So I left on Nov 3 and got here on Nov 4, just as the polls were opening in the US. I had this notion that I’d go on cnn.com in Germany and hit refresh over and over again, then when the results were announced, Germans would flood the streets and and celebrate in a prominent public place and I would join them and hoot and screen and be proud. What actually happened is that I didn’t sleep on the plane, spending 24 hours awake, then crashed for 13 hours. When I woke up, I was in a hurry to get to work and completely forgot about the election until my co-intern Tao Ni offhandedly told me that Obama won. “Oh”, I said, groggily. No clue if there was a mass German celebration.

I’m doing an internship of sorts with Patrick Baudisch, who used to be my boss at Microsoft Research in Redmond. He’s now also a professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute / University of Potsdam, where I am joining him. The lab is pretty empty now, just Patrick, Tao, and I, and part of my duties will be to help set up the infrastructure for future students.

My first impression of Berlin is that it’s…sparse. I was expecting somewhere a lot more crowded, with packed sidewalks and subways and traffic jams. The funny thing is that the city is very dense, at least compared to North American cities, and there’s small stores everywhere. And there are a lot of people on the streets at all hours. I know this sounds kinda contradictory…maybe Berlin is more decentralized, or the sidewalks are wider, or Germans are quieter. The weather has been cloudy with zero sun, and occasional light drizzle. There’s public transit of all possible types (trains, above/under ground metro, streetcars, buses) which come frequently even late at night. They are very smooth, comfortable, roomy, clean, and quiet.

During the past month and a half or so I made a few trips and took pictures at (links to flickr) San Francisco, Monterey/Point Lobos, Seattle, and Boulder. Of these few hundred pictures, only one is in my opinion breathtaking:

Point Lobos, CA (Granite Point)

Pictures of Berlin to hopefully to follow.

That’s right, I’ve moved to exciting Redmond, Washington, where I’m doing another 3 month internship with Microsoft Research working with Patrick Baudisch.

Prior to that, I spent 2 weeks back in Oregon doing my taxes for the first time (US and Canadian). Ugh.

Prior to that, I got tired of traveling and spent a few day’s at Emma’s place in Switzerland doing practically nothing. Like watching TV and surfing the web. What does tired for traveling mean? How is this possible? Well I spent 4 months in India and 1 month in Europe by then.

Also, the internship I’m on was up in the air. Until I got the job. Then I had to wait over Memorial Day Weekend for a Microsoft “relocation specialist” to contact me. At which point I had the pleasure of saying “I’m in Geneva, Switzerland, and I’d like to fly home tomorrow”. And so it was.

So now I’m in Redmond, living the in the suburbs (!) and driving a car (!), a Pontiac G6.

Not really, but there are some surprising things about Switzerland. Like the fact that you can only do laundry at certain times, that apartments have to have matching doormats, and baby names have to come from an approved list.

Things I’ve done:

• Got an insider’s tour of the UN
• Stood at the bottom of a glacier
• Saw 30 waterfalls in a day, many over 1000 feet, some inside a mountain
• Eaten fondue
• Slept with 2 cats
• Watched Colbert Report for the first time in 5 months

The Alps is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to. The pictures don’t do it justice at all. Even with the top 3/4 of the mountains shrouded in clouds the valley I was in still had sheer cliffs on both sides 1000+ feet visible. There was a place in the valley where you could look around and see 5 waterfalls going down the canyon walls. The quaint german-looking houses and cows enhanced the scenery. I went 5 minutes off the cable car onto a side trail and it wasn’t touristy at all. Standing at the bottom of a glacier with tons of ice floating above me was both terrifying and exhilarating. There was a mountain stream running perpendicularly that came from meltwater from a higher-up glacier that made a tunnel under the first glacier. Amazing.

Thanks Emma!

• Visited a fountain museum. Can you believe one actually exists?
• Ate lots of french (cut) fries
• Got a haircut
• As you can see in the photos near the end, I hung out with a very sane, trustworthy looking guy.

Thanks Jan!

• People in Paris like parks.
• Paris is very beautiful
• It was rainy and cold in Barcelona while it was sunny and warm in Paris
• Gaudi is a genius
• So is Joan Miro
• I finally got to see the Mercury Fountain. It was really special.
• Paris has the best sorbet I’ve ever tasted. The raspberry flavor was the best.
• Thanks Pierre!

The airport in Coimbatore, India, is one of the best I’ve ever been to. It’s a small airport with no jetways or even buses to take you to and from the plane. You have to walk outside. And that’s the main reason why it’s amazing. It’s the one airport that I’ve actually felt was welcoming you upon arrival.

You get off the plane and step onto the tarmac. As you walk from the tarmac to the terminal building, you pass through a landscaped walkway. Here’s a photo of it, but it’s taken looking towards the tarmac. There’s a sign set into the grass that says “Welcome to Coimbatore”. The terminal building faces airside, and you walk under an awning through a door to go inside.

