Me again!

Hi,

It's been 2 weeks since my last update so it's well and truly time for another one.

Well I think the weather has improved a bit since last time, all the snow has melted and right now it's 5C outside. Positively tropical!

Yesterday was Nikolaus day. It's a little complicated, but Nikolaus is pretty much Santa. He puts gifts in kids' shoes on the night of the 5th of December. I always wondered how Santa managed to get so much work done in one night, but it makes much more sense now that I know he starts on the other side of the world 3 weeks earlier. So to celebrate this, we had a dinner at my supervisor's house with most of the Australian/NZ contingent from work. We had raclette for dinner, which is a cross between fondue and teppanyaki, and of course got a visit from St Nikolaus.

Still on the Christmas theme, these Christmas markets sprung up all over the country a week or so ago. In Potsdam, there are probably 50 little stalls all up and down the main street, they sell everything - the obligatory Bratwurst and Gluehwein (mulled wine), Christmas decorations, hats, gloves, wooden toys, etc. Buskers are playing strange instruments I've never seen before, and all kinds of street performers entertain the crowds. There's even a temporary ice skating rink in the middle of Potsdam. One of my flatmates is actually selling candles in a Christmas market on the other side of Germany for the whole month.

I also finally went to see park Sanssoucci. It's the most famous thing in Potsdam, so I felt a little guilty because I've been here 3 or 4 months and I've never set foot inside the park. Every day my bus drives right past it, too. I think most buses drive past it though, it could easily occupy a quarter of the area of Potsdam. So it is definitely a very big park, with some very big ornate buildings, and some very nice statues. Although they close all the castles for winter to protect them from humidity, the outsides of them are very nice. They even have a building called the Orangerie, where they put all their tropical plants over winter so they don't get frozen!

I think my German is getting a little better. I think most of the time, when I concentrate hard, I know half the words people use. But the other half are mostly nouns and verbs. So I definitely don't understand half of what people say. The other day I had a little victory when I went to the bakery and wanted 2 baguettes. They only had one on the shelf, and I managed to ask if there were any more baguettes, and then (this is the amazing bit) I understood when she said there were more in the oven and they wouldn't be ready for 10 minutes.

Hope you are all well. Although I really enjoying hearing news from home, please don't tell me about the weather!

Adam

Here are some pictures I took this morning, just so you believe me about the snow.
Here is the road outside our house. We didn't clear the footpath first thing, so the local government does it for you and sends you a bill!

A park across the road from our place looking very white.

Kasi the cat doesn't enjoy snow.

SNOW!!!

Yes, as you may have guessed from the title, it's been snowing here! Yesterday a couple of cm settled, but most was melted by the end of the day, a bit more fell overnight and it's just started snowing again. The news had stories of 30cm in a few hours in parts of Germany, so we got off pretty lightly here. I was going to go to Berlin and see a couple of museums today, but inside seems much more comfortable and warm at the moment. My flatmates don't seem to have the same opinions on snow as me - they are planning on going jogging this afternoon... Snow is better than rain, they say, and I guess they have a point. They did point out that if I don't go outside in the snow, I may get in trouble with my boss over winter.

In other news, I made a pavlova yesterday. I blame the gas oven (all the number have come off the knobs), so it definitely wasn't the prettiest pav ever made. I just filled in the holes with whipped cream, so my flatmates didn't know any better and were suitably impressed. Katharina complained that there were no strawberries on top, like there were in the picture with the recipe, and the kiwifruit actually came from Italy.  I didn't manage to get a picture before the vultures, I mean flatmates, descended on it, so you'll have to be happy with photographic evidence of the remains.

Thanks for reading, and writing, I love hearing about what's up back home.

Adam

Hi

Yesterday I finally manage to organise myself onto a sightseeing tour of Berlin. An Australian at the institute recommended this particular walking tour, and I'd been intending to do it for ages.

 Although the day was very average, a lot of people turned up for it (30, maybe), so there was no doubt we were

 tourists! To counteract this a little bit, I didn't take any photos. They would have all looked grey anyway. It was a pretty whirlwind tour so we didn't stop at any of the sights. The great tour guide, Kristin

, just pointed them out, and told us the stories about them. Hopefully I 

remember some of them, so I can retell them if you visit.

