Weekend in the rain: Part I

On Friday night, my friend Martin, another physical chemistry graduate student from my institute, invited me to a music festival in Wiesbaden.  Wiesbaden is about 30 minutes by bus, North of the Rhine (Mainz is on the South side) in the neighboring state called Hessen (Mainz is in Rheinland-Pfalz) and is somewhat of a sister city to Mainz.  The Rhine separates the two states in this region.  There is some rivalry; recently surveys gave Mainz the popular vote for better place to live, but some think the opposite side of the Rhine from Mainz is more beautiful.

Martin warned me of the impending thunder storm and I made a point to pick up my rain coat and umbrella before heading out.  We arrived at Weisbaden's Hauptbahnhof (main station for buses and trains) next to the Kulturpark and inserted ourselves into the really long queue of people mostly younger than us toward the entrance.  Most of the length of this line consisted of people emptying their BYO bottles.  We had none and skipped immediately to the most congested area near the gates as more umbrellas began to open to guide the falling rain onto shorter people and eventually gave our tickets (10 Euro per day for this festival, or 20 Euro for Fri, Sat, and Sun).  Marteria, had already begun playing.  Martin had introduced him to me earlier that day via youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv2QuxukIfM&feature=related

The rain intensified as we passed through the gates.  Dozens of youths already looking soaking gathered under awnings and tents of various food trucks and drink stands.  We made our way over to the stage where a few hundred people resolved early, that all attendees eventually did, to be soaking wet and dancing.  The rainfall ebbed and flow through Marteria and Grossstadtgeflüster ('the secret of the city').  The lead singer of Grossstadtgeflüster seems to hold disdain toward Marteria, calling him overdressed and underflipped.

We took a break from standing in the rain for some apple wine/beer, which was more like a bitter and sour beer.  We should have tasted the small portion before ordering a large glass for each of us.  By now, the temperature had dropped from close to 30 (Celsius) in the sunny afternoon down to ~12 C.  At the stage I could keep blood in my feet with the kind of dance where you bounce your knees slightly, as my feet became further suctioned into the mud.  In the this tent though, our feet became ice blocks, and we headed to the exit as the band DONOTS closed their set.

We passed a club on the site, decided to 'have a look', then danced for more than an hour until we realized we missed the last train and had better catch the bus while we still had those options.  My shoes took three days to dry.

RAIN!!

A cool blue tunnel under the main road from the bus stop to the  Kulturpark

Yuriy's last weekend started on Tuesday

Yuriy is the Ukranian graduate student who could graduate any day now if he didn't have to return to Ukraine for a semester to fulfill his teaching obligations at a university there.  Ya, he's already hired.  The misses will be happy too.

Yuriy and I stayed late 'fixing' an SEM (scanning electron microscope) on Tuesday.  Thirsty and hungry after triumphing over the machine that had perplexed him all afternoon (read with tone of irony), we strolled over to Baron (Bar On), the campus pub nearest our building for a beer (Augustiner Pilsner) and flammkuchen.  Flammkuchen ('flame kitchen') is a flat bread, pretty much a good pizza crust, spread with a thin layer of creamy cheese, onions, and bacon, fired in a brick oven.  My previous experiences with German pizza remind me of Elio's frozen pizza that you'd serve with American beer from a macro-brewery and on occasion the pot coffee reminds me of the cheap stuff brewed served in our petrol stations.  Flammkuchen, however, is balanced with a lightly crispy crust and slightly chewy and delicious thin strips of onions and bacon.

Doesn't Yuriy look scholarly?

How 'bout now?

I agree

A rain storm started and ended between the time we ordered our stuff and it arrived.  We had expertedly chosen a table under a big umbrella.  

Flammkuchen!

Mmmm... flammkuchen after the rain

Wednesday was Ukrainian independence day.  Thursday was Yuriy's brain's independence day from his body.

Wednesday was also bar night in Wallstrasse.  Amaretto mixed with apple juice became appealing when it was on special for 1.5 Euro.  Disclaimer: fruit juices are pretty good here and taste more like fruit than most of our big brands.  Tasty, but zu viel zucker, my brain was also slightly independent on Thursday.

