Reflections

What is left to say? One month has passed since my return to Hamburg, but still I often think of my experiences in California. I enjoyed my stay over there a lot which was mostly due to the nice people I met, the beautiful nature I saw and also the interesting physics I learned about.
My time there would have been quite different without my awesome "WG" (shared apartment) with TJ, Carena and Tia. Thank you so much! Living with the "locals" is the best way of getting to know the life in a foreign country and of making friends. Also in the institute I met so kind and helpful people. I really hope that those who are planning to come to Germany for physics or travel reasons will make their plans true soon! Furthermore, I was lucky to have Howie as my supervisor who organized so much for me.

I came back after one month with better impressions of the United States than my expectations had been. I realized how manifold the various states are and how much the student life in California differs from the life in the prairie of the Mid-West... In addition I was impressed by the breath taking landscapes outside huge cities.
People are very friendly, open, talkative, willing to help, but therefore not each phrase/ greeting should be taken too serious (like "How was your day?" when paying at the supermarket). In total I prefer living in Europe rather than in the US, but after this short stay I could indeed imagine living there for a bit longer.

I have been reporting about my experiences in detail on this this blog, focussing on the freetime activities so that the readers might get the impression that I did not work at all ;-) But honestly I sometimes resisted the Californian sun and I did work on my master's thesis! I just thought that it is more interesting to read about trips than about calculations... This blog was intended to keep you posted while I was away, as a kind of public diary to remember everything for myself and in the end I hope that some students considering whether to go on exchange to Santa Cruz might find it useful. My advice: go :-)

I am concluding this blog for the moment, but I strongly hope that in the next years there will be more opportunities for physics and non-phyics experiences abroad! :-)

48 hours

Travelling back happened step by step and took hence rather long. On Friday morning I had a delicious goodbye breakfast from our food left-overs with Carena and TJ. Then I had to pack and clean my bedroom before Howie picked me up to go to SLAC once more. He had even promised to bring me to the airport in the evening. Before my departure he invited me to a Chicago-style pizza place where we were able to watch the final of the baseball world series. It was indeed very instructive to see it with him because he explained me the rules and pointed out what was important. In fact, he told me why he got interested in maths as a child when he was growing up in Brooklyn, NY. The reason was that he really wanted to understand the arithmetics of baseball statistics... It was so nice how he had been taking care of me during my stay.
Then checked in and flew to New York overnight. I was shocked about the low temperature and the ugly rain, but it got even worse: it started snowing heavily!! At least I was happy to meet Jukka there (a Finnish friend who is doing his PhD at Yale now). However, the unexpected snow storm destroyed all of our plans of walking through Central Park or going by ferry to the Statue of Liberty. Instead we wanted to visit the Museum of Modern Arts, but people were queuing outside for 2-3 hours in the snow, so we prefered to  spend the day inside. Back at the airport I heard that all domestic flights had been cancelled and that our flight was delayed by three hours because they had to wait for a permission and the airplane had to be deiced.
Finally I arrived tired at Hamburg airport on Sunday, October 30th, in the morning. What a fantastic month!!

Farewell and Thanksgiving

Thursday was my last day at SCIPP.  The best was a physics discussion with Stefano, who thinks that the effects I presented might also be relevant to his calculations. With 8 people from the institute we had a last lunch picknick outside. I was happy to meet most institute members again at the faculty colloquium so that I had a chance to say goodbye.
Back home, I noticed once more what awesome flatmates I had! Carena and TJ had invited lots of friends for a farewell party and they had asked them to bring typical thanksgiving food. They made mashed potatoes, rice crisps with melted marshmallows and I made a pumpkin pie from a huuuge pumpkin. Other people brought mashed sweet potatoes, stuffing (usually inside a turkey, but this time the vegetarian version just without the turkey), muffins,... very delicious food :-) Later on, we moved to a bar downtown.
A very nice, but sad goodbye. At least many of them would like to travel through Europe, so let's hope some of them will make their plans true.

Surfing!!

Thursday morning was my very last chance to go surfing and Eddie was so kind to organize me a surfboard and a wetsuit and to pick me up at 6:30am at my place. Then we arrived at the peaceful beach of Rio Del Mar around 7, even half an hour before sunrise. Dawn by the sea was so beautiful! Eddie taught me how to paddle lying on the surfboard and how to jump onto it. When we went into the water, it felt less cold than I would have expected. The waves were a bit too gentle for real surfing, but it was amazing enough to enjoy the light of the early morning.
Suddenly this idyll was interrupted when a triangular fin sticked out of the water, awfully close to Eddie! We were shocked because we knew that sharks do live at the northern Californian coast, but less in Monterey Bay, though.
Even more surprised were we when this fin turned out to belong to a cute dolphin! And it was not alone, but there were ten of them, swimming around us and even jumping out of the water! I was so fascinated!

After surfing so early, I still arrived on campus in the later morning.

Last days in Santa Cruz

My departure approached way too fast, but the last days were really nice. On Wednesday, we went again to SLAC to attend even two seminars. Walking through a corridor, Howie explained me that the old man who had just gone into his office was a Nobel laureate: Perl, who had discovered the tau. Amazing what people you see at SLAC...
Back at Santa Cruz, the team "Re-Entry" had another softball game which they won of course. At the end I was also allowed to try it, but I was terribly bad at hitting the ball! Yet, it was fun and I got to know another aspect of American culture ;-)

The Big Day

On Tuesday, October 25th, I finally gave my talk in the theory seminar after only few hours of sleep because -as always- there was so much to do in the last minute. I must really learn to finish my work some more time in advance. However, at the end everything went so amazingly well! During the preparation I had been quite nervous because my talk had been announced officially on the seminar homepage http://scipp.ucsc.edu/seminars/index.html, with a notice on the pin board and by email. Luckily I knew that this seminar has a very friendly atmosphere.
I was surprised how many people had come and I felt honored that also the experimentalists from the ATLAS group showed up so that additional chairs had to be squeezed into the seminar room. Stefano helped me with the beamer and Howie gave a very nice introduction and explained how this exchange had started. Then I talked 30min about physics and the audience asked quite many questions during and after the talk so that we had interesting discussions. In addition to my physics part, I spoke about the opportunity of an exchange, trying to advertise Göttingen and Hamburg. Not only students, but also professors seemed indeed interested.
After the talk I was really relieved and tired. But the big day was not over yet since I had a meeting with one professor from the media department who had been in Göttingen as the exchange program coordinator for a while. Unfortunately, this program between Göttingen and the University of California had been canceled due to the financial crisis. So we discussed new more or less formal exchange options. Regarding the stay abroad during my master thesis, I was extremlely lucky because I did not need to pay tuition fees since I did not take any classes or exams. Thus, my exchange was rather uncomplicated. Such a short-term visit for research purposes should be extendable in both exchange directions.

In the afternoon I was so exhausted that I decided not to work but to go mountainbiking on Upper Campus, in the woods where mountain lions live. It is really idyllic there, especially considering that it is in fact on campus. However, the signs about the mountain lion habitat worried me a bit...