The most wonderful time of the year

I've been getting into the holiday spirit this week. Carolling with the Catatonics, visiting the Christkindlmarket downtown, baking cookies (mmm... Elizabeth's great Snickerdoodle recipe) and last but not least, decorating my apartment this weekend with Mike!

Check it out:


You can barely see in the photo, but the ridiculousness of our little tree is impressive. Mike bought it on sale at the end of the holiday season last year. We were a little surprised to find that the base section had colored lights since the box showed white ones... and then we unwrapped the top section. Which did have white lights. Even better, several branches remained dark when we finally got it plugged in. There were no hooks included in the ornament box, so we had to adapt some paperclips to the task. Still, it's our little pathetic tree. Awww...

The heat is on...

woah-oh-woah-oh!

(I'm a nerd. But a warm and happy one.)

Brrrrrr...

I was feeling bad earlier this week for folks back in St. Louis (parts of my family included) whose power got knocked out by an ice storm last week, but apparently I should have saved my pity for myself. I went to bed last night noticing that my radiators weren't putting out much heat, and woke up to an ice-cold apartment this morning. Three phone calls to maintenance (or their answering service, since it's Sunday) were apparently fruitless... no returned calls or helpful visitors. I'm bundled up in four layers on my own sofa.

I should mention that it's illegal in Chicago to maintain an apartment temperature under 68 degrees during the day or 66 degrees at night. I wish I had a thermometer.

Did I mention that the local news just said tonight will be the coldest night so far this year?

Results & such

It's not official, but I think I aced my final and the take-home as well. Yay for not failing grad school! Also, after a week of hard-core book-hitting, I'm finally allowing myself to plug the TV back in. Whew.

In other news, I've got big plans for next weekend... heading to Gambier for the Cornerstones fall concert! Not only is it my first chance to get invited up to sing "The Stone" after the last song, but it will be my first return to that lovely hill since the festivities of May 2005. I'm flying up on Friday and returning to Chicago on Saturday, so I hope I have enough time to track down everybody I want to see on campus. Also, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the weather will be decent. The flights are direct, at least, which would make delays less of a big deal but still unpleasant.

Oh, and my Thanksgiving was awesome. My sister had the fabulous idea to take me to see "Spamalot!" at the Fox, and the whole family ended up coming along. T-day food at Grandma's: good. Getting up at a quarter to 5 to shop the day after was as appalling as ever. In all, a fabulous week even despite car troubles on the way there and Mike's disappearance to Wichita. 2 weeks to Christmas break!

T-minus 18 hours...

...until my second big exam of the quarter. Third if you count the take-home, but I can't: a take-home is open book, there's no pressure of the clock tick-tick-ticking the allotted time away, I can put it away when it gets frustrating and pick it up later when I start feeling smart again.

Gotta nail this one. Wish me luck.

Ewwww

I apologize in advance for the subsequent content, but I really need to vent right now.

First off, I don't generally have a problem with bugs, or any creepy-crawly things. I can happily share my living space with arthropods from numerous subphyla. Give me your arachnids, your myriapods, even plain ol' insects and I don't bat an eye. Through many of my teenage years I lived with a box of feeder crickets in my room for my pet frog. Unlike some members of my family, a harmless silverfish doesn't cause me to freeze and holler at the top of my lungs for somebody else to come and kill it. (Warning to those of you who do exhibit such behavior: Please, for the love of all that is good and holy, stop reading right now.)

BUT.

I draw the line at roaches. In my mind they're dirty and totally unwelcome in my living quarters. Since I'm living in an older (rehabbed) apartment building, though, I understand that this may be beyond my control. The management has already come in and sprayed a couple of times since I moved in. Funnily enough, my first two incidents with roaches in my place happened in the week after these fumigations.

I suppose I should recap the first one... a single roach, apparently living in my doorjamb. I'm pretty sure I saw the same one twice, since it was sitting in the exact same position, a few inches down from the middle hinge, two days in a row. If it hadn't run for a hole on the floor at the base of the door (on the outside, thank goodness) I would have probably never seen it. It got away, but I consoled myself that it was merely at the threshhold of my living space and tried to forget about it. A few days later, however, I came home and started washing the breakfast dishes I'd left in the sink... when one scuttled out from under a dish and down behind the stove. I ran to get a roach-killer (aka tennis shoe) but I was too late. I finished washing up, re-washed the contents of the drain tray and the tray itself, and swore not to leave things in the sink. I moved the shoe back into my room, though, and when I walked back to the bedroom after a few minutes there it was (or possibly another one, perish the thought!) on the floor next to my sneaker. Splat.

They came and sprayed again last week. I thought things would simmer down. Ha.

This morning, I made my usual instant oatmeal before heading into the lab. I opened the trash to pitch the paper packet, and something was moving. That's right, one of the buggers had gotten into my trash and was living it up in there! I grabbed the bag, because that sucker was going out to the dumpster whether or not I had a full trashbag. Grab twist tie, seal bag... double-take. There's a teeny tiny beetly bug, maybe twice the size of your average black ant, sitting on another twist tie in the little handy pile I keep right next to the sink. There's several teeny tiny beetly bugs, actually. Waving their itsy bitsy antennae as if they own the place. I grab a tissue and commence wholesale slaughter, carefully moving the ties out of the way and examining them to make sure I don't miss any. Something like 25 bugs die by my hands in a few short minutes, and that's when I get to the bottom of the pile and find it... the spent egg case. That's right, they're breeding on my kitchen surfaces!!

Now, I keep a clean place. I vacuum regularly, don't pile stuff on the floor, never had more than one meal's worth of dishes waiting to be washed, wipe down food prep areas after use, and my kitchen trash has a lid (though apparently that won't stop them.) Except for the contents of the fridge, all of my food storage is in a pantry apart from the kitchen on an upper shelf. I simply can't fathom why these creatures can't go reproduce in some dank and damp space between the walls somewhere. Why my kitchen counter?

And I worry that if I call and see if the management will come spray again, it will just get worse. The dratted bugs will set up a dayspa in the bathroom, or start putting their family photos on my fridge.

Ugh. Just... ugh.

We're taking over the world...

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 13 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Distractions are fun!

I don't want to talk here about how my monster exam came out (if you really want to know and haven't heard from me already, you'll just have to track me down...) but I did promise a friend that I'd post a link this weekend for a brand-spankin'-new internet time-wasting venture of his.

Thus, without further ado:

Kiss or Diss

Enjoy!

Whew...

I have officially survived my first grad school exam.

I won't know how I did until Tuesday, but I do know that everybody (or at least everybody who took the test on the dowtown campus) came out of the test feeling a little jangly. It bodes well that we all found it difficult... at least, I'm taking heart. It makes the 5 points lost for totally blanking on the identity of a single protein more palatable. Seriously, two questions dependent entirely on our recall of one tiny molecule, which by the way took up about 7.3 seconds of lecture time this whole semester?? I guess that's grad school for you.

Until Tuesday then, I'm going to have a great weekend!

Winter again? Already???

It was 30-odd degrees outside yesterday, and I got snowed on while waiting at the bus stop. This and the never-ending German winter of last year (dragging through, oh, March) make this past summer, officially, the shortest of my life. Not to mention the last, since grad school and real life apparently expect me in lab, working, year-round. Not that I didn't work over summers in college... but I still call it the end of an era.

In more positive news, I'm definitely recovering from the killer cold that hit me this weekend. I'm not quite 100%, still coughing and secreting, but I've managed to catch my classes, get work done and spend some time in lab. Hopefully the upwards trajectory will continue.

At least there's clear blue sky outside my lab window at the moment. Maybe I'll just pretend it's still warm out...

Sicky McSickerson

All hail the first cold of the season, and is it ever a doozy. It possibly didn't help that I had a late night on Friday with friends and didn't make it home until 2am, and then spent Saturday afternoon and evening riding rollercoasters with Mike and his brother Pete at Six Flags Great America. The payment for my enjoyment, sadly, has been more-than-sufficiently extracted over the course of last night and today. I even had to call in sick on my very first Sunday singing with the church choir, when I was supposed to do the psalm, too. On the plus side, it was a fun weekend, and Mike's folks were kind enough to stock me up on soup and orange juice on the way home last night, for which I'm abjectly grateful. I also got a few other snacks, my leather coat, a couple of throw pillows, and two decorative glass thingamajigs. Hear that, germs?? I have objets d'art, and I'm not afraid to use them!

For future reference: Sudafed 12-hour and several mugs of Earl Gray are diametrically opposed to my pursuit of a nap.

Also: Remember to disinfect, fumigate, autoclave, and/or exorcise belongings later. Particularly keyboard.

I'm a lazy blogger

Well, lazy may not be the best descriptor since I am, in fact, keeping fairly busy with school, lab, and all that good stuff. What's new, you ask?

I've joined the graduate school a cappella group, "the Catatonics." We've had a rehearsal or two so far, and it's low-key and fun. It's just one night a week, which is apparently just about right for my schedule. Oh, and I've already been made assistant VP and - get this - assistant webmaster. I haven't even seen the website yet, but hopefully it's got a good template I can work off of. (Tim, expect an email if I'm in over my head...)

