Last time I went to Paris (with Ashlee and Lauren), we were way too poor to even contemplate biting into ‘les macarons’…. …this time, I endeavoured to make up for that lack. I’m a little bit embarrassed to admit where my first french macaron came from: Andy had been prattling on for months about how he intended to eat Mc-arons and Mc-Donalds in France, and to tell you the truth we all thought he was talking bull. But lo! The mc-mass-produced mc-macaron: And to be honest, they’re not too bad. Better than 80% of the stuff you could find in Perth a year ago when everyone thought they should try getting on this new trend and charging 3 bucks for stale/overbaked/flavourless biscuity things. Quite mild on the flavour with the pistachio, and perhaps not so melt-in-the-mouth as possible. But they have a range of the basics- chocolate, choc/orange, strawberry, pistachio, and they only cost 90c a pop. Andy claims that they were his favourite out of all the ones we tried. But this is a …

Last night there was a ton of wind, and when we stepped out this morning most of the golden leaves around our Potsdam haunt had taken their final Fall. Losing autumn comes with a sense of dread, correlated with and caused by ‘winteriscoming-itis’, has only been accentuated by the loss of our daylight saving hour. Now, when you look outside and the sun is setting, it really is only 4:30. So let’s have have some photos from the blur of snaps I’ve taken in the last 10 days or so…as a loving tribute to Autumn. In Memory: Last weekend we headed to the big city to catch up with friends and climb some rocks. Andy decided to practice the climbing before we got the Klettern world: He’s such a filthy communist. These look a little bit Aussie to me…. How great are those colours?! There is something so cool about a day when you actually get a (fairly) blue sky, and you have golden light matching and bouncing off golden leaves. I’m sad to say that the …

I only took a couple of photos on our final day in Budapest.. partially because it was really only a half day, and partially because the weather finally gave in to Autumn and everything looked a bit like this: In order to escape the misty drizzle that had descended, we headed to the Great Market Hall.The building I quite lovely, with a slight air of ‘old British station’ to it, and the ground floor is filled with fruits and vegetables, cheeses and meats and all manner of lovely and unpronounceable (in Hungarian) things. Ellen and I were in search of some Langos, which I had not managed to try yet during our stay, so we headed upstairs. Which to be perfectly honest, I would not recommend. While the ground floor has a fairly open feel, upstairs is full of narrow, corridors, with too many stalls, too many people and not enough space. While they do have the lovely needlework, the area seemed to mainly be dominated by tourist tack. We did find some Langos though… …

On our third evening in Budapest, after doing our traditional walking tour and then wandering around in the dark, we headed to Szechenyi Baths (as recommended by the lovely Szilvia). The Baths look something like this: With the large bath in front being set at a delicious, E. coli incubating, 37 degrees. Inside the buildings out-of-frame to the right, are a whole range of baths of different temperatures, as well as a group of Saunas. Personally, I have yet to see the peer-reviewed science that tells me that jumping from 18 degrees to 40 and then back to 22 only to then spend 5 minutes in an 80 degree sauna is in any way beneficial to my health. It certainly isn’t enjoyable. After kind of adapting to 37 degree- kind of because it felt too warm when I was actually in it-everything else felt amazingly icy, and after a couple of half-hearted attempts I just refused to go in anything that wasn’t plus-or-minus two degrees from 37. Ell and Andy were a bit more adventurous, and not …

The IMPRS retreat was two days of scientific lectures and discussion. Plus evenings for partying the the third day for froicking in the an autumn awesomeland (like winterwonderand?). So if you don’t like pretty pictures like this: (who am I kidding, this is the nicest one) Or posey pictures like this: You should just move along now. We went to Mirow, which is a tiny town somewhere nearly directly north-but-just-a-little-bit-west or Berlin, and nearly-directly-east-but-just-a-little-bit-south of Hamburg. As mentioned, there was Science, but the only photo I have to track its passing is this one of the lovey Max. For those of you who are completely unfamiliar with what I do, he’s made a very accurate picture of a plant cell. The big blob is a vacuole (for storage of stuff), and the smaller ones are presumably chloroplasts (for making sugars from the sun and carbon dioxide) and mitochondria (for making energy from the sugars). We also have mitochondria, and small, unawe-inspiring vacuoles, but because we are not awesome and are too lazy to evolve to …

