my name is Peter Hanßen. If you want you can write Hanssen and actually my parents were nuts giving me three more middle names: Ernst, Wilhelm and David. They must thought the same, cause my younger sister just got one short name. But what are names...just call me Pete.

   I was born on the 20. September 1967 in a small town in Germany called Kleve, where the river Rhein goes into the Netherlands. Nothing much to say about Kleve but it's always nice to come back home, drink a cold Diebels with my friend Robert, walking over the real green grass at the Lower Rhein and go shopping in Nijmegen.

   I actually like traveling and that has maybe something to do with moving. So after school and military service I moved to Aachen to study physics and to become a journalist for technical stuff. Because physics was pretty dull and Aachen was even more boring, I went to Berlin and became a geophysicist. I never got the time to work as a journalist but that's fine, cause geophysics is a real interesting and always changing subject. That's why I'm now in Edinburgh, Scotland after moving houses 7 times in Berlin. And finally I found a nice flat over here, which I share with my partner Stéphanie and our baby-daughter Maya, born on the 29 December 2002.

   Currently I am a post-doctoral researcher at the Edinburgh Anisotropy Project of the British Geological Survey after working and studying in Berlin, where my first daughter Ronja lives. But you can read more about my work over here.

   I really like traveling and the nicest places I've been to so far are Udaipur in India, Florence, Praha, the Seattle/Vancouver area and definitely Greece. You can see some of my photos on the page with the picture books.

   But what are places without friends to share it with. I absolutely like to go out dancing with friends, having some beer in a pub, drinking cappuccino in a cafe or go out for chinese food. I don't have one favorite sport but I like playing soccer, basketball, badminton and sometimes american football. That's because of a half year exchange program at the Juanita High School in Kirkland, Wa. And that's why I'm a fan of the Seattle Seahawks and I like to see my german footbalteam win: Borussia Mönchengladbach, but actually they had there best time in the late seventies.

   The colors I like most are orange and green combined with brown. That's probably the reason why expressionism is my favorite art style and I like the pictures of August Macke most. There's also pop art, pointellism or romantic which I like, so I occasionally go to museums and not only art museums. That brings me to architecture and the traditional mediterranean style, which almost gave me the kick to start studying this field.

   The music I like is hard to define. Well, it must be good :) So I got a quite strange mixture of Peter Gabriel and RadioHead, The Police and Vivaldi, TheThe and Prince, Cake and Jacques Brel. It's much easier to describe what I don't like: Bebop, Dixie, Metal, Kids-Techno and other junk like the Spice Girls. Maybe I start to play bass guitar again ...