The Fundamentals class has a homework set every week for the first unit. We've had two so far, and they're fairly intense... like, Itagaki take-home exam intense. (Kenyon neurobio/cell bio survivors know what I'm talking about, right? "Try to do the whole thing in one sitting." Ha!) The good news is that the powers-that-be are fine with credited group work, so the new tradition is a Monday night group. The first iteration consisted of a quick dinner at a restaurant in Evanston followed by hard-core work at a local coffee shop, which was fun. The second meeting, though, was awesome. I decided to take a cue from my Kiel friends' fabulous dinners and invited everybody over to my (handily central) place for a fajita fiesta, with fresh salsa and all the trimmings. I didn't make my own tortillas or guacamole from scratch like the amazing Mikey and Leslie, but I must credit that historic, nay, epic meal as my inspiration, particularly where the joys of fresh cilantro are concerned. I hope that I've started a regular tradition. Not everybody has the space to cook for 5 or so people, but maybe if we make it a potluck next time...

Mike and I have also started an alternating weekend visit between Chicago and DeKalb, which is simply lovely. Running errands together, cooking and doing dishes, watching movies and going to church together may seem rather quaint, but it's the together part that makes it special, particularly after last year. I love the fact that he can be a part of my regular life, even once a week. My current task is to get used to the new pattern... I need to titrate my emotional response to hellos and goodbyes down to an acceptable level, now that they happen just about every single week. Five years is a whole lot of pent-up missing someone to tap into, but thankfully it's already getting easier now that that chapter is finally coming to an end, however slowly.

Weather has been stormy this week, but I'm hoping for a few more chances to get out on my new bike before it gets too nasty out. I've already made one ride from my apartment all the way downtown, about an hour's ride, with someone from my program, and I want to try to learn the safest street route to Evanston and make that trip as well. I don't know that I'll ever regain the amazing biking muscles I developed in Göttingen with that city's ubiquitous dedicated bike lanes and trails, but I'd rather not lose them altogether sitting on buses and the El!

Class starts in half an hour and then I have to get up to Evanston for Catatonics rehearsal, but I still intend to complete my online photo collection from Germany and take (and post) some shots of my apartment, Chicago, and DeKalb. Expect that soon!

Link of love

I haven't made any progress towards getting my fiancé on Facebook, but he did finally succumb to the siren song of blogging. What can I say about this fabulous guy? He's the best ever, a total keeper, and I'm one lucky girl.

Without further ado:
Go here, and add it to your regular blog-reading schedule.

But don't get your hopes up, gals. He's all mine.

Sweet, sweet wireless... plus ruminations

Ah, yeah, I feel better now. My apartment is now fully hooked up and operational, internet-wise. Actually, I've been online for a couple of days already, thanks to the Super8 across the street's unsecured connection... for whatever reason, it stopped requesting a password when my computer tried to link in this weekend. I don't know if it was a policy change or a mistake, but moderate internet functionality did much to assuage the residual frustration from my wireless router shipping rigamarole of last week.

I did promise some pictures of the new apartment. I think I'll hold off, though, as my folks are coming up this weekend with curtains, which can only add to the homey-ness of the place. Otherwise, the creature-comforts are largely taken care of... I even took the time last week to orange-glo every square inch of floor space I could get to. Shiny and happy. Plus I can walk around barefoot now without acquiring a protective patina of construction dust on the soles of my feet.

I've survived my Ph.D. program's orientation retreat, the graduate school's orientation seminar, and another day of institute orientation to the logistical side of registering for classes, looking for rotation advisors, and whatnot. Another meeting tomorrow morning with my shiny new advisory committee and a meeting in lab with a potential fall-rotation advisor or two is on the docket for tomorrow. In the evening, there's essentially the Northwestern version of the fall Cabaret called the All-Cappella concert. The supremely laid-back (no audition process, no concerts per se but the occasional nursing home gig) grad student group is seeking sopranos. I hear some of the other groups also take old folks like me, so it's a good chance to give everybody a listen and see what's out there. Friday is class registration, and classes officially start Wednesday next week although we have a Monday seminar thrown in for fun.

In other words, I finally have a schedule to fill my time. And it's WONDERFUL! Being busy again is like some kind of holy grail... maybe not at the level of senior year at Kenyon, because that bordered on pathological, but I'm ready to focus and work hard and start accomplishing things again. Maybe it's not a fair assessment, but I still find myself thinking that F-bright, though an accomplishment in and of itself, was unproductive in the end. Sure, I can say I lived abroad. I can say I made strides with a second language, experienced a new culture, made friends and had a taste of independence. I learned to cook, at least a bit. All of that is valuable. But in terms of where my goals and aspirations lie, the research side of things was not the focal point I had hoped it would be. Now, that side of my life is coming back into view... and I'm realizing that I missed it. Arguably, also a valuable realization.

I'm also really pumped about the first-year Fundamentals course. The way it's been described to me, the format is very similar to Intro Neuro as I experienced it: in-depth topics with well-versed faculty, plenty of topical variety, challenging material thrown at us at breakneck speed, while we attempt to get as much of it as possible to stick. Maybe it's not everybody's cup of tea, but I'm anticipating more mental stimulation than you can shake a stick at, and it makes me happy. I already visualize myself riding the El home, mind a whirlwind, everything around me coming in at an entirely new perspective as though the top had been lifted off the universe to let the light come pouring in. Good college courses gave me that feeling on a regular basis, and some of my clearest images of Kenyon - familiar faces, lush trees, genteel buildings, the sky in Ohio winter and spring's aquamarine and oh so many other hues - are evoked from the perspective of strolling down middle path lost in the marvel of the previous hour or so's in-class experience. I can't wait to recapture that, and I'm confident that I can.

Enough gushing. I do have to sleep so that I make it to tomorrow's obligations. I'm sure I'll have sweet dreams.

In withdrawal

Just to keep everybody up to date, I'm settled in at my new apartment in lovely Rogers Park, a north Chicago neighborhood. The difficulty at the moment, however, is my inability to set up internet service I'm already paying for thanks to a certain major shipping company's difficulties in delivering the necessary setup components. Hopefully this will be resolved shortly and I can stop tearing my hair out...

When things are up and going, I'll post some pics of the new place... and probably my assesment of the whole "grad school" transition. Hopefully a happy one.

Sigh. I miss my internet.

Ich lebe noch!

Things that have taken place since my last post:

• Germany lost the semi-final to the eventually victorious Italy, in a disheartening but mercifully quick series of end-of-game goals. I didn't bother to watch the final.
• The Göttinger Uni-Chor und Orchester had a successful Summer Semester concert, consisting of a really well done Shostakovitch Cello Concerto and Mendelssohn's Lobgesang. We got to sing in the Aula on Wilhelmsplatz, which is a beautiful hall despite some acoustic issues and the oppressive heat, which required the opening of multiple windows and even more acoustic issues. I still haven't done much research into choral opportunities for non-music students at Northwestern, but I'm fully convinced that I need to find something if only for my own sanity.
• I didn't have a goodbye party per se at Studentendorf (I didn't really give my dorm-mates enough warning before my departure to arrange another Karaoke party, which was fine by me because they had threatened to start using the German pop songs and even the playing field!) but I did have a nice evening making sushi in the common room. I had been intending to try out my sushi supplies earlier that month but never got around to it, so I ended up using a whole pack of seaweed paper at one go just to use it up. Result: two humongous platters of sushi. I had a good time fobbing off individual pieces on everybody who came in to use the kitchen, and then invited Katha to help me try and polish off the rest of it. She brought out a bottle of plum wine and we made an evening of it, which was very nice for my last night in town. The next day I checked out and called my cab to the Hauptbahnhof, but before I left she and Peter gave me a going-away gift: more gummy candy, a book, and a burned CD. So nice!
  
• I went to Frankfurt the night before my flight home, treated myself to a final dinner in Germany (at least for this year!) at a nice restaurant close to my hotel. Hauling two giant suitcases (20 and 30 kilo, or 50 and 70lbs, respectively) plus a huge camping backpack and my computer case... was less than fun. I left the bigger suitcase overnight in a locker at the Frankfurt Hbf so I didn't have to walk it to the hotel, and navigating escalators to the S-bahn and in the airport the next morning was also rather horrific... but I made it, as did my belongings.
• The flight was fine, and I randomly met my high school gym teacher (famous quote: "Girls, men are pigs and they'll only try to take advantage of you.") on my layover in Chicago. He was taking the same overbooked flight back to St. Louis on his way back from a student trip to Amsterdam. Wierd, but kind of neat.
  
