Ein bier bitte!

--- the first thing I learned to say in German even before I got there. A German doctor on my 10-hour train ride to Munich taught me how to ask for a beer in German. Turned out to be pretty useful because beer is, in fact, cheaper than water in Germany! 

 Beer gardening with Hannah in Munich.

There is so much more than beer in Munich though - from biking up to the Neuschwanstein castle to exploring the Deutsches museum, I almost didn't want to come back to France! Munich is the perfect mix of urban and green-ness, its characteristic churches in city center and large public parks wherever you go!

I only stayed a weekend but it has been one of the most fun I've had in Europe so far. Meeting up with a friend from WV and later Hannah, my itinerary were as follows:

 

Neuschwanstein castle ~ absolutely GORGEOUS. It was built by King Ludwig, who was a little delusional in that he built these magnificent castles to escape reality. With a view like that, who could blame him?

Authentic German cuisine - Fresh sausages, potatoes, and black forest cake!

Inside a eukaryotic cell.

Deutsches museum - 5 floors of awesome science than you can imagine, from pharmaceutics to coal mining! It's like everything they teach us in science class, except really interesting!

Sandeman's walking tour of city center - some points of interest: the stadium where Hitler gave his first speech, and a church (there is one every block or so) that was built in the name of the devil. I highly recommend this tour - it's completely free! I also went to a beerhall with some American students - the first ones I met so far in Europe!

I stayed in a hostel for the first time, on a street called Mozartstrass right next to the place where Octoberfest is held, one of the largest celebrations of beer in the world!

My lab in Lyon.

In any case, it's also good to be back sleeping in my cozy attic with my quirky French roommates in Lyon. I'm happy with the progress I'm making the lab. Since the post-secondary school system works a little differently in Lyon, they treat me as a 'Master's student' here in lab, where I even got to order my own antibodies, and work independently with our lab technician. (My PIs are in Canada for a meeting right now. They told me that if I can finish the immunochemistry and Western blot with my new antibodies, I am free to travel, which is why I visited Hannah in Munich last weekend. It's perfect!)

A word of advice for future IRES students in Europe: buy your EURAIL pass in the US - you get free shipping. I had to take a train to Geneva in order to buy one in order to go to Munich. But with the work schedule of a scientist, where you never know if your experiment is going to work perfectly and you can take some time off, the 10 day travel pass over 2 months for 470euros is perfect for me.

The problem is where to go next...Geneva, London, Paris, so many places, so little time!