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Ich war ein Berliner

Without much fanfare, my wife and I came to the Desktop Summit here in Berlin. I met a whole lot of very cool people and even some kde hackers as well. There are plenty of people I had a great time meeting and forgot to mention, but I’ll blame Behdad. His insistence on more shots of Absinthe is why I forgot their names. It has been absolutely incredible to *finally* meet so many people whom I’ve followed via planet or chatted with on IRC for years.

The great PiTiVi Hackers and I are hacking away in Wonderpots, this frozen yogurt shop right next to Humboldt University with great food and free 1Mbps wifi. Since he last posted, the PiTiVi team has done some great stuff. Stay tuned for more to come. I’m actually hacking on mango, the rewrite of the accounts management system for gnome. I’m on the left side in the red shirt.

In an hour or so, Becca and I will start preparing for our trip around Germany. Of Germany, the only thing I can think so far is that this is a wonderful country. The people are nice (even to American monoglots who try to speak horribly broken German), the food is amazing, and everything is so full of life. If I’d have came here 10 years ago, I’d have never went back to the US. We’ll be doing a walking tour around Berlin, hopping a train or plane to Munich to tour Neuschwanstein and whatever else happens to happen along the way.

If anyone has any suggestions of what to do in the next week, please leave it in a comment. Now back to hacking…

Update: Added a picture of our yogurt shop setup. Pretty sweet huh?

Categories: Open Source, Planet GNOME.

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9 Responses

  1. Hi, if you go to Munich, you should take at least one day to take a tour around the city. I know Neuschwanstein is probably the best known place for foreign tourists, but there is so much more to see around here and more interesting things too. Just start with Wikipedia 🙂

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich
    http://wikitravel.org/en/Munich and probably the German versions of that too.

    If you can spare another day, you should visit the Deutsches Museum and not to forget Munich also has an active night life. 😉

    Have fun in Germany!

  2. Take a train from Berlin to Munich and stop in:
    – Leipzig (great Innercity, great parks, city of baroque music, workplace of J.S. Bach, the Thomaner chorus)
    – Dresden (capital of saxony, historical city of royal residence, the famous Church of Our Lady)
    – Weimar (cultural focus for centuries, workplace of Goethe, Schiller, Liszt, Nitzsche)
    – Erfurt (capital of Thuringia, great historic center, famous cathedral and churches ensemble)
    – Eisenach (the Wartburg – a _real_ castle, not this disneyland-ish Neuschwanstein, workplace of Martin Luther and J.S. Bach)
    – Nürnberg (the Christkindles market and a lot of historical landmarks)
    – Regensburg (the most perfect medieval historical city in Germany with lot of narrow alleies)
    – München (well, Munich – more to say?)

    This is of course just the smallest selection of famous and great places in Germany (and only the three Free States of Germany (out of 16 federal states)) – but just one week is not enough for thousands of years of history.

    • @Hentrik: Thanks for the ideas, we’ll make sure to take a train instead of a plane to see some of the places you’ve suggested.

  3. If you’re into nature and mountains and places one should have been to in life and that kind of stuff you might want to climb the Zuspitze – it’s quite doable if you go the Reintalanger route!

  4. I just hope (assume) the shop isn’t seeing fewer visitors since you’re taking up near-double the number of seats for the number of people who are there. But still, sounds pretty awesome. 🙂

    • @Je: We bought stuff everyday and were very polite. In fact, one of the owners was very friendly. He kept giving us cookies and whatnot so we made sure to oblige and buy more coffee / yogurt. We explained we were in town for the Desktop Summit and were writing software to give away for free. He asked if it was open source and was extremely friendly. I seriously can’t recommend this place enough.

      • Awesome. Yeah, I was expecting nothing less. 🙂

        It really is quite amazing that the coffee shop business model actually works, for what it gives you. I’m sure it all works out on paper, but still: I would never have thought it could work if I hadn’t seen it work myself.

  5. Cool place Wonderpots. Thanks for the tip! 🙂

  6. @Jeff Walden: we actually ended bringing in *more* customers to their shop and gave them good publicity. And the pitivi hackers were ordering many, many coffees to keep themselves fuelled 😉

    Jeff FortinAugust 14, 2011 @ 9:08 pmReply



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