• Within a week of coming back home, my family and I went up to Michigan for my cousin Sarah's wedding. It was so much fun to see everybody again! The weather was perfect and the ceremony was lovely, as was the bride of course! We also had time to run around the beach at Lake Michigan, which is always a blast... oooh, next year is going to be fun.
• Speaking of next year, we left Michigan after the wedding and headed down to Chicago to find me housing for next year. Argh, stress... plus probably some residual jetlag. Driving around Chicago is a ridiculous proposition to begin with, and driving to look at places in the western suburbs from our hotel in Rogers Park on the north side was a chore. Plus, most of the places we found in the newspaper and online were in rather downtrodden neighborhoods. Janet had another scare as well, blue screen of death and everything. She has since resumed functioning, but lack of computer access also didn't help the housing search much. In the end we focused the search on the neighborhood around the hotel, which had been recommended by students in my program. It's between the Evanston and Downtown campuses on the Red line of the El, and the place that I found is right on the lake. It was actually across the street from the hotel we were staying in, and I called the number on the sign outside initially to get a basis of comparison for the price range of the neighborhood... besides the location, the apartments have been freshly renovated, and it was decently affordable. It's further from Mike in DeKalb than I would have hoped, but even with Chicago traffic it's a heck of a lot closer than Gambier, OH and Lawrence, KS. Not to mention St. Louis, MO and Göttingen, Germany.
• My folks headed home later in the week, while Mike and I rented a car and stayed in town for Jen (my college roomie of two years) and Marc's wedding. I had agreed to serve as an usher but was delighted to have the opportunity to "help out" in other capacities as well... making her late for her final dress fitting, working with Jessie to oraganize a scad of friends to decorate the Love Machine (TM) for their departure from the church, dancing like a maniac to the great swing band at the reception, and giving her brand new husband vaguely salacious hotel lobby backrubs to name a few. She definitely appreciated my presence! Actually, it was a great opportunity to reconnect and I for one had a blast seeing so many Kenyon friends again: Tim, Jessie, Robbie, Becky (and her bro), Ginger and Sean, Rachel and Uri.
• Getting back to St. Louis from Chicago was another adventure... Mike and I returned the rental car and rode the El and a bus down to the Museum of Science and Industry, where we mostly looked at trains. Due to my sleeping in a bit, a busy rental place, and delays on the train we didn't get to the museum as early as we had hoped. We got back to Union Station to catch our bus home just in time... and then had to get our luggage out of the locker we had stowed it in that morning, which was a technologically advanced piece of work - piece of something, at least - which asked for thumbprint verificiation of our unlock code. Thing was, the dratted machine had never asked for a print when we got the locker in the first place, so it had nothing to verify it to. The man in charge of the lockers took his sweet time getting there to help us, and I was convinced that we'd miss our bus. Ha. Ha ha. Luckily for us, Megabus was running about 2 hours behind schedule. This is a discount bus company, so they had passengers to at least 3 or 4 different cities waiting out on an unmarked sidewalk by the train station in the hot summer sun. The bus finally arrived, but the AC was barely functional and made a constant dinging sound, which apparently was a warning that the transmission was having issues. We had a break at a rest stop before Springfield, which was fine... then we loaded up to leave. The driver went around the back of the lot to get back to the roadway, but didn't notice the gigantic crater-sized potholes in the gravel. Long story short, the back end of the bus wound up axle-deep in a gravel pond. We disembarked again to see if the lightened load would do any good, and stood around for almost an hour until a kindhearted trucker chained the bus to his cab and yanked the bus to safety and solid ground. We were supposed to arrive at 9pm, and actually got in sometime after midnight. Whee.
• Elizabeth (funny that I still think of her as "Elizabeth from Leipzig" even though she's originally from Arkansas) and most of her family were in town for a weekend, so I met up with her on the 6th. We had fun commiserating the mortifying process that is the Fulbright end-of-year report. ("How many publications and public speaking opportunities have you had over the course of the year? Are you famous yet? How do you intend to become famous and credit your success to the Fulbright program? Give fascinating examples of how you, personally, forged an indelible cultural bridge between the US and [Insert Host Country] which will persevere for the rest of recorded time and possibly save the world. VALIDATE TO US THAT WE HAVEN'T JUST PAID YOU FOR A YEAR OF VACATION, FER CHRISSAKES!")
  
• Last week, I had a visitor from out west. Beto came to St. Louis to visit and see the sights! In about 5 days we wound up fitting in Six Flags, the St. Louis Zoo and a bit of Forest Park, Ted Drewes Frozen Custard, the Arch, Missouri Botanical Garden and its current Chihuly exhibit, the Central West End, my high school, the Cathedral Basilica, the City Museum, and the MUNY's closing-week production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which was awesomely cheesy in all the right places. We also hung out with Therese, and she and Beto were both huge hits with one another. I am now honor-bound to make time to get out to Sacramento for a visit at some point in the future.
  
• Janet is officially getting pensioned off to whatever uses my folks can have for her. This is actually the first post I've written on a new addition, a brand-new shiny MacBook. So far I'm calling him Statler, but when Boot Camp is on and Windows is up and running he'll also be Waldorf. Get it? Dual OS? Aaaaah, the wittiness of it all. I almost blew a gasket yesterday thinking my family's wireless connection was incompatible, until I remembered the old "dollar sign" trick from H-drive access in Kenyon's mac labs. Silly, silly, nonintuitive Apple tricks!

Which (finally!) brings us up to the present, minus some unfortunate gaps particularly in the "family vacation in Deutschland" area. I've been buying stuff and making a pile of things to bring to Chicago, although the serious packing and sorting through old stuff has yet to begin in earnest. I'm meeting a bunch of the St. Louis crowd tomorrow night, and then heading to DeKalb for the weekend with Mike and his folks to help him move. I'll only have until the following weekend to get everything in order for my move, so time is actually rather short. I guess that means I should quit typing and do something useful with my time. I hope to get internet access set up at my new apartment as soon as possible, but if I dissapear for another while that might be my excuse. Tschüssi, all!

Accounting for myself

I'm still alive, as is dear old Janet, I swear! So I suppose the only excuse for my complete abrogation of posting duty is that I've been decently busy for, oh, the last month and a half or thereabouts. Family visits, adventures with Mike, World Cup excitement (Germany plays Italy tonight in the semi-final, in fact) and almost a week of concerts and city life and just a bit of laying about on the beach with friends in Leipzig... oh, how the time has flown! I'm left with a checklist of stuff to be accomplished before I head home, a backlog of about a thousand photos to upload to the Shutterfly page, and the growing suspicion that the next 11 days are going to whip past me faster than the World's Roundest Soccer Ball (tm) zooms along it's 11 meter path and slides past a goalie's desperate hands.

Oh dear, does that make me the Ollie Kahn in this scenario? Part of me is unconsciously slipping into that role already... It's my last visit to the Krebs family, my last Uni-Chor cantata and concert, my last train trip to visit friends, my last chance to take pictures of the Gänseliesel early in the morning before she's surrounded by tourists and punks with dogs. Will this be my last time doing laundry in these crappy washers? It's reminiscent of the pre-nostalgia I felt in my last few days in Gambier. Not as deep, perhaps, but just as singular, just as ravenous for meaning and memory.

I do mean to get my thoughts in order and provide a full report of the sights and sounds, tastes and feelings between Kara's birthday (May 23, family's arrival in Germany) and Mom's (tomorrow, happy birthday!) if only to have a record for myself... but this is not that moment. I have to go grocery shopping and perform other menial tasks of daily life, though with a certain amount of (undue?) perspicacity in anticipation of yet another Life Transition.

Oh, and happy Independence Day. There.

Hmm, a month later...

Well. I took quite a break from writing, now didn't I? Sorry about that, things got busy with the start of the semester and the old 'puter is getting slow... for a bit I thought it was my internet connection here, but now I'm pretty sure that dear Janet is trying to tell me something. She had her first "blue screen of death" and unexpected restart recently, which is never a good sign. I'm depending on her to last through the end of the year here, but my plan to hold off on a new laptop until I pick a thesis lab is going to have to be pushed up a bit... don't tell her I said that, though!

Anyway, I want to get a rundown of what I've been up to jotted down before I take off on yet another massive adventure. My family arrives Tuesday morning bright and early in Frankfurt, and we have a whirlwind tour of Germany planned over the course of two and a half weeks, followed by a few days in Austria with Mike and his relatives... and I'll be staying there with his family until June 11, which brings me to almost three weeks of vacation. Mike will come back to Göttingen with me for a couple of weeks, and we're also planning a long weekend in Florence, Italy during his visit... which means missing even more class, but I'm humongously excited about the opportunity!

I'm not taking the time to add pictures at the moment since it's already late and if I crash Janet this will never get written, but there are lots of new photos on the Shutterfly page, particularly the Göttingen album. Check it out if you like visual aids.

So, my last post brought things up to the weekend before my 23rd birthday. Whew. I forgot to plan anything until the afternoon before, at which point I started text messaging friends to see if anyone wanted to get together for a nice sushi dinner in town. Pat and Claire said they could come, and Claire invited Judy, an Australian friend from her German class, and her German boyfriend Ollie. We tried the other sushi place in town this time, which turned out to be a little bit classier but also harder on the wallet... after dinner Claire and I got ice cream and then went to Villa Cuba for Amaretto Sours, the first drink of a looooong night. Pat texted us from the Irish pub where he'd met up with some friends so we headed that way. Folks were already in fine form by the time we arrived, and several rounds were bought... then someone had the fabulous idea to tell the band that there was a birthday in the house. That was fine for me, since they had me send my friends up front to lead a sing-along and then gave me a free CD!

The drinks continued, including some strange shot with coffee beans floating in it and, particularly cruel, a round of Absinthe. Thankfully "real" (i.e. opiod-compound-containing) Absinthe is illegal in Germany, but this ersatz version was plenty disgusting. Rotten licorice flavored, super high proof alcohol... ugh.

I slept in Sunday morning, but felt surprisingly okay despite having probably quadrupled my previous highest single-night alcohol intake experience (which wasn't too high to begin with, but still...) I had no trace of a hangover, though. Then, at around 2 in the afternoon, I was invited on a mountain biking excursion with Martin. Despite the fact that I biked around town all year, I didn't know if I would be able to handle it, but I wanted to give it a try. I borrowed one of his bikes and we set off on our expedition up a fairly big local hill. It doesn't qualify as a mountain in my mind, but the lookout tower at the top should have had a humongous view had it not been fairly hazy that afternoon. At some point along the way I mentioned the previous night's festivities, and I think Martin was rather surprised that I was on my feet, let along mountain biking the next day!

