Climbing

As some of you may already know, after quiting soccer I have taken up a new sport: rock climbing! When I was home over Christmas I bought some of the necessary equipment to get started, namely shoes, a belt and some carabiners. During the following months I was climbing in a small gym in Switzerland. In the gym ropes were provided, so I was completely equipped to climb there. Now that the weather has gotten much nicer, my place of choice to go climbing has been the University’s outdoor climbing tower. The only problem with the tower is that one needs to provide their own rope. I have been lucky enough to know someone who has lent me a rope on occasion, but this last week I finally splurged and bought my own. The following pictures are from this last weekend when I went climbing on the tower with two friends.

New Semester

Hey everyone!

Even though it was over a month ago, I just wanted to thank everyone for the birthday wishes. As my birthday always falls on spring break, there were not many people in town to have a big celebration. To be honest, I really was not in the mood for anything big anyway. I was happy to wake up to three inches of snow on the ground, which is a rare occurance in all of the places I have ever spent my birthday. I relaxed most of the day. That evening I went to out to an Irish pub with my girlfriend and two other friends from classes.

I killed the next few weeks studying and relaxing. I did not have any test or anything, but sitting around doing nothing was getting on my nerves, so I did some brushing up on solid state physics (exciting, I know.)

The weekend before classes started up again, the 12th and 13th of April, I went to Stuttgart to visit my old roommate, Jo. We went to the Frühlingsfest (The spring version of Oktoberfest in Stuttgart). We sat in one of the beer tents with friends, drank a bunch of beer, sang a bunch of songs and ate a bunch of food. I think I ended up eating a whole roasted chicken in the course of 7 hours.

The following Monday my classes started again. This semester I am taking a lot of classes, just because then the next two semesters will be less stressful, and I’ll have time to study for the exams I’ll have in about a year and a half. (Crazy that I’m already planning for them.) Anyway, my list of classes include

• Nuclear[wikipedia.org] and Particle[wikipedia.org] Physics
• Renormalization Groups[wikipedia.org] and (Quantum) Field Theory[wikipedia.org]
• Modern Experiments of Elementary Particle Physics
• Computer Physics

I am particularly excited about the Elementary Particle Physics course, as it is being taught by a retired Professor from RWTH Aachen. He worked at CERN a lot, and was in the mix of things over the past 40 years as different particles were discovered. One of his students was one of the discoverers of the gluon, which is pretty impressive.

In addition to those classes, I am also participating in two seminars. The difference is that the classes are taught by professors and the seminars consist of 45-minute presentations on various topics from the students. My two seminars are on Quantum Information Theory and Cluster Physics. They should also be pretty interesting.

The big news for me at the moment is that I got accepted into an exchange program to Tel Aviv University in Israel. I should be going over in August to start Hebrew language courses. I’m going to use my time over there doing an internship in one of their labs. The physics department here in Konstanz has connection to the nano laboratory they have there, so I’ll probably end up working on one of their projects. I expect to be done in January.

Other than that, there is not much else to report. The weather has been amazing, as you’ll see in my two following posts (pictures!)

Hope everyone’s staying healthy and doing well!

Chris