Out. About.

One of the nice things about missing train connections is that you get to see small bits of new cities. I'm stranded in Aachen at the moment for an hour on the way to Belgium for the weekend. I headed straight and slightly left from the train station, and within a few minutes discovered . . . . a giant statue of a horse . . . . and a lot of neat classical whitish-blocky-stone buildings with pretty windows. It was as much like Paris as Freiburg -- unsurprising, considering the map.

I also found lots of the familiar German chain stores that already inspire a sense of comfort in me: banks (Dresdnerbank, Commerzbank, Sparkasse), pharmacies (DM, Schlecker), groceries (Basic, the "frische Bio-Supermarkt"). And had time to blog about it before catching the train out.

Today in class, while explaining the solution to a problem on the last model-theory assignment, my tutor was heard to mumble, "Iteration is good, iteration is good, iteration is good . . . ."

Christmas come early

I spent today in Colmar, in France. It's a very pretty Alsatian country town of seventy thousand people. I was there to see its famous Christmas market, one of the first to open for the year. Judging from Wikipedia, most other people who end up in Colmar are there for the same reason.
By very pretty, I mean that even the suburban residential neighbourhood we (Emily and I) accidentally wandered through made our eyes pop, and also our brains tickle. (Why were the roofs so pointy? Indeed, practically equilateral . . . . Were those actually heart-shaped holes that we'd just seen in that house's window shutters? And who, on earth, was affording to live in these streets and streets of rather quaint old mansions?)

By Christmas market, I mean what Der Spiegel describes as "an oversized crafts and bake sale": shiny balls on every evergreen in town, stalls selling Christmas toys and deca-ations and cakes and biscuits and cheeses, a nativity, mulled wine. We wandered, and got plump off free samples. I encountered a craft stand selling framed, illuminated nameplates, charming because of the funny French first names -- Sandrine, Didier, Enzo, Aude -- they were providing for. And before heading home we also hit the coffee shops (for Emily), the bookshops (for me), and the cathedral (for the sake of the amazing stone it's constructed from, red and brown and bluish-grey as well as pink, that makes it look like Freiburg or Strasbourg gone quilting).

Further to last post's complaints on workload, I should mention that perhaps I was being unreasonable. Or naive. I'm beginning to realise that maybe Emily and I are the only ones in the classes who actually do all the homework.

• Helene submits assignments jointly with a friend, and the tutor doesn't bat an eyelid.
• Philippe only bothered doing one question of model theory last week, because he was "busy".
• Leander's assignments are typically a couple of pages long; either his writing's five times smaller than mine, or he makes judicious skips.
• Achim does no homework whatsoever; he's going to be assessed on the course later on, during his final Magister examination, and only needs to know the material well enough to withstand ten minutes' oral questioning.

Of course the assignments are a delightful challenge. But slacking's increasingly tempting.

Revenge of the Hausaufgaben

The week's been full. I've been introduced to a still cheaper spaghetti restaurant. I've discovered that Terry Pratchett's a good solvent for model theory. I've learned the wonderful word Reiseweltmeister ("world-champions-at-travelling"), and also that the Germans are them. And I've enriched a friend's Thanksgiving dinner with pumpkin pies worthy of my mother. But I'm afraid the headline of the last few days goes along the lines of "The Work Strikes Back". For, trust me, it does . . . .

It's just that it keeps going, and going, and going! And my tender New Zealand caffeine-absorption habits aren't ready for it. This Monday was the first time that a classmate of mine has ever expressed surprise that fourteen hours of train journey plus a Sunday all-nighter was enough time for me to do all the weekend's homework. This semester's the first time I can ever imagine not snorting with laughter at such a comment.

I can't really complain -- the exercises are often hard and usually interesting. Or at least I find them so, which I suppose means that I need them. And if I need so much more effort to absorb the stuff from my lectures, I can only assume that we're moving much, much faster than I'm used to at home.

Of course, the mystery presents itself: so many more maths students at each uni, so many more years studying for each student, so much more stuff learnt on average each year -- what's Germany going to do with so many more people per capita, all up, who can define a Borel measure or eliminate quantifiers? (Or, perhaps -- how is New Zealand managing to survive without them?) According to Helene, they all go into "er, business, or something". On the other hand, no one I've chatted to has had particularly clear plans for survival after uni, even the ones who'll be done in a semester or two.

