In an effort to inch my way toward the “I can run a Marathon” mark, but also, maybe mostly, to sieze the opportunity to see Carinthia for the first time, I signed up for the Carintha Half Marathon.  It was quite a trip.

I was a bit ill-prepared.  I had run what I believed to be 15km the week before in 90 minutes, but since then I had run perhaps 30 minutes once, and also drank a lot of beer.  In the countryside of Austria, beer consumption does not cease or diminish.

I was spoiled, once again, to an astonishingly great room to sleep in, and a warm, loving family, who gracefully forgave my shyness to speak German.  The dialect was something similar to what I’ve heard before, but when they really got going, I was completely lost.  It was OK, because I consumed a lot of good food and had a lot of good things to look at while this was taking place.

After the first night, we ventured out into the family’s cabin, where lots and lots of meat was “gegrillt”.  On the way, we were shown a stunning grave yard outside a small churge.  Apparently, on All Saint’s Day, all the candles are lit on every stone, and the place is, perceivably, breathtaking.

I have to admit that lately I cannot be called a vegetarian.  My friend had warned her parents that I was a vegetarian without knowing this, but by the time her mom arrived with a hunk of the wonderful grillable, salty, squeaky Halloumi cheese, I had already partaken, and it was immediately announced: “Bob isst schon Fleisch!”

There were five runners in the family (if I’m counting right), and apparently this is a major occasion for gathering, and this happens this year at least 3 times.  This, and many other cute, but unitelligible things were the topic of discussion.   No sooner were we back from the grill was large portions of spaghetti being prepared (carbohydrates are really great before running).
Up at 6 the next day, eating only toast, drinking loads of water and electrolytic-mineral chemicals, finally to make the long drive to Klagenfurt.  We enjoyed relatively nice café before hand, and as we sat their in our messy clothes drinking fruit tea and crossing our legs (or stretching), I thought to myself, this is really Europe.

We passed by some high school jazz band, a kid’s  hockey club, many cheerers on, shop owners staring in disbelief smoking cigarettes, traditional Austrian bands, and of course, the lovely Wörthersee.  I quite enjoyed the little ones who reached out their hands to give me five. During part of the marathon there was a stretch with a bike path and a road.  Since the road was not level, many chose the bike path.  Amazingly, some grumpy local bikers were yelling at the marathon runners for running on the bike path.  I kind of understand this in any other cirucumstance except that where once a year, the villages all celebrate athleticism and achievement in a good will, locale-promoting event.  Bua.
Every long run has a really lame stretch, but this one had very few. In fact, I was waiting a long time for the scenery to get ugly.  Finally it did, in the 19th kilometer, where, to the right you had some really weedy bushy pointless vegetation, and to the left an ugly train track.  Probably the least good of times, because this is really when you’re nearly there, but not really within grasp.  Besides that it was often entertaining.

At the end, we swam in the Wörthersee, showered, and headed to yet another very very nice restaurant.  Again, the family sponsored us.  How supportive!  Three beers, a whole fish, and a coffee later, I was done.  The conversation really only waned at the end, when really, everyone was dead.  But oh what a lovely time.  (Sorry not any pictures of me in outfit–but you know, I was in a t-shirt and shorts, with a number on, and standing, then running.  Real exciting.)
I might follow them along to the next couple….we’ll see how I feel about that tomorrow.  For now I fight my immobility by stretching my pained legs as much as sensible.

I took this photo when I was interviewing for my position here in Vienna, and lo and behold, it really is true.  There are a smattering of these here and there in different places in Vienna, but maybe I’m just forgetting that I’m passing the same one in the same place.  And it’s true: when something is really shitty in your life, smile at the things that are nice.  You’ll find out that they really are very nice.

I finally made it out to Berlin on the RNA Society Conference.  I saw a couple mildly inspiring talks, I presented a poster, no one really gave me any constructive comments, I didn’t really meet anyone incredibly inspiring, and so on.  Nuff said.

