USA!

I spent most of October in North Carolina, the first week was at a conference on Water and Health at the nation's oldest public university, followed by a speedy trip to Florida and Hogsmede, then some more time in NC.

After answering some questionable questions about my time in Kenya (it is on the other side of the continent from the ebola...), I was allowed through customs and was whisked off to what was formerly the best pizza joint in the city by my parents where we met some friends. The pizza took forever and was not that great, but they have one of the best beer-lists of any restaurant in the city.

Then we walked across the street to see my favorite bluegrass band, Chatham County Line, perform at the Neighborhood Theater. What a great way to say hello to NC after being away for ten months!

I caught a train to Raleigh where I presented and had a poster (about business model innovation and reaching scale in the water and/or sanitation sector) at the conference. There was a good mix of researchers, practitioners and funders in attendance and it seems as if what I am studying is interesting for them.

I probably shouldn't be looking at the screen, but the spotlight gave the monitor in front of me a glare. 

My parents drove up and cooked a southern meal for all of my colleagues. They survived the BBQ, sweet potatoes, green beans, coleslaw, and pecan pie to pose for this photo:

We were rolling deep at this conference!

Pops somehow figured that the best day to escape the Muggle world was a Tuesday, so I spent the weekend in Raleigh, got my one and only pumpkin latte of the trip, and caught the Sunday afternoon train home so that dad and I could drive down to Florida to visit Harry Potter World! That gets a whole photo post of its own.

Tasty! My turkey, avo, bacon, cheddar, mustardish sauce croissant was even better - Helios rarely steers me wrong.

Upon returning to NC, Ma and I headed up to see G-ma, who treated us to lunch in the fancy dining room (like where you need reservations) at the old folks' home. We then continued on to Raleigh where we horsed around with one of my Aunties and her horse, Jack.

Such a good teacher! Mom didn't want to ride, but soon had much better steering capabilities than me!
I got Jack to walk in a figure eight and over a bridge (with a stop in the middle).

After church (and the brunch that followed) on Sunday, we drove back to the western part of the state for a week of sports!

I caught this guy. I have apparently not learned how to hold a fish in a photo, guess I just need to catch some more!
(Also pretty unhappy with how that nail polish color turned out.)

Brisket, corn bread, cheese grits and butter green beans from 12 Bones, when Barack and Michelle eat when they are in Asheville. 

We went to the Charlotte Hornets opener. Dad started taking me to basketball games when I was a little kid, like couldn't go into the bathroom on her own little. I remember taking a notepad to one game and keeping a tally of the score. So it was really neat to see them come back to town (Back story: long ago the Hornets moved to Louisiana, Charlotte got a new team called the Bobcats, Bob sold the team to Michael Jordan, the Hornets (now of New Orleans) changed their name to the Pelicans, fans lobbied to bring the hornets name (and purple and teal branding) back to CLT). They weren't doing so hot, and in the third quarter were down by over 20, but they rallied and hit a buzzer beater, sending the game into overtime.... So now my mom thinks basketball is fixed.

Cool honeycomb court. 

The martini glass bottle opener new building downtown lit up purple and teal for the win!

The following evening the Panthers lost to the Saints (American football). We tailgated with some neighbors down town. The new baseball stadium was open for concessions and beer. It seems pretty cool, hopefully I'll be in town when the Knights are playing some time.

U-S-A!

The big news around the stadium is these new giant screens. Maybe that is what was causing the QB to throw so darn high!

Halloween involved lunch at one of my favorite diners, a visit to the house I grew up in (my old bedroom is now a sizable closet), and heckling trick-or-treaters with some family friends.

Yum! Small block southern style with a side of fried okra!

This is (the garage of) where we used to live. We moved out 15 years ago and the garage is still the same.
We painted it like this when it became the kid's hangout. The dartboard was still on the wall! The house had been greatly expanded and is back on the market.

I thought of it too late, but it would have been cool to recreate this photo while we were there, but I didn't have any pumpkins.

No Halloween is complete without eyeball stew.

A few more days of packing, eating and hanging out with the perma-pup and it was time for:

My goodbye America breakfast. (Belgian waffle, two scrambled eggs with ketchup and coffee)

My goodbye America lunch. (mac'n'cheese, squash, deviled egg, tomato soup and a biscuit)

Thanks USA! That was a crazy on the go few weeks. Hopefully, next time I will have some more relaxation time built in. I'll be back for a really quick trip at Christmas!

Hogsmeade

During my recent visit to the US, I took a quick side trip down to Florida and somehow wound up back in Europe (all I know is that we traveled through the 1950s). It was magical. There was snow on the roofs, even though it was 86°F. I knew, generally, that Florida was warm, but didn't check the weather before we left.

First off, BIG THANKS to pops for being a sport and driving all the way while listening to an HP audio book.

