Heidelberg

(I wrote this right after the weekend but am just now getting around to posting it with pictures and everything so keep that in mind. This was the weekend of June 19th)
 


Wow. What a weekend. Last Thursday was yet another holiday so I took Friday off too. This is what the weekend looked like:
Heidelberg > Landau > Strasbourg > Wissembourg > Speyer > Munster
Since that's quite a lot, I've split up the weekend into two parts.  Stay posted for the next one soon!

Very early Thursday morning, I drove down to Heidelberg (Zimrides).  After dropping my stuff off where I was staying, I headed into town.  I took a tour of the Altstadt, the middle of the town, where the lady took us around some of the historically noteworthy things and explained a lot of the history of the town.  Heidelberg is home to the oldest university in Germany - it was founded in 1386! Some of the buildings are in the Altstadt while many of them have newer buildings on the outskirts. An interesting part of the University is the Karzer - the student prison.  They were thrown in here for various reasons. However this wasn't your normal prison.  They could basically choose when they stayed there. If that night didn't work, then they'd go the next night or maybe even the week after.  During the day they still went to all of their classes/lectures but during the night they went back up to the prison.  Their friends were allowed to visit them and bring food and drink so whenever someone of the friend group had to spend a night, they had a little party up there. Not too bad although the beds are of wire strips so rather uncomfortable to sleep on I'd imagine.  They also decorated it as you can see in the picture.

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Die Alte Aula - one of the old lecture halls

 After a delicious nutella crepe for lunch, I made my way up to the Schloss (castle) via bergbahn (funicular).   Since it's up on a hill, it gives a fantastic view of the town and the river.  The castle itself was built in a few different sections which is visible with the different style of architecture.  Inside the castle is the Apotheken Museum - Pharmacy Museum.  I found it very interesting :) There's also das Große Fass, a massive wine barrel that holds 219,000 liters of wine.

I also took a tour with a Waschweib, a washing lady of the castle.  She took us inside the castle and told us about the history and some stories of the people living there.  The wash ladies of the time would go from castle to castle and gossip with each other about all the rich people.  Heidelberg is in the south of Germany and they speak a very different dialect of German than I'm used to.  This lady had a very strong accent.  I had to concentrate so much to understand what she was saying but I got most of it.

On the tour was another girl traveling alone so we stuck together and ended up spending the rest of the afternoon together, walking around the castle grounds and then going into town for a piece of cake.  She's a study nurse traveling all around Germany collecting data on dialysis patients.  She'll be in a different town each week for a year and then return to those towns to follow up in a second year.  She also lived in the US for a year so we had a great time reminiscing about American things. That night I met up with the people I was staying with and we went to a little festival at the university. Lots of pallet benches, lights in trees, homemade jewelry, super cute decorations, and music provided by a girl who sang and played piano and percussion with a looping pedal.  I always love listening to those people. To get there, we biked but I obviously didn't have my bike with me down there so I sat on the back of one of the other ones. I've seen people be transported this way and had always wanted to try it and now I finally got to! It wasn't the most comfortable but it worked. Unfortunately I don't have a picture but maybe in the next few weeks I'll snag one.

The next morning I wandered to the other side of the river and walked up the Philosophenweg which gave a fantastic view of the town from the other side. This path is up a big hill, about 20 times worse than the Village Hill at JMU. At the top of this hill is also one of the physics buildings. I think the walk alone would deter me from studying physics, as if there wasn't enough already. After walking back down across die Alte Brücke (Old bridge), I caught a bus to the Carl Bosch Museum which is a little bit outside of Heidelberg, nestled in the hills.  Carl won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 for chemistry.  Since that's what I'm studying, I figured it was worth a look.  A cute little museum and definitely worth it.  I learned a lot about his life, his studies, and of course his research. Fun fact: he liked to collect bugs.

Funky monkey statue

This is a bathtub.

For lunch I met up with Julia, the other girl that was staying with the people I was staying with.  We ate a Mexican place but the people that were working there looked Italian and I had a doener, a Turkish meal. Interesting mix but delicious.  Julia had spent a year in Russia so we spent the afternoon comparing the American, German, and Russian cultures.  In the US, people are generally very friendly and open, always smiling at strangers, while in Germany, people are lot more closed off and private.  It isn't that typical to smile at someone you don't know while walking down the street.  Russians are even less smiley.  To them, a smile is flirting. So Americans think Germans and Russians are rude because they don't smile while Russians think Germans and especially Americans are trying to manipulate them because they smile more.  There's a phrase in German that explains this perfectly: Andere Länder, andere Sitten - basically different country, different customs/habits.

