Heidelberg

Hallo!

I'm finally up an moving for the day, and now I can tell you all about the trip to Heidelberg!

Let's start by saying that I have to give the people at RISE credit for even attempting to arrange a meeting of 350 college students when there are really only about 6 or 7 of them running the program. I have to give them even more credit for even vaguely making it work. But I will admit, much of the meeting was a disorganized mess. Not to say that it wasn't still enjoyable, because I did have a good time; it was just often confusing and more than a little crazy.

Heidelberg was very pretty, although I didn't see nearly as much of it as I would've liked. We arrived at the hostel, got checked into our rooms, had lunch, and then piled onto a bunch of buses to go to the old university campus for a welcome meeting. We were in this beautiful room called the Alte Aula, which they said was actually fairly new (it was built in the 1880's). Needless to say, we all snickered quite a bit at that because anything more than 100 years old is practically ancient in a lot of regions of the States (the East Coast may be an exception to this). Still, the university was established in 1386, so I guess that they would consider the Alte Aula to be pretty new.

The welcome meeting in and of itself was dreadfully boring, except for the first speaker who told us some interesting things about the university. So, after that, we walked across to another university building to have some dinner. Unfortunately, they seemed to have forgotten that the evening meal in North America is quite different from here in Germany. They supposedly ordered enough food for 400 people, but it was all finger food and they ran out way before everyone got food. I managed to get my hands on one piece of chicken and a little pastry thing. A lot of people had to go out and find bakeries that were still open in order to eat.

After that, we had these panel discussions about studying in Germany for a Master's Degree or Ph.D. I enjoyed the one about the Master's, but the one about getting a Ph.D. in Germany was rather...tedious. I was itching to get out of there by that point. When they finally let us out (late, of course) I went back to the hostel and hunted down everyone else from Gottingen. They were all sitting out back hanging out. We had thought about going out to explore, but I think that everyone was so tired that all we really wanted to do was relax for a while.

The next day we had to visit a company for a tour. The company I ended up going to was one called Degussa, and was about a 1 hour bus ride to Hanau. Degussa is a chemical production plant, and we got to tour some of the factory. It didn't really have much to do with my field, but I guess it was neat to see how they produce chemicals on a large scale. That took up most of the day, and the bus ride on the way home was about 2 hours for some unexplicable reason (because we didn't hit any traffic) but we managed to get back by about 5:15.

At 7, we went back to the inner part of the city for dinner at a brewery. There were actually so many of us that they had to send us to two different restaurants, but I managed to go to the same one as all of the folks from Goettingen, although I didn't get to sit with them. Instead, I had to sit with all of the people from the ACS. It was actually a lot of fun. Lourdes (she's the lady from the ACS that organized everything for the orientation meeting in D.C. back in March) was there, and she had dinner with all of us. They didn't tell us that only our first beverage was free, so most of us had more than one. Lourdes, though, was very nice and paid for all of our drinks at the end of the evening. We've decided to treat her to dinner at the D.C. conference when we get back.

After dinner we all wandered around the city for a while, and all of the ACS folks had the most amazing experience. We were standing in a square next to this big fountain, just talking, when some old man came up to us and asked us where we were from. Apparently, he was an American who had been living in Heidelberg for about 30 years. He was a professor of philosophy or something like that. It was so crazy, because all of a sudden he just said, "Okay, you all are going to think that I am nuts, but I am going to sing you a song about how much I love Heidelberg." And so he did. It was actually very pretty, and he had a great voice. After that, he asked us to give him 5 or 6 words, and then, right off the top of his head, he made up a song using those words (the words, by the way, were penultimate, tricycle, doubtful, cakes, and one other, but I can't remember what it was). It was so funny, but really great. We all got our pictures taken with him before he left. I'll see if I can find someone who has posted the picture so that you can see it.

The last day in Heidelberg was definitely the best. We all got up, had breakfast, and went out for a "debriefing" in which the head guy essentially apologized for all of the things that went wrong during the conference. Then we hopped on some buses and went down to the city center for a guided tour of the city and the castle that is up on the side of the mountain (that, by the way, was a VERY long walk up more than 300 stairs). But it was well worth it. The city really is very beautiful, and the castle is AWESOME. I will certainly post pictures at some point. After the tour, we were free to do whatever we wanted. Jen and I (one of the people from Gottingen) decided that we wanted to stick around and explore for a little while. I think that everyone else was going back to Gottingen as early as possible, since some of them had been hiking in the Alps and hadn't been back since we went to Munich the weekend before. Hanging out in the city was a lot of fun. Jen and I bought some jewelry from an artisan in a really neat little market, and we went to this bakery and got this AMAZING thing called a castle-cannon ball. Essentially, it was this big pastry that had nougat cream in the middle, pound cake surrounding that, and the whole thing was dipped first in marzipan and then in dark chocolate. It was soooo good, but ridiculously sweet. We also saw this guy from France doing a street performance (sort of like a circus act of sorts). It was really funny because he was switching back and forth between German, English, and French the whole time, sometimes using all three languages in the same sentence.

We ended up missing the train that we wanted to catch back to Gottingen by less than a minute, so we ended up waiting around for an hour until the next (and last) train came. Anyway, it was quite a lot of fun, and we had a great time.

Anyway, I should go. I'm supposed to meet Pingkalai in about 20 minutes to go out and do something for my birthday. I'll tell you all about it tomorrow!