The stack of maths-to-be-done (part heavy coursework, part Lie groups catch-up) continues, and I'm lovin' it. Hard problems! Abstract generalisations! Subtle distinctions! And a marvellous simplification of my life; no obligations to deal with anything else, since the math backlog's obviously the priority. It's a glorious and exhilarating state of mind, and welcome. I haven't felt this way for -- well, at least a couple of months.
As always, my concentration comes in long but sometimes elusive blocks. The resulting devotion-of-self-to-mathematics is neither complete nor structured. I've spent plenty of time procrastinating (lying fallow, I call it). I've also been having very late nights -- it's easier just to keep going -- resulting in a characteristic alternation between the Thinking Days and the Others.
Today, for example, was one of the Others. I got up for school after not-too-many hours' sleep. The four hours of lectures in the morning were okay, the four hours of tutorials in the afternoon a bit more trying. By the last couple, my mind was accepting little other than disconnected daydreams of Prague and bicycles and Takapuna Beach. I did, however, emerge from my stupor on occasion, usually to make helpful suggestions ("direct product of two circles", "Pascal's triangle") to the tutors as they struggled with solutions to the exercises they were meant to be demonstrating.
Of course, I'm still in an exotic foreign country. There's no Halloween and no Fifth of November, but to mark All Saints' Day tomorrow there's a public holiday -- my second in less than a month. Germany loves opportunities to shut up shop. (Did I mention that shops close on Sundays here, too?)
But people's errands are just redirected to the days before and after. University tutorials are too, hence today's über-long day at school. So I suspect that the total time spent on useful activity isn't really varied, but rather just made more irregular in its distribution . . . .
My kind of country.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Just procrastination . . . .
No, life's not perfect, even in Germany. Like,
- I split my time between feeling frustrated, because I'm talking in German; feeling guilty, because I'm talking in English; and feeling lonely, because I'm not talking to anyone. It isn't enough to seriously dampen my spirits, but it is enough to make me grateful for the internet and the friendly people who talk to me through the internet.
- Work's already plentiful and hard -- though this is of course also a good thing, because it's stimulating. (For you mathematicians, here's a nice problem from my half-finished model theory assignment, due tomorrow: prove that there exist uncountably many linear orderings of a countable set of elements.)
Friday, October 26, 2007
Bicycle, bicycle
This post is a tale of quest and fulfillment.
Soon after arriving in Freiburg, I started yearning for a bicycle. Since I can get around perfectly well with my Semesterticket for the trams, this whim wasn't really utilitarian in origin. I'll attribute it partly to the desire for belonging (since it feels like everyone here cycles -- bicycles on streets here frequently outnumber cars, and the front of my building looks like this
) and partly to the hope of improving my self-image by association (since cycling's so picturesque here -- professors with books; housewives with baskets of groceries; girls in long coats, hair streaming helmetless in the wind).
Anyway, rational or not, I wanted a bike, but the secondhand shops I visited quoted me terrifying prices. I resigned myself to a stable and comfortable transportational existence on the Straβenbahnen -- and then heard by chance last week that there was going to be a municipal bicycle auction that Saturday in Müllheim, a tiny agricultural-centre town twenty kilometres south of Freiburg.
So, very early that Saturday, I headed along the main Mannheim-Basel train line down to Müllheim. There were plenty of bikes, presumably rescued from the clutches of gangs of bicycle-stealing gangsters. Caught up in the exhiliration of my first real-life auction and the excitement of finding prices a tenth of the ones in shops and the optimism that results from a general ignorance of possible pitfalls, I quickly obtained a solid-looking green specimen, and then headed back to Freiburg.
It was only later that I discovered that the thing had no brakes. More precisely, it had brakes, but the brake-wire had snapped, or been cut, so that pulling the brake-lever had no effect. At any rate, it was not really a bicycle, but rather a thing that had the potential to become one.
I put the almost-bicycle in the sheds out front of my residence, and forgot about it in the excitement of first classes.
