Back in the USA

16 May 2006, 2050 EDT

I arrived back in Columbus yesterday after spending about five days in Bielefeld, Germany. I chose not to purchase the insanely expensive WLAN access offered by the conference hotel and instead relied on a nearby internet cafe–which was fine for checking my mail, but not so much for blogging. I have a couple of posts stored up, so expect to hear from me a great deal over the next week.

A few impressions from my first trip to Germany.

• Delta Airlines has very friendly service and pretty decent food. The “extras” on the plane–video service and so forth–left a great deal to be desired. Overall, I wouldn’t be adverse to flying Delta to Europe again, but I’d try to book United, SAS, British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, or any number of other carriers first.

• The trains in Germany do not run on time.

• CNN’s US broadcast is to CNN’s international broadcast as:

(a) People Magazine : The Economist
(b) The A-Team : The Sopranos
(c) The Backstreet Boys : The Decemberists
(d) The Da Vinci Code : Foucault’s Pendulum
(e) All of the above

• I still find Coca-Cola Light far better tasting than Diet Coke. I’ve come to the conclusion that Coke Zero, unfortunately, suffers from the absence of cyclamates.

• The tower of Sparrenburg Castle is sufficiently tall to trigger my acrophobic tendencies. The design of the wooden stairs upon which one ascends the tower didn’t help.

• Volkswagens do, apparently, grow on trees in Germany.

• Falafel and sauerkraut make a surprisingly tasty combination.

Filed as: Germany

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.