Do you know what these are called? I’m choosing to believe they’re super traditional Hungarian food- because they were in all the bakeries in many different incarnations- but frankly they were tasty enough for me not to care too much about authenticity. One of the best things about being in an international institute is that it’s fairly likely that someone has either come from or recently been to the city you want to visit. We hit the jackpot in Copenhagen- Joram had just frolicked in the city, and being the perfect Hipster, knew all the (soon-to-be) cool places to visit. This time we had it one better- and actual Hungarian- Szilvia, who spent her uni studies in Budapest. Szilvia spent time telling us which wines to drink, which of the baths to go to (more on that later), and which places were not worth our time. But her take home message was that Budapest (especially the inner rings of the Pest side) are really nice to just walk around. Which coincided neatly with our traditional …

Winter is Coming and the world is racing through autumn, so I’m assuming that you’re senescing for some pictures of Andy and I frolicking, interspersed with pictures of autumnal leaves (see what I did there- plant humour!)…     

Do you know what Kurbis is in English? Maybe I should give you some guesses… (photo from Pau). Last weekend we headed to Klaistow for the pumpkin fest- which rather oddly runs for several weeks (is it just me who thinks that one weekend full of pumpkin is enough for a year). Pau, Andy and I, and Aga and Alicja hopped on the bus and took the 1 hour + ride to the south west with high hopes for pumpkin frivolities. Apparently, you can also ride from Potsdam. If you take two houseguests who aren’t really regular riders, and get a little lost on the way and accidentally ride 35 instead of 20 km, it only takes about 3.5 hours. So I hear. I’m going to be honest- I was a bit disappointed by the number of foodstuffs with pumpkin. We all ordered pumpkin soup for lunch- except for Pau, who got some sort of fried pumpkin fritter- but it was generally watery and poorly flavoured. They had a few biscuits with pumpkin, and some …

One of the best things about living away from home is having friends from home come for a visit! El had a conference in England, and was lovely enough to stop by on her way back home… although in this case she got lost a little to the east of Berlin, so Andy and I had to make the trip out to Budapest to help her find her way back.   Another great thing about having friends visit is using it as an excuse to get out of Deutschland!   Elle and I had never been to anything describable as ‘Eastern Europe’- so we made Andy- who had visited Budapest back in 2009- the official hotel-scout-and-general-tour-guide/directions-man of the group. We ended up staying in something called ‘Design appartments’ fairly close to all the interesting stuff going down in on the Pest side of the city (I didn’t realize until 1 month ago that ‘Budapest comes from two parts of the city- Buda and (unsurprisingly) Pest, sitting across the Danube from each other). The place was …

I’ve been dying again, so y’all have to forgive me for not blogging much recently (incidentally, halfway up some mountain in Freiburg, Andy managed to convince me that we’re now going to use ‘y’all’ for the plural of ‘you group of people’ in English, if only because it’s slightly classier than ‘yooouuussee’) Anyway, back to Freiburg, which is very lovely, but also rather small. So on the third day we decided to escape to the countryside. We were headed to Titisee, but on the train overheard a fairly loud American woman telling her friends about some style of county fair near Baerental. We sneakily followed them off the train, onto another bus, and down the road: We peered at all the wares- skins and furs and honey and liquors and smoked pieces of animal, and I took up with the most amazingly invigorating (SOUR!!) plum juice that has ever passed my lips. Because the fair itself was quite small, we also roamed a bit on the moors.. It was quaint- the sort of thing you’d expect to see …