The pictures here are from the Belvedere castle which is just 5 minutes walk from my flat. The top one is the view from the top. To the left is on the way there, more autumn leaves, I'm afraid. At the bottom is another photo from the top of the castle, looking down at the water reservoir. Last time I visited (and forgot my camera), this was full of water and there were very cool reflections going on. They probably empty it for winter, I'm guessing.

In other news, I've been working pretty hard, had a time course experiment to do on Monday - I had to take and analyse a sample every 4h for 24, so I didn't get much sleep (2h between 2am and 6am) . I started work at 8.30am Monday, and finished at about 3.30pm Tuesday (when I started falling asleep in a statistics lecture, I'm not so sure this was completely due to the sleep deprivation). It wasn't actually too bad, and I got all the samples I need for a while.

Hope you are all well.

Adam

The last 2 weeks

Sorry, I forgot to post an update last weekend, so here are some selected highlights of the last 2 weeks.

Last Thursday I got on the bus to come home and heard someone wish someone else a good weekend. Luckily I asked someone why they said that, and then I found out that Friday was a holiday! It was something to do with Martin Luther (not King) nailing a list on a church door, and for some reason it was a holiday in Potsdam but not in Berlin. So everyone from Potsdam goes shopping in Berlin on this day. I took the chance to visit the NZ embassy and do a special vote. I don't think they get many visitors because they talked to me for about an hour! On the topic of the election, I hear that Helen's reign is over. It wasn't really a surprise, as it's exactly what all the polls had been saying, and to avoid offending anyone, I will not comment any further on this topic. 

On a completely different topic, I went ice skating last weekend in Berlin at an outdoor (but artificial) rink. I expressed my surprise it was outdoors, and the Germans sounded equally suprised that indoor rinks exist. My muscles were quite sore after that but I'm still going back tomorrow again with the same people. On that Sunday, I noticed that it was getting quite foggy as we left the ice skating rink. And it has stayed foggy since then. I actually haven't seen the sun for a week now, people say this is quite standard, it's definitely a little depressing, though.

I've also joined a (very) social uni ultimate frisbee team. Ultimate frisbee seems to be a cross between netball and american football, but played with a frisbee. It's a lot of fun, and really hard work too. I also had trouble walking the day after our first practice. Everybody speaks German, so I just make sure I'm never at the front of the line and it's all good. The team talks about tactics etc are kind of lost on me, though. I think I am picking up a bit of German now, sometimes I can guess what topic people are talking about. German lessons at the institute start on Monday so that'll be good.

Hope all of you are well.

Adam

I went to Potsdam's one and only Abenteuer (adventure) Park this weekend with a group from the institute. As you can see in the picture they've put all these little platforms up in these trees, with ropes, and bridges, and nets, and stuff between them. You get attached to a metal cable and do different courses. It was a lot of fun, but really exhausting, and my muscles are pretty sore today. In German they say Muskelkater, literally "muscle hangover".

Afterwards we went to an Italian restaurant for brunch. All you can eat brunch! I tried my first bowl of quark, a yoghurty cheese thing, and yea, it was ok. One of my flatmates moved out today, so we had a BIG dinner last night with stews and cabbage and dumplings. So I'm definitely not starving! I also went into Berlin to meet up with a German and a Kiwi I met at Massey in Auckland who are now working in Northern Germany. Had a really good night, it was good to see a couple of familiar faces.

I scored an awesome free bed this week. An elderly couple in a coworker's/friend's apartment had to get rid of a fold out couch quickly before their new couch arrived. It's from Ikea (everything here is, I think), but it's much more comfortable than the mattress I had on the floor before. You can see it in the cool 360 degree picture of my room. Sorry I didn't clean up, at least it's real! I also scored some shelves I haven't put up yet, and a very 80s bike (just wait for the pictures!).

I was invited to a board games evening at my supervisor's last night, we played a version of spoons and a crazy 6 person twist on speed. Board/dice/card games seem to be pretty popular, especially Kniffel which as far as I can tell is the same as Yahtzee.

In other news, I had my first lectures today. Plant Metabolomics at 9 then The Uses of Plants for the Future at 11. They were pretty interesting, although not hugely closely related to my project, but the choices are narrowed down a lot by not understanding German. The ball is starting to get rolling on my project, sorting out the little details of how to do stuff mostly, and probably will try to get some real data this week or early next week.

I am pleased to hear the weather isn't fantastic back home, it's a beautiful autumn day here today - clear skies (apart from hundreds of jetstreams), not too much wind, etc. Hope you are all well, and if you have exams, hope you aren't/weren't too stressed.

