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.