So… I know I promised you all a story about Germany ages ago. So here it finally is. Basically arriving in Stuttgart on a Sunday afternoon is not very conducive to getting home. Swebian (or Schwaben in German) Germany is a bit strange on Sundays. We were planning to wash my co-supervisor’s windows on our last Sunday (don’t ask why now, I promise I will get to it in a later post) but Joyce calmly advised us that it would not be a clever idea, as Paul would probably be ignored forever more by his neighbours for such a heinous crime as having three PhD students wash his windows on the Sabbath. So as you can imagine, getting from Stuttgart to Tübingen was not the easiest task and resulted in a 75 euros taxi fare (ouch). The only food option was 10 euro spag bol takeaway from the airport. I will pause here briefly for a gratuitous and exceedingly touristy (seriously… this is like THE picture of Tübingen) shot of THE colourful riverside houses (yes mummy there is even a half-timbered house for you there and more to come =).
Gratuitous Tübingen pic
So anyway I arrived at Paul’s place, which had a lovely sign on the door which basically translates as “You can do without some things in life, but not cats and literature”. I couldn’t agree more. In fact Paul’s cat has even been the co-author on some of his papers. He is a very geological cat =). But I have to say that the second thing I noticed about Paul’s apartment was the extremely odd smell which we became very familiar with in the next few weeks (I guess that is what comes from chain-smoking indoors). And then the skulls of course, which I mentioned in a previous post. So as I said before, feeling a bit lonely I sat around writing posts for my blog and eating some of the chocolate I had bought for Jesper in Spain (I know… how terrible am I!... but I bought him lots… and he didn’t mind… and I was sad!).
Luckily Helena soon arrived and then we decided to do some emergency cleaning, which included de-stickifying the kitchen and throwing out some VERY old food items in the fridge. I mean, I know you are supposed to let cheese ripen, but really. There was one thing we were slightly disturbed by and that was something in Paul’s bedroom that looked exceedingly like big pieces of drying skin stuck to newspapers. We could not work out what it was and eventually had to ask his Post-doc. Thankfully it turned out it was only latex imprints of very interesting rock textures from the fields... it was getting a bit silence of the lambsey there for a minute.
The next morning we followed the Jen’s directions to the city which consisted mainly of, “follow the canal”. So we did and we managed eventually to find the geology building after having an diverting conversation in German with a secretary with extremely hairy arms, in the main building. I have to admit, the geology building is not the nicest and the windows of our office were facing a main, busy street. But it definitely makes me feel better about sitting in my lovely Stockholm office, typing this.
Follow the canal!
And so began a crash-course in C and C++ programming. I unfortunately was rather behind as the other two girls had already taken a basic course. Jen’s pretty much skipped over the concept of functions and for, while loops so I was left struggling behind as the other two headed off further and further into the distance. This coupled with the awful news about Eliot meant I was pretty much a wreck when Jesper arrived on Wednesday. But he is so wonderful. He managed to scrape me up and put me back together and even tutored me in C programming so I could catch up with what was going on.
Here’s a picture of the wonderful boy now.
Jesper had a couple of days wandering around Tübingen while I worked (although he had pretty much seen everything after a day and half). He was the one who noticed something wonderful about the number plates in Tübingen. Basically they all begin with TÜ so you can get some pretty fun words. The next picture illustrates this perfectly:
TÜRD
Some of the other great ones were TÜBA, TÜBB, TÜMM, TÜRF TÜFF (as well as being a cute word for tough this is also a geological term for an ash-deposit… just so you know =) and many others I have forgotten but which made us laugh.
We were slightly terrified by the extremely strange mascot of the Keim backerie (by the way… Tübingen is totally overflowing with bakeries… there has to be at least one for every ten people there. I don’t know how they stay in business). Anyway… the Keim backeries had decided they needed something a bit extra to help them get ahead in the market… so they employed the use of the Keimling. I think the picture will illustrate the freakyness of this enough so I will stop there *shudder*.
Sheer evil in its corporeal form.
And with that chilling picture I think I have talked enough for one post so I will let you go for now. Will be back soon with more Tysk (German in Swedish) adventures. Lots of love and missage!
