Well, then I want to show the awakening of spring from Toulouse as well. Spring is a bit farther here of course!

The only drawback is that one could have matched the colour of the house to the tree. Or the other way round.

50 minutes delay are quite heavy on a 90 minutes ride. The train stayed on the track for a long time, supposedly because children were sighted playing on the track.

Well, certainly I do not want remaining exemplaries of the dying species “children” on the red list of endangered species to be rolled over by an ICE, especially if they are that intelligent and adventuresome to play on a much used track and then resist being removed for such a long time.

But I still cannot help to suspect that they were special “signal children”. The train stopped at the same spot that it also was delayed during the Fridays before. But then they told us it was a signal failure. But then the delay was not that severe.

On Monday night I had the usual project dinner and experienced the other side of English Cuisine. The Sunday lunch at  Crofter’s in Sheringham not being that successful (my boss commented, well, a restaurant you go to with your grandma), we were at Gee’s Restaurant in Oxford.
This restaurant is offering a kind of cooking which I like: modern, European but focussing on local ingredients. The dishes are not overloaded and present a taste reduced to the essential taste of the dish. Ingredients like parsnips or beetroot still are part of the menu.
Interestingly enough prices on the normal evening menu do not differ that much. But protions certainly are larger at Crofter’s.

Well, of course expectations are different between a university town and a traditional seaside resort.

On Monday morning I had to leave Hanna and Michael as I had to go to work. I took the tube to Paddington, where as is known by Agatha Christie and Margaret Rutherford trains leave to Oxford – in my case at 10:22 am and not 4:50 pm. However, trains were not equipped with steam engines but with a Diesel powered traction unit. Other details still are like 60 years ago. Just as on our last train ride I had a train with no door latches on the inside. To get out of the train one opens the door window and then uses the latch on the outside. It is also interesting that you find a first class on this train, but no second. That would be devaluing in any case.

In Oxford I did not have to go to one of the traditional colleges but to Oxford Said Business School, which also is part of Oxford University, but is located in a modern building. I think that it is quite adequate even if architects criticise the mix of styles as I heard. But this mix is even more extreme in old colleges as one may find horrible 70′s buidings planted into medieval structures.

In the 1960s and 70s it was quite common in architecture to declare the concrete used as a modern working material and not to hide it in any way. Not everybody liked it and this was the beginning of a saying: “Apity that concrete does not burn!”.

At that time in Toulouse they constructed a large area with science buildings (Scientific Complex of Rangueil) and obviously covered it with buildings made of concrete in a short time. You will find there technical universities with different directions including aerospace. I imagine that this area was built in line with the rapid success of Airbus at that time.

In this ground you may see that concrete does not need to burn, it will crumble just by itself. More and more they have to repair those buildings which are not that old, and in the course they start to hide the concrete as well.

All the decorating elements, which were produced in concrete (low-grade?) as well, of course have a very low priority in renovation.

Torino in any case was more then the hell ride I described already. Weathher was nit too inviting being wet nearly all the time. The city was in any case more than the hell ride that I descriebed already, but the weather was not good enough than my being able to produce fotos. But for me the city certainly seems worth a visit, assessment spontaneously being much more positive than for Milano.Highlight of my short visit was a dinner at a restauranjt called Tre Galline, specialised in cooking with regional Piedmont ingredients. There we had a 6-course menu with totally regional specialities. I was lucky to know the Jerusalem artichoke already and already cooked it myself. But the Italian vegetable Cardi, Cardoon in English is still a mystery to me, even if it tasted good.Ich liebe jedenfalls Küche, die auf regionale Spezialitäten spezialisiert ist.

Everything seemed to be in order. As I was told, 60 minutes before the start of AZ906 (is somebody able to explain why Alitalia has the airline code AZ?), well, 60 minutes before departure I stood at the check-in and got served immediately. Ok, I also could have arrived as late as 10 minutes before departure, but in exchange for an early arrival I got a boarding pass with seat 1D, directly behind the pilot. On time the 2-hour trip from Torino ZTC to Milano MXP started at 5:10 pm.

