I wrote a final writeup of SimStan experience and posted it on my blog. Read all about it!
SimStan, the story of a summer project

Learned the basics of playing the oriental game of Go, and played some games at Gokgs, where I was promptly trampled. Knowing the rules does not equal knowing strategy!

Unfortunately, wasn't able to find a bar that was showing the Tour de France. I was already behind schedule when I asked the staff of the cafe I was in.

Ken had me eat "Something Round" for dinner. I went for the obvious and had Anchovy pizza on the corner.

My first left turn

This alley looked promising, but found no newspapers and got some strange looks from workers in the back.

So on to the next left

Found some free magazines outside of an organic grocery store

And counted the number of grammatical articles (the, an, a, etc.., but in german: die, der, das, den, etc) per the instructions.
Vowels in Headline (Value A): 7
Articles in headline story (Value B): 74

Then found a nice cafe where people were reading. This guy seemed pretty absorbed in his paper

...so I instead talked to the barista, who was reading this book when I walked in:

I was lucky to remember the German word "Schnitzeljagd" (Fillet-of-meat-hunt), which roughly corresponds to an English "Scavenger Hunt". Once I explained that I was playing a game, showed her Ben's instructions, she stopped thinking I was insane and thought it sounded like a lot of fun.

For those of you who enjoy hearing bad German, here is an audio recording of that conversation.

Book: Das Tibetische Buch vom Leben und Sterben,
(The Tibettan Book of Life and Death, by Segyal Rinpoche)

Number of pages in book: 511
Random page chosen by accomplice: 268

Word 74 on the page 268
"alle". Not so interesting, so we go with the next word: "Daseinsbereiche". : Turned out that this landed us straight in the middle of a Buddhist poem, and "Dasiensberieche" is a very obscure word that doesn't show up in any dictionaries I could find. My accomplice described it as "different ways of being".

Full text of the poem in question:

Und bis sie nicht vom Schmerz geschieden sind,
möge ich der Lebensquell
für alle Daseinsbereiche der verschiedenen Wesen sein,
die bis zum Ende des Universums reichen

Google gives this translation:

And not until they are divorced from the pain,
I let the source of life
for all the different realms of nature,
until the end of the universe

My next instruction was to do a local Google search for the word. This was a prettty random collection of results! The first result was a police station. But [Value A] "number of vowels in headline" was 7. The 7th result was Ver.di.

"Its approximately 2.3 million members make ver.di one of the largest independent, individual trade union in the world. As a multi-service trade union we look after people employed in over 1.000 different trades and professions, making us fit for the challenges of the 21st century.

Truly random!

I hopped on the train to get their, and followed Google's instructions to a T, but...alas!...could not find the place! Instead, I found a cute little park, and in the middle of this park, a small island that is home to a single black bear.

I failed to get a photo before the bear was taken inside for feeding time, but here is his island:

(When I got home, a little further sleuthing revealed that Google had me going to the completely wrong place. Ah well.)

By this point I was already running behind schedule, so ducked into the first shop I could fine to buy some postcards. Per Ken's instructions, I sat down in the nearest Café and wrote out postcards to everyone who gave me their address last week. Hope you get them soon.

And the last event of the day was a sneaky one by Laura. It's the SimStan equivalent of asking the magic Genie for 10 more wishes! She instructed me to plan a trip to happen *after* the SimStan trial week. Well, I looked into flight prices and rideshares, and emailed some friends about making a trip to Basel. We'll see!

Tuesday

Tuesday I woke up feeling a little sick, so slept in and started late with Rob's instructions to "write about the last few days." I worked for an hour downloading and uploading photos and composing the first parts of this entry but, again, ran out of time. "Thinking about Birthday presents" happened while I showered.

I was ready to head out the door when my neighbors and flatmate announced that they were cooking dinner that I *had* to join them for. I must admit, days of running around the city by myself left me hungry for conversation. And days of eating on the run had left me simply hungry. The meal turned out to be a bigger affair than I expected, of fresh lamb cooked wiht basil and cream sauce.

So I had a very late start off to the Altes Museum to see Nefertiti. Further compounded by me making a wrong subway transfer along the way. Nevertheless, here is me with the amazing Nefertiti:

And here, I must admit that Josh's event of "Be A Street Musician" had me nervous when I saw it that morning. I don't have a guitar and didn't know where to get one in time. Would I have done it if I had a guitar with me? I hope I would have. Josh: consider this a rain check for me to be a proper street musician later this summer.

So as I left the Altes Museum about 6pm, I sat down on worked on Roberts event of "Write a Letter to yourself 10 years from now." This was a deeply moving experience, more than I expected. Robert gave me only half an hours, but I got sucked into it and wrote 4 pages over the course of an hour or more with the setting sun falling on the Dome Cathedral behind me. To add to the surreal effect, a Hula-dancing class started behind me in the grass, filling the air with German-accented Hawaiian chants and swaying yellow skirts.

Phew! And so ended the first test run of SimStan.

And as you've certainly noticed, I wasn't very good about giving feedback on events as the days were passing. :(

I'll analyze this, and other lessons learned, in another post shortly.

