Long time no blogging...

So we've been a bit bad about blogging lately, so I'll get everyone up to speed as quickly as possible. The big news is that Marie arrived yesterday and will be staying here for almost a month. For those of you who don't know her, she's a friend of mine from McGill who I (and sort of Jeremi) lived with in Halfax and who we went to visit in South Korea a couple of years back. She's working as a teacher now in Truro, Nova Scotia, teaching grade 2 French immersion, and she's enjoying her summer holidays with us now in Jena. We'll be travelling around Europe a bit with her over the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

Since our last post our only big bike trip was with Calin and Susanne and Franz, a guy from Austria who also works at our institute. We rode down to Kahla, which is about 20 km south of Jena, and is known for its ceramics. The ride was really pleasant, but Kahla on a Sunday afternoon was a bit quieter than we'd expected. A bit like a ghost town, really. Here are some pictures of Jeremi and I in the central city square.

And here are (from left) Franz, Calin, Jeremi, and Susanne, preparing for the ride home.

On the way back we went a bit off the path, and stopped at a really lovely beer garden near Bürgau, just south of Jena. It's right on the river, by a lovely stone bridge, and the weather was just perfect.

Jeremi was still riding his turquoise bike at this point, which has given him one problem after another. We weren't sure it would make it all the way back, especially as the bent back wheel was causing the tire some trouble, but it did. Here's the hernia in the back tire when we arrived back home.

Since then he's found a new used bike (which has also had a few technical troubles) and the old turquoise beast has been patched up a bit and relegated to being the guest bike. Lucky Marie!

Over Canada Day weekend there was a big party at the Camsdorfer bridge here in Jena. Every year they shut down the bridge to traffic and have a big festival on it, with bands, beer, and food tents. There were also fireworks on the Saturday night, which we liked to believe were actually an early celebration of Canada Day. Unfortunately we didn't bring a camera, so we can't show you the people we were there with (from Denmark, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and, of course, Germany), or the jacket of the German guy near us in the crowd which had "Ontario Park Ranger, Camp David" embroidered on it, or even the crazy guy in the crowd who was playing the tambourine on Jeremi's belly. Oh what a night. (Incidentally, the guy with the jacket was German, he bought the jacket in Germany, and he didn't know that Ontario was in Canada or that Camp David was in the US. It's not the first time I've seen Ontario written on clothes - a guy at work had a shirt with a picture of a moose on it that said something about Ontario Elk, and I asked him if he'd got it in Canada, and he told me it was from a Swedish company.) After the party at the bridge (the Camsdorferbrückenfest) we went dancing until the wee hours at the Rosenkeller, this crazy underground bar with stone walls that's been around since the 12th or 13th century.

And finally, our last bit of news is our institute's summer party, put on by the grad students and post docs. It's actually the party for our institute and the one next door (the MPI for chemical ecology). Like all German parties (at least in Thüringen), it was centred around beer and bratwurst. A highlight for us was being introduced to a Canadian PhD student, Brent, from the institute next door. He's from Lethbridge, and at one point he and Jeremi were the only people there not wearing sweaters. We did get a few pictures from the party, mostly of Jeremi falling asleep towards the end of the evening (at least the end of the evening for us).