Dear friends,

Some cold has taken hostage of me for weeks now. Somewhere between ill and well, I have the feeling to reach the finish line and Christmas this year like a marathon runner on his last resources. There was much going on this year and also many tough patches. But in general and on the whole I would say: “Yeah, I rocked it!”

Much freedom was bestowed to me by my BahnCard 100. For a four times four digits amount, you can take any train in Germany for one year. So now I can not only commute to work every day and spend the evening at home together with my husband, but also make spontaneous trips. For its inauguration in April, I compiled a list of cities that I had always wanted to see: Bremen, Wuppertal, Treves and Koblenz in one week. My highlight? The suspension railway over the river is unbeatable and also learning at the Museum for Early Industrialisation how care was taken to protect the merchandise, but not the workforce, also put some things into perspective.

The 3D congress in Berlin commemorated the 90th anniversary of the German Society for Stereoscopy. Even my English couple Mike and Mary came to attend. The two of them ignored me stoically at Schönefeld airport, even though I held a sign with a huge M&M logo right under their noses. Sadly, I aged five years in two seconds when the shipping company called explaining that due to a demonstration on the Spree river on Sunday, they had to refund seventy tickets. Much thanks to the tourist information, who when confronted with the question how to amuse six dozen congress attendees, provided help with word, deeds and private mobile number.

That Prague is more than beautiful, I could rediscover over the summer. The 3D world congress after the next should go to England: The organising person had been quite insistent last year and made sure of that. This year, the same person changed their mind and after I had recovered from my heart attack, I visited the Czechs in my role as current 3D president to ask them whether they would step in. Good Czech beer in Letná park with a stunning view of the city was quite relaxing. Only the hotel was problematic: Surely once the pride of socialist high-class workmanship, their only answer to the boiling summer heat was a desk fan.

In Lisbon, I upheld a lovely tradition, went on holiday with my parents and played tour guide. Wonderful how compact the city is. Weary the steep hills, but practical the lifts that look like the entrance to an ordinary office building and also inside the lift looks completely normal, but opens at the top floor to the other side of the building and this way takes you up to the castle. Up there, a tuk-tuk with chilled plastic wine glasses and the corresponding wine with a glorious view on cork stones – that is what memories are made of.

To be professor at university has never been the declared goal of my career. However, when the Chair of Speech Science and Phonetics was advertised at the University of Halle, my heart did feel a little wistful. A good thing that such appointments take quite long and so I was asked to stand in as interim professor in the winter term. It is great fun to engross myself in phonetic topics. And as if this was not enough work, I also managed to analyse the data from my eye-tracking study and hope to present the results at the big phonetics conference next year.

Other journeys took Olaf and me together with mother-in-law to the polar bear in the zoo of Rostock. The animal banged continuously on the window pane to get to the visitors. Optically impressive, but also an oppressive feeling. I visited the regional groups of the DGS in the Rhineland, Ruhr and Munich. The walking-tour on the Dachstein, where Austrians and Swiss alike looked at my Leipzig lowlands bay shoes with a mixture of pity and incomprehension, was just as beautiful as the visit of the 3Dimensionale in Vienna, where for the first time my hand luggage was weighed at the airport and gave me a free self-taught lesson in creative repacking. My colleague of many years from Cologne finally come to see Leipzig, which lead to some confusion when I read “Andreas in Leipzig” in my diary. At least in my generation, this is more of a collective term than a first name.

For 2019, I wish you the time to be happy and the insight that most things that you share are twice as nice.

Frank