Fastelovendzusammen

Alaaf! Greetings from the Karneval-crazed Rheinland.
Thursday was Wieberfastnacht, the first day in the last leg of the German (or more precisely, Rheinland) Karneval season. My lab headed up to Köln, the center of the Karneval season. (In Köln there are three seasons: before Karneval, Karneval, and after Karneval.) We headed out in an attempt to make the official beginning at 11:11 in the Altmarkt. As you can see, there are alot of people in the Altmarkt.



Once we realized there was no chance to reach the stage, which is on the other side of the risers, we headed into our first pub, had a beer, and danced to some Karneval songs. There are specific german folk songs which are sung around Karneval, and they are awful. How such cheezy music come from the land of Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler, I don't understand.
Then it was time to play the bathroom game. Namely there are way more people than are normally in Köln and all of them are drinking way more than they usually would. After taking care of that problem, we headed to our usual place: Hard Rock Cafe. Here we met up with a former Digitallabor engineer and continued the consumption of way too much Kölsch. Anyone who's been to Germany knows the Germans are a very reserved people but not during Karneval.

Here I am with a Kölsch in my ladybug costume (but wearing Andreas's dwarf hat).



Here's a view of the general chaos in Hard Rock. Not really all that bad actually compared to later in the evening.



Once we were fed up with the crazy loud music, we decided it was time to eat, so we grabbed pizzas. Then we went to a bar which was ridiculously full. Way too full for me. At this point the group split up. Some of us swung by the Hard Rock and then proceeded to the train station. Somehow my coworker and I made it back to Bonn.
Meanwhile the situation at my apartment had exploded. My landlord discovered the new roommate and ordered her out. The whole thing was completely mishandled, and she ended up moving out on Friday evening. I'm rather glad I wasn't there.
The rest of the weekend has been quiet. Today there was a small Karneval parade in my neighborhood. It was actually really good for being so small.
This afternoon I also read up a bit on the Carneval in New Orleans. It sounds like there are some similarities. New Orleans has lots of clubs that organize floats for the Carneval parades, and there are many similar such clubs here in this area.
Tomorrow I'm heading up Köln again to see the Rosenmontag parade. More from the chaos later!

Et kütt, wie et kütt

Happy Wednesday!
So Karneval (German Mardi Gras) cranks into full gear this week. Tomorrow is Weiberfastnacht. The idea with Weiberfastnacht is the wowmen take control for a day and go around cutting off mens' ties. It's also the first big day of Karneval (after of course 11/11) and is more or less a holiday in this region. Tomorrow I'll be going up with my lab to Koeln, the epicenter of Karneval in Germany and quite possibly the world. My costume is a lady bug (Marienkäfer). Needless to say I will be drinking quite a lot of beer tomorrow. Sorry, not beer, Kölsch, because Kölsch is not beer, it's Kölsch. It'll also give me a chance to practice my Kölsch dialect. Drinkste eine met?
Otherwise things are going well. Last weekend I aquired a television from my (former) roommate. She's moved out of our place and into a new apartment with a person who already has a TV. They don't need two, so I get it until I leave. That means I actually got a chance to see some of the Olympics. First of all I'd like to say now nice it is to watch the Olympics without a commerical break every 10 minutes. In fact there are NO commericials during the Olympics. Amazing, I know. I also saw a bit of "curling". I'd never heard of "curling" until I arrived in Europe, and I must say, it's a pretty dumb sport. Basically it's a mix of bowling and pool on ice.
As I said, I also have a new roommate. She's only here for a month while doing an internship in the Bundesministerium, which is too bad because she's very nice.
I also saw the movie Cassinova on Saturday in English. It was pretty good. Funnier than I expected, and it had the normal, golden look that all films which take place in Italy have. And an hour and a half of staring at Heath Ledger never hurts. :-)
Workwise things are at a standstill. I'm still trying to figure out what's coming out of the FFT program. So far I've managed to get one good spectrum of a 42kHz sine wave. I'm convinced the choice of frequency helped. Unfortunetly most of what comes out is Quatsch.
Back to work!

Hallo over there!

Greetings from this side of the pond.
Things are going well. Classes are done. For my sub-mm class there was no exam and for microquasars I just had to go into the prof's office and answer some questions about MQ's. Ya for a relaxed academic environment.
Work is progressing nicely. I'm starting to pick up on the pattern that I'm only productive on Monday's and Tuesday's. This Monday I managed to integrate an FFT core into my now dubbed "Pocket FFT Spectrometer" and get an FFT out. Or at least what I think should be an FFT. The problem is the output doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But I'm still working on it!
Otherwise life's been dull. Last weekend I wondered around the Innenstadt looking for cool european shoes. Didn't find anything I absolutely had to have. I also began looking for apartments in Ithaca. It's a bit mind numbing to search through so many listings not really knowing the city.
Sunday I finished up the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, which I half saw when Andy was here.
In the news here is of course the Olympics. The bird flu also reached Germany this week. I'm on the wrong continent as far as that's concerned. Though if it breaks into a full blown epidemic, it'll get over the ocean somehow.
Next week Karneval (German Mardi Gras) starts. I've been looking forward to this for over a year. I still need to come up with a costume. Any good ideas?
I guess that's all for now. It's getting late and approaching my bed time.

Frohliche Bergfesttag

Happy Over-the-Mountain-celebration-day, which is my poor translation for the German equivelent for Hump Day.
Things are going well with me. Last weekend I meet up with Manuel and we visited the very small Egypt museum here in Bonn. Later in the evening we meet up again for a couple of beers. Sunday I slept in really late, took a nice long walk, studied a bit, and then chatted with some of you lovely people back in Iowa. Not terribly exciting.
I've had a pretty successful week at work. My goal was to shunt data from my analog-to-digital converter through the FPGA and out through ethernet. It turned out to be not very difficult. The harder part was reconstructing the data in the end. But this afternoon I managed to recreate the input sine wave in my output.
Today I also participated in an event to promote physics studies among women. As a woman in physics, astronomy, and now digital electronics, I gave a quick overview of my project, and here's the important bit, in German. I'm pretty sure it was even understandable. I am improving.
This is also the last week of classes. It turns out that I don't have to do anything as far as a final exam (or any exam for that matter) for my sub-mm course, so I really didn't need to be studying these last two weeks.
Time to go relax for a while.
Tchuess!
Laura

Foggy Thursday

Yet another week is almost gone. Tomorrow I'll wake up and it'll be the end of July and I'll be flying back to the US. Ok maybe a couple more tomorrows.
Anyho! The last week hasn't been too exciting. My work is progressing slowly, but I'm pretty sure it is progressing. We managed almost a week of sunshine, but it's still a bit cold. I'm still amazed by how quickly the weather changes here. Yesterday was sunny and clear and today I woke up to thick fog and a light dusting of snow. The cool thing about the snow there is it's always wet snow, which means it sticks to everything, so you end up with the cool winterwonderland thing going on. In addition to fast temporal variations, there's also sudden spatial variations. Like I said, in Bonn we had thick fog all day, but ten minutes south it was perfectly clear. I was able to experience this effect today because I went to Effelsberg, the 100-m telescope run by the MPIfR. One of the directors had his official retirment party this afternoon, and my lab was invited. It was actually a rather nice party with a lunch buffet. It also gave me a chance to have a cultural exchange with some of my colleagues and practice my German. For example I was appalled to learn that lemonade as we know it doesn't exist here. Instead lemonade is all pop that's not cola (Sprite, Fanta, MD, etc.).
Anyho! All for now.