Today, in the lecture-free Friday afternoon which is a delightful feature of my studies here, I got around to paying it some attention again, and took it in to a shop I'd heard of through the grapevine. The shop was said to be cheap, which was what attracted me to it. And indeed it was. For it turned out to be essentially just a large, well-stocked workshop, that anyone can use for a trivial hourly rate, called a bicycle "collective" because you do the repairs yourself, with help (in my case, lots of it) from the wise people in charge. It was in a courtyard off the main street, squished in with a community art studio and a secondhand-clothing shop and suchlike hippy-type businesses, and it had that familiar rather alternative atmosphere that's generated among people who really love their bicycles.
It was delightfully full. The other customers were all under 35, otherwise seemingly a random sampling of Freiburg's population. I spent an hour and a half replacing the wire and lever of my brake, feeling as if I was being initiated into true German-ness, and then cycled home.
Soon after arriving in Freiburg, I started yearning for a bicycle. Since I can get around perfectly well with my Semesterticket for the trams, this whim wasn't really utilitarian in origin. I'll attribute it partly to the desire for belonging (since it feels like everyone here cycles -- bicycles on streets here frequently outnumber cars, and the front of my building looks like this
) and partly to the hope of improving my self-image by association (since cycling's so picturesque here -- professors with books; housewives with baskets of groceries; girls in long coats, hair streaming helmetless in the wind).Anyway, rational or not, I wanted a bike, but the secondhand shops I visited quoted me terrifying prices. I resigned myself to a stable and comfortable transportational existence on the Straβenbahnen -- and then heard by chance last week that there was going to be a municipal bicycle auction that Saturday in Müllheim, a tiny agricultural-centre town twenty kilometres south of Freiburg.
So, very early that Saturday, I headed along the main Mannheim-Basel train line down to Müllheim. There were plenty of bikes, presumably rescued from the clutches of gangs of bicycle-stealing gangsters. Caught up in the exhiliration of my first real-life auction and the excitement of finding prices a tenth of the ones in shops and the optimism that results from a general ignorance of possible pitfalls, I quickly obtained a solid-looking green specimen, and then headed back to Freiburg.
It was only later that I discovered that the thing had no brakes. More precisely, it had brakes, but the brake-wire had snapped, or been cut, so that pulling the brake-lever had no effect. At any rate, it was not really a bicycle, but rather a thing that had the potential to become one.
I put the almost-bicycle in the sheds out front of my residence, and forgot about it in the excitement of first classes.
Today, in the lecture-free Friday afternoon which is a delightful feature of my studies here, I got around to paying it some attention again, and took it in to a shop I'd heard of through the grapevine. The shop was said to be cheap, which was what attracted me to it. And indeed it was. For it turned out to be essentially just a large, well-stocked workshop, that anyone can use for a trivial hourly rate, called a bicycle "collective" because you do the repairs yourself, with help (in my case, lots of it) from the wise people in charge. It was in a courtyard off the main street, squished in with a community art studio and a secondhand-clothing shop and suchlike hippy-type businesses, and it had that familiar rather alternative atmosphere that's generated among people who really love their bicycles.
It was delightfully full. The other customers were all under 35, otherwise seemingly a random sampling of Freiburg's population. I spent an hour and a half replacing the wire and lever of my brake, feeling as if I was being initiated into true German-ness, and then cycled home.
Monday, October 22, 2007
First day of school
At breakfast, I joked to Achim that today would be "der Moment der Wahrheit". The literal English translation is "the moment of truth", and Achim's English is perfect enough for him to know exactly what I meant. But he didn't even laugh. It seems the phrase is used in German too, and so I'd stumbled into idiomatic Deutsch in spite of myself.
So I went happily off to my first day of lectures in Germany, and found that the truth isn't actually that bad. Depending on the clarity of the lecturer's voice, my comprehension can be anywhere from almost everything he (always he, so far) says to almost nothing. And I haven't yet managed to get hold of textbooks. But the blackboard is my saviour. Like in New Zealand mathematics courses, the exposition proceeds in neat "Definition"-"Lemma"-"Corollary"-"Example" format, and everything gets written on the board; once it's there, I can squint and re-read it and mentally translate it at leisure. My other great help is that the German vocabulary used is very limited, and often the same as in English anyway.
