Update from Tubingen

Life in Germany is good - I go to work, make dinner, knit, read, catch up on email...

I only have an hour of daylight after work, so I have been trying to explore a new part of the city every night before going back to my room to make dinner and do more work.

Yesterday I went to try to find an old tower that I had seen from a distance over the weekend, only to find it was a rather boring feature of some sort of public utility. When you have this much history in your architecture, some of it has to get used for pure function I guess.

I did stumble across another large park near the university. All of the green space is surrounded by several walking paths and bike paths. If I can find someone to rent me a bike I hope to get to explore where some of those paths lead.

A few recent highlights:

• Someone at work buys everyone a fresh German pretzel every day from a local bakery. Yum.
• I have seen at least 10 different children riding unicycles in my neighborhood since I've been here. Is this a new trend?
• Another tenant in my building puts their pet guinea pigs in a pen outside during the day when they're home. There's a local cat that spends its entire day within an inch of that pen, watching the guinea pigs, in case somehow the pen will miraculously disappear.
• I of course hear a lot of German around me all day every day, and often prepare short sentences to say in case someone should approach me for directions or to say hello, though I try to avoid engaging. I get really excited when I go through a checkout line at the store with Hallo and Danke only - they don't even know I can't speak German!

It's only Day 3 of the project, but I feel like it's nearly over! I have only about one day per week in the office for the rest of my project (not including the 10+ travel days at the end) - the rest is traveling for meetings, which will make time go very quickly. There will be much to tell as I travel to a new German city nearly every day, starting next Tuesday.

Bis spater!