Yes, I know, my readers are absolutely knowledgeable in geography and I feel them shouting: Torino is about 60 miles from Milano and then the flight is supposed to last 2 hours? You are right, AZ906 is not operated with an airplan, but with a bus. And it does not start at the airport, but Torino ZTC is the name of a shopping mall in the former FIAT factory, quite nice but totally empty on a Tuesday afternoon.

And the bus driver obviously had a special relationship with Fiat. That is to say that he seemed to have undergone training at Fiat’s daughter company, the one with red cars.

Maybe it is still normal if he passes town at 40-50 miles an hour, mostly on bus or taxi or even tram lanes wet from rain, showing a wonderful feeling for traffic, no emergency braking or panic reactions when cars want to cross the special lanes from left or right. Even when everything came to a stop he still was quite relaxed. At a roundabaout the traffic lights had failed and stubborn as the Italians are, evrybody in rush hour traffic entered it, from four directions and hardly any body was able to leave it. All blocked each other, a classical gridlock. 20-30 minutes just standing still, until ordinary people started to guide the traffic and eventually two bored policemen tried to do something slowly.

Finally the bus was free. And then the hell ride began.

For an airline of course it is expensive if many passengers miss their connecting flights and even a hotel booking becomes necessary. Therefore the would-be Formula-1-driver put his foot on the accelerator. You need to know that two thirds of the motorway from Torino to Milano consists of roadworks, with narrow lanes, bends and speed limits of 40 to 50 miles. But our pilot speeded with 60-80 mph through the construction areas, on the overtaking lane, 20 yards behind Unos and Puntos, in streaming rain of course. Taking over was prohibited for trucks, therefor it was alwys a challenge passing trucks. Especially interesting is overtaking trucks with containers, but the driver was clever, he knew that gusts of wind hid on the right and he therefore veered to the right after passing container trucks, towards the truck, not to be pressed into the construction works in the left.

Appeals by fellow passengers that it might be better to arrive safe than to reach the flight (a contradiction in terms?) were ignored. Therefore group trembling did occur. With a 20 minutes delay we arrived, I met my connection. I even had to wait 5 minutes at the gate and the the flight was 20 minutes late.

The incoming journey on Monday in contrast was quite normal. Entering the plane on schedule, in January it might happen that you sit on the strip for 90 minutes due to fog in Milano. And retrospectively it might have been not bad for my nerves to have missed the hell ride. And also skipped the alternative AZ bus ride as this would have meant 5 hours waiting. Instead I took the the shuttle bus to Milano central station and took the train. That way I only was 3 hours late. Well, getteing up at 4 in the morning this still was a bit exhausting.

You could feel a general excitement. Everything should work, a good talk was set to go and further steps should be agreed upon. Two presidents of universities, two high-ranking R&D managers from industry, a representative of our local government and two manging directors of (semi-) public institutions were listening with our small project team to a talk from Oxford University and then discussed how the relations between universities  and industry could be improved.

In the beginning everybody was quite reserved and slightly exhausted at the end of the working day, but then everybody got relaxed and we had a fruitful discussion. The final special dinner with Knieper (a Helgoland dish of crab pincers) contributed to lively informal talks and successful networking. So in the end the conclusions were positive.

The general public does not know much about research fundin of the European Union. It is organised in so-called framework programmes (in the past one would have said five-year-plans) and until now they followed just this rhythm, money and goals were  valid for this period. Now it has turned into a seven-years-period.

This is the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Development, the European Parliament has approved it on 27 November and the Council will do it just these days. And all researchers are getting ready and long for the latest news on the conditions.

It is not a tiny programme, every year the Union provides some 7 billion €, last year about 16,000 applications were submitted, which were evaluated by nearly 5,000 experts. And therefore it is no surprise that more than 500 participants had registered for a local information conference (just for the greater Hamburg area) to get the latest information. And it is about time: the calls for proposals are planned to be published on 22 December and the deadline for proposals will be mid to end of April. Further information is available on Cordis or on the Commission’s site.

With the right weather, autumn can be really wonderful. This morning the environment passed by quite fast, blue sky in the background. The sun started its warming routine and drove the dampness from the meadows. The milky white combinded with the brown to red colours of autumn. Then you like to blink into the sun and think, yes, this may be winter: not damp, not too cold, sunny and merry.