18 Apr 2009 No Comments
Marburg and FASE’09
I have the feeling that my blog is slowly becoming just a collection of reports about my trips… Not that there is anything wrong with that, but a bit more of variety would be better. Anyway, here I am once more talking about research and travelling.
During March I had two trips. The first was in Marburg, a little town about one hour train north of Frankfurt, Germany. This trip was not due to a conference, but because I needed to work together with my colleague Adrian – who was spending three months as visitor research at the University of Marburg – on an paper which we had to submit for a journal publication. Marburg is a delicious university town, it reminds me a bit L’Aquila, at least the L’Aquila I am familiar with. I have been staying one week in a king sized room of a guest house, with furnitures from the beginning of the 20th century and a bathroom that was probably bigger than the room I have in Bergen. 
No, I did not have money to waste in my travelling budget, on the contrary I tried to spare… This was actually the cheapest solution available since Marburg was hosting a big conference on Medicine exactly that week and all the hotels were fully booked. We managed to get finished with the paper and to submit it. But fortunately it was not only work, we have also been able to enjoy German beer and food. I enjoyed so much a couple of “auflauf” (casserole) I tried. I learned also something curious: many of the public toilets in Marburg has special sink specifically designed to… puke. A local PhD student commented with “We have strong drinking traditions in Germany…”. Amazing!
The second trip was to York, as always together with Adrian, to attend the FASE 2009 conference, part of ETAPS. Here I presented our last published paper. I was not so stressed in the end, and everything went smoothly. I am very satisfied by the presentation, and receiving compliments from colleagues and other researcher was a great reward. The very same evening after the presentation we had a “gala dinner”, which was actually delicious, and of course we continued the celebrations in the pubs of the city centre. The ale beers from the local breweries helped me to forget about the research carried on in the last months… The city of York was somehow fascinating, also because of its history. Founded by Romans in the year 71 and captured by the Vikings in 866, it shares a lot with the history of both my home country and the country where I live now.
I hope to be able to upload pictures from both trips soon!