My trip to Europe - Day 4

Day 4 - Riding the Rails

On Day, Laritza and I headed over to the Hauptbahnhof fairly early to catch a 7:50 train to Fussen, so as to see the famed Neuschwanstein castle, the castle Walt Disney patterned Sleeping Beauty's castle after, and then subsequently the Sleeping Beauty castle at Disneyland. Our train ride included one transfer that was supposed to be, and turned out to be, quite simple. Just get out of the train with a bunch of other tourists and walk across the platform to the other train.

Upon arriving in Fussen around 10 am, we realized that the castles (there's Neuschwanstein and another called Hohenschwangau) were not in Fussen, but located at some distance from where the train had deposited us. A hotel clerk directed us to the Tourist Information building, and a girl there explained to us that it would take between 45 minutes and an hour to walk to Schwangau, the town closest to the castles where tickets are sold for tours. Or, if we preferred, there was a bus that traveled the approximately 5 km, but the next one wasn't leaving for another hour or so. Given that we didn't really feel like just sitting there for an hour, we opted to walk the 5 km over to the castles. And it really was 5 km, and of course it was quite warm.


A river we crossed on our way to Schwangau


Our first glimpse of Neuscwhanstein. You may need to look closely, but its there in the distance.

We arrived at Schwangau about 45 minutes later and bought tickets for the English-speaking tour of Neuschwanstein, which would be starting in a couple hours.


Hohenschwangau castle watches over the town of Schwangau

Then we took a shuttle bus up to a drop-off point a little ways above the castle, near Marienbrucke which is a bridge over a deep gorge that gives a spectacular view of the castle. After taking our fill of spectacular shots, we started off down the road to the castle.


From Marienbrucke


More from Marienbrucke

About halfway through the 15 minute walk, we stopped on a bench and ate the lunch we'd bought the day before at the grocery store.


Looking down at Schwangau and Hohenschwangau

We killed the rest of the time milling around a touristy shop and just taking pictures of the outside of the castle.


Looking down at the countryside


Front view of Neuschwanstein


Looking back at Marienbrucke from Neuschwanstein

Inside the castle, picture taking is not allowed, except for pictures taken looking out of the castle are the surrounding countryside. A few people on our tour were taking pictures of everything and only once did I see someone actually tell them not to. The castle is decorated with lots of art work based on the operas of Richard Wagner who was good friends with King Ludwig II who commissioned the castle (and several others in Germany). I thought the most impressive part was the throne room, which sadly never got a throne. The King only lived in this castle for about 17 days before he was declared insane by the government and found dead a few days later, under suspicious circumstances.


Another look down at Schwangau and Hohenschwangau Castle

After completing our tour, we didn't have tons of time remaining to catch our train back to Munich, so we returned to the shuttle drop-off point, rode back down to Schwangau and happened to arrive just as a bus back to Fussen was arriving. Looking at the bus schedule there, I can't actually imagine that we'd have had to wait an hour in the morning. Maybe the tourist information center had faulty bus tables or maybe the girl helping just misread them.


Looking back on the walk back to the shuttle


One last look up from Schwangau

After another sticky two-hour train ride back to Munich, we met up with Guilherme at the hotel and went out for dinner at (yet) another beer garden, this time one near a botanical garden, not far from the Hauptbahnhof. I was savvy enough at this point to actually order a steak with french fries, and managed to not eat sausage and sauerkraut for a 3 consecutive night.


This is the kind of scenery we enjoyed during our train ride.


More German countryside.

After dinner, we walked over to the Marienplatz to look for some gelato and from there we headed back to the hotel and got ready to head out to the airport the next morning where we'd meet up with one of our department faculty, Jon Hurdle, to drive down to Austria.


Guilherme and Laritza


Night time by the Fountain

More pictures from Day 4.

Coming tomorrow: Day 5 - Cruising on the autobahn

So far:
Days 1 & 2 - Exploring Munich
Day 3 - Mass Transit Extravaganza

My trip to Europe - Day 3

Day 3 - Outskirts of Munich

Having gotten a decent night's sleep, we got up in the morning ready to go see some of the further out parts of Munich. Lartiza had arranged to do some yarn shopping with someone she knew from Knitters without Borders, so Guilherme and I were on our own.

