June 18

It was a very busy day at work today so I got started right away and accidentally did an extra distillation. I was able to get the reaction done before my German lesson today and when I got back, the HPLC indicated that the reaction had gone to over 97% completion, which was just what I wanted to hear. Unfortunately, when I took apart the apparatus I failed to put the cooling tube back on, so I was using a heated and very much closed system, which is a huge no-no. I heard about this from Barbara when I got back. She was justifiably upset, and hopefully I don’t do that again. Rookie mistake! After that I got everything taken down without incident, washed and dried my crystals, and then headed by bike to meet Matthias and Christian at the Ingelheim Sommer Biergarten (an der Mole) for the Deutschland-Serbien match. It was a nice tight, loud atmosphere for watching a match. Today also happened to be incredibly gusty and windy down by the Rhein. The match didn’t turn out very well for Germany of course, which was unfortunate…for them. The U.S. match was an hour after that, and very few people hung around. Matthias said he was going back to his apartment to drink beer and cry. He’s a funny guy. I hope. I sat with some German fans (apparently of Fußball in general, because they were cheering for the U.S. and Slovenien evenly). It was a rough first half for us, but we of course managed to equalize during the second half and ended up with our second tie. I am quite sure that I was the only American there, which I think was pretty obvious. There were some Germans with an American flag and a big floppy starred and striped top-hat, but they might have been making fun. I tried a good weize bier that Dirk had recommended, and it turned out to be quite good. I did learn that I’m terrible at pouring beer into a glass though (don’t worry, no one was injured in the pouring of my beer). I stopped at Real on the way back, which is like a Target or Meijer equivalent to pick up some practical things like soap for instance. Tonight I’ll probably just watch some tennis or soccer then go to bed. I’m headed to meet Joe and Marc in Koblenz early tomorrow so that we can get a good day of sightseeing in. We’re going to Trier (a very Roman influenced city, which is claimed to be the oldest in Germany) and then to Cochem likely (which has a cool castle that Joe would like to see; castles are pretty cool all around, and they are hard to get tired of).