Kissing

Ideally Mumbai should have been the place I should have started from.There was an option of doing it starting in flight too as I watched 'The Reader'.Munich was so romantic that morning that well it had to happen but I had to wait...and wait...a few stations later, getting lost in the desperation to not miss it, I finally got it done...

Well its just been three nights here and don't strain your grey cells much for that 'coz the title refers to this beautiful town on my way to Augsburg.

For those who may stumble upon this while searching for summer internships or higher education, I'm on a DAAD funded WISE internship program in which I had to find a project of Interest and a host Institute.I chose this place called Augsburg which is in Bavaria and around 40 kms away from Munich.The universitat Augsburg's faculty of Informatik are involved in the Organic Computing project and I'm currently working on some specifications relating to deadlocks after reconfigurations and the details wouldn't make much sense to you.If you would like to know more about the Internship or the project mail me on pratikmandrekar@gmail.com.

Now continuing with myself, I arrived at the station at around some time close to noon, my watch had stopped working at this temperature and all other devices on me showed Indian time, so I just presumed it that way.However the sun shines all day here in Summer(like 6am-11pm) and so that was a bad presumption.

The streets were almost deserted but I was made comfortable here thanks to the guy with whom I would be working here ofcourse under the guidance of Prof. Dr.Wolfgang Reif and his team.My address to be:Hermanstr. 33a, H.no 30, Augsburg turned out be a room in proper european style house with a window facing an amazing garden and better than most hotel rooms I have lived in.I had my personal kitchen too and am still experimenting with cooking(Have managed my past 3 days of breakfast and dinner in there :) ).

Bavaria is an awesome place with the Bavarian Alps,Switzerland and Austria to the South and Paris et all to the west.The Romantic Road passes right through Augsburg and have a look at this for a rough idea of Augsburg(It's much more amazing though, the city was reconstructed after WW-II bombings and is one of the oldest settlements in Europe-An ideal place to experience europe and have the best of contemporary as well as rennaisance culture)The University is amazing too, have a preview here. I'm supposedly the only Indian studying here amid students from over 95 countries and it seems they have been receiving many applicants from Indians off late and well, lets c :p

I walked up to the university witha 4 euros(approx 250 bucks) map in hand exploring the streets.It took me 2 hours and then1.5 hours back another route.Phew!The next day I got myself a monthly pass on the tram.Either way the transport system is amazing and beautiful in all aspects and respects especially considering the fact that with little knowledge of german I could navigate evrything in German perfectly.The food's more of a choice I have to make based on the price on its appearance 'coz 95% of the times I have no idea what it stands for(I entered a store which was supposedly a Drugstore and picked up some baby food thinking its mayonnaise, fortunately the younger generation knows English and that helped me save a few euros!) but I love the cherry yoghurt pudding and ummm..I don't know what the rest of the stuff's called.

I'm sleepy now with all this cooking and hogging and hard-working and so am sleeping, dats enough for an intro I guess and yeah Augsburg's the place where Mozart spent most of his time and his father was born here, and so was Rudolf Diesel, the one whose engine runs your car...and remember this?



Its the castle you see in every walt disney movie, its not very far from here...prolly I'll be rock climbing, or kayaking at the olympic stadium or sun-bathing at the lake on campus or at the zoo or simply getting lost at one of the streets by now, but I need to catch by 400 winks before that..

chao

Guten Tag!