URGENT MEMO

Michael Phelps!!!!!!!


Handlebar Mustache = NO






In other news, I'm just a tad bit excited about the Olympics. I'll be rocking the 2 am viewings over in this corner of the world.

Brügge

Brugge is in Belgium and is known as the Venice of the North, mostly I think by those who want to attract tourists there. A group of us FZJ people took a bus there for the day a couple of weekends ago.

Our first (real) view of Brugge.

The group (sans me) by the canals. Will, Akash, Rehan, John.

Wide-angle seeming view of the canals.

In a restaurant’s upstairs window, just outside of an (austere, pretty) convent. I really like the expression on the nun’s face.

Yep, Brugge was touristy. And yet, who wouldn’t want boat rides through canals and carriage rides? I suppose.

More canal pictures. Yep, I liked the canals.

Tourists on the canals. Throughout the day, we got sporadic, intense rainstorms, which would start without warning and last anywhere from 5 – 45 minutes, after which the sun would come out again almost instantly. Quite bizarre. Anyways, I was pretty amused by all of the canal tourists with their matching umbrellas. Either they were tour groups or the boats came armed with their own umbrellas for this very reason.

Pretty canals. Maroon umbrellas this time.

Trolling the streets of Brugge, with my trolls. Just kidding.

In the city square.

We had fries. The braver ones of us had fries with mayonnaise, a Belgian specialty.

Mmm, fries and dip, a balanced diet. Don’t worry, we had chocolate too. And… beer.

We went and saw the ruins of an old church, which are located underneath a ritzy hotel today. Will had acquired an insiders knowledge of Brugge before we went there (probably to get his money’s worth :-P); this was the only reason we knew that the ruins were there, or accessible in such a swanky hotel. Anyways, they had this painting they had unearthed that I quite liked.

Rehan: “Do something crazy!”

The canals again.

We found a cannon! (again, inside know-how). Noone knows how this cannon got upended and embedded in the sidewalk; the challenge is to spot it on this corner (apparently hardly anyone notices it). John and I saw it right away, and we had a fun 10 minutes watching the others try and spot it. “Warmer! No, colder. Colder.”

We visited the oldest bar in Brugge (est. 1515). There I had a Leffe beer (I asked the bartender what she recommended), which was pretty much the most delicious thing ever, and in fact blew most of my expectations about Belgian beer right out of the water. They still have an old stove and kettle in the bar, and lots of paintings of famous people (think: royalty and the like) who have visited. Fun.

Inside a candy shop that Will had heard about run by a 80-something year old woman. Discipline + Respect!!!

Would a tour of any Belgium town be replete without a windmill picture? I think not.

Frankfurt (am Main)

When I’m getting photos sent via snail mail from overseas containing complements to these photos, I know I have taken too long to post. Nearly a month too long, to be precise.

Here’s the Römer Square in Frankfurt; I actually have a (better) duplicate of this image in the form of a free poster I got while in the square.

The other side of the Römer Square. Apparently, the first set of buildings are all the originals, repaired former homes to some wealthy people in Frankfurt. These buildings are all new since the war, but built in the old style (so the square would look authentic? I guess).

In the square, looking for soveniers. I’m guessing you’re telling me not to take a picture of you, aye?

The Main river, after which Frankfurt am Main takes its name. There’s another, significantly less famous Frankfurt on the banks of some other river, but it seems both need to be distinguished.

By the Main River. Aww!

What’s that?

A bird, a plane. A flying dinghy?

The M: “You just took that photo of us huffing up the stairs to blackmail us with later.” Mission accomplished!!

Frankfurt am Main, as seen from a very cool architectural museum we visited. This was not the only reason it was cool.

Kayaks and cathedrals.

And a barge. I couldn’t decide which picture I liked better, so you get both.

A paper flower? That’s what it seemed like. This was in the botanical gardens in the park we visited. There were lots of cool plants, but unfortunately we got to the gardens only half an hour before they closed, so we didn’t get to see too much.

In the botanical gardens.

More pictures from the gardens. This patch resembled the plants you’d see in Texas, with its dry, rocky (or rock) soil. We all wondered how they got these plants to grow well in rainy Germany.

Foxgloves? Cool, anyways.

Space alien giraffe plant!! Truly bizarre.

Sitting in the gardens.

After everyone else left for Greece (lucky people) I ended up taking the slow inter-country (IC) train back to Jülich. This turned out to be a whole lot prettier than taking the express train (ICE) because for most of the trip back the train tracks ran along the Rhein River. Thus:

And:

This reminded me just a bit of the Marlborough Sounds, which is perhaps why I liked it so much.

Well, it was like the Marlborough Sounds, except for, you know, with castles.

Le sigh. Very cool!

I confuse people

Since uploading images isn't working for some reason, I'll tell you about this instead. I meet new people at a pretty constant rate here, and often we'll end up having a conversation that runs something like the following:

Random Person (RP): So, where are you from?
Me: ... The U.S. Texas actually.
RP: Oh?? But you don't sound like you're from Texas at all. I mean, you don't have an accent or anything.

