Into history: The way to Krakow

The day before yesterday ended in one of the cleanest discothekes I had ever seen – the air was cool and fresh, the floor was clean, the security had basic competence and courtesy, and a beer cost 2 Zloty – half a euro. Apart from the choice of music, which was mostly 90s dance music, it was virtually perfect. Accordingly, we had a lot of fun and spend three hours there, until the disco closed at 2 AM. Repeat: The disco closed. While I was in it. That has never happened before. The evening wasn’t over yet, as we’d lost somebody and some excitement ensued until we met him on the way back to the hostel. We tried scolding him for not telling anybody before leaving, which didn’t impress him very much. So once he was asleep, we tried to put his hand into a bowl of warm water. The rumor couldn’t be confirmed, because nothing happened. An experiment for another day.

Yesterday was our last day in Warsaw for a week, and led us to the technical museum, which had a few interesting exhibits: Two jet turbines, a machine for typesetting for linoleum printing, a collection of mechanical music boxes. But since explainations were mostly absent and a lot of the exhibits very old and not very interesting anyway, we left rather quickly and went up to the top of the Culture Palace, the tallest building in Warsaw. At over 200 meters, it gives a great view. After lunch, we picked up our luggage and took the train to Krakow – three hours time. After arrival, we checked into the small pension, bought and ate dinner and spent the rest of the evening at a pub. A good day all over.

Today was our first day in Krakow of course, and we looked around the old downtown and had a guided tour of the Wawel, the hill that housed the cathedral and the royal residence in Krakow for centuries. Everything was rather crowded and we had some trouble catching the guide’s words. The pinnacle of the tour was the 11 ton bell of the cathedral, cast in Nürnberg and last rung for the death of Karol Wojtyla, alias John Paul II and the election of his succesor, Paparazzi I. After the Wawel, we ate cabbage and rice roulade with potatos and went on a shipping tour on the river. After that, we had some free time to go shopping, or rather check out the marketplace. There was a large stage in the market, were a whole orchestra, choir and a solist were playing to empty seats and a crowd of onlookers – logic suggests a dress rehearsel. According to Kasza, one of our guides, the music was made by a new-and-coming polish composer by the name of Rubik. It was classical music with audible pop and musical influences, very sentimental. I’d like to take a CD home from Poland, but I don’t know if Mr. Rubik will see any royalties from me. There was also a very laudable group of break dancers on the other side of the market, performing live to a drumset. We spent some time watching them and ended up donating some money.

Right now, we’re at the hostel waiting for dinner. Our host has just bought a new kind of lemonade of a screaming red color that he admitted was “new and exciting.” No doubt he is right.

Warsaw Polytechnica – Come in, we have lightning!

It cannot be said that universities do not try to interest their visitors. Generally, professors and assistants beeline to the most visual apparatus in the entire institute, lest the visiting group be disappointed with dusty blackboards and messy desks – which are, as we know, the staple of actual research. The electronic engineering faculty of Warsaw Polytechnica followed the principle by starting off in the high voltage laboratory – roughly put, the lightning shop. They were doing research into surge protection systems, so electronic devices are no longer put down by a nearby lightning strike as is now often the case. To test these systems, they have a ten meter tall generator capable of supplying a pulse of several megavolts with only a microsecond of ramp-up. A battery of batteries offered the necessary juice to put several kiloampere into the surge – ouch. Then we saw some more discharge experiments on bottles and student labs.

After the light show, we headed to some operating labs, some used by students for practicals, others by master or phd students in their research. We saw some people in the process of making robot control hardware and other integrated electronics. We got another demonstration in a smaller lab, which I thought was even cooler (lightning is only that): A hovering induction smelter. It’s a box with a coil in which a ball of aluminum can be put. The ball will then hover there and begin to glow and melt. On switching off, it will drop into a bucket, splash onto your wooden floor and begin to smoke gently there.

The last program point was a lecture on global warming, which unfortunately failed to tell me anything new. It was right after lunch, so I wasn’t really wide awake, either. After that, we returned to the hotel. In fact, we managed to convince our guides that we could actually split up because we were capable of finding back to the hotel with a map and a ticket for all the trams, metros and busses in Warsaw. Played some card games in the yard behind the hostel, and will be going to a disco later tonight.