We headed to the Hauptbahnhof and figured out which tram we'd need to take to get to Nymphenburg, a palace on the outskirts of Munich. We boarded and were soon joined by a large number of school children who appeared to also be on their way to see the place.

When we got there, the building itself was under renovation, but we were still able to go inside and see some fancy rooms. But the real attraction there were the grounds. The gardens behind the palace are quite extensive and include a kilometer long canal surrounded by woods that surround other minor palaces and lakes. There were lots of trails through the woods and a good number of locals were taking advantage of them for jogging and walking. We also saw more school kids running around and jotting down information on various attractions. Must have been some kind of worksheet they had to fill out.


Front of Nymphenburg


Some swams in a pond in front of Nymphenburg


Nymphenburg Grand Hall


Nyphenburg Gallery of Beauties


Looking out at the gardens


Another swan


This photo of the pool at the end of the canal is one of my favorites. It also makes a nice desktop background, in my opinion.


Some kind of memorial rotunda in the woods

After spending a few hours at Nymphenburg, and walking nearly 5 kilometers in the gardens, Guilherme and I caught a bus over to the Olympic park, home of the 1972 Olympics that were held in Munich. You might remember a film by the name Munich that came out a few years ago, which had reference to the fact that Israeli athletes were taken hostage and killed by terrorists during the Munich games. We didn't have any kind of tour guide to explain the significance of anything to us, so we just kind of wandered through the Olympic park and paid a couple Euros to enter the stadium and walk around the concourse.


The distinctive architecture of the park ensure that it certainly wouldn't be mistaken for something else.


The spaceneedle-esque tower


A look at the main stadium.


After finishing there, we took the subway back to downtown, ate lunch at a turkish kebap restaurant, where we ended up with kebap platters rather than the kebap sandwiches we were trying to get, and then made it back to the hotel where we took a nap and did a few other things before collecting Laritza and heading to a supermarket to buy a few things. We had to get to the supermarket early as all markets in Germany and Austria close at 6 pm. Laritza and I bought some food to make lunch on the road trip we had planned for the next day.

After dropping our groceries off at the hotel, we headed out to dinner at the Augustiner beer garden, which felt much less touristy than the Hofbrauhaus. Under duress in the food line, I ended up buying more hotdogs and sauerkraut and being as I didn't see any non-beer beverages there, I made do with my trusty liter-sized bottle of water. One nice thing in both Germany and Austria is the presence of numerous fountains designed for filling water bottles as you travel around.


This truck drives around picking up used beer glasses from stations located throughout the garden.


Just to give a hint at the amount of people frequenting these places.

When Guilherme and Laritza started on their 3rd beers, I left them and headed back to the hotel stopping at the Hauptbahnhof along the way to buy a Fanta and some chocolate.


On the walk home


In the Hauptbahnhof

More pictures of Day 3.

Coming tomorrow: Riding the rails to Fussen.

My trip to Europe - Days 1 & 2

Okay, I've had enough time to settle back in to being home and working on my research project and have uploaded all the pictures I plan to for the time being to Flickr. So I finally feel ready to give a brief travelogue of what all I did on my trip.

Day 1 - Travel

The first day, I got up around 5:30 and my mom was kind enough to pick me up and take me to the airport. My passport still is valid, even if the photo is nearly 10 years old now.

The trip was pretty uneventful. Layover in Atlanta and then an all-nighter from Atlanta to Munich. I switched to an exit row seat for the overseas flight for the extra legroom and was happy that I did, although it turned out the flight was less than full and I probably could have stretched out just as easily in the back of the plane. I slept a bit, not sure how much and the next morning we were in Munich.

