Deleted scenes

When I arrived in October in Freiburg to my bare and empty bedroom, I got depressed. I mused glumly the way I muse glumly almost every time I move house: that my living standards have plummeted, and that my personal comfort has reached its all-time low. So my floormate Achim (who felt a bond with me because he'd visited New Zealand) took me to IKEA. We bought me a carpet and drawers and duvet and hangers. And curtains. Because I hated my curtainless blind-less windows and felt as if everyone was staring in at me. More precisely, we bought material and curtain-rings and a curtain-rod, and I sewed it in to curtains.

A month later, someone mentioned casually that the shutters on their window were stiff. I asked myself what shutters these were, and later examined my window more carefully. It turned out that I had window shutters too -- it was just that they were the clever German sort that roll down the outside when you twist a little stick on the inside, and I'd never even noticed them. They were wonderful. But I didn't want to look oafish. So I went sour-grapes, and let on that I'd spent the six hours sewing curtains not because I didn't know about the wonderful window shutters, but because I didn't like them.

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Over lunch one day in the university cafeteria, some of my classmates started laughing in a not-too-malevolent way about our differential geometry lecturer, who was Australian, and sometimes while lecturing twisted up his German words in little ways like pronouncing the German word "Mannigfaltigkeit" [English "manifold"] as "Mannifoldikeit". After they pointed it out to me, I started noticing it too. Then I started noticing the little half-giggle that went around the class each time it happened. (Deep down, Germans are proud of how difficult their language is.) Then, for camouflage, I started joining in occasionally too.

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I found myself in Rome one January Sunday morning, prying open a heavy door in a tall windowless wall of a big blocky building on a sidestreet, and discovering inside a Baroque church, just as a random website had promised me the night before. Moreover, it was a romantic decaying Baroque church, with sixth-century foundations and an interior by a famous seventeenth-century architect called Francesco Borromini and peeling gold-leaf curlicues all over the walls. And, moreover, it was a tiny romantic decaying Baroque church, just big enough for the twenty nuns who were seated hymn-singing at the front and the nine parishioners who eventually gathered for morning Mass and for us.

I found it fascinating, and beautiful, and also a little sad. The nuns were subdued, and their singing wavering; their faces were hard to read. Altogether I couldn't help thinking that nowadays being a nun -- or, at least, being a nun, and maintaining your belief in the importance of what you do, without the constant external reassurance you would have had from the calling five hundred years earlier (back when admiration for nuns was widespread and passionate, and convents were very prosperous) -- must be sometimes a difficult business.

After the service, one of the nuns stayed behind to show the old church to two little boys who'd been brought by their father.

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Late the last night of term, I was out in town with friends, and we were cold and decided to go hang out at one of their apartments. So we separated to go pick up our bicycles from where we'd parked them, and met up again in town centre. Then we all cycled out to Sarah's through the dark empty streets: fast and smooth and quiet and swerving round each other. Like geese in a flock. Or witches on broomsticks.

The time has come

I've been saying goodbye to people.

I went cycling west the 20 km to the Rhine with my maths friend Clemens. It was a gloriously sunny day that looked like New Zealand February rather than German; the countryside was yellowed and very slightly rolling, with fields and apple orchards and vinyards and a couple of typically delicious villages. We hit the Rhine at the smallish old town of Breisach, puffed up a hill to its cathedral, and ate lunch looking out across the river to France. Then we lurched and bumped the steep cobblestoned way down.

I met my neighbour and fellow exchange student Alex on the trams, and elicited within moments both that she was sad to see me go and that she'd happily take all my furniture off my hands. So we spent much of the next day or so transferring carpet and curtains and chest of drawers and kitchen utensils down the stairs of my building and up the elevator of hers. My room's nearly emptied now.

I went out for lunch with my floormate Max. I went out for ice cream with my exchange student friends Alyssa and Vanessa. I ate cake with Elliot.

Emily I'm meeting for dinner now; her job is to keep me from dejection on my last night in Freiburg.

Conversations IV (Special Waitangi Day Edition)

The day before yesterday, I started musing: on Wednesday it would be February 6, and I would be all aloooooone. And a little bit homesick, and yet what could I do? I couldn't have a cricket match, because no one here knew how to play. I couldn't eat pavlova, because it'd start arguments with Australians. I couldn't throw mud at the Prime Minister, because it wouldn't be very nice.

And then inspiration came.

