I'm Fulbrighting in Bavaria, it's near Germany.

I was having this discussion last week about how sometimes I don't feel like I'm living in Germany. All of my friends from my language course are. But I'm doing my Fulbright in Bavaria.

Bavaria is often compared to Texas in the US, both my the people here and the people visiting. It's not that there are really any similarities with the people themselves, but more their status in the rest of the country. There's this sense that I've gathered from the few people I've met from Texas which is that Texas is the true America, the other 49 states are lacking on this intangible quality which makes us... well... not Texas.

The difference here is that Bavarians are more of the idea that they are NOT German, but rather Bavarian. There's a Bavarian movie where someone gets asked, in English, where they are from and they respond "We're from Bavaria, it's near Germany." And that's the Bavarian attitude in a nutshell.

But the difference between Bavaria and the rest of the country isn't just in attitude, there are cultural and language differences too. For example, usually when Americans think of a stereotypical German they're actually thinking of a Bavarian. Lederhosen, Dirndl, that silly hat with a feather in it... those are all typical Bavarian things (just like most foreigners think I own cowboy hats and guns). Every region has their own style of traditional dress (in fact every district in Munich has its own style, and I've been told there was once a day where you could tell where someone lived by what kind of Lederhosen they wore), what one normally thinks of as Lederhosen is usually somehow the Bavarian style.What I still find amazing though is that Bavaria is the only region I know of where people still wear their traditional dress for normal occasions... like going out on the town for a night. Other regions have their dress and it appears for festivals once in a while but, at least to my knowledge, it is very rare to be in a state capital at 4 in the morning and see someone leaving a bar in Lederhosen. That's pretty commonplace in Munich.

And Bayrisch is called a dialect but in reality it's more of a separate language. When Ben and Marty came to visit I had to translate menus for them. And they both speak German quite well, but there are just some stark differences. Hähnchen is Hendl, Brötchen is Semmel, you greet people with Grüß Gott or Servus instead of Guten Tag, you start meals with An Guadn instead of Guten Appetit... and those are just the superficial differences. There are postcards that have the same phrase written in English, Standard German, and then Bayrisch and it's pretty weird. "Ich liebe dich" comes out as "I' mog di" in Bayrisch. Native Germans have trouble with this stuff too, not just learners.

I really do love Bayern but I often have trouble justifying it to, well, anyone. Especially non-Bavarian Germans. If you tell a Bavarian you love Bavaria they just accept it, as though you just informed them that water was wet. But the rest of Germany sort of despises Bavaria. I once met a guy from Berlin that had been living in Munich and hating it. And it was interesting because he had spent time in the South in the US and loved it there. So we had this disagreement, where I loved Bavaria for basically the same reasons he loved the South, the regionalism, the cultural pride, the contrast to the rest of the country, but he really didn't like Bavaria and I had no love of the South.

I went to the Nuremberg Christmas Markets a little bit ago and now the real deal is coming up. I'll be spending that in Munich with some friends and then heading out to gallivant around for a couple weeks. I hope this finds you well and you have a wonderful holiday, preferably with snow.

Frohe Weihnachten und einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr from the land of Oktoberfest, Haxe, Weisswurst, and Weissbier,
Shane

This Shane has had better...

birthdays that is.

Let me start by explaining what I mean by "this" Shane. I mean not the other one. Or the other infinitely many other ones.

A month or two ago I got obsessed with the podcast of Radio Lab. One of first recordings I listened to was an interview with Brian Greene, a physicist at Columbia. One of the ideas he supposes in the interview is this: there are infinitely many of you, exactly like you in every way. Not only that, but there are infinitely many realities that are completely identical in every way except that my walls are painted blue or my hair is blonde. Basically, he says every possible reality exists somewhere. In all honesty I disagree with the argument given in the episode. I don't think, based on the information given in that interview, there is necessarily an infinite number of completely identical Milky Way galaxies. But the idea fascinates me.

The idea fascinates me so much that I often come back to it in some of the strangest ways. When I choose the Käsespätzle for lunch, I think to myself "there are infinitely many Shanes that just chose the Spaghetti." When I think about funny things in my life I think "there are infinitely many Shanes that carved a Roger Moore pumpkin instead of a Tom Selleck pumpkin." Infinitely many Shanes are actually fluent in German by now.

Normally my optimistic side comes out. I realize that I'm one of the Shanes belonging to a universe where I got this opportunity to be in Munich and I have fantastic friends and family and life is just fantastic for. And furthermore, I'm not in one of those universes where a piano fell on my head on my way to work this morning.