Day 2 - Munich

We had no trouble getting from the airport to downtown Munich via the S-train. Our hotel was just a couple blocks from the Hauptbahnhof (main train station) and upon arriving there around 9 or so, they even had one of our two rooms ready for us, so we stashed our luggage there and headed out to see the town. I guess I should mention at this point there were three of us: myself, Guilherme, and Laritza. A pretty diverse crowd, each of us claiming different home countries and languages, and ranging in age from 28 to 47 or so.

Anyway, Guilherme had been to Munich before and steered in the direction of the Marienplatz, a several block area of shops and sites in old town Munich.


Entrance to Marienplatz


Towers of the main cathedral that we went up in later.

We stopped into one of the cathedrals there and mostly just wandered around for a couple hours. We ate lunch there. I bought a pretty safe looking baguette sandwich and bought a liter bottle of water that came in handy throughout the rest of our stay in Munich. After lunch, we went back to the hotel, got Laritza checked into her room and settled in a bit. I napped for an hour or so and Guilherme talked to his wife and daughter in Brazil using Skype.

After recharging our batteries a bit, we took some pointers from the Fodors guide I'd brought and headed out on the town again. We walked through some kind of botanical garden and then went to the main cathedral where we marveled at the scale of the thing and then paid a couple Euros to climb a spiral staircase up to an elevator in one of the towers to get a nice view of the city.


View from the Cathedral Tower

After that, we headed out in search of the Englischer gardens, which are Munich's version of Central Park. We walked through there a bit, saw a bunch of people cooling off in the river, and then decided to head to the Haufbrauhaus, Munich's most famous beer garden, for dinner.

Raging Waters - Munich. Actually its just the river in the Englischer gardens.


Statue of Maximillian we came across in our travels


Hofbrauhaus - note the 1 liter mugs that about half of the beers come in.

I ordered a bratwurst that came with some mashed potatoes and sauerkraut for dinner, and was one of the few people only drinking lemonade.

After dinner we headed back to the hotel for a good night's sleep.

More photos from Day 2.

Coming tomorrow: Day 3 - Mass Transit Extravaganza

Up and At Them!

Well, I'm kind of back on Utah time, I guess, although I did wake up around 5 this morning. I'll probably be tired tonight, but hopefully by tomorrow things will start to be feeling normal again.

Looking around my apartment last night I had to wonder what would happen to some people if they had to live on their own. When I got home there was no toilet paper in either of the bathrooms that I share with my 3 non-master-bedroom roommates, so I was glad to have kept an emergency stash last time I bought some. Additionally when I woke up this morning I realized that I was cold. Not just cool, but really cold. I went down to check the thermostat and found that it was set to well below 70 degrees. I'm all for keeping the house cool, but I'm hoping the thermostat wasn't set that low the whole time I was gone.

Anyway, I'm in the process of uploading pictures to Flickr (click here to keep an eye on what I've put up so far) and will hopefully be giving you a rundown of the trip a couple days at a time, once I take care of a few other pressing matters (laundry, figuring out how much money I spent in dollars, etc.).

Back from Europe, Stay Tuned for Details

I got back from Europe this evening and I'm working hard at staying awake a bit longer so that I can get back to being on Utah time a bit quicker. This means that save for 2 30-minute naps that I took today, I've been up for the past 23 and a half hours. I've never really been up this long consecutively, and especially considering that the sun's been up the entire time and is just now going down.

I'll definitely be putting up a lot of pictures on Flickr, and I hope to give a fairly extensive description of my activities, especially given that I also need to write up my experience for the organization website anyway.

The EMF

You know how some girls have a guy friend who is always around, and clearly the guy is in love with her, but she either doesn't realize (how could she not?) or pretends to not realize because she either a) doesn't want to deal with the situation, or b) doesn't want to lose his friendship. I always think those guys must have no self-esteem. Usually they've either tried to date the girl and gotten shot down or haven't tried assuming they'd be shot down, and in the aftermath, are hanging on to the "lets just be friends" olive branch like a drowning man hanging on to a floating piece of debris. I like to think of this guy as the Ever-present Male Friend or EMF.

