Dateline: Leipzig
Bob, Martin and I walked around Jena for a few hours, visiting some of Bob's old student-haunts. It's a picturesque university town, seat of Freidrich-Schiller-Universität, and location of former Warsaw-pact champion "optics" industry (formerly Zeiss optics I think – before WWII). Anyway, there was at least 10 cm of fresh snow on the ground, and we helped dislodge some stuck cars on narrow streets, and saw the new "Goethe Galerie" (mall) downtown, and university buildings and some medieval stuff – a fragment of the city wall. Jena is quite an old town – 11th or 12th c I guess. Martin works for Zeiss but his position is in the IT department, which was recently outsourced to "HP" – which means that Carly Fiorina was his boss – at least until last week.
This morning, Bob and I took the train to Weimar and changed for the "InterCityExpress" for Leipzig, where I am now. I spent a few minutes just now answering a frustrating email from (ex)work – looks like trouble with the National Accounts commissions reporting process (the finding of new accounts sold under National Agreements eligible for commissions). The sample report run by Ravi & al. is correct format-wise but appears way off-base in terms of content – unless it was meant as a sample (which I don't think it was), it seems like something is amiss in the kingdom of DenMARK.
Bob is off shopping for rare bits of sheet music, and I'm here in the trainstation where I found a hotspot. There's less snow on the ground here than there was farther south, but Leipzig looks like an interesting city. The trip from Weimar up the Saale valley was quite beautiful under the snow, with castles up on the bluffs and old churches and all – reminded me of the Mississippi valley southeast of St Paul, in terms of natural appearance, but with that central european overlay of orderly-chaotic buildings, roads, etc.