Guten tag!

Greetings from germany!
Here I am, after 2 very long days of travel and an equally long (but much more enjoyable) day of academics. Amazing that I arrived here at the hotel yesterday at 5PM, jumped in the shower, changed and dashed off to the opening talk and reception. After spending only a few hours with some of these people, I feel like I have known some of them for years, and have made some good friends (aided, I'm sure, in my case by jet-lag induced delirium!). And how cool (in myvery geeky way) to met a group of people who are all as interested in the same things as I am (if not even moreso). I sincerely wish that it was a longer occasion since most of the group are leaving tomorrow after the final talk (I'm staying until SaturdayAM with only two others). But the cool thing about academia is that even though you don't see these friends very often, you will see them again eventually at another conference or some such event. Still, I'm sad that I'll 'lose' my friends so soon, though I'm quite excited about the second part of the trip.

Blogging and email are made more difficult here by the strange german keyboard, which has relocated just enough letters and punctuation marks to really screw up what tenuous typing skills I had managed to acquire over the last few years.

My paper isn't up until tomorrow (first thing). So far everyone had done a good job, and I've reallty enjoyed the discussions (though I really hit an intellectual wall in the afternoon--thanks to the 9hr time change!). I'm glad I'm first tomorrow though because even for those who had much less jet-lag, there was a level of fatigue that set in as the day wore on. In AM, hopefully everyone will be fresh and ready to go. I read over the paper again before dinner, and though I was horrified by a couple fatigue inuced stylistic infelicities (AKA typos), I think I raise some interesting points, and I'm looking forward to this first non-peer/colleague feedback on my project. There are some problems with the paper that I recognized after hearing one of the other discussions today (I confused the artist who produced the dust jacket design with the artist that did the frontispiece--had it backwards, which I need to correct) but that's easy enough to correct.

cross your fingers for me!