Bis Bald, Deutschland

Today, I will be bidding Germany farewell yet again as I leave for the environs of France at just shy of 10 in the morning. A longer update will be posted once I'm situated in my new country.

Farewell, Germany; good-bye, BASF. It's been fun. When will I be back? Who knows. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

Copenhagen and Chemistry

Wow, it's been a month or so since my last update. Meaning a lot's happened.

First up, the Denmark trip that I had been planning for long time finally happened about two weeks ago: I left on the 30th by night train to Copenhagen and spent three days there. And Copenhagen's really nice, I must say. It's very easy to get around, there's a lot of pretty sights and things to do, and the weather was extremely cooperative. However, there was a major downside: Copenhagen's really expensive, sometimes moreso than Switzerland (shocking).

Remember how I mentioned a 1½ litre bottle of soda was about CHF 2 (then, about €2/$2.50)? In Denmark, you're lucky if it's less than 20 Danish kroner (€3, $4), not including the deposit of 3 kroner. McDonald's is surprisingly cheaper than in Switzerland, but still pretty high at about 55 kroner (€8/$11) for a meal. Public transport ticket... well, the basic ticket is a one-hour pass for 24 kroner (€3.50/$5), but you can buy a one-day ticket valid for the Greater Copenhagen area (a lot, trust me, and it comes in handy for a trip to Elsinore, home of the castle featured in Hamlet) for 130 kroner (€18/$26). A part of it is due to the 25% VAT on pretty much everything, the highest VAT in all of the EU (and the only VAT that comes in a single rate) and the high wages paid to the average Danish worker. But, fortunately, I was able to minimize the damage, and I had an awesome time.

Also, when one's in Copenhagen, there's another country just 30 minutes away (Sweden). So I went there too, namely to a little city called Malmö. It's a rather cute little city, marked by a lot of charming buildings and streets, plenty of trees, and the highest density of restaurants in Sweden. But it was a good few hours for roaming in the area.

Other excursions, of course, have occurred. Namely a trip to the Wurstfest in Bad Dürkheim. If you've been to a German Fest, though, you know that these are not the run-of-the-mill fairs that you find in the US: these are rather massive events, with beer tents, rather extreme rides, Bratwurst galore, and lots of different types of alcohol (and not just beer). They're pretty impressive, all in all, and this one was sufficiently large. It made me happy.

And the science is getting done as well. It's not too much different from the usual, just running some tests and generating the graphs, but I hope to do some cooler stuff before I leave... no explosions, mind you.

In any event, it's a bit surreal that I leave for France in... two and a half weeks. And this comes at the point when I'm falling madly in love with this region of Germany. People assure me that I'll love Auvergne, and I don't doubt it either, but I just don't want to leave Germany right now.

In any event, have a good remainder of your week. Or something vaguely approaching such.