Life with Cara

One more week in Bochum! It's starting to seem more like home here, and I can do pretty much all of the "regular life" stuff with minimal problems. It seems dumb, but grocery shopping, going to the city, and even buying lunch can be way harder when you don't speak the same language as everyone else! The Language I'm still working on learning German (obviously), but I feel like I've gotten a lot better over the past week. Today I had a small moment of panic when I tried to pay for my lunch and my card didn't have any money. Apparently the cashier was asking if I was going to pay with cash or a card, but it took a few other people translating for me to actually understand.... Oops. I asked my boss a question in German the other day, and for transactions at ALDI and the drugstore I usually don't have to resort to English. Progress! The Lab This week, we helped a master's student named Christian on Tuesday and Wednesday. One of the PhD stude...

One of the people we work with in the lab told Megan and I that we could take the train to a few cities in the Netherlands for free, so we planned a trip to Venlo last weekend! Venlo is right across the German border, and it was only a 1.5 hour train ride to get there. Here are some of the pictures I took and things we saw! This cute little water feature is also a drain for the street! Those clever Dutch people... Everyone was sitting outside and enjoying their Sunday morning when we arrived, and the town looked so peaceful that we were worried it wouldn't be any fun! A bit later in the day though, the city center was bustling. I thought this was a church, but it might be the town hall! Everywhere we looked, there were Pride flags, and one of the streets even had the crosswalk painted to look like a rainbow :) Narrow streets with tall houses <3 Inside the cafe where we had breakfast! I definitely was not cool enough to be eating there... It was very hipst...

Megan lived in Münster for three summers, and she has a friend who lives there and studied with her in California! Her friend Jan made us brunch at his apartment and gave us a bike tour of the city, which was so amazing. Here are some of the pictures I took, with tidbits from Megan and Jan about the history of the city. Münster is the bike capital of Germany! We saw so many people out for a weekend ride, and Jan told us that there are 3 bikes for every person in the city. Outside Jan's apartment there is a restaurant that uses scooters for deliveries! I thought the little cooler on the back was absolutely ingenious. Our lovely German brunch spread. I especially loved the bread with cheese spread, which we topped with tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and cucumbers. I thought his kitchen was so cute and compact, and the washing machine even fit in there too! They also had a dishwasher built into the cabinets, which is pretty rare for a college flat. German waffle...

My first week in Bochum was a success! I've had a lot of trouble getting WiFi in my apartment, so I apologize for the lack of posts since I've arrived. Here's an update! The  Language Not knowing German has made life harder than I thought! Luckily Megan is pretty much fluent, so she helped me at the bank, the student administration building, the grocery store, the restaurant... Basically everywhere I've been so far :) Currently I Can:  Understand the subject of the conversation ~50% of the time Know what people are saying ~5% of the time Go to the grocery store by myself (probably because it's mostly visual) Read some of the advertisements on the train I'm still trying to learn, and I think I'm making progress! Duolingo is somewhat helpful, and my German for Dummies book comes in handy too. Hopefully I can keep learning lots of words and maybe someday order for myself at the bar! The Lab This week, we helped an undergraduate student named Da...

The view from the cafeteria roof is so beautiful! Living in Germany has been really fun so far, but the you can definitely tell that the culture here is very different from the United States. For one, my supervisor always makes fun of Americans for saying that everything is 'so cool' and 'awesome'. There are also lots of small, everyday things that are just a little bit different from how we do things in the US. For example... On German keyboards, the position of the Z and the Y keys are switched! The only German words that contain a Y are words borrowed from foreign languages, so the Z is used way more often. I've accidentally typed 'verz' and 'especiallz' too many times to count! The handicap signs here are facing the other way! Maybe it's just because we've had to reproduce the ADA symbol so many times in my civil engineering classes at Mines, but it's very noticeable for me and it just looks so wrong! The escalators in German...

Megan and I went to the lake after work on Wednesday! To get there, we had to walk through the Botanic Gardens at the University, which was really amazing. It took us 45 minutes to get there, and we were able to buy a beer beforehand and drink them on the way. There's no open container law in Germany, and enjoying a beer in the sun was a great way to end the day. You can also recycle bottles here for cash back, so a lot of homeless people or students needing extra money will go around and collect your empties. You can leave the bottles next to any garbage can and be confident that they will be recycled soon, which is really cool. It means that the streets and public areas are always very clean, and it's another way for people to make a couple euros. Another really cool part of the lake was the man-made beach! Germans love the beach but it's pretty far away, so they bring in truckloads of sand and make a mini beachfront next to the lake. you can play volleyball, drin...

My one day in Minnesota was awesome! I got to have breakfast with the fam, and they even took me to the Pancake House so I could have the buckwheat pancakes, sausage links, and 49ers that I had been craving for so long in Colorado. I also had coffee with one of my high school teachers, and it was super cool to hear about the Science Bowl team's national win, her thoughts on being a woman in STEM, and so much more! My mom and I visited our friends' new farm, watched the dogs run around, and I spent some time with my brothers. For a trip that was less than 24 hours, we really fit a lot in :) Objectively, the best breakfast order ever After all that, the 8 hour flight to Paris was really not as bad as I expected! I had made grand plans and researched how to survive long flights for weeks, but in reality I listened to music, napped, and looked out the window, and before I knew it we were touching down at Charles de Gaulle.  The French countryside is so pretty The a...

Traveling often involves long days, cramped seats, jet lag, and frustrations all around. But I think traveling can also offer small moments of unexpected joy, if we only stop to look for a second. In the spirit of stopping to smell the roses, here’s a list of the tiny, awesome things I encountered on my journey from Colorado to Minnesota.  The family in front of me at security was on their first day of summer vacation, and the kids were so thrilled when they found out they could keep their shoes on that they twirled in circles.  A boy with special needs in DIA thought the light rail to go between terminals was THE COOLEST THING ever and made sure everyone around him knew how excited he was.  The dense clouds over Nebraska made the shadow of the plane stand out in stark relief for part of the flight, which I’ve never seen before.  Another plane flew past us and it was going so much faster that we seemed to stand still in comparison! (I think the other plan...