Mailing restrictions for Germany

I am anxiously awaiting a package from the US containing ski pants for my trip to Austria next week. I leave at 8am on Monday morning so I am hoping that the pants somehow arrive today. Things are not looking so good. The USPS tracking system shows that my pants arrived in Germany on Wednesday and cleared customs late last night. However, as of yet, there has been no sign of them. :-/ I am still crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.

In the meantime, my office mate was trying to help me figure out what company will deliver my package today. While browsing the USPS website for Germany, he came across a list of things that are prohibited for shipping. I copied the list below.

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Prohibitions (130)

Absinthe.

Arms and weapons.

Articles bearing political or religious notations on the address side.

Human remains.

Live plants and animals.

Melatonin.

Perishable infectious biological substances.

Playing cards, except in complete decks properly wrapped.

Pulverized coca beans.

Radioactive materials.

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Improperly wrapped playing cards are banned? Seriously, you have got to be kidding me. Are the Germans worried that they have an overabundance of the Queen of spades?

Surprisingly, incomplete decks of playing cards are accepted in France, but prohibited in Spain.

I am rather curious to see if these prohibitions are ever enforced. So someone send me an incomplete and unwrapped set of playing cards.

:-)

Stranded!

I write this post on my macbook, hoping that I live to post it online. If you are reading this post on my blog, I obviously lived to tell the tale. I am currently sitting on a bus on the top of the hill where I work. Marburg is a city of hills and by hills, I mean mini mountains. The hills here are as steep (or steeper) than the alps, just not as tall. Taking the 7 minute bus ride from my dorm, which is already 40% of the way up the hill, to the building where I work, on the top of the hill, causes my ears to pop twice. The hill is called the Lahnberge and its the center of science and medicine in my little town.

When I came into work this morning, the sky was sunny, but snow started falling intermittantly. The snow continued to fall, but the streets were warmed by the sun, so the snow melted. As the sun set, the snow started to fall more heavily and the temperature started to drop. When I left to catch the bus around 9pm, the snow was not only sticking to the road, but covering it. From the time I walked out of the building at 8:58pm, the road went from black to solid white. The effect was quite lovely and I stood mesmorized, thinking about how I could describe the enchanting snowfall to my blog readers.

The bus arrives and I board. We make the first stop, the university clinic, and start the short trip (4 minutes) down the hill to my dorm. Like I said, the hills around Marburg are quite steep and the bus ride even in the best of weather sometimes feels like a children's roller coaster as we fly down the road. But the bus driver notices a problem as we start to pull away from the clinic, into the roundabout. Everytime he tries to brake, the bus slides 3-4 inches. This happens even when he moves the bus from a stop and hits the brakes as soon as the bus moves. While testing the brakes, the bus driver effectively moves us from inside the roundabout to halfway into the two lane road. He then decides (probably wisely), that he will not proceed down the hill to studentendorf. He radios the bus terminal and says (Ich stehe heir, Ich warte). Which means, I will stay* here, I will wait. I didn't catch what we were waiting for. (*stehen directly translates as "stand" and bleiben means "stay" but I guess the German bus driver has heard English speakers butcher the German language enough that he says stehen instead of bleiben)

That radio conversation happened 25 minutes ago. I am still on the bus. We haven't moved. The bus driver got out and walked for a bit. but the bus hasn't budged. I guess we are waiting for morning. :-/

However, while I have your attention, I should note that my German has progressed to the point where I can even understand a bus driver speaking 10 feet away from me. That's pretty cool. In fact, I understand a lot more German than I ever dreamed I would. I conversed entirely in German for 4 hours on Friday night and I regularly speak German to my lab mates. Pretty cool I think. Anyways, I digress.

30 minutes have passed....still nothing....I guess I will save this blog entry until the bus actual does something. .....

40 minutes have passed...the bus driver decided to conserve energy and turned the engine off. The heat is still on though...

1 hour later...the bus driver is "dancing" in front of the bus..actually...he is kicking snow around. I wish he would close the door, my toes are freezing. Now he is walking around the bus. Maybe a Chinese fire drill?

65 minutes later...I located the heater so my toes are starting to warm up...still no sign of whatever we are waiting for.. I have passed the time by writing this post and finishing a Daily German podcast....now I move to thesis writing? Four people just left the bus, probably to call a taxi....I may join them soon.

75 minutes later, the AST service showed up and offered to take people to the southern part of town. I live in the northern part, its faster for me to walk home from here than from that part of town.

80 minutes later...we were just told that the bus isn't budging and they ordered three mini AST buses. They arrive in 10 minutes. ...yeah I get to go home!

95 minutes later...I walked in the door...made some warm tea and slipped on my fuzzy slippers (thanks Lala!) We talked to the bus driver, turns out that the Marburg buses don't run if the roads are slick, its too dangerous. In a really interesting twist, I learned how tall Marburg hills really are. At the Lahnberge on the top of the hill, it was snowing heavily while near the bottom of the hill (my dorm) there is no snow at all. Gotta love the weather.

Now that I am home, I guess I should feel lucky for
1) a bus driver who knew to check his brakes before heading down the hill
2) the chance to live a in a town where a 7 minute bus ride is the difference from a mild winter storm and a foggy evening
3) A fully charged macbook, loaded with podcasts and things to do. I probably would not have made it through this ordeal without crying had I not been distracted for so long.

I am posting the only picture I was able to take tonight. In this photo you see two AST mini buses preparing to take the remaining people down the hill. In the back, you can barely see the bus sitting in the roundabout. The dude with the backpack is a Russian who catches the bus nearly every weeknight from the University Clinic. I have never talked to him, but he seems nice.

