Introducing An Expats Notebook

Posted by James.

After living in Silicon Valley for 30 years, Renate and I are leaving our house in the care of a friend and moving to Berlin for the summer. I've got a job with the Technical University of Berlin for 6 months teaching computer networking, working together with the researchers, and just generally hanging around, talking to people and seeing what's new in the academic world. I've worked most of my professional career in industry as a research scientist in information and communication technology, most recently with Ericsson Research. In the last 8 years, the technology has been changing quite rapidly in networking so I've decided to take a sabbatical to spend some time in academia seeing what's new. I'm really looking forward to it.

But in addition, this will be the longest time since 1978-79 that I'll have lived abroad. During that time, I lived in Karlsruhe, in the southern part of Germany along the Rhine and worked as a research assistant at the university, developing computer programs for hydrology research. In 1981, I spent the summer at the University of Stuttgart as a guest researcher working on my PhD dissertation topic. I did visit Berlin briefly at some point during the Cold War, and I remember the dogs sniffing along the train led by the hard faced East German police, and the grumpy officials checking our passports when the train stopped at the border with the DDR.  Since then, though, most of my trips to Germany have been short, a few days to a week at most. So it will be interesting to compare my experiences from back then to the way things are now, 26 years after the wall came down. I don't know if I'll really be able to experience the change, since in a way having visited for short periods over the years I have a perspective of Germany slowly changing, but I'm hoping to get some perspective on the new Germany.