A hole in the head

Nu and I got piercings! Nu got her lower lip pierced and I got my eyebrow done. This was my first piercing, which explains why I was willing to pay 25euro for a not insignificant amount of pain. I guess I'm a bit of a wimp because I felt pretty bad for a while after it was done and Nu had to administer emergency icecream. It continued to be a bit sore for the next day. After that it was fine except for when I made certain facial expressions, meaning that I would wince in pain at seemingly random moments. I guess this would have been fairly funny for a third party, but it just gave me a good excuse to whinge at Nu for convincing me to do it. In the end I quite like it, and it's an appropriate souvenir of my time in Berlin.

Food

I tried some Asian noodles for the first time in Germany the other night when Nu and I went out for a quick drink. The place we ate at was fairly dodgy looking, but the food was as good as I had expected. The menu in the noodle stores here is quite different to what I am used to in Australia. There are none of the dishes we can normally get such as Singapore Noodles, Cha Kwai Teow (not sure how you spell that), Laksa soup, etc. Here the menu seems to just give a few options as to the ingredients you want - type of meat, rice or noodles - but there doesn't seem to be any choice as to the sauce you get. It seems that they use just soy sauce and not much else. The dishes seemed fairly healthy but not that tasty.

I believe that the reason for this lack of variety is that the restaurants are catering to the German tastes since most of their customers are not of Asian origin. I think that it is fair to say that the dishes in Melbourne are more authentic and that this is at least partly because we have larger Asian communities than in Berlin. A case in point is that in Berlin where there is a very large Turkish communtity it is easy to find authentic Turkish food. So I guess if I want to find better Asian food I will have to find a restaurant with a predominantly Asian clientele.

Office

I now have an office! Hooray. You may remember that I mentioned that there is a nice BMS lounge out at HU Adlershof with many offices for students, but there is no such facility at TU. Luckily Prof Ziegler offered me a desk in one of the rooms in the area where his research group is based. This is great for many reasons. Firstly, I have managed to more or less separate my study life from my home life by only doing maths in the office. This means that when I am at home I can pay full attention to my beloved Nu (and relax sometimes too). Also, I am beginning to meet the people in the research group so I feel a bit more involved.

Adventures with Kris and John

On the night they arrived we all went, at my suggestion, to a 'Maths Show' at the TU. I was expecting it to be a sort of public lecture that would be reasonably interesting even though I knew it was in German. Unfortuneatly, whilst it was interspersed with interesting graphical presentations, it turned out to be mostly long speeches of which we understood more or less nothing. I believe most of it was spruiking the various reseach programs in Berlin. To cut a boring story short, we left early.

The best outing we had with Kris and John was on Saturday when we went to Prenzlauer Berg to look for bars. We found a sort of cafe/bar that had a cocktail happy hour from 6 til 9. It seemed that most of the bars around there offered cocktails. Even the Indian restaurant where we ate dinner had them. The restaurant was quite good and cheap too, except the curries where not especially spicy and a bit salty for our tastes. This seems to be the German preference. Also, the curries were served one to each person together with rice on a plate, instead of in bowls with a large bowl of rice to share as we expected. So we made a nice scene by asking for four additional plates and sharing the curries between them. Then we polished it all off in record time (18 mins I think).

Offline again

Anyone who visits my blog regularly (perhaps there is no such person) will have noticed that it hasn't been updated for ages. I have been fairly busy running around with Nu and finishing the last few weeks of class before the Christmas break. In fact if you visit Nu's blog you will find a bit about what I've been up to. Otherwise wait a little longer and there will be a whole stack of new posts including the story of how I got a new hole in my head.

John and Kristen arrive

I have just spent an enjoyable weekend with the latest arrivals in Berlin from the Monash maths program, John and Kristen. Kristen is here to begin her PhD at the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam, and John is also hoping to do the same. We have been wandering around various parts of the city trying to find a neighbourhood that meets with John's approval. Since we are all looking to rent a flat we may consider renting together. I'm now investigating how much more value for money we can get if we pool our resources and rent a large apartment. Looks to be quite a lot.