My St. Patrick's Day weekend

My St. Patrick's Day weekend was awash with self-pity rather than beer this year. Jeremi's aunt Jeanne had just died that week, and he had flown to Moncton for the funeral. This also meant that he could go to our good friend Rishad's birthday party on the Saturday night, where many of our other good friends from Halifax would be as well. I so desperately wanted to fly back for this. Jeremi was going to be nearly half way to Germany and spending time with his family and our closest friends, and I was going to be stuck in Jena. Add to that the fact that St. Paddy's isn't really a big deal here, and my only real drinking buddies (since Corene and Alex left) were in Denmark for the weekend. So I was feeling sorry for myself.

To counteract this, I decided to go for a walk on Sunday. Not just a walk, a four hour hike from town to town. Just me, my mp3 player, and my camera, to record some of the sights. Sights such as these furry little ponies in the nearby town of Ammerbach,
or these even fuzzier little spring flowers by the side of the path. (For those who want to know, I think they're anemone patens, or Pasque flower. I only know this because if you type "looks like furry crocus" into Google, it will tell you. I love search engines.)
And then there were these ridiculously furry cattle, with huge horns.
And, in answer to my brother's questions about the landscape here and the different types of trees, here's a view that sort of shows the exposed limestone hillsides around these parts.
Living by the river it's easy to think that you're surrounded by hills, but I've walked to the crest of enough of these hills now to realize that they just open up into plateaus of farmland and windmills. It's not that they're hills, it's that Jena's at the base of a big valley carved out of otherwise fairly flat terrain at a higher elevation. And because I was trying to explain to my brother how Europeans for some reason like to make beautiful trees incredibly ugly by cutting them and letting new young branches grow from the elevated stump, I'm including a representative picture of this as well. I'm still not clear on why they do this - I was thinking it was to preserve peoples' views, so the trees don't get so high, but a friend here said that it was a particular kind of tree that will break if it's not cut like this. I can't say for sure, but I really do think it makes the trees look diseased.

You can also see a little thing painted on the bark of the tree in the foreground, two white stripes with a green one in the middle. This is how they mark the official trails (Wanderweg) around here, and at least a few different colours are used to avoid confusion around junctions.

Some other random sights from my walk, at least two of which are quite typical: a hunting blind. These little wooden towers are everywhere. In the woods, by the side of the highway, along walking and cycling paths, in the middle of farmers' fields. Often they're only about 100 m apart, so that you can sometimes see three or four at a time. Now safety officer Julia was a bit concerned about this, since I don't think it's a good idea to hunt directly next to a path or a road, but it seems that in Germany this is completely okay. The explanation that I've been given is that it's necessary to keep down the deer and roe deer populations, as there are no natural predators such as wolves. And of course the blinds are near roads and trails because it's not so easy in Germany to find places that aren't. There also seems to be a difference in hunting culture here. Rather than going with friends to a cabin or going camping and hunting for a few days or over a weekend , people will just go after work to one of these towers and try their luck around sunset. At least this is what I've been told.
Another thing that is visible all over the place right now are trees that are decorated for Easter, by having coloured eggs hung from the leafless branches. I think it's quite pretty, and a nice bright bit of decoration for the early spring. And this particular garden in Coppanz even has a gnome!
And finally, one other thing that I've seen twice now, and with no explanation at all, are these mysterious circles in the grass. You might have to look carefully, but there really are different coloured rings of grass in this picture. Is it some sort of really lame crop circle? I'm not sure. Someone suggested that maybe there was something sitting there that deflected water in a circle, like the top of a silo or something like that, but I'm not sure with all of the different sizes. Any theories would be appreciated...

My new computer arrived!!!

I apologize in advance for the highly-technical nature of this posting, but I've spent the past 24 hours doing nothing but working with my computer and reading blogs and websites about how to get it configured the way I want it (oh yeah, and I slept a little too). I'm under the delusion that the world at large actually cares about this sort of thing.

And why this highly technical entry? Because it's finally here! It's my brand-new work computer, a fancy-dancy MacBook Pro, ordered a couple of weeks ago, and held up by the special-order international English keyboard (but more on that later). It arrived in my office yesterday around 3:30, and I played with it, trying to set it up just so, until around 12:30. Yes, I didn't leave my office until after midnight. There are both good and bad sides to living in the building your work in. Well, here it is, after only the most basic of configuration by me (i.e. getting all that mess off my desktop).
All in all it really is quite lovely, and so much faster than the beater I've been using for the past 6 weeks. (Which is my old Windows XP laptop, but it is busted. Not enough that it doesn't work at all, just enough that it does everything really slowly, and needs to be rebooted anytime that I change LAN cables or it goes to sleep if I want access to the internet afterward.)

