Yeh, I completely forgot about the blog until recently and a lot has happened in the last 2 weeks since I last blogged.
My first day in Germany was overwhelming to say the least. It started with a long car journey through the mountainous/forest roads driving on the wrong side of the road. Then when I arrived in Clausthal, I was introduced to the people I would be working with for the next ten months, my project and all the information behind it (which went in one ear and out the other) but worst of all, the kind of institute that I would belong to; The institute for physical chemistry!!! This explains the chemistry degree. I then had to sort out lots of admin stuff like a bank account and my room and a phone. I was finally able to go back to my room to sleep at about 6pm which meant that I had not slept for over 30 hours!
I thought I would give a quick description of the project I will be working on for the year so you may want to just skip this part if your not interested. Basically as I have said before I will be studying latex films (which I only just found out can be any type of polymer in the form of a micro-particle in a dispersion) as they are drying so that we can gain a greater understanding of the particle dynamics. The main way that I am observing the particles is through dynamic light spectroscopy (DLS) where you bounce light off the moving particles and then some witchcraft is done through an autocorrelation function and out pops the cooperative diffusion coefficient. I also will be doing diffusion wave spectroscopy but I have no idea what that is at the moment.
The next day I worked very hard. I got to the institute at 10am which is the time they they go on break, I was then on a break until 11am when I had a group meeting which went on for an hour. During this I had the living daylights scared out of me when the at the end of the meeting, everyone just randomly knocked on the table! I had no idea but apparently this is what Germans do instead of clapping. I then went with everyone to lunch for over an hour so I did not make it to my office until gone 12. A very productive morning! I also found this picture in the toilets which I thought was hilarious!
It took me until Wednesday to get internet and a phone so I was essentially cut off from the world for a week. I had to learn the hard way how important internet is. My room is pretty awesome! I have my own fridge-freezer and bathroom with an amazing shower however I do not have any access to an oven which kind of screwed me because I do all my cooking in the oven. I also learnt that chicken is not really eaten here (which is rubbish because it is basically the only meat I cook) but they do however have an entire aisle dedicated to all the different kinds of sausage.
Last Saturday, I was invited to go to a party that was celebrating, one of their friends leaving to go and do a phD in England. Guess where he is going? Thats right, he is coming to the University of Surrey and he is going to be studying under Professor Keddie. What are the chances of that? (and dont actually try and work it out). Then on Tuesday, I went to a pub quiz. As you can probably imagine, this was quite difficult because it was done in German and mostly on German topics. However I did manage to contribute a point because it was on old English football so no-one else had any idea. I also learnt something very interesting during the quiz about something called the mull of Kintyre test (look it up!).
Anyway I have written far too much so I will stop now. I hope all of you are getting on ok and I may see you in April some time.
Clausthal is known (by a few people) for its millions of lakes so I thought that I should probably take a look. I had no idea where any of them where so I just started walking and eventually found a pathway that goes past a few of the lakes. Just to give you a guide of how cold it is, most of the lakes are frozen over although it has started warming up. I found signs that explained the origins of the lakes but I cant read German that well yet so I may have to go for another trip around when my German is better.
After having explored most of Clausthal, I figured that I should visit the local town of Goslar so I decided to go with Merlin (my partner on the project) and his girlfriend Steffi. Goslar is quite a vintage town with many churches and sort of Edwardian house architecture but also had many modern shops so overall was a very nice town but was still not what I expected Germany to be like. I can probably put that down to being up in the Harz mountains. One thing that I noticed was that Germany still have Woolworths which is quite strange becasue they went bankrupt in England. The journey back to Clausthal was quite interesting because Steffi drove and she was mental. I think that I can extrapolate from this experience that all Women drivers are scary!!
The most recent trip that I have done was visiting the beautiful city of Hannover. Me, George and Erica (the people i met from the international day) caught the train to Hannover which was quite entertaining because none of us had any idea about the train system. We ended up paying twice as much as what we had to but oh well. On the train, we got speaking to some German citizens which was difficult because we could not speak very good German and they knew no English. I took a while but we eventually understood each other. Luckily, Hannover is a tourist friendly town with a red line running through it showing all the places of interest which we stuck to religiously. Hannover was the perfect city because it had a big shopping area and some very interesting architecture but also had some very large fields and a huge lake. I have also found the most awesome form of transport.
Its called a Bierbike which is basically a bar on wheels where you can cycle around the city. I am definitely going on that when I next go to Hannover!
During our time there we also visited the Markthalle which was a massive hall filled with stalls that sold food from all over the world which was also awesome! We ended the day by the lake with music playing in the background and the entertainment of a group of drunk people getting off the bierbike and some people doing parkour which was the perfect finish to the day. Hannover was more the kind of Germany I was expecting to see but we are planning to visit several cities throughout Germany like Hamberg and Munich so this will hopefully give me a better view of Germany.