The vintage-style hotel we stayed in was part of the resort and was really cool. Multiple pools, a lazy river, a gym, a shuttle bus we never had to wait for long, discounts at Margaritaville and most importantly the privilege of entering the park an hour early. (Only problem is that the walls are a little thin - I sneezed and the neighbor said, "Bless you!")

First stop: the goblin run bank! These guys are animatronic and move (someone I showed this photo to thought that they were real people in costume). This was also the first stop of almost everyone else who was allowed into the park at 7AM.

The goblin robots aren't so great at posing.

Such detail! This was a house-elf dealer storefront (wasn't actually a store). 

Pretending to go into Order HQ.

After exploring Diagon Alley a bit, we had some time to kill before the train to Hogsmeade departed, so we rode the Transformers ride - I'm pretty sure I saved the world during it. The Shrek 4D experience was okay, but the room they have you wait in was pretty entertaining.

If they have magic, why do they need all that coal? It seemed like the line for the Hogwarts express was the longest/slowest one we waited in all day. 

Sipping on some butterbeer (very vanilla-y) with an early lunch at the Three Broomsticks .
There is no way I could have drunk a full serving of this.

Such a dramatic looking school.

A pensive for your thoughts.

After riding the rides and checking out the shops in Hogsmeade, we took a lap around the rest of the park. I really liked the "The Hulk" ride, so many twists, accelerations, loops, and just upside downs! And pretty much no line! Then it was back to Diagon Alley for dinner and shopping; we had hoped to ride the Gringotts ride again, but there was something wrong... maybe they realized what had escaped from it earlier...

Beard bags for sale!

This was not on the menu, but my peanut butter-strawberry ice cream was delish!

Captured the dragon breathing fire on digital film!

I thought this shirt from the Magical Menagerie was perfect for my lil'sis, but dad said no :(

Overall, the trip was great! I can imagine going in the summer! It was hot and (the HP parts) were kind of crowded as it was. Since traffic was lower, we had time to look at other parts of the parks and take an afternoon nap a break to watch Champions League.

I prefer the old-school roller coasters to the ones where you wear 3-D glasses and are surrounded by screens as you are moving.

It was a really neat experience- walking around a few blocks that have been fairly carefully curated to be a world that only exists in books or on the screen. I made my coffee this morning in my souvenir beer mug from the Hog's Head and have my a quddich club pennant hanging on my wall. They had a lot of cool merchandise, but nothing as awesome as the Ravenclaw quiddich hoodies a friend and I made in high school (I do not have a digital image, but will scan it once I am home again for Christmas).

Luzern, Switzerland

I was hoping for some fanfare for
 completing all the levels, but it
just went back to the skills screen :(

First and slightly unrelated, I finished Duolingo's German program. Sounds like the perfect time to spend three and a half weeks not using any German (I head to the States on Friday)! Time to switch to French or Spanish before Swedish gets through beta.

I had been to Luzern/Lucerne thrice before. Once with my mom (where she was in awe of how expensive french fries were), once for the swiss national championship, and most recently just to the train station to get picked up to go to Lecco, but neither time was really about seeing the city. This trip was for my department's annual excursion. 

We took the train from Zürich and then a bus to the other office building of our research institute, which is outside of Luzern. Situated on the lake shore, it is where all of the fish researchers do their work. The office is at least a 10 minute walk from the nearest bus stop and the first floor smells like you would expect it to with dozens of aquariums around, but they have a really nice view and a cup of coffee costs less than half of what it does in our restaurant. The social scientists that I work with were pretty excited to see a "lab"! 

The warm fish room. They look into the rapid speciation occurring in some of
Africa's lakes from both ecosystem and genetic perspectives.

Fish boxes with a view (an a nice vineyard to the left). These are for studying
how certain fish modify their environment and how that affects their progeny. 

We then took a boat across the lake, back to the city center where our scavenger hunt began. We split up into four teams and followed different trails of clues. I was not looking forward to it, but it ended up being pretty neat. It took us through parts of the city that a tourist usually wouldn't see.

Hill top conservatory with real musicians...

and a great view.

Sad lion commemorating Swiss mercenaries who died while protecting Louis XVI during the French revolution.

Mark Twain was quite impressed with the monument as were the hundreds of tourists trying to take selfies with it. 

It wasn't totally un-touristy, concluding with a trip across the Chapel Bridge.

My team was the Siegergruppe, not that it was a competition or anything. The day around town was followed by an apero at the department leader's house and dinner at a nice restaurant (still thinking about that chocolate mousse) that was decorated with colorful circles strewn with googly-eyes.

Summer

I was gone for ultimate or work quite a bit over the summer. Between practices, tournaments, workshops and conferences I was at home for something like four weekends in four months, which provided content for the travel blog, but it is  really strange now to have some free time. I don't really know what to do (I spent this weekend in bed and on the porch with a nasty cold).

I did try to cultivate some hobbies while I was in Zürich. I had two such endeavors over the summer. A balcony tomato vine and my first continental foray into homebrew. While neither turn out perfect, the second way much closer to be considered a success.

