Henry turns 7!!!

Henry had a fantastic 7th birthday. Thank you to all for the cards, wishes and phone calls. Steve came back from Ireland this afternoon and he brought Henry the biggest chocolate bar he could find.




We were also happy to have Madalyn visit us as well. Maddy is here in Germany visiting Katrin, who was the exchange student who stayed with Joanna’s family this past spring. Katrin and her family live outside of Dusseldorf, but her mother drove Maddy the four hours to Frankfurt on Friday afternoon. Henry was happy to have another family member here with us for his birthday and he chose to go out for pizza and ice cream as his dinner selection.






On Saturday the five of us traveled out to Langen to go to the Appelwine Festival with Fabian, Almut and their girls. It was very much like a county fair- complete with rides and greasy truck food. One major difference, however, is that many people set up little pubs in their own gardens. Apparently, this is a once a year opportunity to open your home and make some money. After riding the Merry go round and the ferris wheel, we ate dinner in a lovely garden. The place was packed and the food was good. It wasn’t elaborate at all, but it was tasty.









Finally, on Sunday we put Maddy on a train back to Katrin’s family. Actually, we missed her train, but put her on another, faster train that got her to Cologne in time to catch her next train. Then, Steve the boys and I went to visit Susanne and Bernard, who are friends of my parents. The short story is that S and B lived in Doylestown for about 3 years and they were somehow part of my father’s German conversation group. They have since returned to Germany and had two children, but they have kept in touch with my parents. They invited us out to their house for a visit, so we took the train to Bad Neuheim for the afternoon. Their kids are a bit younger than ours, 2 and 3, so they didn’t play together too much. But, Bernard had a fantastic remote control VW beetle that can go up to 25 mph. He was kind enough to let the boys play with it out on the street in front of their house. Once they got it going men and boys from all over the neighborhood came out to see the action.






We have LOTS planned for our last two weeks!

German school

On Thursday Charlie had the opportunity to go to a German elementary school. Henry was supposed to go with him, but because he had been sick and was still not well on Thursday (he actually begged me to take him back to the doctor’s office, but he is all better now) he didn’t go. For those of you who know Henry well, it is not out of character for him to not want to go to school. In the end, it is probably better that Charlie went solo, as he didn’t have to worry about his brother being attached to his hip. I will let Charlie post his own impressions of the day. But, this is a photo of Charlie and Merit outside of the school at the end of the day.

German Healthcare

It has been a quiet few days. Steve is still in Ireland and the boys and I have been laying low. Yesterday morning Henry woke up with a fever and a sore throat. I have been dosing him up, alternating between tylenol and ibuprofen, but his fever always comes roaring back just as the drugs are wearing off. This afternoon I finally took a look in his throat and it was not looking good. So, the three of us set off for the University Clinic, which is on the medical school campus on the south side of the Main River. We arrived and were seen by a doctor within 10 minutes. He took a look and his diagnosis is a bacterial infection, but not strep. How he could tell this from just looking, I am not sure. He did say that Hen's lymph nodes were not swollen, and that this was an indication that it isn't strep. So, we are holding off on the antiobiotics for at least a few days. We needed to settle up out bill before we left and I braced myself- the total for our visit was 21 euros. That is right, about $30! I shudder to think what we would have been charged at home.

I have taught Charlie and Henry how to play solitaire. In their version it really isn't solitary, but rather a group effort. It is an interesting way to play and they spent hours playing last night and picked up the cards again first thing this morning. At this point the cards have been shuffled so many times that they are getting a little soggy!

The other bit of news around here is that we now have a tv in the apartment. We have actually always had a tv, but it requires a digitizer to work. When Hen came down with his bug, I realized that the three of us were going to be close to home for a bit, so I asked the house frau for a digitizer. We successfully hooked it up and now we have television in German. The boys have been enjoying the Simpsons, even though they have NO idea of what they are saying.

Tomorrow Charlie is supposed to go to school with Merit, our friends' Fabian and Almut's oldest daughter. Merit is in fourth grade also and she is fluent in English. Henry was supposed to go as well, but given his present state we will keep him home. The boys were going to spend the night out at their place, but since Henry couldn't go Charlie decided to stay here tonight and we will take him out there first thing tomorrow. It will be an early morning!

Planes, Trains and Automobiles (and Buses)

On Friday morning we took the subway to the train station, where we picked up a bus that took us to Frankfurt Hahn Airport (about 120 km from Frankfurt itself) and we took a flight to Kerry Airport in Ireland. We flew one of Europe's budget airlines, RyanAir, and I will just leave you with a link to one of the MANY websites that offer opinions on their service, I Hate Ryan Air. We did arrive in one piece, despite a very rough landing, and with all of our luggage, so I suppose I should consider us lucky! Steve has a Keystone Conference this week, so we all went up on Friday, spent the weekend and he will come back to Frankfurt this coming Friday (on Henry's birthday). We rented a car and Steve bravely drove- between the opposite sides, the crazy drivers and the multiple round abouts I think it may have shaved a few years off of his life.

On Friday evening we took a short drive from the hotel, just to sort of get a feeling for the lay out of the town. We were staying in Killarney, and our hotel was on the edge of town. We headed off towards the lakes and just followed the road up a bit, hoping out of the car whenever we saw a good view and a convenient turn-off.




