First Things First, or What?

The original idea behind this little blog of mine was to keep all of my friends posted during my American adventure from 2008 - 2010. However, a fact I haven't addressed too often here is that Chicago wasn't the first foreign place I have lived in, and today I would like to report a little bit on that. The reason for this is that earlier on today I got word from my former advisor, Dr. David Lennon, (who is a "supervisor" in British English, actually an Englishman, and anyways someone I look up to as a scientist and a person alike) that the work I was involved in finally got accepted for publication. By a funny coincidence, some of the people I later worked with in Berlin are co-authors of this paper as well. So, Chicago didn't mark my first stay in an anglophonic country, even though the accents from Chicago and Glasgow couldn't probably be any more different from each other ... the latter being by far the thickest I have encountered so far. (But in a sense the two cities share being rooted in working class culture.)
I am particularly fond of my Glaswegian experience, because it was there that for the first time I was treated like a real researcher. Ten years back the Anglo-American and the German educational systems were distinctly different from each other, as only more recently Germany and the rest of the EU introduced the three-tier Bachelor / Master / Doctor degrees; formerly the German undergraduate level ended with a Diploma, a Magister, or a Federal Exam, all being almost peers to a Master's degree, and also taking respecively more time. As a student of Chemistry at the TU Kaiserslautern, I was required to do three six-week research projects, one in each of the principal topics of Inorganic, Organic, and Physical Chemistry. I was pleased to learn that my alma mater had signed collaboration treaties with various other universities across Europe to facilitate the mutual exchange of students. (Foreign experience is a much-cherished value over here.) In the Sciences this is particularly easy, as it isn't so important where the lab is located that the student is working in; and the core of the deal was that Kaiserslautern students could substitute one of their three domestic research projects with the one abroad. There were two major benefits for me: I got to gain for the first time some international work experience, and it was handed to me on a silver platter: while it is usually a bureaucratic mess to temporarily leave one's home university to attend another one, this agreement was specifically designed to encourage just that. Oh, and there was even a little bit of money involved to cover my travel expenses. A triple Hooray to the "Erasmus program"!
As a result of this wonderful invention I could go to Glasgow from early April to mid July 2002. As I have hinted above, people from where I completed my doctorate were also involved in the Glasgow project - it so happened that the day I introduced myself to David Lennon in his office, Hajo Freund from Berlin called him to talk about the results ... and since they were confidential, I, as the new guy, actually had to leave the room for the time of their conversation. Still, I added my little share to the progress, and at the end of the day I even earned the second spot on the authors' list. (The person in front of me is Alastair, Scottish for Alexander.) And due to the longer duration of this assignment I got involved more in the science than I could have ever been in the other two undergraduate projects in Germany, which gave me much satisfaction. (Sadly, the other two didn't give me much satisfaction at all, for different reasons.)
However, the highlight of this time clearly was a meeting of all research groups from Scotland that work in the field of heterogeneous catalysis. This meeting has a tradition and takes place every year in May, in a youth-hostel style cabin on the shores of Lake Tay in the Southern Highlands. I retrieved a representative photograph from the depths of the Internet to share with you the beauty of the place. The meeting consumed four days, of which only half were dedicated to science, and the other half to outdoor activities. So it came to pass that I engaged in the Scottish national sport called hillwalking, which is a euphemism for serious uphill hiking in the Highlands. My legs felt like jelly, but I did make it all the way to the peak of the hill, where I saw patches of snow as big as 10x10 m^2 even in late spring. I am a fan of eating, so to speak, but the little snack we had there was especially delicious! - The next day my legs were incredibly sore, but I went on a little bike ride with another student participant, and at night I managed to win the ping-pong tournament. (In the final game I beat David, my boss.) But I guess the fact that we had a ping-pong table in our garage when I was a kid probably gave me a head start ...
By the way, there are two reasons why I had to download someone else's picture to illustrate Lake Tay. Digital cameras were the exception rather than the rule, and hence way beyond my tiny student's budget. And I also relied on my then-girlfriend, a hobby photographer, to take the pictures for me when she came to visit me for two weeks; but we broke up shortly after my return to Germany, so all the pictures stayed with her. As sad as I was at the time, being single granted me the freedom to fully dedicate myself to science ever since. You might say, that ever since this break-up I have been in league, but not in bed, with science ...