On that Wednesday Claire and I started a new tradition after she told me that there is a mini-golf place in town and we found it and gave it a try. I did horribly, of course (55 on 18 holes) but we made plans to go back every week.

The following weekend (April 29th and 30th) I made a visit to Tübingen to hang out with Kola, which was wonderful! I arrived in time to go to Stuttgart for an opera on Friday night, so we saw Mozart's Le Nozza di Figaro. I had sung the Countess' role in a duet from this show (Sull' Aria) in a friend's senior recital last year, so of course it was cool to hear it performed by professionals. Like most theatrical performances here the set design was fairly modern as were some of the costumes, but there were also more "classical" elements, particularly the costuming of the Count and Countess. It fit well together, though, and the principal players were fantastic. Sung in Italian with German subtitles, yay!

Kola and I spent the rest of the weekend in Tübingen, wandering around a huge market and by the Neckar river on Saturday and visiting the Schloßmuseum on Sunday to see the HUGE collection of antiquities. Compared to the region around Göttingen, Tübingen is very hilly place, with large chunks of the city built on fairly steep slopes. I'm sure it's treacherous in winter, but I found it absolutely gorgeous. The river was particularly nice... you can rent paddleboats or gondola-type craft and go for a ride! Sadly we didn't have time to give it a try.

On the 3rd of May I bettered my mini-golf score by 4 whole points. Yay! The following weekend Elizabeth came to visit from Leipzig, ostensibly to visit the Bach Institute at the Uni and do some work, though it turned out to be closed so we were forced to simply hang out and have fun instead. Schade! I showed her the mini-golf course and we played a round... 46, even better! On Friday night we saw a play by Brecht in the Deutsches Theater, "Der Aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui." Like the last piece I had seen at the DT, there were plenty of wierd modern elements. I wasn't really familiar with the show at all, though I knew it was supposed to be a mockery of Hitler's rise to power. The actors were very good, but we left the show a little confused and it took some time to figure out what had actually taken place, and connect the dots to historical events.

I spent most of Saturday afternoon in rehearsal for Sunday's Bach Kantate with the Uni-Chor, which was BWV 102, "Herr, deine Augen sehen nach dem Glauben." The opening choral section was very difficult, and thanks to the semester's schedule we had only two weeks in which to learn it! We ended up scheduling a couple of extra rehearsals to make it happen, and I think it went fairly well all things considered. Elizabeth is studying Bach in Leipzig and was familiar with the work, so I asked the director if she could join us for the final rehearsal and the performance, which he was fine with after I gave my word that she'd be able to learn it quickly enough... I only wish I had such reading skills!

I invited Min Jung, my friend from Chor and classes last semester, to mini-golf with Claire and I on the following Wednesday, the 10th. She doesn't speak very much english so I was a bit concerned that we would all be able to communicate, since Claire and I haven't really used german together, but it was great. I shot a 47, which was okay.

On the morning of Saturday the 13th I took off once again for Leipzig, in order to see a concert organized by several current Fulbrighters there (including Jen and Elizabeth) to showcase interplay.exchange, a German-American music initiative. Elizabeth's parents were visiting at the time as well, so I got to meet them and even kidnap them for museum exploration while she was in rehearsal for the concert! We ended up going to the regular Saturday Kantate at the Thomaskirche, and I had an absolutely unbelievable Kenyon moment... Elizabeth had told me that there was a Bach association conference going on in Leipzig that weekend (she was busy and sadly missed it) but I mentioned that we had a Bach scholar at Kenyon, and it turns out she had heard of Professor Sanders from Bach association publications. Anyway, I noticed a familiar profile about 8 rows in front of me during the Kantate, and whispered to Elizabeth that I thought I saw Reggie in the church. When the music was over I zipped through the crowd to say hello, since I knew him pretty well after eating together at German Table through most of my junior year. Sure enough, it was him, and he had even noticed me coming into the already-packed church before we found our seats. He was heading to Berlin the next day so we couldn't invite him to the concert, but randomly seeing a Kenyon person in Leipzig was amazing enough!

The concert, "spiel eins," was the following afternoon, and of course it was a world-class show. I expected as much after the performances at the Berlin conference a couple of months ago. I got to hear my Kiel friends Jen and Amanda again, and Elizabeth played piano and harpsichord. The first piece was J. S. Bach, Kantate Nr. 51, Jauchzet Gott in allen Länden, which particularly featured Jen and Amanda. Such Profis! Then we heard Partita for Wind Quartet by Irving Fine, a 20th century American composer. I had never heard of him before, but the piece was absolutely thrilling, with individual lines for the flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and french horn running seemingly rampant most of the time and then suddenly interspersed with very tight moments when everyone came together.

The second half started off with Liebeslieder für Hohestimme, Op. 195 from Carl Reinecke. The three short songs were very sweet. Then came Luxury of Superstition, a composition from current Germany Fulbright grantee Paula Matthusen. There was plenty of interesting dissonance, and I thought it was cool that Jen's vocal part was integrated within the texture of the whole ensemble and sharing equal weight with the instrumentalists. The final piece was Wagner's Siegfried-Idyll, lush and opulent and utterly Romantic. I haven't heard a large amount of Wagner (though I have a passing familiarity with some of the better-known operatic themes thanks to Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd) but I think I'll have to start seeking it out.

I had to hit the road pretty much immediately after the concert ended, unfortunately. It was lovely to see so many friends once again (Meghan and Andrew from the Kiel group were also in attendance) but I had to get back home in order to throw together a presentation on Germany's conservation movement for my Interkulturelle Landeskunde course, since I was supposed to meet with my teacher on Monday afternoon to go over my talk. Ugh, was that ever a headache! Granted, it was my own fault for going away for the weekend when I had work to do, but it didn't help that my computer problems picked up significantly every time I opened powerpoint to work on the presentation! I ended up having not much to show at the meeting, but I managed to throw things together at the last minute (as per usual) and aside from some technical difficulties which were actually NOT on my end it went pretty well. I've never had to give a talk in German that was longer than 10 minutes before, and this was easily 25 even without the fancy slides and photos, so I was glad to have survived and gotten it over with on Wednesday!

I started planning the Italy trip and talked to Mike on Thursday, which was our last "official" phone call night until I see him in Austria. I won't say that the time has always felt like it was flying by in the last 5 months, but it's amazing to think that I'm so close already. We've been arguing via email about a certain well-known topic for a bit now (ever since he sent me this, the weasel!) and it took quite a bit of energy... the back-and-forth of email rebuttals finally numbered 20 or so (and can provide the full transcripts to anyone with an interest, especially if you're on MY team...) but anyway, I think I finally got him on the ropes when last we spoke. I generally dislike conflict and could never seriously consider a legal career, but by golly am I stubborn when I know I'm right!

This weekend was the Chor Probewochenende, so I spent all day Saturday and the whole morning today (or I guess yesterday by now!) in rehearsal for our second Bach Kantate (BWV 45, "Es ist dir gesagt, Mensch, was gut ist") and our major concert work, Mendelssohn's Lobgesang. Once again I've self-selected into second soprano, and I'm still amazed that my voice survived the weekend... I still feel like our warm-up routine leaves something to be desired, and I have bad support habits (or rather, a lack of any support habits at all!) when reading new or only slightly familiar pieces, which was pretty much all weekend. I will be missing a few rehearsals thanks to my pending travels, so I don't know if I'll ever feel as comfortable with the music this semester. I'm sure it will be fine, but perfectionist tendancies die hard. On a more positive side, I ended up baking a couple of batches of brownies and a giant batch of snickerdoodles (from Elizabeth's recipe!) for the Probewochenende party, which were a huge hit. Even better was hearing all of the various attempts at pronouncing the word "snickerdoodle." From now on every time I miss an umlaut I'll just take a moment and remember... snickerdoods, snickeldoodle, snickedoo...

I spent this afternoon at the mini-golf place with Claire and Judy (whom I met at my birthday dinner) and shot 38, my best yet! The gentleman owner also asked me if I needed a blue or green scorecard... the blue ones cost 2 euro and are for adults, while the green are only 1 euro and for kids. Yet another person shocked to hear that I'm 23 already... Tonight was packing for the first leg of my trip and sorting stuff that can be sent home early with my folks, and tomorrow I'm meeting up with Claire and Laura for lunch. Claire will be out of town when I'm in Göttingen with my family, and then by the time I get back with Mike she'll already be back home in Dublin. I've also got to call a potential relative in Weimar to see if they have any family history information, and hopefully to organize a meeting when we get there. I've got class and Chor tomorrow night, and then Tuesday morning bright and early I head to Frankfurt to meet Mom, Dad, Kara, Steve and Grandpa Wuensch at the airport!

I suppose I should sleep, then... I don't know when I'll have time to write again, but I'm sure there will be plenty to say!

Still catching up... April 14-19: Easter with Em, and Berlin (again!)

