The End of Geneva and the Start of Munich!

Here we go! It's been awhile, and there is much to tell. There a few pictures on here, but check out http://picasaweb.google.com/willieblackmon for many many more pictures and videos.

First though. Contact info for those interested.

Address:
Helena Mayer Ring 7  A1123
80809 Munich
Germany

Phone:
+49-151-553-76-456

Since my last missive, I spent a week with my...lets just keep it simple and say...second cousins... Mark, Anne, Andrew and Eleanor Fitzpatrick in Geneva, Switzerland. On March 8th I took a train to Munich, and started school on the 15th.

Lets start with Geneva. It was great to see the Fitzpatrick family, some of whom I'd met a long time ago, and others I believe I'd never met. Mark and Anne both speak French fairly well (or so they say, they could be fluent for all I can tell) and the kids are fluent, having grown up speaking it at school. Anne was my personal tour guide for the week, taking me to CERN, a castle, and many other places around the city. Mark took Andrew, Eleanor and I to the Geneva car show, and later skiing in France!

CERN is a European organization for particle physics. It mostly carries out experiments in a giant, 27km long tunnel constructed 100m below Munich and into France. I took a tour, but won't pretend I really understand what's going on. Basically though, they use magnets to accelerate and guide tiny pieces of matter - protons, atoms, or other stuff - around this giant underground tunnel. They accelerate matter in two different directions around the circle until BANG, they hit each other, both going nearly the speed of light. And apparently, within that BANG we can find stuff not seen since a fraction of a second after the original big BANG. It was pretty cool. This is me with a section of an old part of that tunnel. You can see the crazy amounts of wiring needed to set up the guiding magnets.

So Blogger formatting sucks. This looks perfect in the editor, but previewing it looks terrible. So sorry about any ugly formatting.



It was Mark's birthday while I was here, so I got to join in on the cake eating festivities. We also went on a fondue dinner boat ride on Lake Leman, which borders Geneva. Pretty awesome.

I'm not sure if everyone knows, but we are gangsters.

The Geneva car show is apparently the biggest in Europe. Its pretty crazy huge. Its probably the most people I've ever seen in one "room." Its actually a series of giant warehouse rooms filled with the newest car models and (more interesting in my opinion) concept cars. Also thousands of people taking probably millions of pictures.

Teaching Eleanor and Andrew how to drive a stick. I think they are ready for the road!

About 45 minutes out of Geneva, on the edge of Lake Leman, is the Chillon Castle. Its pretty amazing. I had fun running around trying to find every room, and get to the top of everything. Good times. Also amazing views of the water and mountains from a freakin castle window. Sweet. I definitely have castle fever, and will hopefully being checking out many more in Germany.

More castle.

These are the royal toilets. Its amazing, the castle was designed with these 50 foot drops into the lake for you know what. I'm very impressed.

One of many great views from the castle.

On the fondue boat for Mark's birthday! Ahh even writing this is making me hungry.

Awwwww

People played giant games of chess at one of the parks. Very cool.

Skiing in France is quite the experience. It took us awhile to actually get on some slopes - the place we were intending to go turned out to be closed due to winds. Starting off was a big weird; it was reallllly cold and the snow seemed really...slick. It was funny. But after a few runs I got the hang of it and the rest of the day was awesome. I had fun learning how to ski in powder, or "off pist" as apparently the French call it.

Fantastic views.

On the final run, Mark and I split up and I ended up going down this amazing run, completely by myself. I mean I didn't see anyone the whole time. Which turned out to be a bad thing, because they shut down the lifts, and I was headed down the wrong side of the mountain, where you can't actually ski to the very bottom. So this picture is of me once I finally made it back to Mark, after a very long walk through the snow. 

