I was guest at L3D in October/November 2001 as part of my PhD project. This has been throughout a pleasant stay.

Things contributing to this have been:
- the L3D research group, especially the people I cooperated with intensively (Hal Eden, Eric Scharff, Ernie Arias),
  all people that helped me (Glen, Francesca, Andy, Lea, Gerhard, Stefan, whose cubicle I time-shared....),
- the interdisciplinary nature of L3D,
- contact to other departments, mainly the communication department, where I could participate in the data sessions,
- the nice campus (some photo impressions),
-  the city (which is probably the closest to European life style one can get in the Midwest.... and really nice),
- and its surroundings (beautiful nature and mountains), (see links to photos from trips down below)
- my host family,
- the International CU guests committee with its the monthly pot-lucks providing opportunity to
   get to know other international visitors

Life at L3D and some insights into what I have been doing
 
 
 

I have been immensely lucky to find a private place to stay. This is K.C., one of the family members. You see, it's him ruling the house.  Staying with a family with 2 teenage children has been really nice and interesting, as I got some more insights into current US life and met people from outside research.

Some of the things I learned:
- although one never knows what time of the day, time of the year, and wheather is outside,
  one can get used to working in cubicles...  I time-shared a cubicle, as my stay was during
  a very busy period, but this worked out very fine. The cubicle lab had some advantage of
  getting to know a lot of other PhD students.
- that there are quite a few german researchers in Boulder. Not only at L3D as guests, but also in
  the rest of the computing department and in other departments (esp. physics and NIST, Jila and
  whatsoever)
- that things which seem difficult to organize in advance, sometimes are really easy once you are
   there (at least in the US)
- how painful the differences between European and US video standards can get...
- how different US TV is from printed press in the manner & style of reporting
- how different Midwest is from the East coast and how far away it feels

In addition this period of time was interesting (and impressive) as it was still close to September 11th and I could as well observe a movement of unity and solidarity across the US and in parallel a deep interest in understanding the causes of this terror attack.

BIKING
Usually I have been biking around. Unlike other guests, nothing happened to me, although I did not wear a helmet. Biking in Boulder is very convenient. There are a lot of very good bike trails going through most of the city. I was able to stay on bike trails respectively use small roads from where I lived to CU.
Nevertheless I have been told by several people to rather use the pedestrian walkway in case there is no bike trail !

With my hosts and some other International  visitors I mad e a few trips in the surroundings of Boulder and other parts of Colorado, although the short time of my stay and the tight work schedule did not leave much extra time for that.

Some more photos from trips around Colorado:

Hiking in the mountains nearby Boulder

A wekend trip of "extreme Tourism" : Garden of the Gods
                                                                Pikes Peak
                                                                Great Sand Dunes
 

See you again, Boulder!
 

Eva Hornecker

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Copyright and Impressum:  Eva Hornecker  research center artec University of Bremen, Germany February 2002