Travel Report I: Freddie Mercury's Angel Hair Pasta

For the next two months, I’m gonna be on vacation. I feel like I have left a whole mess of things behind that I should’ve taken care of, and a whole lot of stuff ahead that I should’ve started to figure out, but oh well. I’ve been in Munich for a week now, and nothing has horribly broken down yet.

Strictly speaking, Munich doesn’t really count as the vacation just yet; I’m doing a hackathon (and hopefully getting some expenses refunded for it), which means I’m basically working. If you don’t know what a hackathon is: imagine a geekend, but during working hours and in a very fancy office.

I am used to feeling out of place at those types of gatherings, and I truly was out of place here: Everyone was a PhD student, PostDoc or Professor, with access to some huge cluster pc[^3]. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that I was having less of my usual hangups about that, or maybe so many that it drove me straight into the Machine Zone[^1] — I asked questions, wrote comments, had discussions, which are the things I am normally terrified about, and despite barely knowing the codebase. In the end, a bunch of people even came by my desk to say goodbye. Somehow, only bothering with the technical stuff and being an antisocial goblin otherwise somehow made it easier to actually build a connection with these guys.

Due to my government-mandated spite for Bavaria and also the draw of the machine zone, I have not done a lot of sightseeing in Munich, but here are the highlights:

Big ol’ Glockenspiel with feuding knights and rotating party dancers
Lots of construction going on, and all the cranes have RBG lighting :)
There is a concept store for soy milk producer alpro. Can you call it a concept store when they don’t sell anything and just promote their new soylent drink? In any case, what a delightful find for an advertisement head like me: The interior was absolutely deranged, and the employees visibly dead inside. The front was all high-end concrete, with railway tracks painted on the ground leading to a huge mirror and prize lockers, because they had some sort of underground theme? Went into the alpro photobox, won some socks; finally, vegan street cred. The drink itself is just okay.
Stumbled into a drag alphamale mindset coaching at the local youth center and learned to find the lion within me. The show was great and smartly done, and the crowd was absolutely hyped. Turns out that no matter what the content is, it feels great to howl and growl and holler with a whole room of people.
Talked a bit with the munich scene kids, who were all busy applying to theater schools. One is meeting his former best friend tomorrow that he hasn’t seen in a year. I ask him what he likes the most about him, he says his laugh, it’s so amazing, I miss him so much. Kids? They’re alright.
One good horse statue, one free-to-access horse artwork.

I’m not normally very anxious about traveling, but there’s something about airports that makes me want to be there at least 6 hours early, giving me plenty of time to write this post. I accidentally checked in everything except for a tiny book of french fairytales[^2], including all of my chargers, making the day-long layover in madrid a bit of a challenge. The hostel for the layover was operated by a very old and very drunken lady, with one of the guests (a young former soldier from honduras) taking over all communication for her. The way he speaks makes everything sound like an order, even when offering help.

On the big transcontinental flight, I somehow get a bigger seat and a bunch of free extras, which the flight attendant seems angry about. I spend the night at the airport, finally reunited with my chargers and slightly stressed that I entered the wrong passport number for the next flight, but it doesn’t seem to matter. At ten in the morning, I arrive in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande de Sul, Brazil.

[1]: get hype for machine zone, this is going to be all I talk about for the foreseeable future. [3]: I am apparently now 2 degrees of separation apart from both BionTech founder Uğur Şahin and the costume Designer for Tàr. [2]: So far, it’s not been very surprising that there is only a single well-known french fairytale.