Köln: Day Four
Sep. 18th, 2023 10:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aI've continued to be somewhat low momentum, so this morning I decided to meander, to try and get to know the local neighborhood that I get lost in. I headed west and found, as so often seems to be the case, that the neighborhood deteriorated as it neared the train tracks. Then I crossed over, and soon was back in that ring of parks. Past them I found a business district and then looping back, across the main road from where my apartment is, I found another residential neighborhood, except where our residential neighborhood has commercial businesses in most of the ground floors, this one was pure residential. It seemed much nicer. It even had its own park, heavy with trees.
I returned home with a sandwich and after eating that was ready to head out again. This time, I had a goal: THE TIERGARTEN. And it was a GARTEN that really honestly had TIER.
It was in a park called the Stadtwald which was a few miles west. Which meant back to the bikes.
So I again took the opportunity to meander. I went back to that ring of parks and this time began to head counterclockwise (on bike). A few blocks on (and up another slight hill that was tough on the heavy Call a Bike), I passed by the university. It was less amazing than I'd hoped: pretty modern buildings overall, albeit with lots of open glades (and sports fields). Past it I swung west and biked through more neighborhoods. Past the university hospital, there were some nice suburban looking tree-filled neighborhoods, but then it was back to urban storefronts, which I ran along until I got to the Stadtwald.
The Stadtwald was totally worth visiting. It's the most foresty park that I've seen since I got here, with lots of tree-lined trails. The Tiergarten was fun too. They advertised having some hundreds of animals, but that almost entirely meant goats and geese. But the goats seemed nice and there was actually quite a variety of geese, a few of which were quite beautiful and didn't look entirely evil like most geese. There were also two highland cattle, which were one of the things I really wanted to see. They didn't get as close as I'd like, but were pretty cool.
So, trip to the foresty and animal-filled park totally successful.
Dinner was sushi at a local Vietnamese restaurant(!) that I'd spotted on my first trip out to my AirB&B. Then, it was the train into Hürth.
I'd fortunately spent part of my time at home this morning figuring out train tickets. I discovered that a weekly (_wochen_) pass between Köln and Hürth was cheaper than the six round trips I'm likely to take. Better, it takes the stress off of constantly having to buy tickets just in time and making sure I hit the right train. And, I also got my train ticket back to Frankfurt for Saturday, and it turns out it was half the price of last week's ticket when I got it in advance, there's just big price gouging if you get it same day (but that was the only reasonable thing to do after coming off of a trans-Atlantic plane on Friday.)
Anyway, the main event in Hürth:
Rebooting the Web of Trust (RWOT) started tonight. That's of course my reason for being here in Germany. Tonight was Poster Night, which is our current methodology for everyone to introduce their topics. It was done a bit different this year (that's often the case from workshop to workshop, until we eventually settle on something that we think really works).
This time around, Erica led off with our rules, making the Poster Night a much more coherent part of the overall workshop, and then we did a warm-up exercise where we gathered into groups of six and each talked about what brought us here and/or our paper and other issues. Afterward, everyone wandered around and read all the posters (mostly abstracts printed up from the papers).
It felt pretty successful to me because the warm-up exercise got the communication going and so the poster session effortlessly moved into conversation about the posters (well, hopefully, but even more likely it was conversation on topics of use to the conference).
It looks like we've got about two dozen people, which is our smallest in quite a while, but hopefully it can be an advantage and let us be more focused.
I just barely caught a train back to Köln, which is good because they're pretty irregular in the later evening, with a sequence of three trains around the top of the hour, and then a gap of 30 minutes at the bottom.
And I fortunately figured out where the switches are to turn on the lights in the hallway of the apartment building (spoiler: their everywhere, it's just the idea of having to turn on the hallway lights is totally alien to me), which is good because otherwise it literally would have been pitch-black.
Tomorrow, the real work begins, and I'm experimenting with a new role for myself of itinerant writer and editor during the event, giving all the groups a boost (rather than supporting as a participant).
But I still can't get my apartment cool even though the temperature dropped to the mid-70s today. It's a heat sink. Hopefully by the time I get to bed because last night I was up at 5am because I was hot.
I returned home with a sandwich and after eating that was ready to head out again. This time, I had a goal: THE TIERGARTEN. And it was a GARTEN that really honestly had TIER.
It was in a park called the Stadtwald which was a few miles west. Which meant back to the bikes.
So I again took the opportunity to meander. I went back to that ring of parks and this time began to head counterclockwise (on bike). A few blocks on (and up another slight hill that was tough on the heavy Call a Bike), I passed by the university. It was less amazing than I'd hoped: pretty modern buildings overall, albeit with lots of open glades (and sports fields). Past it I swung west and biked through more neighborhoods. Past the university hospital, there were some nice suburban looking tree-filled neighborhoods, but then it was back to urban storefronts, which I ran along until I got to the Stadtwald.
The Stadtwald was totally worth visiting. It's the most foresty park that I've seen since I got here, with lots of tree-lined trails. The Tiergarten was fun too. They advertised having some hundreds of animals, but that almost entirely meant goats and geese. But the goats seemed nice and there was actually quite a variety of geese, a few of which were quite beautiful and didn't look entirely evil like most geese. There were also two highland cattle, which were one of the things I really wanted to see. They didn't get as close as I'd like, but were pretty cool.
So, trip to the foresty and animal-filled park totally successful.
Dinner was sushi at a local Vietnamese restaurant(!) that I'd spotted on my first trip out to my AirB&B. Then, it was the train into Hürth.
I'd fortunately spent part of my time at home this morning figuring out train tickets. I discovered that a weekly (_wochen_) pass between Köln and Hürth was cheaper than the six round trips I'm likely to take. Better, it takes the stress off of constantly having to buy tickets just in time and making sure I hit the right train. And, I also got my train ticket back to Frankfurt for Saturday, and it turns out it was half the price of last week's ticket when I got it in advance, there's just big price gouging if you get it same day (but that was the only reasonable thing to do after coming off of a trans-Atlantic plane on Friday.)
Anyway, the main event in Hürth:
Rebooting the Web of Trust (RWOT) started tonight. That's of course my reason for being here in Germany. Tonight was Poster Night, which is our current methodology for everyone to introduce their topics. It was done a bit different this year (that's often the case from workshop to workshop, until we eventually settle on something that we think really works).
This time around, Erica led off with our rules, making the Poster Night a much more coherent part of the overall workshop, and then we did a warm-up exercise where we gathered into groups of six and each talked about what brought us here and/or our paper and other issues. Afterward, everyone wandered around and read all the posters (mostly abstracts printed up from the papers).
It felt pretty successful to me because the warm-up exercise got the communication going and so the poster session effortlessly moved into conversation about the posters (well, hopefully, but even more likely it was conversation on topics of use to the conference).
It looks like we've got about two dozen people, which is our smallest in quite a while, but hopefully it can be an advantage and let us be more focused.
I just barely caught a train back to Köln, which is good because they're pretty irregular in the later evening, with a sequence of three trains around the top of the hour, and then a gap of 30 minutes at the bottom.
And I fortunately figured out where the switches are to turn on the lights in the hallway of the apartment building (spoiler: their everywhere, it's just the idea of having to turn on the hallway lights is totally alien to me), which is good because otherwise it literally would have been pitch-black.
Tomorrow, the real work begins, and I'm experimenting with a new role for myself of itinerant writer and editor during the event, giving all the groups a boost (rather than supporting as a participant).
But I still can't get my apartment cool even though the temperature dropped to the mid-70s today. It's a heat sink. Hopefully by the time I get to bed because last night I was up at 5am because I was hot.