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!

pictures, pictures, pictures

I've posted another hefty batch of pictures onto my picasa.

They are of Nuremberg, Prague, and Olympia, Augsburg, and Theresien.

Nuremberg and Prague I've already written about. Olympia refers to the Olympic park where the '72 Olympic Games were held in Munich. Augsburg is an old medieval (and older actually) city northwest of Munich that I took a day trip out to. Theresien is where Oktoberfest is held every year inside of the city. The pictures for these three places tell as much of the story as is really necessary so I'll just point you to those. Viel Spaß!

Shane

Our Last Full Day Together

Today we woke up in Prague, ate breakfast in the hotel again, and hit the road back to Munich. I don't really know why, but we set out with only general ideas of where we needed to go. So of course, we got seriously lost in the Czech Republic, again. But it was a good opportunity to get to stop at random gas stations to try and get directions from people that didn't necessarily speak a language common to any of us (and by common to any of us, I mean either English or German). The drive back to the highway took us through a bunch of tiny little towns, through the hillside, in some cases with a view of mountains, so it was really a beautiful drive. Once we got back into Germany we stopped in Regensburg which is a nice little Bavarian city somewhat known for having some neat castles and stuff like that. And one fact that I've always liked, Regensburg means "City of Rain" in German... and very near to Regensburg in Bavaria still is a city called Feucht which translates as "Wet." Anyways, we actually had no idea what was in Regensburg to do and we all were pooped to begin with so all we did was stop in a shopping mall, get something to eat, and then continued back to Munich. Back in Munich we dropped off the car and I took Ian and Dave to a little beer garden by the River I've been to a couple times. I made them have O'batzda mit Brez'n (Mixed Cheese with a Pretzel), and of course a little beer to accompany the food (or was the food to accompany the beer?). In the walk back to the train station we picked up some pizza, stopped for some ice cream, and then just went back to Garching for the night. Overall I thought it was a really nice day, but pretty uneventful so not much to say beyond this. Tomorrow Ian flies to London, and then Dave the day after so for our joint adventures, that's it for now. So chances are my next update will be back to 'normal.'

8/1/07
Shane

Prague Revisited

After waking up and eating breakfast at the hotel (a breakfast which could only be described as "weak sauce"). We used the metro line to get back into the city center, or just south of the center in order to meander northward and hopefully stumble upon things to see. Holy Crap! Most of the day was spent in this "northward" progression and the first part of we really had no clear goal, so we just ran into things. Every building around every corner had this really neat and unique architecture to it and half of them had awesome sculptures just in the middle of two people's bedroom windows, and I felt like it had to have some equally unique and neat history behind it, but since none of us knew a single thing about the history of Prague we had no idea what to think of anything. I wanted to take a walking tour so that we could get some of that information from a local while seeing the sights but the idea didn't take. It was actually frustrating to me to be seeing all this really amazing stuff and not knowing a single thing about it beyond "ooh, that's pretty." It felt as though I wasn't actually there, but instead took a look at someone else's snapshots of their tour through Prague. This is almost the exact reason I'm writing all of this right now. All I have taken from Prague is pictures and personal experiences, no cultural exchange, no further understanding. So I'm trying to preserve those aspects I did get to hang on to.

Eventually we decided on going into the direction of the castle to see how far we'd get before fatigue set in. Before we crossed the bridge to get to the proper side of the river though we ran across a building which I could only assume to be a museum that was littered with statues, of who I could only assume to be philosophers, striking the most majestic poses ever. Only pictures can truly explain just how majestic this was. But let it be known, I want a statue just like one of these on my tombstone. Don't even need a grave really, just the statue somewhere. On our ascent towards the castle we ran into what I think was the sort of garden in front of the current Senate building. It had, again, some really awesome statues, fountains, and a crazy looking wall that I still don't understand beyond the pictures I took.

