US president Obama came to Europe this week for a number of “summits”. The German part of the NATO 60-year anniversary was held in Baden-Baden in South West Germany.
Incidentally, my father works right across the street from where Obama’s helicopter (“Marine One”) landed, so he took a few photos of the helicopter arriving. Enjoy.
Update: Here is the gallery with the rest of the pictures, along with some pictures of an “Obama/NATO cake”, one of the many products made in Baden-Baden for the occasion.
We all know, getting into your university of choice can be quite hard. But, who knew getting out of one (properly) is almost equally as complicated?
I am telling you, the university wants to see how much I can suffer, one last time. By sending me across campus multiple times to acquire signatures and pick up forms. And stand in line (first to pick up the form, then to fill it out, then to hand it in, then to pick up the signature). And by telling me that they decided to close their office on Mondays. And Fridays. And to open it between 10 and 12 only, the rest of the week. By-appointment-only, naturally.
Oh, and by closing my favorite on-campus coffee place, of course.
Now, it’s not all that bad, really. There are also interesting new discoveries to be made. Like, that the computing center (Rechenzentrum) apparently has a women-only computer pool. In an imaginary press release, they might say: “The new, three-desk facility was established to give all women studying computer science in Karlsruhe room to work at once.” Of course, I am exaggerating. The actual student statistics for 2008 reveal a whopping 10 % of students in computer science are women here. And at any rate, the computing services are used by students in other departments as well. But, more seriously, what’s wrong with the other computers? Guess I’ll never know.
This week, I handed in my master’s thesis (German: Diplomarbeit) with the title “Transaction Management Challenges For Federated, Workflow-Based SOA Applications”:
Fellow German blogger ix got married in Las Vegas recently (congratulations) and faced the problem to have the marriage accepted by his local civil registry office in Hamburg—because only then they would be able to get all the rights and duties that marriage entails in Germany.
So far, so good: Along with a certified copy of the marriage certificate, he also needed to bring an “Apostille”—a standardized transcription of a legal document (in this case: the marriage certificate) to be accepted by another country (in this case: Germany). Of course, one cannot expect the government officials to be able to read the English language, not even when a marriage certificate consists of a quite simple set of information that does not differ significantly between the two countries. So he had to obtain an official translation of both documents from a certified translator, before they finally accepted his marriage as valid.
That the German government is very strict about “our official language is German” is no news to me: Once before I had to provide US documents to an agency and in spite of the relevant passages being very tiny, they demanded to have the whole document translated. Eventually, I managed to have them accept my (and therefore an uncertified) translation, which probably saved me what would have felt like a million dollars in translator fees.
Though all in all, it seems to be a quite tedious process, I now hope to know quite well what needs to be done to have a US marriage accepted in Germany. My fiancée and I will face the same process soon and this way we know what to expect. I’ll make sure to blog about it again when it’s time.
(pictured: “The Tower of Babel” by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563))
By the way: After some vacation in Florida (warm!) and Oregon (cold!) I am finally back in Germany. I got one of the last decent flights from Charlotte, NC before an ugly snow storm hit the American Northeast, so I guess I am lucky.
All the things I brought from the US made my suitcases a little heavy but it also came in handy that it is now legal to import 430 Euros worth of stuff to Germany without paying customs, which I didn’t even come close to.
Now I am busy unpacking, and also finishing up my master’s thesis which will be due to be handed in by the end of the month. And afterwards… but that’s another post entirely
The Oscars are over again and a movie named “slumdog millionaire” won a whopping 8 of them. Now, I’ve never heard of this movie before. Seems to me like it was buried in the ridiculous amount of advertisement for “mall cop” — a painfully cheesy flick that I did not want to see in the first place and whose overdone ads everywhere made me want to watch it even less.
Also, “Slumdog Millionaire” is going to premiere in Germany mid-March only, well after its release date in the US, and obviously after the Oscars as well. I thought the times when movies are released in Germany later than the US were finally over? Guess not.
Is it time to leave? Again? Yup. The final days of my stay in Pittsburgh have come: My master’s thesis is more or less complete (by the way, it has the nice name “Transaction Management Challenges for Cross-Organizational, Workflow-Based SOA Applications” and spans 104 pages total), so it is time for me to take it back to Germany and finally wrap up that “Diplom” of mine.
It was a fun time in the “Steel City”, I’ve learned a lot both professionally as well as personally and I have met great people who I will really miss. Thanks for making my time in Pittsburgh great, you know who you are!
But I am not quite flying home yet: Before diving back into the “frozen tundra” of Germany, I shall visit warmer parts of this country. I promise I’ll feel a little bad for you, snowed-in readers, while I sit by the pool sipping margaritas!
(Pittsburgh skyline photo CC by-sa licensed by Ronald C. Yochum, Jr. on Wikimedia Commons.)
I am telling you, the university wants to see how much I can suffer, one last time. By sending me across campus multiple times to acquire signatures and pick up forms. And stand in line (first to pick up the form, then to fill it out, then to hand it in, then to pick up the signature). And by telling me that they decided to close their office on Mondays. And Fridays. And to open it between 10 and 12 only, the rest of the week. By-appointment-only, naturally.
