After our day trip to Karlsruhe, Vicki and I met up with Vikas Aggarwal (another former labmate of mine) and headed over to Heidelburg. When we arrived, we met up with my old friend Sandra Panienka and Vikas’s friend Stephanie Jungkunz.
Sandra Panienka, Stephanie Jungkunz, Victoria Argyle and Vikas Aggarwal
The city is incredibly beautiful. High up on the hilltop is the famous Heidelberg Castle which went to visit.
Heidelburg castle
Entrance to Heidelburg castle
Stephanie standing in front of the castle
Vicki and Stephanie checking out the local architecture
After galavanting around England, Vicki Argyle and I headed off to Karlsruhe in Germany, where Frederik Klöwer (my ex-labmate) picked us up from the airport and took us to the “Institut für Anorganische Chemie der Universität Karlsruhe”, which is the inorganic chemistry department of Karlsruhe university. We got to meet Frederik’s lab mates, including Julia Rinck who is coming to Dunedin shortly. Frederik also took us on a tour of the city of Karlsruhe and taught me some highly useful German phrases such as ‘Willst du mich heiraten?’.
And the prize for the busiest tourist attraction in London goes to … the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace.
I took the photo below by standing on my tippy toes, waving my camera held high and clicking away in the vain hope that I’d get a photo of something interesting.
Vicki tried the same approach, but had a lot more luck than I did!
I’m having a Bankart repair done on my shoulder on Monday. Below are some photos of my shoulder. Uunfortunately you can’t see much damage as it’s the soft tissue which needs repaired. My shoulder pops out of the socket on a regular basis ever since I was body checked in a non-contact ice hockey game. I even managed to dislocate it picking up a bottle of coke the other day!
Here is a video explaining the type of surgical procedure I’ll probably be getting.
I travelled to Brighton in Southern England to visit my friend Kerry Perkins. There were lots of lobster coloured people on the beach, er stones. Nice place, but I’d recommend avoiding the fish ‘n’ chips, they’re a little nasty. Below is a nice photo taken from the Brighton pier at sunset.
After hanging out in Brighton, Kerry and I headed north to see London on skates
Except this time it happened to my flatmate, and by ‘it happened again’, I mean literally. Mary was mowed down by an evil man at exactly the same corner, on exactly the same side of the street and going in exactly the same direction! Conveniently she also wasn’t too badly injured either, just some aches, pains and bruises.
I’m not going to go into the details here, but we almost got kidnapped on entering Palestine. After that, I wasn’t particularly interested in taking out my camera to take photos. Thankfully Vicki Argyle took some photos of our visit. Since things were a little stressed during our trip, we didn’t do anything beyond taking a taxi to Bethlehem, visiting the Church of Nativity and getting taken to an overpriced souvenir shop where we had to buy some crappy products (taxi drivers must take tourists to a souvenir shop apparently).
This photo is of the inside of the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem. The church is quite run down, but spectacular none the less. It is supposedly the birth place of Jesus Christ, although it is highly doubtful that this is the correct spot as there are no records of exactly where he was born.
I wasn’t allowed into the church with shorts on (apparently that is impolite), so our taxi driver arranged for me to wear a strange skirt thing around my waist.
You need to step up to go through the doorway I am standing in front of, but despite that I was still taller than the height of the door. This is because the church was built in 565 AD when humans tended to be a lot shorter than they are now.
If you look carefully at the bottom of the doorway, you can also see where the slab of stone has been worn away during the past 1400+ years of foot traffic.
