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.