Berlin is quite nice and interesting in many ways.  It’s in a bit of disrepair, being a city that is so unwieldy and having so many hard times come upon it.  The Marco Polo City Atlas of Berlin states a 20% unemployment rate, very high for anywhere, very, very high for Europe.  The poverty is not so heartbreaking as you might see in inner city America, though, since so many welfare systems are in place.

The city, just like the others I’ve been to, has its own post-historic-heyday character.  Bikes are everywhwere, and notable are the cyclists wearing half my month’s salary carrying their shoes in their backpacks.  It’s a more cheerful town than Vienna.  At an organic Curry Wurst stand, I encountered a friendly conversation among strangers about what is going on in their lives, their visitors, their families, nevertheless using the formal “Sie” form to converse.  In Vienna, one would be lucky to hang with overweight mustachioed alcoholics complaining about how the world is broken at a Wurstl stand in Vienna.

There are no fewer Turks in Berlin than in Vienna.  In fact, you can buy trading cards for the various Doenner and Kebab stands, detailing the place, number of stools, years in service and even the number of brothers the owner has, among other things.  One guidebook says that you could eat only Turkish food for two months and never have to eat at the same place twice.

There’s a lot less pretention about Berlin’s past in the air.  Perhaps it has to do both with a greater acceptance of Hitler’s presence, or also the mess still left by the former divide between the East and West.  It’s quite interesting to see the disheveled buildings among the great ones, even in the touristy areas.

The tourists get cute walk/don’t walk “ampels”.  This becomes the subject of many postcards and paraphernalia, much like the London Tube.  The DDR (East Germany) museum somehow made it seem decent and even a little kitschy to live in a communist state.  There’s a great museum I can’t recommend enough called Pergamon.  Nuff said.  For a good time, though, check out the East Side.  Way hip.

Overall, not bad.  A little crowded with things at a poorly organized conference, and a little tiring, but good.  A good run in there too.

And so ended another trip to the US.  The first week was spent warding off the throes of hard times in Vienna, and, in doing so, a near descent into complete alcoholism.  It was good to see everyone, nonetheless.

Jean is yet again making a calendar of Chicago, this time featuring the graves of famous people buried there.  I chose Ignaz Schwinn, bicycle baron, famous for the Schwinn Bicycle, and incidentally, a German immigrant.  (How fitting, huh?)  We thrifted and found a few articles vaguely resembling something he would wear, and brought Jean’s (modern) Schwinn in tow.  It was really the Sherlock Holmes hat acquired from a friend of hers that put the whole thing together.

She had recently been kicked out of another graveyard, and so we were both a little nervous.  We weighed our options to optimize the opportunity of getting a photo before getting caught: first, just taking the front tire of her bike, we ran stealthily to the grave stone, snapped a few, then as the coast was clear, retrieved the rest of the bike.  I really felt like I was on Jackass or something.

(You can see a little more documentation of this in her own web log: http://jeanfitz.wordpress.com/)

I spent a very pleasant week with the family.  It was relaxing, and had no less of the excitement of previous visits.  It’s good to know that we still have it.

I noticed a few things that really remind me of how silly the US is.  The over commercialized music equipment store, geared to fool customers into thinking their purchases were setting them onto a course to rock stardom, had a sign with useless umlauts on it (this phenomenon is actually documented in Wikipedia).  In Myrtle beach, there was a sign on the corner in front of one of the hundreds of tasteless T-shirt stores advertizing “SHARK TOOTH NECKLACES 1$”.  I really should have bought one.

On the way back, I had a one night layover in NYC, and I found out that day that there would be no where for me to sleep.  I stood at the airport gate, about to board a plane that would take me to a city with no bed for me, and looked across the hall to see a later flight to Las Vegas.  I pondered a bit.  Here I was, about to re-enter my not so great life in Vienna.  I have a choice: I could go visit my friend, spend all my savings and my credit at casinos, get married, annulled, and perhaps end up waking up lost in a drainage ditch the next morning, having no idea what happened, or go back to Vienna.  Very tough question.

