Farewell Switzerland ...

I just wanted to take a minute to post some of my favorite pictures and memories from Switzerland as a final farewell. Of course we will be back there at least once this summer so expect the blogs from Switzerland to continue indefinitely along with our many blogs that will start coming out from our adventures in Germany.

Lake Maggiore, Locarno:

Sunset over Lake Geneva, Montreux:

The Matterhorn, Zermatt:

Getting above the clouds on our hike to Wasserauen:

Almost dying on the group outing:

Cows and mountains:

Good friends, good hikes, good food, and great views:

The best bratwurst in Zürich:

The chocolate:

And who could forget our games of nailing (I think that's what it was called):

Martin's Apero

Friday evening was Martin's apero. His whole lab group came (plus some of their partners) and we had a little barbecue on the top floor of the chemistry building. Of course most of it was indoors because it was quite chilly out with occasional rain showers. Thomas (he's french so his name is pronounced Toe-mah with the stress on the mah part) gave Martin a 3-liter bottle of champagne so we started off all sharing that. Thomas was born and raised in the champagne fields so he knows his champagne.

Julian presented Martin with a farewell gift from the group which is a night with dinner at a nice hotel somewhere in Germany. They decided since we like to explore new places that this will help us start exploring Germany. The hotel has a spa so I'm all set! It's also surrounded by vineyards, biking/hiking trails, etc so it will be a good time.

Here is David, lighting the grill with various flammable chemicals. You'd never guess he's one of the most brilliant chemists, would you?

Here's a little rain cloud, doing his thing:

Here are a few of the nicer group photos. This is us posing with most of what is called the "French Connection" - there are a lot of french speaking people in Martin's lab. Martin is actually the only native English speaker in the lab right now. I'm not sure who will proof read all of their papers after he leaves.

People stayed out and partied until 3am so Martin had himself a good sendoff.

Bad Dürkheim: First Impressions

We drove to Bad Dürkheim yesterday and stayed overnight in order to have extra time to get a lot of paperwork done for our move there. Since we had a little extra time to wander around I actually took a few pictures. But only a few.

Bad Dürikheim is a spa town and there's this huge building in it the purpose of which we've been trying to determine since our first visit:



Turns out it's an inhalatorium. The dark sides of it are covered with something that looks like vines or maybe even grapes and water runs through them constantly and I guess you can go inside and just ... inhale? It costs money to go inside and we didn't feel the need to do it on this trip but we'll go after we move there and will hopefully have all of our ailments cured. We don't know the full purpose of this building yet because the sign on the outside was in German and while we're usually pretty good at German we didn't understand most of the words on the sign so we walked away still curious. It's part of the spa so it must be good for you somehow.

Anyway, here are some shots from the little pedestrian area downtown:





We ate dinner at this restaurant last night and the food was pretty good:



The search for our new favorite restaurant will be underway as soon as we move there.

There are also some churches that we will have to explore (spire of a big one in the background of this shot):



So ... more to come after our move!