And so I collected together some floormates, and we made chocolate fish.


They were pink and sweet and very sticky. As confectionery went, there was certainly room for improvement -- but as exotica, they were excellent. I left some at home, took some to uni, and fielded questions.

Hans: Does one wish someone a "Happy Waitangi Day"? "Merry"? "Congratulations on the occasion of"?

My floormate Lena: What are your exciting New Zealand Day traditions?

My classmate Clemens: What are we celebrating? The signing of a humane and revolutionarily civilised colonisation treaty that was later repeatedly broken? why, how very interesting.

My classmate Leander: What are your national songs like? Can you sing one? Please?

Unidentified model theory classmate: So, how do you spell this . . . er . . . Vy-tay-ni?

Emily: What is this pink thing you're giving me made of? Oh -- marshmallow, really? . . . I'd never have guessed.

It was fun while it lasted.


But now the chocolate fish are all gone.

Rosenmontag

"What's the German word for 'parade'?" I asked my floormate Max.


"Parade," he replied.

Witch Sabbath

The guy across the aisle from me last night on the train was wearing a bear costume. It was brown, and fuzzy all over; he was eating a pretzel, and his friend next to him was just wearing normal army-corps uniform. 'Twould have felt surreal, except that the train was packed full, and half the other people on it were dressed as eighteenth-century sailors or fleecy goggly-eyed pink things. It was Hexensabbat ("Witch-Sabbath"), and we were heading into the Black Forest to celebrate.

"Carnival"'s got quite a precise meaning in Germany: it's the few weeks and days just before Lent starts when people do silly things in an organised fashion to let off steam before the forty days of boredom. It's highly regional; round here it's called "Fasnacht" and I'm told the highlight in Freiburg is a parade tomorrow which I'll be making certain to attend. Twenty minutes away by train, in 20,000-inhabitant Waldkirch, where I was yesterday, people spend the nicht of February 2 costumed and drinking and burning a straw witch in the town square. German Wikipedia claims it's the local version of a Celtic festival called Imbolc. (The American version is Groundhog Day.)

At any rate, it sure beat Halloween. Well, New Zealand Halloween, at least. It was nice to see a crowd-together-and-make-merry festival that attracted equal parts families, elderly couples and packs of drunk students.

I missed the witch-burning, but the place was still crowded by the time I got there. I felt a little left out costumeless, though I've no idea where they all came from (does every German have a Carnival costume somewhere in his wardrobe for annual use?) It seemed to be a matter of pride to be part of as big a group as possible of people all costumed identically -- a group of friends would all be dressed as bumblebees, or New York policemen, or the aforementioned fleecy goggle-eyed pink things (the girls in that group also had yellow miniskirts with bright blue flowers). Default costume (that adopted by the middle-aged men) was devil ears and a pitchfork.

Admittedly, lots of that pulsing carnival atmosphere was thanks to German power-pop boomboxed all through the square. Every booze-selling stall, of course, had a vested interest in making people feel as festive as possible while in its immediate vicinity, and so each one was blasting its own noise; sometimes in between two stalls I'd get the weird wavy effect of hearing both. Sample track: this song, known as "Reiß die Hütte Ab" ("Smash Down the Cabin"), which I've since discovered has a cult following of German teenagers who post montages of collapsing structures (Galloping Gertie, the World Trade Centre) to the internet with it as soundtrack.

I came home and learned about Weyl groups for a while before going to bed. I've been speed-learning Lie theory for a little while, and though it's very beautiful I'm frustrated by the need to go faster and faster. This is the course I decided to take out of optimism, despite being woefully underprepared; the unwritten soundtrack of this blog of exciting European adventures has been Lie theory steadily and mercilessly leaving me behind. (That, and me mixing my metaphors, of course.) To catch up, I've read fifty pages of the stuff in the last week. Progress sounds great, until you realise that I've another eighty, plus other material, to cover before the exam ("Klausur") Friday after this.

Wish me luck! And, sometime when I get home, ask me to tell you about maximal tori. You'll like them.

Some evangelism

I wrote an email this morning.