Naturally, I'd never question why anyone would want to learn lots of beautiful mathematics. But it's still rather curious.

A happy hop to Holland

The Lonely Planet entry on the Netherlands (which, as always, I spent part of the train ride there reading) was brilliant. The cheapest sleep in Amsterdam is the "Hans Brinker Budget Hotel". The country's liberal attitudes on almost everything have begun to conflict: banning smoking in bars restricts freedom of weed. And Amsterdam's very picturesque, but you should stay away from canal edges once you've had a few drinks.

On arrival I installed myself in a hostel and went to bed. I had a day and a half for sightseeing, seven hours' train trip there and seven hours back taking up the rest of my weekend, so on Saturday I was up early for my day in Amsterdam.

My first destination in the morning was the Rijksmuseum, and accordingly from the city centre I headed south. Walking, I got my first taste of Amsterdam. Apart from the canals, which I'd expected, I discovered it to be a city that specialises in brick buildings of various shades of brown, all with chunky white windowframes in not-quite-perfect alignment that make it feel like a drawing by a kindergartener. It was rather drab, and like nowhere I've seen so far in Europe, but as charming as I'd been told.

The canals, aside from being pretty, force a labyrinthine layout on the place. After forty minutes of walking straight, I ended up -- to my great surprise -- exactly at the train station where I'd started. Resorting to the street map in Lonely Planet, I headed south again, more carefully, and eventually made it to the museum.

So I found out about what the Netherlands has done with itself for the last four hundred years, looked at some Rembrandts, and then occupied myself outside for the rest of the day, getting back to the hostel lateish that evening. I spent some time in the afternoon browsing in a tiny secondhand bookshop, enjoying being in a country whose national language is minor enough for the selection of English reading material to be extensive. I found a wonderful history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North American attempts at demography. (Quoting a guide for new immigrants from Europe: "In the old countries an average family has perhaps four births; in America the figure must be more like eight. Now, if we assume that half of these births reach adulthood . . . .")

On Sunday I went to the (Lonely Planet: "refreshing and vibrant") town of Leiden, slightly south of Amsterdam, to meet Birgit, whom I know from Vietnam, for a few hours of sightseeing and deadpan harebrained nonsense. She's doing a Ph.D. at the university there, which is one of the Netherlands' largest. We climbed up to a circular fortress on a mound near the town centre which was probably high enough to qualify in Netherlands parlance as a hill. Then we nosed through the university (avoiding the maths building, which according to Birgit confirms my theory that every building housing mathematicians is ugly).

I heard about the need to double- or triple-lock even the oldest bikes for safeguard against theft, the cheap government-subsidised housing in Leiden which takes only seven years on the waiting list to obtain, and the Dutch Sinterklaas who rides a white horse onto rooftops and is accompanied by by a troop of Black Petes (pictured below, as seen in toyshop window).We went to the local museum, where I found out what the Netherlands did with itself for the ten thousand years immediately preceeding the last four hundred. (It made ceramic pots, of increasingly large size.) Then we climbed up a windmill. Then I had to hurry back to Amsterdam to catch the train back to Germany.

So delightful . . . .

And today it really did snow!
Though not too much; people were still attempting to defend themselves with umbrellas.

Getting colder

Today -- very briefly -- it snowed! It was midafternoon; I was sitting in the maths library reading about cotangent bundles; the rain suddenly seemed rather loud, and I looked out the window and saw it was hail. A couple of minutes later the hail turned white and slow and silent, and (abandoning all pretence of work) I watched it drift down. But before it had lasted long enough to stop melting on the ground, it had stopped snowing altogether, and we were back to our long rainy week.

When it started snowing, I'd pointed it out excitedly to the girl sitting next to me in the library, and a conversation of my usual random-chat-with-strangers style ensued: she said things, I listened carefully for key words, and then tried to make replies that would follow sensibly from as many of the things she might have meant as possible. (There's no point asking someone you'll never see again to repeat casual pleasantries.) I'm getting better at the technique; this exchange lasted a good ninety seconds.

I have these sorts of chats fairly frequently. Contrary to popular belief, people seem to strike up conversations with strangers more often in Germany than in nice little friendly New Zealand. Of course it's possible that I'm just more conscious of it here, because of the need to snap to mental attention to understand well enough to reply. But I think the difference is in the reality as well as in my noticing it. I can't remember the last time that a man on an Auckland bus exclaimed to everyone in earshot how crowded it was, or that a woman passing me in a Christchurch supermarket made a comment on the available pasta varieties.

