A bit of Germany

Okay, so to start I had my first week of classes. Here's a brief schedule.

Monday:
Stat discussion 10:15-11:45 (meets every other week) in Garching
Stat lecture 12:15-1:45 in Garching

Tuesday:
Organic Chem Lecture 10:00-12:00 in Garching
Organic Chem Discussion 12:00-1:00 in Garching

Wednesday:
Construction of Traffic Infrastructure 8:30-11:00 (it's an English taught Graduate level class that Kristina and Tim might be taking... and I'm hoping to get 400 level Technical Elective credit for... pending approval) at the Main Campus
Novellas of German Literature 12:00-2:00 at the LMU
Genocide in Eastern Europe 2:00-4:00 at LMU (hoping to get Non-western credit for this but kinda doubtful... Kristina and Tim are taking it too)

Thursday:
Organic Chem Lecture 8:00-9:00 in Garching
Organic Chem Discussion 9:00-10:00 in Garching

and that's it! granted two of those classes are still waiting for approval in the US so I might end up dropping them... so we'll see what happens. But I have Fridays free again! Yay!

Anyway, so that was my school week... then Friday I hopped on a train to Cologne to meet James who I'd never met before. We've got a group of mutual friends and he's in the Netherlands on Spring Break this week with a EuroRail pass. I got in around 8 pm and we introduced ourselves and wandered around looking for dinner and then just around the city. Headed back to get a club recommendation... James was looking for the Industrial German music scene... well, apparently that doesn't exist in Cologne. Just everywhere else in Germany. We took a 20 minute tram to the recommended spot and walked in... it was after midnight on a Friday night. The place was completely empty. The bartender looked surprised to see us. We left.
The next morning we headed over to the Cathedral and wandered around inside. I said it last time I was there and I'll say it again. Massive. We opted to be brave and hike up the 509 steps to the top. We regretted it pretty quickly. You're literally hiking straight up a spiral with no landings. 509 steps. On the way there was a stop off so you could see the bell- this is the largest swinging church bell in the world. Then we went up farther. We thought we were at the top! The spiral ended! We entered a large room! With another staircase! Ah! But we finally made it to the top. Awesome view. The entire thing is caged in on top and all sides though.
After we made it back down we headed over to the chocolate factory. That was pretty cool. There was a bit of background on chocolate as well as a climate-room with cocoa plants, and then there was a working factory where you could taste the end product. They were also making the Lindt truffles that they were selling there too. Then came the awesome gift shop. Chocolate pretty much anything and everything you can imagine. Chocolate Cathedrals, beer bottles, noodles... So then we stopped for some food and to rest our feet for a bit. Afterward I headed over to this old Gestapo prison museum. It's one of the best preserved in Germany. The basement has a bunch of cells. You can see the scratchings in the walls from the prisoners. Upstairs is a war museum. Then I stopped by the Ludwig Museum, which is a later art museum. It's got the second largest (after Paris) Picasso collection (mostly later works), Surrealism, and as part of the more recent collection, Andy Warhol. Following that came dinner and then a walk outside the Roman-German museum... no point in paying 6 Euro since the walls are glass and a good portion of exhibits are outside. Cologne used to be part of the old Roman Empire... from the year 300. There's a lot of stuff from Rome still there and it's all over the city.
Also, as a side note, I found my numbers on the Cologne parade that I was wondering about last time: "more than forty tons of sweets, 100,000 chocolates, 100,000 packets of popcorn, flowers, and cologne are hurled into the crowd!" That's a lot of chocolate/sweets.

Anyway, Sunday morning I took an early train to Heidelberg. James was going to meet me later for the castle tour since he wasn't interested in the Altstadt. I wandered around on my own and found all the churches, the University (the oldest in Germany), The City Hall, and Hotel Ritter, which is apparently the only building from the 17th century still standing due to invasion/war, etc. (now, obviously, a hotel). At 2 I met up with James and we hiked up to the castle. Pretty cool. It's half ruins and half standing and it was pretty awesome on both halves. There was enough to walk around on the outside that we opted against touring inside. We did head to the "grosse Fass" though as I didn't remember exactly what a Fass was... wine barrel. We saw one that was about 12 feet in diameter and started snapping pictures. "Yeah, this is a big barrel..." Then we walked into the next room and found the real one. It's 9 meters in diameter... that's like 30 feet. Wow. Apparently the kings here liked wine... Anyway, we wandered around the castle a bit more and then figured we were castled out. I stopped for crepes at the base for lunch... which proved to be a bad idea as I will shortly explain. Then we crossed the famous "Old Bridge" (not really all that old but looks cool and is pedestrian bridge) and headed to the other side of the river to hike the "Philosopher's Path" which was apparently frequented by philosopher's back in the day. Well... Heidelberg is in the mountains. The path is on the hill... which means we had to get up to the path first. We of course had hiked 509 stairs the day before and had just hiked up the hill on the other side to get to the castle. I think James was regretting letting me plan the day out... needless to say having eaten salty crepes (ham/cheese/tomato) was not helping the lack of water we had... It was quite steep to get up but we finally made it and then had a lovely time hiking along the gardens/vineyards/trees on the hillside. Lots of really good overlooks to the river (Neckar) with the bridge and the castle and the city. We got to the Philosopher's Garden which is where it looked like it branched off on the map and decided to take the downward route. This turned out to not actually be the route which maybe we should have noticed... but we ignored. So we jumped down a 6 foot tall stone wall onto a grassy path, and walked through two wooden gates (in our defense they were unlocked) and jumped down another wall until we realized that we were in a private garden area and could go no farther... Oops... So then we had to turn around and go all the way back up the hill and back up the walls and go the actual marked way down... and then we trekked back across the city to the train station, bought ourselves cold liquid from the supermarket inside and got on the 7:00 direct to Munich.

