snoflakes everywhere

I like Basel, still - it’s amazing! I like the little town, the people, the Rhine, the Institute, my flat and flatmates and the sunshine. Since February, I was so busy just living and working that I quickly have to summarize: After the workshop in Bled I moved to my new place [big 2 level flat, 3 flatmates, 100m to the Rhine] and we had the flat warming party a week later. I actually started learning some techniques in the lab and all of a sudden was involved working with living things! While learning to optimize a Support Vector Machine, I differentiated embryonic stem cells to neurons (see Fig. 1) - it’s so easy when you have the right people to ask for advice! After Easter, the weeks passed very fast during a very rainy april (doing lab work just takes forever, man!) and at the beginning of may my parents picked me up on their way south to tuscany - our usual spring trip since I’m 14 years old! We had not been there for the past 2 years because of Australia and Vienna and so it really felt like being back to a balanced state after this chaotic time! I stayed til mother’s day and took the train from Florence back to Basel but stopped one day/night in Milan to visit Giulia (my flatmate from Australia). Milan really is a styler city, beautiful buildings, beautiful people, however - some water, eg. a Rhine, is missing *g*. Back to Basel I discoved that there is still a talk to prepare and a fellowship application to write, however, there was the PhD selection again - crowds of people at the institute!… Friends from Berlin and London came visiting for my birthday and the weekend, Simon finally left Bielefeld, moved to Freiburg and visited as well. There was a big joined B-Day party with Fabio and after one week of going out every day all the sleep I accumulated in tuscany was compensated again…

Anyway, pictures of the outlines things here.

No worries, I’m still in Basel but moved couple hundred meters down the street to Erasmusplatz - I’m still in the painting phase - no furniture yet *g*.

2 weeks ago there was the 23th Winterseminar of the Institute for Theoretical Chemistry in Bled, Slovenia - and the first time for me to join the Bioinfo Crowd around RNAfold from Vienna and Leipzig. Since I didn’t know at all how to find the little Slovenian village and was the only one coming from Basel, I decided to fly to Vienna and join the TBI going by car. In the one day I stayed in Vienna I could catch up with friends, breakfast at Karlsplatz with my Salsa partner, coffee with my old flatmate, dinner with Andrea and friends and party at Cafe Leopold until morning with my Vienna-Late-Night-Swim-Mate, breakfast on sunday morning with a friend from Australia/Vienna and off we went to Bled…

In addition to the people from the workshop in autumn there was also the LocaRNA team from Freiburg and people from Danmark and Hamburg! The little town just 30km beyond the austrian border is located right on a lake on which there is an island with a little church and a castle nearby. Since the talks were always scheduled from 4pm til late at night there was enough time to explore the surrounding and enjoy the sun. On thursday the presentations were part of the biomathematics afternoon at the University of Ljubljana, so we spend a day and an extended night in the very beautiful slovenian capital which we agreed on feels like a mixture of Venice, Leipzig and Vienna and much more - it reminded us all of something…

On the last day in Bled the usual geocaching team from Leipzig left the hotel with a GPS to hunt a treasure ‘near by’ - 300m before reaching the destination coordintes we faced a huge scarp hopeless withouth any climbing equpiment. So, it took us the 20km walk to finally get to the hint and the hidden box… anyway, it was a nice way to explore the slovenian countryside as well!

On my way back from Vienna to Basel I stopped in Zurich to visit a fellow student from Bielefeld who is now doing her PhD just next door - see you again soon, Nicole ! …and hope to see all of you RNA-friends in Basel some day!

pICtuRes HerE

Ok, let’s see what wikipedia says about Basler Fasnacht:
The Carnival of Basel (German: Basler Fasnacht) is the biggest carnival in Switzerland and takes place annually between February and March in Basel. It has recently been listed as one of the top fifty local festivities in Europe. The Basler Fasnacht starts on the Monday after Ash Wednesday at precisely 4:00am with the so-called Morgestraich. The carnival lasts for exactly 72 hours and therefore ends on Thursday morning at 4:00am. During this time the old town of Basel is ruled by the Fasnächtler (the participants), where they run loose in the streets and restaurants. In 2004 over 480 units were registered with the Fasnachts-Comité: 141 Cliques, organisations and groups, 141 floats and coaches, 61 Gugge music groups, 86 pipe and drums groups, and 55 individual masks and small groups. In total, there were more than 12,000 Fasnächtler who took part in organised groups.

Sunday: I hang out along the Rhine in the sun until picking up Tobi from the train station - we know each other originally from a dive trip in Australia and since he’s from Freiburg we finally met in Europe now to celebratre Basler Fasnacht together! …but first we jumped on a train again to view the huge traditional fire which is carried through a small village close to Basel, prior to the ‘Morgenstraich’ … Back in Basel, my flatmate, Tobi and I prepared cannelloni and Aude, Jakob and Steffen joined with wine. Around 12 we went out, first to the rest of a punk concert just around the corner and later to a bar in Grossbasel. Eventuelly we found ourselves on the street with thousands of other people in-front of the enlightened city hall - it was very calm though. At precisely 4am the big clock rose, with the last gong all the lights went off and at the very same moment drums and flutes started to echo in the city and the cliques came along with colorful lights. This went on and on and after 2 hrs we met our friends again in a pub to have ‘Mehlsuppe’ and went to bed at 7am. I don’t know when the drumming stopped but this morning they were rocking already when we woke up. The whole day there was a huge parade going around the city and since I live so central, they all pass my window…without a break - not even at night *g* - 72 hrs from now on.. This is how it sounds like when I’m in my room:

Sound of Fasnacht.avi

… I don’t hear the club downstairs anymore *g*. It’s a funny place, Switzerland - they have the chaos, but organized!