Saturday we set off for the Muckross House and Killarney National Park in the morning and a tour of the Dingle Peninsula in the afternoon. The Muckross House was a family estate that was donated to the Irish government in the 1920s, I believe, it is now a part of the Killarney National Park, it is truly a magnificent house (52 chimneys) and it sits in the most gorgeous spot. We parked our car at the road and walked the 3 km in to where the house is. Along the way we passed the abbey, which was destroyed by Cromwell in the 1600s. We decided not to take a tour of the house itself, as the day was so beautiful we walked around outside and enjoyed the gardens and flowers.















We also took a jaunting cart ride around the grounds- these carts were ALL over Killarney and every time you paused some guy asked if you wanted a ride. We broke down out here and it was the best way to see the estate, and he gave us a ride back to the road so we didn’t need to walk out again.







After leaving Muckross we headed straight up to the Dingle Peninsula. We passed through several little towns along the way and we stopped in Castlemaine for lunch. There were only four establishments to choose from and only one, Knightly’s actually serves food, so the choice was easy. We walked in and really surprised a local group of pub goers. There were several men watching the Royal Ascot races and enjoying a few pints. I think they were surprised that we stayed, but we did sit in the adjacent room so that our talking wouldn't disturb them. We ordered up three meals, two fish and chips and one sausage and beans, and I had a glass of Guinness as well. The food was fantastic! We devoured every last bite and then set out again heading north.






We didn't make it all the way around the Dingle Peninsula, we went about halfway down the north side and then cut across and came back along the southern side. The views were unbelievable and the water was incredible. It was so blue that it looked like the tropics.






On Sunday we had a pretty relaxing day. Happy Father's Day to Steve! The only sight-seeing we did was to go out to Ross Castle, which is just 2 km outside of town. Again, we decided against a tour, but we wandered around outside for quite a while and the boys had plenty of opportunities to climb on the castle walls.




Late in the afternoon we met up with some colleagues of Steve’s from Jefferson. Karen and Eric are both faculty in Steve’s department, and Eric is attending the same conference as Steve. They have two boys who are almost exactly the same ages as ours. Every summer they travel as a family, even including Karen’s mother and her husband as well. This year they have rented a house here in Killarney and then they will go up outside of Dublin for a second week. They kindly invited us to their house for dinner. So, we enjoyed a great meal with them and the boys played with their kids.

Other highlights of the trip included the hotel pool and the all you could eat full English breakfast. Both Charlie and Henry really liked the trip to Ireland and definitely want to go back some day. I have to say that it was quite nice to be somewhere that I understood the language and felt a familiar connection. It has been a long time since I have been to England, but this was very similar. Perhaps we will have to consider a longer trip to the UK sometime in the near future.

School!

We have been slow in updating the blog because we have been very busy. The past two weeks I have been lecturing- 5 1.5 hour lectures on post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression and immunology. My class had about 60 second-fourth year undergraduate students. We met at 8:30 out at the Riedberg campus. That meant that I had to leave here around 7 to get out there in time. It turns out that most German students do not live on campus, so they all commuted out to Riedberg as well. I met one young woman who has a 90 minute commute and my class is her only class! Luckily the class is taught in English, so they were fairly comfortable with English, although I do have a bad habit of speaking too quickly. While I knew what I was going to lecture on before I arrived in Germany, it wasn’t until I had my first class that I could be sure about their level of knowledge and the level that I should lecture at. Consequently I spent a lot of time writing lectures! I think they went over okay. I did have a problem with talking during the lecture. I noticed this when I taught in the education department several weeks ago. During Prof. Klein’s portion of the class several students were talking. They weren’t too quiet either. I was a bit surprised, but Prof. Klein just continued speaking and they eventually stopped. Well, in my class I had two young men who talked throughout my entire third lecture. After class I went up to the office that I am sharing with a post-doc and a graduate student and who happened to be there but these two guys. They were there picking up some lab reports. I said hello, it is my two talkers! They were a little shocked, and I asked them to please refrain from talking in class, as it is distracting and not fair to the other students. They apologized and left, and when I arrived at my desk on Monday morning I found a small box of chocolates that they left as an apology. Even better, they were able to keep quiet through the last two lectures!



Our new friend Fabian is a high school biology teacher and his class won a DNA isolation kit from BioRad. The instructions and protocol were all in English, so he asked if I would be willing to come in and talk to his class about study abroad opportunities and then help them with their DNA isolation. They were a nice bunch of students and their English was excellent. Many seemed interested in studying in the states, but just as when I talked to the college students about the American education system, these guys were absolutely shocked at the cost of college in the states.

Afternoon at the Uni.

On Friday afternoon we spent a great afternoon with Fabian, Almut and their girls.
The weather here was beautiful and we all went up to the Westend Campus of the University. It was so beautiful- the buildings date from before the second world war and they are so very impressive. Enormous sandstone or marble structures that go on forever. Fabian pointed out some of the architectural features, for example the windows on the bottom floor are slightly larger than those on the top, they actually get smaller as you go up the building. This gives the impression that the building is actually taller than it is. Inside we discovered the coolest ‘elevator’ ever- it is called a paternoster. The cars continually loop through the building and you just wait for an open car to pass and hop on, once you reach your destination, you just hop off. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time riding the paternoster - luckily it was a Friday afternoon AND the day after a holiday, so there were not a lot of people around actually trying to do work. The building also has a lot of very interesting history-during the war, it was the Nazi headquarters and after the war was over it became Eisenhower’s headquarters. The United States occupied the buildings until after the reunification and at some point the University got them.











The adults sat by the fountain in the courtyard drinking coffee while the children played under an enormous weeping willow tree. They made some wood nymph costumes, complete with bows and arrows. While we were there a film crew showed up and set up to film a scene for a movie! It was a really nice afternoon with some new friends.