News this week

I'm sorry this post is a bit scattered, but I'm mixing together a bunch of little things into one. In roughly chronological order of events, I'll start with a picture of Calin and Susanne from a hike that we went on the weekend before last. We were a bit north of Jena and on top of a hill which gave a nice view of the city below. (This hike was definitely necessary after the enormous bacon and egg and hash brown and roasted tomato breakfast that I'd prepared that morning - they were suprised that people would have potatoes with breakfast, so I had to make them a complete hangover brunch to demonstrate.)

Now, jumping ahead to this week, I was finally successful in attaining my residence/working visa. Here it is, in all its colourful glory. Not only did the woman at the foreigner's office compliment me on my German, but I even met an American guy there who gave me his email address. I'm sorry that the picture's sideways, I've rotated the images both in iPhoto and in another folder, but when they load into blogger they end up on their sides again. This didn't happen back when I was using linux or windows, and I haven't figured out the mac fix for this yet. (I also only discovered this problem now.) I'll try to fix it, but for now just tilt your head.

And now you have to indulge me and pretend to care about my tomato plants. Last October when my parents and grandmother were visiting we went to the Salt Spring Island Apple Festival, at which we bought several varieties of heirloom cherry tomato seeds. Six kinds in fact. Our friend Brandy also went, and she bought two different kinds. We swapped, so I actually have 8 different varieties which I was really excited about. I planted them a few weeks ago, and they just took off. I planted two little jiffy pots of each kind, and put about 3 seeds in each in case they didn't all germinate, but they did. And so now I have over 50 little tomato seedlings with roots already overtaking their tiny little jiffy pots, as well as some nasturtiums and marigolds that I also planted. I'm going to repot at least some of them into old yogurt containers and milk cartons that I've been saving, but I'm afraid that I might have to save only 2 per variety or so, or else my room will soon be overtaken by tomato plants. I'm tempted to save a few more though, and see if any of my colleagues want some interesting tomato plants grown from seeds smuggled in from Salt Spring. They really are interesting varieties - different shapes and sizes and colours, including red, orange, yellow, ivory, and purple. Don't worry, you'll hear more about the tomatoes as the season goes on. I'm sure you can't wait.

This week I had a big surprise, with the delivery of a large box to my office. Inside was a huge Easter basket filled with chocolates and cookies from my parents and Baba. Thank-you so much! Here's what it looked like:

And finally, the biggest news this week is that I've signed a lease, and I should be getting the keys a week from today. Hooray!!! Of course the things that we shipped haven't arrived yet, and won't be delivered before I move, but in some ways this is nice so that I don't have to move the boxes myself. On the down side, this means that I won't have anything at all when I move in, except for my clothes and a few books. We didn't ship furniture anyhow, but at least the boxes have pots and pans and blankets and towels. Some of my colleagues have said that they can lend me some things until I get a bit more settled though, so I shouldn't be roughing it too much. I did take some pictures when I went to see the apartment, but for now I'm only posting the picture of the exterior. Ours is the lower balcony on the left. The other pictures that I took are full of the other people's things, so I'd rather wait until I can get pictures of it either empty or with our new things. Then I promise to post some more!But in the meantime you can still see where it is in the city here.