TO: The Hon. Judith Tizard, MP for Auckland Central
SUBJECT: Plastic bag tax

Dear Judith,

As a University of Auckland student on exchange this semester in Germany, one of the first things that struck me about life here was that supermarkets don't provide plastic bags. It was inconvenient the first few times, when I'd forget to bring my own cloth bag and have to waddle my overladen way home. Then I got used to it -- it's really not that hard to deal with -- and now, knowing what plastic bags do to the environment, I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'll be back in Auckland next month, and intend to carry on the anti-bag habit I picked up here. I heard about a New Zealand group (www.bagtax.org.nz) of people with similar feelings, who are calling for a plastic bag tax in New Zealand. I think it would be a great idea. I hope you do too -- it'd be wonderful to have it implemented.

Sincerely,
...

And they'd sing, and they'd sing . . .

Early this evening I was lingering late in the maths building, which was quiet, and dark, and had almost emptied for the weekend. And then suddenly I heard singing -- three or four voices, perfectly together, perfectly in harmony. I went exploring, and tracked it as far as a closed door, and listened for a while, and then went back to work.

Half an hour later, the singing stopped. A couple of girls and a couple of guys emerged -- one or two of them I knew by sight -- and ran downstairs, whistling.

It wasn't the first time I'd heard of a university with a sweet little maths-department a capella group. But my mind started wandering, and I thought back to the large and excellent village choir I'd heard in 2000-inhabitant St. Märgen just before Christmas. Then I remembered that at least a couple of the not-too-many people I know well here sing in small semi-organised choirs -- one of them I discovered one day during a particularly boring differential geometry class, quietly skimming the score and (Russian) words for a new song. And then I thought of the brilliant YouTube video of a University of Mannheim lecture hall breaking into song:



and of buskers in the Freiburg town centre, and realised -- well, that I was altogether very impressed with the local grassroots choir action.

Germany's known for its proliferation of superb music schools and orchestras, or so I'm told. But it seems that the national enthusiasm that supports them starts deep down.

The weather at the moment is weird. On Wednesday it was brilliantly sunny. Yesterday was nice too, and at night the wind started to blow in whooshing big gusts. I felt it, cycling home, and with my Christchurch-trained instincts assumed it'd be dry and hot for the next few days. Then it started to hail . . . .

Germans' opinions on the general situation vary. Someone said joyfully, it's spring! But someone else gloomily predicted a relapse.

Flights and mountains

A floormate greeted me this morning by asking if I'd "heard about Edmund Hillary".

I had, indeed. Everyone else in Germany had heard too; it was front-page news.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine called him "one of the greatest adventurers of the twentieth century", and added:

In New Zealand, where Hillary was revered as a national hero, people reacted with distress to the news of his death.

"He's on your money, too, right?" asked Hans. "Yes," I said, rather proudly. Of course I don't want to give Germans the impression that New Zealand goes in for apotheosis -- but by all accounts he was a wonderful man.

Moving from the international news on to the very very local, I had my first experience with the famous European low-cost air carriers this week: I booked a weekend trip for late January on Ryanair. As I'd been warned, the original FIVE-EURO FLIGHT!! steadily accumulated extra charges for return trip and taxes and baggage and check-in, finishing at 80 € on the actual credit card bill. Still, it costs more than that for a trip home from Auckland to Christchurch.

And where am I going on this 80 €?

Rome.

Book of the hours

Christmas Eve I spent in midnight mass in Freiburg Cathedral, cold, and squished in on every side by Elliot and maybe a thousand other people, and seeing almost nothing, and hearing glorious ritual and music. There was also a tongue-in-cheek sermon by a rather charismatic priest, a slight twist on the standard New Zealand "Christmas is a time for God and family, so beware of consumerism": "Christmas is a time for God and family, so beware of overeating."

The very early hours of Christmas Day I spent outside and very cold, cycling to Emily's along a road that seemed endless. Christmas morning I spent waking Emily up (she has a fondness for dozing), and then making pancakes that changed on the fly to French toast when we realised that neither of us had bought milk before Christmas Eve shop closing. Christmas afternoon I spent visiting a really, really nice German family whom the university had acquired on its drive for holiday-day adopters for its lonely foreign students. We went for a walk in the Black Forest, and then I was showered with home-made Lebkuchen.

On Boxing Day Simon arrived from Princeton, safe, and with hair ruffled only to the correct degree, and intact apart from his suitcase, which British Airways had sent to London. (It was last heard of yesterday in Basel. With luck it will make it to Germany by the time he leaves.) On the day after Boxing Day we went shopping for replacement clothing, and studied ("studied") representation theory. Two days after Boxing Day, or rather yesterday, we left for Cologne, where we are still now.

