Tues­day, there was a little arts exhib­i­tion and a party announced to take place in a very unsual loc­a­tion: the cata­combs of an old monu­ment of the Kaiser which has been dis­troyed in World War 2, I think the statue of which had been removed by the GDR, thanks Bea for point­ing this out (see third com­ment). The great thing: It’s in the very in centre of Ber­lin, and you would never ever get to see those spooky arches under­ground, right next to one of the smal­ler arms of the Elbe Spree (the river that flows through Ber­lin), and the old Palast der Repub­lik.

So the entrence itself was pretty dodgy, just one small little man­hole, and a 5 meters lad­der… Down you came straight into the old cata­combs, where some artists put up a vari­ety of light– and sound install­a­tions.

Unfor­tu­nately, the party was can­celed on the night itself when sud­denly some police men showed up and bas­cially for­bade the whole thing for a num­ber of reas­ons. It was great to have a look around any­ways, and I also got to take some nice night shots…

I became a pro­fes­sional fish­er­man, but dis­covered that I couldn’t live on my net income.

I would never have thought it, but being at the right time in the right city, I had the oppor­tun­ity last Fri­day to see Herbie Han­cock live and dir­ect here in Ber­lin.

Although the tick­ets were fairly pricy (the cheapest star­ted at 38 EUR), in my book, it was worth every cent. Even if this guy is 66 years old, you couldn’t tell neither by his looks, the energy he radi­ated, the humour he showed nor the music itself. (By the way, that’s him on the cen­ter of the stage with the gui­tar like key­board I for­got the name of).

In a single word: it was as massive. No com­par­ison in qual­ity to any­thing I’ve ever heard, when it comes to a jazz combo. Of course, this was also due to the other musi­cians he played with: Vin­nie Colei­uta (a par­tic­u­lar­ily fam­ous drum­mer), Nathan East (an impress­ive bassist and singer) and Lionel Loueke (I didn’t know him, but geez, he was a geni­ous too).

Among the pieces they played were clas­sics like Can­ta­loupe Island, Water­melon Man or Chameleon as well as more recent songs.

Being good at being stu­pid doesn’t count.

Not sure if you guys know, but the 11^th of Novem­ber at 11:11am is a very spe­cial day /​moment. In a few cit­ies /​regions in Ger­many — such as Köln (a.k.a. Cologne), Mainz, Düs­sel­dorf, etc. — it’s the start of the Karneval Saison, the „Fifth Sea­son“ for the people liv­ing in those parts of the coun­try..

Being from Ber­lin (where people typ­ic­ally have a rather ant­ag­on­istic opin­ion on all that buisi­ness) I do not know all that much about this stuff, but make sure you read the Wiki­pe­dia art­icle on it ;-)

Why am I men­tion­ing that? Well, purely by coin­cid­ence I happened to visit a good friend of mine that par­tic­u­lar week end, and when I tried to get some clas­sical break­fast ingredi­ents like Brötchen (a.k.a. bread buns /​bread rolls depend­ing on where you from) or Crois­sants it was simply not pos­sible to reach the bakery because of all the people on the street already get­ting wasted at 9am. Well, this con­tin­ued for the entire day, and it actu­ally looked like fun (I didn’t have any cos­tumes or the like on me, so I couldn’t really join in), and I’ve decided that at some stage, I wanna go with it, full time :-)

It just needs a bit of pre­par­a­tion to look as funny as all the other people… On the photo that was one of the many little bands that played some ran­dom semi-​rythmic noise to cel­eb­rate their drunke­ness :-)

Eat yoghurt and get cultured!

Fri­day last week I went to a big party, the birth­day party of one of my broth­ers (Jan) and two good old friends of his (Michael and Mat­thias), who all just turned 30…

It was a great party in many terms. Nice (fin­ger) food ;-) Nice ladies, loads and loads of dan­cing (I was all sore the next day, and that rarely hap­pens), so thanks for organ­ising it, guys! Also, this was a great oppor­tun­ity to only see a lot of people from old times (you always know your broth­ers’ friends fairly well too, and I haven’t seen most of them for a good dec­ade!) and my fam­ily again.

As a sur­prise (even I didn’t know of it!) my dad drove all the way up from Stut­tgart (on the other end of Ger­many) and my other Brother (Daniel) was there too. I even­tu­ally man­aged to con­vince my broth­ers into a little photo with the three of us together, which I like a lot (and it’s the first of its kind in a about a dec­ade too!).

Why is 6 afraid of 7? Because 7 8 9!

Since Wed­nes­day this week, I’ve offi­cially star­ted work­ing here at the Tech­nis­che Uni­versität (TU) Ber­lin, in the „Insti­tut für Ener­gie– und Auto­mat­is­ier­ung­s­tech­nik“ or more pre­cisely in the „Fachge­biet Regel­ungssysteme“ that is Prof. Jörg Raisch’s group.

Right now I’m still in the pro­cess of filling my empty office (pic­tures soon…), get­ting to know people, and gen­er­ally just get­ting set up. As well as read­ing. And heaps of it…

In a way it’s weird, I’ve really fin­ished my uni degree now… I’ve gradu­ated, I’ve got some title to offi­cially put in front of my name (that’s „Dipl. – Ing.“). Kind of excit­ing. Also, my name is already fea­tured on the name table just next to the elev­ator (see last line in the pic­ture).

Guess that makes it offi­cial…

Once I worked in the woods as a lum­ber­jack, but I just couldn’t hack it, so they gave me the axe.

Once I came back from Trento, it was time for some ser­i­ous relax­ing and — of course — party­ing too ;-)

I spent most of the time in Mag­de­burg, the place where I stud­ied for three and a half years. It felt great to have noth­ing to do other than wor­ry­ign about what cool meal to fix in the even­ing.

The photo here was taken at Uwe’s birth­day party, a friend of mine from Uni. I think it was Julia (that lovely lady at the back of the photo) who sud­denly decided it was time for some Macar­ena dan­cing… Some­body took a short video from that, you can watch it here.

Oh boy, those days were days of fun… now it’s back to work, as you’ll soon read about…

I just got back from a pleas­ure trip. I took my mother-​in-​law to the airport.