In the summer of 2019 I was able to spend four weeks in China. One week during The 37th Annual International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (just "Lattice 2019" by the people in the field) in Wǔhàn (武汉市) and three weeks during a summer school "Frontiers in Lattice QCD" in Běijīng (北京市).

This is the first of a series of articles about my trip. You can find the whole Series via the China tag. The following map shows the cities that I've visited in China to give you a rough impression.

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This trip to Groningen is the sequel to my last bike trip to Utrecht & Holland. My brother was finishing up his studies in Groningen, so I took the opportunity to visit him there and take a look at the city.

The booking process via the telephone was quite cumbersome last year, so this time I just searched the connections for one that was suitable and booked it in the Reisezentrum at the main station in Bonn. The process was really smooth as the agent just entered my details, I payed with debit card and got printout of all the tickets. Again there was a slew of documents for both ways of the trip:

1. Travel itinerary
2. Train ticket for me
3. Bike ticket
4. Reservation for bike rack

The connection that I got had a bunch of transfers:

Bonn → Düsseldorf → Arnhem → Zwolle → Groningen

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København has been on my list of cities to visit for a while. Recently my friend Chris's girlfriend started her PhD in that city and moved there. He had invited me to visit them there, and that it what I have done in this trip.

As the city is known for its cycling infrastructure, I have done this trip with the bike in mind; similarly to the trip to Utrecht & Holland.

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In September 2018 the collaboration that I am part of, the European Twisted Mass Collaboration, short ETMC, had one of their bi-annual meetings in Poznań, Poland. This time I got to attend the meeting as well.

As usual I have researched train connections first. At the time of booking there were only connections with around 5 transfers and a bus connection over the border. Trips would have taken around 12 hours from Bonn to Poznań. However at the time of writing this article there seemed to be a somewhat sensible connection taking about 8 hours:

• Bonn to Köln with IC
• Köln to Berlin with ICE
• Berlin to Poznań with EC

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Going on bike trips around Bonn is not so much fun. The roads near the Rhine river are too small for pedestrians and cyclists going both ways. In the city the bike infrastructure feels like a timid afterthought. During a vacation to Zeeland in the Netherlands a couple of years ago we had amazing bike trips. At some point I wanted to do a longer bike trip in the Netherlands, and I just did the first one of them in the region of Utrecht and Holland. I took my bike in the train to Utrecht, rode it from city to city and took it back home in the train from Rotterdam.

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