Before the Storm…¶
There’ll be quite a large and long (100+ people, 4 weeks) summer school at our department in July. It’s not really my area but the sheer size of it will make sure there are some interesting talks for me anyway. Being locals we were asked to help a bit looking after the guests. And I ended up planning one of the excursions. The plan is to visit the nearby town Hannoversch Münden. They have three rivers there, the Werra and the Fulda who merge to become the Weser which goes to the North sea. Which is fun for me as I’m from Bremen which is further down the Weser.
And while that may not be as interesting for the guests there are loads of old half-timbred houses there and we can visit a brewery and do a boat trip on all those rivers. One of the most difficult aspects about planning this was the problem that getting a guided city tour for hundres people in small-town Germany isn’t easy. They tend to have one or two guides who can do the tours in foreign languages, so things need to be split up. But we’ve found a way to make that work and if everything works out the way it’s planned it should be a really nice trip. I’m just afraid that with such a large group we might lose people somewhere on the way or so.
Even more amusingly, I took a long train ride to Bremen this evening. Not only was this a little test ride of the MacBook to see how its shiny screen does when landscapes and a lot of light move around it (and the result is all right – I didn’t have any real problems; there were some reflections, but those were badly noticable only in situations where I wouldn’t have seen anything on the old iBook’s screen; so while it’s not perfect, it still looks like an improvement), I also had some nice mum-made osso bucco once I arrived.
And, most importantly, I’ll go to the Hurricane festival tomorrow. Hooray for uncomfortable outdoor living among drunk teenagers and seeing many great bands!
On Friday there’ll be the the Arctic Monkeys and Maxïmo Park both of which aren’t the greatest but still worth seeing. Saturday will then be insane. In the sense of there being too many bands and too little hours in the day. With (chronologically) playing: The Kooks, The Raconteurs(!!), Hard-Fi, Mando Diao, Adam Green (clashing with the Shout Out Louds), The Hives, Element of Crime, The Strokes and – finally! – Sigur Rós. If that isn’t insanely great, I don’t know what it is.
And on Sunday we still have a thing or two to look forward to. Like Pretty Girls Make Graves, Two Gallants, Apocalyptica (whom I saw at Hurricane in 1998 already and considered to be surprisingly good back then), the wonderful Wir Sind Helden, Muse or Gnarls Barkley (which to be honest I don’t quite get).
So I hope it will all be great. Even the weather looks like it will be reasonable – as in mostly sunny but not excruciatingly hot – for the weekend:
Oh, and don’t expect any writing here in the next days. I’ll try to fill the empty pages for those with short remarks on and photos of the bands when I return. (Read: Hurricane Friday, Saturday, Sunday, the storm after.)