I am, by the way, in Europe again.

So there has been quite a bit of activity without really many pictures to back them up. I think I have to throw away my “don’t post without pictures” policy in order to continue a decent pace. Or perhaps I should take better pictures.

I finally watched an EM game of Poland against Austria, but not at the stadium, instead in the “FanZone” where mass amounts of people hang out and watch games. We have a few Poles around the BioCenter, so it seemed appropriate. Unfortunately we turned up too late to actually make it into the FanZone proper, because apparently already 100,000 people had arrived there. So we stood outside of some bar near the FanZone that had a big screen above.

It was…soccer. There are some funny songs that everyone drunkenly sings, most of which have a bit more of an Austrian edge to the accent. Fans of the Austrian team were really excited to tie it up on the penalty kick. I was excited that it was over.

On Saturday there were attempts made at Salsa dancing. I really like to dance, but I can’t really dance. This stops most people. Anyway, it was difficult to keep up, because most there were taking a class, and were quite good. Perhaps soon this will blosom into a great dancing career.

Today was labmate Kasia’s concert, in which Dvořák was played. It’s funny, because really I haven’t been to many classical concerts, partly because I’m busy, but maybe there’s some sort of underlying distrust of the “mainstream” classical Vienna. I know for a fact that I don’t want to see Mozart or Strauss that badly, but surely there are other concerts here. It’s the whole indie disease, I guess.

OK one picture. I don’t know if it’s appropriate to do this, but I will anyway, because it’s a real difference culturally. Here we see a photo from Cologne, taken while my parents were in town. I think it’s fairly safe to say that even if this were your surname, you could never, ever make a store with this name in the US. There are similar sensitivities here, but of course to different things.

Someone a friend told me to write seven songs I like in my blog. Fine.

For some reason, I have had only songs I don’t really like in my mind.

1. Scorpions - “Winds of Change” So these dudes are German, but they never did a record in German. I guess that’s what you did in the 60’s. But I suddenly was curious about where they came from, because by the time they had their bigger songs, they were already an old band. Indeed, they started doing dark psychadelic rock at first, and moved on to really tasteless hard rock, taking everything but the few remnants of class Led Zeppelin had and putting it on records. They even had this one record called Virgin Killer, which had a naked prepubescent girl on the cover. (The cover was actually designed by someone at RCA — unbelievable.)
2. NOFX - “Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing” There are some people going to the US from here, and I think of all the things they should see, but then I was thinking about how much of a cancer that country is. Being here really makes you think about world politics, and Europe is not quite what I was hoping it would be either. Anyway, point is the lines “We are wolves in wolves’ clothing/We are the planet’s kidney stone/In the process of being passed” really ring true at the moment. By the way Europe, BARACK OBAMA ISN’T THE PRESIDENT YET. DON’T GET YOUR HOPES UP.
3. Portishead - “Silence” This new record is really really great, but hard at times, because of the painful emotions it faithfully depicts. “Did you know what I lost?/Did you know what I wanted?”
4. Die Ärzte - “Anneliese Schmidt” Wizo did a cover of this song that really made it interesting. It’s one of the only songs I know in German all the way through. It’s really awful, again, about a guy who is in love with the (young) daughter of his neighbor. But he mostly sings about her playing in the garden and building cities for the ants.
5. Breeders - “German Studies” This song is in really poorly sung German. They had someone translate it for them, but no one helped them with the pronounciation. But anyway it’s about this older woman who wants to sleep with a younger man, and the awkward situation it presents. The ambivalence of the man is portrayed through the woman’s begging. Really cool. “Das ist kein leerer Raum/Ich sitze doch hier…Ich bin nicht verschwunden/Lass das licht an” (”This is not an empty room/I’m sitting here…I haven’t dissappeared/Turn the light back on” And it gets really racy, too. The record is really good (Mountain Battles). But if you have no Breeders, get the Amps’ album (it’s by Kim Deal–essentially a Breeders album without Kelly…)
6. Captain Beefheart - “Blabber n’ Smoke” I picked up the Spotlight Kid/Clear Spot this year, and I wasn’t too excited about it as compared to TMR, but some of the lyrics are kind of funny. I like the thought of having such a boring simplistic lifestyle with simple people to whom you might say “all you ever do is blabber n’ smoke”. Sitting on some porch in the hot country, swilling beer all day. Etc. etc. There’s also this song called “Too Much Time”, which sounds like one of those motown crossovers, except that the song is completely unromantic, “I got too much time to be without love”. Extremely catchy.
7. Nada Surf - “The Fox” So believe it or not, Nada Surf turned out pretty good after the Weezer thing. They stayed popular in Europe. I unfortunately missed their show. This latest record, Lucky, is really good, mostly straightforward rock, but with a really eerie resonance.