So I may spend less time than expected struggling with the language, and be able to devote myself mostly to struggling with the mathematics. The greatest struggling will be with my paper on representations of compact Lie groups. I'm taking it here because nothing much similar's offered in Auckland. Consequently, however, my background in the area is somewhat skimpy.
Lectures are two hours long, with a break of ten or fifteen minutes in the middle. I had three lectures today, and was at uni from nine til six. Class sizes are huge, by New Zealand standards: thirty to sixty students in courses whose Auckland equivalents might have five. In anticipation of German winters, there's a coat rack at the back of every classroom.
There's an lecturer (originally European) in Auckland who's beloved for his habit of washing the blackboard with a bucket of water after every lecture he gives. Here, however, it's the norm. And every lecture room comes equipped with two little thingamabobs: one like a mop, for washing the board, and one like a razor, to scrape off the excess water afterwards. Drips form, and run down the side of the blade-thing as it's pulled across the board, collecting in a long skinny puddle on the floor underneath.
At the end of each lecture there's a round of desk-thumping, to signal applause.
So I went happily off to my first day of lectures in Germany, and found that the truth isn't actually that bad. Depending on the clarity of the lecturer's voice, my comprehension can be anywhere from almost everything he (always he, so far) says to almost nothing. And I haven't yet managed to get hold of textbooks. But the blackboard is my saviour. Like in New Zealand mathematics courses, the exposition proceeds in neat "Definition"-"Lemma"-"Corollary"-"Example" format, and everything gets written on the board; once it's there, I can squint and re-read it and mentally translate it at leisure. My other great help is that the German vocabulary used is very limited, and often the same as in English anyway.
So I may spend less time than expected struggling with the language, and be able to devote myself mostly to struggling with the mathematics. The greatest struggling will be with my paper on representations of compact Lie groups. I'm taking it here because nothing much similar's offered in Auckland. Consequently, however, my background in the area is somewhat skimpy.
Lectures are two hours long, with a break of ten or fifteen minutes in the middle. I had three lectures today, and was at uni from nine til six. Class sizes are huge, by New Zealand standards: thirty to sixty students in courses whose Auckland equivalents might have five. In anticipation of German winters, there's a coat rack at the back of every classroom.
There's an lecturer (originally European) in Auckland who's beloved for his habit of washing the blackboard with a bucket of water after every lecture he gives. Here, however, it's the norm. And every lecture room comes equipped with two little thingamabobs: one like a mop, for washing the board, and one like a razor, to scrape off the excess water afterwards. Drips form, and run down the side of the blade-thing as it's pulled across the board, collecting in a long skinny puddle on the floor underneath.
At the end of each lecture there's a round of desk-thumping, to signal applause.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Amateur economics
Some things, like milk and meat and vegetables, are more expensive in Germany than in New Zealand. Some things, like books and cell phones and booze, are cheaper. On average the costs for various goods and services seem roughly the same.
And the standard of living in Germany -- by blunt economic measure, the amount of these goods and services that the average person consumes -- seems roughly the same as well. It makes you wonder where all Germany's extra $10,261 GDP per capita goes. A recent theory of mine (caveat: real Germans are skeptical) suggests that it goes to provide the average German citizen with perhaps three years more "holiday" time -- in the form of education and society-sanctioned leisure -- than is enjoyed by the average New Zealander.
The evidence, at least, is friendly: Germans start school a year older; they have the same total thirteen years; German guys then have a year of compulsory civil service, which some German girls choose to do too. Then, for those intending to go to university eventually, the gap-year tradition is also more firmly entrenched. And so (I discovered to my surprise at Maths Orientation), most first-year university students are 20 or 21 -- older than me. They then stick around uni longer, since most degrees -- science, arts, law -- take five years rather than four or three (although this is changing). So by the time they start "proper jobs", Germans will be considerably older than their New Zealand counterparts.
(My German friends have tended to rubbish this theory, instead blaming the discrepancy on European Union membership fees or on support payments to the old East Germany.)
