The las couple of weeks have been crazy travel-wise and tomorrow I’m on it again. This year we were 4 guys who had booked tickets for Madrid from friday the 21st till monday the 24th in the hope that we could get tickets for the champions league final at Bernabeu. Unfortunately we didn’t and since we were not ready to pat between 800 and 2000€ for tickets outside the stadium the trip turned into a guys weekend instead. When the 3 of us arrived friday afternoon - yeah MC couldn’t join since the US embassy needed his passport in that weekend :( - we realized that we had been lucky with the weather. Just a week before it had been ~5-10 degrees, rainy and windy, but for the whole weekend we had around 30 degrees and sun! We spent most of the time just roaming around the city, drinking and eating (mostly tapas). On saturday we, needless to say, went to the stadium to feel the vibe and the atmosphere - and what vibe. At that point I REALLY regretted that we didn’t manage to get our hands on some tickets! And the plastic cup maß they served only helped a little on that. In the evening we watched the match in a bar/restaurant (the madrileños apparently don’t bother to put up a big screen for such an event unless Real is in it - too bad) with a couple of swedes. Afterwards we went out for beer and whiskey and had a blast. On the sunday we spent quite some time in Retiro park which is a green oasis more or less in the middle of Madrid. All in all I had a great time and really enjoyed the atmosphere and especially the food and wine of Madrid - I could easily imagine going back there!

Since we got back the night between monday and tuesday I basically only had time to empty my bag and fill it with clean cloths before I had to leave HD again. On wednesday morning we went for this years IMPRS retreat which was held in Cologne. Good ‘conference’, cool city and pretty amazing cathedral, but what really made it for Cologne was there LEGO store... a store only with lego! It was amazing - made me a proud dane seeing the enthusiasm of my colleagues when we went there. I think we spent like 2 hours in the around 100 square meters of LEGO heaven:D

Around 10 of us stayed a couple of days extra to get a bit more of Cologne. We went out a couple of times to some really cool clubs and bars and had some (semi)good food and a whole lot of Kölsch - thin beer served in 0.2L glases - weird! The club we went to saturday night (while the rest of germany was celebrating the win at the eurovision song contest... it was CRAZY!) was amazing. It was a newly opened ‘soul’ club which made me kind of sceptic before we went there, but I must admit that whatever I had against soul as party music was really blown to pieces, by an amazing crowd, a couple of awesome DJs and a whole lot of dancing. It’s been a while since I have been sweating like that (gross actually).

When we got home sunday evening I had even less time before I had to leave HD again. Monday morning I jumped on a train to Munich where the first ELIXIR school was held in a small suburb to Munich called Ottobrunn. It was really good to see the fellow ELIXIR students again and we had a really great time... and yes again we had a lot of good food - and especially good Bavarian beer ;) The meeting was held at EADS Astrium where they are building the NIRSpec for JWST. On monday they gave us a small tour and let us in to the clean room (all suited up in ‘space’-suits not to bring any dust in with us) so we could see the beast... pretty cool I must say :) The rest of the meeting went with lots of really cool and very interesting talks about JWST and all its instruments and their capabilities. I came back to Heidelberg wednesday evening and had a couple of days to get ready for next weeks conference. I had a poster to finish and some logistics to fix but luckily I was almost there, so it didn’t take long - I actually managed to work a bit as well ;)