United States of America

Los Angeles & San Francisco, CA, August 2010

The main purpose of this trip to California was a business meeting with the electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla Motors, a popular Silicon Valley start-up in Palo Alto. I spent the weekend with the sales director of the American office and his wife in Los Angeles. After California followed some days in Detroit to meet with the same companies as mentioned below (they were still alive...).

Detroit, MI, November 2009

In late fall of 2009 I met several engineers at R&D centers of GM and Ford for business. GM was recently hit hard by the economic crisis. Both, Ford and GM were on short-time work and laid off many people. The city center was almost deserted. In 1950, the registered population of Detroit was more than 1.8 million. After several crises in the automobile business the head count was cut in half. Today less than 900'000 people live in the city.

Miami Beach, FL, January 2005

In the winter of 2005 I attended a scientific conference on microsystems in Florida to present my work which I pursued at the Danish Technical University. The conference venue was the Hilton Fontainebleau Resort Miami Beach just a stone's throw away from the beach. Of course, I couldn't resist sneaking out of a boring afternoon session and hitting the beach. The water and air was just right, not too hot and too chilly. But the subtropical sun was too much for my skin which was completely bleached from endless Scandinavian winter nights. I ended up with a nice red face...

Knoxville, TN, May 2005

In Knoxville I visited a scientific workshop at the University of Tennessee. This event was organized by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That's why I went to such a remote place in the Appalachian Mountains for a conference. The Oak Ridge Labs were established during World War 2 as part of the secret Manhattan Project (the atomic bomb project) and were hidden away in the forest for protection against attacks and espionage.

I spent some time after the workshop to travel the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. I stopped by at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the Cherokee Indian Reservation and in Chattanooga.

Boston, MA, October 2005

My last scientific conference trip in 2005 took me to Boston downtown. I used this chance of being back in New England to visit some very nice friends I met during an earlier work assignment near Boston.