Comings and Goings

Hallo all!

By the way, this may be a bit random, but it is going to take me a while to get used to saying "Hello" again when I come home. I've gotten quite used to saying "Hallo" instead. In fact, I've grown so accustomed to it that I tend to use it even when talking to native English speakers here. But anyway, that is just a bit of a random side note.

In other news, Monday was quite an exciting day. Steffi and Gudrun came back from vacation, Mattias was back from being ill, and we got a new practical student, who unfortunately knows next to nothing about molecular biology. She seems to be very nice though. Pingkalai has her preparing fly antenna (poor girl...I wouldn't wish that job on anyone). So the lab was literally packed with people again. And David came back from his vacation on Wednesday. So now everyone is back. It's so much fun to have a full lab again, especially since last week there were maybe three or four people there at any given time.

Tuesday night was certainly interesting. One of the Americans here (he isn't from the RISE program, but he spends a lot of time with us anyway) was leaving, so we all got together to say goodbye. It was a lot of fun. It is rather sad to see our group slowly dwindling. But anyway....we all walked Frank to the train station that night (he was going briefly to Switzerland before he came back to Germany to fly home). I had taken my bike (and by my bike, I actually mean Steffi's) with me so that I could get home faster, and I wheeled it up to the train platform with me and parked it. We were all saying goodbye to Frank, when one of the other guys knocked into my bike and turned it over. The bike lock, which was sitting in the basket, flew out and fell down between the platform and the train tracks. Yikes....not good. The basket was also a little bent, but I managed to straighten that back out again.

Anyway, there wasn't anything we could really do about the lock until the train left, so we finished saying goodbye to Frank. After the train pulled away, one of the guys jumped down to retrieve the lock. At first I was really relieved because it looked like the lock was fine.......and then I noticed that the key had broken off in it. I managed to pull it out, and I can still lock up the bike, but I'm going to have to go out sometime in the next few days to buy a new lock for Steffi. ::Sigh:: Oh well. Apparently I can buy one for a reasonable price at one of the nearby supermarkets.

Erm...really, that has been the only eventful thing from this week. Steffi has started this new thing where she only speaks to me in German, and I can only answer in German. It is great practice, but it makes my head hurt sometimes. Hehe. Oh well. It's a shame that we couldn't have done that the entire time I've been here. I would be nearly fluent by now!

I still don't have any plans for the weekend, but I'm sure I'll think of something. I think that Jim is going to Hamburg, and I would love to go too, so maybe I can send him and email to find out when he is leaving and then tag along with him. We'll see how it goes. One way or the other, though, I'll let you all know what my plans are!

Love you all!