But it's not always so peachy. Somewhere out there, there's a Shane who is the trophy-husband of a rich beautiful woman that let's him just do science experiments in the basement of their mansion (Honey, can I have a few hundred thousand dollars to expand my compute cluster?). Another Shane single handedly defended earth from alien invasion, thus becoming a legendary hero. There's even one that had a great 23rd birthday. It just wasn't this one. I mean it wasn't disastrous (that happened to a different Shane) but it wasn't very nice. Long ago I had to cancel awesome weekend plans and go to an internal workshop with my group instead, which kinda blew. And then on the day itself, I just worked. Actually my highlight for the day was leaving work early enough to go grocery shopping before the stores closed. I had wanted to go out and do something but I suddenly felt really tired and cold (which was weird because my apartment isn't even cold) so I just bundled up until I felt warmer. I ended up falling asleep until about 1:30 AM or so when I promptly stood up, walked to the bathroom, and puked my brains out. Yep, I ended my birthday (at least in the time zone that counts) with some awesome food poisoning. On the grand scheme of things that's not bad for a "worst birthday so far" but still... not cool.

The upside is that the internal workshop (which was yesterday) actually turned out to be pretty good and informative. And then last night I had a sort of birthday dinner with Robert. We went to Steinheilstraße 16, which is both the address and the title of the restaurant which according to one friend has the best schnitzel in Munich. I have to agree. I think the size alone almost made me want to cry at the beauty.

Also noteworthy: that's the first picture to be publicly available taken with my new camera. Yay! Only took me like three months to get that whole picture taking dilemma worked out. Here are the second, third and fourth pictures. I have no idea what this structure is, but I just like posting pictures again.

That's all I've got for now. Til next time (with pictures!)

-your (not another Universe's) Shane

Two Months in Ten Minutes

I'm a lazy bum, I'm sorry. The first part of this post I wrote about a month ago and then went to do something else thinking I'd come back to finish it... but that hasn't happened yet. Here's that part!

I tried to write some account of things I've been up to over the last month or so but bored the piss out of myself and could only imagine what it would do to you. Instead, here's a bullet-list of fun facts with accompanying support.

Bicycles are fun. I now own a bike, which I used to travel around the big parks in Munich and check out all the Fall foliage. Experiencing Fall for real was been really fantastic... let's see what I say once I'm in Winter.

The Rhine is pretty. No really. I took a trip towards the center of the country and did some town-hopping up and down the Rhine with Ashlan and Chris, the highlight of which may have been a boat ride upstream. Since I'm too lazy to write a recount of that I refer you to Ashlan's.

It pays to lift TVs for old German men. While wandering through the tiny town of Boppard during this Rhine trip I was stopped by a German man standing outside his home. He asked me if I could help him and for some reason my immediate response was, "yeah, of course!" I helped him lift up a new TV onto a wallmount, which took all of 30 seconds, while Ashlan and Chris talked to his wife. Then we got a chocolate bar as a reward. Not bad I say, not bad.

Now the rest of this post will be the same format but written now. Notice the utter lack of details all because I'm an idiot and waited a month before writing anything.

Clichés can be fun. I went to visit my favorite Russian drinking buddy, Sergey, in Bremen, very far up in Northern Germany. One of my favorite things about my friendship with Sergey is how much we can bask comfortably in each other's stereotypes and just marvel at the German way compared to ours. Sergey met me at the train station and we started off speaking German before I decided I wanted to be able to say things to him and he decided it'd be good to practice his English while he could. One of the first questions he asked me in English on our walk back to his home was "What can you drink Jack Daniels with?" This was a clue: We are going to be drinking Jack Daniels tonight. And this is what I'm talking about. Sergey wanted to have something to drink together, had never tried Jack Daniels, and figured I must be an expert on it. The next day, after touring Bremen all day, which is a pretty neat city, Sergey had organized an American themed party with some of his work friends and enlisted my help to cook, of course, Hamburgers. To go along with the very American Hamburgers (which he even put tiny American Flag toothpicks into!) we had some liquor... from Cuba... pretty much exclusively because Sergey knows trade with Cuba is illegal in the US and he likes to tease me about breaking my home country's laws while abroad (last summer we did this same ritual with Absinthe).