The road to the castle was a little on the steep side but once we got to the top, surprise surprise, it was amazing and huge. We all went back into picture mode since we again had no idea about the history of any of this stuff. We went picture crazy on the gates, a church on the inside of the gates, and everything else we stumbled across. At the top we kind of just sat around for a little bit to let our minds be blown. I'm still not even sure whether we saw the actual castle tower or not. When I first started exploring Prague I thought to myself that as nice of a city as it was I don't think I could bring myself to live there. It seemed as though it could really start to get to you. But then at this area I started to change my mind. The city can seem a little crazy, but they still have places around that retain their peaceful qualities. Not a whooole bunch, but just enough to make it seem livable.

We started looking for a place to eat while heading towards the general direction of the metro. Our food solution was to stop in two different restaurants along our way, each time ordering one meal and splitting it three ways. Worked out well I'd say, as we got to try some fairly varied things from completely different restaurants. On our journey back to the metro we kept on running across more awesome-ness of the city but by this time it was too dark for pictures to come out. For example, the Charles Bridge, which is an old gorgeous bridge with tons of statues lining it took us nearly half an hour to walk a tenth of a mile because of our (mostly failed) attempts to take so many pictures. After that we headed back to the hotel (although first had some sausage type thing at a little stand that I think we'd all rather forget about). Sitting here now I am positive that two days was not enough to see anything here. I feel like a day could have been spent in the castle alone, not just two or so hours. And the first night we were here we passed by other interesting things that we didn't come close to finding again but we didn't stop to explore because we were being hurried to go eat. In the end I think it serves as a small taste of the city and I'll have to come back at some point to really see the rest of it. There was simply no way to get as much out of it as possible in two days.

Shane
7/31/07

Ian, Dave, meet Germany. Germany, Ian and Dave.

Ian and Dave showed up on Friday, hence the day was almost completely filled with shuffling around baggages and people between the airport, Garching, and their hostel. Dave and I had a pretzel and a beer at the Viktualien Markt before Ian's flight came in but then met up with Ian at the airport, dropped off his stuff at my place, and had some Bavarian food in the city, i.e. Sausage and Beer.

Saturday I met them at their hostel and we headed to the concentration camp at Dachau. Well at first we headed to the actual city of Dachau, and since I had never been there before and had no idea where to go, I was naturally appointed as navigator. I decided to get us lost in the city center for a while before asking for directions to the camp. Upon asking, I discovered that the best way to get there was to take a bus from the train station we had gotten off at at Dachau. We were able to find a second best option by hopping a couple buses (buses which crossed at " J.F. Kennedy Platz") and met Robert out there.

Dachau as an experience was really neat and I would even say powerful. Everything is so perfectly preserved that at first it's a little too nice looking. But after living here for as long as I have I can definitely imagine Germans putting all the TLC in the world into making the lawn look gorgeous while ignoring heinous crimes behind them. Alles muss ordentlich sein. Not that Germans as a people are amoral, just that their attention to detail seems to sometimes prevent them from seeing the big picture. But that in itself is quite a strong stereotype that would be impossible to extend to the whole population. It'd be like saying every American drives a Hummer to work wearing cowboy boots and carrying a rifle.

Beyond that I really have no idea how to describe the experience... so I'm actually not even going to try. Miraculously my camera batteries were dead that day too so I don't even have pictures to refer to. Maybe it's better that way.

We used some information posts to find a tiny Bavarian Restaurant that was ridiculous to find (by German standards). We got into one of those situations there where the waitresses either didn't speak English, or I had somehow fooled them into thinking that I speak German, so I became the representative for the group. The place had no menus, and only three dishes, which she described to me in German while I tried to translate, and keep the details in my head, before explaining back to the group. A lot was "lost in translation" but I was able to get out "Schnitzel with French Fries", "Noodles with cheese", and "Turkey something." There being 4 of us and three dishes we ran the gamut. Despite the difficulties, that place was really good, and perhaps my favorite place I've found in Munich so far.

After this we headed towards the English Gardens where we promptly passed out in the grass for a couple hours. After that was the Chinese Tower where they have live music, beer, food, and also wireless internet... who would have thought. We stumbled upon a blockparty inside the city that was really neat where we had our dinner and listened to some Germans singing English music before the rain called it a night for us.

The next day Ian and Dave procured our valiant Steed and we headed off in the direction of Regensburg. Or we would have, but I had left my passport in my guesthouse in Munich. Those things can be handy this side of the globe, so we turned around about 30 minutes into our journey to grab it and by that time we decided on just cutting out Regensburg from this leg of the trip and headed towards Nuremberg instead where our Hotel was.

