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tcpipAfter the Parisian visit, the next brief stop on the journey was Strasbourg. This is a city that the French and Germans fought over for centuries and, having finally settled on the Rhine as a natural border, have decided that it would make a good showcase for contemporary Franco-German friendship, as well as a number of European Union institutions. It is quite a beautiful, clean, and inexpensive town and shows plenty of signs of being a nexus between the two cultures in style. It was market day in the old town, and I managed to resist buying various trinkets from the antique market. One thing that cannot be missed is the impressive (even by European standards) Strasbourg cathedral with its stained glass demons and the astronomical clock.
The next step from Strasbourg was a short distance away across the border, Freiburg, often suffixed "im Breisgau" to differentiate from Freiburg and Freyburg in Saxony and Fribourg in Switzerland. It is another town with a notable university sector, and a few years back I visited some of their high performance computing centre. Pleasantly surprised that we were doing HPC-cloud hybrids, quite cutting-edge back then, but from completely different approaches, we went on to produce an academic poster for the IEEE and a follow-up journal article published this year. Rather charmingly, their team came out to have a long breakfast Schloss Cafe, which overlooks the town in a rather picturesque manner. If one was to do a postcard of a classic southern German town this would be a good candidate, with the hills of Schwarzwald in the background. I am rather fond of the Baden-Württemberg region ("Wir können alles, außer hochdeutsch").
After Freiburg it was a short train journey to Zurich, where I am here for a more formal part of the vacation, the compulsory residency required for completing my MSc degree in Information Systems (which I am jokingly calling a "Swiss Finishing School"). We're located in a miniature-sized studio apartment, which is nevertheless quite good value. The residency class is quite large, probably close to fifty or so people from around the world, although I am the only Australian. The chief lecturer, Dr. Alistair Benson is a cynical Glaswegian with a dry sense of humour, but with excellent content. I think we're going to get along quite well. For what it's worth, the claims of "sticker shock" in Zurich are very much true; most basic food items seem to be at least 50% more than comparable European or Australian prices.
The next step from Strasbourg was a short distance away across the border, Freiburg, often suffixed "im Breisgau" to differentiate from Freiburg and Freyburg in Saxony and Fribourg in Switzerland. It is another town with a notable university sector, and a few years back I visited some of their high performance computing centre. Pleasantly surprised that we were doing HPC-cloud hybrids, quite cutting-edge back then, but from completely different approaches, we went on to produce an academic poster for the IEEE and a follow-up journal article published this year. Rather charmingly, their team came out to have a long breakfast Schloss Cafe, which overlooks the town in a rather picturesque manner. If one was to do a postcard of a classic southern German town this would be a good candidate, with the hills of Schwarzwald in the background. I am rather fond of the Baden-Württemberg region ("Wir können alles, außer hochdeutsch").
After Freiburg it was a short train journey to Zurich, where I am here for a more formal part of the vacation, the compulsory residency required for completing my MSc degree in Information Systems (which I am jokingly calling a "Swiss Finishing School"). We're located in a miniature-sized studio apartment, which is nevertheless quite good value. The residency class is quite large, probably close to fifty or so people from around the world, although I am the only Australian. The chief lecturer, Dr. Alistair Benson is a cynical Glaswegian with a dry sense of humour, but with excellent content. I think we're going to get along quite well. For what it's worth, the claims of "sticker shock" in Zurich are very much true; most basic food items seem to be at least 50% more than comparable European or Australian prices.