Bremen is ironically obsessed with the Brothers Grimm. I mean most German cities that have any connection to the Brothers Grimm are exceptionally proud, but Bremen is proud of the story "Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten" or "The Bremen Town Musicians," a story about four animals that decide to become musicians in Bremen. The problem with this is that the animals never actually make it to Bremen. In fact Bremen really has nothing to do with the story, except that it is being made fun of because these old decrepit talentless animals think they can surely become musicians there. But that doesn't stop Bremen from sporting all sorts of statues and memorabilia. I don't get it.

Altbier is the bomb. Another nice weekend I had was with Marco in Düsseldorf, the land of Altbier. It was a really cool weekend, despite both of us losing a single glove. We both lost our right glove too. Weird.

Munich in white is pretty. On the ride back from Düsseldorf it snowed like mad. The five hour drive from Düsseldorf to Munich ended up taking about twice as long so that I didn't show up to Munich until 3 in the morning, well after most of the normal public transport has stopped running. The upside is that I was pretty much the only person in the street and the entire town was white. There were hardly even footprints in the snow. I flagged down a tram driver who I think felt bad for me and took me as far as he could even though I'm pretty sure he was only on a service drive. The ride from Odeonsplatz to a few blocks away from my place didn't take long but was pretty surreal. Really beautiful too. The next morning the snow plows had made their way through so that the streets and sidewalks could actually be seen again but I was really glad to have seen that spectacle. Also really tired.

Students don't know what they want. I've been a TA for my professor's class "Einführung in die Quantenmechanik" (Introduction to Quantum Mechanics). After about three weeks of the class hearing me butcher their language one of the students asked me to speak English to the class. I asked if everyone agreed and then when they did I spent that class, as well as the next, speaking mostly English. Then the class had evaluations for their teachers. My class's only comment to me was that they wanted me to try to speak more in German. Come on! Now I just speak whatever I'm spoken to in.

Without a camera, I've been relying on other people to prove to the rest of the world that I still exist. Now, I can pass on a couple of those proofs. The first example comes from our small group trip to Andechs, the Monastery just outside of Munich that has been brewing beer for about 500 years. This picture was taken at the top, after about a liter of beer and some Haxe. Mmhmm.

Left to right we have Sergey (Russian, not the one in Bremen), Alena (Russian), some stranger, and Duygu (Turkish).

We had a symposium in honor of my professor's 65th birthday and it was well documented by members of our group, which means a couple pictures exist of the group. Yay!

Call me crazy, but when I look at myself in this picture all I see is Ian. Forgive my position in the background.

A nice collection of the group. This was however after two hours of teaching and then two hours of sitting through scientific talks so I'm in somewhat of a daze.

Now I have a favor to ask. Keep on bugging me to keep this thing more up to date. I'm apparently failing with the self-motivation.

Auf da Wiesn

Today Ben, Marty and I visited Oktoberfest. This is the sort of experience that can only be described with detailed minutes. Thank you iPod Touch.

1:00 - 6:54 Ben snores
6:55 wake up
8:06 show up at fest
8:11 at the Paulaner tent
8:11 first prize for best legs
8:26 random guy from tent waves at crowd; first rumblings
8:47 first reference of the Bromance; thank you Miya for this wonderful vocabulary
8:50 larger rumblings; random cooks wave
8:51 random cooks take pictures of us taking pictures of them
8:56 Shane on wooden walkway to door
8:59 Ben and Marty both get a single foot onto the wooden board
9:00 doors open; entering can only be likened to being pushed violently through the birth canal; Ben was screaming
9:16 Shane sees his first beer wandering around
9:18 sit down; yes Italian neighbours, we speak a little English
9:47 received our first beers; Prost!
9:58 we see sausage from a distance
10:06 we share an absurdly pathetic round of high fives for our accomplishments: getting into a tent and finding a seat
10:10 we share fist bumps (terrorist fist jabs?) in celebration of choosing a good tent
10:32 hottest girl we've ever seen wearing a Dirndl; picture at 10X zoom
10:40 scrape together all of our money to calculate how much more beer we can buy; counting every penny
10:42 high five for having enough money for two more rounds
10:54 second beer; cheers/whatever Italians say/Prost!
11:02 band starts; we decide to come tomorrow also
11:04 we toast Fulbright; wonder whether Reiner knows/cares what portion of our money goes to alcohol
11:18 Ben and Marty see two guys escorted out by "Fashion Friends"
11:35 Ben professes to be drunk
11:39 Italian neighbours tell us the international opinion of the US is going down
11:40 we toast to Bush being too stupid to be president; Ben abstains from drinking
12:18 Ben leaves the tent because he's too scared to wait in line for the bathroom
12:23 Shane tells a guy from Nebraska that his goal for the year is to find a Bavarian girl; being published is secondary
12:41 Marty and Shane both note that Germans love to hum Seven Nation Army
12:50 Marty and Shane profess to be drunk; also meet the first Europeans that profess to only speak a single language
13:02 Nirvana is played, but people still hum to seven nation army
13:13 third round starts; Marty and Shane still have no idea where Ben is
13:37 the sun comes out. Huh?
14:28 Shane and Marty learn the way to get a Bavarian girl is to choose one and say hi... When pressed about what the other factors could be their German neighbours answer "alcohol"
14:48 Marty and Shane learn how to say cleavage in German (Ausschnitt)
15:00 after three hours of wandering Ben emerges from the Frauenkirche sober... Hung over even. This was unknown to Shane and Marty.
15:40 Shane and Marty exit tent; why is it so bright out?!
16:07 why didn't Matt call us?!
16:23 the three reunite at a coffee shop by Münchner Freiheit
16:52 Shane finally admits to himself he drank three liters of beer already today. So did Marty actually. Ben only had two.
18:15 Shane and Marty are sobering
18:45 Shane and Marty are hung over
19:58 Shane is passed out
22:17 it is unanimously decided to not go back tomorrow

