At the end of the first day of the workshop we went on an excursion to the Christmas market

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I confess that before I went there, I had no idea that Bonn was on the Rhine. I found it out by studying the map in my hotel room, so the next morning I went for a walk to see it - the famous river that I'd never seen before. There were little patches of snow lying around and puddles that were essentially ice, so I had to walk rather gingerly ( Read more... )

The first part of my trip in December was to Bonn, where I had been invited to present a 'master class' to PhD students in the Development Research Centre at the University. On the last day of this event (which mainly involved reading and commenting on student papers) I had to give a public lecture. I was pretty nervous about it as I'd no idea what ( Read more... )

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/arts/christa-wolf-dies-at-82-wrote-of-the-germanys.html

The book that made a huge impression on me was the semi-autobiographical A Model Childhood (I think it had a different name in the US). It ( Read more... )

We had a deadline to get to Russia and we had no idea how long it would take, so we basically raced across from Oostende to Denmark. What I remember of Belgium, the Netherlands and north Germany is virtually nothing, apart from some canals and overpasses. We were camping in our green tent by now, saving on B&Bs, but I have no idea where we stayed ( Read more... )

Salzburg is very close to the German border, but the public transport was not good. So we took a local bus to a big road junction outside of town and put out our thumbs. After about an hour somebody picked us up. He drove us to Munich on the autobahn. The distance was 160 km and we covered it in 1 hour. I was terrified and we were by no means the ( Read more... )