back to the alps

Sun sparkles over rocks,
Parts mists, lights mountains, and shines
On all those who smile.

I got another chance to see the Alps, and this time was absurdly fantastic. The comment I put on my Facebook album was that "this place was stupid gorgeous. I'm photo-retarded and wound up with some great shots."

I got to see Alex's "office," and by that I mean the obscenely gorgeous (and freezing) river he has to climb into every day. The water is a really fascinating blue; he told me that it's because it's running over limestone and picking up some of the minerals.

The place that we stayed the first night was a little hütte in the mountains that was owned jointly by a guy named Charly and a guy from Nepal. Charly rides his motorcycle into the mountains along a crazy trail every day to get there. There's a helicopter place out back so that they can airlift the beer in. At night, Charly plays the hammer dulcimer, Simon strums the guitar, and the guy from Nepal sings in languages I can't even recognize. The morning awakening (at a confused-blink-inducing 5:50am) is the same.

Some snow was still hanging on in the shadows of the mountains. I took some time to play in it.

We wandered over everywhere, spent some time stargazing (the Perseids are this week, for those of you keeping score at home), and explored a cave that Alex's supervisor had asked him to check out. The thing was not only at the top of a talus cone, there was about 3 metres of free-climb to be done to get up to it. And do you know what was at the top? Sheep poop. Damn sheep.

We ran into a friendly bunch of mountain sheep, actually, the black one among which was super excited to see us for some reason inapparent.

More wandering brought us to another hütte, where we stopped for a beer (airlifted beer... mmmm...). The rest of the day took us through the klam (gorge), where sudden rain fulfilled the double purposes of chasing away other tourists and making the place feel like a lost world. The klam is basically a canyon carved out by the Partnach (the river Alex works in); it has caves bored through the side for people to walk through, and they're lit with lights too tiny to push back the darkness of a stormy German sky entirely. It was spooky and beautiful.

I met Alex's roommates/field partners: Martin, a PhD student, and Christopher, the son of the professor he's working with. The four of us took a gondola up a mountain the next morning to start another hike.

Atop this mountain, it's apparently great sport to skydive. There were about half a dozen people packing parachutes on the grass, and there were platforms hanging into space designed for them to jump from. I wish I could've tried.

So we hiked down and down and down... pausing, since I was in the company of geologists, to survey a cave or two along the way. The route we took is evidently rather frequented: there were stairs in tough spots down it. We came to another hütte along the way, and Martin and Christopher had sensible lunches while Alex and I had less-than-sensible maßes (litres of beer). It made the rest of the hike down the mountain more fun.

We emerged through another klam, which makes for a pretty excellent story since it was the way out of hell. The valley we'd been in for a while was called Hell's something-or-other (Alex? what was it?). Anyway, this one was even more spectacular than the other one.

Following all that, we went back home for a much-needed shower. Then out to dinner with Mr. Steven Soneff, who was in the area on "business" (and by that I mean he was visiting family in Zürich and wound up committing CLs at the Google office there for part of a day).

I miss the mountains. I'll probably have to find myself there once again in the not-too-distant future. Maybe I'll be a geologist, after all. ;)

p.s. Picasa has been updated! All my photos are there now. :)

d&d revisited

No need to cower
In a dark basement when you
Play a robot bard.

Last night brought D&D: Round III. Evan got to take part this time, since he was around, but first a recap of last week's epic board adventures:

0.) The dwarf, the mage, the druid, the defender, and the barbarian find a lonely dragon in a cave and are presented with a medieval cell phone crystal in exchange for a pledge of friendship to him.

1.) The team return to town to sell the heads they've collected during their battles and get some much-needed rest. (And level up!)

2.) The party makes its merry way to Winterhaven in search of a new quest, following a tip from a patron of the tavern in the town they'd come from.

3.) Two dragonborns walk into a bar... and beat the shit out of each other. Well, Juniper (me) beat the shit out of Shamash (Julius). Well, actually, Juniper had been drinking, but he was the one who knocked himself out by trying to charge down the stairs at her. The battle was made more interesting by the fact that one in our party tried to stop us (we thrashed him) and one tried to keep the fight going as long as possible by alternating healing the two of us. The dwarf, Harbek, made sure no one important was coming and dragged the unconscious out of the way when necessary.

4.) We get a quest! This is mainly due to the fact that Shamash and Juniper are out of commission and not able to harass the Lord of Winterhaven. Then we pay for the table we broke in the inn and head out to beat up some more Kobolds.