The week that was (#5)

I've found that living in a new country there is so much that is new and unfamiliar, it's impossible to take it all in. I think if I mentally noted every time something suprised me, I'd be exhausted. The first example I noticed of this was very early on in the guesthouse. Someone else asked me if I thought the pillows were strange. I knew that they were big and floppy, but it wasn't until she asked that I realised that this was weird. An example from this week, I went a bar called Waesch Bar (I think that's how you spell it). It was only several hours after I left that I realised that it was very unusual that half the bar was a laundromat.

I am officially enrolled at the University of Potsdam! This means, amongst other things, that I get to use all the public transport in Brandenburg and Berlin for free. This is a good thing, because the buses were costing me a fortune (~nz$3.50 for a bus to town). I took advantage of this and took a trip to a big mall in Berlin where I bought lots of useful but not-very-interesting stuff (eg towels, lamp...).

I'm starting to get into some work in the lab, which is very good, but also quite frustrating at the start because things take 5x longer than they should because you don't know where to find everything. Yea, nah it's all good.

Sorry this hasn't been a very exciting post, I'll try harder next week! I hope you are enjoying the sunshine back home!

Four weeks

First of all, the trip to Czechoslavakia was called off :( The weather wasn't looking the greatest and I think it was getting quite complicated. I should still have enough material to fill a blog post, though.

Walking back from the institute, I heard a noise in the bushes beside me. First I thought it was a neighbour tending their garden, then I saw it was some kind of animal. It was too big to be a cat, and didn't really look like a dog. After quite a bit of staring, I realised I was looking at a fox rummaging through the compost bin! They're smaller than I thought, and I was tempted to try to pat it. You'll probably be happy to hear that I decided to take the option with a 0% chance of rabies.

On Wednesday night, I went to an Indonesian karaoke restaurant! Melanie from the institute's Dad is Indonesian, so she was friends with the owners there, which was kind of lucky, because it was pretty much their living room. Because I speak English, they expected me to know all the words to every English song that has ever been written, which isn't exactly the case. Nonetheless it was a very fun night, and I found out that "Lemon Tree" (...all that I can see is just another lemon tree...) is by a german band!

Here are a couple of photos from Berlin.

Autumn colours somewhere quite close to Brandenburger Tur. So many people were taking photos here, I definitely felt like a tourist.

Stage at the Brandenburger Tur where they were celebrating German Unity Day (anniversary of official reunification of East and West Germany. It was much busier on Friday night, but I forgot to take photos then. I think I must have looked pretty suspicious because they searched my bag twice on the way in.

Thanks for reading, hope you are all good.

3 weeks!

Hello again,

This week has been very productive. As well as getting a contract, I've also *almost* got a visa (just have to pick it up on Tuesday), and I've *almost* enrolled in university (just need to take my visa to the university on Tuesday), AND! I've found somewhere to live and have moved in!

The flat is a big old house in a really nice part of Potsdam. It's 30 seconds walk from an old palace called Schloss Cecilienhof (the G8 summit was held here last year). It's not the prettiest flat, so it reminds me a bit of my Dunedin days, but the people are really cool. 

I was a little worried that they were all vegetarian yesterday because there was no meat in the fridge and lots of vegetarian cook books around, but it turns out that the girl who's room I've moved into was a vegan, but all the others are completely "normal". They've loaned me furniture and bedding and stuff till I get that all sorted. AND! they all speak really good English, and are keen to help me learn German.

Had some chestnuts roasted on an open fire last night! A friend of one of the flatmates has a yearly chestnut night and it was really nice. I'm so amazed by how friendly all these Germans are! I'm not seeing the stereotype at all. I'm going to the "prettiest climbing wall in Brandenburg" with the friends today, and they even loaned me a bike to get there!

Oh, I almost forgot the most exciting thing! My new flatmates casually mentioned yesterday that they were going tramping next weekend and would I like to come. It later emerged that we were going to the Czech Republic for this! They have a big campervan/bus thing so we're just gunna hop in that and drive to another country! Should be an awesome adventure, I'll make sure I take photos (you have to guess which part of this post these photos correspond to).

Thanks for reading again, tune in next weekend (at the latest) for the next exciting installment.

I have a contract!

