I am back! Yesterday I came back, caught by the rain only on the last bit. But first things first.

On Sat Sept 23rd, I left at 7:20 (am). It was a tough day and I was not in the mood of packing in advance, so I missed my original goal of leaving at around 5. Leaving at sunrise was not bad either. At first it was cold, then the weather warmed up and I did the approx 900 km in 11 hours, making 6 stops and counting in the roughly 2 hours of breaks.

Yesterday, I came back then, in 10 hours this time, I used a different route and also did less breaks, and I had ear-plugs. The ear-plugs protect me against the noise on the motorbike, from the wind continuously hitting the helmet and being really annoying. I learned that there's a lot of thinking going on during such a long trip, because the driving is a monotonous activity which does not keep all of the mind busy. But on a motorbike, the slightest mistake can mean end of thinking altogether so at least it does not get boring.

It is impressive to see Germany again. On the highway, you can see scenarios we're you are driving among dozens of vehicles on four lanes, and they all seem to stand still because everybody's at the same speed. That speed was 150-160 km/h (that's 100 mph for you British and American folks). Germany has amazing technological infrastructure. At home, I realized something that never caught my attention before: some sidewalk was being repaired, and there were several special purpose vehicles pouring concrete or piercing the ground or whatever. My motorbike needed a little fix, and the garage (a Mercedes service point) was full of big trucks, all scheduled for maintenance, however all looking shining brand new. Germany is extremely industrialized. It's very high-tech, the coutryside landscape of my parent's place notwithstanding.

I also paid a visit to Hamburg, and I shot some videos there, which I hope to piece together and upload to the net once. I really want to play with videos and music again, I miss expressing myself somewhat artistically (even if it's layman-artistically). I know I will never impress you with my words :-) and I used to enjoy making music.

Programming does not, and will never, get recognized as an art, like engineering. Lucky for me, it fulfils part of my desire to produce things. It's like blogs -- people when writing them are in fact constructing things (words and sentences and meanings). It might not serve a well-defined function but it is fun to do it and to share the result. And when they are shared and linked and when it is fun for somebody else to read them, they become more than the sum of their parts.

Back in Lausanne, I recovered from the trip by taking a shower, watching Aeon Flux, eating peanut cookies, and going to sleep early. It's a good one, go and watch Aeon Flux if you like futuristic scenarios and a story with a psychoactive twist. Of course it is nothing like the MTV animated series that I used to consume in a former life, but it's also much easier to understand. The other movies in line are Inside Man and V for Vendetta... I am not the kind of person that goes and buys tons of DVDs but when going shopping with the family my father insisted I pick some movies to cheer up my single life at home.

Now I am back at work, the code I hacked up for work during my week off turns out to work out well. I did some chatting today and later am meeting friends for breaking the fast together. It's good to be back.

Tomorrow I shall hit the road and visit my parents in Germany. ViaMichelin says its 885km, which is quite a trip. My furthest ever trip was to Cambridge, UK via Reims, France, roughly the same distance but in two days instead of one. The summer is slowly coming to an end, and if I don't take this opportunity, I will reproach myself the whole winter.

Of course it's not just my desire to eat asphalt, but since Martin, my professor, and my colleague Nik is going to be on a conference, and my colleague Sean is going to make holidays in China, there is not going to be much life at the lab. Plus I have a nice package of work ahead which I prefer to do without the interference I get.

But the most important reason is that the month of Ramadan starts, and I'd like to be with my family in this beautiful time of the year. Who knows what will be next year or after that, when either the last mile of the phd is reached, or the inflexible schedules of work life will finally get your humble narrator after he has spent 20 years in educational and academic institutes.

Today is Friday, and before the khutba the Imam mentioned that inscriptions for this year's Hajj are open, I saw a flashback image of all the Turkish people form all over the world that meet at Mecca, especially those from Germany, cheering at the sight of each other while carrying the sign that shows which city they are from. Well of course not only the Turkish... And now I realize that I forgot to pull my friend Asif to the Friday prayer, as I intended to. Asif, if you are reading this, remind me of reminding you to go together next time! That would be in two weeks.

Before I start preparing the trip, I write a bunch of emails and phone a lot of people because I am afraid that I will forget all the things I need to arrange with them in my distractedness when I'm traveling. I have to prepare and send some teaching material for the German class of those three kids whom I normally teach on Wednesdays and get the number of a friend who (very suddenly) moved to Germany from Switzerland. And I should probably get some sleep, too.

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning. (Rainer Maria Rilke)

It's almost a week that the Pope created a lot of fuss by using an obscure citation in a lecture. Among all the reactions, I liked most what Tariq Ramadan contributed. When I think about the Truth being limited by "reason", I can only think of Khidr a person mentioned in the Quran whose acts look unreasonable but as we gain more knowledge, it turns out they were more reasonable than we thought at first.

On this nightly browsing journey, I came across the story of Al-Hallaj. He did not end very well, but it's hardly him alone that can be blamed for that. It's quite interesting to read what he thinks about the people that call him a heretic and about the people that call him a good guy -- he says the ones that hate him are right. Translated in today's language this is an extreme form of self-denial. He got burned for the things he was saying, although his story lives on in countless poems.

Today I was writing code... this is not very surprising, because I do that everyday. But today I had exceptionally great fun, because I was cleaning up some messy part of our software that I have not written myself, and that nobody had ever asked me to clean up, and if I had not touched it would probably live on in its messy state forever. The maintenance work consists of disentangling programs from time to time, especially when there's several people writing them. And it was great fun. Pirsig expressed it beautifully in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the pleasure one can experience when something technical is done right. There are a dozen times when he inspects the chain of his motorcycle and greases it.

That reminds me that I have a motorcycle too, and the week starting from Sunday might be a good week to use it and make the big 1000km trip to my parents in Germany. This happens also to be the first week of Ramadhan. It is a wonderful time of the year, when friends come together to break their fasting and the day-to-day routines are exchanged for some spirituality. Probably, this is the time designed to disentangle the habits and little acts of ignorance that came to affect one's life, and replace them with a new life. A new life and new blog.