5.) We get the tar beat out of us by the Kobolds.

6.) Two of us die. :(

And there ended our game for the evening (and our consumption of horrible-for-us foods like peanut butter-flavoured Cheeto things, sour gummy strips, and chili pepper-flavoured tea), whereupon we adjourned and made our way to our respective professions/distractions.

This week found us with three new characters: an elven druid, a shape-shifting humanoid of some kind, and Evan's robot bard.

The adventure that we faced involved the strange circumstances of meeting these fellows (the shapeshifter managed to sneak into our camp disguised as... a Siberian tiger? how did I not notice that...?) and the more standard beatings of monsters alongside them. Unfortunately, there was no wolf-throwing or dragon-tackling or stair-tripping this game, but at the end we wound up with our robot bard running through a waterfall into an ambush and being javelined and rusted into robot death.

So we again packed up our treats (this time we had feasted on brie, crackers, playgirl-shaped gummys, more sour gummy strips, curry ketchup chips, more peanut butter Cheetos, more gummy everything, and beer) and headed out, managing to squeeze in a few hours' sleep before striking forth to appear as productive members of society.

There were a few important lessons that I learned during the game (related to, gasp, real life!). One is that having fuzzy dice hanging in your car, which in the US implies that you are a "playa" or some such, in Germany brands you as a role-player. The second, and really more vital, lesson was that, when toasting, you are always to use the bottom of your glass because "glasses and women are to be thrust at the bottom."

Then I took Evan to the airport, and here I sit. Run, experiments, run!

birthdaze

Even a Wednesday
Can be used for a party
If you do it right.

I'm 21, guys! The traditional benefits associated with such birthday in the States don't really apply here in Europe, though, so I guess it's probably time for a post-birthday drinking-ages-around-the-world rant:

As you may know, kids in the US are not legally permitted to imbibe alcohol until they have reached the age of 21. Most places in the world it's around 18 (although some have interesting laws on that; in Deutschland it's 16 to drink and buy beer and 18 to buy hard alcohol, but most places (the UK, most of Canada, etc. (come to think of it, it seems to be places where English is spoken)) it's just straight-up 18), but there are exceptions, of course. In Tokelau (ocean nation), the drinking age is 29. In much of the Middle East, alcohol is illegal, period. In Cuba, there isn't a drinking age at all; you and your five-year-old are free to enjoy a beer together on the veranda if you so choose.

So what's the allure here? When I went to visit Evan in Gatineau, it was obvious that there was one. Gatineau is right on the border of Ontario and Quebec, which happen to have disparate drinking ages. Lots of bars on the Quebec side had signs up that you were only permitted to drink at 18 (rather than 19) if you could prove that you lived in Quebec.

Then, of course, there are the famous American fraternity parties. I'm pretty sure that some amount of underage drinking goes on there.

But it's so ridiculous to have high drinking ages, ne? At least in the US, kids don't learn how to drink properly and wind up abusing alcohol. I don't remember the stats, but a while back I read an article about incidence rates of various psychological illnesses, and a person who goes to university in the US is like 500% more likely to be an alcoholic than an average person in the US.

It's a wonder that things like Prohibition were ever passed. People aren't going to get over alcohol. It's a social lubricant! Based on media and advertising nowadays, it's impossible to have a good time without it.

Anyway, I'm sure that you've heard all this before from a zillion other sources.

For my birthday, I was given many pleasant surprises! In the morning, my lovely friends Mathieu and Teetee (as well as a couple guys who work in our lab, Simon and Roman) busted out "Happy birthday" and a cake that they miraculously produced from somewhere. :D My mom and dad also sent me a collection of chocolatey deliciousness, and Marie made a cake for me that she brought to my party. I do believe that the only things I ate yesterday were cake, cake, chocolate, cake, and a salad.

Steven gave me a really interesting gift: carrot seeds! Why is a carrot more orange than an orange? Well, I dunno, but I'm about to go proselytize about it.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the number of people who showed up! Nearly all the Darmstadter interns as well as friends from Jugger. Woot!

Summary of the evening:

Mathieu: It's Jager!
Me: !
Mathieu: You can only have it if you are going to drink the whole thing.
Me: !

Julius: Let's go to the park
Me: !

Poornima: I need to go to the bathroom.
Me: We just have to get over this fence. *climbs over fence in dress and heels*
Everyone else: Dammit. Now we have to do it, too.

Olex: Pool?
Me: !

...this morning...

Me: Hi, Teetee.
Teetee: I'm impressed.

