Italy... or not

This post was supposed to be the one detailing my fun adventures in Venice and Rome, but instead I'm going to tell you about fake Italy and Würzburg.

Last Friday Hayley and I woke up really early to catch a tram at 5:20 to take us to the train station in time to catch our train, which was going to get us to Hanau in time to get on a bus at 8:00 which was supposed to get to Frankfurt Hahn airport at 9:42, plenty of time to catch our 10:50 flight. Everything was fine until the bus, which was running a little late anyway, hit traffic on the freeway. An hour and a half of traffic. Apparently there had been an accident, so we ended up at the airport about 10 minutes after our flight took off. We were very sad about this and so went to the italian restaurant in the airport and ordered pizza and wine and pretended that we were in Italy. We then did all of the above transportation backwards and got home at 6 pm, 13 hours after starting out and getting pretty much no where.

We thought about trying to catch a train to France, since we had already planned on traveling that weekend, but everything was too expensive and it was rainy in Germany, so we just stayed home, did some work and watched movies all weekend. Sunday was Rex's birthday so we went to Kiliani for it's last night, watched fireworks, ate pretzles and candied nuts, and had a mass (1 liter of beer).














The next week I was just working on my project and playing frisbee. Supposedly I'm going to take data the first week in August, but it keeps getting pushed back. Hopefully it will actually happen before I leave so that when I have to give a presentation of what I've been doing all summer it is more than just simulations and theory.

This weekend I decided to do something outside. I tried to find a winery tour, but they're all in German which is problematic. There is a walk through various vineyards which I will probably do eventually, but this weekend one of my room mates and I decided to walk to a nearby forest and wander around it for a while. We really did wander - there isn't a map of the place so I just looked on google maps, took note of the roads around the edges of the forest so that we could find our way back to where we started, and off we went taking random turns whichever way looked either a) more interesting, b) had less stinging nettle or c) more pathlike and less road like. It served us well and we saw some pretty German forest before popping out in a wheat field just above the town we started in.

Slow summer

I haven't posted in a while because there hasn't been much going on. The first weekend in July I went to a women's frisbee tournament with team Frankas, comprised of women from Würzburg, Bomberg, Nürnburg, and one other city in Franconia (part of Bavaria). We were a decent team and had several close matches but just didn't play well together and so only won our last one. It was a fun tournament though, and of course lots of frisbee :) Here's our team -
I spent the week after the tournament just doing research, well, working in mathematica trying to simulate negative refraction (my project topic). Hopefully I'll get to start actually taking data next week. I did much the same this week as well, with the exception of Kiliani. Kiliani is a festival that is held every summer consisting of lots of carnival rides and food tents, as well as a large beer hall. My room mates and I visited it twice, rode the ferris wheel and partook in the 1 liter beers offered at the tents. I wanted one of the mugs and couldn't find a place to buy them, so when three elder Germans sitting next to us told me that I should take my stein after drinking the liter, I was rather easy to persuade and now I have a Würzburger Hofbrau bier stein :)

This week has been filled with Grey's Anatomy and trying to work on my research. This weekend Hayley and I are headed to Italy for what will probably be my last international adventure of the summer (funds are running out, as are available weekends), so definitely a much longer, more interesting post to come!

Snipets from Germany

Life continues here in Würzburg. I eat a lot of ice cream, finally found decent tea, my research is actually starting to be productive, I play frisbee a couple times a week, going to a women's tournament this weekend, our flower plant died so we bought a basil plant, listening to
thunderstorms almost daily, cooking with the room mates, wine festival this week, beer festival next week, planning a trip to Italy, bought plane tickets home, found out a HS friend is in Germany too, nearly finished with Gilmore Girls, found a swim park nearby, getting used to summer heat without air conditioning, finding a thesis advisor and trying to convince them to give me a project, and learning small bits of German. And writing run-on sentences. That's my life in a nutshell, be back in Texas August 18!