Yea, today the powers that be decided I could have a contract that ensures I get paid at some point. Although it was in German, I did get a (n informal) translation which sounded very reasonable. Now getting a visa should be childs play (although the one place in Germany where the employees don't speak English is, you guessed it, the foreigners office...).

The latest observation of how Germany is subtly different to New Zealand: They have an uncany ability to place light switches EXACTLY where you would expect them.

Thanks for reading, I'll do another proper post in the weekend.

Week 2 (good title, yea?)

Well my second week in Germany is nearly over so it's time for another update for both my loyal readers.

The highlight of this week has probably been... beaureacracy! Maybe that should be beaureacrazy (ha!). I don't want to bore you with the details, but let's just say that there are about a dozen different people spread across 3-4 organisations that all want to get the right paperwork in the right order, and then they are meant to pass it on to the next right person in the right order. Not as seemless as I was lead to believe it was meant to be in Germany! They've changed their mind 3 times already about who is going to actually employ me, too. But I'm making progress, I should be able to sort everything out next week. I did manage to open a bank account with very little drama - thank God the banker could speak English!

The search for somewhere to live is going good, I've found one place that would do, but I'm going to keep looking for a bit to see what else there is out there, I've got a few more to have a squiz at this weekend, but I don't think I'll be homeless when I get kicked out of the guesthouse.

In other news, I went for a half-day of "sailing" on the Havel. There was not a huge amount of wind, though. I'm told that the wind in Potsdam starts work at about 10, takes lunch from 11 to 2 and knocks off by 4. I think it may have called in sick this day. The boat was a beautiful 40 year old, mahogony 8m day sailer. The trip was very scenic, and I was amazed how many little castles/ruins/old buildings you could see.

I have managed to get into Potsdam and properly explore the city. It's got a really nice atmosphere, with no cars allowed in the middle of town, so there are heaps of little food stalls and souvenir shops covering the streets. There are also McDonalds (where McChickens come with sweet chilli sauce, not mayonaise) and Subways (where they earnestly recomend the best sauce match to your sandwich) and all those kind of shops. Whereas Berlin is full of foreign tourists, Potsdam is full of German tourists which must mean it's good, eh.

Hope you find this vaguely interesting - let me know what you want to hear about, and let me know what's up back home!!! My cell phone over here is +49 175 4419568 (it'll only cost you 30c if you're on prepay, 20c on a plan).

Almost a week!

So it's almost been a week already. All the shops are shut on Sundays, so I'll take the chance to finally get the ball rolling on this blog.

The flight here was actually quite painless. Going via the States meant that I could take more luggage, but it also meant I had to survive LAX airport. I thought I did, but apparently I forgot to hand in my departure card. This means the CIA/FBI/whoever thinks I'm still in the States! I am a little worried about this, but what's the worst they can do?

I met my Supervisor at the airport in Berlin. He's really nice and has been very helpful. I stayed with his family the first night, and of course they are all really nice too. Now I'm staying in the guesthouse attached to the Max-Planck Institutes in the Golm "Sciencepark". It's nice enough, but it is kind of at the arse end of nowhere - not even a pub within walking distance! They're gunna kick me out in 2 weeks so I have to find somewhere else to live by then. I'm thinking living in Berlin might be a good choice - there are more options in there than in Potsdam, might be a little cheaper too. Watch this space though, I'm going to have a look at a few places next week.

I haven't really seen much of Potsdam itself. I'm kind of worried that if I wander too far from the main train station I'll get hopelessly lost and never find my way home. I went into Berlin yesterday to have look around and meet up with a friend (of a friend) from NZ. It's definitely a very cool city. Everywhere you look there's another museum, another ancient building, and a information board about the world-changing historical event happened there. We had a look at Potsdamer Platz - they were holding the annual firefighter challenge there (!?), the Berliner Dom - very impressive royal cathedral, and the Brandenburg gate. I forgot my camera, so you'll have to google them if you want pictures! Oh and of course tried some authentic German weissbier.

I think I'm settling in OK to this crazy culture. Although it's the big things I noticed first - everyone speaking German, driving on the right, etc - it's the little things that add up to make everything very strange. Pillows are big and square and floppy, windows open in and take up most of the wall, meat comes in wierd plastic pottle things, there are cobbled streets, and there are 5 different bins for recycling.

Anyway, thanks for reading this blog. I intend to get out and explore Potsdam properly, continue the search for a flat, and open a bank account, so tune in next week for these exciting updates! Let me know what's up with you back home!