Somehow we ran into some sort of Block Party again! but it was really neat and all types of food (not just Sausages and Doener like at the other one). I had myself some Flammenkuchen (flame cake). I had no idea what it was at the time, but now that I've been educated by the Germans here I can tell you that it's a dish from the area of Germany near the French border which is like meat and cheese on a thin bread which is then thrown into a really hot oven for maybe 5 minutes (cooks really fast because it's really really thin) and then a large group of people are supposed to eat it really quickly since it gets cold really fast (again, it's really thin). Or that's how they'd do it in those regions. Here they just treated it like a pizza. But it was still quite good and recommendable. Ian and Dave went for some Curry Wurst (Curry Sausage), their sausage intake for the trip at this point at about threat level Orange, despite me trying to convince them that Germans don't eat nearly as much sausage as they had been doing and they have much more varied and different types of food, many of which had less risk of keeping ME up at night.

Overall, Nuremberg is a nice quaint little town. I felt fairly comfortable there since it's still Bavarian and more and more I feel like a "Bavarian"... or at least a permanent tourist of Bavaria. My vocabulary is especially southern, to the point where I think if I spoke normally to a northerner they would say something like "where the hell did you learn German?" Nuremberg was also unique enough in its own right to stand out from Munich to me. Both are nice nice places. The night ended with a bunch of wandering, some Doener eating, and some sleeping.

I think I've got no more narrative about this phase so I'm going to revert to some nice randomness which seemed to work out in the past.

-One day in Nuernberg and I seem to have met more non-English speaking Germans than in Munich two months of Munich. It would be expected that there'd be a little bit more but it seems like more than I imagined. Poor Ian and Dave don't always have it easy since I'm not always around and not always able to translate.
-I'm starting to build a taste for Pilsener beer... but still doesn't compare to a good German Helles or Weissbier.
-Prague seems to be a huge destination for German Tourists. Most signs are written in Czech and then repeated in German and English. (This point was explained to me later on. The Eastern bloc was a good vacation spot for West Germans since everything was so cheap by comparison, and East Germans couldn't go into the West so it was basically their only option.)
-I like the sound of Czech... it's a little softer and not so "wavy" as Russian and also uses the Roman script so it's actually somewhat possible to read.
-I've really had to go out of my way to not be sold all sorts of things in the middle of the street in Prague, legal and illegal. Scariest part is that they start by speaking English. Although nobody I've met recently has guessed me to be American... but I'm not sure if that's because only the people really bad at guessing guess or if it's not perfectly obvious. I usually get spoken to in Italian or Spanish if the person's native language doesn't yield good results.

7/30/2007
Shane

Prague

We drove to Prague from Nuremberg, using directions from our Nuremberg hotel to our "Prague Hotel". Everything about Prague makes it nearly impossible to navigate through it. Imagine Boston's crappy layout, but remove most street signs, and those that you leave are as far as we were considered a random collection of letters and accent marks, which just happened to be repeated identically in our map. To make it worse, no street is longer than about 3 blocks worth, where it changes name to something else equally foreign to us. So if you're trying to follow a map driving on one road, you look up to see what road you just crossed, and when you look back at the map you're on a new road. The names change so quickly that at first I was convinced they were just the names of the buildings, not the street signs.

But despite everyone being at their nerve's end my first impressions were that the city was really quite gorgeous and I couldn't wait to be able to walk around the city once we found our hotel. We got to the address for our hotel, which also happened to be very near the city center of Prague, and certainly the most crowded area, only to discover that it was some sort of monument. This lead us to reconsider the accuracy of our information. After calling expedia, we finally discovered that our address was completely wrong, were able to get some internet access thanks to this really sweet girl working at Europcar, and once we got the real address she helped us locate it on our map. I think we partially owe our lives to that girl. Our wrong address took us to the dead center of the city, hence the worst driving conditions I've ever seen, but the real address took us towards the outer edges (district 10 of 14, instead of 1 of 14). At that point we could smell victory on our drive to the hotel and so the ride was much more fun than the stress induced first section. We checked into our hotel and decided to brave the public transit back to the city to wander a little before the night was over and to get an idea of what we want to do with our one full day in the city. On our way to a tram line we stopped inside of another hotel to buy tickets and saw an old German couple trying to ask the receptionist for help but they spoke no English and the receptionist spoke no German. Ian ordered me to go play translator so I tried to jump in and see if I could help. Essentially they wanted to exchange tickets they had bought so I was able to find out for them that the man that does that wouldn't be available until the following day and they needed to come back then. I felt mostly inadequate, but I think the couple was really frustrated before I jumped in and they at least knew something afterwards so it wasn't a complete bust.

