Apologies and Updates

I have another 17 minutes before my internet cafe money runs out. So I'll make the most of it.

Basically, I'm really sorry that I have posted near to nothing on this board. But I have a valid excuse. Basically, my power adapter melted within 3 days before I could get internet in my room. I asked several electronic stores for a replacement and they all said "Nein" or " Nächste Woche vielleicht" (next week perhaps). And I asked in German. My parents sent one which was supposed to get in by a week but it never came. A week after it came I finally got word of it but its stuck somewhere in customs. I finally found a power adaptor. Following that came the internet crisis. Unlike Emory, which has a seemingly simple process for obtaining the Internet, Uni Regensburg drags you through a 5 step paper work process which comes to the excruciating finally of typing in my extremely long 9 -10 digit IP.

BUT ANYWAYS. That has been the small negatives and everything else is AUSGEZEICHNET (excellent).

First Weekend:
City tour (saturday)
Walhalla (pronounced Valhalla) the Parthenon of Germany

Second Weekend:
Befreiungshalle (Freedom hall commemorating victories against Napoleon)
Schulerloch: Cave system in Bavaria
Weltenburg (Oldest Monastic Brewery) Basically where the Monks got their party on and played a lot of bier pong.

Third Weekend: (Loads of Fun. I took two days off for this one. I met with fellow Emory Slovak Matej Varga in Vienna and we travelled around)
Vienna(really pretty city)
Bratislava, Slovakia (very historic)
Road trip to Hungary!!! Budapest ranks as a top city in my opinion. Better than Madrid and comparable to Paris.

Hungarians have a crazy language that belongs to some Finnish subgroup

Fourth Weekend:
-Chem Party. Ya, I think the Uni Regensburg chem club raises a lot of money. Particularly for partying and alcohol. Im sorry but their Chem Party, (and this is just chem), rocked Dooleys Ball. At least in my opinion.
-Linderhof and Neuschwanstein: Palaces of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Very pretty but at least he didnt starve his people like Louis XVI did over there in Paris
-Konzentrationslager Dachau. The beginning of the Nazi nightmare. The Alpha of the concentration camp system. A very solemn place. Ironically it was a much prettier day than Linderhof.

The Lab:

My supervisor, Robert Lechner, is quite possibly the coolest guy I could have worked with in Germany. He's very lax and I'm learning a lot. I've been synthesizing flavins this entire time. I now have a main starting flavin from which I can create new flavins (ones that havent been created yet) . We tried to make new ones with Grignard agents and Lithium but it didnt work as in theory. Doing synthesis is a lot harder than doing it on paper.

Oh, and I DETEST running columns.

The labs P.I. , Burkhard König, is a cool guy but I don't see him that much. The other grad students (about 20, its a really big group, everything is bigger (sometimes better) in Germany) are really cool as well. They're very social and we've had barbeques, afternoon pickup Fußball games (soccer for those that dont know), and we even started our own IM Dodgeball tournament. Of course they play it the german way. And these events are usually accompanied by beer drinking. Prost! (cheers) I can resist the offer to smoke (europeans, at least young people, smoke a lot) but its hard not to join my fellow German comrads for a bier or two.

I've made friends with my Barcelonan neighbor down the hall, who speaks fluent german in addition to English, Castellano y Catalan. My fellow Czech lab mate lives next to me as well. He's doing a similar IRES program but a Czech version you could say. He's from Prague or Praha and is an undergrad as well.

Hopefully, with internet in the next few days, I can compete with Wendy and post some pictures. I hope this makes up for a long drought of posts

Servus von Regensburg,
Miguel