I grew up in the garden. I am pretty sure I got into college because I wrote about playing in the compost pile. Growing a potted tomato vine on my balcony couldn't be that difficult, could it? I got three slightly larger than cherry-tomato sized tomatoes from my vine, but at one point I didn't think I would get any. By the time the last tomato was close enough to ripe to pick, there were no leaves left on the vine.

I guess I didn't realize the importance of tomato stakes.
(this was after I untangled it from the rosemary bush) 

So, I built my own, with special levels to accommodate the
existing vine branches. The poor vine had been through enough!

But soon the leaves yellowed and dropped:

A call to my dad diagnosed it with "the blight"
Plucking the bad leaves did not stem the spread.

Not all hope was lost, they continued to ripen:

48 hours difference.

In the end, they were eaten unceremoniously as a trio, with just a little salt and pepper. An afterthought, as I was rushing out the door to catch my flight to Stockholm.

Homebrewing was slightly more successful. It ate up a lot of refrigerator space and had my neighbors ask me to keep the noise down (bottling took much longer than expected), but it was fun + science-ish and now I have just over two Kiste-s of trinkbar beer (a Kiste is a plastic crate that Germans buy beer in, which makes it easier to transport and take back to the store to get your deposit back).

  

Part of the process. Yes that is pantyhose over a strainer.

Measuring the specific gravity (inverse of the density)

All set up to ferment in my room. Quickly moved
to the basement due to noise and temperature.

To keep the temperature down I filled discs with water, which was
pulled up into the towel and due to physics (chemistry?) lowered
the internal temperature by a few degrees Celsius.
Thanks Internet for the idea!

I waited some weeks, monitoring the specific gravity to see when fermentation changed, then bottled, put the bottles in the fridge and waited four more weeks and voila:

Pröschtli!

It is fine to drink and actually pretty tasty, just a little strange, because it isn't filtered, so there is some yeast in the bottles. It is also a little, ummm, unevenly carbonated, so it is best to open a new bottle over the sink :) My bottle caps are lime green - still working on a label. Stop by and test it out yourself!

Stockholm

I just got back from nine days in Stockholm. The first bit was World Water Week, which is the "leading annual global event for concretely addressing the planet’s water issues and related concerns of international development." This year the theme was Water and Energy and there were over two thousand participants, including folks from NGOs, various UN branches, research institutions, multinational corporations, national aid agencies, etc. The weekend was spent with friends from when I had lived there.

World Water Week is intense. Interesting sounding sessions and side events from 9 AM - 6:30 PM, with networking meetings sprinkled throughout, plus social events in the evenings. It is a big enough deal in Stockholm that one of the princesses and the king even made very short appearances (at dinners that I did not attend).  My adviser was part of a panel on business potential of resource recovery in sanitation systems and some other colleagues held a session on Fecal Sludge Management.

Our booth was pretty popular because there were games and prizes,
 including Fecal Sludge Truck card game. Fun for the whole family!

A classmate from my masters course was also there! This was taken at the
Stockholm City hall. The upstairs portion has a magnificent mosaic, which
recounts some of Sweden's history, with mostly golden tiles for quite an effect.

That is ten, count 'em 1-0, men on stage for a panel about how to create the
monitoring system for the upcoming Sustainable Development goals.

My colleagues and I rolling deep at a session with the theme "Water as a Human Right"

I didn't spend much time outside of the conference venue during the day, but I think the conference was worth it. Basically everyone in the water world is there and fairly accessible, so it is easy to get meetings, cement collaborations, and get a sense of where things are flowing. It was even easier to meet with a Swiss professor, who teaches at the same university as my adviser, in Stockholm than in Switzerland because they both travel so often.

People are starting to put a price on water, under the veil of sustainable development, in two ways: selling water futures on commodity markets and selling water benefit certificates (like carbon trading, but with water). I am not sold on either idea just yet, as they seem to be up the green, or in this case blue, -washing alley.

After I got roped into an additional, but beneficial Saturday meeting, I was able to relax sthlm style. This meant joining old friends for homemade dumplings and a rock concert at a bar where I felt old, then waking at a decent hour Sunday to hit the forest to forage for mushrooms. It took three patches of forest before we found any. I was not much help, as I could only identify two safe types (and the species we eventually found wasn't one of them). After picking our fill, we stopped for a late salmon and dill potatoes lunch before heading home to prepare the mushrooms for drying:

Counterclockwise from top right: Fika! Homemade cinnamon bun and coffee for fuel on our search; Frida in the forest; splitting the mushrooms to look for spider eggs; the haul; the dryer filled with mushrooms (didn't smell half as bad as I was promised it would)

Upon my departure Monday morning, I was given a bag of the dried mushrooms, which will make a nice Autumn meal.

On Monday I had a meeting with my thesis adviser about working together on a paper. Some of my work is still hanging around, albeit next to the trashcan...