Hamburg, and other random adventures in Braunschweig

I went to Hamburg yesterday as part of the excursion segment of my orientation. It was a nice city downtown, but overall it was just way too industrial for my tastes. As something for all the engineering kids we took a river boat tour of the shipping district, which I must say turned out to be almost as boring as the steel manufacturing tour I had to put up with in Salzgitter. The only thing I can say I got out of it was that I can now claim I've been boating on the Elbe. One interesting thing I did notice, however, is that the bookstores there carry textbooks. Not only do they carry textbooks, but they are relatively cheap and come in both German and English. The biology section was incredible. It certainly put Border's and our crappy little bookstore at URI to shame. The GSL section was even better. If we had more than a day there I would have cleaned out the lexicon section and maybe grabbed a textbook or two just for reference.

I also had an interesting experience on the trams today. While I was on my way back to the Weststadt, an Arab-looking fellow asked me if I was an American. Every American abroad knows that the Arab-looking types really are not our friends so I thought to myself, "Oh shit." It turned out the guy was just an Italian who wanted to know the date of Thanksgiving this year. His justification for the completely random question was that he had a friend in the USA who was getting married two days before and wanted to send him a card. Go figure. When I asked him how he knew I was an American, thinking maybe the clothing or my still somewhat plus-sized frame gave it away, he said he'd heard my accent. Damn.

Time is running out for me in the biology sphere. My core electives are pretty much completed, and now I must decide on a concentration. The problem with this is that all of biology interests me, but I would prefer to do something that would give me lab work AND pay me reasonably well. As of right now I am leaning in the direction of pursuing Microbiology. It still remains to be seen as to whether or not I'll get approval to take micro courses here at the TU-BS, and I have devised a new plan to compensate for this. While here I will finish my German major, and I can think of no better way to finish a German major than to actually finish it in Germany. This will leave me with the last two years at URI to work on the biology. There is also the issue of French. It's the third language I've studied, and perhaps I would like to pursue it to bring my skills up to snuff. Dr. Nuebold, my advisor here an der TU-BS, has put together a special program for the Rhode Island students. Instead of taking mostly course intensive work in our fields he has arranged research projects for us. I would love to do this, especially since I have no work yet to put on a resume. It would also give me time to take the course work that suits me. So far for the winter semester I have signed up for Advanced Technical German, a German history class, and an advanced grammar class. I would like to supplement that with a ground course of micro and perhaps that French course I've had my on for the last week. More on this to follow.

There is also good news on the search to find clean living. Not only are there great apartments in the city, but it turns out my Chiense friends (or fiends, for my fellow McCarthyites) are only here for one more semester. Until that time I continue to cohabitate with them and their lack of hygiene.

There isn't much else going on here right now. Tomorrow I have another excursion to Wolfenbuettel.