I'm never quite sure how girls fall for this tactic. Here's the truth: guys don't want to be friends with girls they are attracted to. They want to date them. If you break up with a guy and he says he still wants to be friends or he agrees to still be friends, its because he hopes that there's still a chance he can make it from "just friends" back to "more than friends". Its not because he just enjoys your company and accepts the fact that you aren't interested. And now that they are "just friends" they'll jump at any chance to spend time with their "BFF". In fact they are pretty much inseparable. Girls love someone who will listen to them and can also give a man's perspective on things.

Seriously, though, don't you have to kind of pity those guys? Its just not an easy situation to be in. Its much less of an ego-swallowing ordeal to just walk away from the situation than to just be friends. Maybe, given sufficient time, a guy can get past the feelings he had for her and move on, but its not happening overnight, and even then he's not going to want to be her best friend. And until he's been able to move on, the last thing he wants is to hear her talk about guys that she's interested in or watch other guys try to make a move on her. I think this is part of what leads to the everpresent-ness of this guy. He wants to do all he can to keep her from dating other guys or for other guys to become better friends with her than he is, even though its pretty much inevitable. I always think these guys have pretty much given up on dating, and the best thing that could possibly happen for them is for her to get married. Hopefully, marriage is a sufficiently clear signal that she's not changing her mind.

On occasion, the rare fellow does manage to get back into her good graces (see the Persistence Theory), although sometimes its more because he's been so effective at scaring off other potential suitors. And honestly, its a bit of a turn-off when a girl who has some hanger-on guy always calling her up to do stuff and always there with her at everything, even though they are "just friends".

Strangely I kind of found myself in this same kind of situation in the last year or so. There was a girl that I was into, and went on a few dates and then her interest started to wane and then finally she told me that maybe it was best if we didn't date any more. "Out of fairness to [me]" of course. But could we please still be friends. Because she really thinks I'm cool and that she has a lot of fun with me.

Now in case you've already forgotten, "guys don't want to be friends with girls they are attracted to." Anyway, in the aftermath of my own "lets just be friends" moment, I've really struggled with whether its worth hanging on and being "that guy" that I've pitied in so many other instances. I mean I really do enjoy spending time with this girl, and of course I think she's attractive. But I can't feel right pretending that I only want to be friends, and my ego doesn't really want me to be that kind of guy either.

I, mean, I do still call her and email her and on occasion have a longer chat with her, and part of me still holds out hope that someday she might change her mind. But I also hope I'm not being the EMF. I hope I've been pretty clear about what my feelings are, and I would never tell her that I'm fine to "just be friends" with her, and in the meantime I've been doing my best to meet other girls and date in the hopes of finding someone I can feel the same way about. But I guess if I actually believed that the EMF strategy would ultimately be successful I'd consider it more seriously. The honest truth is I don't think I could live with myself as that guy.

Thoughts?

Mental Aerobics

UPDATE: As of July 11th, Lumosity is no longer in Beta testing and they now want to charge exorbitant rates for their services. As a Beta user they offered me the super low special price of 2 years for $49.95, which apparently is a huge savings over the annual price and the non-Beta user price. At that kind of price I'm sure I can find better options for mental exercise.

Lately I've been enjoying a mental exercise site/game called Lumosity, where each time you come to visit it gives you a new set of exercises to do (assuming you've taken a minute to set up your login), and keeps track of your scores and overall progress on exercises from a few different categories (attention, processing speed, memory, etc.). There are 30 sessions to work through. I do one every day or so, and its fun to see how I'm doing. I've done about 20 of the sessions so far. Its kind of along the lines of things like Brain Age, but free, so if you are interested, you should check it out.

I'm checkin' in (checkin' checkin' in)

Okay, so I'm not checkin' in to a drug rehab clinic. Just checkin' in with you, loyal reader.

I had a fairly eventful weekend, including going to a rodeo and moshing at the Warped Tour in 100+ degree weather. I've got another week before I make my inaugural voyage across the sea to visit the continent from which continental breakfasts are to have originated from. And I also have an idea for what could be the most successful Big Digital weekly feature yet. Still trying to decide if I'll get the first out before the trip or if you'll have to wait until after, but either way, I think I'll enjoy it when it does show up (because after all if I don't enjoy it, why would you?).

