Joe and I recently celebrated our birthdays and interbirthday, since our birthdays are just two days apart. It's been too busy with language classes to celebrate formally, but we managed to visit the Tübingen chocolate festival on Joe's birthday, where we saw... a lot of chocolate, some of it as art. We celebrated by meeting our new American friends for drinks, and I did manage to get Joe the one thing he wanted: an advent calendar. Advent calendars are more of a secular tradition here, just a fun way to involve chocolate in the count-down to Christmas.
We took off on a Friday and headed to the Allgäu region of Germany, to celebrate with a long weekend in the Bavarian Alps. The University that I work for owns a cabin in the ski town of Oberjoch, near the Austrian border. We spent two quiet days hiking and got to experience the first snowfall of the season. We made it up to the top of Mount Iseler via the old smuggler's route ("Schmugglersteig"), but got turned back by snow and ice that prevented us from walking the narrow ridge that turns into the Austrian border. We headed down into town and celebrated my birthday with hot chocolate and cake.
We went to the cabin in Oberjoch partly because my research group was heading there for a retreat on Sunday. So I sent Joe back on the bus and train to Tübingen while my colleagues turned up in Oberjoch for the retreat. We spent the next two days discussing some science, and having some fun presentations. I made a "USA Jeopardy" powerpoint presentation to introduce my colleagues to some of the subtleties of American culture. We also played a rousing round of trivia, which I am happy to say my team won. We celebrated by drinking a round of schnapps from the winner's cups we were presented. I think the highlight for my advisor was the much-anticipated and compulsory snow hike and snowball fight, although he appears to have torn the meniscus in his knee in the ensuing scuffle. Fortunately, it snowed about a foot for the annual snow hike and snowball fight, and kept snowing until we left the next day.
This weekend we head to Frankfurt. We'll be sure to post an update about our next adventures.
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