Thursday and Friday of last week the students in my institute in Stuttgart had a meeting to share their projects and discuss results with their partners from Universities in Holland and Belgium. I was invited to go with them. I really didn't have much to do at this meeting so I pretty much chilled out the whole time. It was in Fraudenstadt, which is a little town in the black forest. It was pretty cool, they put us up in this little chalet outside of town, which was really nice. I had a room all to myself. I basically relaxed for two days and watched presentations of phd students. 
I also experienced television for the first time in a while. The only channel that was in english was CNN, so that sucked, but I could understand what was going on during the teletubbies, and also the german version of mtv played a few videos on english, although the songs were sub-par. Nevertheless, It was cool to watch tv, even if it was only for an hour. 
This picture is of my supervising professor for the summer. He's really funny and quite hyperactive. He's always joking around with his students, its pretty hilarious. He, as well as this other super-smart professor that was there from Utricht were always joking around and they have really great personalities, but then when it comes down to business they're total brainers, its amazing.
On thursday, after all of the presentations were finished for the day we took a tour of the town. Our tour guide reminded me of debbie-downer from SNL, she would start out saying something and make it sound exciting then it would turn into a really lame story. Two cool stories came from the tour though: 1. Apparently when they were building Amsterdam way back in the day they used trees from the black forest as piles, so most of historic Amsterdam is still sitting on trees from the black forest near Freudenstadt. 2. The tour-guide-lady told us about when the Americans were moving through the area near the end of WWII they bombed the town and it completely burned to the ground except for one street. We walked down this street, and apparently the residents saved their housed by putting out the fires with their own human excrement. Now, this street was pretty long, which begs the question. How did these people gather enough .... stuff .... to put out a house fire. It also didn't stink anymore
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