The upshot of this is that unlike every other airport I’ve been to, this one feels welcoming. It feels that the terminal is Coimbatore, that once you’ve walked through the terminal doors, you’re there. It feels like you’ve parked your car in a parking lot, and you’re walking across the parking lot, and entering a store. Contrast that to most other airports where you get off the airplane, shunted into a jetway (or piled onto a crowded bus), get to the terminal and have to navigate a series of corridors to get to the other side, where you get into a taxi or subway or other form of transport. At no point do you feel you’ve arrived.

How does Coimbatore Airport create this welcoming feeling? The most important part is the fact that you go outside. In general, you don’t really feel you’ve arrived anywhere until you go inside. And to go inside, you have to be outside first. The landscaped walk makes the short walk more pleasant, like you’re in a park.

And by the way, British Airways has the most comfortable seats, thanks to the fold-out headrest wings that let you lean your head to the side. Heathrow Terminal 5 is more like a mall than an airport. There’s a bunch of stores, and in between the stores, if you look hard enough, you’ll find the gates. It also doesn’t have water fountains (I guess because they want you to buy bottled water) which I think is criminal. On the other hand, Heathrow does has huge oversized couches for people to sleep on. Thank you, interior designer, for caring about people.

I ate lots of good food. Thanks Andrew! I will list the food I ate. For lunch the first day I had shrimp noodles in the most amazing mall food court ever: all the food looked delicious! Then we had dinner at a satay stand in the street. There were actually like 15 satay stands, all looking exactly alike except for the sign bearing their identifying number on this street with tables. We ate at satay stand number 9. Breakfast/lunch the next day: dim sum. Dinner: Hainan chicken rice. Breakfast/lunch: Hokkien pork soup. Snack: Pastrami sandwich. Dinner: Korean BBQ.

Also Singapore had nice fountains. Most were plain but nice, but there were a few exemplary ones that you’ll see in the photos.

We also went apartment-hunting (for Andrew, not for me). This was fun and interesting because it was un-touristy.

Singapore ice cream comes wrapped in white bread. Interesting texture.

The weird looking sculptures are from Har Paw Villa, a park built in the 30s by the guys who brought the world Tiger Balm. The sculptures illustrate stories from Chinese mythology. Very bizarre. A lot of photos are from their “10 Courts of Hell” attraction, which is a sort of Chinese version of Dante’s Inferno.

Oh and the alien looking guys dressed in orange with “Danger Keep Away” signs taped to their backs aren’t mutant zombies who have been tricked by the living into wearing warning signs. They are groundskeepers wielding weedwhackers. Like everyone else doing manual labor, they’re Indian.

So I get to the airport 2 hours early on Thursday and check in. The guy types the info from my paper ticket (they still exist!) into his computer and calmly tells me “Your flight has left already.”

This slowly sinks in. “What do you mean?” I ask, as if to stave off the realization of the mistake I had made. But I give in to logic and sigh. “Ohhhhhh.” I’m thinking, “I guess I’ll just have to pay the penalty to rebook the flight. I wonder if there’s seats? How could I have done this?” But then I realize the situation can’t be too bad as the guy is still typing stuff into his computer and hasn’t given me back my ticket.

“There’s a 500 rupee fee for changing the flight,” he tells me. I’m relieved! I have 500 rupees ($13 USD) in my pocket and gladly hand it over. He types more stuff into his computer and prints me a boarding pass and tells me something about getting a receipt over and such-and-such location which I don’t understand. Instead, I just ask him where to go next and he points to the escalator.

So I go up the escalator and through security and sit in the waiting area and listen to my iPod.

As I’m waiting in the security line, I mentally go through the process of blame. Of course, I blame myself, but in the field of human-computer interaction, we have this handy little saying that goes:

The user is always right.

And conveniently enough, I’m the user! So instead of blaming myself too much, I try to think of ways this could have been prevented. I think up this graphic that Expedia could have used:

Dimly, I hear this voice over the PA “Would Mr. Gare-ald Chu please see an Indian Airlines employee. Would Gare-ald Chu…” I get up and walk around and look for an Indian Airlines desk but there isn’t one so I wander around for a while and decide to ask the guy standing next to the entrances one of the airport’s two jetways. I tell him “I’m the person mentioned on the intercom.” He asks to see my boarding pass, which I give him. I think he was actually the same guy that was behind the check-in counter. He says “Since this was just a mistake, we’re going to give you the 500 rupees back”.

Now that’s customer service.

As for the flight itself, I can’t say that much about it since my eyes were shut in sleeplessness during most of the 4 hour long flight. But near the end I hear an announcement “Ladies and gentlemen, regulations require that we spray aerosol in the cabin. It is perfectly safe for humans.” On cue, a flight attendant walks briskly through the aisle his arm outstretched. It’s holding a can, and the can is spurting a mysterious scented liquid. Babies cough in its wake.