Life in Freiburg

Wow, there's quite a bit of time I have to report on. Here's a quick summary: In the first week I found a room pretty quickly, and then went about all the official registration stuff that a foreigner has to do in Germany. In the second week I did things such as visit the university library, figure out online accounts, and other things to introduce myself to academic stuff. I also had a lot of free time, so I did hunt (unsuccessfully) for a few geocaches and take a walk along the edge of town on the Black Forest side.

Last week was the first week of classes. Because you don't sign up for classes in advance here, but rather begin attending them and register later, I visited more classes than I planned to take and picked out the ones that are interesting and understandable for me. As it turns out, I plan to attend three Physics lectures, on solid state physics, nuclear physics, and multiscale materials modeling, and one language seminar entitled The Comparative Typology of English and German, which is taught in English primarily for people whose native language is German. In the first lecture we went over some examples of bad English from German students, and we discussed the reasons and generalized it to all language learners.

That's enough of daily details for now. I thought I'd give you a kind of virtual tour through some aspects of my life in Freiburg - at least as it is when I have time to enjoy it.


The building in blue is the one I live in. (Thanks to Google Earth for the image.) As you can see it's nicely situated in the center of a block, so it's away from traffic and noise. I get the impression there are a lot of families in the surrounding buildings, and there is even a playground in the block. Altogether it's a nice place to live.

Here are a few pictures of my room. I didn't clean up especially when I took them, so you get to see how I really live ;-) .


This is where I keep my clothes. The shelves and the bin came with the room; the long blue thing I bought at IKEA to supplement storage space.


My room has a couch!


My room has a bed!


My room has a GRAND PIANO! Unfortunately I don't play piano, so right now this is serving as something to store things on and under.

That's pretty much where I live - in later posts I'll try to describe what I do here.

Train ride with Clemens

The Mitfahrgelegenheit* I used to get to Freiburg gave me the unique opportunity to converse with a seven-year-old German boy. The man I had contacted really just arranged the trips, and he paired me with a middle-aged widower and his son Clemens for the group ticket. On the train, the father wanted to sit facing backwards for reasons of comfort, but his son wanted to sit facing forwards, so I agreed to share a pair of seats with Clemens.

Clemens turned out to be a very active and talkative kid. We talked about lots of things, ranging from figuring out the train schedule to Star Wars movies. He could understand everything I said, and he himself spoke very clear Hochdeutsch. I wonder if that has anything to do with his father being a Ph.D. I even learned a few words from him, like Ohrläppchen (earlobe). There were a few awkward moments, such as the time I had to convince him not to stab at the upholstery with his collection of plastic cocktail swords, but mostly it was fun. I must admit I came away from the experience a little proud that my German is good enough to hold a conversation with a kid.

* This word doesn’t really translate well. It refers to an opportunity to drive or ride along with someone else that is set up on the web.

Last Days in Berlin

On Wednesday three of us made a meal together before heading to Stammtisch for the last time. Nelly had had enough of always being the one to come up with and prepare a dish, so she insisted that we males do something. When I described my Mom's green spaghetti dish, they sounded interested, so we gave it a try. It wasn't quite the same; rather than pesto Nelly improvised something with fresh basil, garlic, and something else, and the noodles were flat, not round. The essentials were all there, though: spinach noodles, spinach, olive oil, mushrooms, feta cheese, and of course dried tomatoes. Nelly and Erik really enjoyed it, and Nelly made sure to emphasize that my mother should be very proud that her dish impressed a Frenchwoman.

The next day and a half were test days for me. I took the Goethe-Institut's Zentrale Oberstufeprüfung (central upper-level exam), which consisted of writing an essay (250 words in 90 minutes), listening to an interview and answering questions, reading and responding to an article, grammar exercises, and an oral report and conversation. Out of possible scores of very good, good, and satisfactory, I scored "good" overall with "very good" in the grammar and the speaking. So now at least I have an official record of my German skills, in case I ever need it.

After the oral part of the exam on Friday, Nelly, Erik, Fabrice, and I went to Wannsee, a lake near Berlin popular for getaways, and picnicked. We had bread rolls, baguettes, cold cuts, broccoli, and of course a bottle of Bordeaux wine. It was a really great and sunny day, and the scenery was beautiful. Fabrice kept feeding the ducks from the lake, who then kept following us, so we even ended up making friends with some of the locals. Unfortunately I lost all my pictures of this day for some reason. Also unfortunate is the fact that this beautiful lake was the setting for the infamous "Wannsee Conference", where the Nazis distributed their plans for the "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem". On our way out we stopped by the house where this happened, which is now a museum.