Christmas Letter

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Dear circle of friends,

• I feel like I want to sleep for several weeks. My boss and I are offering a new lecture for students who are going into teaching. Concep­tualising it was incredibly fun, but an insane amount of work went into it. But above all, I have to dream a lot. This year held so many wonderful impressions that I haven’t even come close to processing them.
• However, the year began with a nightmare. Last Christmas was a wonderful last festivity together. A month later, life left my father. I am grateful that I was able to be with him on his last day and that we perhaps made it easier for him to go. Now in November, the memories came flooding back: How around this time, I was going to my parents’ house every week with a big shop to support my mum and cook or bake something for my dad that he might eat. The tears are flowing as I write this, but the universe is fair and has tried to comfort me in the best way possible.
• I have been able to visit many old and new places. I made a virtue of the fact that I had two trainings at the other end of the Republic one week apart and travelled in-between them to Amiens, the capital of Picardy, where I had studied in 1998. The campus from the 1960s still looks exactly the same. However, the bond of memories with my 22-year-old self has been cut. Olaf and I didn’t even try to rekindle the memories of our first holiday together in Paris. Back then, our hotel certainly didn’t have a lift in the middle of a spiral staircase. In Versailles, I was amazed twice: how small Marie Antoinette’s room was and when at the snack stand Olaf threw the paper plates into the container together with the tray. He was of the opinion it was also pressed cardboard, right? Prague also saw me again. My parents would have celebrated their golden wedding anniversary this year. Instead, five of us – my mother, sons and sons-in-law – travelled to the Golden City. We went to see “Fantom opery”, ate Svíčková at Café Imperial and visited a Banksy exhibition.
• Japan was epic. The week-long 3D World Congress took place in Tsukuba. The week before, I explored Kyōto and Tokyo. Shintō shrines and Buddhist temples in mountainous nature, wooden houses from the Edo period and meticulously designed Zen gardens, ultra-lively streets with shops and hip bars up to the fifth floor – the impressions are overwhelming. The Japanese do not speak English. Well, they do, but they are afraid to do so. However, you can thaw them if you lower your own language level. I explained my master plan to simplify the Japanese language by reducing three alphabets to a single one using only two-word sentences and facial expressions and earned a lot of sympathy. Conversely, Japanese is a challenge. When buying 3D blu-rays, they stood with the narrow side facing forwards. Instead of looking at cover images, I looked at Japanese 仮名. Even what you can read doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Any idea what “gum syrup” is? Answer: a sugar solution for iced coffee. And also everyday life needs to be read. In Kyōto, you get on the bus at the back and pay when you get off at the front. I swear, they do it on purpose! But everything runs orderly: When I couldn’t book my train ticket, even though the button had been there the day before, it dawned on me: the website had opening hours. Culinary recommendation is definitely かき氷 _Kakigori, the soft as clouds water ice.
• I showed my 17-year-old godson around London. We lay on the glass floor of Tower Bridge, ate street food at Borough Market, went to see the musical “Hamilton”, for which we first bought the boy new clothes at Next. The full programme. I thoroughly enjoyed the evenings when we moved the armchairs to the windows in our flat and chatted as adults. I was unsure about the last day. Would a teenager find a visit to an aeroplane museum with my 80-year-old English friends so great? Not only was he happy to try another English dish for lunch, but he chatted in fluent English with Mike about aeroplanes. More than one person was amazed.
• My favourite summer memory comes from Moravia in eastern Czechia, where I visited a 3D friend. In Brno, the local 3D club was brought together straight away. I was given 3D slides of Potsdam and Meissen from the 1970s and got told stories about how one only speaks Czech but as a former railway employee still travels the world by train. In Zlín, I learnt that the entrepreneur Baťa had built the then tallest high-rise building in Europe here and that his entire office was a lift. But above all, my friend asked me if I had my swimming trunks with me. We were going to the outdoor pool. I must have misunderstood something, because a minute ago I’d been told we were going for a beer. I decided to wait and behold: I can still see the image of two freshly tapped pints in the evening sun by the pool.
• In business and as German 3D president, things were a mixed bag. A major American client decided after 16 years to cancel all trainings because of the recession. But my colleague and I are forming a trainer tandem: Photos have been taken, website is in progress – world, watch out! I sent the last chapters of my phonetics textbook to Cambridge in May. Now it means editing, proofreading and production. It is due to be published at the beginning of 2025. I know. Me too. We have given the DGS a new, modern logo and moved fifty years of documents from my parents’ house to the Saxon State Archives. Incidentally, I will have to celebrate my birthday next year at the 3D Congress: This will take place from 21–23 June in a cinema from the 1920s in Regensburg.
• And now the journey begins. Into a new year that is still invisible to us. At Whitsun I will be travelling to the 3D Congress of the British society. Czechia has become a nice home away from home and I’m also reading the even Harry Potter parts in Czech and will have to buy the sixth one. I want to continue learning Japanese. The motivation is not as high as with Czech, but the linguist in me is looking forward to venture into new worlds of thought. What about you? When will we meet again? I can already say: I am so looking forward to it!