I'll miss you Marburg

When I started the language course in Marburg, I apparently stepped into a black hole of writing. To be fair it's entirely my fault. I mean, I'm principally a procrastinator (then maybe a Chemist?) and there were always other things to do than write... so now that it's 6 weeks later and I'm back in Munich on a national holiday I've run out of other things to do instead of write.

I think it would be impossible to recount everything that we did over this time. Not only impossible, but boring and worthless too. What I'm going to attempt to convey is the overall feeling that I, and I think everyone I was close with in Marburg as well, have when I consider that period of time, even after only a few days of it being over. Brace yourself.

I think my overall feeling for Marburg is tied closely to, and thus well explained by, my relationship with my friend Ghislain. Ghislain lived on the same floor as me in my dorm and we met while making dinner in our shared kitchen one night. It was probably about 4 of us silly Americans, Ghislain, and a friend of his. Ghislain comes from Cameroon and has been living in Germany and studying for a couple years. The national languages of Cameroon are English and French, which means he has a mother tongue, French as a second language (which is nearly perfect from what I understood), very very good German (from studying and living in Germany), a passable amount of English (he can understand pretty decently and speaks more than he would like to admit), and I think some basic Spanish as well. The point of that list is to explain that my relationship with Ghislain exists almost entirely in German, but since he does know some English he's able to translate words for me here and there. My first impressions of him were that he was amazingly patient with my crappy German and just a really nice and fun guy. Our ability to communicate was stunted at first, but as my German grew (which was in a big part thanks to him) we were able to understand each other much better.

One of the ways this group of Fulbrighters chose to pass their time was to hold amazing Potlucks on a weekly basis, amazing because for some reason the group was filled with god-damned-amazing cooks. Since Ghislain, as already mentioned, is just a super cool guy I started inviting him to our Potlucks. Not surprisingly (did I mention he's super cool?) he meshed great with the group and so we all ended up spending a lot of time together. We talked about life in Germany, Cameroon, the US. We laughed about each others mistakes in German (apparently one does not visit toilets in German). We discussed whether the question of gay marriage is a moral question or not (this required some new vocabulary on my part, including 'to procreate'). So a big part of this experience was getting to know this awesome Cameroonian guy, an experience that I've never had, especially not in a foreign country AND language. I think it's noteworthy that this was my first friendship auf Deutsch... a language which is neither of our mother languages. That's a milestone.

My last day in Marburg Ghislain saw me off at the train station. We got some innocent bystander to take a few pictures of us, including the one above, and said our goodbyes. It was my last goodbye in Marburg. I received an email from him later in the day which ranks up there with the nicest e-mails I've ever received. The gist of the email was that he had a great Summer getting to know all of us and getting his first real contact with Americans (although according to one of the employees at a Döner shop in Marburg, I'm not a real American). He said we changed his general opinion of Americans such that he no longer believes us to be as arrogant as the world seems to want to believe we are. Here's a little excerpt:

ich freue mich echt eure Bekanntschaft gemacht zu haben..deine zuerst..du bist wirklich ein netter mensch, du bist ruhig, ehrgeizig..ich kann soweiter nennen...du bist einfach ein wunderbarer Mensch..bleib so...das ist gut.

which loosely translates as:

I'm really happy to have made your (plural, as in ours... there's no distinction between singular and plural you in English but there is in German) Friendship. Yours (this time singular, as in mine) first.. You are really a nice person, you are calm, ambitious... I can keep on naming... You are simply a wonderful person... Stay so... that's good.

