Nice

We are into the final days of the competition, but it is remarkable how calm everything is. I'm working long hours, but not crazy hours. I generally leave before 8 pm every day, and I'm always the last person to leave the building. I'm not complaining, its just an observation. It allowed me to join Saori for dinner last night at her place (we cooked a huge pot of pasta for me since the only things I'd eaten that day were a bowl of museli and a bag of salad), and then we went to a party at her friend's house.

The party was in Bad Canstatt, a more suburban, newer development of Stuttgart across the river. Bad comes from the historic baths, but its also not an entirely unworthy name since the area is very bland, 70s and 80s architecture, and host to the regional stadium and fairgrounds, so the area gets flooded frequently with drunk and noisy revelers.

The party was an eclectic mix of friends of Saori's coworker. There were a few architects, a concert violinist, a chemical engineering scientist from the Max Planck institute, a fairly young and drunk student of English and PolySci, and a structural engineer who mostly works on tensile fabric structures in Saudi Arabia. This Latvian is a bit younger than me, and he hasn't traveled outside of Europe. We were talking about the city of Stuttgart and he commented that he liked living here better than Munich.

He said that Stuttgart is just 'nice', it's a nice place which is nicer than Munich. 'Nice' is a great summary of Stuttgart: the buildings are nice, they have a variety of nice neighborhoods, the shopping is nice, you can walk up the hills around the city and look down at the city. The center is not too big, the traffic is not bad, there's some good restaurants. The quality of life is good.

It doesn't have the cultural treasures of Berlin or the energy of Hamburg or Frankfurk, it's not historic like Aachen or particularly beautiful (although it's an undeniably 'pretty' city).

It feels like a city in search of itself, a Houston or an Atlanta, (but much, much more further along urbanistically than both of those!) To be fair, there's still a lot of Stuttgart I haven't seen, nor been to the very famous ballet company here.

You're so... nice.
You're not good, you're not bad, you're just nice.
I'm not good, I'm not nice, I'm just right!
 I'm the witch- you're the world!