Concert and Karneval der Kulturen

So Friday was like any other day in the lab. It involved a lot of titrating samples. I am definitely feeling research is not something I want to be doing post-undergrad. It seems like all Steffen does is that he has one big problem - reducing CO2 in the waste stream - and he has to vary 10 million parameters one by one to see what the optimal combination of parameters is. That is definitely something I don't think I'd enjoy doing. So maybe that lawyer thing isn't so far-fetched. Definitely need to get in at Merck for a day when I get home and also talk with some lawyer types. I met some more people in the lab though...Julian (Julio? can't remember for sure) is from Columbia, and he has been working here for like 2 years with another guy on some project with working on seperation of oil layers. Turns out he lives in the same building I do which was cool to know. I at least did the smart thing and brought something with me to read while I was sitting at the computer, so I read a Men's Health cover to cover. Oh, actually, come to think of it I did get one piece of good news on Friday...Monday is a holiday in Germany, so I was going to get a 3 day weekend my first weekend here.

Christoph really wanted to go to a "The New Pornographers" concert on Friday night. To all relatives out there...no worries, they're just an indie rock band from Canada. They had a song in Rock Band, that game all your grandchildren/nieces/nephews place with the fake instruments :). I have only heard one song from them (the aforementioned Rock Band song) but I figured, "Why Not?" So he led me a ways to the club, where all we had to pay for this show was 6 Euros...not bad. The opening band ... well they just plain sucked. Really no two ways about it. But, being we were in a club and not in a traditional, "stadium-like" rock show, I was about 2 or 3 rows from the stage, which was very cool. Christoph met up with some of his friends that he's met, and one happened to be a guy named Andrew, a rising junior at Duke studying electrical and computer engineering. So that was a nice little (comforting) surprise.

After the show ended the Europeans kept dancing, and Andrew and I were like ... we can't do this, we reached our end hours ago. So we headed out, and went our seperate ways to get home. Unfortunately, by the time I got back and got to bed it was like 4 am, and with the exhaustion of the week, some possible lingering affects of jet leg, and the lack of a true alarm clock, I slept till 3 pm, and boy was I pissed off. There were two guitar shops I wanted to go to that were both only open to 4 pm, and I couldn't get to either. In Germany nothing is really open on Sunday and I assume they'll be closed Monday for the holiday, so Tuesday perhaps if I get off work early enough. Or I might just walk over to the one during my lunch hour since it's close to the university. Needless to say Saturday quickly turned in to a wash and it was all my fault.

Sunday was a little better. A bunch of us from the lab - Steffen, Andreas, Martin, Jasmin, Övgü, and myself, and then Övgu's boyfriend, Steffen's girlfriend, and some guy from Greece whose name I forget - went to the annual Karneval der Kulturen - Carnival of the Cultures. It was a huge street festival and parade spanning pretty much the entire city district of Kreuz. It was huge. I got lots of pictures and ate some good food, as we walked around, listened to music, and did some light shopping...well the girls mostly.

Hopefully tomorrow I will be able to get out a little more and sightsee, since I messed Saturday up. And as for pictures, Facebook won't let me upload pictures for some reason, so I can't post a public link to the albums yet...I have over 200 pictures so far. If Facebook is still being stupid (come to think of it it's probably this ridiculously slow and terrible internet) I might try something like a PhotoBucket.