Heidelberg Day 6 and 7

Our final days in Germany were good ones. Chris had colloquium on Monday in addition to Saturday, but it was the first time that there had been no activities planned for the spouses, so I was able to just sleep in, get our stuff together to leave the next day, organize our pictures a little and do some shopping.

The next morning we headed out for a leisurely breakfast of coffee and pastries, and ended up going back for seconds on both things! We were just enjoying finally having some time to debrief from the whole event, get our thoughts together and get mentally prepared to head to Edinburgh that afternoon.

We didn't leave for the airport until after lunchtime, so we wandered around the city a bit more and got a few last pictures while the sun was shining. The weather ended up a lot better than it had started, and we had a warm and sunny day to end our stay and get some pictures by the river.

We enjoyed our last German meal in a little outdoor plaza, schnitzel, sausages, and apple strudel.

Also, more of our Germany pictures are now on Flickr, so click here if interested.

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Heidelberg Day 5

On our 5th day in Heidelberg, we went to a castle in a nearby town for lunch and a tour of the gardens.  Both were incredible, the cold and rainy weather finally broke so we were able to enjoy most of the tour in the sunshine, which made for a much more enjoyable experience.

It was the season for white asparagus while we were in Germany, which apparently only lasts for 6 weeks of the year, and this is a huge source of excitement for the Germans.  It's not a delicacy, but has that sort of connotation-something that isn't available that often, is a bit expensive, and a huge treat when it is served, so we had this with a few meals.  One such meal was lunchtime on this day when it was our main, and we were encouraged to go for the 1 lb. serving of white asparagus for our lunch.  This photo is of my serving, which was only 1/2 lb.  Chris did receive the full 1 lb. serving, which was 9 stalks, each the size of a large carrot!  They didn't taste bad, but it was such a monstrous amount.  I don't think that I could eat 1 lb. of anything in one sitting, let alone this asparagus!

After our tour of the gardens, we headed back to Heidelberg for one of our best meals, which was served in the Heidelberg castle.  We all took a tram sort of thing up to the castle, where they had a champagne reception on the terrace before dinner, (I know!) complete with that same professional photographer snapping pictures while we all chatted.

We then headed into the castle for a delicious meal with an incredible view from our table.

 

 

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Heidelberg Day 4

Our 4th Day in Heidelberg was the first colloquium, which meant that the winners and evaluators were busy from 9-6 doing presentations. This part of the trip was closed to spouses and guests, (thankfully!) so they organized a day trip for us to the nearby town of Spryerer.

It was a beautiful little German town, known for having one of the largest cathedrals in all of Europe.

We had a tour of the city and the cathedral, and started and finished our trip in perfect German fashion, with a trip to the cafe with the best coffee and cakes in town, which I somehow neglected to get a picture of. We did feel bad for the men who were all busy being academic while we wandered around chatting, but not too bad.

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Day 3: Awarded

On Friday morning, we took a little tour of the city.  We didn't make it incredibly far because it was pretty cold and rainy, and it was really difficult to stay focused on the history of something when I was trying to make sure that my toes didn't fall asleep.  I was so bummed, because we have plenty of clothes that are well suited for walking around in weather like this, but when we had packed to leave on Sunday, the weather was still supposed to be warmish and sunny.  Oh well, it was still beautiful through the fog.

The castle looked particularly beautiful surrounded by a foggy cloud of rain.

We went to a delicious lunch and then got showered and ready for the award ceremony that evening.  The center had gone all out, as we saw throughout the rest of the trip, to make the whole experience a beautiful and memorable one.  There was a baroque group that played music during the event, and it was all incredible.  The inside of the hall where the ceremony was held was absolutely beautiful.

The research center had hired a professional photographer to take photos for the evening, and we discovered afterwards that we would each be receiving a disk of the photos from the evening.  Unfortunately I didn't know this at the time, and was a bit irritated that I didn't get a great picture of Chris receiving his award, because the photographer had jumped in front of me.  (But I'm sure that his picture is excellent, so you'll just have to wait for that.) I did however, make Chris pose for me in the room, because it was too incredible to not take advantage of.

Here is a photo of all of the winners.

I've decided that I'm going to upload our photos from the event onto a Flickr site, as to not bombard the blog with the hundreds of photos that I have already taken, but if anyone is curious then they can take a look.  I will link to the Flickr site on my next post, when it's all ready and available, but need to get ready for dinner at the moment, so it will have to wait for now.  More soon!