It's a city of a million people. It's one of Germany's smaller big cities, and I picked it more or less at random to go see: it had Roman ruins and Rhine frontage, and less of a journey to get there than Berlin or Munich, and sillier and friendlier people than Frankfurt. We caught a lift up with Jutta, whom I'd found on the miraculous car-sharing website Mitfahrgelegenheit, the penniless German student's primary mode of transport. She was from a small town south of Freiburg originally, where she'd been staying with her parents over Christmas, but lived now in Cologne, where she was heading back to for New Year. She agreed that people from Cologne were silly and friendly: the local dialect is exciting, though she couldn't describe it, and on New Year the people stand on the bridges over the Rhine and let off fireworks. We went to the hostel and dropped off our bags.

We spent the evening with friends of friends, a middle-aged gay couple who run a dog-walking service in an eastern suburb. They were silly and friendly: they had a collection of miniature East German cars arranged on their mantelpiece, they served us pre-fizzed water, and we ended up chatting til midnight and crashing the night. They were also really interesting: we learned the German words for "nepotism", "deform", "taciturn" and "surveillance".

And today? The normal Saturday-sightseeing mix of sleeping in, wandering around, rushing through fantastic museums a little too close to closing time, and sitting exhausted in cathedrals pretending to pray. Dinner was a sausage Simon claims to consist of blood and fat, though I maintain it's only food colouring. Then we hung out in a cheap internet café with a loud Italian guy talking on Skype.

And then they all went home and had some toast. The end.

What we heard on high

It's Christmas Eve, and my 3000-resident "student village" has almost emptied for the holidays. Shops shut at 1 pm today, and will stay shut for the next two days. Despite having only the slightest dusting of snow out, it's bitterly, bitterly cold. I'm grateful for really powerful radiators, and for supermarket "Just Add Heat!" mulled wine.
Yesterday it wasn't cold. I went hiking in the snowy upper Black Forest, with Emily, and Elliot (American), and a couple of Kiwi tourist friends of friends. We took the rickety regional train 8 km east to Kirchzarten, the bus 5 km more to the village of St. Peter, and then walked 8 km from St. Peter to the next small village, St. Märgen. The route was high, white and full of Germans out for Sunday afternoon strolls. For the middle of a Forest, the countryside was surprisingly open, and surprisingly populated.

We reached St. Märgen in time to have a look around before the community choir carol concert we'd come for began. It was a small place (fewer than two thousand residents), with a lot of big decorative bed-and-breakfasts. I passed by a community notice board, according to which there was a lot going on. Nearer the church, we came across a sobering (Second World) war memorial: for St. Märgen's war casualties, it was unusual to be the only son in your family that was killed.

The carol concert was put on by the St. Märgen choir. It was amateur, but competent, and apart from an unfortunate trio of zitherists totally enjoyable. Elliot chatted up the locals with practiced smoothness, Emily and I burst into laughing at a heavily-Alemannic-accented rendition of Feliz Navidad ("We wanna vish-you-a Merry Christmas"), and we went home with O du fröhliche ringing in our ears.

I'm heading off now to hear midnight mass in the Freiburg cathedral, and then sleeping over at Emily's. Happy Christmas, everyone!

Under the weather, and really over the chill

I've been fighting a cold for the last few days, and consequently haven't been maintaining this diary in the manner to which it's become accustomed. A pity, too, since it means that my exploits downing tequila in antlers, and my long wait for 5 am (when McDonalds opens) in the Karlsruhe train station on the way back from Vienna, and my miraculous discovery of sparkly Christmas decorations in a back cupboard of the kitchen just hours after wishing for them, will go forever unblogged. Really a pity.

However, when times are tough, blogs must share in their writers' sufferings -- and I know mine bears its tribulations willingly. Thanks, darling.

Anyway, what I've been doing too much of this week to ignore -- apart from sneezing, and beating someone (he knows who he is) at internet Scrabble -- is goofing off with my classmates in honour of Christmas. On Wednesday afternoon, most of the way up the four flights of stairs to representation theory, I encountered Janine, who's also in the class, coming down. "Too boring to stay?" I wondered. No: the tutorial had been cancelled, by unanimous vote, in favour of a class trip to the Christmas market. We headed over, crocodile formation, and drank mulled wine in what even the Germans considered to be a cold breeze for an hour and a half.