The nice part is this is basically exactly how I feel about him. My justification for talking about Ghislain was that he's somehow symbolic about how I feel about Marburg, so now it's time for me to clarify that. Our course in Marburg was this really tight period of time, with a solid start and a solid end. But the results of that course -- the friendships, the experiences, the sentiments -- will stay with me more vividly than any other 6-week period of time thus far in my life. I doubt I'll ever go back to Marburg, but I'll keep the memories, the feelings, and (I'm positive) many of the people close to me for a very, very long time. This of course includes him and all of my Fulbright friends. I consider it kind of a magical time. I think these pictures prove that magic.

these pictures courtesy of the lovely Rachel

I'm off to meet a couple of my boys and explore my beautiful city for the day, before hitting up Oktoberfest tomorrow. Sorry again for the long delay, but at least you were saved from pretending to read my droppings. Hopefully I'll become more regular again and you'll be pretending much more often. Also something to look forward to is that with increased regularity, the size and consistency should be more... digestible.

That was a disgusting metaphor.

-Shane

Life in Marburg

I mentioned the principle reason we all came to Marburg is to improve our German, and that's where the large chunk of our time goes. We've gotten into this habit of meeting at 8:00 in front of our dorm and walking to class together (about 10 of us) after stopping for coffee/breakfast at a bakery on the way. Everyday from 8:45 to 12:30 we have a language course. As of last week I am now in the fourth group, which is going swimmingly. Then we break for lunch. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday we have a course on German culture, which includes such topics as the German federal system, an overview of the German political parties, and discussion on some of the major topics facing Germany today. Tuesdays and Thursdays we have another two hours of language after our lunch is over.

After this time, well, mostly everyone splits up. I've been diving my time mostly between climbing, working out, and running random errands. I (naturally) made friends with the other climber in the group and we've found this really neat little climbing gym in Marburg. It is just a room that's next to an outdoors shop of sorts. There is no administration or employee or anything like that at the climbing gym. In fact the gym itself is about the size of my dorm room, but all the walls are bouldering walls. The members simply rent the key, at a dirt cheap rate of 10€ per month and go whenever they feel like it. It's a tiny room but it's been nice and challenging so far, and I can't complain about the price at all.

There are also three of us (I and two others) that got ourselves a five-week membership at a gym near the train station. I lost a few days trying to find out how to get a membership to the climbing gym, but since then I've been going lifting on my non-climbing days. There's nothing really too special to describe here, but it's been nice and fun.

The days that I neither climb nor pump iron I'm usually dead tired and just go shopping and go home. Most nights involve just reviewing what we've done in class a little, maybe reviewing some other things I have been feeling weak on (as in German things) and then passing the hell out. Because that's tiring.

Weekends have been cool here. We have I think every Saturday off to just explore around. So yesterday, we had a medieval fair of sorts, so 5 or 6 of us picked a time to meet and headed over to it. As always happens here, we then ran into a couple more groups of about the same size once we got to the fair so our numbers were in constant flux. Regardless, we enjoyed the fair. There was lots of food, mead, beer, tea, smithing, axe-throwing, and some stage performances. And it was neat because, unlike every medieval fair I've experienced in the US, this took place outside a castle that actually existed during the time period they were mimicking. That is pretty cool in itself.

Sundays we have excursions to old castles, neighboring cities, or just important things to see. Tonight we're going to a pub crawl in Marburg as a group, so we're all pretty intrigued to see what this will contain.

So yup, that's what life is like here. Exciting eh?

Grimmburg

On Tuesday I left my cozy little Munich and caught a train or two out to the city Marburg, in the state of Hessen. Marburg is a nice little German town, with about 80,000 residents and 20,000 students. There’s a saying in Marburg that a lot of cities have universities but Marburg is a university. Coming from Gainesville, which is nearly half student, it’s not a big deal to me but it’s nonetheless very nice place. The Brothers Grimm were very active in this area and they are quite proud of that, so in keeping with my tradition of renaming “burgs” after who they boast, I may just refer to Marburg as Grimmburg.