Even if it doesn't singlehandedly reduce German's standard of living to that of New Zealand, the older student population does have one noticeable effect: the student residences are clearly built to house semi-adults rather than teenagers. The bedrooms are much bigger. They're also much emptier, and furnished by their tenants. The walls are thicker. (Fortunately.) Kitchens are provided, to be cleaned by student elbow-grease, and students cook (or not) for themselves. The university authorities act more like normal landlords would -- you lease a room for six months at a time, with first dibs on the room when the lease ends, so that students often never move out of their initial spot. When they go, they often leave things behind, which no one bothers to dispose of; hence the collections of kitchen utensils in the cupboards are really extensive, and so are the collections of junk on the balcony.
It's very comfortable, and I can't help wishing the New Zealand government would make similar efforts to provide cheap and efficient and easy housing for its youth.
And the standard of living in Germany -- by blunt economic measure, the amount of these goods and services that the average person consumes -- seems roughly the same as well. It makes you wonder where all Germany's extra $10,261 GDP per capita goes. A recent theory of mine (caveat: real Germans are skeptical) suggests that it goes to provide the average German citizen with perhaps three years more "holiday" time -- in the form of education and society-sanctioned leisure -- than is enjoyed by the average New Zealander.
The evidence, at least, is friendly: Germans start school a year older; they have the same total thirteen years; German guys then have a year of compulsory civil service, which some German girls choose to do too. Then, for those intending to go to university eventually, the gap-year tradition is also more firmly entrenched. And so (I discovered to my surprise at Maths Orientation), most first-year university students are 20 or 21 -- older than me. They then stick around uni longer, since most degrees -- science, arts, law -- take five years rather than four or three (although this is changing). So by the time they start "proper jobs", Germans will be considerably older than their New Zealand counterparts.
(My German friends have tended to rubbish this theory, instead blaming the discrepancy on European Union membership fees or on support payments to the old East Germany.)
Even if it doesn't singlehandedly reduce German's standard of living to that of New Zealand, the older student population does have one noticeable effect: the student residences are clearly built to house semi-adults rather than teenagers. The bedrooms are much bigger. They're also much emptier, and furnished by their tenants. The walls are thicker. (Fortunately.) Kitchens are provided, to be cleaned by student elbow-grease, and students cook (or not) for themselves. The university authorities act more like normal landlords would -- you lease a room for six months at a time, with first dibs on the room when the lease ends, so that students often never move out of their initial spot. When they go, they often leave things behind, which no one bothers to dispose of; hence the collections of kitchen utensils in the cupboards are really extensive, and so are the collections of junk on the balcony.
It's very comfortable, and I can't help wishing the New Zealand government would make similar efforts to provide cheap and efficient and easy housing for its youth.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Conversations
With Hans, who lives on my floor in the hostel: The English word "load" is only used in the context of putting stuff onto something portable. You can't load a house, for instance. The corresponding German word is "einladen", but it has no such restrictions. How would you translate into English a German sentence about einladen-ing some furniture into your new home? You'd have to resort to some generic word like "move".
With Ece, an exchange-student friend from Turkey: Her German got as good as it is from attending at a German-language high school. No, they're not at all unusual in Turkey. Weak Turkish high-school students go to trade schools; good ones go to grammar schools, where they get prepared for university. The language of instruction in a grammar school is always something other than Turkish. There's an exam at the end of primary school that determines which type you'll be sent to.
But the exam decides not only what type of high school, but also exactly which -- the best students go to the English-language schools, the next best to the German ones, the next best to French and the very worst good students to (that natural language for slackers,) Spanish.
With Achim, another floor-mate: Yes, Germany has a lot more smokers than New Zealand. (Achim lived in New Zealand last year for six months.) Maybe it's because the New Zealand government (and the Australian and American and British ones too) is a lot more agressively anti-smoking than European ones. The frequency of corner cigarette-machines (like chocolate or Coke machines in New Zealand) might also have something to do with it. Constant temptation's hard to resist.
I also played Mafia in German yesterday night. (This is a cult math-student game of psychological manipulation. At an IMO, you will usually play your first Mafia round within five hours of arrival. It should come as no suprise to hear that my Mafia games here arose during Math Orientation.) I learned a few useful German words ("dead", "detective", "murderer"), but otherwise understood almost nothing.