Me: 1 Hangover: 0

heidelberg. or: how to put 360 north americans in a german university town

Under blazing sky,
Ancient music spreads softly
Through the old city.

This weekend was the DAAD-RISE 2009 conference in Heidelberg, which meant that the 390 (only 360 were from North America.. others from the UK) interns hired by the programme to come to Deutschland for the summer were treated to a weekend in the city that houses Germany's oldest university. The conference itself involved thanks from the organisers (amazingly, the organising team is just 5 people, which is probably why their email response time is somewhat... laggy), a jazz ensemble made up of a trio of a previous year's interns, chats about how to go about getting funding to do a Master's or PhD in Deutschland, company visits, and a trip for everyone to the Culturbräurei.

The company visit that I went on was a little bit (read: quite) dull. It was a trip to Agilent, a company that makes measuring instruments for chemicals. I mean, that's an important thing, and some of the machines that they demoed for us were pretty neat. For instance, there was a chip that they invented that vastly simplified the tasks of geneticists who have to do electrophoresis-type experiments: you just put in a tiny sample, put the thing in a box hooked to your computer, and the box and software magically record everything about the sample for you and run whatever experiment it is that you've told them to run. I don't know why no one thought of this before, but it was kinda sweet. Maybe I was jaded about the content of this tour because of all the Take Your Daughter to Work Days I've been to; Dad's toys are way cooler than these people's.

Other people went on other company visits, based on the area of their internships. Alex (Mr. Geologist) went to Messel Pit, a UNESCO site with a lot of interesting dead things in it. After that, the group went to a vineyard to experience, um, German hospitality.

At the Culturbräurei, there was a moment that made all of us realise that we're not in Kansas (or even North America) any longer; one of our dear friends who had enjoyed herself a little too much at the winery passed out on the table at dinner. In NA, this would be grounds for a kicking-out, but in Deutschland? The bartender brought her a pillow.

Thanks to the DAAD, all the interns were also given a free tour of Heidelberg. There's a famous castle there, and there are a few awesome things about it. For one, the inner courtyard is filled with buildings in the Renaissance, Baroque, and Gothic styles. Evidently, the castle has been home to many prince electors (they get to choose who is king) over the years, and each one wanted to feel like he contributed something to the design of the place. One thing that stayed the same for all the live-ins, though, was a wine cellar, including the largest wine cask I've ever seen, located in a room obviously built specifically to house it. There was also a gate that was built for Queen Elizabeth. For her birthday. In one night. See what I'm expecting, guys? ;)

Other than the scheduled things, there was a lot of free time to explore the city. Heidelberg is positively brimming with culture, as most cities around this area, and I was thrilled with the opportunity to go to a Bach concert in Peterskirche. It was put on by a group at the university in Heidelberg, and it was awesome. There was a choir and a pipe organ, and lots of "yay." ^____^

Also! I finally got to see my 4(+7)th of July fireworks! Saturday night, one of the famous bridges in Heidelberg was closed to foot and car traffic in order to put on a pretty good lightshow. The schloß was alight, too, and made an awesome backdrop. To make it even better, the moon was near-full and rising, and the beer was only 80 cents.

münchen ado about nothing

History's weight, it
Can crush you if you don't take
Care. See the past now.

Standing at the top of the stairs, just where Hitler stood a few dozen years ago to give a speech to some 20,000 people, at a plaza in München was almost crushing. I know that I've talked about this in a number of posts, but it's incredible to be in places where the wheels of history really turned. I know that we've had a few skirmishes and great men in the New World, but there's nothing that can compare to this. Dachau, the first concentration camp, is about 20 minutes from München. The room from which Hitler ordered the Kristallnacht to be carried out was just off the town square. On the tour we attended, every other building came prefaced with something like, "This is the third one of this building built... the first two were destroyed in..."

There were some pretty frickin neat buildings, though, with neat stories. My favourite story that we were told was about the opera house downtown; its first design included an inverted dome roof for collecting rainwater, and this reservoir was then connected to a series of tubes (the first internet?) that were intended to be a sprinlker system. It was an ingenious system, and it was given a chance to prove itself just a short time after the construction was completed. Fires broke out downstairs, and a worker raced to the proper valve to open it, and... nothing happened. Unfortunately, it was January, and the pool of water in the dome was frozen solid. This meant, unfortunately, that all the water in München would have been frozen, so he had to come up with something else... but what liquid was there going to be in great enough quantities that it might put out a fire?