We ended up at a place where the guy had no clue what language we spoke (his first guesses were Italian and Spanish) that served 'set' meals with the description of being Czech. I don't know if they were actually Czech, but it at least was neither German nor American and it was good so who cares. They serve almost exclusively Pilsener beer in Prague, and I'm not a huge fan of Pilsener, but I've been getting myself used to it, and as far as Pilsener goes it was pretty good.

After dinner it was a little on the late side, and we were getting towards the last 40 minute or so of public transport so we walked to a busy pick up point for the trams and started our... debate... about which way to go. I was proposing the 24 line, North... Ian was a big fan of the general Northern direction, and I think Dave was a little partial towards the 9, South. We had fewer maps than suggestions, and were making no progress so I was able to convince everyone to jump onto 24 North as it passed by. As I had guessed, the 24 line goes practically right next to our Hotel and would have been perfect... if we had picked it up going in the opposite direction. Dave saved us a few stops in and we hopped off and started to figure out where we need to go to not be lost in the middle of the Prague for the evening. Nice of a city as it was... not a place I wanted to be lost at past 1 am. We went to a metro during our random scramblings where we tried to ask a worker there to help us with directions and her first sentence to us was "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"! As it turns out, my German helped us more in the Czech Republic than it ever did in Germany.

We spent so much time being completely lost in our first day in Prague that I think we are NOW some of the most directionally apt tourists to ever visit Prague. Have to be. This was only the first day though and I'm really excited to go back to the city in the morning to have a full day of adventure. Yay!

7/30/2007
Shane

The next few updates...

... will be incredibly boring. But what's new about that?

no that's not what I meant to say. I meant to say "... will work a bit differently."

Last week Ian and Dave visited, during the course of which we saw a fair bit of Munich, Nuremberg, and Prague. During most of the trip, while Dave and Ian were keeping up with their respective marriages (Dave to Donna, Ian to Mark), I would scope out whatever semi blank pieces of paper I could find in the hotel and write voraciously about the day. So now I have a stack of numbered papers (many of which have advertisements acquired in Prague, half in English and half in German, for massages on the back side) which tells the condensed story of our trip as best I could at the time. It strongly resembles the basic theme to Vonnegut's "Hocus Pocus" if you're familiar with it.

Anyways I'm going to work on writing and polishing these up a bit and posting them as soon as they're ready. So the next few posts will be these writings, organized chronologically by when I wrote them (which happens to be out of order of how they happened...), and with an extra date telling you when I first wrote them.

I have no working laptop currently, so pictures could be severely delayed, but they will come.

Shane

Berlin

Last weekend I met Cassie in Berlin. Oh Berlin... how to describe.

I got there using this carpooling website to meet people already going to these cities and then you just split gas with them essentially and it works out great usually. The guy that drove on my way to Berlin FLEW on the Autobahn. I was actually pretty sure that if the car was any more aerodynamic or god forbid had wings we would have been having lift problems. I was remarkably calm though considering I had trouble trying to imagine friends of mine that I would even agree to be in a car with going nearly that fast.

Let me start by explaining that it was the hottest day I've had to experience in Germany so far... it was on the hot side even by Florida standards (90s Fahrenheit... I think... either that or I've become a wimp this Summer) and since Europe has virtually no air conditioning the only escape you can get from the heat is finding some shade with a breeze. So after Cassie and I met we tried to walk around and see some sights but it was about 1:00 in the afternoon so it was at its hottest so we decided to find a park and some shade and hang out for a bit hoping it would cool down soon. Neither of us having slept much the previous night, we ended up passing out for a few hours in the Tiergarten under a tree. When we woke up it was indeed a little bit cooler... but still pretty awfully hot as far as I was concerned.

