People

At the Creative Places + Spaces conference in Toronto last year, I met a couple of colleagues from Breda University in the Netherlands, who run a number of creative industries-related courses - but in a leisure management context, which is quite different from the approach we're taking at QUT, but also includes exciting new concepts such as ' imagineering'. This week, Peter Horsten and Arend Hardorff are in Brisbane to visit QUT as well as a number of other local organisations (such as Michael Doneman's Edgeware) and explore opportunities for further collaboration. Last night, Ann and I took them out for dinner at the Tibetan Kitchen, and ended up chatting until the restaurant staff had to tell us in no uncertain terms 'we're closing now'. Let's hope we can maintain the connection - good to see you again, guys...

Frankfurt
Well, this European journey is almost at an end. We spent the last few days visiting my mum on Ibiza, taking in some summer sun and sampling the local food (we bypassed the plethora of dance clubs advertised everywhere, though). And in what's likely to be a once-in-a-lifetime moment, Ann and I got to hold the real Oscar awarded to Casablanca as best picture of 1943, which now lives in the El Palacio hotel alongside a range of other movie memorabilia. It's about as heavy as you'd expect!

Hannover, Germany
We spent the last few days on a brief visit to my home town of Hannover, via a brief detour through Berlin and the Hurricane music festival at Scheeßel, to see Australian sensation Wolfmother. (Luckily, the storms which led to the cancellation of the later days of the festival only hit after we'd already left again.) This is the first time in six years I've been back to Hannover, and only the second since I left Germany for Australia in 1994. Strangely, I'm finding myself in a position of seeing Hannover (and Germany more generally) through the eyes of a tourist rather than those of a native, which is somewhat disconcerting - albeit a tourist with better local knowledge than many of the football fans and other travellers currently traversing the country.