I was by necessity one of the silent players I always despised in English-language Mafia, who vote when needed but never say a word. On the other hand, it was a great chance for me to test the folk theorem, often cited by those about to make improbable accusations, about it being "not people's words that matter, just their faces and voices . . . ." (Result: It's balderdash.)
With Ece, an exchange-student friend from Turkey: Her German got as good as it is from attending at a German-language high school. No, they're not at all unusual in Turkey. Weak Turkish high-school students go to trade schools; good ones go to grammar schools, where they get prepared for university. The language of instruction in a grammar school is always something other than Turkish. There's an exam at the end of primary school that determines which type you'll be sent to.
But the exam decides not only what type of high school, but also exactly which -- the best students go to the English-language schools, the next best to the German ones, the next best to French and the very worst good students to (that natural language for slackers,) Spanish.
With Achim, another floor-mate: Yes, Germany has a lot more smokers than New Zealand. (Achim lived in New Zealand last year for six months.) Maybe it's because the New Zealand government (and the Australian and American and British ones too) is a lot more agressively anti-smoking than European ones. The frequency of corner cigarette-machines (like chocolate or Coke machines in New Zealand) might also have something to do with it. Constant temptation's hard to resist.
I also played Mafia in German yesterday night. (This is a cult math-student game of psychological manipulation. At an IMO, you will usually play your first Mafia round within five hours of arrival. It should come as no suprise to hear that my Mafia games here arose during Math Orientation.) I learned a few useful German words ("dead", "detective", "murderer"), but otherwise understood almost nothing.
I was by necessity one of the silent players I always despised in English-language Mafia, who vote when needed but never say a word. On the other hand, it was a great chance for me to test the folk theorem, often cited by those about to make improbable accusations, about it being "not people's words that matter, just their faces and voices . . . ." (Result: It's balderdash.)
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
End of the good times
The dull fortnight spent navigating German educational bureaucracy has had some use, it seems: International Orientation began today, and I could understand the speakers close to half of the time. I'm now freshly stocked with data on the population of the university (25,000), the major sources of international students (China, Bulgaria, the US), the locations of free campus internet (library, departmental labs) and the price of the university cinema (1.50 €). They had free pretzels at orientation, too!
At the moment, my other metric for the quality of my German is how often I understand when a stranger makes some quick casual comment. I still usually don't, but I picked up one today ("that cash machine is out of order") and even managed to reply.
I caught an early train back to Freiburg this morning from Paris, where I'd stayed over the weekend for what will be my last Touristic Adventure for a while. I saw all sorts of marvellous things --
Bonus! insider travel tip: To avoid paying necessary surcharges, feign sleep when the train's ticket inspector passes your row.
At the moment, my other metric for the quality of my German is how often I understand when a stranger makes some quick casual comment. I still usually don't, but I picked up one today ("that cash machine is out of order") and even managed to reply.
I caught an early train back to Freiburg this morning from Paris, where I'd stayed over the weekend for what will be my last Touristic Adventure for a while. I saw all sorts of marvellous things --
- a neighbourhood full of streets named after mathematicians
- the France-England RWC semi-final, projected onto a huge screen behind the Eiffel Tower, in a thousands-strong French mob first attentive, then impatient, then sullen
- Van Goghs and Cézannes, in real life
- a high-end department store being ransacked by autumn-season-sale Paris crowds.
Bonus! insider travel tip: To avoid paying necessary surcharges, feign sleep when the train's ticket inspector passes your row.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Strasbourg highlights
On my second day in Strasbourg I went to Mass, continuing a run of three consecutive cathedrals and three consecutive Sundays. (I'm not Catholic, just curious.) The Prague Mass had been subdued: few people, an empty half-church roped off. The Vienna one had an oddly cosy feel, with lots of parish notices (German, half-understood) at the end, and so much artwork in the cathedral that the walls and pillars were almost hidden.The Mass in Strasbourg was the most spectacular. The cathedral was huge and medieval and bare, and of stone a beautiful pink. The congregation was large; the singing was loud and clear (helped, I suspect, by some sort of hidden microphone and boom box); the organ music was more and better than elsewhere. A man with no legs came on a stretcher, and the big front doors (usually not used) swung open for him.
