Johannisfest

As some of you may know, Friday was my birthday and my lab group was really great in that they gave me presents (chocolate, school gear, card), cake (they left it in the PhD student's desk and forgot about it until dinner though, so we're going to have dry cake on Monday :P with lots of tea and coffee. lol.), dinner, and hung out with me at Johannisfest.

Johannisfest is a 4-day long festival that begins on Friday and ends on Monday with fireworks and it is to celebrate John the Baptist's birthday. It's great that it coincides with my birthday :) So my lab basically took me out to dinner first at this church-now-restaurant and then we met up with another RISE participant's PhD student and herself (they were friends with Sven/Florian). Afterwards, we just walked around the festival and drank some wine/shots along the way. It's really great awesome when you can drink on the streets, if only they had this in America. I have to mention that when you purchase a drink at the festival, they charge you for the cup/glass your drink came in. So you can take your drink with you as you wander around the festival and just return the glass to a beer stand and get your money back. Great system :) So yea, we just hung around and drank beer :P

I also attended a lecture with Florian on Friday just to see how a lecture (hall) was like. The lecture talked about protein degradation (via ubiquination?), citric acid cycle, other cycles, DNA replication, and DNA repair. So I guess the class would cover both biochemistry and molecular biology. The professor seemed very nice and enthusiastic but he seemed to go through the slides quite fast. A lot of material was covered and I don't know if I could have understood everything if I had not taken the classes on these topics already. Based on my one lecture sample, it feels like lectures in Germany are pretty similar to those in the USA.

So yea, for the rest of my weekend, I just lounged around outside where the festival was located and listened to tons of live music. I tried more weinschorle (half white wine half sparkling water), lots of erdbeerbowle (strawberries in red or white wine), and a sangria :)

I think I also got slightly more tan today since I laid around in direct sunlight. There's a tan-line right on my chest now. *sigh* I wish I didn't tan that easily.