The very, very month of.....August?

Here I sit six inches away from a cliff that plunges

down over a thousand feet. The picture taker kept saying

just a little further back....a little more.....

I dont know what happened to August. I think I put it in one of my many wallets that I have lost over the last decades, never to see again.

Sorry for the lack of posts. I have to make and give many a seminar every week this last month and that always take a lot of time for me. I think my average for seminars is one hour of preparation per slide. When you have twenty slides to give (which in truth isnt even that long) it takes all the brain power I have for a couple of days. But on to the fun stuff.

So a couple of weeks ago I went to Hirschegg, Austria. Depending on how you get there, it is a full day trip. Me and some of the chinese graduates students went down there by the cheapest method possible. Only taking the Regional train. What would be a 5 hr car ride was 10 hrs by Regional train. With the intercity trains it would be only 6 hours, but this costs 70 euros vs 7 euros Regional.

But the trip was actually quite fun. The graduate students brought so much food along with them that the train ride was a constant picnic of peaches, apples, canned meat, and strange chinese food concoctions--like sweetened dehydrated orange peel. Not so delicious to me, especially as it looks more like grey mold, but the chinese girls really liked it.

We arrived in Hirchegg, Austria sometime in the evening and we had a beautiful Mountain Sunset. Hirshegg is a very popular ski resort in the Winter and a hiking Mecca in the summer. They are the greenest mountains I have ever seen. The fellow chemistry students and I went up the mountain for seven hours, and then took the gondola down. That was only 20 minutes and a much better idea.

I just came back from three days in Munich where I was shown some proper methods and techniques on how to work with siRNA and cell culture. My experiments have been failing in this area so I went for more professional help. Unfortunetely when I showed up, my expert was gravely ill and couldnt come to lab. That wasnt a problem though--it just gave me more free time to hit the city center in Munich.

I went to a famous brewery in Munich called the Hofbrauhaus. It has been operating for some 400 years and originally made all the beer for the aristocracy. Do you know what this brewery has learned in 400 years of beer drinking? Large pipes in the bathrooms. They have a special sink that flushes in the bathrooms there for all the men that puke in there. The pipes are the size of a soccer ball to make sure everything neatly drains. It reminds me of the vomitoriums that were once in Rome. Eating one meal just wasnt enough--just like drinking 2 liters of beer isnt enough--one needs to make room for more.