I've met the whole group at this point, I think. More or less anyway. And I'm pretty sure I know everyone's name. Sort of. I can identify the two Christian's, Steffi, Dominik, Anna, Sabrina, Danielle, and Simon. And Dr. Tiemann, our boss. I'm only sort of sure who Thorston is, but I'll get there. I also feel like there's someone I'm forgetting but oh well. They're all super nice and friendly. And they do all speak some english, but they mostly speak German unless they're talking to me. My german is improving by the way. Drucken means push and ziehen means pull, which I know because all the doors at the university are labelled. Also, they call foosball "kicker" or so it sounded to me. They thought "foosball" was a pretty interesting label but I haven't the slightest idea why we call it that. This led into a discussion about how americans don't care at all about soccer. They thought it was very funny that it's sort of something we have our kids play, but when they get older most of them stop playing soccer and pick a "real sport".
Oh and the lab is beautiful. It was built only a year ago so it's brand new and shiny and pretty. It's large too and all the students have individual desk spaces. Really nice. I'll try to remember to take pictures so you can see. The other thing about this lab group is they're very close knit. Apparently we have lunch together every day in the cafeteria. (The food in the mensa is pretty good and very reasonably priced btw). Even Dr. Tiemann eats with us. He buys his food there just like the rest of us. Very cool. His english is really good too, although he has a distinctly British accent when he talks, which is kind of funny. Then, tonight a bunch of people from the group (like 7 of us) met up with David and his grad student Martin at the school pub. Yes, you read correctly, school pub. As in serves-alcohol-on-campus school pub. I just had a coke but it was fun. We sat outside and just talked and laughed for like 2 hours. I'm really happy with my group; it's going to be a fun summer.
I'll put some of my other odds and ends in another post. Tschus!
Yeah i think drucken and ziehen were the first new words i learned here too. Most of the doors on campus just have a z or d on them though so it took me awhile to figure out that those were actually significant.
ReplyDeleteThe doors here are nicely labelled in both german and english or otherwise I would never have figured it out.
ReplyDelete