Jan´s Blog Spot

Those numbers are all anniversaries that took place since my last blog entry:
2: Paola & Christian’s second wedding anniversary: the two got married two years and one day ago in Lima, Peru (congratulations again!). After the ceremony they invited us to go on a trip and discover at least parts of Peru with them. P&C: thanks to you again, I’m sure I’m not the only one who had the most amazing time.

(This by the way is what it looks like if you climb up to Machu Picchu one day after you got married…)
The forty-one goes to my cousin Reinhard – happy birthday! Already one year since I last saw him to celebrate his 40th…
As for the three: this is more about me and the French, I just finished my third year here in Paris.

Three whole years – who would have thought? Certainly not me, when I first came here I was convinced that I’d be going back to Munich after the fourteen months I was supposed to stay here. There has been a lot going on over the last three years, but I just can’t believe how quickly the time went by. Time sure flies when you’re having fun…

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Well – after almost a week of having the dishwasher I can only say this: worth every cent it cost (ok, it wasn’t my money, but still…). Work has kept my pretty busy during the week, but at least I finally made it to the Ciné-Cité in Bercy again on Friday night and went to see Spiderman 3 (after missing I don’t know how many movies over the last couple of weeks). The movie turned out to be “just what the doctor ordered” for a Friday night, i.e. nothing unheard of but good entertainment and nice special F/X – what more could you ask for?

Saturday I finally got around to have a second go on the replacement of my notebook’s hard drive, and since I was “better tooled” this time it finally worked, I’ll spare you the gory details here, but it was one of those “don’t try this at home things”. The evening saw the first actual going out I’ve done in weeks since I finally mostly got rid of a cold that proved to die a lot harder than I would have liked, but so I followed an invitation by Christian (this one, not that one) to a barbecue and clubbing night on the “péniche” Le Quai, which also came as an excellent reminder that Paris is just a great place to live during Summer.

Speaking of Christian, he managed to be the big news on Sunday: on the way back from Fontainebleau he had an almost accident with his motorbike (thanks to some moron car driver he seems to have overlooked him) but fortunately managed to catch/stabilize the bike by putting a foot down which bought him a partially fractured bone. While that does of course suck, I can’t even begin to tell you how happy I am nothing worse happened to him or Paola who was on the bike with him – I’d rather not think about what all could have happened and can only hope he’ll recover in as little time as possible.

And a completely unrelated topic: my new boss and one of the new colleagues from mentasys are going to visit the offices here tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to this, it should be quite interesting and also provide a few answers to open questions, some of which might also have an influence on the question where I’ll be after my current contract here is terminated (so far it says end of this year – let’s see…).

Oh – and one more thing: some funny crap I just came across. Certainly not everybody’s humor, but even though I haven’t seen 300 IMHO still good for a laugh or two (“This is Cake Town!” )

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Today it finally happened – after almost three years of abstinence I again live in a place that has a dishwasher, my flatmate Fabiano bought one that got delivered this morning, despite the fact that today is a public holiday in France. Given that the kitchen already was kind of full before, some major rearrangements of the kitchen furniture ensued, nothing that’s really fun, but totally worth it. So obviously I can’t complain about how today started, I got to sleep in and I’m so not going to miss doing the dishes…

The rest of the day will most likely see some serious catching up on my reading list and since I’m feeling saucy I’ll have a second go on the “upgrade my notebook’s hard drive” project, i.e. in case you don’t hear back from me in a while that went very wrong.

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Already almost a week since the last post, time sure flies these days, but at least I’m back home in Paris from a long weekend in home/Munich. After living in Paris for what will be three years in about two weeks and finally giving up my apartment in Munich two months ago, I really can’t say where I feel more at home.

After spending the better part of Friday in the Pangora’s Munich offices, it was yet again time for goodbyes@Pangora, this time Martin, head of the reporting & billing invited for farewell drinks, leaving only six more people who have been working for Pangora longer than I have. It will be interesting to see the rest of the fallout the Pangora-Mentasys merger brings. From there I went to have dinner with Bernhard and Stephanie and was delighted to see their son Noah (who was born three weeks ago) for the first time.

The rest weekend itself was quite nice – Munich lived up to its reputation of being more of a village than a big city, as I ran into a friend from Paris who moved to Munich three months ago by pure chance. Turns out that he’s the new neighbor of an old friend of mine… …what are the odds? (Usually I would have said “slim to none” but given that we’re talking about Munich: pretty good, apparently.)

Anyway – after dinner we went to see the Eurovision Song Contest which usually is an event that is just painful to watch, since the voting system is as bad a joke as most of the songs and (for lack of a better word) artists are. But I must admit that I was surprised to see that it can actually be fun, given you have the right crowd around you and enough alcohol handy.

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Just in case you’re wondering: I am of course aware that the design (or lack thereof) of my home page and also this blog is very non-web 2.0 – the lame excuse good reason for this is that it is hand made HTML, since I wanted to try out the HTML bundle of TextMate, which is my new favourite editor on the Mac. Making the pages prettier will be step two, bound to happen rsn…

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Yesterday’s brunch turned out to be much shorter for me than I had planned, I left early since I didn’t feel too great and slept most of the day, so it is only now that I get around to follow up on the first posting. Maik actually beat me to the chase and posted a comment

The other big event in France yesterday (next to the brunch) was the final round of the presidential elections here in France. As I guess most of you have heard not everybody was happy with the majority’s choice and so a group of Sarko’s biggest fans staged a reenactment of the French revolution at the Place de la Bastille, which is just around the corner from where I live. Since the French riot police CRS decided to also play it really became a quite remarkable show.

The one thing I have to hand to the French is that they have become a lot more political again, my colleagues discussed the whole SOS (Ségolène Or Sarko) thing for the last six months straight. It’s going to be interesting to see how well président Sarkozy lives up to his promises – after the occasional verbal rioting he did as minister of the interior I must admit I’m a little sceptical, but I guess we’ll just have to see what’s going to happen…

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…it finally happened. Not only did I start to work a little on what is supposed my virtual presence on the net, i.e. the pages you can find on www.gaensler.com, but I also set up the blog that I recently learned my web hoster was kind enough to add to the package I got from them.

So all that remains is that I actually put some (allegedly) interesting things here, and I’m planning to do so later on, starting sometime after I’m back from the brunch at Paola & Christian’s place.

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