That was all of Heidelberg! Friday afternoon I took the train to my cousin's in Landau, which is about an hour south of Heidelberg.  Those adventures will be in the next post!

I had posted another post two weeks ago but never linked it to Facebook. If you missed it, you can click here to read it. 

Sailing, Strawberries, and Bike First Aid

Lab crisis of the week.  Last week a round bottom flask with my product fell into the water bath of the rotovapper. Friday I spent all day extracting it with ether and ethyl acetate only to run it through a column and get 7% product out.  Kind of frustrating because we were hoping to divide this one up and make a few different things. So today we continued on with the next step of the synthesis using what we had and boiled the water out of the water layers from the extraction. I extracted those again and was able to get a little bit of product out of them.  I also extracted the blue paper towels that I used to wipe out the water bath and got some product out of that too. It's really dirty but product all the same.  That's real science kids.

Life crisis of the week: My second day here, I was biking home across some cobblestones and managed to get a flat tire. I found the air pumps and fixed it, no problem.  Fast forward a month.  This past weekend, we took a nice bike ride around the country side to Haus Ruschhaus and the tire decided to give out about 1 km from our destination.  After walking the rest of the way, we were able to put the bike in the car and then drive back to the house where we spent the afternoon patching up the inner tube of the tire with this little bike first aid kit. By the time I left that evening, it looked like the tire would hold up.  It had three new patches and was holding air just fine.  But then this morning on my way to the university, I sensed another flat coming and sure enough, halfway there, I was bouncing and clanking all over. I walked my bike back straight to the bike store (which is conveniently right across the street from where I live) and was able to buy a new tube.  After choir practice(more on that in a sec), we took the bike back to the family friends' house and he graciously spent the next 30 minutes taking the bike apart to install the new tube.  I cannot thank them enough. And now my bike is good to go again!

I sing in a choir! We rehearse every Wednesday night and there's a concert in a few weeks.  Now there's a story behind this choir.  This is the same choir that my parents met in 30 years ago, with the same director.  Once I found out I'd be in Munster for the summer, my dad called him and asked if I could sing with them for this concert.  He said of course and before I even knew that he had said yes, he had already announced to the choir that an American would be joining them.  There's still a few people in the choir that have stayed in Munster that remember my parents.  I'm the youngest by at least twenty years although last week we got another young person around my age. It's been a lot of fun, expecially since it's been a while since I've sang in a legit choir.

I did a lot of little things this past weekend.  Thursday I was done with work rather early so I went to the Friedensaal - literally translated peach chamber.  This is where the peace treaty that ended the Thiry Years' War was signed.  A pretty important bit of history.

 

My supervisor is a rapper.....so I went to his show on Friday night. 

Saturday, we went sailing on the Aasee.  There wasn't too much wind but it was still nice to enjoy the sun.

 

Das Ruschhaus - the house of Annette von Droste-Hulshoff- a poet 

Sunday I spontaneously decided to go to Koln (Cologne) for a few hours so I found a ride on a site similar to Zimride.   Once in the city, I climbed to the top of the cathedral and then just wandered around the city and along the Rhein. I watched some street performers while enjoying ice cream.The cathedral itself is a massive structure.  Not the most beautiful but still impressive.  It took over 600 years to be finished because the building was interrupted many times. Now there is almost always some sort of construction going on to fix it up.

So many love locks!

Monday was another holiday so I went Oma's house for coffee and cake with my aunt, uncle, cousin, and other uncle. It was practically half a family reunion. And I ate my weight in strawberries.  They're right in season right now and just so delicious. I can't get enough of them.

Monday night it practically hurricaned.  There was a massive thunderstorm an Tuesday morning there were trees and branches down everywhere.  People couldn't get to work because the train tracks were blocked.  They also canceled school for Wednesday in some areas because they determined it wasn't safe for the kiddos.  I went for a run while it was storming though and it was so great.  I came back completely drenched. Don't worry, I stayed away from the trees.  

A Weekend in Review: Amsterdam

I have been receiving notices from some people very closely related to me that I have not been posting enough...so here is my weekend post.