Oh, beer. He ran a few blocks to the Hofbrauhaus (originally built solely for the Royal Family) and convinced the owner and patrons thereof to form a human chain down the street to the opera house, passing kegs and glasses and any other sort of container that could be found, each filled to the brim with beer.

Strangely enough, despite the fact that many litres of beer seemed to be leaving the Hofbrauhaus, not that much was making it to the other end of the line. The opera house burned down. Alex commented that "that story pretty much sums up humanity." It's a fair point. :) Culture? Let's save it! Well, hmm... beer.

We learned some pretty interesting things about the Hofbrauhaus "back in the day," as well. Originally it was designed only for men, since it would not be seemly for ladies to be intoxicating themselves in public. It was an extremely busy place, so once one got a spot, one certainly would not want to lose it, ne? But consuming alcoholic beverages tends to lead to a powerful need to urinate, so the solution was to put troughs under each table that ran the length of the brauhaus, and each fellow could just open the flap at the front of his lederhosen and let go under the table.

Also back in the day it was (and still is, perhaps) illegal to throw up in the main room of the building, so a "vomitorium" was installed in the men's restroom. Our guide commented that it took him some time to figure out exactly what that curious structure was with a powerful flush and large basin, located too high to be a urinal... Classy.

One of the most famous sights in the city is the Glockenspiel. It was underwhelming, to say the least. I guess it was one of the first things of its kind (although I'm not precisely sure what "its kind" entails), so it's impressive in that respect, but unfortunately it was really, really lame. It only does its famed dance 3 times daily. Before we knew this, we hung around for about 20 minutes to try to see it go off, although I guess when it really went off we weren't much more excited. There are two scenes: one depicts the marriage that essentially created Bavaria, and the other is of cobblers dancing to celebrate the plague's being gone (for the time being). Love and death, what an interesting balance. Too bad it was a poorly-executed one.

We learned a bit about the history of Munich's name and its founding, as well. "München" means "monk" in German, and before it was a city, München was just a collection of monasteries in the middle of Bavaria. Munich is actually the word for monk in Old German, so that's where its English name comes from. Our guide (he was with New Europe Tours, for the record, and really good; they have tours running in several cities, and I was quite impressed with this one) told us tales of some of the kings and dukes of the area, and we felt learnéd.

I guess I didn't even mention who "we" was yet. Part of the purpose of this trip was a reunion of Mathieu, Alex, and Nadège, who had met in the language course in Berlin. Titilayo and I sort of came along to crash their party. ;) Certainly these sorts of trips are more fun with more people, and another girl, Marie, from Sherbrooke (where Mathieu and Nadège go to school) came along the second day, as did a guy named Steven who recently moved into the dorms in Dieburg just down the hall. RISE kids on an adventure. Seriously, though, it was good to see them. I guess I only really knew them from 36 hours or so in Berlin, but in summers like this there's no time to waste on the whole awkward "getting to know you" crap; I learned last summer that all that nonsense can be skipped in favour of having lots of fun together like old friends.

I have to say that I'm a bit jealous of Alex's experiences; he's actually living in the middle of a small town in Germany and is surrounded by the language all the time, while I'm in a sad little bubble of English. :( I did just find out that there's a free German course offered by TUD, and I'm pretty surely going to look into it.

Oh, the trips to and from Munich were quite intriguing in themselves. Mathieu, Titi, and I all elected to try using a German rideshare website to get there, and Mathieu and I used it on the way back, as well. The man who we rode with to Munich was a really nice, knowledgeable guy from the area (sort of) who had been in Frankfurt for the day doing an interview for a job as a consultant for a law firm. He pointed out some neat sights on the way into town, including the Allianz Arena and the Queen's Plaza (which I can't, for some reason, find any information about... perhaps I'm misrecollecting the name). The people we rode home with were really interesting; I'm pretty certain that they were German hippies. They drove a red VW bus with a kitchen (!?) in the back, and they had just come from a wedding and some kind of seminar about their shared job: occupational therapy. :D

The Autobahn was another experience. I had always assumed that it was just one road that connected, perhaps, the main cities in Germany, but every highway is an Autobahn. No speed limit means that people in nice cars drive fast; Alex mentioned that during his several trips along the A9 he'd watched Ferraris and the like racing the ICEs, which, mind you, go about 300km/h. Next step is driving it myself.

There was, of course, some time spent "enjoying the local culture," but those stories are best told in person. The internet doesn't need to know everything.

carry on dancing

The Blue Danube Waltz,

The city of Strauss, a night

Of old melody.

Wien!

