Hobbies -
Flying
- I've been a private pilot since 1989. I am a relatively low time pilot
with about 175 hours in single-engine Cessnas and Pipers. The
picture on the left is me flying a Cessna 172, Skyhawk.
The picture on the right is an aerial view of the Rose-Hulman campus. Click
on any photo on this page to see the larger version.
Skydiving
- I hadn't done it for many years until August 1998, but in total now,
I have made about 31 jumps and the latest jump was fall 2003 with Gabi. In the picture
on the left, 16 year old Lee Waite makes his first jump! The
next two photo's are from August 1998. The two pictures below are from
fall 2003.
Fitness - I enjoy jogging, swimming, and bicycling. I run and swim with my friends and colleagues, Jerry Fine, Janice Bossart, Gabi Nindl, and Rebecca Dyer. I have run in the Indianapolis mini-marathon four or five times and competed in the Terre Haute Triathlon several times including last year.
I have ridden the Wisconsin bike trail, RAGBRAI in Iowa and TRIRI in Indiana (approximately 1 week long bicycle trips). I like to ski although I am not so good at it. Several times I have taken a ski trip, with my family, to Leadville, Colorado at the end of winter term. Next April I hope to ski at the Rocky Mountain Bioengineering Symposium at Copper Mountain Colorado
Mountain
climbing/hiking - once again with Jerry Fine. In 1995 we climbed Ixtacihuatl
in Mexico. In July 1997 we climbed Kilimanjaro by the Machame route. I
have climbed Mt. Fuji, Hakusan and Tateyama in Japan. Some serious mountain
climbers would not call this mountain climbing at all but perhaps high
altitude trekking. The picture at the left is a photo
of Jerry Fine (right) and me on the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa.
In
July 1998 I went to Colorado with Jerry and his family to climb 14'ers.
You can see us on Mt.
Antero and Mt. Yale by clicking on this link. In
July of 1999 I climbed the highest mountain in Germany, the Zugspitze (2964
m) with some German friends. Here are a couple of pictures from the
Zugspitze. If August of 2003 Jerry and I went to climb mountains in
Ecuador. The picture below, shows us very near the summit of
Cayambe,
just a few hundred yards from the equator.
Reading - I enjoy reading in English or in German. If it's German it needs to be a somewhat simpler novel (nothing by Kafka or Thomas Mann). A couple of my favorite books are Count of Monte Cristo by Dumas (which I've read in English and in German), and A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens. I enjoy reading Len Deighton spy novels and I also have enjoyed reading Hemingway. Within the past several years, I've read Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer and Jakob der Lügner, by Jurek Becker, The Climb, by Anatoli Boukreev, Der Hahn ist Tot, by Ingrid Noll and Meister Wilhelm's Lehrjahre, by Goethe (in English), Im Treu und Glauben, (German translation of Winter) by Len Deighton, several Patricia Cornwell novels and several Harry Potter books translated into German.
Foreign
languages - I can speak and read German. I have lived in Japan and studied
Japanese for one year. I took about a year of Russian in college, almost
all of which I have forgotten. The photo on the left is
the largest construction site in the world - Berlin. I last visited there
in June 2002.
Travel
- I have lived in Germany and Japan and I have visited the following 30
or so countries on 5 continents: Canada, Mexico, England, Ireland, Denmark,
Germany (the former East and West), Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, France,
Belgium, Holland,
Spain, Italy, Portugal, Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Japan, Korea, China, Australia,
New Zealand, Malaysia, Fiji and Ecuador.
Oh yeah - I almost forgot the USA. The first time I left North America was in 1985 and my first commercial
airplane ride was in 1980. The picture on
the left is a kangaroo in Australia. The photo on the right is a village
in Ghana.
During summer 2001, I took a trip around the world!! You can check out my around-the-world travel journal here.
In summer 1999 I was living in Heidelberg, where I was working as a visiting scientist in a Heart Surgery Laboratory at the University of Heidelberg. If you'd like to read my journal from summer 1999 just click here. I was back in Heidelberg this past summer for the last two weeks in July. I was a bit too lazy to write a journal in summer 2000 summer. For July 2001, I was back in Heidelberg. The description of my 2001 Heidelberg visit is also included in the around-the-world travel journal.
In November 1999 I visited the Atsina Charity
Medical Clinic in Accra, Ghana. The ACMC is a free medical clinic
in Ghana. My Iowa State classmate, George (Komli-Kofi) Atsina is
the doctor at our clinic. Colleagues, Jerry Fine, Christine Buckley
and I make up the board of directors of this clinic. You can read
all about the ACMC at :
http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~waitel/ACMC.htm
and you can read about my November
1999 trip at:
http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~waitel/ACMC_visit.html
I was back at the clinic in
July 2001 and
June 2002..
In summer 2002 I also visited Kakum National Park in Ghana, I visited Germany
for the "Germany Today Program" as a guest of the German Academic Exchange
Service. You can see photos from any of those trips at (there are a lot of
pictures so it could take a few minutes to download):
http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~waitel/summer2002/
Here is a picture of the kids at the Village of Hope orphanage near Accra. They are a few of George's patients! We just bought a new property at the Atsina Charity Medical Clinic which you can see at the following link: http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~waitel/property.htm