And that was my weekend. James hung out till this afternoon. Yesterday I had my two Stat classes and then research which went till 6 so he went on a city tour and wandered around the English Garden. Tim and Kristina joined us for dinner. Meanwhile I've got quite the to-do list for this week with homework and research and planning because... Thursday night we fly out to London! Update on that next week...

Pictures:
Heidelberg:
View from the castle across the river
View of bridge and castle from Philosopher's Path
Me on bridge with castle in background
Castle Ruins x2

Cologne:
you've already seen these, so just a picture from the top of the tower

The semester begins again

So classes start tomorrow. Finally. I have my preliminary schedule for the semester worked out and it currently includes the following classes:
Statistics (STAT 400)- I'm gonna see if this is actually going to be doable though, because the UIUC guy who approved it said it looked like there was a prereq I hadn't taken, so we'll see.
Orgo (CHEM 236)- also hoping this one is passable. I do have the benefits of having the script to the lecture because the professor sent it to me so I could get the course approved. Lucky me!
German Lit- for my minor requirement. Not sure which class I'm going to take yet, so I'm going to visit a couple of them first.
Organic Chem Lab- this apparently starts halfway through the semester. Unfortunately it meets Monday 9-5 and Tuesday 1-5 which is a lot of time. It also conflicts with Stat, so I'll have to see if Stat's worth it by that point.
Technical Elective?- Kristina and Tim, the two CivE's here, found a CivE class in English about transportation/traffic. I'm really hoping it will be approved as a 400 level class, in which case I could get 400 level technical elective for it.

Meanwhile, I got my Religion Sociology paper back. I got a 1,3 which is also what my Basic Sociology professor gave me, meaning the combined 4 hour class will transfer back as an A. Unfortunately linear did not go so well... The exam was actually more difficult than the first exam, coupled by the fact that none of the questions on it were even remotely similar to the first exam, and most I had not seen before, homework or otherwise. Anyway, running far away from that class this semester. It conflicts with other classes anyway.

As said, I spent Easter weekend in Austria. I went down Saturday morning and hung out. Sunday we took a day trip down to South Tirol (northern Alps of Italy), which is a really gorgeous location. We specifically went to the Kaltener See (Cold Lake) and spent a couple of hours hiking in the area amid blossoming apple orchards before
settling down for a picnic lunch on the lake. Then Monday we went over to my previous host aunt's house for the yearly Easter brunch.

The rest of the week (following the linear exam) was spent finishing up research. I've started analyzing the data and writing up my report. That will take a while. As classes start, I'll be working in the lab only a couple of days a week, probably for the next three weeks. Then I'll be down with research and just have to finish writing.

This previous Saturday, I did a day trip with the TUMi organization to Augsburg on Saturday. Augsburg is a pretty cool city, it turns out. We went to see the cathedral, which is huge and dates from 900 something. It's got a mix of styles because of this. It looks pretty Gothic on the inside but has a random attached room with a baroque style alter. It also (apparently) has the oldest stain glass windows in the world. Glad I thought to take a picture. The crypt is also pretty neat. Augsburg also has a neat Town Hall with the "golden hall" which is a very gold decorated room. The other big stop was the Fuggerei, which is the oldest social housing project in the world and a "city within a city". A rich trading family opened it up to house the poor. Each family gets a (tiny) 4 room(bath/kitchen/living/bed) 600 sq ft apartment. Rent has remained the same since it opened in the early 1500's- 88 euro cent per year. Yes, year. They do have to pay heating now though. Gates are also locked nightly at 10 pm. It's still managed by the same family and was rebuilt after the war as all but one of the houses were pretty much completely destroyed. It turns out Augsburg was a pretty important city pre-war time, and thus got very heavily bombed. Anyway, the city was cool. I liked it. I didn't like the trip back.

It was supposed to be a 45 minute train ride. We left at 5:06. I got home at 8:50. Why? Something happened on the tracks between Augsburg and Munich. I still do not know what as even though it closed the track down for several hours it didn't make it into the paper. So we had to stop and wait for a bus. Except the bus didn't come for 2 hours. We got off the train at 5:30 and got on the bus at 7:30. We finally got dropped off at the working section of the tracks again after 8, in time to catch the subway and be back home by 8:50. That made for a long day.