I had an awesome Easter weekend, starting on Friday the 14th when Kola arrived in Göttingen for a visit! We had an Ostermarkt in town, which turned out to be rather similar to the traditional Weihnachtsmarkt except with more animatronic bunnies:
Actually I haven't really heard about Ostermärkte outside of Gö, so I think it's a local thing... another chance for folks to set up a booth and sell crazy crafts and foodstuffs while kids run around and ride the seasonally-themed carousel and gorge themselves on sweets. I wonder why it hasn't caught on everywhere else...

The highlight was some kind of hard-core Christian youth group whose members were handing out flyers and postcards, mostly because it was completely outrageous: they had a guy in a santa suit and a large wooden cross to which was tied a poor innocent stuffed bunny... near as I could tell, they were staging a protest of sorts against the secularization of Christian holidays. Right, because that's exactly what you want to have to explain to a 5-year-old at the Easter fair. I do think the message has merit, but the venue was a little inappropriate. I also mentally docked some points for a feeling of anti-ecumenicism I got speaking to some of the members... I was asked if I understood the true meaning of Easter, and I responded that I darn well better after 15 years of Catholic school, but they didn't seem to think that counted for much. I got invited to their next meeting with the explanation that they were against all those hoity-toity rules, traditions, and regulations that some less-hip churches adhere to... Again, it just rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe I'm just addicted to the incense, though... I saved the flyer anyway.

Anyhow, I picked up Kola at the Bahnhof and we checked out downtown and saw some of the festivities (and had the best ice cream in town) before heading back up to my place. I pointed out the Planetenweg landmarks we saw along part of the way... there are a series of metal signs representing the solar system along a westward artery from the train station, with distances and size supposedly to scale. I've seen the sun and all of the closer ones, but haven't had the chance to find the outer planets yet. Suffice it to say, I recently found out that I live pretty darn close to Uranus. (Insert "your mom"-type humorous response here, guys! I'm looking at you, Ricebag!)

We made a fabulous stir-fry and spent the evening catching up and of course mooning over all things Kenyon, especially the Cornerstones. What a great feeling to be able to share those memories with someone who knows them all as well as I do! I still wish I could've gotten a visit in sometime this year, but thank goodness I had such a fabulous alternative!

Saturday morning was sunny and gorgeous, so we went back into town and were happy to find everything open on a holiday weekend. We had pizza for lunch at Arul's, and then went shopping for dinner supplies (quesadillas, which is no small task over here. Thank goodness for the "international foods" section in the supermarket!) and baked goods for Easter morning, including a chocolate-covered bunny cake and a pair of Osterlämmer, little lamb-shaped cakes.

We walked our groceries home and then I called my host family to wish them a happy Easter... and hopefully get invited over for a visit, which was indeed the consequence. We picked up a flower to bring them and wandered up to Weende for delicious homemade Küchen and lots of conversation, which was great fun. Every time I go back for a visit I'm pleased to realize that my language skills are actually improving. It's still strenuous to try and listen to 4 conversations at once in a room full of native speakers, but I remember going to bed every night completely exhausted from simply talking to Christina and Wolfgang over dinner. Things are much better now.

We went home and cooked our fabulous pseudo-mexican meal and then stayed up half the night listening to Cstones and some Chamber Singers music and discussing school, life, and all the big stuff.

The next morning we ate our Easter treats and then headed once again into town, although it was overcast and things were mostly closed. We stopped in at the Jacobikirche and Johanniskirche to look around, found the Nikolaikirche locked and ducked into a cafe for lunch... mmm, crepes! Since it was drizzly out we stayed there until it was time for the evening service at the Michaelkirche. I hadn't been to Mass there before, and although it wasn't too full it was nice. Then we headed home and finished off our leftovers, and got ready for the next morning's trip to Berlin!

The original plan had been for Kola's friend Ashli to come to Göttingen, but after Kola had to make a surprise return to Tübingen (after her wallet was stolen in Rome!) plans got shifted and Ashli and Em were going to reunite in Berlin. I decided on the fly to tag along for the first couple of days of their visit since I didn't have much else going on. Our reservations at the hostel were already made, but we weren't scheduled to check in until midafternoon on Monday, so we had a few hours to kill after our arrival. Since we were at the Zoo Bahnhof I recommended the zoo or the aquarium, both of which I had seen during the March conference. The lines to get into the zoo were humongous (I guess since it was a holiday weekend) and since we didn't have the whole day we opted for the aquarium.
Oh no! Kola's about to get eaten by the creature from the black lagoon! Luckily some other tourist taunted it and the monster ate him instead. We made it out alive...

I also remembered this time to get a photo of the placard with the German name for White's tree frog:
Coral finger?? Is coral particularly sticky? I certainly don't think that's a visual reference. (Awww, but he's still sooooo cute!)

After the Aquarium we went to check into the hostel and meet Ashli. As a Douglas Adams fan, I can heartily recommend the Heart of Gold to any hitchhikers that find their way to Berlin... and even if you forget your towel, they've got you covered! They will also lend you sunglasses (??) and reading material for a small deposit.

I sent a message to Andrew, another friend from Kiel, proposing dinner and a movie on Potsdamer platz (where they show many films in the original language.) As it turns out he and some other folks were already planning to see The Inside Man there, so we made plans to meet them either at the movie or after, depending on what movies were available. We had a lovely dinner and thought we were going to miss the start of the film, but Andrew and Jen, who was also in town, caught us and we got tickets just in time. I'm actually glad that I saw the movie in English, because I think I would've gotten pretty lost in a German version.

We hung out a bit after the movie and then Kola and Ashli and I decided to head back to the hostel, since it was a moderately long walk and it was already dark. We did pass the Brandenburger Tor on our way back, which I hadn't ever seen at night. Very pretty!
We planned out Tuesday and hit the sack, since the crux of our plan was a major 4-hour walking tour of the city. I'd already seen many of the signs on previous visits, but I still learned a few things along the way. I was actually glad that I'd heard about Berlin's historical landmarks previously, because it's quite a bit of territory to cover and our guide was rather new... so we got a smattering of factoids and anecdotes with no overarching story to tie them together. Not exactly the best introduction to the city, but at least we saw all the important stuff.

And like I said, some things were new to me as well, including the supposed site of Hitler's secret underground bunker. There are no signs of any kind because nobody wants to create a rallying point for neo-Nazis and sympathizers. Now it's just a little playground behind an apartment complex.

We headed back towards the hostel and found a nice Thai restaurant nearby for a late lunch. The waiter was really talkative and wanted to know where we were from, what we were doing in Germany, what we studied... We had him take a couple of pictures since he was so nice. I need to get a copy from Em of one that I'm in!
After our meal we stopped back at the hostel, and got free t-shirts. Cool! We decided to wander to Alex and check out the Fernsehturm (TV tower.) I'd never been up to the top and the view had been highly recommended on our tour, so we decided to check it out. Unfortunately the day had turned overcast and rainy so things were a little hazy, but it was still neat:
Of course, it had also been a long and full day and we were understandably exhausted:We did find the World Clock after a little bit of wandering, and then Andrew met us again with a restaurant recommendation for dinner, this time a Vietnamese restaurant. Lecker! He had to leave the next morning to catch an early ferry for another adventure, so we found our way back to the hostel yet again... with a bit of map consultation. I'm still fairly proud of myself for maintaining the role of navigator with minimal panic and a reasonable degree of competency, considering it was my fourth visit to Berlin!

I had to catch a train the next morning back to Göttingen, so we made plans to wake up and do our goodbyes then. My sleep was disturbed a little bit by a snoring hostel roommate (nobody in our party, of course) but I still managed to bet back with plenty of time for the Einstufungstest for second semester... and like I already mentioned, I managed to get Oberstufe, so I must've slept well enough!

I still want to cover last weekend's Geburtstag escapades before I take off on my next adventure tomorrow morning (visiting Kola and Ashli in Tübingen!) so I guess stay tuned!

Catching up... April 7-9: Bonn & Köln

I have to go back in time almost three weeks to chronicle my recent adventures, but hopefully I won't make a habit of this... Anyway, I spent the second weekend of April at a Max-Kade-Haus reunion with Meghan and Patrick, the other Kiel Fulbrighters who lived in my dorm there. I arrived in Bonn on a gorgeous Friday afternoon and dropped my stuff off at Meghan's super-awesome lab (highly jealous!) and then Patrick and I wandered around the city while she finished up the day's work.

Bonn is apparently Beethoven's hometown, which I hadn't realized until I arrived! Anyway, with this shot and my Leipzig photo with JS Bach, I now have a budding collection of photos with awesome composers. Now to track down Mozart, or Mendelssohn or Brahms...

We stopped in at St. Martin's Basilica (Münsterbasilika), a gorgeous 13th century church, and went to see part of the University. While we were around town, we tried to track down Beethoven's birth house as well. This proved to be slightly difficult, as at least one of the handy tourist-friendly streetsigns was pointing entirely in the wrong direction!
We did find it, eventually, and got some quick photos outside before heading back to meet Meghan. She took us on a bit of a guided tour, including the Kufürstliches Schloß, an 18th-century Bishop's palace which now serves as the main University building. We stopped in at Bärenland, a gummy bear shop, and then Chocoladen, which is exactly what it sounds like, a chocolate store! I could have stood inside all day just inhaling the smell... since the day had cooled off a bit, we had gourmet hot chocolate outside and then headed down towards the Rhine.