Anyway, all this mostly means I need to go to the record store. Half hour till rave up closes. I really hope I don’t get into this writing about things on the internet thing. Ugh.

The PhD retreat I just returned from was the first work trip I’ve taken since that disasterous ski trip, in which I sliced my leg open. I’ve said before and I’ll say again: science makes you a rock star. 60 of us stayed in a 4-star hotel and ate free food from God-knows-where-it-really-comes-from-and-how-you-justify-spending-it-that-way money. Beyond that, it was one of those trips where you spend more time with people you normally don’t have extended talks with. We did some boring poster sessions and stuff, but finally ended up at the lake on paddleboats.

In the end, it felt a lot like a school field trip, with all the head counting, organizing, planned activities and so on. Maybe no one ever really moves on.

I noticed that every time I leave Vienna, it’s like going to another country. This is nearly true, since Vienna itself has its own political province, in order to avoid the conflicts it has with the much more conservative surrounding Lower Austria province. It’s not just the attitudes, but the infrastructure and such are quite different. Hard to describe it…maybe I just need some sleep.

Yesterday I watched a documentary about GG Allin, and was truly awestruck. The guy was really a lot more clever than he appeared, and he never stopped. Such devotion to self-destruction is alone laudible, but the guy actually had a message and a clear meaning in his existence. (He also wrote some really great country songs!) There was this one story in particular, in introducing GG Allin, where someone described the first GG Allin show he went to. GG ran down on stage and collapsed, unable to do anything at all, because he had taken too much heroin. The audience still tried to get something out of it by kicking him on the floor and breaking bottles over his head. That’s when he knew that GG was something special.
As I awoke this morning, knowing I had the last leg of a relay marathon, wondering whether I should sleep or not, thinking about what a wreck I had made of myself from Friday and then today, thinking that everyone else in the relay had probably given a lot of forethought to getting up on time, meeting everyone, packing the right things, and so on, I thought to myself, this is kind of punk. In fact, though, this is as punk as I really ever got. But this is no stumbling on stage and getting bottles broken over my head. Not even remotely punk.
After having run, I feel like hell, despite all my training. It’s probably because of the fact that I don’t usually run around other people, and whenever I’m around other people, I feel a constant urge to go past them. At several points I tried to slow down, but I really couldn’t. I ran the whole thing in less than an hour…I’m pretty sure that’s faster than I’ve ran in any of the previous runs.

It was quite an experience, in the sense that I never started a run by saying “Yay! Jen!” then tagging them, and running off with a smile. Another couple of labmates had come and made signs for everyone, and I experienced for the first time ever, I think, feeling encouraged by silly, meaningless cheering.

They gave us a lot of goody bags along the way, and this was nice. I’m probably the only person who has already consumed all of the the food they gave us. I was so hungry. As of today, I became aware of a brand of Müesli (cereal), called “Fitness”, comprised mostly of chocolate. There were also lots of beers and cigarettes at the end. You got to love Europe.

On the way back, people noticed that you were sweaty and had stupid clothes on, and a number on your shirt, and everything, so some of them would talk to you. One kid on the subway with a really fantastic haircut and a beer, said droll, “Wer hat gewonnen?” (Who won?) Lacking any energy to say something clever, or even something in German, I simply said “I don’t know.” He laughed.

