I had an uneventful trip to the institute, and I was in my room by around 4:30 pm on the 31st. I took the bus into town that night to pick up some groceries for that night and the next morning, as there is a small fridge in my room and a shared kitchen on the floor above. (For those of you who don't know, for the next couple of months at least I'll be staying in the guest apartments of the institute. They're actually in the building itself, so if I'm not careful I can go days without going outside. So far this hasn't been a problem, but I'm trying not to get too lazy or hermit-like.)
Actually, just to give some orientation, here you'll find a map of Germany with Jena indicated. It's in the state known as Thueringia in English, or Thueringer in German. By European standards it's rather isolated, since it takes 2 hours to travel to Berlin or 3 hours to travel to Frankfurt, for example. Because it was part of Eastern Germany, people here really don't speak so much English, which makes it a perfect place to learn German! (As well as making it very hard for me to know what the hell is going on most of the time...) The institute itself is not right in the town of Jena, but rather about three kilometers south. Here you'll see a map of the city with the institute indicated. The river running through the town is the Saale. And finally, here is the website of where I'm working, where you can see a picture of the institute itself. That round part to the right is part of a 4-storey tower which houses the guest apartments for both the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (where I'm working) as well as the one for Plant Ecology, which is right next door.
One of the funniest things I saw that first night were these big posters all over town for some sort of presentation about Western Canada. I actually went back to take a picture (below). This seems to be somewhat common here - I saw posters today for one coming up about New Zealand. It's funny, because it seems like this sort of thing would be sponsored by BC Tourism or something, but they're actually put on by camera companies. Anyhow, it was a strange thing to be greeted by on my first day in a new country.
I don't actually have too many more pictures of Jena yet, but I did at least get pictures of my office. I was completely amazed when I saw that I was going to get my own office. I honestly thought that I'd be one desk in a room full of desks for the next 10 years at least. I thought I had it good in Victoria because I had my own filing cabinet and shelves and an adjustable chair. Here, I'm really living the good life. They also already had my name put up on the sign by the door, which I thought was very nice of them. And if you look carefully in the reflection you can see me and my flash! (I'm really useless at taking pictures. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.)
And then here's the view from the door into the office...
Note that I have the main desk, the small table for collaborative meetings (or for reading the newspaper over a cup of tea), and also a desk with a stool by the window which actually has a view of the outdoors, and not someone else's office. There's a hill immediately behind the building, so I don't exactly have a sweeping vista, but apparently sometimes you can see birds and hares outside. Here's a better view of what I see from my desk out the window:
And finally, what I see from my desk when looking from my desk toward the door. There are bookshelves all along the left wall, and the cabinets on the right have shelves in them as well. Somehow I don't think that my 15 or so atmospheric science-related books will really look so impressive with all that shelf space. Maybe I'll have to start collecting something just to fill up the open shelves at least...
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