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Home is where the heart is, or so the saying goes. It always takes time to feel home at a new place, but we are slowly feeling at home here in San Jose. Part of that feeling is that our flat starts to feel like a real home, with more furniture, more books, more things that make us feel home. Here's a selection of some pics I took from our new home (pics from the inside soon). It's a small but bright, natural and well located apartment in a four apartment house. In the meanwhile, we got so used to the occasional noise from an airplane that we hardly hear it anymore. We're really happy with the current situation and are looking forward to a warm summer (although it's hardly ever cold in this area).

The front (ours is the bottom left):

The side:

The back with the garden:

The patio in the back:

The entrance and the kitchen:

And just in case you live behind the moon:

Other than that, there's not much news. Two days ago, I was invited to Google by someone who bought a painting almost two years ago, and he is trying to schedule me to give a talk at Google. Of course, it would be quite an exciting opportunity to talk about the paintings projects in front of such an audience, so I hope this is going to happen.

I'm flying to Switzerland tomorrow and I'm looking forward to meet friends and family, and to feel some of the excitment about the Euro 2008. However, it is mostly a "business trip", because the reason why I'm going back is an interview with the scientific board of Society in Science, a program that offers fellowships to scientists as an opportunity of up to five years freedom in research with the aim to find novel ways of exploring the societal relevance of their scientific work. Fingers crossed.

Ok, let's stop the day counting. Completely lost track (probably somewhere around 25 or so).

So, we've really settled down. I started working at Stanford, Rahel at MBARI, and so far, we enjoy our jobs a lot. I can't speak for Rahel, of course, but from what she says the MBARI is a great place to work (a little misty at times, however - that's the price you have to pay for having an office right at the beach). Stanford's been great so far. Readers of this blog know that the only thing I didn't like was the cubicle without daylight. I have asked for an alternative, and now, not only do I have a window in my office, but I've got an office for myself! Quite an upgrade.

The apartment we have is quite cute, but it needs some work, and I think we're gonna paint most of the rooms soon. We've had bad luck with IKEA (I always have), and the sofa was broken when it arrived. We're now waiting for an exchange.

The best thing about this place, anyways, are our neighbors. We had a BBQ yesterday (it was a public holiday here in the US) and we had two Swiss visitors from Fribourg, friend's of Nicholas, one of our neighbors. After speaking french with them all evening (Nicholas is a french teacher), he played some Chopin on his Steinway Grand Piano. I wish that every European who I ever heard say that the Americans had less culture than Europeans (unfortunately, that prejudice still exists) had been with us yesterday. Nicholas isn't the only amazing neighbor we have, but let us not bore you with neighborhood stories - we hope you will get to know them personally sooner or later anyways.

Talking about prejudices - here's one I personally had to let go quite quickly: that American beer is bad. It might sound hard to believe, but the beers here are better than almost any beer I had ever had in Europe. My favorite here is a beer that goes by the name of "fat tire". The label says that the beer is named in honor of Jeff's mountain bike trip from brewery to brewery through Europe (Jeff is probably the owner of the company). And on top of that, the brewery is wind powered. You gotta love it.

In good Swiss tradition, let me end this entry with a complaint (talking about prejudice!). Living in San Jose means living next to the airport, no matter in which neighborhood you live. It can get quite loud sometimes, but we already (sort of) got used to it. Given the great things about this place, that's really just a minor issue.

What else? I am going to Berlin for an interview soon - I will also spend a couple of days in Zurich (June 7 -12). Hope to catch up with some of you!

I completely lost track of how many days have passed since we arrived. I take that as a sign that we have arrived mentally, too. This is - again - just a short update on how things are going:

-We bought a car (a 2001 Honda Civic with a great mpg) three days ago.
-As I am writing this, Rahel is on her first field trip on one of those boats with the deep sea robots that are collecting stuff from the bottom of the ocean. I'm sure she'll write about it soon.
-A record breaking heatwave is predicted to start today. Temperatures should go as high as 100 Fahrenheit (i.e. about 37 Celsius).
-The Bedsofa has arrived and we are now officially accepting applications from prospective visitors ;-)

I need to get a social security number today and I am expecting to stand in line for an entire day, so I'd better get going.

PS There seems to be a problem with commenting. I'll try to fix this as soon as possible. Email always works!

Still unlucky with cars. We switched to a long term rental car (for about a month), and our frustration level is getting into areas where we are considering buying a new car. So far, all used car sales people were trying to sell us accident vehicles or otherwise crippled cars. It's not often that people insult your intelligence on such a low level, but these guys made it happen repeatedly.

I had my first day at Stanford. I quite enjoyed it, apart from the fact that I am supposed to work in a cubicule without daylight. I am now looking for a nice place on the campus where I can work and where I can in fact enjoy the spectacularly beautiful scenery of Stanford campus. I hope I'll get a window upgrade soon.

I have briefly considered using public transportation to get to work, but after waiting for about 40 minutes for a bus (on campus at 6 in the evening which I would consider rush hour) that would take me to CalTrain that would take me to San Jose where I would have to take another bus, that idea died a sudden and painless death. Rest in peace.

What else? We bought a sofa bed on which we hope to see many vistors in the coming months. It's extremely comfortable and has enough space for two.

We've got an apartment! And what a charming place - pictures as soon as we moved in (this coming weekend). It's one of those places that you never learn about on the web or in newspapers, but only through your friend's friend. In our case, we heard about it through a friend (and future neighbour) of someone we stayed with last february (see an earlier post on this blog about couchsurfing.com) in San Jose.

We think that's not too bad for day 3! We still don't have cars but we're optimistic that we'll be lucky tomorrow.