We received encouragement from our advisor to attend the ACS Webinar by Paul Weiss broadcast on Thursday, and I encouraged it because Ich bin ein großer Paul Weiss fan.  2pm Eastern Time in USA means 8pm MST (Mainz Standard Time).  With Sebastian's laptop feeding into the beamer (projector) on the table and a screen on an easel, Yuriy, Sebastian, Janak, and I gathered in their office for the show.  This group can make me laugh until my belly hurts.  The webinar was intended for a general audience and consisted of about 15-20 minutes of Paul presenting and half an hour of questions.  It attracted a wide variety of viewers who asked a lot of thoughtful questions thinking they were sparking debates, but most of us in nanoscience have been in and out of all of these concerns and arguments repeatedly.  Thus, most of our time was spent reading questions from the audience, as the wise moderator picked and chose a handful of questions out of the hundred that came in.  Good thing we had refreshments.

Paul Weiss, you have our undivided attention

Every Friday, a subset of the group goes to Baron, for a drink or three.  This week, the contingent was Yuriy, Irene, Chrissi, and I.  I am effectively Irene's (pronounced ihr-RAY-neh) protege, my project branches from her thesis work, and I help keep her microscope and white light laser properly exercised as she writes her thesis.

  

We know something....

She really knows something

Yuriy agrees

 Irene recently gave me a compliment: I don't speak German with an American accent; my accent is Chinese.
I knew that side of me would manifest itself some day.

On the home stretch of my Saturday roaming in town (see upcoming posting), I walked into a bakery, heard my name, and there was Yuriy, finishing lunch with a friend.  Bon voyage Yuriy, good luck waking up at 5am on Sunday!

My tiny kitchen: episode 2 (mini)

This episode features food I consume more than step-by-step features of food I make.  You will probably learn very little about Germany.

The grocery stores have vending machines for bread, kinda.  You don't put money in it, you pay for it later at the register.  Nonetheless, there's different buttons for rolls, whole grain rolls, a whole grain loaf, a rustic loaf.  I pressed the button and out dropped a 750g loaf of whole grain bread.  That's 1.65 pounds of bread people!  Slightly warm to the touch, crusty, less than 2 Euro, and it has lasted me a week.

Here are some purchases, some of which I've modified, and some of the offspring from their combinations:

750g of bread, notice the scale bar

Banana juice, yes, you can juice a banana....

To make olive oil better, peel and squish some garlic cloves and shove them into the bottle.  Also sprinkle it some Italian seasonings, especially if it includes basil and paper flakes.  Garlic aroma upon opening the bottle will be noticeable after a few days.  Everything you put it on will taste really really good.

The more active the caterpillar, the fresher the lettuce

22 Aug. - As long as it's 'triple washed', it makes a very tasty salad, especially if you add  'Pikante' bratwurst and mirabellas, tiny little yellow plums.  

16 Aug. - Schupfnudlen!  With tomatoes and mushrooms with olive oil and Italian seasoning

19 Aug. - Toasting bread without a toaster in the pan, drizzled with garlic infused olive oil

21 Aug. -  .... or directly on the burner...it was better from the pan.

19 Aug. - Finishing up the merguez (lamb sausage), this time with mirabellas, tiny little yellow plums

19 Aug. - This cheese supposedly has jalapenos in it

24 Aug. - Mushroom ravioli with tomatoes, onions, garlic, and  sliced bratwurst sauteed together in garlic infused olive oil.

25 Aug. - Finally....................

Now I can eat!!

Hiking the old city

From the high points in Mainz, you can see Frankfurt.  It's about 40 km away.

The metric system hasn't been a problem for me.  1) I'm a chemist, liters are our friends.  2) I'm a runner, the good races are measured in km. 3) I convert to Celsius every time I leave the US...I think it's because the rest of the world is metric...because multiples of 10 make more sense than multiples of 12 or 32...

Saturday was a fine evening of walking through the city with my next door neighbor, Matthias.  Turns out I added many extra paces on my personal excursion to Zitadel the week before.  This week's outing was more of a guided meander through the old city.

Taking this picture was a touristy thing to do...

Built in 1450, renovated in 1708, 1890, 1976

Multiple bachelor parties approached us.  In each case, the all members of the entourage wore matching customized T-shirts with a photo featuring the groom-to-be's finest moments, while the groom-to-be was dressed in some pastel effeminate t-shirt tucked into tight shorts, one with a pink body puff as a tail, adorned by other head gear, carrying a box of miscellaneous junk for sale to humoring members out on the town.  I had to sneak a picture, it would have been expensive otherwise.