[science-y part- skip if not interested]
The lab is going well-we've been working on a few different compounds with varying degrees of success. Most of our research group was in Cologne for the day for a presentation on another flash chromatography instrument but I stayed here and worked with Wally, our CTA (chemical technical assistant).  Once we've synthesized our molecule, we give it to her and she tests it against the enzyme to see if it actually does what its supposed to.  Our group is focused on FAAH inhibitors so they have developed an assay to test all of the molecule with. The goal is for the molecule to inhibit, or break apart, the FAAH enzyme.  I pipetted various concentrations of diluted solutions of the compounds into a little plastic capsule with a phosphate buffer solution and the enzyme. These were incubated for an hour and then put into the HPLC machine where they are tested.  The resulting peaks from the HPLC correspond to how much enzyme is still left in the sample which can be translated into how much the molecule inhibited it.  Different concentrations (1uM, 0.33uM, 0.1uM, 0.033uM, etc) are tested to see which concentration will result in a 50% inhibition, known as the IC50 value. Other factors are also tested, like stability in the body, metabolism, etc. From there, its in the hands of those big pharmaceutical companies.  If they are interested in a successful compound, they'll buy it and then produce it on a large scale in the form of a drug.  Of course that takes another few years because of all the additional testing that has to be done but that's the general idea of the process.  Make sense? Good. Moving on.

This is the paper that my supervisor and his supervisor just published on the molecules we're working on. You may or may not be able to access it but at least the abstract is there and one of the molecules. http://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2014/md/c4md00181h#!divAbstract

Oooo pretty colors

Travel bits.
Last Thursday was a holiday so I took Friday off as well and made it into a long weekend.  On Thursday the family friends and I drove out to Schloss Nordkirchen which is a castle not far from Munster. It's called the Westfälischen Versailles, the Versailles (that big pretty castle outside of Paris) of Westfalen. It was finished in 1734 and built for the Fürstbischof Friedrich Christian von Plettenberg-Lenhausen.  In the 1950s, the land bought it and now its the Fachhochschule fur Finanzen Nordrheinwestfahlen, the finance school of this bundesland.  People go to school and live in the castle.  How cool is that?!

 

And a massive garden. I can just picture the students having classy parties with parasols out there.

On the way back we stopped at Burg Vischerring.  We were trying to think of the English translation for burg but couldn't think of the right word.  It's somewhat of a small castle but used as protection.  Similar to a military fort? Either way, it's cute and has a little moat and a bakery where I bought rosinenstuten, my 3rd favorite bread, after broetchen and baguette.

Friday morning my cousin and I headed towards Amsterdam with a stop in Arnheim for some shopping.  Lunch was Dutch frites and fricadel and a stroopwafel for dessert. Frites are thicker fries with a variety of sauces but I prefer just mayo.  A fricadel is something to a bratwurst or sausage. and stroopwafelen are a delicious waffle with caramel.  I could live off them.

Yummmmmmm

The grocery store had these convenient little scanner things- you scan your items as you go along and pay at the end.

We headed towards Amsterdam for the evening and met up with my friends Lea and Michelle for dinner at an ethopian restaurant.  Lea is a friend from high school studying in Groningen, a city in northern Holland while Michelle is another high school friend that I've known since 6th grade.  It's crazy how we all happened to be in the same city at the same time.  At this restaurant you order a few different things and it comes on a big pancake like thing on a platter with different sauces.  We had chicken, fish, beef, and a vegetarian one.  There was another pancake like thing that you used to pick up the food and eat. So yes we ate with our hands.  It was very different and also very delicious.

Saturday morning my cousin and I visited the Anne Frank Museum. We had to wait quite a while because many people had the same idea but the museum itself was nice.  It is an exhibition through the house where Anne Frank and her family were hiding during the Holocaust. I'd say it's worth a visit but only if you get there first thing in the morning so you don't have to wait that long.  Unfortunately I couldn't take any pictures inside but here are some other pictures of Amsterdam.

This is the room we stayed in....yes 10 people total. It was pretty quite though...until they started packing up at 7 the next morning.

Hey look I'm in a picture

The rest of the afternoon was spent walking around the city.  We had planned on taking a walking tour but that fell through so we made up our own.  The houses along the canals are adorable and I definitely plan on taking a canal tour when/if I visit the city again.

The locks on bridges trend has made its way here too

And I think that's enough for now. Thanks for reading! And as always, let me know if you have any questions about what I'm doing, or Germany, or anything.