Afterwards I went sculpture-seeing in the museum. Among the jumble of stonework salvaged from churches and abbeys now collapsed was a scene labelled "Temptation, and the two foolish maidens, and the four wise ones". Temptation was offering an apple; the two foolish maidens were holding upside-down egg cups and the four wise ones were holding ones the right way up. I'd love to know what the egg cups represent . . . .
I came across a junk market full of stalls offering secondhand novels or used clothing or old dishes and knickknacks. My favourite sold only ancient French posters: "Coca-Cola!", "Bostik: for joins and gluing", "Queen of Pleasure, by Victor Joze -- at all bookshops", "Tell your mama to buy Chicorée Nouvelle".
I splurged in a bookshop (it was a cheap splurge, books here are $10-$15) before heading back to Freiburg. I read French much better than German, and have been missing having comprehensible novels.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Freiburg (Scene-setting)
Church bells and a celebratory (virtual) cigarette: I'm in France for the first time! I crossed into Strasbourg for the weekend, motivated by two free weeks before lectures start and by the France-NZ rugby quarter-final yesterday evening. For the obligatory remark on the quality of net cafe, let me note that the rates are similar to Germany and much lower than in Austria, but that the keyboards are like nothing I've seen.
The two free weeks may in fact be not quite as free as I'd been hoping, thanks to the sort of German bureaucracy that requires foreign students to visit (and queue at, and present a respectable facade in broken German at) some seven different government offices before obtaining a university enrolment. Clever me, I've raced through five in the four days I've spent so far in Freiburg. But everything shuts on the weekends, so I feel justified in taking off for now.
The rugby I saw last night in a smoky bar somewhere by the river, packed with French twenty-something guys watching the rugby and French twenty-something girls watching their boyfriends. The guy on my left was reading a comic book. The girls on my right were drinking beer from shapely things that looked like oversized cocktail glasses. The cheers at the second French try and at the end were matched only by the gales of laughter at the haka. For the sake of my mourning friends back home, I'll say no more.
So I'll spend some time talking about my week in dear little Freiburg, where I'll be studying for the next five months but which (due to lack of net access) I've so far had no chance to introduce.
It's a town of 200,000 people in the bottom-left corner of Germany on the map, close to Switzerland and closer to France.
It's very flat, with lots of trees and grass and a river running through the middle.
It's in a valley, and if you walk for twenty minutes* in any direction the town suddenly stops and steep hills covered in forest suddenly start.
(*I speak from experience. I managed to arrive in town on a public holiday I'd never heard of. Absolutely everything was closed, including the office at my residence which would let me move in, so I had a lot of free time to wander round.)
It's very sunny.
It's surprisingly dense, with lots of people and lots of cars and even more bicycles.
It has a university which is celebrating its 550th anniversary, and is a thorough enough student town to have cheap beer gardens and Italian restaurants and ice-cream parlours.
I have a large and very empty room to myself, and share a kitchen and bathrooms with a dozen other mostly German students, most of whom haven't yet moved in. It's one floor of one building of a giant three-thousand-resident student village set in a park with nice woods and pond twenty minutes from city centre.
I've spent most time so far with the other exchange students (mostly European -- the Americans can be heard, sometimes, but they don't turn up to outings) and with my housemates. People are friendly and intelligent, so far as my limited German can judge. My limited German's rapidly improving, from necessity.
I got complimented on it on Friday night, in fact -- "much better than most English people's, you can actually be understood".
Anyway, time to go see some Strasbourg sights.
The two free weeks may in fact be not quite as free as I'd been hoping, thanks to the sort of German bureaucracy that requires foreign students to visit (and queue at, and present a respectable facade in broken German at) some seven different government offices before obtaining a university enrolment. Clever me, I've raced through five in the four days I've spent so far in Freiburg. But everything shuts on the weekends, so I feel justified in taking off for now.