We walked around the city trying to find sights to see and just sort of wander... we didn't realize it at the time but we walked through a good 80% of a tour we took later. The most noticeable thing about walking around the city, this is on a Saturday evening mind you, is how just terribly quiet it was. It didn't feel like the capital of a fairly big country with a supposedly famous reputation for getting crazy... it was just... quiet. We scavenged together a dinner from a grocery store (where after speaking to the cashier there in German her first real sentence in response to me was "you speak English?"), did a bit more walking, a bit of beer drinking, and called it a night.

We took a 'free' tour of the city the next day which ended up passing exactly through most of what we had seen the day before for the first part, just with a lot more information, and sort of placing the historical events I had known to occur in the city to specific spots. The actual chronology of our day at this point is partially a blur and mostly unimportant so I'm going to drop that construct.

Compared to Munich, Berlin certainly wins in just how neat their memorials and monuments are. They have a Holocaust Monument which is just absolutely amazing. They stuck it right smack in the middle of the city, I think with the intention to make it absolutely impossible to ignore. I have pictures of it so I'll refer you to those to see what it is exactly, but the beauty of it isn't in the actual structures erected so much as the experience of being there and walking through it. I don't think I can describe it correctly like this so maybe you'll have to ask me personally about it sometime, but I strongly recommend this to you if you're ever in the area. I was actually reluctant to mention it or post pictures of it because the difference between seeing the pictures or hearing about it is so vast compared to being there and walking through it that I felt I would be doing it a disservice.

And on the spot of where the first Nazi book burnings took place they have another really neat monument. It looks almost like a window sitting on the ground. If you look at it at an angle you see shelves... shelves that are said to contain an empty space for all of the irreplaceable books that were burnt that day. And then looking straight down at it all you see is your own reflection. This translation is repeated in the captions of my pictures but the marker for this monument has the extremely fitting quote by Heinrich Heine (written over a hundred years prior to this burning, and whose works were burnt) which translates as "That was only a prelude, for where one burns books, in the end one also burns people."

In the end I think if I had to pick one way to describe Berlin it would be as a "recovering Schizophrenic." Berlin was originally many small villages that were sort of mashed together to form one city, and then after WWII it was split up for some 50 years. It's only been one city again for 17 years, and only been the capital of unified Germany since 1996. In some ways I feel like it's somewhat skittish and still sort of in the middle of integrating the lifestyle of West Berlin and East Berlin to make a single identity, not to mention the huge presence that the Soviet Union and the Allies have left there... maybe not as far as military presence, but historical... and you can just kind of feel it there. After our two days there I felt as though I had seen nothing of the spirit of the city... I really felt as though I hadn't been in Berlin at all actually. By contrast I really felt like I had started to feel comfortable in London after a few hours, Edinburgh overnight, and after spending one day in Munich I felt closer to the city. Obviously a weekend isn't enough time to really see any city worth seeing... but Berlin especially so compared to everywhere I've been up to now. But it's changing so quickly these days that I would imagine someone that grew up there would have the same problem if they came back for a weekend.

This is already way more than I thought I was able to write about Berlin. Ian and Dave are coming to visit at the end of the week(!) and the entire time they're here I'm taking off from work so I think my next adventures will be all about that time.

Mit freundlichen Grüssen,
Shane

ein kleines Update

So I've added some more pictures to my Munich album. For the most part they are relatively random and there aren't many stories behind them but I'll try to highlight the additions.

 -one church here has a series of bones on display, i don't want to know whose or why... it's more fun that way
 -I had the opportunity to play chess on a nearly lifesize chess board
 -We witnessed a hunting protest involving marching and dancing boars, birds, cats, and foxes.
 -So many of the churches here have dragon slayers... I think that's a part of the Bible often forgotten in the US
 -Found a Quantum Physics book in the Gift Shop of the Deutsches Museum titled " Schrödinger's Cat." And yes, that does imply that the gift  shop for this museum contains Quantum Physics books ... in German... also Mathematics and Chemistry books... among others.

