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