Laying Claim to a Pub

Salads are salads. Except in Germany. Where salads are not really salads anymore. There's the obligatory potato salad and sauerkraut (though that's already sort of edging away from salad) and coleslaw (or something like coleslaw). And apparently Wurstsalat. Which is really no longer salad by any standards. It's sausage. (in strips). and cheese. and pickles. maybe some oil. This is not salad.

Also lunch is lunch... Except when it's noodles covered in a sweet vanilla sauce served with applesauce. For lunch. As the main course. Let's just say, as a whole, the whole German food standards has me fairly confused.

On a more work related note, I got my dymola model to take inputs from simulink, which I was supposedly able to input Matlab functions into. This way I could check my functions, and make pretty animations. AT THE SAME TIME.

I was also going to take a picture. However it worked once, then I changed some initial values in the simulink model and the dymola model broke itself. So instead of being done with that this week, I spent a large portion of the afternoon trying to get the model to compile. Eventually, it was fixed by taking exact replicas of the parts causing the issues, and using them instead. Why? I DON'T KNOW.
My adviser and I have a theory that the computer realized it was Friday, and quit early.

Taking the weekends seriously is apparently quite important here. Normally when I leave lab, the center of the campus is full of people, but today there was hardly anyone around. And if they were, they were headed somewhere, not lounging in beach chairs on the grass. (Normally there's so many people you can barely see the grass).

This is because on weekends Germans go to their pubs. You find one you like, you go there every week and you get instant friends or something. As a group of international students, we decided we would also find ourselves such a pub. However, as we are the group that likes to "take the long way," we couldn't just choose any place. No, we had to find one decently far away (by foot), with at least two ways to get there, plenty of opportunities to get lost, and one significantly longer way. (the one we would be taking, of course)

It was a really pretty hike by the lake

To fit all of our requirements, we found a small restaurant in the middle of a forest by a lake. Like actually though. You have to hike to get there. For us it's by sign 2km, but with our fairly directionally-challenged group we estimated it took more like 3 - 3.5km. On the upside though, it served very traditional German food, and because it was so hard to find, we were likely the only foreigners in the area. (ie not a touristy destination, though totally should be)

Lentils, noodles and sausage- a traditional Swaibian dish

Since we got started fairly late, we were battling the fading sunlight.. at 10:20pm. I'm quite suddenly glad I'm here for the summer, and not the winter. Imagine trying to get places if it got dark at 4? Oh wait.. I can actually picture that quite well....