BAH!

So I was just about done writing that previous email to everyone when there was a chemical spill in my wing of the building and we had to evacuate the building for the day. I had been in the building just long enough to sit down and write the majority of that email.

So then I found Egor again, we met up with more people from our research group and after a while went to the Mensa (cafeteria). The food was so-so but different than I'm used to so it was a nice experience. We had a table of like 8 people filled with me, five Russians, an Asian girl (I haven't actually spoken to her yet so I don't know from where), and a German girl. The Russians spoke a lot of Russian and I understood nothing.

We had some coffee, played some table soccer, and I learned some bad Russian words everytime someone would score. Then myself, another Russian (Sergey), Manuela the german girl, and an Algerian girl from the research group all went into Munich together. The two girls went shopping while Sergey gave me a pretty decent tour of Munich along with a lot of the historical type things.

Munich is quite beautiful. I hadn't planned on going into the city at that point so I didn't have my camera with me but I'll be here so long that I'll have plenty of opportunities. I'm definitely going to go back and revisit mostly everything I saw there.

There was a really neat souvenir shop type thing attached to a Museum there that just had tons of science books in German, like introduction to group theory and algebra, electricity and magnetism, relativity... like real science books in German... at a souvenir shop. I'm cutting out a lot of detail but eventually we found our way to this Italian restaurant and had some food and beer. Then we met back up with Manuela.

Previously everybody had been speaking to me almost exclusively in English (with a couple exceptions of people asking me if i speak any german in german). But with Sergey and Manuela I just started to speak German whenever I had something to say that I could get out in german and eventually they started to respond back and say things to me in German, although it's very hard because my level of german is so low compared to their level of german or english.

We decided to go to the Cinema to kill the rest of the day. We picked out some movie, called "How to Cook Your Life", that looked like it might be interesting and I thought it was going to be in German so I would just get some fun practice with my listening skills. It turned out to be all about this guy that practices zen in baking in California so the entire movie was in English with subtitles.

But at that point we called it a night and I caught the train back to Garching and passed out quite quickly.

Sergey was a really good tour guide and we got along really well and he and Manuela were both being really nice and helpful in General. Everyone has been in fact so with their help I'm doing quite well. And people have begun to speak to me in German a little so I'm glad for that but hopefully moreso in the future.

I think I need to start some work so I'm going to sign off for now but there will be more eventually.

Shane