It's a hard life

Hi there internet, how are you today?

Over the last week my room has slowly transitioned from floordrobe to fully furnished (ie it has a bed, a desk, some shelves and some drawers). This has been a somewhat arduous not to mention reasonably expensive task, and I hope I don't have to do it again any time soon! I hadn't realised how spoiled I had been up to now by furnished accommodation...

I'll be honest with you, I still haven't really gone out that much, although I have visited the odd restaurant/ beer dispensary with various Vienna friends who have had the decency not to move away (unlike most of my previous acquaintances here). The weather has been monotonously lovely, apart from when it dipped down to 14 or so degrees at the beginning of last week and everyone briefly thought it was the end of the world. We're comfortably above 20 now though.

I went in for lunch with my colleagues (weird to say, even if they do use the word a lot more often in german than in english) last Monday. They seem a very friendly bunch, much given to jokes and silliness, thank god. Not that I'd expect even a bunch of people who had partially left geology behind for the lofty peaks of thermodynamics and materials science to be anything else, really. But it was nice not to feel like I was sitting an exam by talking to them.

As luck would have it, they were planning a small research group seminar at the weekend, so I went along. One of the Professors owned a beautiful wooden house in a valley near Zell am See (Salzburg area) and so it was that a week before even starting I got to hang out with a bunch of geologists in an alpine house, with gorgeous views from every window. Also there was beer, schnapps, bread, cheese and meat. Oh, and progress reports from various students and postdocs on their research to date.

Although all the talks were pretty darn technical, I had at least heard of all the words before, so I didn't feel completely lost. It's really good just to switch my head back into excited about science mode, out of obsessed with furniture and application forms mode. It was also really good to spend such a big chunk of time extensively speaking german. Although it will take a while to get used to the sentence 'and of course Tom's project is looking at (such and such a thing)...' and having everyone look at me, whatever language it happens to be spoken in.

All in all I can't wait to go in tomorrow to start thinking about my own work and someday soon be able to talk about research successes and failures of my own!

Der Tom