Claudio Saavedra

Go forward in time to February 2009.

Sat 2009/Jan/17

• Thanks to the kind support of Igalia, I'm going to FOSDEM this year. I've never been in Belgium, so this will be an interesting trip. Of course, many friends will be there, so it's gonna be a good opportunity to catch up with all of them.

  

Sat 2009/Jan/10

• Felix did the final work to remove the Eye of GNOME dependency on libgnome. Great work, dude!

Sun 2009/Jan/04

• Vacations ended up being really cool, in spite of having lost the initial connections and having had to spend the night in a scary terminal of Berlin-Tegel. That night ended up being really funny, as I met some backpackers in a similar situation and realized that getting stuck on a terminal is a fundamental part of life. I decided that, later at some point, I will take a few months to backpack the world that I still don't know. Then, I'm sure I will find my Tegel experience just irrelevant.

  I spent Christmas in Zuschendorf, at Marie's parents. This was the most German Christmas I've experienced ever, with pyramids, Räuchermänner, Klösse, beer, and so on. I even tried ice skating and proved to be completely useless for it. I should definitively try again here.

  

  Later, Prague. Francisco, Edgardo and I went for a few days to the Czech capital. I enjoyed once again the delicious Czech food and beer. We took a few walks through the typical places, and made lots of pictures. Weather was nice: although it was always under 0 degrees, we didn't see a cloud during the three days. Not bad.

  

  For new year, we traveled to Berlin –the good thing of Dresden is that you can reach many interesting cities in less than two hours– and met other Chilean DAAD scholars. We made it through the crowd in the Strasse des 17. Juni until the Brandenburger Tor, and enjoyed the fireworks and party afterward. It was really cold (probably around -5 or -7 degrees), but Glühwein, continuous movement, and dancing stopped us from freezing.

  

  Then I spent the days after walking around Berlin-Mitte and Berlin-Kreuzberg. There is quite a lot to see, and I definitively will need to visit the city again, as time and energy weren't enough to go all the places I wanted to see. At last, I was so exhausted because of this trip, that I ended up sleeping more than 12 hours a day during the last three days. Crazy.

• So, I'm back in the North pole after my nearly two months world tour. During the last two months I visited Santiago de Chile, Talca, Curicó, Lima, A Coruña, Dresden, Zuschendorf, Prague, and Berlin. Fortunately, the last few days have been quiet enough for me to recover energies and I am already missing work. Let's get it on!

Go backwards in time to December 2008.