The snow may not be quite here, but winter habits are settling in. My classmate Leander turned up to model theory today with a thermos of tea and the most wonderful sleet-protection hat (the photo's not mine, unfortunately, but it looked almost the same). I find myself reluctant to venture outside, and perhaps everyone else is too. My 9 am lecture today was suspiciously empty. Emily, my Canadian exchange-student buddy, appeared later, just in time for our second class. I reassured her that she wasn't the only truant: "I was the first person to arrive in class this morning," I began, and -- knowing my unpunctual tendencies -- she needed hear no more.

In which our Heroine discovers that her bicycle is rotten to the core

I went to the bicycle collective again yesterday, hoping to fix a stiffness in my bike's joints that made the handlebars very difficult to turn. The problem had developed quite suddenly this week, and I imagined it should be easy enough to fix -- perhaps a bit of grease in the steering mechanism, and then voila! As I wheeled my bike over, I was daydreaming peacefully about how I'd spend the rest of my afternoon.

Alas, crippling rust was discovered in hidden places; fixing the joint turned out to require the total replacement of a small but crucial metal cylinder deep inside my bike's front bar and of two ball-bearing mechanisms, and took three painstaking hours. The bicycle mechanic supervising was the same patient, rather taciturn little man as last time. I'm quite proud of the mess my bike must have been in for the repair to cause him such apparent enjoyment. At any rate, on at least three occasions he made the cheerful discovery that the problem wasn't what he'd thought, but actually something considerably subtler.

His instructions were half in German, half in broken English. I was pleased to find that the mathematical German vocabulary I've been acquiring lately is helpful for bicycle mechanics: such phrases as "straight" and "separating" and "hold fixed" carry over directly. The optimistic meaning of "relatively easily" is also a common feature.

Let them eat cake

No class on Tuesdays. I slept very late, did a little work and then set out in pouring rain to meet a couple of exchange-student friends in town for afternoon tea. Being my kind of girls, they were also happy to have an excuse to eat sweet. We went to a confectionery shop promising "Freiburger Spezialitäten".

Inside it was warm and cramped. There were lace curtains at the windows, wood on the floor, and two stories of small tables well full of (mostly middle-aged and older) patrons. At the counter were shelves and shelves of elegant, and hugely varied, and very complicated, cakes and chocolates. Altogether it felt rather fussy. It was as if everyone involved were trying to rationalise their bestial lust for gluctose, by colluding to make the enjoyment of chocolate a very complex business. Maybe if you construct an elaborate ritual around the eating of sugar you strengthen the psychological barrier against overindulging.

Anyway, we picked out our eats, and found a table upstairs, and passed a happy half-hour or so. Fulfilling a months-old promise to myself, I had a slice of Black Forest cake: layered cream and chocolate, rather fluffier in texture than I expected, and yummy and rich. Mmmmm. It was with difficulty that I brought myself to go back out into the rain.

My dinner later consisted almost entirely of vegetables.

I was mildly disconcerted to hear the pair of elderly women next to us in the café addressing each other as "du". I've gotten used to using the informal German second-person with people my own age, but the formal -- at uni and in offices and shops -- whenever I speak to adults. I suppose it's surprising to remember that grown-ups can have friends, too.

Conversations II

With Anna, a classmate: It's nice that I'm managing to understand the differential geometry lecturer's German. Everyone else in the class is having trouble with it -- he's from somewhere anglophone and has a difficult accent. Of course, my German accent is also often incomprehensible. Maybe the two cancel out.

With Helene, another classmate: I'm from New Zealand? That's interesting. Her flatmate last semester was from New Zealand too -- or at least he claimed to be; there was a rumour that he was actually British. He never spoke to her, so she wouldn't know.

With Max, my floormate, a law student: How many people live in New Zealand? . . . . Oh, that's very sweet. So, er, what are the job opportunities like for [stifled laughter] New Zealand law students?

Today after class I went shopping for a warm winter jacket, having discovered that cycling in a long coat is rather less picturesque than expected. My success was rapid; I wasn't in a mood for deliberation. This weekend I'm going to visit Bad Liebenzell, a small town in the Black Forest about an hour from here.

I shall conclude this post by confirming that yes, everything's better in Germany, even the safe-sex campaigns. (Click to see properly.)