Spending some time with Leland

Earlier this week I was able to attend our annual NLM training conference at Leland Stanford Jr. University aka Stanford.

Its not always the easiest conference to pay attention during because the topics presented are so broad and specialized as to sometimes be almost unintelligible unless its something very similar to what you are working on. Thank heavens for the USA Today puzzle page.

I know I haven't been blogging much lately, but I guess I've just had a lot on my mind, but not anything coherent enough to blog about. Anyway, here's some pictures from the trip:


The Hoover Tower, named for Hebert Hoover, one of the esteemed alumni of Stanford. Apparently he was a Geology major. I made a crack about him getting elected because he was "so down to earth", and offered to let the tour guide use it, but for some reason she declined.


Memorial Court, leading to the Main Quad and Memorial Church


Classic university look


There are a lot of casts of Rodin sculptures at Stanford. These are the Burghers of Calais, but apparently "Burgher" isn't pronounced the same as "Burger".


Inside the Memorial Church, which was really quite impressive.


Looking down from Hoover Tower, you can see the Main Quad and the front of the Memorial Church pretty good here.


I was asked to give a poster presentation. The conference organizers set up tables with display devices on top of them, but there were a lot of problems. First, the boards they had to mount the posters on didn't seem to fit right for the posters, so that some of the posters had to span from one board to another. Then the wind picked up and tipped nearly all of these boards over. I was glad that I hadn't pinned my poster to both boards or it probably would have been torn in half. Instead it just tore free of the pins and blew a few feet away. Anyway, in the end they moved us to a different spot, put the boards on the ground and had us stand by them in the hot sun for an hour. Thank heavens for a nearby tree that provided some shade to lurk in while people looked at my poster.

A Peculiar People

In case you've ever wondered what its like to go to a singles ward:

We just found out at church yesterday that our stake is being split, and that the dividing line will be practically a stone's throw away from my current location, and just by moving 3 blocks in February I've managed to put myself in the south half of the split. We're losing close to half of our ward due to this and a few other boundary changes that are coming along with the split, and then picking up some more people as they expand our boundaries southward (for the 3rd time since I've been in this ward).

Anyway, there'll be a lot of people that I'll miss, and right now it seems pretty hard to fathom what things are going to look like when we finally get back to our ward building in 2 weeks.

And let me just say its been quite the 12 months for the 30th ward. Last July, we moved from the stake center to our current building. Then in August we got a new bishopric, then in September our boundaries were changed. From October to January, we kind of got some time off, if you don't count the nearly 250 individual interviews I had to arrange for tithing settlement. Then in February the Relief Society split. In March we got a new Elders Quorum President, then in April we got a new Stake Presidency, and just two weeks ago our Elders Quorum was split. Now two weeks after that, our ward is getting cut in half, and we're getting a (nother) new stake presidency (because we will be in the brand new stake). To sum up, in the last year, we've had 3 relief society presidencies, 3 elders quorum presidencies, 2 ward boundary changes, 1 stake boundary change, 2 bishoprics, 3 stake presidencies, and will have gone in numbers from 170 to 320 to whatever we end up with after all this, maybe around 220 or so.

Needless to say, its been quite the year. I don't know how much more of this I can take. Some of my friends have been in 3 different wards in the last 10 months without ever moving. Hopefully things can settle down a bit now, once we replace all the leadership positions that have been left empty by this change.

Cable Jacked

Yesterday I feel like I totally earned some serious Man Points. I've been living in my current apartment for almost 4 months now and felt like I'd been there long enough to start rearranging some of the furniture to suit me better. Mainly, I wanted to get our TV into the living room instead of in the kitchen were there was barely enough seating to support the four of us who live here. So I spent an hour or two yesterday morning moving stuff around and finally got everything in place in a way that I thought was pretty decent.

