This is an announcement for the paper "The geometry of Minkowski spaces --- a survey. Part I" by Horst Martini, Konrad J Swanepoel and Gunter Weiss. Abstract: We survey elementary results in Minkowski spaces (i.e. finite dimensional Banach spaces) that deserve to be collected together, and give simple proofs for some of them. We place special emphasis on planar results. Many of these results have often been rediscovered as lemmas to other results. In Part I we cover the following topics: The triangle inequality and consequences such as the monotonicity lemma, geometric characterizations of strict convexity, normality (Birkhoff orthogonality), conjugate diameters and Radon curves, equilateral triangles and the affine regular hexagon construction, equilateral sets, circles: intersection, circumscribed, characterizations, circumference and area, inscribed equilateral polygons. Archive classification: math.MG math.FA Mathematics Subject Classification: 52A21 (Primary), 46B07, 46B20 (Secondary) Citation: Expositiones Mathematicae 19 (2001) 97-142 Remarks: 56 pages, 28 figures The source file(s), fig10.eps: 54544 bytes The paper may be downloaded from the archive by web browser from URL http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/0708.2900 or http://arXiv.org/abs/0708.2900 or by email in unzipped form by transmitting an empty message with subject line uget 0708.2900 or in gzipped form by using subject line get 0708.2900 to: math@arXiv.org.