more photos of Aachen -- http://mw.spaces.live.com/

I uploaded about 5 dozen photos from my walk around Aachen to http://mw.spaces.live.com/ for your viewing pleasure.

Mitch teaches in Aachen, Germany (part 5)

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The Aachen office is under construction so Microsoft rented a conference facility 2 Km from the office in a castle called Schloss Rahe. The castle has a moat, a dungeon, and well-appointed, brightly lit conference rooms. We had no projector but someone ran back to the office to get one (a tiny 8" squared unit that worked amazingly well). Microsoft Redmond sent the printed workbooks too late but they arrived literally minutes before the class began. The food and coffee at Castle Rahe is bad (except for the fresh fruit) and there is no Internet available, ouch! However I had almost all of the materials I needed and the courses ran quite well without network access.

Mitch teaches in Aachen, Germany (part 4)

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The hotel Aquis Grana is in the center of Aachen next to the big Cathedral complex and cobblestoned squares / pedestrian-only areas. Parking is in an underground garage next door. The rooms are clean, small, and quiet. There are plenty of restaurants and wonderful shopping in the area (great book stores!). There is no health center inside the hotel but it's really interesting to jog around downtown because of all of the tourist attractions (fountains, shops, historical landmarks, University, the Cathedral itself). And push-ups / situps can be done anywhere. I had a great dinner in a local basement-restaurant filled with noisy kids, young couples, and extended familes. German beer is the best. Breakfast buffet at the hotel is also fantastic. I am a big fan of most breakfast foods including Cantonese rice porridge, grains (oatmeal, granola), eggs, fruits, salads, fresh-baked breads. It was fantastic and I ate too much.

Mitch teaches in Aachen, Germany (part 3)

I shall be back in Zurich, Switzerland after teaching two courses in Aachen. I shall be in the Microsoft Zurich offices meeting with some people there.

Zurich is an interesting town with a long history and much less visible devastation from the "war centuries" that one sees in most of Europe. Napoleon fought the Austrians in the area but the town itself was not attacked.

Zurich is on the Limat river and touches the long, skinny, deep lake Zurich. The lake is very clean and the water sports on it are fun.

My daughter Adinah (15) is blogging about her job in Zurich at http://adinahwyle.blogspot.com/ and she has some photographs there of swimming and speed-boating.

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Driving from Dusseldorf to Aachen, Sunday 20th July, 2008

The drive from Dusseldorf to Aachen is interesting. There are very many tiny cultivated fields and dozens of wind turbines generating electrical power. In Germany, apparantly if you generate power using a "renewable" energy source (wind, solar, hydro) the government will pay you 10x the normal price per kilowatt hour. So, for example, if you mount solar panels on your roof, it is more cost-effective if you pump the power into the grid and then pull power back out to run your house because you are paid 10x what it costs you.

There were a few areas of the highway where there was no speed limit but I did not go over 200 for more than a few kilometers because it was really scary and the roads were wet. There were crazies going very fast (about 240). The GPS systems navigated me to the hotel in downtown Aachen without a single wrong turn or difficulty. It is unfortunately very slow to drive in or out of the downtown Aachen area because the streets are narrow, one-way, and serpentine around the pedestrian-only zones. I cannot imagine trying to drive around Aachen without a GPS.

Mitch teaches in Aachen, Germany (part 2)

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The Air Berlin flight was late leaving Zurich so I arrived in Aachen at rush hour (around 5pm).  When we landed there were two other planes flying right next to ours. All the planes landed within 1 minute of each other (two at once on parallel runways).  Our plane rushed off of the runway because another plane landed right behind us.  The runway on the other side had a plane taking off right after the one in front of it landed.  It was like watching military jet operations.  The Aachen airport uses those special buses that scoot around the tarmac, taking people to and from the planes instead of having the planes pull up to a gate.  We were very efficiently wisked through the high-traffic tarmac and taken to the terminal.  I actually prefer a smaller terminal and those buses to walking and taking trains through the humongous terminals of large airports.