I was talking about SimStan with Jan Slaby late last night during my night out event, and we observed that my time hasn't been especially crazy, but has given me a heightened awareness of how much of a normal day is consumed in "stupid little stuff": doing the dishes, finding mismatched socks, debating whether or not to bring a jacket, chatting with neighbors in the hallway, running out to buy some milk and then realizing that you've accidentally purchased whipping cream.

The other observation, which I should have seen coming, is that I am much more comfortable skipping out on tasks that assigned myself than those put there by my friends.

Thus the lack of updates in the past days, as I've consumed the "SimStan Maintenance" events with stupid little stuff.

This experiment has also shown the fluidity of most events: I missed lunch appointment on Friday because of trying to shift times to meet Crisi, and a lack of feedback from the system when the date got changed. Then on Thursday I thought I would have lunch with Manuel instead, but he go stuck at work and needed to shift to evening. My goals of "not making any decisions" and "having my whole day scripted out" are clearly not happening. Life is slippery!

The final observation is how much of my "normal" life is filled up with reading my feed reader, Google news, and talk sites like Metafilter. Never realized how much time I spend there until they were taken off the schedule!

Interesting that only 2 people have dared instruct me to spend money: Cornel to buy a online game for playing, and Josh to buy tickets to a Spanish Sci-fi comedy show.

There is more to be said about how the "experiment" is running, but alas, I'm already running behind schedule today... :)

Summary of the Days

On Thursday I enjoyed a nice nap, and then was off to the Kunst-Werke museum for some modern art, courtesy of Ken. I almost missed over half the museum because the second exhibit was titled "Organic Food Store." From in the main hall I saw the door labelled as such, decided I wasn't hungry, and thought "gosh, this sure is a small place."

The art was cool. Super detailed photographs of unusual but somewhat ordinary objects. E.g. a series of photos of a baseball cap woven out of bamboo. To me, however, the real star was the museum itself, which had a very cool feel just to be in the space.

After that it was a Skype call with my parents, who seemed genuinely amazed that by fiddling with Facebook they were able to grab some of my time!

Friday began nice and easy with reading an online essay from Robert about "The Search."

Cornell wanted me to play some old-school video games, but I was thwarted by stupid regional problems: even though I was buying a "download", their system could not understand how I could be in Germany but be buying something with a credit card from the United States. Even paypal didn't work, as it had a U.S. address on file. Ugh!

Rob Johnson had a nice event scheduled: to send a note of thanks to the director of the Arestua Mountain hut that I have visited so often over the past 10+ years. Per his instructions I tweeted my thanks, and also posted some photos.

Friday night was Josh's Sci-Fi comedy show in western Berlin. (Outside The Ring, no less!) The show was fun; wordless physical comedy in the vain of Blue Man Group, but scenes taken from Sci-fi tropes and R-rated.

(No idea why I look so serious...)

And lastly, Fabian scheduled me for typical late night (i.e. early morning) in Berlin. I made it only to about 4am. Oh well.

I'm rushing to get the first SimStan update published before my next appointment on the Spree river. Running late mostly because I goofed off for most of the time that I was supposed to be fixing SimStan. (Hmm...goofing already on the first day?!)

There have been the usual technical hiccups, with several people not able to access the site at all, and some users in Europe experiencing very slow load times. I've done some patching, but let me know if you're having any trouble.

The first "real" SimStan event I did was yesterday, an event from Ben Casnocha:

Write in my journal Make some notes on my current thinking of living in Berlin, and also ask myself the question, "What's my craziest belief?"

Here is me doing exactly that, at my favorite neighborhood café, Johann Rose.

(The craziest belief turned out to be, well, really crazy. You already know I'm a bit crazy for doing this project, so I feed your imagination any more.)

This morning began bright and early (yaaaaaaaaawn!) at 8am with a task from Saskia:

Good Morning and Know Your City - Walk
Have a short walk in an area of Berlin you do not know yet but would like to see. Get a Brötchen for breakfast on your way back.

I decided to walk north from my Kreuzberg flat, as that's the area I've explored the least. Turns out there's a reason: it's mostly boring buildings. But it was interesting to observe the entirely different crew of people that you see on the streets at this hour. John Sander and I had the same discussion about the East Village in New York: how it seemed like a completely different neighborhood between, e.g. jogging at 7am vs coming home late at 2am.

Anyways, I did see some cool graffiti, and had a nice sit by the river.

Ken had me work on a book proposal, something that we've agreed to keep each other accountable to this summer. I had a very productive time, writing a few pages and coming up with some good analogies scribbled in my notebook. Alas, forgot to take a picture. :(

Crisi had to cancel on me for lunch, which raises as interesting SimStan question: how to handle last minute changes like this? I'm thinking of removing the "lock-in" of events. If the lunch hadn't been locked, then Crisi could have re-arranged the schedule for me, or converted the time into a nap. Which is what I ended up doing on my own.

Adam, ever the practical New Yorker, had me do some IT consulting for him and create an online survey for his property management business. You can take the exciting survey by following this link. (Thanks Adam...I'll get you back for this at our next workout!)

Then it was time to email everyone and ask for their address. This is really cool: a set-up preparation for a later event. Nice!

And that's it for today. I'm excited to see my schedule filling up. More thoughts and reflections later. Thanks guys for playing along!

Not much to report on yet, as I still haven't sent out the invitation email. :)

See About Simstan to read what this is all about.

Getting excited!