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Day 2: Arrived and Admission of Defeat

Okay, so if you have checked this blog at all in the past 5 days, you have already seen what I am about to tell you, that I failed at that whole "post something every day" thing. Now before I start into a dizzying list of excuses with words like jet lag, packed schedule, so exhausted, etc. I will give you the biggest reason for my absence in 3 little words: inaccessible wireless internet. Ugh. As in, they have it, they told us how to get it, but it's not working. Really, is there anything more annoying than something that is just out of your reach? But now it works and here I am.

Day 2: Arrived

We got in Wednesday morning around 7 am local time. The plane ride here was bad, but I won't go into that until I have actually talked to my mother about it. (Everything is fine and everyone is fine, but still, some things need to be discussed privately before publicly. I've really gotten you curious now, huh?) Anyway, we arrived in beautiful Heidelberg, and despite Chris' good intentions about not sleeping much, we succumbed to my excellent intentions about sleeping for several hours. After we emerged from our slumber, we ventured out on the streets and discovered a beautiful view of the Heidelberg Castle.

The city is beautiful and charming, even in the rain. It has the longest pedestrian stretch in all of Europe running right down the middle, and by that I mean an adorable cobblestone street of shopping, dining, hotels and banks, with beautiful statues, squares and churches sprinkled throughout, and our hotel was on that stretch. Within 10 minutes of walking, we had quickly filled all of the needs of that trip: a bank, an Apple store (what luck!) to get an adapter, a little grocery store, cheap umbrellas, and a Starbucks that we smiled fondly at and promised to return later.

A bit later, we went to a dinner that was being held for anyone who had already arrived in town. We had no idea what was in store for us, neither the length to which we were going to be wined and dined, nor the actual length of the evening. We went into the restaurant and began to meet everyone, and started off with champagne and introductions. Next we were seated at a long table full of candles and glasses where we moved on to white wine and bread, followed by salmon something (sorry, I know no German and haven't known what I've been eating all week), then soup, then red wine and fowl, then creme brulee, and then cappuccinos. It was so nice to meet everyone and they were all incredibly friendly, but we were so exhausted from the jet lag already, the wine was making us even more sleepy, and it's kind of difficult to keep carrying on extended conversations with people that you've just met under those circumstances. Additionally, many of the people that we were meeting had rather thick accents and the room was so loud that it took extra concentration to carry on conversations with them, and concentration wasn't coming to us very easily.

When we eventually left for our hotel, we discovered that we had been at dinner for a staggering 4+ hours!!! It was delicious, but exhausting! I wish I had pictures of the evening, but it was a bit too formal and I wasn't quite ready to reveal myself as one of those crazy camera ladies just yet.

More soon.

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Day 1: Germany Bound

It is my intention to post 1 picture per day on the blog of what we're up to. With the time change putting us at 7 hours ahead of the time at home, I'm hoping that I have the opportunity to do this since the "end" of our day will still be normal daytime hours at home. This is also one way that I might be able to keep people up to what we are doing, and force me to share a little bit of the trip at a time, instead of arriving home with thousands of pictures, and not the time or desire to sort back through them all and detail what we were up to. I recognize that giving myself a daily assignment such as this is a fairly lofty goal given our relatively full itinerary, and also contingent upon us quickly locating a power cord adapter for the laptop. However, I think I am up the the challenge.

We had a few near-shaky starts to our trip Wednesday morning. The first was Tuesday night. When we went to visit the Morrison's, we took a diaper bag, a toy bag, a makeup bag, a clothes bag, and a camera bag. Guess which bag did not make it home with us? That's right, the only bag of which the contents couldn't have been easily replaced at Walgreens, the camera bag! Complete with new lens and backup battery specially purchased for this trip! Excellent. Luckily for us, Andy and Patsy insisted on making the 4 hour round trip drive to retrieve our camera, and got to have a few well-earned snuggles with their new grand baby as well.

Wednesday morning, about 20 minutes before we left for the airport, we discovered that that darn Icelandic volcano was erupting yet again! Luckily for us, it didn't affect our trip that morning, but it has planted some anxiety in the back of my mind over what it may mean for our flight to Edinburgh in a week. Hopefully the air will be clear enough that there are no major interruptions and smooth flights all around.

Furthermore, we had a sad time leaving our little buddy on Wednesday. We left him at the house with his grandma, no use dragging out the goodbyes on the drive to the airport, and I made it all the way into the airport doors before I started sobbing. Luckily Chris took care of me, led me to the bathroom to get myself cleaned up, and then over the course of the day got me coffee, crumb cake, a margarita (it was Cinco De Mayo after all), a few books for the flight, and even let me pick what we watched on the flight. He's good to me like that.

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