Today is Thursday, and I pretty much just spent it getting ready for tomorrow morning, when we travel to Munich. I bought some food and got my things together. We leave early tomorrow morning, for a long day of traveling. At work though I did another reaction for Barbara, and got a yield that is quite high; certainly higher than expected, which means that there are probably some more impurities than usual. I will be interested to see what the yield on the next reaction scheme is, but won't know that until Monday. Anyway, it was another quiet night.
Friday was a little more exciting and fun. We met on the train in Mainz at about 6:30am, then transferred at Frankfurt Flughafen to Munich, taking Intercity Express trains the whole time. It was nice, and relatively quick for us. We arrive in Munich at around 10:30am or so, found our Hostel and dropped off some bags. We were there waiting for the train that would take us to the Eagle's nest, when Marc realized that his EurailPass was back in his bag in the Hostel. That ended up costing us an hour in the Berchtegaden area, but no matter. What can you do? We got to Berchtesgaden through Freilassing, and started looking for a way to get to the Eagle's Nest and back, however a man in the tourism office informed us that it was too late for a visit. Instead, he recommended that we check out the Königsee nearby. That turned out to be a wonderful choice and even though we didn't go to the Eagle's Nest, we did still get to see it. And in either case, we were still in the Alps, which are rather beautiful. The Königsee is a nice, cold Alpen lake, surrounded by mountains. We initially just plunked down and sat with our feet in the water, but then Joe found a boat rental place nearby, so we rented a rowboat for an hour (the last hour we could have) at €3/person. We rowed for a while until we could see the church that is located on the lake, then decided to go for a dip. Of course we had all forgotten our trunks, so we swam anyway. There were a lot of people swimming all around the lake, and we just picked a spot, dropped our drawers and swam around in the cold clear water in our boxers. It was incredibly refreshing and gorgeous. A lake fit for a kind indeed; and naturally, we got some good pictures. On the way back we talked with a corpulent, drunk Bavarian man. He was there with his wife for their anniversary, and incredibly hilarious. His accent was difficult to understand, but we got to practice a little German, and watch him roll around on the ground, and flop about like a seal in the water. The best part was watching him roll about though. After the Königsee, we headed back to Munich on our railpass. Our connections worked out ok, although we nearly had a hiccup. In Munich we got to our room and settled down. I met a couple new people who were staying there (our room was coed with 8 bunk beds). The first person I met was Cris, a guy from Poland, who drives bands around in his van, even though he is a Master of History. Apparently teaching in Poland is not very lucrative (and from what he was saying, not much is lucrative in Poland in terms of employment). He was in Munich because his van had broken down, and the people at VW, who make the van could not fix it (a German company not able to fix a German vehicle, in the place of its origin?). He was not pleased to be there, because he was losing a lot of money, and the shop was taking forever to get the thing back up running. I also met Qi Xia, who is a Physics Ph.D. student studying in Mainz of all places. She was visiting Munich for the weekend, and was a lot of fun to talk to. It turns out that she is from Suzhou, which is COOL, because that is where the Katester is from. We got to bed somewhat promptly to get a good start on Saturday.
No comments:
Post a Comment