Weekend (part 1)

I personally always lumped Fridays with weekends. In fact, if I were to have the power to pass any one law for the whole planet, it would be to institute 3 day weekends. Seeing as I don't have this power yet, I will instead describe the weekend starting with what happened on Friday.

Friday
I woke up at the ripe hour of eleven in the morning to a drizzle slightly knocking on my window. I got up and decided to give the oatmeal that I purchased the day before a shot. I made it the usual way: two to one ratio of water to oats, then an addition of honey (kindly lent by Jannis) once the porridge was out of the pot. It tasted pretty much the same as the Quaker oatmeal I'd been eating all summer. I found this encouraging, because it meant that for 35 Eurocents I had breakfast meals for as long as half a kilo of oats lasted.

After this reassuring meal I wrote and read till about four, then borrowed a bike from Jannis (the constant borrowing seems to be a thing these past couple of days) and pedaled up the hill to see the University.

I suspect that the architects of Uni Konstanz decided to compensate for the relative simplicity of the town's geography by creating something that was actually challenging to navigate. I have to admit, they succeeded. The University of Konstanz, at least upon first inspection, seems to house all of its departments in one giant building complex. I wouldn't be surprised if one could visit all of them without ever having to go outdoors.

My agenda was much humbler: I only wanted to find the linguistics department, since I would probably be spending considerable time in it and would prefer to know how to there ahead of time. According to some information that I gathered online before my arrival, linguistics was on the second floor of building G. I had with me a plan of the university very thoughtfully provided by the International Programs office in one of their bulky packages that I got before my departure. I studied this plan for a couple of minutes, then decided to wing it based on an approximation of where I thought G was.

This was a mistake and I paid for it by having to meander in loops through corridors with pipes, wires and armature hanging down from the ceilings, balconies with life-size statuettes of falcons or hawks, closed cafeterias and complex systems of terraces and stairs. I also passed some rooms called "Buchbereich" that looked like mini libraries and had extensive lists of items one was prohibited to bring into them (one might think one was entering some sort or temple of knowledge because the lists made it seem that one could come in only if one left practically all of one's worldly possessions behind).
One increasingly annoying recurring theme in this first round of wandering was that instead of building  G I kept running into M. No matter where I started and how many different floors I traversed, I always ended up somewhere in building M. I learned by heart that it was the biology department and that it had a stuffed animals exhibit that contained a fairly large fox. I would rather have known the most efficient route to G.

After some time I got fed up with this loop and decided to first go outside, then enter the labyrinth from some other point and in that way break out of whatever passage system I was stuck in. Just to be fair, I decided to go into the first door I encountered while outside. But this ruse didn't work: I entered a basement full of white walls and machinery and after some wandering around discovered that (surprise!) I was again in building M. At this point I'd been walking for at least half an hour and really wanted to end the tour.

I pulled out the plan and consulted it again before attempting one last time to reach building G. Now, however, I had a better understanding of how the real buildings correlated with the rectangles shown on my map and also realized that if one were to start at the main entrance, there were signs to all of the buildings that made life much easier. Thus I was finally was able to find G, see some classrooms, yet another Buchbereich and some posters about current (and not so current: there was an ad for a computational linguistics workshop from 2009) events, courses and research at the department.

This being done, I left that maze without delay and rode down the opposite hillside from the one I went up earlier in the day. I soon reached a town called Egg that naturally looked nothing like an egg and from there followed a picturesque alley lined with old trees that took me to the entrance to the isle of Mainau. Because there was a fee for admission to the island (and I didn't want to pay it), I turned back, retraced my steps to Egg and from there took small streets to the adjacent towns of Allmannsdorf and Staad. From there I biked to the Rheinbrücke and home through Sonnenbühlstraße. On the way I saw loads of other cyclists, two breweries (on a stretch of at most 1,5 kilometers), a ferry and a casino. These, I observed, seem to be legal in the city (unlike in the US, where gambling is confined to certain districts) but tastefully few and unobtrusive (unlike Moscow, as I remember it, with practically a one-to-one ratio of grocery shops and huge neon gaming signs).

I came back home for a very short while, then left again for the now almost traditional Hafenhalle meet up with the folks from the LEI programme. There I heard that a pub-crawl was happening the day after. More on that in my next entry.