Scotland, or Alba, as increasingly few of its inhabitants call it, is a fascinating country, for political and cultural reasons and, most importantly, because it sports a beautiful, unique, and largely rather sparsely populated countryside. It is also a place I have wanted to visit for some years—I would have gone last year, if I hadn't ended up in the USA. This year, however, I went there. And loved it.

The organization that got me to the Highlands is called Fahrten-Ferne-Abenteuer (FFA), which roughly translates to journeys-distance-adventures, but sounds a lot more elegant. They're in the business of providing teenagers with exciting camps and adventurous trips to other countries, all in the manner of the scouting movement. I wasn't one of these teenagers, I was one of the people leading and coaching them.

After spending a number of days in London, Edinburgh, and our coach, getting to know each other and the equipment (for the most part, that means “tents”), the three groups we had created selected their routes for the hike everyone had been waiting for. Each group was to start off at a different place on the Isle of Skye Friday afternoon, and meet up in Portree Tuesday morning. My group, seven young lads, between 16 and 18 years old, chose the longest and certainly most scenic route, a beautiful trip that many of the younger participants would probably have had great difficulty with.

A trip planned for over a year which, due to lots of cars breaking down, could only last five days, this holiday in the heart of the southern Alps was thoroughly enjoyable. We, six youngsters, stayed in a cottage, property of one of our families, above the Val Calanca in the canton of Grigioni (Graubünden), in Italian-speaking Switzerland. There were mountains. There was an abundance of blue sky. There were woods. And there were goats.

FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, is probably the largest and most important community-hosted, community-centric free software event in Europe. FOSDEM 09 will take place on February 7/8 2009 in Brussels, Belgium. I'm going to be there.

If you read this blog, and are attending the conference as well, I'd probably like to meet you. So please, surprise me with a comment, trackback, email, line on IRC or something like that

If you spend a while in the USA as a European, you will inevitably notice some differences in culture et cetera. This shall be little more than a silly list of things I, as a German and European, noticed while on vacation in the states.

Plenty of great, great cities are to be found all over the surface of the sphere of rock we call earth. In every region of this planet man has constructed large settlements, and each and every one of these is unique. Every land, every city, has its very own, very unique character. Every city is different.

So, I was in Paris, one of Europe's largest and finest cities, last week. While it was technically a school trip, representing the school, the amount of completely free time we had made it more of a Paris holiday with a bunch of mates, with academic interludes. Paris is indeed a beautiful city which, to me, didn't really seam foreign: It's a post-industrial Western-European metropolis like Munich, Berlin, Brussels, London and others too, and exhibits the characteristic Euro-city flair splendidly.

But, mec, what was you doing à Paris anyway ?

Well, mon ami, what brought us there was a programme called classes musées internationales. The concept is that lycée-aged students from around Europe work together on some scientific subject, in Paris, speaking French, thus improving their knowledge of science and their French. For us, this didn't quite work out: we were scheduled in such a way that we were in the Cité des sciences with a group from Regensburg, Bavaria (same language) and one from the Aosta Valley (incompatible schedule requirements ?), which meant each group worked for itself. Pity, really — we would have all enjoyed working in small groups with Hungarian students.

Alors, t'as fais quoi ces jours-là ?

A quick round-up of what I did:

Monday: We arrived at Charles-de-Gaulle airport with Air France and métroed into the centre to the Hôtel Printania on the boulevard du Temple. That hotel is a not-too-expensive, "very French", no frills hotel in the city centre that served us well. Afterwards, we had a short look at the historical centre, entre-autres at the Hôtel de Ville, where there was still a group of pro-Tibet demonstrators left over from the Olympic flame run earlier, and, of course, the «Paris defend les droits de l'homme partout dans le monde» I'd heard about in the morning radio was up.

Tuesday - Thursday: All in all, these days were structured equally: breakfast in the morning, after which we went to the Cité by métro. There, we presented our school to the other groups on Tuesday (I was the first student to speak... scary) and, after that, attended workshops and talks centred around the environment (climate, energies, water, etc.). Sometime in the afternoon, we were told when breakfast was the next day. Some of the things we (that is, the subset of the group I tended to hang out with) saw: le Centre Pompidou (brilliant), le Louvre (didn't like that kind of art much personally), the Obelisk, the Arc de Triomphe (two of them, actually), the Défense, the Eiffel tower, the métro, many crêperies and many baguette sandwich shops. Other things we did include drink a lot of French white wine and (non-French) vodka.

Friday: To keep it short (FAIL): We held a presentation about the subjects we'd been working on the past days in front of the other groups. While our Tuesday presentation was probably the worst (at least it was nice and short), on Friday we integrated the audience with questions, sported variety (a narrated illustrated play on drinking water, a scripted and played discussion on nuclear energy and a semi-improvised talk on consequences of global warming (that was fun to present)) and some loust jokes. After eating at one of the many cheap restaurants, we headed off to the airport and caught an Air France Fokker 100 to Munich.

Some more photographs may be found on Flickr.