Check out the Vienna marathon website for more cooler pictures.

So ends my second foray into the great Germany, and also my second into the greater Cologne area. (More on the previous one later.) This time was for a concert, but also an offhanded effort to begin a string of “Concert Tourism”: that is, since lots of our favorite bands do not come to Vienna, we can use the fact that they are touring through other fantastic cities in Europe to visit and see the band. If the city sucks, we still have the band.

And boy was it a good city, and a good band. Unfortunately the rain and coldness kind of put a damper on the second day, but there is no denying the Ludwig Museum and the splendor of the main Dom. There was a great stretch of bars and shops and such things, a really good vibe, and a nice, not too big feel to the whole thing.

Kölsch, the dialect of Köln (Cologne), is also interesting. It really sounded Italian or Spanish to me, until I’d recognize a word like “trotzdem” or “gebracht”, or something. It really is amazing how much the rhythm can affect the sound, appearance, meaning and mood of the language. In several ways it is German (parts are discernable in written language), but in sound it is almost unrecognizable. It is also an inflection-sensitive language: an example in wikipedia attributes 18 meanings to the same sentence, depending on the way it is pronounced and toned.
But ultimately it was Portishead that took the cake. The show was unbelievably good, and perhaps the first time in years in which I really felt an aural orgasm. They’ve quite ironically titled their third album “Third”, as it is nothing like the previous ones. I suppose you can download it for free, but I’m old fashioned. It was also quite a kick to hear for the first time live.

Hopefully my fatigue is not rendering my writing here so uninteresting that I’ve lost you…more will come. Enjoy the pictures on flickr! (Link on right….as always….)

There really isn’t much to say in this post. I just moved. nijibabulu.org now lives in the 3rd district of Vienna. It’s up. You’re looking at it. And here, my friends, is the toilet, the toilet offered to visitors of the world famous Hundertwasserhaus, the toilet…of modern art. It really isn’t too ironic, given the house itself.

More about the move and all that other fun shit later, after the ski trip.

Earlier this month, Renée (my advisor) had a zealous burst of ideas for things I should do in the near future, including going to EMBL in Heidleberg for a workshop, and going to a RNA structure meeting in Bled, Slovenia.

The whole event was dominated by this monster group of computational RNA groups, that of Peter Stadler’s. They presented everything from RNAz to LocARNA to ViennaRNA to RNAz. I came in the odd position of being the not-so-computational guy, despite my nerdiness.

It was a lot of fun. The core participants were staying in a “Villa” which quite seriously resembled my old cooperative, Michigan House. Quite similar also was the amount of beer consumed there. Over the course of the meeting garbage bags of beer cans accumulated in front of the building, as did the hangovers.
Bled itself was gorgeous. It was the most developed I’ve seen of a Slavic country, although I can’t say I’ve really seen a lot of Slavic country. We walked about two lakes, both of which were remarkably unsullied, and in contrast to almost all the really beautiful lakes I’ve seen in the US, was largely undeveloped, by necessity, by law.

Shamefully, I neglected to actually read the Wikipedia entry or do anything to find out about Slovenia before going, and I still don’t really know that much. It’s odd and unexpected, though. The quiality of life seems good. One of the former Viennese had moved there to continue his work, and really liked it. Amazingly, he’s actually making a pass at learning the language. Then language, by the way, is also set apart from most Slavic languages in that the words, when spoken, were quite clearly separate; the beginnings and endings of words were evident to a non-speaker. Some conjectured it was the German or Italian influence, but who knows.
Sometime during the second lake walk, I realized that this really is the good life.  Doing fun science, getting paid for it and travelling around Europe to meet other scientists.  I think the only thing missing is more illegal drugs.  But I don’t really want to get deported, so I’m going to let that one slide.
Our talks went well, and we made some new connections, yadda yadda. Take a look at the pictures on flickr (, link on the right, or here).