See PiCs here

Read a lot, learned a lot, been to the Lab, had lots of ideas and meanwhile enjoyed being (Auslaenderausweis) B-Basler - one month in Basel and at the FMI. I like it !!! Special and happy occasions deserve a special “Histone-cake”…

see more PiCTurEs of the last month

…on Friday afternoon Giulia, my lovely Italian flatmate from Australia, arrived in Basel! We had not seen each other since I left Brisbane last January and so there was a biiiig Italian hug-session on Claraplatz! We spend the time simply walking around Basel, chatting - and once in a while we ran into a funny parade of a bird, a tree and a lion which has something to do with the upcoming event of Basler Fasnacht - misterious… In the evening of course we had risotto again, like in Australia and went to a Salsa Party with 2 other friends. Today, I already had to take her to the train station again - but this time it’s not sad because Milan and Basel are only 4 hrs apart!

piCTuRes HeRe

Last Saturday: Due to my late arrival in Germany my clothes barely dried when I had to pack again = my parents offered to take me to Basel so I took everything the car cold possibly fit, including my beautiful green austrian bike - prepared for the new adventure. I didn’t expect it to be that adventurous in the beginning when it turned out that the only flat mate who could have let me into the apartment was skiing for the day and did not have sufficient power supply for a phone call *g*. I ‘downloaded’ all my stuff to my new temporary place to stay the next morning and found out soon that I’m living in Basel’s red light district = but you barely notice the gay bar downstairs… When my parents left, first thing I did was to look myself out of the appartment, so I spend the rest of the evening with two friends from the selection learning what to expect during the first days at the FMI and that every bike in Basel is supposed to have in case you’re forcing a tram to drive in a bank or something…

Monday Morning: I classified this bike accident thing as very likely to happen, so first thing I did was buying one of these stickers. At the FMI, I got a batch and a huge stack of forms and regulations to read and fill out. Meanwhile I managed to work around most of these papers, I opened a bank account, got a mobile number and learned a heap of new epigenetic stuff, got a lab intro and practiced to understand Swiss German!
On friday I’ll already have my first visitor…

In the morning we went to Soho to ask for tickets for a NYE party in a record shop, however our favourite was sold out already and so we bought a Time Out Magazine, sat in a gay-english-breakfast place and checked out alternatives. Luckily the second best party according to our ’scene guide’ worked out: Cargo Bar (I trusted the name because there is another one in Basel). So, we were all sorted and prepared some dinner for us and 2 more friends arriving in London around 10pm that day. We toasted to new year in germany which was 1hr ahead and took off to see the fireworks at GMT along the River Thames. However, we didn’t get that far: due to a sudden appearance of millions of people in the underground the respective stop was simply shut down and we had to get off another station - within a huge crowd we just heard the fireworks behind some buildings. That was it. Anyway, we tried to make our way to the club walking since all the tube stations around had huuuuge ques…we passed some pretty sights on the way, e.g. St Pauls and reached our destination in east end 2 hrs later *g*. However, you can’t complain about London nightlife, the club was exactly what the Time Out told us, good music, nice atmosphere, great party! Nevertheless, we decided to celebrate in a more quite place next year to actually see the fireworks without any stress…

On the first of January, Guido’s flatmates prepared an original British breakfast for us, which we finally managed to eat around 3 and went for a walk around regents park and into the city, took a ride on the London Eye and came home early to sleep again since my flight was early next day. I don’t want to complain about London public transport again but I missed my plane because of trains just not going and finally landed in Berlin instead of Leipzig 10 hrs later than I had planned. Well, the trip to London was still worth it - I saw a good friend again and I’m now even more looking forward to move to a little city like Basel appreciating the clear arrangement and small distances - 3 days to go!

pHotoS hERE

I arrived in London around 7 tonight and since Guido arrived from Germany on another airport we met in the city to have dinner in a little Italian restaurant. Toasting to our reunion I thought of last New Year’s Eve in Sydney - we both arrived the 30th from different destinations: Bali and New Zealand - it seems very long ago because so many things happened last year… So another reason to celebrate this NYE properly!

Working between Christmas and New Year is not the most enjoyable thing to do, however it’s nice and efficient when the rest of the office is empty - with Bach’s Chello Sonata in the background, Tanja and me used the time at the Biocenter very well, worked until late at night and at least prepared some figures etc. Around 1am I met my old roomie again for a good-bye-drink and slept some hours before going to the institute again. Thanks Tanja for the very nice breakfast, taking me to the airport bus and everything!

I’m looking forward to meet Guido in London again and continue our just starting tradition of celebrating a glorious New Years Eve which started last year in Sydney…