But anyway, classes tomorrow. This coming weekend I'm hoping to head out to Cologne and Heidelberg. A friend of a friend back at U of IL is studying in the Netherlands and has Spring Break and a EuroRail pass and wants to see a bit of Germany, so I'm meeting him in Cologne on Friday night and we're heading to Heidelberg on Saturday and then back to Munich. So that'll be the next update!

Here's some pictures of Augsburg!

Pictures: (in reverse order)
St. Maria's Church (the old one)
The Golden Hall
A strip of the Fuggerei
A really pretty residence we passed
A couple of other churches... the one in back (the big one) is the Catholic church and the small one in front is the Protestant one.

SPRING!!!

So… the last two weeks of my life, I guess.
First off, the weather has been GORGEOUS! Munich finally decided to accept SPRING! So we've been having weather in the 60's and 70's with gorgeous sunny blue skies. It's been absolutely perfect since April 1st!
Meanwhile, I’ve been mostly keeping pretty busy with the research. I’m working 9-4 or so daily, with hours varying on the day and the experiment. It’s still pretty interesting stuff but science is starting to kick and not do what it’s supposed to do… the best part of lab work, so the results are taking longer than expected. I’ve now worked 2.5 full weeks. (Good Friday here is a national holiday so On no one worked…). Classes still don’t start for another full week, so I’ll work most of next week too, and then start working part time around classes until I’m done with the research. I’m going to have to write a 15 or so page report of my work. Considering I wrote 15-20 page lab reports weekly freshman year, this doesn’t sound so bad… and hopefully I’ll have these 3 credits under my belt and be completely finished by early-mid May.
In other news, all the new semester students are now here. I met Tim and Kristina, both sophomore civil engineers from U of IL, on the 1st and 3rd of April respectively. They both live in my building (yay!) so my life has been a little more social in terms of grabbing dinner and running errands, etc.
Meanwhile, I’ve been using the leftover free time to study for linear algebra. Exam is Tuesday. Tuesday is also the day I get to go pick up my grade for my Sociology paper. That means that by Thursday (granted the linear exams are graded as quickly as last time), I should have all my first semester grades! As classes for this semester are dependent on my passing of linear, while I’ve got a very good idea what I will be taking, I’m not 100% sure yet.
Friday I decided to take a day trip to Zurich. Zurich is not technically a day trip. It’s a 4.5 hour train ride in each direction. But quite honestly there’s not all that much to do in Zurich and it’s also quite the expensive city to overnight in, so I figured a day was okay. The train left at a very early 7:12 from Munich and got in to Zurich at 11:45. I changed over enough money to last me a day, picked up a map from the tourist info (after I found it… that took about 30 minutes) and headed out for a self-guided walking tour of the city. It’s a very pretty city. Pretty and clean and obviously rich. And the weather was absolutely gorgeous. Blue sky, sunny, and a perfect 70 degrees! Bahnhofstrasse (Train station street) is the main shopping street with expensive stores selling watches and jewelry. This leads into Paradeplatz (which used to be a pig market and is now the financial center of the city) is the square where most of the main banks are situated. This further leads (and then dead ends) into Lake Zurich, which has an Alpine skyline on the opposite horizon. Along the way you pass some of the more famous churches in the city, including Augistanerkirche, Münsterkirche (two twin towers to represent lightning and fire), and St. Peterskirche (which has the largest clock face in mainland Europe). One church was closed till evening because of Good Friday. Those I did get in were setting up for evening concerts/services so no pictures, but they were surprisingly plain on the inside. Liebesfrauenkirche, which I stopped by only at the end because I had a little extra time, was actually the magnificent one and it’s a bit out of the main inner city. Anyway, on the way back up from Lake Zurich, I walked through the Schipfe, which is a very pretty little street on the river that used to be the artist sector of the city. I also walked up to Lindenhof, which is the highest point in the city and has a gorgeous view. I dipped into the Swiss National Museum, which is actually in an old castle. It’s the largest culturally historical collection of Switzerland and was partway under construction… I got to see exhibits starting from way back about things they’ve found in Switzerland… so starting with Ice Age fossils and moving up through old weaponry to Middle Aged coins and jewelry to a section on the stuff that had originally been in the castle. I still had an hour to kill when I finished with the museum, so I crossed over the river again and wandered up to ETH, Zurich’s University. It’s quite a climb to the top but also has a great city view. The train back was 6:16. That was a very long 4.5 hours until 10:45 when we pulled back into Munich. Worse still was the realization that I was going down to Austria the next morning to visit the Planks for Easter… which meant another train ride. Luckily it’s only two hours to Innsbruck.

Anyway, posted are pictures of Zurich. I’ll update sometime midweek about how Easter in Austria was, how linear went, and the results of my sociology paper as well as plans for the next couple of weeks… from the plans already being determined for the next 6 weeks, it looks like this semester is going to move pretty fast!

Pictures:
National Swiss Museum (former castle)
City Peaks with Mountain backdrop
Frauenliebkirche
Münsterkirche
St. Peterskirche and yet another bridge
View of the city from the southern bridge