Life with Cara

My mom and her friend Trish came to visit me in Germany! They spent one day here and I showed them the lab, my apartment, and the most delicious street food :) After that, we were off to Prague! It was so much fun, and I'm so happy they were able to come visit. An unforgettable adventure! A selfie by Charles bridge :) Prague has canals too! We took a walking tour and our guide explained that the little troll guy on this water wheel is actually a water sprite... I thought they were supposed to be cute! Even though John Lennon had never been to Prague, the Czech people were very fascinated with him and young people used to come to this wall to play his music and soak up the hippie spirit. The graffiti on John Lennon wall used to be more thematic, but now is mostly made by tourists and has no overall message.  We saw the changing of the guard at the castle... And sampled some Czech beer after the tour! These "chimney breads" are billed as a tradi...

The first weekend of July was our program conference in Heidelberg! Everyone who is in Germany for this scholarship program met up in the south for two days of lectures and sightseeing. We learned about other scholarships for continuing your studies in Germany, and some students also gave presentations on what they'd been working on in their internship so far. We left at 3am on July 5th, so we spent the night of the Fourth of July lighting sparklers and hanging out at a music festival in Bochum! After that though, we just waited in McDonald's until our bus arrived... Look how cute the streets are! This is so cool! Maybe I can convince my professor to take us to Germany instead of LA to see the tunneling construction sites next time :) Heidelberg's history was so fun to learn about, and every building we came across was more beautiful than the last. I'm not totally sure what this one is though...  This Protestant church in Heidelberg was way pretti...

After we ran our 10k, Megan and I hadn't had enough of athletic competitions for the weekend and one of our friends invited us to the German National Championships of bouldering! It was at a gym that we had climbed at before, but it looked totally different for the competition. There were people packed in as tightly as possible, and the routes were totally crazy. It was also like a thousand degrees and other people's sweat was dripping on me, but I digress... I was really surprised by how young all the competitors were! The oldest one was probably 23 or 24, and most of them were between 16 and 18. Each person was so strong and technically proficient though, and it was amazing to see them all solve the problems in their own style. You could definitely tell that some of them preferred powerful, risky moves, while other relied more on balance and technique to get them through. So cool! We're planning to go back to the gym tomorrow, and hopefully the routes will stil...

When I arrived in Bochum, I saw tons of posters for something called the Bochum Urban Trail, which is a 10k race that was held yesterday! I convinced Megan to do it with me, and we've been training for pretty much all of June. I have to say, it exceeded my expectations! We took most of our photos before getting all sweaty :) I knew that it was an urban race, but I wasn't prepared to actually run through the buildings! We saw so many cool places, like the Planetarium, the Ruhr Congress, an art museum, a petting zoo, and a bunch of local companies. We also got to run backstage through the Starlight Express, which is a roller skating show that's super popular here. It's sort of like Disney on Ice, except with roller skates and a different play to go along with it. We ran through a church! This photo is so blurry because I was still running 😂 There was also live music in a lot of the buildings, and some people even paused their run to start a dance party! ...

I went to Berlin last weekend! I spent three days there and had a great time sightseeing and just walking around the city :) I wasn't really prepared for how sad all the historic museums were, but I still saw lots of cool things and took some pretty pictures. Sightseeing The Brandenburg Gate! There was a demonstration by the metal workers union going on the last day I was there, and all the fences and tents are set up here in preparation. The Reichstag is the meeting place of the German parliament. It was burned down in 1933, and wasn't rebuilt until after the reunification of Germany in 1990. This is a conference center that I accidentally walked through :) I thought the roof design was so interesting! The East Side Gallery This is a section of the Berlin Wall that was left standing and now houses powerful graffiti and other art by artists from around the world. These are some of my favorite ones that I saw. Gorbechov kissing JFK - by far ...