I'm pretty sure that this is my new favourite city: it was full of gorgeous things everywhere. It was also comparatively much cleaner than places I've found myself on other weekends... Athens, for instance.

Okay, how did we start... we got in to Wien at about 08:00 on Saturday, then tried to check into our hostel. Yours truly had, in some kind of inconvenient date-telling time warp, booked the room for the following (i.e. wrong) night... so we asked very nicely about a room for the correct one. It was only 4euro more, and we got a private room instead of a dorm. The hostel was super nice, though: it was half hostel and half hotel (the Do Step Inn, in case you ever find yourself in Wien), and it was really clean, it included towels and linens, it had nice kitchen facilities and free internet. Not to mention that it was located right next to the Westbanhof in Wien, which is their big, international train station.

Anyway, we got a room and headed off to explore. Wien has a CityBike programme wherein one need only register for 1euro in order to use any of the bikes (located outside of every U-bahn (subway) station) for up to one hour, free of charge. After an hour, return the bike for 15 minutes and take another free hour! What a deal. :D So we did this to take a trip down to the Schönbrunn Palace and gardens, and the oldest zoo in the world. The gardens were massive... it took us 4 hours to get around what we saw, and what we saw was far less than half of what there was. One of the most ridiculously impressive bits of the park was the Gloriette, which sat atop a hill. From a distance, it looked like the Brandenburger Tor (see post on Berlin), but it was much farther away than we could have guessed. The scale of the thing!

More bike riding through gorgeous, old areas of the city followed. We saw the Hofburg, which was the "winter residence" of the Habsburg dynasty. It was awesome. And now the streets by it are lined with, predictably, stores like BVLGARI and Giorgio Armani. Oh, and shops for tourist junk. :)

There happened to be a market in a parking lot that we passed, so I picked up a nice party top. Probably not anywhere close to as fancy as something I'd need to get into a Viennese ball, but those are in the winter, anyway.

The next stop of note was the Republic of Kugelmugel. It is essentially a crazy man's own private nation. He started printing stamps of his own (infuriated by taxation) and was arrested, but instead of being thrown in prison he was pardoned by the President and permitted to set up his own republic in the middle of... an amusement park. Too bad he didn't seem to be around when we stopped by; I'd've bought a stamp for sure.

We ate some Wiener (in English: Viennese) cuisine: Wiener schnitzel! Haha. I guess schnitzel can be made from any meat (much to my relief), so I tried some made with chicken. And Austrian beer is pretty tasty, too.

We went out for the night with a group of other travelers from everywhere. There were some from Australia, some from Mexico, the US, Austria, and even Canada (this guy was particularly hilarious in his stereotypical lumberjack-plaid shirt and furry beard). They were a lot of fun.

The next day brought us to the Zentralfriedhof, where Mozart, Strauss, Beethoven, Brahms, and other famous composers are buried. There are also sections of old Wiener presidents/rulers (one was labeled as a Burgermeister, which made me think fondly of one of my favourite movies), Buddhist philosophers, and a Jewish section. It was interesting how well-manicured most of the Friedhof was... excepting the aforementioned Jewish section. It was sadly overgrown. :( Probably this had something to do with the massive Catholic church in the centre.

Also we made a stop at the Blue Danube of song to take a look at the Danube Tower, and we were shocked to see a rescue of a drowing person during our brief visit there. A guy jumped into the river and was pulled under; under a minute later, there were firetrucks, police cars, a rescue helicopter, and scuba rescue teams to find him. I'd never seen scuba rescue teams. It was kind of scary... but they did find the kid and pull him out. I hope he's okay. A few seconds of decision can make a big impact.

Then... well, there was nothing else in particular that we wanted to see in Wien, so we took a brief trip to... Bratislava. That's in Slovakia, and under an hour from Wien. The language there is Czech, which is a far cry from anything I can speak (or even pronounce). Hardly anyone spoke any English, and they didn't seem to be accustomed to tourists. It wasn't as bad as it looked to be in Eurotrip (45 cents couldn't buy us a palace... *sigh*), but I did learn why we are kindly asked by some rail lines to refrain from using the WC while in the station. They didn't make any effort to disguise the fact that it simply, um, opens onto the tracks.

So that was the weekend. Well, that and another overnight train trip to make it back to Darmstadt just in time to get to work during which we were awakened by the Polizei for a passport check because Mathieu looked like a felon they were searching for. He had encountered a swastika charm on the train back from Bratislava, which he had fortunately dropped sometime in the interim. I wonder what would have happened if they'd found it on him...

Beautiful.