The Germany Post
June 19th, 2005 by Mark
So, I got back from Germany on June 1st and I’m just now getting around to writing about it. I really should have written about it earlier because it would have been easier to remember the details. Regardless, here it goes.
I’ve already written about the plane ride over to Germany and a few other things. So, I suppose I’ll start this list of highlights from when I got off the train. It took me about 45 minutes to find my hotel once I stepped out of the train station. However, the hotel is 5 minutes away from the train station. If I knew where to look I could see it from one of the train station doors. Here’s a picture from the balcony my hotel had in which you can see the train station. The hotel room was pretty nice. The see-through doors in the bathroom were a little weird. So was the toilet with two buttons. I spent the first day tooling around Stuttgart. I enjoyed my first German meal which was a falafal sandwich and chicken wings. I spent a lot of time in the Schlossgarten. It was really great to see how German people live day-to-day. You can’t see that in a museum. I watched some guys play real bocce.
I went to Heidelberg the second day. I wrote about this in a previous post, but I have pictures now. I have one of me walking around Heidelberg with a lemon ice. Once I made my way up to the castle, I was able to take this picture of part of Heidelberg and this picture of part of the castle. There was much more to the castle as you can see in this picture I took from the Philosopher’s Walk.
The third day was when we took the trip to the medieval city of Esslingen. I didn’t take many pictures and the ones I took didn’t come out very well. The fourth day marked the beginning of the GUADEC conference. The conference was really awesome. It really motivated me to get more involved in Gnome. Jeff Waugh gave a talk about trying to get 10% of the desktops in the world running Gnome by 2010. He called it “10×10″. I saw John and met some other people as well. We played some giant chess while John hacked on DBUS.
I left the morning after the conference ended. I had a great time and it was really cool to be so far out of my element. Guadec 7 is going to be in Barcelona. We’ll see where things are a year from now, but I would really like to get out to Guadec again. The Gnome Summit is in Boston this fall and I will most likely be attending that as well. I suppose that about wraps up my post about Germany. All of the pictures that I took and deemed were of good enough quality and relevance are available on my flickr account and are tagged with Germany.