This new laptop really is pretty slick, but I'm having to put in a great deal of effort to actually make it useful to me. The main (temporary) problem is that the IT department here installed the operating system, and they seemed to not bother including the oh-so-important (to me at least) X11. This is an optional install, but it's what lets you switch to a unix interface at the click of the button, complete with multiple desktops. Without this I'm able only to open up a terminal or two on the already crowded mac desktop, and it's no better than having an ssh terminal on my windows machine and working remotely on a unix server in Halifax or Montreal or Victoria or Hamburg or Dorval (which are all places where I still run jobs, oddly enough). I'm also having trouble getting used to the Mac interface, which is substantially different, especially if you're used to doing almost everything with keyboard controls (as I am).

But the biggest problem by far that I'm having, and to which I don't think I'll be able to adapt, is the damn keyboard. As mentioned before, I ordered an English keyboard so that I didn't have get get used to the switched Z and Y on a German keyboard, in addition to the different location of much of the punctuation marks. This is particularly important when programming, and especially for someone like me, who doesn't look at the keyboard at all while typing. I really just know where everything is. Which is why this is such a pain in the ass. Here is what the enter key looks like on my keyboard, and below is what the layout looks like on US and Canadian models of the same keyboard.

They made the return key all screwed up and hard to reach on the European models so that you could more easily get at the backslash. Who decided that? Anyone who either programs or works from a command line uses the return key all the time, almost as much as the space bar, and this is just not workable. I'm going to try to use Ukelele right now to switch the \ and return keys as far as the software is concerned, which means that my computer will be exceedingly difficult for anyone else to use, but I don't really care.

Aside from this, I think the built-in webcam and mike are better than my old ones, so I can't wait to talk to someone to find out! Oh yeah, and blogger unexpectedly switched to German when accessed with the new laptop. Not really sure about that one yet.

Schwarzbiernacht!!!

After riding my bike for four hours yesterday and walking around Weimar for another four, I was pretty tired. But not tired enough to miss Schwarzbiernacht (literally: black beer night). This is an event sponsored by the Köstritzer brewery, the makers of a popular Thüringian Schwarzbier. For this event you need to have a wristband, which costs 10 euros, and this lets you into all of the participating bars in town, all of which had live musical acts. (Unlike, say, Halifax, live music in a bar is uncommon here.) In all there were over 3 dozen bars, restaurants, and clubs participating, as well as bands playing at the Goethe Gallerie, the shopping centre in the middle of town. I thought this was hilarious, that the mall was packed with people, all of whom were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and eating bratwurst, while watching a band play on a big set up stage. (People were lining the railing of the second floor atrium, dangling glass bottles of beer and lit cigarettes from their inebriated hands over the heads of the unsuspecting people below. But I've learned that in Germany you don't have to prevent accidents, just buy insurance to protect yourself from them financially.)

I wasn't sure how good it was going to be, after all for 10 euros on any other night I could buy myself four pints and still have a euro left over after tip, but Susanne and Calin and another PhD student, Hagen, were all going, so I figured I'd have fun. I really didn't realize that the entire city was going to be there, everyone from about 14 to about 65 years of age at least, and possibly some people from the surrounding towns as well. The city was jammed full of people, all out to hear some music, drink some beer, and eat some sausages.

Unfortunately I didn't get pictures of some of the funniest parts of the evening, but here's a scene on Wagnergasse, a street lined with bars and cafes, just to give some idea of the numbers of people that were out.We ended up going to 6 or 7 places last night, and it was a good excuse to see some new places that I hadn't been before. To me, the most entertaining place was Nordsee, (lit: North Sea), which is a fast food chain of fish and chips shops here. It's not usually a bar at all, just a restaurant with a lot of deep fried sea food and potatoes, but tonight they had live entertainment and a bunch of beer in containers of crushed ice. And the entertainment was Käp'n Alfred, who was going to be performing Seemenschlieder (see shanties). Käp'n Alfred was an older guy with an accordian, a song book, and some back-up tapes for some of the numbers, so I wasn't expecting much, but I was more than entertained. Suddenly it was like being at a bar in Halifax where everyone knows all the words to all the songs, and they're singing along, except that it was in German, and it was in a place that was more like a McDonalds. This didn't stop people from dancing though! Interestingly, there were a couple of tunes that I recognized, but with different words. One was to the same tune as "Roll out the barrels", and the other shared a melody with "The Wild Rover", a staple of the Irish bars in Halifax. I wish I got a picture of the Käp'n, but it was too small a place, and seemed a bit too much like I was taking pictures of the people dancing in front. Sometimes I just don't like taking pictures in public places.

