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.