Week 3

I've been living among the Bonners for 22 days now, and am officially a resident. It feels like it's been a lot longer than three weeks, but at the same time it's gone by super fast. This past week was really fun, especially the weekend (but that's every week amirite?). We visited the small river-side town of Cochem, and we saw probably about 8 people total the first day. I never even saw our landlord once. It's apparently the off season for them, so the town was fairly deserted and pretty much every restaurant was closed. The two we went to were both very good, though, and we even made friends with Nicholas the waiter at the Italian restaurant. We got to tour the little castle they have, and even though it was drizzly the scenery was beautiful and I got some great pictures. We also went wine tasting (again!) and got to try the famed "ice wine," which is basically the closest wine can get to straight grape juice. It's amazing. The wine people were very friendly and we ate like three loaves of their bread. The apartment we stayed at was super cute and cozy...during the day. At night, I'm 98% sure it's haunted by angry German ghosts, judging by the sounds that resonated through the rooms. But we survived!

On the more academic side of things, we've started working on research for our project with enmodes. I'm not really sure how this is going to go, but I hope we can live up to their expectations from last year. I know more about bubbles already than I ever thought I would need to know. At least it's interesting. We visited Bayer headquarters in Leverkusen yesterday. The most interesting part was learning about the process of making and marketing a new drug. I was also surprised to learn about Bayer's involvement in agricultural preservation and farmland stuff. Wheat weevils are a huge problem, apparently. #whoknew. Classes are starting to pick up pace, and I'm already dreading the week of 2/22, but we also have Vienna coming up soon and I'm pumped for that. OH and Karneval, almost forgot about that. I'm gonna be a polar bear, people are gonna throw candy at me...it should be a fun time.