I’m here for a 6-week language and culture prep course for 38 (about half) of the Fulbright recipients to Germany. We started our Marburg adventure with a two-day orientation mostly with the Fulbright people just giving us tips on life in Germany and then we were thrown to the staff at the university who will be running the actual course. There was a lot of PowerPoint and a lot of eating but it was pretty fun.
The treatment we’ve been getting from the University of Marburg and Fulbright in general has been pretty fantastic. Really, it was all this that gave me the first inkling that maybe Fulbright is indeed a big deal. Maybe. I mean, the President of the University had dinner with us our first night here, which is pretty cool since it’s a reasonably large university (about 20,000 students). I doubt Bernie meets with incoming Fulbrighters.

The language course started on Thursday and has been pretty sweet so far. They split us into four levels, and I got thrown into the third. I think the fourth level is for people who are nearly fluent but just need to improve some for their project, and the second level is for people that have studied some things before but maybe not fully, so our level is somehow sandwiched in between there. I think most of us have learned all the basics before, we just need a little help with some specific or advanced topics and need practice speaking and expanding our vocabulary. I feel pretty comfortable in this level, but I have been considering moving up just because I think if I am severely challenged I could learn a lot faster than if I’m mostly comfortable. We’ll see though, I’m going to ask my teacher(s) for advice first (yeah, we actually have two teachers that rotate).

My time here has been really fun though. One of the coolest parts of this orientation, that I didn’t even consider at first, has been just meeting all the other Fulbrighters. We come from all over in every sense: all over the US, every field imaginable, and every personality type… but everyone is really nice and we’ve been having fun getting to know each other. It’s this huge group of very nice, interesting, and smart people just clinging to each other because we really don’t know much else around here. One friend Keith (who comes from Southern California and is an opera singer) described the experience we’ve all been having as “what we thought college would be like” and it’s pretty accurate. It’s a really good experience though because at the end of these six weeks, we’re all going to have a bunch of contacts, which can (most importantly) translate into free lodging and tours of cities all over the country. It’s just been a fantastic time of networking and learning German. The only problem is we speak way too much English, although the members of my class have almost entirely agreed to start speaking German to each other from today on. It may suck for some of the people that aren’t able to understand but we’ll strike some balance.
My camera broke on me… I have no idea why or how but until I either get it fixed or just buy a new one I’ll probably be picture-less… I’m probably sadder than anyone else is about this since we’ve seen some pretty beautiful things. I have however been telling my friends to go picture crazy to make up for what I would have taken and they’ve been good sports about it. So, I’m really looking forward to getting some good German practice and experiencing more of Marburg and, of course, chronicling these experiences here.

Landing

Grüß Gott, München!

Munich has, thus far, given me a very rainy hello. My first weekend was mainly Robert catch up time. It also happened to be a big parade through town.

I met him at his place and we made this bitchin' salad for lunch. We ate this masterpiece on his porch, which worked well because it was the small portion of the day where it wasn't raining, and then continued on to look at the parade. However, we didn't stay very long. Did I mention it was very rainy? After the parade, we split to run errands, and then met back up to watch a double feature of Iron Man and Hulk in the one really good English theater. Overall, it was a fun night.

After a little over two weeks here, I have to say: a lot of things just haven't changed. However, some things are just a little different.

One of my favorite differences is having my own office. I mean, Egor was a great office-mate... but it's very very nice to be able to talk to yourself in the middle of the day without having someone think you're crazy. Besides yourself that is. Come on, my office even has my name on the outside of my door. Beat that!

Just like last time, I started off my stay in the dreadful guesthouse. Ian, Dave, and Cassie can all attest to the crappy crappy conditions of said guesthouse. One upside compared to my last stay is that every once in a while I found a wireless signal so that I could get online... but that was rarely.

The difference is this time I got out of the guesthouse. Robert is on vacation for the next few weeks so I'm staying in his place during that time. It's a cool place just up the street from the central train station with two nice flatmates too: Antonio who comes from the west coast of Mexico, and Felix who is German.


View Larger Map

Other than that I've just been catching up with people and re-experiencing some of the city. Last weekend was a celebration for the 850th birthday of Munich. I took this picture of a big armored Lion there. Supposedly it danced and stuff, although I missed that part. All I can attest to is it's size... and that there were at least two of them. On Thursday the group had a going away party for Manu, who is leaving to work at Bosch in Stuttgart. Then Friday night I ended up going out with Antonio. We went all over. I mean all over. Including an "over 30" club... that was weird.

I stay here until I leave for my language course on August 12th. Until then I'll be working a little and looking for apartments a lot. Maybe even climbing a ... medium amount...! Here's to hoping the current residents of apartments want to live with an American chemist! Wish me luck! Woohoo!