One really neat little highlight was spending a day in the Deutsches Museum with Robert. This is essentially a massive science Museum... massive. To give you an idea Robert and I spent nearly an entire day there, from 10:30 to 5:00(when it closed), and by the end of the day I think I had seen maybe one quarter of the exhibits they had... and those that I saw we ran through a little on the quick side since we skipped almost all the displays which were in German since for me to read just one display may take 10 minutes so it just wasn't worth it. They have scheduled "shows" every now and then including one that incorporated loud bangs from strong electrical discharges and a Faraday Cage! They had a room to demonstrate some of the interesting results from Newtonian Physics, an example of which is a video I took (several actually) of Robert or Myself holding onto dumbells and spinning on a platform with our arms outstretched... then when you pull your arms in due to the conservation of angular momentum you speed up... this is exactly what figure skaters do in just about every finishing of a routine, that super spin effect. I felt like a little boy running through a toy store throughout most of the day because every thing was interactive, there was always some button to push or magnet to play around with or chemical to mix... such a great place. I hope to go back soon but I have other priorities so we'll see. For a geek like me though, this place is heaven.

That's all for now. I've been busy lately so more to come shortly, just wanted to appease the fan(s).

Shane

Freising, Cassie, Tantalum... Beer...?

Hello Hello,

I have new pictures and stories to share that I've been just sitting on so I wanted have an accompanying update. So... here it is...

And as a general notice, I've become absolutely obsessed with war memorials here... I'm really fascinated with how people view their past in general, even more so in Germany, so every time I came across a monument I would usually stand there and pull out my dictionary to translate the whole thing... until my friend here Robert suggested I just take a picture and translate it at home... so because of that I've got more pictures of monuments than anything else and I've translated as best as I can into the captions. I don't particularly go searching for these things either, I just run into them and go trigger happy.


- Freising -

A couple weekends ago my Portuguese friend Robert and I took a little day trip to this city just north of Munich, Freising. I feel like we did so little there but it was a really fun day. Our first order of business was finding the tourist information and there they suggested that we eat at this restaurant that was about 200 feet away from the Weihenstephan brewery. Weihenstephan is a separate little sub-section of the city there, and it's also the oldest brewery in the world, it was started in 1040. There's a picture of our meal... but I have no idea what it actually was... except that it was good. And the beer was incredible. I think it is the best I've had since I've been here and I'd be hard pressed to think of any time I had something better.

As an aside, I feel as though I'm starting to grasp the thing about beer here compared to say Gainesville. I think in Gainesville we could find most of the stuff I find here or something of almost similar quality... but you'd have to search, and that's the main difference. You can go to practically any restaurant in Munich (with the possible exception of McDonald's) and ask for a "helles Bier" and it will just about always be better than what you drive 30 minutes to find a specialty store in a weird part of town for in Gainesville. It'd be like being able to walk into a place like Applebee's and literally saying "normal beer" and getting something really really good... and for about the same relative price that they charge for crap like Bud back home too. I think I'm getting spoiled.

Okay, so after eating, Robert and I wandered around the city, trying to see some sights on a map we were given, but getting sidetracked a lot. We walked into some exhibit of a Freising window maker or something like that... but the man running it didn't speak any English and the exhibit was entirely in German so the details were lost on me besides "please come in, have a look around, it's free." We did make our way to this really neat church on a hilltop where a lot of pictures came from. It had some really neat statues inside and some candle lit plaques in the basement. I really liked it in that city though... I would definitely go back.

- Munich -

This past weekend Cassie's family was passing through Munich so she spent the weekend here and I got to be a tourist with her and her family. I haven't really had many chances to be a tourist here so it worked out great. As far as my pictures go though, the Munich album is my repository for all the pictures I've taken in the city since I got here... most are from this weekend of tourism, but some are from just wandering the city with a friend or by myself... and I'll be continually adding to it since I'll be continually taking pictures in Munich.

