I have to say that I was a little bit skeptical at the beginning of the task and didn’t really know what the sense of this whole thing was.
Usually you can choose your friends. It was unusual for me to simply be assigned a new unknown friend without having choose him.
The first task helped me to understand what kind of book my new friend was. I quickly understood that this was a different type of book than I was used to. First there was no version in the ETH library available. The only available version was in Einsiedeln.
So, I went there for the second task. When I got into the library, I was very surprised. Books several hundred years old piled up several meters around me. The librarian then gave me a brief introduction to how to read and threat the book. That too was a new and exciting experience for me.
I loved rummaging through the pages. My new friend has fantastic illustrations of several old buildings. My friend is very old, so I had to treat him with the greatest care.
It was the personal contact that took our friendship to a new level. Before, we only knew each other from the Internet, but when we saw each other it was clear to both of us that this would be a very special friendship.
The other tasks then became more and more digital and technical. The third task already made it difficult to find relatives and ancestors of my friend online. Unfortunately, there were only very few traces.
In the fourth task of digital text recognition, my friend was unfortunately too old and too complex. We had to go our separate ways, but that doesn’t mean that our friendship has ended.
In conclusion, I would like to say that it was a very exciting experience that I can recommend to everyone. Maybe it would be great if there were more tasks where you actually sit opposite of each other.