Tomorrow we’ll be moving to Krakow for three days, and Zakopane three more days. Back in Warsaw in a week. I don’t know if I’ll have internet there as well, so I’m not sure about future posts. If not, I’ll be saving them up.

Adventures in Warsaw – not all strictly necessary

It’s the end of the third day in Warsaw, and we’ve racked up enough miles on the bus, tram and on foot to apply for any frequent flyer program offered by Warsaw’s transportation authority – none. Our program has been varied, the organization slightly chaotic and our illustrious group has birthed a number of unexpected problems. Nevertheless, disaster was always but skirted.

So far, we’ve been to the botanical garden, the military forces’ exhibition, the royal palace, two shopping centers, a cabaret, an Imax cinema and several eating joints of varying quality. The botanical garden was great (lots of pictures), the military thing had at least a few historical interests. I found the nearby National Museum more alluring, but apparently our polish partners do not think so, and they make the program after all. The military collection features old hardware from before WW2 up to the 80s. Nothing more recent than that, but a few interesting things anyway. Key point of the exhibition in my eyes was the Kubus armored car, which was produced on the sly in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. It’s essentially a Chevrolet truck with armor plating welded on in a shoddy manner, but it’s also a symbol of the commendable, but sadly unsuccessful resistance act. Too bad I was the only one who even knew what the Kubus was.

The cinema and the theatre had in common that they were both in polish, which relegates us to visual cues for everything. Polish is so dissimilar from german, english or norwegian that very little inference can be made from word sound. The cabaret piece was apparently a sequence of sketches and songs, which left me a little bewildered. The songs were quite good and enjoyable, though. The cinema was an Imax 3D cinema which showed a movie about fishes in coral reefs. That’s more of visual thing, anyway, so we had little trouble following it.

This morning was spent at the in the old downtown. First we had an inofficial tour with one of the students, which was nice to see, but didn’t offer much historical background. English skills differ between our hosts, and I’m uncertain about historical interest. Afterwards, we entered the royal palace right next to the old quarter, where we actually had a professional guide who spoke decent english. We heard quite a bit about polish dynasties, alliances with Lithuania, descent and eventual annexion. The decoration was opulent and gaudy, entirely as expected. Some of the mirrors and paintings offered interesting sights.

About the polish so far: Contact with our hosts has been intermittent; we live at a nice hostel on our own, so we meet only the day’s organizers, who then try to herd a group of fifteen people to certain locations. Punctuality suffers (that clichee about germans is entirely unfounded…), and amusing twists are endured. Map reading ability varies greatly among poles, and the about-turn count is currently at five. Some of them are quite nice, others it’s difficult to get a good conversation going with. This is sometimes because both parties are uncertain, sometimes because of language skills, and sometimes because of the temptation to fall back into clichees.

On that note: I bought a Xenophobe’s guide to Poland today at a store in a mall called “american bookstore”. I think that 6 EUR is not too much. Generally, though, prices here are only somewhat lower than in Germany, averaging maybe 80% for non-groceries. Groceries and essentials are cheaper. Globalization is also showing its effects, with many stores familiar. There’s a Saturn here, a New Yorker, Media Markt, McDonalds’s… the list is long.

This evening, we’ll see unspecified sights of Warsaw, and tomorrow is a new day.

Arrival in Warsaw

First post from the Poland exchange (nicknamed Wild East)! We have managed to get to Warsaw more on less on time, no thanks to German Rail at all. We started out at six in the morning, then managed to get to Hagen on time. There, however, our luck departed us. The railway to the airport was blocked off because a cargo train had lost part of their load, and the railway wouldn’t be open again for quite a while. So we dodged by taking a train to Dortmund Central, from where an airport shuttle bus was supposed to leave. Only on saturdays, it doesn’t go at all from 10:00 to 13:00, which was perfectly the window where we needed it. A second train got cancelled for no discernible reason, and thus we were completely stranded. Desperate times require desperate measures, like cabs… and thus we ended up spending 20 euro to take five people and their suitcases to the airport. That’s actually not too bad.