The groom is in pink, notice the tail

A cool fountain on some corner.  The bird spits water periodically, not continuously

Another old place

 Also turns out I passed the best brewery in town, Eisgrub, on my previous meandering.  Since I'm saving on gasoline, filling up on beer is no problem.  At Eisgrub, you can fill up a 1L bottle of beer for 5.5 Euro, that includes a 2.5 Euro deposit for the bottle, which you don't have to get back if you don't want to.  You can bring it back time after time and they'll fill it up for 3 Euro.

One Hell one Dunkel please

Ivy grows all over a stone wall near Eisgrub

You can drink drinks on the go if you want.  We enjoyed Eisgrub's incredibly fresh tasting brews on some steps by the Rhine.  A paved walking and biking trail follows this segment of the river, some restaurants and bars reside behind the popular sitting area we inhabited.  Just a hundred meters to my right, was a bridge leading to a biergarten and bathroom house.

Barge on the Rhine near sunset

Finally, a beer as dark as my intentions mwah ha ha

This is a lively and bustling place for a locals and nonlocals filling up on the weekend, and running a bathroom is a lucrative business.  Each visit will cost you 50 cents.  Evening fell, the moon rose, and so did most night owls, aerial and terrestrial.

Lights of the passing barge, photo courtesy of Matthias

We played roobio on the walk home to stay warm and scare other towns people

My tiny kitchen: episode 1

I woke up to landscaping at 7:30 this morning and thought 'Where am I?  Houston?'  Fortunately I crashed early last night from back-to-back nights of not enough sleep.  Moving along...

I dropped my yogurt when trying to key into my apartment building last night...that's twice now that I've exploded dairy products onto pavement.   

The total floor space in my kitchen is probably about one square meter, same with the counter space.  Seeing how I have supplies for only a few months, cabinet space is relatively luxurious.  If you ever visited me at my 'Shady Oaks' apartment on W. Main St, you'll know that I got good practice there when it comes to producing something within a small space.  The difference here is that my refrigerator is the size of most of y'all's dishwashers, if you're fortunate enough to have one, and therefore fits nicely into the kitchen unit. 

Kitchens are units here.  If you purchase a house or a flat, it doesn't necessarily come with a kitchen.  Kitchens are modules that are bought and sold like couches, desks, chairs, etc.  You can even buy and sell half a kitchen, although you better take a close look at which half you are getting.  I haven't had this headache, but the Australian postdoc in my lab has: he's been fixing up a new apartment night and day for the arrival of his wife and baby this weekend.  

The hot plates in my kitchen are very powerful.  I can bring a pot of water to boil, turn off the burner, empty the pot, rinse it with cold water, put it back on the plate with a cup of cool water in it, and it will boil within minutes without me turning the hot plate back on.  Here's an intro from 9 Aug, with one of my first products:

The following day, I used the same merguez and some plums that were on their way out and made a delicious lamb and plum...stew, soup, whatever.  Here we go:

Garlic, plums, merguez (Lamb sausage)

Hard candies, because I didn't have any sugar.  I used these 4 pieces.

Slice the plums, remove their pits, slice up the sausage, peel the garlic and smash it a little bit with the knife.  Put a small amount of water in the pot and let the candies melt.  When they stick to the pan, try scraping them off.  In the meantime, fry together the lamb sausage and garlic.  There's enough fat in the sausage, no need to add oil, especially if the pan is nonstick.

Remove the lamb and garlic from the pan.  Slightly salt and pepper the plums, inners down onto the hot pan.  Again, no need to add oil.  Flip them over in a little bit to see if they're slightly brown.

Make sure the sugar water is even now.  Once the plums are slightly brown, combine everything into the pot/sauce pan.  Add a splash of red wine and balsamic vinegar.  Season additionally as you like.  Lower the temperature and simmer.  If it's simmering too vigorously, take if off the burner.  Everything is safely cooked, this step just lets all the flavors mingle together, so you can simmer only a few minutes or a bit longer if you like.  

Serve with a piece of really good bread.  This one has zwiebeln, onion, baked into it.

Hope that was fun and tasty, stay tuned for more!