I will be in Wawa from Dec 30 to Jan 04 and from now on already available under 0048-503-365845.

photo by zosia zija – place in poland (www.zija.net)

After all this busy life just before Christmas I hope you all find now the time to lay back and relax.

I wish you all a merry and peaceful Christmas time this year with your family and friends. Have a good start into the new year! All the best for everything you plan and do in the upcoming new year!

Since the last three years I attach to my personal greetings a poem, unfortunately only in German, but I want to present it nevertheless to all of you:

This weekend seems somehow to become a reminiscence of the good old times here in Ingolstadt. Yesterday Christoph and Jens invited in “il Vero” for their farewell dinner – we have been over 50 people. Thanks again for the event and the excellent pasta!

Thomas, a friend of mine, who I have not really seen for half a year and who is also alumni now, has come down from Berlin with a friend of his for this weekend. Partying with him and the others, who I also have not seen for a long time, afterwards on the LDC party organized by the Aventin society was lots of fun. More get-togehters this weekend are planned – we will see..

Tonight some exchange students at my university have organized a visit to the theatre. We saw Neil LaBute’s “Das Ma der Dinge” (in English shown as “The Shape of Things”) – once shown on the broadway. A play about the manipulation of persons, shown by the transformation of the in the beginning so ugly, shy guy Adam to a handsome, adorable man by the crazy and dominant Evelyn. It turned out that Evelyn did all this not out of love, as she pretended, but for her final work in her art studies. So LaBute raised in this play the question if art should change persons or more general it shows that society itself is keen on changing other people, such as somebody’s face or nose, and hence the play asks for the moral justification. For me in the end the author leaves this question open because not everything that Evelyn did was just cold, calculating and inhuman.

In Ingolstadt it will be running till end of January 2004, but you can also watch the very popular play on DVD or read it.

This morning the postman woke me up at 9am and brought me a package from my family with lots of chocolate, a cake etc. for today’s Santa Claus. So much that I won’t manage to finish them all this year, but we will see…

Meanwhile the city is packed with people on this second advent Saturday and everybody tries to sell mulled wine (i.e. in German: Glhwein) to do some charity – three organizations on the Ludwigstr. competing for each person walking by. Beside this stress I still do not have a clue what to buy for all my beloveds as presents. For sure I will make some quick shoppings the very last day before Christmas Eve as the year’s before. Actually now I would have time, but by far no motivation.
In the evening I went to see a gospel concert in the Franziskaner church with Martin. The first time I visited such kind of entertainment. It was not as bad as I thought in the beginning because the group came from Switzerland (Gospel Joy) and I thought they would produce less excitemtent than a colored group would do. But in the end they caught the full-packed church and earned lots of standing ovation after many encores.