Our address from May the 12th on will be:

755 N 2nd Street, Apt. 1
San Jose, CA 95112
United States

Check out the map.

Arrived in California. It's 7 am Saturday morning but of course, we're wide awake thanks to the jetlag. We now need:

an apartment
two cars
US mobile phone numbers
a US bank account
a shaver

Let's see how far we can get in one day. I'm confident at least about the shaver.

(Update: at 3pm: we've got the shaver, a phone number, two bank accounts with credit cards, looked at an apartment and didn't like it. Oh, and a parking fine.)

Take off May 2nd 2008.

Funny, almost exactly a year ago we took off (on April 30th 2007) to another adventure. This one, however, is gonna last a little longer.

This is probably the last blog entry written from Switzerland.

Uf widerluege, au revoir, a rivederci, a revair!

Overdue. Looooong overdue. But because of time issues (with a reason, see below), I will keep myself short.

We're back in Switzerland since almost two months. The rest of the trip was great too - we had a fantastic time in and around Auckland and then went up to Northland for some beach, snorkeling & diving fun. In Auckland, we stayed with Esther & Dominik who were so kind to share their flat with us for a couple of days. Those were fantastic days, and we will never forget having eaten one of the best Röstis in NZ! After a very relaxing flight to San Francisco (Air NewZealand still beats them all), we first spent some time with Lee & Etienne & Lionel (just two days old at that time), and then later moved south to our future homebase, San Jose CA. There, we met (in vivo) with a couple of people who we met (in silico) on couchsurf.com. We took the time in San Jose to check out some neighbourhoods and we now know where to look for flats.

In the meanwhile, Rahel also got her funding from the Swiss Science Foundation, and after some initial confusion around the whole visa process, we finally have an appointment (next Monday the 14th) at the US embassy in Bern. If everything runs smoothly from now on, we should be in California in about 3 weeks (which means we're busy organizing everything). Looking at the weatherforecast for San Jose for the next few days (29 C, 29 C, 29 C, 30 C) makes me think we made the right decision!

There's not much to be said other than what is already said in the title. We are in the beach mood since almost two weeks and it's unlikely that we will get out of it any time soon.

Dani who used to live in the same WG in Zurich joined us for a couple of days. We are now in Auckland, staying with Esther & Dominik. I gave an informal talk today in Paul Rainey's lab where Dominik is a postdoc. Surprisingly, I could remember some of the stuff I worked on back in 2007.

In the remaining few days, we will rent a car and check out Northland, the northernmost & subtropical part of NZ.

We headed to Kaikoura to catch up with Jukka, Curt & Co. (still cracking snails) and went swimming with the dolphins. The dolphin swimming tour started at 5:30 am and was fantastic. Jukka was so kind to let us use his underwater video camera, so now we have about 15 minutes of underwater footage of dolphins. We'd really love to put up some of it on this blog, but the videos are on a DVD. I will figure out how to rip a DVD to create a browser readable format as soon as I find free internet access and two hours to spare, which probably means in March ;-) Anyway, the dolphin swimming was great - visibility was not too exciting, maybe 6, 7 meters, but it didn't matter at all because the dolphins were extremely curious, and there were about 80 of them.

The day after we headed north to catch the ferry to the North Island. Although various people recommended that we should visit the Abel Tasman National Park on the South Island before leaving, we decided to skip it - yet another good reason to come back! The ferry trip was quite nice, about 3 hours in beautiful weather to Wellington, crossing the Cook Strait. We had no clue where we would want to go on the North Island, so we decided that the sunny weather should generally guide us. The forecast for the central area seemed best, and so we went there. The central area is probably one of the most frequented areas on the North Island (tourism-wise), mainly because of the three big volcanos and the surrounding national park. Being good Swiss citizens (i.e. mountain people), we felt the urge to go to the top of Mount Ruhapehu, the highest of the three (2797 m) and still fairly active. The area was heavily used as a filming location for Lord of the Rings (Mordor and Mount Doom, also known as Mount Ngaurohoe, a perfectly shaped volcano).

We stayed in a campsite near Ruahpehu, and gave it a go early in the morning. Despite good weather forecast, a lot of clouds covered the top of the mountain, and an additional strong wind made us retreat. The next morning, we tried again - perfect weather conditions this time, and around midday, we stood on top of the highest peak on the North Island. There is actually something of a track going up to the crater, but we missed it. The reason is quite simple: there is another official track going to an elevated viewpoint, called the "Skyline Track". We didn't know then that this track didn't go up anywhere near the top, and that the official track to the crater was on the other side of the mountain... So we hiked up the Skyline Track ("Skyline" sounds like a perfectly reasonable name for a track to the top, doesn't it?) and were a bit surprised to find the path had ended after about a half hour. However, there were some pseudo tracks going up further, and a well-equipped japanese mountaineering group seemed to have the same goal as we did, so we went along with our plan. Needless to say, it got steeper and steeper, the tracks disappeared, and we soon found ourselves crawling up the crater like two hobbits.

When we were on top, we realized three things: 1, the views were worth the effort, 2, the track to the crater was on the other side of the mountain, and 3, we went much higher than the official track would have taken us (because we were actually on the top). When the japanese group arrived and started praying, we thought it was a good time to leave and hiked back down again.

The next morning, we left the area and headed further north through a very active volcanic area - lots of mud pools, geysers, and other steamy, stinky evidence of the fact that the earth was hot underneath. We drove further north until we finally reached the ocean: the bay of plenty. The bay of the plenty is a superbly beautiful area, the climate is perfect and the sandy beaches are endless. We are currently staying at a place called Waihi Beach. We found a campsite right at the beach and think we will probably stay here for a while and build some sandcastles.