Hello

I should have known not to mention how warm the weather was in my last update... Minutes after my last post, two white kittens arrived in our flat, Friedrich and Wilhelm, and with them came the winter. For the last 3 weeks or so we haven't got above 0C. The temperature's been consistently below -10C, even below -20C. It hasn't snowed much, but when it did, it was really cold, so the snowflakes were like real snowflakes from a cartoon. Here's one I tried to take a photo of on my sleeve.

That day the kittens were allowed outside for the first time. Wilhelm (probably, we still can't really tell them apart) got stuck up a tree. I climbed halfway up the tree, Wilhelm climbed onto my head, then I climbed down to terra firma. I hope he appreciated it, and that he's not the one that's peeing on my bed when I leave my door open.

Anyway, last week the largest annual public film festival in the world started in Berlin. I'm trying to see as many films as practical. So far I've seen two amazing films. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is an American film about 9.11 and a boy trying to handle the death of his father. Film critics seem to think it's a cheap ploy to get awards, but I found it a really absorbing, honest, and uplifting film. I also managed to get tickets to one of the funniest movies I've ever watched - it was called Iron Sky and it's about nazis living on the moon. It was really clever, and despite the subject matter, there was not a single awkward moment for the audience. In Q&As afterwards, the producer mentioned that he did find it hard to get funding from Germany!

Instead of taking the train back to Potsdam on Sunday, we walked back over the frozen river. It was very cool, a real experience. It was not so cool that I didn't zip up my pocket and lost the tickets I had to 2 more movies this week. Doh!

My tickets are out there somewhere...

Anyway, hope you're all doing well. I love to hear what you're up to!

Adam

Hi from Germany

Hello everyone,

Here's a very late blog post. My updates are getting further and further apart. At the start of this blog, I decided to post an update every week. I apologised sometimes for having 2 weeks between posts! Last year, I made 3 updates in total.

But that's all gunna change this year, I'm gunna aim for monthly updates, I've written it in my diary, and even if nothing exciting has happened, I'll still post that.

So after a fantastic 3 weeks in NZ, catching up with friends, family, and sun, I survived the flight back and got over the jetlag by the time I had to go back to work. The shock in being back in the northern hemisphere was not quite as bad as I was expecting, maybe because this winter is a really warm one, there's pretty much been no snow or even many frosts. It's been over 0 C most days, which is fine by me. I can still ride my bike, whereas this time last year there was half a meter of snow on the ground still!

Nothing much has really happened in the last 2 weeks, I had a presentation a week after I got back, so was working pretty long that first week finishing enough experiments for the presentation (and they seemed to work, I think there's hope with this PhD thing!). Next week I have an awful "circadian" experiment, taking samples every 4 hours for 24h straight, but my supervisor will help out so I can get some sleep in between. Other highlights this year include doing my washing, deciding to adopt 2 white kittens in the flat, and my flatmate announcing she's pregnant! This house is going to be getting full, and we've already got 9 of us living here!

Anyway, hope you're all well, enjoy the end of summer in NZ, because it must be our turn up here very soon!

Adam