(I should also mention that while this was incredibly fun, the best band I saw, in the musical sense, was The Merry Poppins, this fantastic Austrian band who were playing at the Irish Pub. I wish they were a little more local so that there was a greater chance they'd be playing in Jena again!)

And of course there were lots of stands selling bratwurst, open late for the occasion. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but the famous bratwurst here are pretty long, something like 25 cm, while the bun is at most 1o cm in diameter. It's really just a little grip to keep your fingers clean. They certainly do make great cheap (1.40-1.80) and greasy snacks to slow down the absorption of alcohol though. Here's a terribly unflattering picture of Susanne partaking in the Thüringian speciality:

Cycling to Weimar

Hey, this is our 100th post! Hooray for us!

After all the fun I had last weekend with my bike ride out to Lobdeburg, I decided to try to make it all the way to Weimar this weekend. Weimar is a somewhat smaller city (maybe 65000 people), about 23 km west of Jena. It's about half the way to Erfurt, the capital of the state of Thuringia, in which Jena is located. I mentioned my plan to Anna, a PhD student at the institute here, and she said that she'd like to come along as well.

And so we set out at around 9:30 on Saturday morning. The weather was quite nice, only partly cloudy, though a little colder than it's been lately. At first the trip seemed like it was going to be really tough, but we sort of took a little detour that required us to go straight up the side of a little mountain. Upon looking more carefully at the map, it seemed we didn't actually have to be on this little road, and we could head back down to the main bike path, which had much more gradual elevation changes.

From then on, the ride wasn't too bad, though the parts that were on a dirt path were incredibly muddy after the rains the night before. We ended up with our bicycles and pants covered in silty mud, but we did finally make it to Weimar (after stopping many times to check the map the the signs along the way) at 11:45. This was a bit longer than expected, but it still gave us over 4 hours to explore Weimar before we had to turn around to get back to Jena for 6:00 pm.

Despite its small size, Weimar is quite well known across Germany because of its history. Heck, it's even a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The first constitution of Germany was developed at a conference there in 1919, which gave birth to the Weimar Republic, which lasted from 1919 until 1933. It is also very famous for being the primary residence of Goethe, a giant of German literature, from 1794 until his death in 1832. Friedrich Schiller, another famous poet of this era and close friend of Goethe's, also lived in Weimar for some years during this time, and the two of them are immortalized all over the city. (And actually around Jena as well, and really anywhere that either of them even visited in Germany.) Here's Anna and me in front of a large statue of the two men in the middle of a square in the town centre - proof that we actually made it!There are lots of museums in Weimar - it is as focused on the arts as Jena is on science and technology - but we were really more concerned with walking around the city and getting to know our way around. Besides, the weather was much too nice to spend the day inside. One of the largest is the Schlossmuseum (which translates to something like the palace museum), an art gallery. Here's a picture taken inside the courtyard with a big compass rose inlaid in the cobblestones. The museum makes up the whole building on all four sides of the courtyard, to give you some idea of scale.
And here's an incredibly friendly-looking lion guarding the entrance to the courtyard. He really looked like a cartoon character with his ringlets and huge eyes, and he's even smiling. Not the fiercest lion I've ever seen.
We did go into the "Ginkgo Museum", which was free, and really more like a glorified gift shop. But it did tell me more than I'd ever wanted to know about ginkgo trees. Goethe was fascinated by their morphology (which is quite bizarre, but I'm not going to go into the details), and he wrote a famous poem about them, and planted at least a couple around town. Anna was nice enough to translate most of the plaques in the museum for me. We also went out for some chinese food for lunch, and I even picked up a couple of Asian groceries that I haven't been able to find in Jena yet (rice paper wrappers and hoisin sauce).

Then we went to see the UNESCO park, a nice green area near the Ilm river, where they had this strange fountain-like thing:

The water wasn't running now, it being winter, but in general it would flow around this partial circle, going over all the bumps in the way. The different things along the water's path are items symbolizing the chronological history of Weimar, starting with impressions of fossils and cave paintings, moving on to a scale model of the old city centre, and then the faces of some of its most famous inhabitants, and finally ending with things like a computer mouse encased in cement. Anna explained that it's designed to stimulate the soles of your feet, and in the summer people would take off their shoes and walk along the top in the water, feeling the bumps of all the items laid in the concrete. There's even a section part way through with a container of sand, to mix up the texture. I'm very curious if people actually use it - I'll have to go back in the summer to find out.And then it was time to go. Here's one of the bike path signs showing us which way to head out of the city, to go the 23 km back to Jena. The return trip was much easier and faster, more like 1:40, and that was still with a couple breaks to check the map. Anna thinks that we should try for Erfurt next time, which (as you can see from the sign above) is about 56 km west of Jena. And of course we could take the train back, so we don't have to return right away (or in the dark). And there are tonnes of other towns within visiting distance as well. Who knows where I'll go next weekend!