The flight was uneventful, and we landed in Warsaw with 29°C and sun shining. Much better than expected. We immediately met some of our polish partners, but as with all group introductions today, names did not stick and would have to wait until more personal conversation could establish a frame of reference for memory to hold on to. We were first taken to the hostel by an adventurous combination of bus, metro and tram. It’s actually rather close to the city center; maybe 20 minutes walk, which isn’t so much in a city the size of Warsaw.

The hostel itself is barebones, but nice. It looks terrible from the outside, but inside it reveils rooms painted in gaudy colors and cheap but effective Ikea furniture. There’s even free WLAN in the whole building, which is how I can post this. We’re three people to a room, and the three physics students participating decided to room together.

Once we were a little rested, we went out again. First we exchanged euro for Zloty at “the best exchange office in town” – which wasn’t too bad, but not really perfect. Then we got a tour of the local student dorms – rooms of 10m^2 shared between two people. I’m not sure I’d manage in that. We took a lengthy (and convoluted) path back to downtown and spent a good hour gorging ourselves. We’d had nothing to drink or eat since before boarding the plane, and were consequently ravenous. This was apparently not as transparent to our partners, since they seemed surprised by the earlier requests for drink (not so much food until later). The pub we were in served large platters with a selection of sausages, steaks and other meat, lain on a bed of cabbages and fries. Veeery healty, but filling.

After dinner, we went out to a student party at the dorm we’d been to earlier. We had a nice time chatting with the poles there, but some of them spoke no english or german, so communication was down to symbols, translators and vodka shots. Polish like vodka shots way too much, in my opinion. Although I will conceed that the vodka employed was high quality and very smooth, quite possibly the equal of Absolut. Unfortunately, due to a poor bus situation at night, we had to walk back to the hostel in a 40 minutes walk, and ended up pretty dead. Most of us were already tired from last night (I got up at 5 am, others earlier).

Positive notes so far: Everybody made it, nothing has been stolen and I have sufficient backups to avoid desaster almost no matter what happens.

Negative: I’ve forgotten to pack pyjamas.

Riding the storm of activity

The past few days have been more than adventurous. I have initiated a number of new activities, organized a lot of things for stuff that was already running – in short I have been pretty active. Let me give you a list:

• I have booked the flights for the exchange to Warsaw
• I have requested financial support for that exchange from a company, and believe we may get 500 EUR out of it
• I have been to the first meeting of the new stipendiates of the Saurer company, and met several very nice engineers there
• I have contacted one of the local institutes about giving the same stipendiats a tour at some point, and got a positive response
• I have begun painting the large painting for my parents’ hallway
• I have practiced a lot for the choir, and managed to catch up quite a way
• I have been to several local concerts featuring choir or brass bands
• I was in Maastricht on april 30th, the dutch national holiday, and saw interesting parades, drum groups and markets
• I went to my art class again and painted several quick pieces
• I looked up a lot of books and managed to borrow most of them in some fashion or other
• I read a lot about neural networks and vector support machines and automatic classifiers
• I set up the experiment for my diploma thesis with my supervisor – itis now nearly operational
• I barbecued several times with friends
• I had my hair cut short again
• I became a member of the german physics society (DPG)
• I subscribed to Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft
• I got myself a headset for my new (used) mobile and am enjoying it greatly. It’s very handy
• I spent half an hour cleaning and repairing my bike. After that, it ran properly again. Very nice.
• I finally got a working front light for the bike. The old one had some sort of electronic connection breakage that I couldn’t pinpoint
• I got the light above the sink in my room working again

There, that’s basically it. There are a few large points for the next two months on the horizon:

• run a lot of experiments in the near future
• go to Poland from may 26th to june 9th
• go to Techtextil exhibition on june 13th
• take the entrance exam for Mensa next week
• implement either a vector support machine or a neural network and try it out on new data
• finish painting the hallway picture

Lot of work, but most of it fun. I’ll be going to Burg Vogelsang, a local history relic from the nazi age, on sunday with the catholic highschool community. I’m not catholic, but that doesn’t seem to be required.