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, I love cities with rivers! I feel instantly at home somehow, probably since I find it much easier to navigate a new place with a large aqueous landmark. Across the Rhine from Bonn is Beuel, which is more of a suburb nowadays than a separate city. Anyway, Meghan took us to see the Kennedybrücke (subject of the single worst German pun I've ever heard: "Ich kenne die Brücke") and pointed out the sculptural adornment seen below:

Closer inspection reveals this little guy, wagging his bottom across the river towards Beuel:
Apparently the financial support for the building this bridge was a source of contention between the two cities, and in the end Bonn had to foot the bill for its construction... but they certainly got the last word in!

The three of us headed back to Meghan's and recreated our fabulous Max-Kade dinners together in the classic fashion... stir fry! We also planned Saturday's day trip to Köln.

Of course I had heard about the magnificence of the Kölner Dom, but guidebook blurbs are no preparation for the apogee of Gothic architecture. It is the city's dominant landmark, and the cathedral's north side is the very first thing one sees exiting the Hauptbahnhof. All the pictures I took from that perspective wound up horribly backlit, so here's a panorama from the southern side of the building:Of course there's nothing to do but pay the €2 (€1 for students) for the opportunity to climb some 509 steps to the top of the south tower. Whew! We caught a good time, though, and managed to get to the top without any major traffic jams in the narrow stone spiral staircase, quite a feat since over most of the distance the traffic is two-way. The Stau (traffic-jam) we passed on the way back down was awful, and made even more horrifying in sections when the waiting climbers gravitated to the outer wall where the handrail is, forcing us on parts of the descent to take the much steeper inner wall. I came very close to chewing people out auf Deutsch right then and there; sadly I'm not German enough to really pull it off, although I did manage some very pointed whimpering and the occasional polite yet hopefully guilt-inducing shriek of abject terror. All that notwithstanding, the view from the 157-meter spire is breathtaking:
We did manage to make it back to solid ground unscathed, and then set out through the Innenstadt in search of lunch. After a couple of side trips and map consultations we found something nice, and then set off again to check out a museum. Köln has a fairly well-known chocolate museum, but since I'm coming back with my folks and Meghan had already seen it, we ended up going for the art in Museum Ludwig next to the Dom, including a Dalí exhibit centering on La Gare de Perpignan ("The Perpignan Train Station") and a really amazing photo exhibit called "Für Immer und Ewig/For Ever and a Day?" which contained pictures from "the world's most photographed" including Marilyn Monroe, JFK, Elvis, Muhammed Ali, and Ghandi.

We headed back to Bonn to meet up with some of Meghan's roommates from last semester for dinner, and she and I ended up learning how to roll sushi! I haven't tried it yet by myself, but I've bought about half the supplies and certainly intend to give it a try sometime in the near future. We got plenty of practice!
After gorging ourselves we played a few games, including a 20-questions variation in which we wrote the names of famous people on post-it notes and adhered our new identities to one another's foreheads, and then tried to guess our own character. Then there was a quick and crazy game of Pounce, which I first learned from Grace at Kenyon... although it was played with special decks of cards that were color-coded and only numbered through 10, and was called "Libretto" for some strange reason.

I had to head back to Göttingen on Sunday, but the three of us decided to fit in a little bit more sightseeing in Bonn that afternoon. On the bus into town, though, I was once again mistaken for some kind of preteen... I attempted to buy my fare, and the driver disbelievingly asked if I needed an adult ticket... less than a month before my 23rd birthday! I swear, if that ever happens again I'm totally taking the discount!

We ended up going down the "Museum Mile" past the Palais Schaumburg, the previous home of West Germany's first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. Here's his head, which is also along the way:
Okay, it's not his real head, but it is a pretty creepy-looking representation thereof. To make matters worse, the sculpture also has reliefs of symbolic objects on the back. Adenauer is another of Bonn's favorite sons, since he is responsible for bringing the seat of government to the town during the east-west split... He got elected and decided he didn't want to commute. Berlin is once again the capital city, but there are plenty of reminders left in Bonn, many of which are now ministries of various sorts. There is plenty of political history, though, which is why it's a fitting location for the Haus der Geschichte. This museum is basically a walk through modern German history since 1945... and is there ever plenty to see! It was really cool to associate objects, images, and sounds with my understanding of Germany's development since WWII, and the exhibits provided a great sense of the massive scope of political and societal change here in the last 60-odd years. Plus, they have an actual moon rock!

I caught an evening train back home in anticipation of a day back in lab! Sadly, monday wasn't much of anything... I tried to look busy for the visiting deans whom I never even saw, and didn't get any further in terms of getting back on the project for this semester. Granted, now that classes are starting up again and given that I'll be distinctly less available when my folks and Mike and his family arrive in about a month, I've rather resigned myself to *gasp* a semester without lab work... although I can't say for certain that I wouldn't drop all sorts of other stuff and head off to Erlangen if things started looking promising... sigh. I can always dream.

Additional posts forthcoming about my Easter and travels with Kola and my birthday weekend, hopefully before I head out on my next adventure on Friday!

da da da da da da da da BACKLOG...

(Title to be sung to the tune of the Batman song. Y'all know the one.)

Aaaaah! I actually had to jot down NOTES from my Bonn/Köln trip of two weekends ago so it doesn't all fade away into the bottomless memory pits of my mind (although at least the pictures are already uploaded)... and then there's Easter weekend with a special visitor and some amazing food, followed by a spontaneous and out-of-this-world return to Berlin...

But all that will have to wait, you see. Since yesterday, I am on a quest. It is a quest of utmost importance, and is both dangerous and difficult. Also, I kind of suck at it. Nevertheless! All 3.7 of you will just have to anticipate the continuation of my adventures with bated breath until AFTER I succeed!

This may take weeks...

Especially since this weekend is my Birthday (23! Ah! Maybe people will finally stop mistaking me for 12!) and classes resume Monday. Oh, holy mother of pop-tarts! Before I forget, the biggest news of all! I did it, I really did it! I tested into OBERSTUFE! Grammatik II, here I come!

And now back to my regularly scheduled questing... And to anybody who takes on the challenge themselves and beats the dratted thing in under 5 hours (consecutive or not): feel free to gloat in the comments section, but I reserve the right to accuse you of making out with monkey bottoms and enjoying it.

Frohe Ostern

I promised myself I'd write my Bonn/Koeln post BEFORE Kola got here, and then completely and totally failed to get around to it in a timely fashion. But it's COMING. I promise!

Meanwhile, she arrived Friday afternoon and we're having a ball! Today we have plans to eat Osterlamms and chocolate bunnies, and then get ice cream in town. Sounds like my kind of day! There's a Katholisches Hochschulegemeinschaft service tonight as well. Tomorrow morning we're going to Berlin, and then I'll come back Wednesday morning... hopefully in time for my 1:00 Einstufungstest for second semester German classes and my 7:00 audition for this semester in the Uni choir.

So I guess more details will have to wait until later next week. I've realized this morning that after the next two weekends, I have plans ALL THE TIME until my family arrives on May 23. So maybe Italy won't happen this year... unless Mike wants to go to Rome some weekend while he's in Europe. He leaves at the end of June, and then two weeks later it's already time for me to head home. Wahnsinn!

Now that Em and I are (gloriously) reunited I'd like to hit Tuebingen and the surrounds for a visit, too... maybe the weekend after next? Wow...

Aber Deutschland hat ein Superstar schon gefunden...

*****UPDATE: I've been informed that the embedded player doesn't work for everybody (yup, that would be MY family still using friggin' Windows 98...) so go here if you don't see anything below. If that doesn't work, sorry! Also, I'm travelling again this weekend, this time to Bonn and Köln (Cologne), so more adventure updates are pending!*****



Ho...ly... CRAP. Queen of the Night, at that. I'd say it speaks for itself, really.

But Ricebag, how do you find this stuff??

Deutschland sucht ein Superstar...

That's the title of Germany's American Idol equivalent. I think last night's mondo-Karaoke session was plenty of practice and I'm ready to sign up for the next round of auditions. Ich wird Superstar!

Okay, not really... but why didn't we think of this in college? My friends totally got on the Dance Dance Revolution train (some folks from my circle more than others) and it made for some great parties. Plus, most of the folks I associated with could actually sing, including those who thought they couldn't... (I'm looking at you, certain someone who still owes me a duet, whether it be Sir Elton & Kiki or or Huey & Gwyneth.) So that's it. Five-year reunion comes around, I'm totally bringing a Karaoke set. Right here, right now, I'm throwing down the glove: Kenyon Reunion 2010 Idol. Who's with me??

In other news, this same someone seen above has also seen fit to bestow a miraculous cure for my nascent Protestant tendencies. How can I keep from rejoicing in Catholicism, when this exists??

My goals for the day... convincing my laundry to dry itself in a timely fashion (main tactic: squinting meaningfully at pants) and getting on the German equivalent of Facebook... Dear Lord, how far I have fallen!

Pub crawl, Opera, Lutheranism... oh my!

I am once again remiss in my posting duties... I've been back from Leipzig for several days now, but stuff keeps happening. For example, I was hijacked by my dorm-mates for an hour and a half last night during prime blogging time to test out Katha's new Karaoke system, which she got for her birthday yesterday. More on that later...