My stock answer is that my parents are from New Zealand, so that I don't spend 5 minutes talking about how Austin is fairly international, not all Texans have a stereotypical Texan accent, and what have you. I know plenty of Texans without "Texas accents". But still, people seem inordinately surprised here about where I come from. I've even gotten:

RP: Oh?? But you're not... I mean, you're not big. *makes increasing girth motion with his hands*

Eh? Many question marks. I guess it's bad when all Texans are thought to be overweight.

In Soviet Russia...

When I got on my bike to go to work this morning, I was rewarded after my first few pedals with a horrible, ratchety, screeching noise, the noise you get when your bike chain is about to fall off. I put up with this noise for a few dozen more pedal strokes, but it was abundantly clear that the chain death rattle was going to persist until either a) I stopped, or b) my rust bucket fell apart. At considerable speed, I coasted, took my feet off the pedals, and gave the bike chain two hard kicks with my heel. This solved the chain problem completely, although I hard a hard time keeping myself from making Soviet Russia jokes the rest of the way to work. "In Soviet Russia, bike fixes you!!" Well, maybe if you're a guy...

It doesn't really help that the place I work at looks like some old East German compound. I'm told they lifted in the building I'm in and the one next door by crane, of a piece. Add the non-color color scheme and the fact that most of the FZJ buildings were put in in the 1950s, and you have a pretty grim place.

Generalizations

So last night Will, Torston, and I went to a small wine festival being held in Jülich, where we met up with 4 other guys. I've gotten used to being the only female in attendance at most of these things, but not so much to some of the baffling stuff that gets said. For example, I tried a Rose wine, and then a dry white wine (this is probably not the order you're supposed to go in; I know nothing about wine culture), and was talking about how the Rose was really a bit too sweet, and how I liked drier wines more. Robert then said "Huh, but I thought you would like sweet wines, because you're a girl."

"Sorry, what?"

"Because girls usually like sweeter wines."

"This is based on an n of what?"

There were several seconds of confusion as to what I was talking about, before he said this was based on two other girls he knew. We all had a laugh. Then I decided to go ahead and jump in all the way now I’d started. I said “Usually the variance within a gender is larger than the difference between the genders.” You know, which it is.
He seemed a little taken aback (my interpretation, of course), and said he wouldn’t generalize again, but I’m not sure whether this was just said for a laugh (“I’ll never generalize again! Haha! Never!”) or what.

What I really should have said was “Say the same thing you just said, but put “guys” in instead of girls. Does the statement make sense any more? ‘I would’ve thought you’d like that wine, because guys usually like sweeter (or whatever) wines.’ And it probably doesn’t make sense anymore, because you all recognize that guys are a pretty diverse group of people, and probably all have different tastes. If it doesn’t make sense to say for a guy, the same statement doesn’t make sense to say for a girl – we’re not all the same, weird, different being.”

But then, as they say, this is just how it works:

Aachen

Three weekends ago now I went with some people/friends from work to the Netherlands. What did I do in the Netherlands, you ask? Why, I watched an American movie in English (and went in to a McDonald’s, very touristy things, really.) My friend/mentor at work lives in Aachen, which is about 45 minutes from work by bus, and right on the border with both Belgium and the Netherlands. Since they have an English movie theater just over the border, a bunch of us went over there for the evening. It was too late to catch a train back to Jülich after the movie, so I stayed in Aachen overnight and then Kristin showed me around Aachen the next day a bit, which was a lot of fun.

Kristin’s apartment, a.k.a. a real German kitchen (albeit one inhabited by someone from France and someone from Georgia).


Escher’s Stairs outside of Kristin’s apartment. You wouldn’t want to cross these stairs on a dark night, let me just tell you that. I am still a little dizzy looking at these stairs in this picture, but perhaps that’s just because I experienced how devious these stairs are firsthand.


In Aachen. There are lots of old buildings in the center of the town that they either a) survived the war, and were restored or b) were destroyed, then rebuilt. I don’t remember how much damage Aachen suffered.


Here’s a typical center city street we saw. Notice anything a bit strange about it?


Now notice anything strange?


Apparently Aachen quite often has some sort of art display/event going on in the city center. This week it was elderly people sitting on the sides of buildings. I can think of several things that could be a metaphor for, but I won’t trouble you with them here.


Another such photo. We spotted at least half a dozen of these guys.


Walking up to the cathedral – cool!


Kristin: “This is the only photo you’ll get of me, so make it count.”

I think some of these figures are supposed to be the Bremer Street musicians. All of them are poseable - the copper bits that are still copper colored are the joints.

Chocolate! Tempting.


I really liked how Aachen was just sort of a typical German city going about its business. No messing around or just peddling to us tourists.


Aha! The secret revealed.




We spent a lot of time just looking in at the shops. I heard a lot about the best places to eat, drink, and get chocolate, but those don’t make the most interesting photos. One thing I really like is the density of the window displays in German shops. They make up for lack of window space with just a crazy amount of stuff crammed into their one window display, often.


Last: A random, bonus photo for Jessie! Thistle spectacular!!!! This is so you don’t have to wait 5 weeks until I finally post about Frankfurt to see this photo.