Election Night 2008

I am beginning to write on the backlog of posts detailing events that I never discussed on my blog. Tonight, I will begin with a discussion of Election Night 2008.

I was really curious about how the election would be covered in Germany. Would Germans know that the US was electing a new president? How would I watch election night coverage? Would I need to camp out in my lab to enjoy the privilege of streaming video? Would people be offended if I wore red, white, and blue?

Anyone who red the news knew that not only did Germans know we were electing a new president, they were counting down the days until Bush is gone. Not surprisingly, most Germans were fans of Obama and would shout out "Yes we can!" anytime they saw an American. (I liked to respond to these exclamations with Nein, wir können nicht!) In the days leading up the the election, the energy became noticeably more powerful. I often overheard "Obama" and "McCain" in the school mensa (cafeteria) and saw signs for Obama in the hallways. The day of the election, however, felt suprisingly normal. I kept wanting to scream, hello, my country is electing a new leader today! Lets get excited! But in reality, the real excitement would not start until midnight my time, when polls started closing on the east coast.

I tried to find information about an election night party from the large American contingent in Marburg (large but invisible for the most part, but that's another post) but I found no information. So I decided to have my own little election night party in my room. I borrowed a large lcd screen from my lab, trucked it back to my dorm, and hooked it up to my laptop for a two screen election night experience, as you can see below.

I attired myself in red, white, and blue and sat down with some pretzels, fruit, and cnn.com to watch the results come in. (I am on this healthy food kick, unlike my fiance) The results start out pretty boring, Kentucky was called early for McCain (big shock there) and around 2am, I seriously regretted my decision to stay up until I had a new president-elect. However, as the returns continued to come in, the list slowly started to tip for Obama, and you could feel the excitement building through the TV screen. When they finally called Ohio (and the race) for Obama at 4am, I started dancing and jumping up and down.

I ran into the hallways, expecting to hear whoops of joy. I ran onto the balconey, expecting to see fireworks. Instead, I was met with silence. Not the nervous, scary kind of silence, but the calm and restful silence experienced at peace. I was very sad to hear my whoops of joy met with such uter-nothingness, and that's when it hit me. Of course its calm and peaceful here. A new American president won't make a difference to how the Germans sleep at night. The real excitement lies with the Americans. Oh how I wished to be with friends and family in the states, reveling in the excitement of the election, but instead I was here in Germany, celebrating my joy secretly.

However, I did not celebrate completely alone. I called one of the other Fulbrighters in Frankfurt (where she actually found a party) and was able to share a brief moment of joy with an American voice. I stayed up to watch McCain's consession speech and then Obama's acceptance speech, BOTH of which filled me with pride to be an American. I finally forced myself into bed around 5am. I woke up the next morning from a horrible nightmare, that the election continued like the 2000 election. :-) However, when I woke up, I realized that the election was not a dream. I smiled and began the day as an American with a new president.

Here are some pictures and videos from German and Turkish news programs that night.

Election 2008 - Germany

Why am I here?

After successfully defeating insomnia for 5 days (I actually went to bed before midnight)...it return this week with a vengance. This time, however, I realize the shear amount of work I have to do before I leave Germany. Which leads me to the topic of the post, why am I here in Germany.

The Fulbright program is meant to be both a cultural and intellectual exchange. My exchange focuses mostly on the intellectual part. I came to Germany to work with a specific research group that specializes in computational analysis of chemical reactions. Since the research group is multinational, cultural exchange means dealing with scientists from 4 different continents and the Middle East. For a scientist, cultural exchange typically means that we discuss how science works (or doesn't work at times) in our home countries. For example, a recent lunch conversation discussed how PhD students are evaluated for a degree. In Germany, students receive a grade on their PhD thesis while Brazilian, Turkish, and US students receive a pass or fail on their oral defense and written thesis. We discussed this issue at length for about 20 minutes (it really was an exciting conversation). Other conversations discussed how software codes work on various platforms and the difficulty of obtaining software for your research....but I digress...

The real reason I am here is to engage in intellectual exchange with the German computational group. My research group in the states actually makes the molecules in lab while the computational group just makes models. In my Fulbright proposal I stated that my synthetic knowledge would help the German group improve their models to match the real world while the German group helps me learn computational tools that enable me to make predictions for the real molecules. The interchange is quite nice, but heavily weighted in my favor; I learn much more from my research colleagues than they could ever hope to learn from me. I am in great debt to the amount they have taught me already, but I still have so much more to learn.

In addition, I strongly desire to defend my thesis shortly upon my return to the US, mostly so I can finally move to the same zip code as my fiance. Thus, I end up spending extremely long hours in lab. For a while, I was very disappointed that I could not experience German life as Germans live it but then I remembered, I am not just here to learn about German culture, but to become a better scientist. Thus, I SHOULD be spending long hours in lab, working to create better models (and publish papers) that connect a synthetic group in the US with a computational group in Germany. Besides, my German labmates are there working long hours as well.

I met with my German boss last week and ended up starting three new projects. One project with a postdoc is finished, while the other two projects are barely started. I hope to finish most of the work for one project and write it up (science lingo for write an article) before March 5th. Why March 5th do you ask? That's the day my next (scheduled) guest arrives. Maria, one of my German sisters, will be visiting Marburg for a conference. On March 6th, my US sister (the one that I am legally related to) arrive for a weeklong visit. I want to enjoy all my time with them. Thus, I want to finish as much work as possible. On that note, I should either return to my studies...or try to fall asleep....hopefully the latter.

As I deal with insomnia more, I hope to start posting highlights of the last few months, including pictures and descriptions of the few things that took place outside of research. (what, there is life outside of research?)