I suppose I should go all the way back to last Friday night... The Gö-team met up once again, plus Claire, for a nice sushi dinner in town. Somehow, a glass of wine or beer with the meal turned into a ginormous pub crawl, and we went to three other places for drinks afterwards. The triumph of my evening, though, was finally sampling the much-coveted Amaretto Sour at Villa Cuba, the one place in all of Germany that I've found the drink actually the menu. It didn't exactly match up with my expectations (the ones at the Grill basically taste like liquid Sweet Tarts candies, but this version must've had grapefruit juice in it or something) but I enjoyed myself nonetheless. And regardless of how I look in the photo, I wasn't drunk!

These guys, on the other hand, I can't exactly vouch for...

I eventually got home after 2am and still had to pack for my trip to Leipzig, and my train left the next morning before 9am. It was a great night, though. I met my first German trekkie as well! It was a surreal moment; folks exchanged contact information, I saw his email address... "Locutus. Like, Locutus of Borg??" and we spent the next five minutes quoting at each other and laughing hysterically. Nerd heaven! I'd say it was an all-around success!

Of course on Saturday morning I missed my original train and had to catch the next one, but I still rolled in a little after noon. A second umbrella had to be sacrificed to the gods of "Alaina can't possibly keep track of all her crap on the train," but otherwise it was uneventful (if a bit delayed.) Jen (from Kiel) and Elizabeth, a musicologist from Arkansas whom I met at the Berlin conference, were there at the station to meet me. I dropped my stuff off at Elizabeth's place and then got to see a little bit of the city. We met up with Jen again at the Thomaskirche, hoping to catch the usual Saturday afternoon Bach cantata (every Saturday afternoon! How cool is that!) but it turns out they had an organ vespers on schedule for this particular week.

We paid the €1 fee and were treated to an hour of fabulous music from Max Reger, good ol' JS himself, Franz Tunder, and Olivier Messiaen. I had to have my picture taken with the statue outside, as the man himself is buried at the front of the church (sorry that the photo is kind of upside-down!) I thought the Uni-chor in Göttingen was hot stuff with our twice-semesterly cantata schedule, but that's nothing compared to the Bach-lovin' that's all over Leipzig. Want to hear every single cantata and possibly most other pieces of music the man wrote over his whole lifetime? Simple, just live here for a couple of years!

We stopped for Kaffee und Kuchen, did a little shopping, and then Elizabeth and I went to see more of the city. The Nikolaikirche is most famous as the original site of weekly peaceful protests, or Montagdemos, at the end of the DDR era in 1989, since the church was the only place where the Stasi police didn't hold sway.

As awesome as it looks from the outside, the inside is truly stunning, with massive columns topped with green palm fronds. It was closed by the time we got there on Saturday, but I finally got some pictures of the inside on Sunday morning. But as for the rest of Saturday, Elizabeth and Jen and I made a lovely pasta dinner with snickerdoodles (gotta get the recipe!) for dessert, and hung out until Jen had to leave in order to rest up for the following day's performance. Elizabeth and I ended up chatting until the wee hours of the morning, which was great fun... well, until we realized that we'd have to get up early the next day!

Despite it all, we woke up on time and I was treated to a fabulous experience... we went to church at the Thomaskirche! I haven't been to a Lutheran service since high school (it was part of a "world religions" class project and the assignment was to sit in on another Christian denomination's worship.) Elizabeth's family had actually converted to Lutheranism from Baptist a while ago (fascinating story, and part of the reason we were up so late talking!) and I'm completely jealous that she gets to attend these services every week! For starters, the Thomanerchor, one of Europe's most famous male choirs, provided most of the music. These guys first got famous under JS Bach's direction between 1723 and 1750, and they were AMAZING.

A quick rundown: Introitus was Hugo Distler's "Gott ist unsere Zuversicht" from "Der Jahrkreis" op. 5; the Kyrie was a glorious (if anonymous) setting from the 10th century; after the first reading was a piece entitled "Wer sich nach seinem Namen nennt" by E Mauersberger, who was also Thomaskantor from 1961 to 1972; after the homily we heard "O Jesu, nomen dulce" from Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) with a glorious alto solo (I can see why this boy-choir thing was so popular); the service was concluded with a JS Bach organ piece, I. Allegro "aus dem Concerto a-Moll nach Antonio Vivaldi BWV 593." Of course we stayed for communion and heard yet another organ piece, "Jésus console les filles d'Israel qui le suivent" from Dupré's Stations of the Cross. It was completely beautiful, and it totally didn't matter that I hadn't even heard of any of this stuff beforehand... Good thing I'm not living in Leipzig, though, because if I could hear music like that every week I might just go Lutheran! (Kidding mom...)

It was a royal Luther-fest of a morning, though. Our next stop was Wittenberg, as the Mitteldeutsche Kammeroper presentation of "Hänsel und Gretel" was put on at the Wittenberg opera house. It's officially known as "Lutherstadt Wittenberg," since it was here that he taught, preached, raised his family, and on October 31, 1517 nailed a certain famous piece of paper to the door of the city's Schloßkirche. Of course they have all 95 theses on display at the side door... click here for a hopefully readable (English) image of the accompanying plaque.

Elizabeth told me it's a hoot and a half to see the city during the annual "Reformationstag" celebration, with folks dressing up like Luther, his family members, and his compatriots and generally having a fine old time. I missed this year's celebration, but it probably wouldn't have been in the best of form to heckle at the burning of the papal bull which threatened his excommunication in 1520. Hmmm... I'll still be around for the next annual reenactment of his wedding in June...

Oh, and here's the man himself, entombed since his death in 1546 at the Schloßkirche where it all started. Across the way is his good buddy and supporter Philipp Melanchthon (not pictured). Sorry about the fuzziness, I guess I'll just have to go back some time to get a clearer picture! We also had time to check out the Marienkirche, with another famous altar from Cranach (the elder). Elizabeth was a great source of Luther-lore and info, and apparently at this church he converted the entire congregation with a single sermon.

We had lunch in town and then headed off to find the opera house for Jen's performance. She filled a dual role as the Sandmännchen/Taumännchen (Sandman/Dewdrop fairy?) who puts the kids to sleep out in the woods and then wakes them up again only for them to stumble upon the evil Witch's tempting abode. The Witch was one of my favorite characters in the end... not a sympathetic role, of course, but the actress was just so deliciously evil. Jen told us on the train ride back to Leipzig about the performances they had done for schoolchildren, and how the most vociferous (and charming) audience response was always enthusiastic boo-ing for the böse Hexe.

We got back and cooked a fabulous dinner for six (myself, Elizabeth, Jen, another Kiel friend Andrew, James who studies Oboe in Leipzig, and a visiting friend of his from the U.S.) consisting of yummy homemade mac and cheese and salads (plus more snickerdoodles and of course homemade brownies for dessert!) and I made plans to run over to Dresden the next morning to see the Frauenkirche... but I ended up staying up too late once again and decided to spend another day in Leipzig. Elizabeth continued to play the role of the fabulous hostess, and showed me even more of the city. We met up with James and his visitor (her name is unfortunately escaping me at the moment) at a café, then made plans for additional sightseeing.

One of the big items I had read about is the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, a memorial to slain German soliders in the 1813 Battle of Nations against Napoleon's forces. It's huge, imposing, bombastically nationalistic, and as Elizabeth so aptly put it, "a fabulous example of everything that was wrong about the 19th century in Europe." A huge basin in front of the ziggurat-like building is used as a skating rink during the winter.

The sandstone-colored figure on the front of the building is St. Michael, who is depicted glowering down over his slayed enemies and basically telling the world not to mess with his 'peeps. Of course Hitler and his ilk ate this kind of stuff up with a spoon and capitalized greatly on the sentiment.

Inside, if possible, is even creepier. Even on a warm spring day the stone walls shut out the heat completely so it felt like walking into a huge refrigerator. The main chamber, with the imposing arched windows, contains giant symbolic statuary, massive mercenary figures with gigantic muscles which are supposed to represent the inherent strength and power of the "Volk." Unfortunately the reconstructed panorama I put together rather fails to convey the scale of these herculean dudes (and at least one dude-ess, symbolically breastfeeding some monstrous babies) but the informational display panels under the windows were at least 10 feet tall, if that provides a sense of the size. I was about ankle-high to the statuary.

The view from the top, however, is pretty nifty. Also much warmer than inside. We paid the €1 fee for elevator service to the middle level (that's below the green-covered scaffolding) and then skipped the tip-top since we had arrived just before closing time (and it would have been quite a few stairs). Still, we could see basically all of Leipzig.

Elizabeth and I split up from James and his friend and headed back into town to see if the Mendelssohn-haus was still open. It was, luckily. Several of the rooms were restored to the period of his residence, and the others contained exhibits which included letters, the family silverware, and an actual lock of his hair. (I was probably a bit more excited than was warranted at the chance to use Mendelssohn's bathroom... unoriginal of course...)

We grabbed leftovers and headed over to James' apartment for dinner with the same crowd as the previous night, and as I had decided to take a train out the following morning I once again had a fabulous, if late, social evening with Elizabeth. I have to go back in May when Jen and James and some other folks have organized a Fulbright recital, so I already have plans to check out the Stasi museum in Leipzig, finally see Dresden, and maybe even make an excursion into the nearby Sächsische Schweiz if time allows... And Elizabeth needs to come to Göttingen to do some research, and we both seem to have the travel bug at the moment, so hopefully we'll get to do more adventuring together in the near future!

