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.

Good cop, bad cop

Before I left for Germany, somebody warned me that the professors would be distant and scary and never speak a word. I heard the story of Albert Einstein, who made a lifelong enemy of his one by addressing him as "Herr Weber" rather than "Herr Professor Weber". And to some extent it's true. But there's a hidden counterbalance, to which I shall pay tribute today:

every course comes equipped with a tutor.

And this is not the nonentity sort of tutor that I myself have been in Auckland, who from the grand heights of one-semester-further-along-the-mathematical-spectrum gets paid small wages to grade calculus exercises and deflect some of the silly questions away from the lecturers.

Nah, these are gold-hearted black-belted mathematical ninjas.In their other incarnation as students, they're usually occupied writing a thesis for their Diplom or Doktorat. They know their stuff, and they're beautiful, beautiful people. They call us "du" rather than "Sie". They organise field trips, they take whole classes out to end-of-semester afternoon teas. Their eyes fill with tears when there's something we don't understand.

(In case you ever read this, dear representation theory tutor, maybe I'll just mention that . . . well, the exam I wrote this morning . . . er . . . well, it'd benefit from your characteristic generosity.)

Pullbacks and frozen peas

I've spent this weekend studying for a differential geometry exam.

Differential geometry's the mathematical equivalent of the TV dinner. It was invented one afternoon by some disillusioned engineer or physicist, who got bored doing her 47th messy multivariable calculus computation of the week, and told herself that there had to be a better way of doing things. So she rewrote all the calculus into lots and lots of meaningless abstract symbols, and spent ten years doing every conceivable convoluted computation on the meaningless symbols for once and for all. Then she settled down happily on the couch, knowing that for the rest of her life she'd only have to defrost her pre-computed meaningless-symbol solutions and not actually cook new ones herself.

(There is a problem with this approach, though. The engineer realised it a few years later, prematurely aged and trying unsuccessfully one day to get her mental microwave to do its reheating stuff. All this high-falutin' time-saving mathematical technology is kind of complicated, and once you forget how the meaningless symbols work, you're back to the chopping board again.)

Anyway, my exam tomorrow is on the convoluted mechanics of differential geometry -- the 129 pages just before the engineer sits down to her first TV dinner -- and may well be both difficult and dull. But every computation I do tomorrow is another 388 that no one else will ever have to. And for this, you should all be very grateful.

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.

Murdering the time

It's 3 am on a weeknight. But when you're friends with Emily and Matthew, sleep becomes a random and unscheduled pastime, and when you have an old friend to stay for a week and a half, your to-do list tends to grow merrily unattended. Fortunately, I'm energetic and stubborn enough these days that telling myself "you can't go to bed until you've done X properly" produces good work rather than an infinite insomniac loop.

Princeton Simon left for Princeton on Sunday morning, leaving ice cream and a representation theory texbook behind to console me. Before Helene and I met Oxford Simon (down for another day's visit) for dinner yesterday, we killed time for half an hour by hanging out in the maths common room at uni. The maths common room is a nice little place -- there's no equivalent tiny room at Auckland squished full of blackboards and posters and sagging couches and a coffee machine, just for the use of the undergrads. It's also always full of people, so I avoid it when I'm not with friends -- my German's not yet up to large groups of strangers. I can still sort of listen in to the chat, though.

Anyway, I'd never been there in the evening before, and was delighted to find that at about six pm it's full of maths students happily loitering and swapping their plans for Monday evening, just like the schoolyard at middle school after class finished for the day. The nicest part of the common-room crowd -- eat your heart out, supposedly-egalitarian New Zealand! -- was the total lack of hierarchy. Little first-years (well, they're still mostly older than me, but . . . .) didn't get in the least ignored, and a postdoc and a lecturer were there too, chatting totally casually with the undergrads about who they were going dancing with that evening.

A woman from an investment bank sent me an email last week, and I replied today. Selling out? No. Curious? Yes.

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.

Monday morning, maths department

I've been keeping quiet about it here lately -- but German's hard, and keyword-spotting has its limits. Survival doesn't necessarily entail competence. And of course this blog thrives on total honesty. So, to destroy any illusions that have formed . . . well, I suspect that when speaking German I still typically sound like a cross between a caveman and a person with ADD.

Like, with a classmate yesterday,

Clemens: Hey, have you seen David?

me: Heya. Who? What?

clem: David, you know, he's in the differential geometry course too. I was just looking for him there.

me: Diffgeo? Oh, yes, I know I saw you in there a second ago, but that was just to hand in my assignment. I'm actually skipping the lecture there today to go finish my model theory assignment for later this afternoon.

clem: Ah. No, I'm looking for David. He's IN the differential geometry course. He's in representation theory with us too. You know David, you speak to him sometimes, don't you?

me: Ohhh -- yes, I know I sometimes speak up in class in representation theory. I know it's a pain for everyone else, since my German's so bad. But it's a hard course, and I need to ask questions sometimes, even if it takes the tutor ages to work out what I'm trying to say . . . . I hope it doesn't get too much on your nerves . . . .

clem: No, don't worry about it. But it's David I'm after just now. You know each other, don't you? He told me your last name, it's very funny!

me : Aha! Yes, my last name . . . yes, I've been getting teased about it for years.

clem: Haha. I'm not surprised. But, er, anyway, I should go find David. You haven't seen him, I guess? See you later.

me: Oh -- David, you say? No, I haven't seen him. Ciao then.

But I promise, my comprehension has been getting better. For example, it's good enough now to occasionally overhear things in the supermarket. Like, last night,

woman whose purchase included several kilograms of birdseed: Aagh, these seeds are spilling everywhere!

check-out lady: Here, wrap up those packets in this bag. You don't want to walk through town looking like Hansel and Gretel, do you?

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.

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.

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.)

On autopilot

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.

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.

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.

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 --

• 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.

I feel tired and frivolous from all the sightseeing, though, and am rather looking forward to lectures and security and structure.

Bonus! insider travel tip: To avoid paying necessary surcharges, feign sleep when the train's ticket inspector passes your row.

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.