Then I went to hook up the cable, and for some reason it wouldn't work. I had already been down to the basement and made sure that the cable marked "West Living Rm." was connected to the splitter that the "Cable" cable came into, but for some reason all I was getting was static. My roommate had said that he'd had some troubles getting the cable hooked up in his bedroom and that he thought some of the cables might be mislabeled, so I tried pretty much every other cable all with no results. Finally, and here's where I really felt manly, I decided it was going to take the cable jack off the wall in the living room and see if there was something wrong in there. And, in fact, there was. Turned out the cable jack wasn't actually connected to the cable inside the wall. A quick couple turns later and I was in business. To quote one of my favorite lines from Seinfeld, "I'm a man!"

Random Thoughts about Planning

Its been said that, "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail." Strangely though, if you plan to fail, you clearly have not failed to plan.

Weekend Update

I know its been a while since I posted, but since I did take my camera out with me to the baseball game this week, I thought I'd share some photos from that. (For those of you who keep up with my Flickr account, this is all probably old news, so to you I apologize.)

We sat on the grass and had to try to see the game while looking at the sun for the first while, but in the end it was nice and there was a great turnout, including more friends up in the stands, and at the end, I got to try out the "Fireworks" auto-setting on my camera. The verdict...it makes for cool shots, although perhaps not what I think of as traditional fireworks photos.

Anywhere, here's some pics:

The first few innings were kind of hard to see:






Which led to my "slipping" down the hill into some people seated below us:


There was some actual baseball played, with the Bees pulling out an exciting 10th inning comeback after giving up a solo HR in the top of the 10th.






And in the end there were some fireworks. I keep wondering how much it costs them to do fireworks at the game, because they have them almost every weekend they are at home it seems.

Threat Level...Blue

Those of you who read this blog out of the desire to glean some small bit of what's going on in my life (as opposed to those of you who enjoy sifting through the randomness that seeps out of my brain to stain the Internet) probably are wanting to know whats the deal with the yellow threat level alert issued recently.

Well if you've been waiting to know whats going on, there's really nothing to say, other than to say that sometimes things just don't work out. Sometimes they don't work out on my end and sometimes its on the other person's end. Suffice it to say that this time it was on my end. I thought there was a chance for this to work out, but for some reason I just couldn't get over the hump from Yellow to Orange, if that makes any sense. It never feels good to have to tell someone that, especially when they seem to think that I'm worth their time and emotional investment, but I guess its just one of the many risks you take when you take a chance on love.

Mom always said I was special

Today I was reading Ken Jennings' blog and there was a brief mention at the beginning about a condition known as synesthesia, which I was unfamiliar with, so I clicked through the link he posted to the Wikipedia article.

**TANGENT ALERT**

Can I just say, by the way, how much I love wikipedia. I realize that its not foolproof, but where else could you learn about synethesia and also find out which tracks have been announced for Guitar Hero 3?)

**TANGENT OVER**

Anyway, so I'm reading about synethesia which apparently is "a neurological condition in which two or more bodily senses are coupled." Not really making sense of that, I scrolled down to find examples. Among the most common is one in which people see letters and numbers with color. This is known as grapheme -> color synethesia. Also there's a similar one where people experience colors in connection with musical tones. (music -> color synethesia).

Anyway, I thought all this was interesting and wondered what that would be like, and kept on reading, when suddenly I came across this chart:



Apparently one form of synethesia, number form synethesia, is having a mental map of numbers. Until this moment, I never knew that there was anything abnormal about having a mental map of numbers. Or of the alphabet. Or of the annual calendar. I just assumed that everyone has one of those. Because I do. How else would people remember where things lie in relation to each other?

Mine isn't exactly like the one in this image, but I totally have a mental map of numbers. I've even thought about posting them on the blog, but wasn't quite sure how to draw them up, because while they are a map, they twist and turn through 3 dimensions in a way that would make drawing them all together quite difficult.

Even after reading about this, I'm still not sure that this concept isn't something that everyone else experiences. A second Wikipedia article refers to the fact that everyone has an unconscious number line, but mine are very much not unconscious. Anyone out there have some of these mental maps? I'll try to find a way to draw up mine, at least the alphabet and calendar ones, as their finite nature lends itself to a simpler map.