And now, Munich! It was about a 7 hour train ride, with interesting scenery. Not bad. Crossing from Switzerland to Germany included two undercover cops (or something) interrogating an old woman sitting across from me but not saying anything to me. Weird. My "buddy" from the university met me at the train station and showed me to my dorm room. Honestly, its a pretty nasty room, but its in the same building as a lot of other international students, and is close to school, which is nice. I'm on the 11th floor of a 16 floor building. This is my room. I also have my own (tiny) bathroom. We went to Ikea a couple days after I arrived to spruce up the rooms. Notice the plant and rug. Classy.

Its crazy how many people you meet doing the exchange thing. This is a group of Americans and Brazilians at (the very German) Pizza Hut. Come on, it was all you can eat, who can say no to that? Anyway, from left to right is Frederico, Raphael, ohhh no I forgot, (All Brazilians), Spencer (Cal Poly), me, Vanessa (Wisconsin), Tim (Cal Poly), and Marcello (Brazil). 

Its finally getting decently warm, but for the first few days, it was pretty cold. Maybe 15 F was the coldest it got. This is a fountain at Marienplatz, a main square in Munich. FROZEN.

We went up in a big tower. I took a picture.

Not really sure why I am including this picture. Me and Lindsey from Canada.

Starkbier (dark beer) fest. Random German guy named Nicoli on the left, Jarad from Cal Poly on the right. What a crazy, fun atmosphere.

A cool sunset from the balcony of my room.

What else has happened in Munich? So so much. When we arrived, nobody had much in the way of bedding, cooking stuff, etc etc so we went to Ikea, which is always awesome. We had a few days of school orientation, which was quite helpful. There was quite a bit of bureaucracy to get through, to get registered with the school, and the city, and the athletic places, and get a student transportation pass, get a bank account, set up deposits for rent, tranfer money, and the list goes on. I'm getting closer to done, but still have lots to do. 

Getting used to living in Germany, and in a big city, has been interesting. I've got the public transportation down pretty well, and its generally easy to use. Almost all transportation stops from 1:30AM to 4:30AM which makes for interesting nights if you miss the last train. Other strange things in Germany include strange business hours. Many things - like the city hall - are open only from 7am until noon. Grocery stores all close by 8pm. There's no drinking fountains, and water is really expensive in restaurants. Its crazy stuff. I've gotten good at remembering to bring a water bottle anywhere I go. Cool things: escalators the go either direction, depending on which way you are going, bike lights powered by your wheel turning,  

Classes: Many classes don't start until next week, but as of now I think I'm taking Ergonomics, Finite Element Method, Physics of Logic, Human Machine Communication, and a German class. Should be good! I think I have Thursday and Friday off, which will be nice for trips. Tomorrow I'm leaving for a 1 night trip to Salzburg, Austria, and next weekend we'll hopefully go to Prague. 

Today I went ice skating, good times. Yesterday a group of Americans played soccer with an Indian and two Iraqis we met at a park. It was a little awkward when we said we were Americans, but its pretty cool we could just...play soccer!

Two days ago was Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. It was quite an experience to see the furnaces and walk into the room labeled "Showers" but was actually a gas chamber. The gas chamber was never used at Dachau, but was similar to others used at other concentration camps. It was amazing to see...how well thought out and designed this mass killing devise was. A strange combination of insanity and total logic. Pictures of that next round.

Although I've been mostly speaking English, I have met quite a few Germans, as well as lots of French, Spanish, Finish, Australian, and Brazilian folks, to name a few. 

Alright we are off to Augustina, a restaurant and brewery for dinner, so that's all for this time. I'll add captions to the pictures on picasa soon, so maybe wait a day or two to check those out.

bye now

Geneva, St. Gallen, and back to Geneva

Alrighty, lets do this thing. So there aren't pictures here. Sorry, its sort of a lot of work to get them on here nicely, so I'm just gonna say, at least for this one, just go to picasaweb.google.com/WillieBlackmon to see pictures. Go! Now!

