Bizarro Me.

So, I have a friend here who did his Ph.D. with my postdoc advisor and his postdoc with my Ph.D. advisor. He spent the last year in California while his wife was back in Germany, while I spent the last year in Germany apart from my wife in North Carolina. My wife is an MBA, his wife is a Ph.D. in economics. He has about a 45 minute commute to the office in Bonn, I will have about 45 minutes to Columbia. It is rather strange how parallel our lives have become.

Well, we have had the pleasure of knowing each other in grad school because our advisors work together often, in organizing a conference together and now living in the same country the last two months. It has been a real joy to have a good friend here who has been living this same life, just to have coffee, talk about life or math, and simply to laugh at things we both have become fans of in an attempt to distract ourselves the last two years (both of us are big Flight of the Conchords fans for instance). Plus, we have started working on a really cool project looking at Strichartz estimates on domains with corners, which has been a lot of fun to discuss.

In any case, tonight I was able to have a nice dinner at their house before the movie since they very generously were donating a box to pack all my books. It was only this past weekend they were finally able to move in together, just one week before my grand experience ends. They seemed so relieved and happy to simply have their lives back in order, it gave me hope for experiencing the same thing soon. However, there is a tinge of sadness in that I only wish they had been here for more of the year. I immensely enjoy their company and will miss out of the chance to get to know them better since they are really just getting settled as I have one foot out the door.