We are off to Connecticut in less than 12 hours, but we found enough
time to write one last page to describe our trip to Spain and the last
week here in Heidelberg. This is it. Hope you've enjoyed
the ride!
After returning from Istanbul, we had about 3 days to do laundry, etc.
before packing up for a week-long trip that included stops in 3 cities
in former East Germany (Jena,
Leipzig, Dresden), followed by a few days in Prague. It was a
full, fantastic week. Four hours of lectures for Gerald, plus two
seminars. Last weekend we went to
another former Eastern city, Halle, for the last of Gerald's
three weekend-lecture series, and have included that with the visit to
the other cities.
We have also had some wonderful visits with friends during this period, especially a long weekend in
London and a weekend in the Ahr Valley of Germany. We have
separated our adventures into three parts (so that we could include more pictures): former East Germany, Prague and "Other"
that includes London, Ahr Valley and events closer to Heidelberg.
Enjoy!
Well, we were right; our trip to Turkey left us with enough to
share in its own page - pages, actually. There are separate pages
for each of our stops.
Enjoy!
Hope all's well on your end.
Love and hugs,
Elyse & Gerald
As promised, we have seen a lot these past few weeks: Munich,
Pisa and northern Germany were our major trips. We continue to
enjoy the offerings in Heidelberg and are very much looking forward to
our excursion to Turkey (for two weeks starting May 26th!). We decided to send this out now under
the assumption that Turkey will hold enough treasures for its own
"page" here.
April was a special month for us - filled with wonderful visits with
family and friends. It was all made that much better by the
spectacular show put on by Mother Nature: sunny, blue skies and bushes
and trees filled with colours and perfumes. Still, April flew by
quickly and we are well aware that we are in the final quarter of our
sabbatical year. We are relishing each day fully.
We look forward to hearing from you and hope that life is treating you well.
It's hard to believe that another month has already passed and that
it's April already!! We have been busy with our intensive German
language course, but have managed to squeeze in some weekend excursions too!
We can now understand some German, but are not quite ready to write poetry in German.
We hope that all is well on your end, and that you'll be in touch soon to update us on your goings-on.
Hello from Heidelberg where we are settling in to our life here for
six months. Gerald's
work is going well, with many good physicists here with whom he can
discuss/collaborate and many others relatively close by. His
(Our)
schedule is already filling up with talks and conferences, never mind
the work here in Heidelberg! Elyse has been keeping busy
volunteering
a few days a week at a local school ("gymnasium"). The 1,000 or so students in the school
range
from 10-20 years old (and we worry about mixing 5th-8th grades!) and
there are about 30 kids in each class. In addition to English
classes
(required from 5th grade on), there are also bilingual (i.e., taught in
English) classes in History and Biology, which she has observed.
So far
she has mostly been partnered with an English teacher (teaching 8th and 11th
graders) and has participated in some of her classes. The first
observation
Elyse made is that, despite differences in the structure and delivery
of lessons, kids are kids; she immediately recognizes the wise-guys,
the disorganized ones, the eager ones, etc. There have been some
big and little differences she has noticed about the school (e.g.,
expectations of classroom management, the fact that most of the kids
use fountain pens as it is believed that it improves their penmanship,
etc.) and it's been a good way to be
reminded why she became (and loves being) a teacher. Hopefully
she'll
be able to have a book or film club with a few kids who want to
practice their English more, but we'll see what comes after their
vacation (week of Feb. 19th).
We will both be taking an intensive German language
course (9:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. each weekday) through the University for
the month of March.
That should help our ability to communicate here! (We are at THE
most basic
level right now, mostly involving horribly mutilating the language
while pointing to what we want.) People are very patient and most
speak/understand some English so we are getting along okay. We managed
to buy some bikes in a negotiation conducted by sign language and
broken English and German. Elyse is
still hoping to audit a course at the University when their term that
starts in April, but the catalogue of courses is not yet published, so
it's not clear if any will be offered in English. She is enjoying
having the time to read and explore and will continue to do so -
especially as the weather improves!
There will be more about our adventures in Heidelberg and beyond, but
we thought we'd let you know what we've been up to lately. We
miss you and hope that life is treating you well. We'd love to hear from you when you get a minute....
Tschuess ((=Bye!) pronounced "chooss")) for now! p.s. this is NOT our apartment - it is in the Goethe Haus in Frankfurt.
Well, we knew it would come, but time flew too quickly, as usual, and
we had to depart Adelaide on January 22nd. There were more
good times - with family, friends and just in our every day life in
Adelaide - than we could possibly document here, but we thought we'd
share a few highlights.
G'day!
We have had some opportunities to take some fantastic trips in October
and thought
we'd share some memories from them. Details are with the
photos.
We're making our first attempt at sharing a movie with you.
It is a compilation of audio from a walk in Mt. Remarkable
(where there are over 115 species of birds!) and two encounters with
kangaroos. The first one was playing hide and seek, while the
second was looking for a food handout! Thanks to Jaime
Russell for the guidance. Kangaroo Film (with bird
audio)