I left Seatac around 6:30PM last Tuesday and headed to London. I had the fastest night of my life. Actually it was pretty funny, they served dinner, then like 5 hours later, served breakfast. I flew British Airways, and they served tea, which I added milk to, and felt very British. I also had an interesting epiphany: British accents make all women more attractive and all men resemble Michael Caine. Its amazing.

Yep, spent 45 minutes in Heathrow Airport, then off to Geneva, Switzerland. After I landed, I headed through customs (He literally said nothing to me, no questions at all.) and to the place I was supposed to meet Bert, a friend my aunt knew long ago. He wasn't there, and I went through about 5 minutes of rising panic before he got there, and all was well. Bert and girlfriend Claudia are 50-somethings living in an apartment on the edge of town. He works for a human rights organization and she works for the UN. He speaks two languages fluently, and she three. They both are required to for their jobs. And that seems like a somewhat typical setup in Geneva. It's an international city where 40% of the population are foreign born. They don't have kids, which seems common. Often, apparently, women have careers, or have kids, not both. Childcare isn't easy to find, and kids get two hours off of school for lunch, plus no school Wednesdays. Sounds pretty awesome to me, but it does present issues for two income families. Anyway, Bert and Claudia were great about letting me into their home, feeding me good food and trusting a complete stranger with a key to their apartment.

Jet lag gave me an awesome few days of easily getting up at 7 or 7:30AM. It was amazing. On my first full day in Geneva, I ventured into the city to explore. I came prepared with a little background of German (very, very little) but was fully unprepared for the French speaking Geneva. I practiced saying "bon-zchour," "mer-see," and "par-lay voo onglay" a few times and went for it. Geneva has a fantabulous public transportation system. I paid 7 Franks, about $7 for a day pass (cheap considering everything, cost of living and wages, are much higher than in the U.S.) which gave me access to intense double accordion buses, trams, trains, and even boats.

I checked out the UN in Geneva. Although most politically important UN stuff happens in New York, most of the "behind the scenes" organizational stuff happens in Geneva. The tour was alright, nothing amazing. I mostly just walked around, learned how to use the public transit and took pictures of cool looking things. Because I didn't see the key to the apartment Bert left me, I had to stay out until 7PM when he would return, which meant I had quite a long day walking around, and ended up just taking random buses out into the countryside and back to stay warm, which was actually interesting.

Next day headed out to a city near St. Gallen, which is 5ish hours by train. The Swiss, as well as the Germans apparently, are amazing with their train schedules. I arrived on time to within 1-2 minutes of when I was supposed to, on a 5 hour trip. Its really quite impressive. Julian, a friend I met while he was studying abroad in Vancouver BC, met me and took me to his house where I stayed for two nights. I met his family, who all speak at least some English. Again, they were amazingly nice about setting up a nice place for me to stay, making food, and buying way too much for me. We went skiing in some local mountains the next day. The weather started off perfect, and it was some beautiful scenery. In the U.S. in by no means a great skier, but I'm probably a little better than average. In Switzerland, I am terrible. Little kids whizzed by me. But whatever, it was awesome. As part of a traditional Swiss festival, bands of dressed up, drunken Swiss played songs at the base of the slopes. Everyone sang and danced to the music, and nearby, people in in ski-wear sunbathed on pool-chairs sitting in the snow. Switzerland is a crazy place. That night we went to a bar with Julian and his girlfriend. A bunch of his friends ended up showing up as well. I was in high demand, either because I am really awesome and charismatic, or because people wanted to practice their English. Probably the former. One guy had a strange German-Australian accent (after spending a year in Australia) and possibly knew more about American pop culture than me.

After a few hours of sleep, I got up and headed back to Geneva to meet second cousins?...some sort of relatives...Mark, Anne, Andrew, and Eleanor.

More on that later. I'm tired and apparently going to a castle tomorrow, so must sleep.

For pictures, check out the picasa website. http://picasaweb.google.com/WillieBlackmon

tschüs! (bye!...German)