Saturday I met up with Cassie, and we went to Sergey's place first, dropped off Cassie's bag, had a short rest, and then went to the city center to meet her family. Sergey guided us to a nice Bavarian Restaurant in Munich where I had some Bavarian meat dumpling type dish which was quite nice. We headed towards the English Gardens where Robert met up with us and towards the Chinese Tower for BEER by the liter (that's how Bavarians like it). In the water under some bridge we saw a bunch of people in full wetsuits surfing... I had always heard about that but never been sure if it were true... surfing in Munich... who would have thought. The night ended with Sergey, Cassie, Robert, Jandy, and Nick having a couple beers at a little pub/restaurant type deal and then Cassie and I heading back towards Garching.

Sunday we visited die alte Pinakothek which is an art gallery in the city. After leaving there we stumbled upon some big festival celebrating immigration or something like that we're guessing... there was Bavarian dancing and what seemed to be Turkish food but it was really neat. i recorded video of the Bavarian dancing but I'm currently having technical difficulties getting it online... so that will have to wait. We met with Robert again at that point and later we continued on to the Deutsches Museum since it was free for the last hour it is open. That's a gigantic science museum and it's pretty awesome. I need to spend about an entire day there at some point since in one hour Robert and I barely finished looking through a single exhibit on Mining.

- Tantalum -

So if any of you are having trouble sleeping lately, this was written with you in mind. I guarantee you that by reading through what I'm writing next, you will be on the verge of falling asleep. You can thank me later.

I've been asked now and then about what my research entails and now that I'm starting to make a little progress I can (somewhat) answer that question. I'm currently studying small systems containing the metallic element Tantalum, to try and compare it to other theoretical work done or experimental results found. I'm trying to fine tune our method and basis sets so we can have reasonable accuracy and also be computationally efficient. The basis set is just the collection of functions you use to describe a system... the more you use the closer you get to reality but the more the computations cost. Most people normally don't spend as much time on the basis sets as I have to, but I'm the first person in this group to do calculations on Tantalum so I have to start from the beginning. The end goal is to study the catalytic properties of silica supported Tantalum complexes although I'm not sure I'll ever get to that point before I leave. My next step is to just calculate tons of different molecules for the sake of comparison. Tantalum is named after the Greek Myth about Tantalus. That's also where the word tantalizing comes from. So, do deal with Tantalum, is equivalent to suffering... that's the moral of the story.

Well now I'm being beckoned to lunch and I've avoided working long enough anyways... hope you enjoy.

Shane

Mozartburg, the city where Salz was born.

Today is a holiday here in Germany (before anybody asks, not Memorial Day) and so yesterday a few of us took a day trip out to Salzburg. Salzburg is the city that Mozart was born in, and they take that very very seriously. Around every corner you see Mozart plaques, memorabilia, souvenirs, or just plain portraits. And then for the actual sites you can see his birthplace, where he lived, bars he frequented, where he once took a dump, I mean the city really takes that man seriously.

The collection of people was Sergey, Manu, Siham (very nice Algerian girl from our research group), and MS (short for something that I don't really remember actually, but he's from Paris). We started off in a garden with a live Orchestra that was quite good, and a series of statues of Hercules wrestling Antaeus representing the four elements.

We moved on to walk around the city, climbed up to the main tower of the castle (and when I say climbed, that is definitely what we did) had lunch at this place with a beautiful view towards the top of the area where I also took pictures which I used to make the panorama with that I'm attaching to the email. It was really quite a beautiful view... and it's a beautiful little city.

There were a few exhibits inside the castle area that we visited. After that we walked back down, had a short rest at some cafe type place down near the city center and then eventually continued on to climb some last little mountain to see what the view would be before heading back to the train.

Other than their obsession with Mozart, Salzburg really was a great city... and I would gladly go back sometime. It was just very peaceful and quiet... relaxing even. More so than Munich is I can say. But it also had some character to it, and history. We found a cemetery and some catacombs on our climb up to the castle that were very nice and interesting and I imagine that if we spent more time there we would find more little hidden pleasant surprises.

And the people were really nice, most of them seemed to be able to speak any language you could throw at them. Our group kind of confused them I think and so a waiter tried to give me my total in French and I just stared at him. But other than that after hearing us speak once they would speak English to me, German to Manu, French to Siham and MS, and either German or English to Sergey depending on who.