After forty minutes' pretence of work, the same thing happened in differential geometry on Thursday. On Friday was our model theory tutorial, and there the celebrations had even been planned beforehand: everyone brought a plate of Lebkuchen, and we made tea. I should mention, in view of previous remarks, that the Lebkuchen produced by our mostly-male class were quite fabulous -- enough to make Emily and my jam circles (the result of a four-hour Wednesday bakeathon) look rather frumpy. And that only some of them were store-bought.

Somehow, I find Christmas festivities at university just indescribably cute. But I suppose it's really only the novelty: I've spend half my schooling in a country too fiercely multicultural for public Christmasses, and the rest in one where (summer) holidays start too many weeks beforehand for them to make sense.

Conversations III

With Leander, a classmate: The German system of encouraging, and often drafting, people into a year of military or civil service immediately after high school isn't restrictive, it's character-building. Most people serve in the army or work in kindergartens or rest homes -- but the German government sent him to the Jewish community in Prague, where he spent his Freiwilliges Soziales Jahr as general factotum for some elderly Holocaust survivors. He ran errands for them, and helped with meals, and played lots of games of chess. They got on together quite well.

With Stefan, a local on exchange-student pastoral care duty: No, it's not true that German men are more domesticated than most. The lovely fluffy Black Forest cake that he brought to our potluck dinner? Doesn't count, he learned it at his mother's knee. My floormates that cook gorgeous meals for their girlfriends? Well, they're cooking for their girlfriends. My floormates that cook gorgeous meals for themselves? Well, they're students, and it's cheaper than eating out. (My floormates that spontaneously wash other people's piles of dishes, and that spend afternoons baking cookies, and that cook gorgeous meals for themselves, using private stocks of obscure vegetables and personal kitchen utensils kept apart from the common hoard, and wearing big efficient-looking aprons? I didn't mention this; I doubted he'd be able to respond.)

My own theory, by the way, is that men are indeed on average somewhat more domestic in Germany than elsewhere. The only New Zealand guy friend I've ever known to bake was gay. But I suspect that because the guys I know here are older than the ones I know in New Zealand, my data is biassed.

With Emily: How on earth will we be able to break the news to our schools back home when we fail our horrible representation theory paper? But of course, since our results notices will be in German, maybe we won't have to. Having the result for one class different from that for the others might look suspicious, though. Perhaps the best chance for deception would be to fail all three.

I'm going to Vienna again (briefly) this weekend. I'll be local for Christmas, but Simon's coming from Princeton to visit over New Year, and we're wandering north. People with great sightseeing suggestions or long-lost friends for us, as far as Koblenz or Cologne, should speak now (and please, do!), or forever hold their pieces.

The end of some loose ends

Caught up in errand-running and Christmas shopping and Christmas-wards socialising in the last week, I've been experiencing more of everyday life than usual. Some of it's fun. Among the mundane things I shall miss from Germany are:

• bicycles and thermoses
• self-seating in restaurants
• self-vegetable-weighing and self-grocery-bag-providing in supermarkets
• wearing hair long and loose and frizzy
  
• crumbly spongey sandy-feeling public toilet soap
• shop assistants who get rid of you by answering "you're welcome" before you've had a chance to say "thank you"

Among the mundane things I shan't miss from Germany are:

• unreliable student-dorm internet that's been broken for the last four days

Oh well. Some of the people who frequent internet cafés late on Saturday nights are quite interesting.

Another Friday, another visit to the bicycle collective. Yesterday I went in hopes of repairing the lumpiness of my bike's gait. It turned out, surprisingly enough, to derive from a flat tire. I fixed it, and stayed on to straighten my handlebars, re-wire my back light, and replace the generator that powers it. Now the bike just flies! And of course with the newly-working lights it's visible for miles. I've been celebrating by temporarily eschewing the trams.

Today I daytripped to Strasbourg with a couple of exchange-student friends, to see the Christmas market there. It was lovely -- though a bit more expensive and a lot more crowded than the little Colmar one. The Strasbourg cathedral is just as impressive the second time round.

And I can see why a classmate of mine (whose father comes from Alsace-when-it-was-German) told me rather sentimentally the other day that Alsace is "everywhere in view from Strasbourg Cathedral's spire".

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.

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.)

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.)

I went out hiking in the Black Forest yesterday with my Canadian exchange-student friend Emily, round Schauinsland, the highest peak. We climbed halfway up, got tired, and wandered back down, feeling decidedly superior to the tourists who were taking the six-minute cable car to the top.