26.5.08

Well, we did make it to Munich…thankfully

Wednesday night was a lot of fun.  The French had a good party with lots of food and wine.  I kept getting people coming up to me and letting me know that they wanted to come to Munich with us…word of mouth.  The only problem that I had with it was that we didn’t book a hostel and the number of people kept growing for the next days trip.  By the end of the party I had 13 that were coming with to this excursion…

Thursday morning we all got up early and headed to the Bahnhof.  The train that was going to take us to Regenburg was late, so we had to improvise and find another train.  The other part was that our 13 reduced down to 10 which helped out a lot since each laender ticket can have up to five people.  We eventually did make it to Regensburg.

Regensburg was a very nice city.  We visited the Dom St. Peter which was enormous and was having mass when we arrived.  I have a video of the choir singing.  It was very heavenly.  We also visited one of the oldest bridges in the area which was built by the Romans that wanted to cross the Danube.  It was actually at one point the only way to cross the river.  Afterwards we got some food and headed towards Ingolstadt.

Ingolstadt was put on my agenda for one reason: Frankenstein.  This is the city where the book Frankenstein took place.  Victor studied there and made his monster.  It was said the Mary Shelly chose this city because there was a person whom dug up bodies and this city was the only one at the time that had a University and a leading hospital on the dead.  After going the wrong way on the bus, we eventually arrived at a beer garten where they were having a Corpus Christi festival.  We went and saw the castle which had loads of old cannons which were really cool, but the guards wouldn’t let us into the weapons museum.  So after playing on the cannons, we got back on the train to get to our main destination: Munich.

We got into Munich really late at night, but we had enough time to check into the Jaeger hostel and go get some traditional German dinner.  Everyone was really tired from the long trip there (about 8 hours of train), so most of us went to bed early.

Friday was spent exploring the city.  We went on a free tour of Munich which was really cool.  The company that runs it is the same one that I took in Berlin.  Since I have seen most of the city already, I wanted to take the tour and get more history that this company is really good at conjuring up.  I did learn that Munich and Munchen both are old German words for “Monk” and this city is the setting for the early years of Hitler.  We also saw where the White Rose group had their last stand against the Nazis and got to sample a lot of German cuisine at the market.  Strawberries and cherries are in season here and they are very good.  After the tour we went around the English Garten before we headed back to the train station for the Beer tour.

The tour company has these special tours that they give which are their money makers.  Since we heard about their Beer tasting tour, we decided to join up.  The tour, although said not to be a pub crawl, turned out to be a pub crawl.  We went around six different locations in Munich including the Hofbrau Haus and the Augustina Beerhaus.  We learned how to properly hold a mass beer and sang a few German drinking songs.  We did learn that a proper beer garten does have chestnut trees since they have the biggest leaves and can keep your beer colder for a longer period of time.  It was a fun night.

Saturday was more serious that Friday.  In the morning we went on another tour of Dachau since I did not see it the first time I was there.  I would have to say that Dachau was a lot more commercialized than Sachsenhausen.  There are a lot more memorials and the grounds are a lot smaller.  Dachau was the first concentration camp built and was a standard for how the others were to be made.  We learned that the Nazis stopped counting their prisoners after 1943 since there were so many and ’43 was also the year that they starting burning bodies.  It is a very sad place since the original structure of the ovens and death showers are still in place.

After the tour we went back to Munich.  Pavel wanted to see the stadium of Munich, so we went to the Olympic grounds where the ’72 olympics were held.  The place was massive and there were a lot of people there.  We thought there was a soccer game going on, but it turned out to be a concert.  We walked to the top of this hill where we could see the stage and listened to the music.  Pavel asked one of the people who was playing and they said it was some Irish group.  They said that the main band was Bon Jovi!  So we waited about 20 more minutes and Bon Jovi came on stage and sang his greatest hits…it was really cool.  I could not believe what great timing we had too.

After the concert we walked back to meet up with the Irish since they went to Neuschwanstein for the day since they already had been to Dachau.  Some of them went clubbing while the others walked around and went to bed early…I did the latter.

Sunday was spent sleeping in.  After we all eventually woke up, we went to the Deutsches Museum where they have a lot of everything.  I went through it pretty quick since I have been there, but I did find a lot of interesting things that I missed the first time.  After the museum, we went to the Bahnhof and headed back for Darmstadt.

The train system in Germany works like clockwork…during the day.  The trains on weekend nights are very bad.  Something went wrong with the trains and the entire train ended up being dropped off in Rotenhof.  After a half an hour a new train came and picked us up.  It didn’t matter though since we already had missed our connection.  Eventually we got into Frankfurt and then into Darmstadt.  We left Munich at 5 and I got into bed around 2am.  The good news about it was that our train ticket for the whole day only cost 5 Euro.

Today I slept in before going to 10.15 German class.  After class I got into the lab and worked on my project.  Schmidt-Walter came it and got me the part that I needed for the membrane and I was excited to get it working.  After getting everything together, I realized that I didn’t know how to press all the right buttons, so I started guessing…not the best move.  I got the hydrogen flow finally going through the membrane, but it wasn’t working right.  I wanted to get help from Michael, but he wasn’t there, so I have to now wait for him.  The bright side was that I was alone.  The reason being is that I could have made a big boo boo.

After letting the hydrogen flow for about a minute I turned off the gas.  The room is equipped with CO, H2 and O2 sensors since we work with the stuff all the time.  Since I seem to have sprayed a lot of H2 in the air, the CO alarm went off.  The reason being is that it measures O2 in the air and no CO, so when the O2 amount dropped, the alarm went off.  I opened the windows, but the alarm would not turn off.  Eventually I did find the switch for the alarm and got it to stop beeping. 

I am so lost in the lab because I do not know anything in there or how it functions…never got the tour.  I also am very angry since my project is going so so slow.  I just want to get everything working, but because I have to wait for things to arrive, I get days where I have nothing to do…it is very frustrating.  My project is due in July and I need to get it done.  I am glad I still have a month, but I want to be done early so that I can work with Huettenhain on my chemistry class.  That along with parties, traveling and German is really making my head spin.