Overall it was a nice day, and a little email can't describe it at all. I posted pictures on my picasa. The last picture is a panorama from near the spot we had lunch. The quality on picasa doesn't really do it justice so I've attached the "medium" quality version I have which is still quite large. It was a really amazing spot. We had to wait on the girls to go to the bathroom at that spot and I just spent the entire time we were waiting taking pictures of that view.

Until the next time I do something interesting...
Shane

Aus Deutschland

So,

last I left everyone I was escaping chemical spills and gallavanting around Munich. Hmmm, what's new?

Well I started my "work" for one. Thus far I'm doing basically a training program on the use of Gaussian which is a very popular computational chemistry program. For those that are interested (all one of you) the sorts of things I've been doing with this training are doing a series of calculations on a particular system, say the atomization of formaldehyde, with different computational methods, different basis sets, different orientations, and then comparing the results against each other and to experiment as well as evaluating the flaws and strengths of each particular method (does it cope with spin coupling, is it computationally efficient, etc.). Everything I've done so far is very well known and studied both computationally and experimentally but once I'm done with this training section I'll be moving on to some problems where the answers aren't known and in some cases the existence of an answer isn't entirely certain... that's the more interesting part of research. And it seems like the professor is interested in getting me to work on some solid state stuff so maybe that will be my area.

Everybody in the lab is really nice in general. Nobody here understands me if I speak normally in English so I feel like at the end of the summer my English will get worse since I'm constantly simplifying myself and slowing myself down. I share a room with Egor and at about 6 PM everyday when we start to get very bored and anxious for the day to be over we start to chit chat about Russia or America and comparisons of the two. I have to say I never thought I'd learn so much about Russia while in Germany, but I won't complain. And I think I've made a couple good friends out of Sergey and Manuela. Sergey is also Russian, but Manuela is German, from central Germany type area. Sergey has spent a few days just showing me around Munich and going to biergartens with me and whenever possible Manuela (Manu for short) joins us. I went running with them the other day. They ran about a total of 10 km I think (which is around 6 miles). I however was not able to keep up with them and I think I only managed maybe 4 miles. They literally ran circles around me at certain points. But it was still fun although I'm still very sore. Monday is a holiday here so we may go up to the Alps or do something like that on that day. Oh and Manu told me that my pronunciation in German is actually quite good which made my day... it's just everything else about the language I have to fix.

Also, another Russian from the lab gave me his old bike today so now I have a bike to get myself around! The main city area where I can buy groceries and such is only about 10 to 15 minutes away by bike and I believe Munich itself is maybe 30 by bike so this will be very useful and I'm excited about the prospect. I mean it's a crappy little bike but it goes so I'm happy.

FOOD! I actually haven't been eating much since I've been here but when I do eat it tends to be in the Mensa here. Mensa pretty much translates to cafeteria but I feel like they are different experiences and even when people speak english here they still refer to it as the Mensa so I will do the same. I have this habit to look at food and think to myself "hmm, what looks the strangest and least enjoyable? Ah yes I will try that!" Since Mensa food is not necessarily the best it hasn't always worked out for me. I also don't pay attention to the names or signs since I can't actually read them so I couldn't even tell you what it is. For example, today I had some asparagus like vegetable (although certainly not asparagus) with a cheese sauce, rice and salad. And another day I had basically a sweet roll with some strange fruit filling in the center. I think this drive to try the stuff that looks the strangest to me might just get me into trouble at some point but so far no harm done. I have had trouble trying to find some German restaurants because apparently Germans don't eat German food. Everyone tells me all about great Greek restaurants or great Italian restaurants but nobody has recommended to me a "good" German restaurant.

I can't really think of much else to add to that for now and it's getting late here so I think I will call it a night. I've started to post my emails on the blog I made so if I happened to forget someone (and I hope I haven't) in one of them they are all here. Maybe in the future I'll put something up there that is not exactly an email but maybe you'll have to check to find out! And I'm still working on getting some good pictures but for now I have some on my picasa account, although they're mostly crap.

I will try to say more later, but I'm going to go to sleep now. Gute Nacht.

Shane

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