About Me

My life started with my birth (who'd have thought...!) on 24 December 1979 in Gelsenkirchen - football supporters might know it under the name “Schalke 04”. In 1983 I moved to Marl with my parents and got a sister shortly after. Just in case Marl doesn't ring a bell: There is the Chemiepark - one of the biggest chemistry sites in Germany -, the Adolf Grimme television award and the artwork “La Tortuga” - a steam loco laying upside down.

Hobbies

You can easily guess my most important hobbies from the top menu of this page: The first one is, of course, public transport, i.e. Buses, Trains and Trams including their timetables. What I find especially interesting is the differences between transport networks, vehicles and timetables in different regions. But what's most impressive to me is still high speed trains, even though I have done some trips in ICE, TGV, Thalys und Eurostar in the meantime.
Beside public transport there's Languages, in which I take a rather wide interest: I have or have had lessons in five languages (English, Latin, Russian, French, Dutch), but don't speak all of them really good. I also spent some time reading about linguistics: e.g. with language families and their properties or phenomena generated by the contact of languages.
Well, when I'm not busy with buses, trains and languages, I often listen to Music. What I like most is all kinds of pop (from Alizée via Pet Shop Boys and Pink to Roxette), A cappella (Wise Guys, 6zylinder and [early] Die Prinzen) and Musicals (my favourite musicals are “Linie 1” and “Blood Brothers”). Since a few months I try to make A-cappella music myself as a bass singer of Popchor Goldbach (a young choir that sings mainly pop, musical and gospel songs).

School, University and Work

I also went to school (what a surprise!), namely to Goethe-Grundschule (elementary school) and Geschwister-Scholl-Gymnasium (grammar school) in Marl, where I passed my Abitur (A-level) in 1998. Luckily, I didn't have to attend a military or civil service. Even more luckily, there was a little notice in the newspaper about the new Logistics studies at Dortmund University, so there was an answer to the question of “what to study”. Of course, I gained some practical experience, too: with my internships at the haulier company van Eupen, the Zentralwerkstatt Prosper of Deutsche Steinkohle (a workshop for maintenance and repair of mining machines) and the public transport company Vestische Straßenbahnen, where I also worked beside my studies from January 2002 to March 2003.
In April, 2004 I successfully finished my studies. My “pre-thesis” (Studienarbeit) and thesis (Diplomarbeit) deal - who'd have thought - with public transport mainly by bus. The main subject of the Studienarbeit is timetable construction, in the Diplomarbeit it is the conditions for cross-border transport from Germany and France to Luxembourg.
After my studies I started another internship in 2005, this time with Locom, a logistics consulting company based in Karlsruhe.
Since January, 2006 I am living in Aschaffenburg. Here I am working as a traffic planner at DPD, one of the biggest parcel distribution companies in Europe. As the parcels follow a kind of timetable, too, my work is quite close to my hobby. It's that much fun that I keep telling everyone about my work and recommending everyone to send their parcels by DPD :-).

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