 

There was no line at the Avis counter and I had my "Skoda Octavia" in under 3 minutes (German efficiency).  When I travelled extensively in Germany in 1981 the Berlin wall had not yet fallen and the idea of driving a Czech (Soviet block) car was absurd.  Now Volkswagen has a close joint venture relationship with Skoda and the Octavia is very impressive.  The six-speed turbo-diesel can accelerate the car (on the Autobahn) up to 200 Km/hr quickly; the German-style performance clutch is like high-friction rubber, biting hard as soon as the clutch pedal moves a few millimeters.  It has a large multi-function display with GPS navigation, entertainment, weather, bluetooth for the phone, and many other features I have not yet needed or used.  The portable GPS I brought with me is not nearly as good as the onboard system; on the way from the airport to my hotel I used both systems but from the hotel to the conference facility I used only the onboard GPS.  I have become better at entering the destination data and the system is gathering up my destination points.

Mitch teaches in Aachen, Germany (Part 1)

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My oldest son (Simeon, 17) drove us to the airport, saving Microsoft the $35 shared van ride service fees. I left my laptop at work and texted (sent a text message via cell phone) to Adam, asking him to email me the slide decks for the courses I am teaching in Germany. Adam sent out all the materials and I retrieved them on a borrowed laptop in my hotel the night before the classes started. The class room has no network access so I am very grateful to Adam for sending them.

My 11-year-old son Yofiel and I flew USAir from Seattle to Philadelphia. A 3.5 hour delay on the ground because of a broken jet engine kept us in the plane in Philadelphia longer than we would have liked. Luckily we had packed lots of food (carrots, apples, veggie-burgers, egg-beater sandwiches) and a large nalgene full of water. USAir does not feed or offer drinks topassengers, even after they keep them prisoner on a plane for 3.5 hours because of their extreme incompetence. When USAir announced the a 15-minute delay because the jet engine needed repairs we immediately burst into a familiar song:

Wanna be late?
Well ain't that great.
It ain't no crime
You're not on time.
(chorus)
Got time to spare?
Fly USAir!
And we don't care.
We're US Air!
Connecting flight?
That can't be right.
Gonna miss it.
Goodbye kiss it.
(chorus)
etc.

Yofiel and I drew battleship grids on blank paper and fired at each other for a while. I finally won a game against him! Then we spent a few hours watching two movies I had in my phone, sharing the bluetooth headset (one earphone per person). Afterwards, Yofi read about 50 pages of _The_Kite_Rider_ (his summer reading) and I read _The Opposable Mind_ that Austina (a co-worker) gave me. I think the topic is interesting but the writing is bad (tedious, pedantic, repetitious, short-sighted, illogical). Eventually the plane took off and caught a tail wind to make up some of the delay. We were only 6.5 hours in the air instead of the scheduled 8 hours.

My wife Gabriella and two of my three daughters (Adinah, 15; Eitana, 4) have been in Zurich for 4 weeks; they came to the Zurich airport to greet us along with my two nephews (Pino, 5; Livio, 3). My family is visiting Gabriella's family. Adinah took Sunday afternoon off from work to visit the airport and greet us. She is working three jobs at a Zoo here in Switzerland and is having the time of her life. My wife announced to us (in Swiss German) that she would speak exclusively Swiss-German with us in order for us to improve our language skills. Adinah is already speaking Swiss much more fluently than I. I answer back in a mixture of German and Swiss, but everyone understands me. We went shopping in the airport and I babysat the three youngest kids while Gabriella took Yofiel's luggage and groceries to the car. I bought a SwissComm SIM card for 20 Swiss Francs and my cell phone is now working here in Europe; it includes 20 Francs (about 250 minutes) of cellular air time and can be used anywhere in the world (unlike my T-mobile service, for which I must buy a special roaming add-on plan plus $1.50 per minute if I want to use it in Europe, tsk tsk). My brand-spanking new cell phone number is: +41.79.863.2758 (to which you can send text messages). I set up Microsoft Office Communicator to forward office calls to the new cell phone number.

The Zurich airport has grown somewhat with another terminal of gates and more, shorter flights inside Europe. I connected from Zurich to Dusseldorf from where I drove to Aachen. Aachen is about an hour's drive from three different airports and the flight to Dusseldorf connected best from Zurich.