Korean cooking

Last Wednesday I had some friends over for some Korean food. Cathy, Nic's wife was in town and I wanted to cook a nice supper for them. For those who don't know, Cathy lives in Bolton, ON and Nic lives here in Victoria so they don't get to see each other much. After that I kept inviting people because I figured I was going to make a lot of food. Finally, four people showed up: Nic, Cathy, Sonya and Brandy (clockwise around the table starting with the guy that looks like me). Of course I made far too much food and will be eating Korean all weekend. Here is a bad close up of the food. I served: Beef Kalbee- marinated and BBQed rib eye on skewers, shown on the plate at the far end of the table that you can really see; Bindeadok – a pancake looking thing with vegetables and made mostly from blended mung beans (bean sprouts are sprouted from mung beans) seen on the plate I half cut from the picture (bottom left) served with a spicy sesame/soy sauce dipping sauce (in the little white plates); Kimchi chige – a stew or soup made from kimchi, dried and fermented cabbage and the national dish of Korea; and finally, sticky rice.

Koreans seem to attribute a lot of their good health to their mass consumption of kimchi. It’s good once you get use to it but it’s very much an acquired taste if you didn’t grow up eating it. I prefer it cooked in its soup form.

You may also be able to see several different strange looking bottles on the table. Coming back from Korea, me and Julia brought back several bottles of duty free alcohol. We also got some Korean rice wine and the little cups from Connie and Ray (Julia’s Aunt and uncle). So we had a bit of a Korean wine tasting. We started with a bit of the big brown bottle which had ginseng folk liquor in it. Very strong. The white bottle had mushroom wine in it. It was good but tasted very much like mushroom, which I think is very unusual in an alcoholic drink. The stubby little round glass bottle was the rice wine. Sweet and easy to drink. The other glass bottle at the end of the table that you can hardly see was ginseng wine. Much closer tasting to a white wine. As always, I was challenged to drink a shot of wine out of the little cup without touching it. I just barely made it. Good times had by all.

Thanks for the use of your camera Sonya.

Internationale Frauentag

The title of this post means "International Women's Day", which happens to be today, March 8th. This really isn't celebrated so much in Canada, maybe a few protests and such, but I knew that it was a bigger deal in Europe, particularly in former Soviet countries. Wikipedia tells me that it's still a national holiday (i.e. no work) in a host of countries, including Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Cuba, and Vietnam, to name just a few. And though it was originally founded by a German socialist, Clara Zetkin, it doesn't seem to be widely celebrated these days in Germany.

But this morning, when I got into my office, I found a mostly dead red rose on my desk, with a little slip of paper reading: Best wishes from your colleagues in reminiscence of the former "Internationale Frauentag". I know this was partly to do with the translation, but I thought this sounded really sad, particularly accompanying a three-quarters dead flower. Of course I don't have a vase or anything like that, so the flower's sitting now in an empty beer bottle on my desk. I spoke to one of my co-workers, and he said that this used to be a holiday back in the good old DDR days.


And for those of you who don't really read the blog but rather just skim through the pictures, I'll put in something for you as well. Here's a picture Jenny sent me of her and her daughter Janka, who is dressed from head to toe in hand-knitted goods. The little purple cardigan was my contribution.

My hungover Sunday excursion

This past weekend I was feeling awfully popular. I was invited to not one but two parties on Saturday night. One was at the house of a member of my research group, and the other was Corene and Alex's going-away party. (I know Corene, who is Canadian, because her friend works with my mom, and our email addresses were exchanged.) I opted to go to the work-related party first, since I was fairly certain that the party at Corene and Alex's would go on later into the evening. They knew that I had another party that night as well, and Alex specifically mentioned that I could show up very late.

So first I went to Rona's, and had a really nice time. It was a fairly small group, pretty calm (I think everyone else split 2-3 bottles of wine, while I drank several beers), and she'd laid out quite a spread of food. We got talking, and I completely lost track of time. The next I knew it was 2:30 in the morning. Now I wasn't sure if I should go to someone else's party that late at night, so I decided to call first. I was pretty sure that I remembered the number correctly, but I got only a recorded message in German, which of course I didn't understand. Nonetheless, I decided that I should just show up and ring their doorbell. If they were already asleep, they probably wouldn't get up to answer anyhow, and then I could just head home.

