information.

For example, I identified the title of this book.


How, I have no idea. I don’t think I’ve read it before, I just had a vague feeling it was something about a prince.

Thanks to Damjan, I knew with absolute certainty that the country hosting this year’s Eurovision final is Serbia.

Having debated this at Hamley’s toy store with American friends, Debra and John, I knew that the first Monopoly game was based on Atlantic City in the US.

The question that made me happiest, though, was ‘What is the name of Bob the Builder’s cat?’

You see, that morning, I had to watch five minutes of Bob the Builder with Neo, while waiting for the bathroom to be free. The episode was about Bob cutting a cat flap in his door. I remember thinking, ‘That cat’s named after a fish.’

While at the quiz, I struggled for a few minutes to remember exactly what fish it was. Then I got it: Pilchard.

   

Pilchard the cat

 

Pilchard the sardine

I have isshoos

Last week was exciting. I spent Monday and Tuesday at Bristol to meet other engineers (and scientists and sociologists) that ‘think in systems’. I was able to confirm that I, too, ‘think in systems’. This means that I zoom out and see the big picture of how bits of a project or team interact with other bits in unexpected ways. (example and again)

For various reasons, there were a couple of non-systems thinkers at some of the sessions and I could tell that they thought we were talking gobbledy gook and mumbo jumbo. I’ll admit, sometimes things get so zoomed out and abstract that things get almost mystical. To a typical engineer, we systems engineers are hippies.

One thing that stuck out in my head from the conference was that while trying to make conversation with an older (retired) engineer, he looked at me patronisingly and made fun of me for saying ‘isshoo’ (issue). I think he was implying the correct pronunciation is ‘issyoo’. Horrid person.