Jena and the start of the PhD
After four intense months in Dresden, during one of the hottest summers I have ever lived through, time came for me to move to what was suppose to be my home for the entire PhD. The small university town of Jena was chartered in 1230 and its university was founded in 1548. It is best known for having been the home of the German Romantic movement, home of such intellectuals a Friedrich Schiller and Wolfgang Goethe. Walking through the small university town it is easy to find many a blue plaque identifying 'X" house as the home or birthplace of some well-known, long dead personage. What fascinated me the most was that it had managed to remain so small, for so many centuries, somehow it felt unchanged -minus the hideous communistoid tower right smack in the middle of an otherwise medieval/early modern town centre- since the 13th century. This feeling was helped by the fact that the medieval Catholic Church, only one in the town, had been Catholic since its foundation back in th