I hadn't actually been to their apartment before, but I had their address written down and I had a vague notion where it was. (I couldn't check a map before leaving because at supper I was chatting with Jeremi over Skype, and I wanted to show him how nice my Greek salad looked, and instead of moving the webcam I tipped the salad, spilling oil and salty vinegar all over my laptop, so my computer was drying out.)

I was riding my bike slowly down the street, checking the names of all the cross streets, when I passed a group of three people who I could hear were speaking English. (This is not so common in Jena.) I turned my bike around, and found the it was Corene and two of her friends. Corene had just gone out to find some cigarettes for her drinking-induced craving, and the others were planning on heading home. But upon finding me arriving, they decided to head back up to the party as well. There were still several other people there, and it turned out that showing up at 3:00 am wasn't such a bad idea after all. In the end I got home around 6:15, just as the sky was beginning to lighten.

Needless to say, I didn't spring from my bed early Sunday morning to make the most of the day. In fact, I slept until 3:15. I woke up groggy, but not feeling too badly, and I decided to make the most of the remaining sunlight by taking a long bike ride. I left quickly, before I had a chance to think better of it, and before I thought to drink any water to rehydrate.

My plan was to head south east, away from the city and on the other side of the river, to Lobdeburg, the ruins of an old castle from the 12th century or so. I didn't know exactly where it was, but I was hoping there would be signs or something. The first part of the trip went really smoothly - I made it to the old city of Lobeda, maybe 5 km to the south from the institute. This town is just down the hill from Lobdeburg, and from there I found a trail running along the side of the hill. (Because of course the castle is at the very top of the hill.)

From this trail I had a great view of all the old Soviet-era apartment buildings (Plattbau) for which Lobeda is famous (or infamous). They've fixed them up a lot recently, painting them bright colours and this sort of thing, but the vacancy rate is considerably higher in these than in the old-style apartments.The path was rather muddy, so I left my bike and walked for a ways. I could see Lobdeburg now, just up the hill, so I figured it wasn't much further. (Here you can see it through the trees at the top of the hill.)
See, that doesn't look so far away, does it? But I couldn't quite figure out how to get through all the trees and up to the top. At this point I'd been walking for a few kilometers, and I started to worry that this road only skirted along the hill at this height, and that I was going to end up walking all the way to Drackendorf, the next town to the south. (I think this town sounds very Harry Potter.) But then I saw a small path sneaking up through some trees and across a field. This path looked like it was going somewhere! So I followed it along until it sort of ended at a little patch of forest. At this point I was ridiculously close, and I wasn't about to turn around. But the terrain here was really steep, and I had to scramble up using my hands at least half the time. I was not looking forward to going back down, especially as the sun was getting lower in the sky. This is also when I started to get really thirsty. The kind of thirst you only get after an hour of physical activity the day after drinking for 10 hours or so. I really hadn't thought that one through.

But still, I made it through the forest, to find myself on a broad path, more like a road really. And there were lots of people walking here, old people too, most of whom were looking at me strangely for climbing up from the midst of the trees. Of course there was an easier route up the hill, I just had no idea where it was or where to find it. (This is the story of my life here - I never know what the hell is going on.) Here's a view down the steep part of the hill I climbed. The picture really doesn't capture it. I'm telling you, it was steep.
From here it was just a short walk up the road to the ruins. I got a couple of pictures there, just to prove I'd really made it:
You can even see my shadow in that last one! (I am not a photographer. Merely an amateur chronicler.)

The way down was much more pleasant, following the gradually-sloping path that snaked around the side of the hill, finally meeting up with the road that I was on earlier. There were even signs along these paths, indicating the distance to various things. I really need to find myself a decent map, that actually shows these trails.
And then I made my way back home, also following much more pleasant bike trails than the roads I'd taken on the way there. Except that I was on the wrong side of the river, and I misjudged the distance and had to overshoot to cross at the next bridge and then double back. (Again, I really need a map. I'm heading to the tourist office next Saturday morning for sure.) I made it back to the institute not long after sundown, quite proud of myself for not wasting the few hours of sunlight I had left. The next sunny weekend I'm hoping to make a big day trip, either north to Camburg or west to Weimar, both of which are roughly 20 km away. And if I get too tired or it gets too late, I can always go back on the train, with my bike, for less than 5 euros. I'll let you know how it goes!