The rugby I saw last night in a smoky bar somewhere by the river, packed with French twenty-something guys watching the rugby and French twenty-something girls watching their boyfriends. The guy on my left was reading a comic book. The girls on my right were drinking beer from shapely things that looked like oversized cocktail glasses. The cheers at the second French try and at the end were matched only by the gales of laughter at the haka. For the sake of my mourning friends back home, I'll say no more.So I'll spend some time talking about my week in dear little Freiburg, where I'll be studying for the next five months but which (due to lack of net access) I've so far had no chance to introduce.
It's a town of 200,000 people in the bottom-left corner of Germany on the map, close to Switzerland and closer to France.
It's very flat, with lots of trees and grass and a river running through the middle.
It's in a valley, and if you walk for twenty minutes* in any direction the town suddenly stops and steep hills covered in forest suddenly start.
(*I speak from experience. I managed to arrive in town on a public holiday I'd never heard of. Absolutely everything was closed, including the office at my residence which would let me move in, so I had a lot of free time to wander round.)
It's very sunny.
It's surprisingly dense, with lots of people and lots of cars and even more bicycles.
It has a university which is celebrating its 550th anniversary, and is a thorough enough student town to have cheap beer gardens and Italian restaurants and ice-cream parlours.
I have a large and very empty room to myself, and share a kitchen and bathrooms with a dozen other mostly German students, most of whom haven't yet moved in. It's one floor of one building of a giant three-thousand-resident student village set in a park with nice woods and pond twenty minutes from city centre.
I've spent most time so far with the other exchange students (mostly European -- the Americans can be heard, sometimes, but they don't turn up to outings) and with my housemates. People are friendly and intelligent, so far as my limited German can judge. My limited German's rapidly improving, from necessity.
I got complimented on it on Friday night, in fact -- "much better than most English people's, you can actually be understood".
Anyway, time to go see some Strasbourg sights.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Off the track
I went yesterday to Baden, a small town just south of Vienna, for a day of what turned out to be mostly sight-non-seeing.
Enterprising second-century Romans had turned the place into a thermal resort (hence the name, "baden" being German for "bathe"), but (Misadventure the First) the famous hot pools proved elusive. The closest I got was a swimming pool called "römertherme".
In Misadventure the Second, I took the bus out towards the mammoth Cistercian abbey Heiligenkreuz (discovered on Wikipedia). Misled by a highway sign, I panicked and got off too early, finding myself ten kilometres from anywhere in a stretch of healthy but exceptionally boring Austrian forest, with an hour and a half to wait for the next bus back.
Serves me right for going somewhere not in Lonely Planet.
It was a nice enough town, though, with an averagely-pretty (my standards are rising) church and some parks and a large oldish central area full of old shops. My German went down better there than in Vienna, too, and I had several quite coherent conversations. From twelve til two there was what seemeed to be an Austrian version of a siesta -- all the little one-man shops shut, and the streets emptied, and mushrooms of people appeared in cafes.
I went back to Bratislava yesterday evening to say goodbye to Eyal and Lauren and pick up the luggage I'd left with them. I'm taking an overnight train tonight to Munich, and from there to the university town in south-west Germany where I'll be studying for the next few months.
Enterprising second-century Romans had turned the place into a thermal resort (hence the name, "baden" being German for "bathe"), but (Misadventure the First) the famous hot pools proved elusive. The closest I got was a swimming pool called "römertherme".
In Misadventure the Second, I took the bus out towards the mammoth Cistercian abbey Heiligenkreuz (discovered on Wikipedia). Misled by a highway sign, I panicked and got off too early, finding myself ten kilometres from anywhere in a stretch of healthy but exceptionally boring Austrian forest, with an hour and a half to wait for the next bus back.
Serves me right for going somewhere not in Lonely Planet.
It was a nice enough town, though, with an averagely-pretty (my standards are rising) church and some parks and a large oldish central area full of old shops. My German went down better there than in Vienna, too, and I had several quite coherent conversations. From twelve til two there was what seemeed to be an Austrian version of a siesta -- all the little one-man shops shut, and the streets emptied, and mushrooms of people appeared in cafes.
I went back to Bratislava yesterday evening to say goodbye to Eyal and Lauren and pick up the luggage I'd left with them. I'm taking an overnight train tonight to Munich, and from there to the university town in south-west Germany where I'll be studying for the next few months.
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