I got back to Göttingen uneventfully on Tuesday afternoon, and things have been relatively quiet. Well, except that Katha got that Karaoke machine for her birthday which had to be set up and tested last night, and of course I had to participate. I'm at a bit of an unfair advantage since all the songs are in English, although Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" was tricky enough even in my mother tongue! There's also some kind of party in the works for tomorrow night. You need a can of mace and a big stick to keep me from making a fool of myself when there are 80's pop tunes to be had, so I anticipate a fun night.

Oh, and I need to call Christina (my host mom) since I bumped into her at the bank yesterday but we were too busy to really catch up... Spring cleaning bug has hit as well, plus there's laundry to be done... I don't have any specific travel plans hanging over my head at the moment, but after the whirlwind last two weeks I hope to rectify that soon! I'm also still not sure what's up, if anything, with lab stuff for 2nd semester... but I find that I'm not particularly worried at the moment. Blame it on the sunshine, I guess, and the fact that I really do feel like I'm in the homestretch! Developments, as always, to be posted as they... um, develop! Also, this is the second post today AND I updated the Dortmund trip post with photos, so enjoy!

I love my alma mater!

Okay, humongo-awesome Leipzig post is on the way, I promise. (Something about being kidnapped by my dorm-mates for a couple hours of Karaoke last night made it difficult to make the time to finish it up... hmm...)

In the meantime, the thing that I most love about Kenyon College is the unabashed willingness of the community to engage wholeheartedly in wonkish dorkery... and have an awesome time in the process. I have a million examples, from the annual Catholics vs. Protestants kickball game, to Prof. Shutt's halloween ghost tours, to pizza-fueled friday afternoon Psych department jam sessions, to campus-wide performance art contests, to the 24-hour mass reading of Ulysses on the Kokosing (and I have the T-shirt to prove it!)

But I think this one takes the cake.

But the most important part is definitely the original video.

Sigh... Farewell, old Kenyon, fare thee well!

4-1, Deutschland *UPDATE*

I have lots of snazzy photos from my trip to Dortmund to see Wednesday night's "friendly" Fußball (yo, that's soccer to you silly Ami's) game between the USA and German national teams, but Shutterfly is being a big, fat turd and not letting me upload anything. So, pics later, description now...

*****UPDATE!! Now with visual aids as of March 31! New text indicated in purple with asterisks because I said so! Also, a major humongous Leipzig update is on the way.*****

Pat and Laura and I spent the 2.5-hour train chatting, and we met Alana in Dortmund. I had packed for an overnight at a friend of Laura's place, but Pat and I decided on solidarity with poor Laura (who had to teach at 8 the next morning) and opted to stay up until the first "morning" train at 2:58am, so I threw my stuff in a locker at the train station. The next stop was Karstadt, a department store, to find red/white/blue wigs to match one Laura bought in Göttingen... because if we're up against the Germans on their own turf, we're darn well gonna stand out anyway! There were none similar to be had, so I improvised with a red and white mohawk with artistically placed sparkly blue scrunchies. Truly fabulous! *May it never be said that I'm one to shy away from a chance to look like a complete and utter doofus for the sake of a good time.*

We walked around town a bit. Dortmund, the 7th-largest German city you've never heard of, is in the western "industrial belt" state of Nord-Rhine-Westfalen (North Rhine-Westphalia), which means LOTS of people and a distinct lack of the old-style architecture I'm spoiled with in Göttingen. Like cows in Chicago, bears in Berlin, and super-creepy humanish figures in St. Louis, Dortmund has its own civic symbol displayed all over town in various "artistic" (read: corporately sponsored) iterations: it's a rhinoceros with wings. That is totally not a joke. *My personal favorite was definitely the shiny silver beastie with head- and tail-lights that blinked with a tug at the door handle on either side!* There were lots of folks already wearing their game colors, and although the vast majority were of course schwarz-rot-gold there were the occasional glimpses of our colors as well.

After a U-bahn hop to the stadium, we hit a concession stand for the requisite beer (Or, in my case, white wine.) There, we gravitated to a small cadre of red-white-blue, donned our wigs and got decently obnoxious, y'know, like loud Americans. We had a great view of folks entering the stadium area. My favorite were the American ex-pats with German families, usually with a kid or two in tow, half of the couple wearing, say, a USA baseball cap and the other half carrying a small German flag... the decorations were always understated, and all the kids I saw had German paraphernalia if anything. But we always got a wave or at least a nod. The couples were always holding hands.

As Pat had gotten two sets of two tickets each from Ebay, Laura and I split off from the group to go get in line. That would be "line" in the loosest sense of the word possible... the German interpretation of "queue" is much closer to "cattle-call crowded mass of bodies." We generally got smiles from those mashed up next to us, since we obviously knew a little of the language (and since the US was pretty much expected to suffer stunning defeat.) We'd hit the crunch a little late, and I definitely got more and more smooshed as game time approached. When they started announcing the players before we got through the gate things got a little more pushy-shovey but once we were through it was fine.

We navigated to our seats and gee, who'da thunk a couple of young American girls in crazy wigs in a sea of Germans would attract attention? Nothing negative, mostly photo-ops with some guys in the row in front of us ("This is going on the internet tomorrow!" only in German.)

Now, I'm not a huge fan of organized sports. The Cards were in the series while I was at college and I didn't watch a single game. When my family got discount tickets for having honor roll kids, I used to bring my chem homework to the ballpark (self-fulfilling prophecy, perhaps?) and I watch the Super Bowl primarily for the commercials. My version of "playing" soccer (aka herdball) as a kid was generally confined to mid-field spectatorship and freelance horticulture. Volleyball consisted of the occasional inadvertant ball-to-face moment... and I couldn't even serve underhand over the net until I'd been playing for a year and a half. Even with the above caveat, I'd argue that the first half was fairly uneventful. Germany scored near the end and Laura is apparently in love with their blonde ape-man goalie Oliver Kahn, so that's something I guess.

*We had a birds-eye view, and aside from a ghostly half-head the composite shot turned out pretty neat.* I did find the crowd pretty entertaining. It was certainly the most concentrated example of national pride I've seen here, ever, hands down. There's quite a bit of historical baggage associated thereto, of course, so in most contexts it's generally avoided as bad form. I find that rather refreshing compared to home, actually. By way of clarification, I do appreciate where I come from. I have veterans in my close family whom I love dearly, but I've always found out-and-out patriotism disconcerting. It may even be tied to my sports apathy... I find competition generally distasteful, and even though I know that the inherent loyalty and camraderie of shared experience can be lots of fun and even accomplish good things, I know enough history to understand that it can be manipulated and turned into something very very ugly. And I just can't stomach that. For me, it's better to deny the former than live with the fear of the latter.

But anyway, there were flags and loud music (almost always in English...) and chants (some may have even had words at some point in their existence!) and everyone in attendance was having a good time. If the first half was low-key, the second half took a turn right away into the realms of "rather embarrasing for the visiting team." Germany scored again pretty quickly, and when we finally got the ball to the correct half of the field to get a shot, Kahn came out of the goal like a steam train to meet our guy... resulting in two men on the ground and the ball blithely rolling into the corner of the net. Seriously, it wasn't even kicked. They couldn't even credit the score to our player on the jumbo-tron.

I guess it's better than a shut-out. Barely.

Folks seemed to know it was as good as over and some left early, missing two more German goals over the rest of the second half. There was a smidge of pretended teasing, but folks in our surrounding area were generally conciliatory. We got a little lost walking out to our meeting point and wound up catching a couple of the guys from before the game and acquiring some new folks, including a pair of brothers in town from Wuppertal (home of Schwebebahn, a suspended train) who were completely astounded to have run into so many actual Americans at the game. *The ride on the U-Bahn was pretty exciting with our newfound chums. Someone from our group had to be informed that smoking on the train was not allowed, but apparently glasses of beer are pretty much expected on board after a game night.*

We ended up going to into town to the Irish pub (actually run by a rather unfriendly Englishman... but apparently you can't have a city in Germany without an Irish pub, so I guess it's a niche) and hanging out until last call. *Pat and Alana, the other half of our foursome caught up with us there (photo).*

We caught our super early and/or late train back and it was a peaceful ride, pretty empty except for straggling fans and some folks heading into work already. I got home and into bed at around 6:30 am and slept until 1:30... I have until Saturday to get my sleep cycle back in order, since I have a morning train to Leipzig! I think I can do it...

The insane thing about meeting Americans over here, particular but not completely isolated to the student population, is that when you meet someone you don't exchange addresses, or even email or phone numbers anymore... The new social currency is membership in internet social networking systems. Now, Facebook existed during my time at Kenyon, and got popular there rather early. I set up an account in 2004 for all of 12 minutes until I deleted it in disgust. Seriously, with my schedule senior year I needed additional procrastination outlets? I had to literally plan in advance to make time for sleeping, eating, and using the bathroom. I glibly mocked my friends who had joined the herd and vowed never ever EVER to go over to the dark side.

Well. Welcome to the dark side. And in a freakin' big way. I'd still rather people read this blog if you want to keep track of me or say hello, but I understand the necessity of putting my name out there, gosh darn it... Ladies and gentlemen, I have been diagnosed with Internet Social Networking Disorder (ISND) and I have it bad. Pray for my eternal soul.

Pictures coming when Shutterfly stops being a humongous turd, and stay tuned for Leipzig/Dresden adventures!