Hi All! This week we were fortunate enough to be able to tour some more of the city. Bryan's department was hosting a conference this week about the Straßenbahn (street car system) and how to plan a city around that type of transportation. Bryan's boss let us both come to one of the evening events: a tour of the city on a private Straßenbahn car. It was very generous of him and very cool! We got to ride around on an adorable tram (it was specially decorated) and go across the city while Bryan's boss explained what we saw.
We spent a lot of time in Grünau, which is a part of the city that contains a lot of old Soviet housing. It has a reputation for being a not so good part of town, but it's not as bad as it's reputation suggests. As Bryan says, "it's just that everyone is old." There are a lot of grocery stores and open areas, so it is actually convenient for older citizens to live there, but the city is concerned about getting more young people and families to move in.
However, when it is cloudy and gloomy, it can look pretty depressing:
We've noticed that the weather here can change in a matter of minutes. As we write this, it is both sunny and thundering outside. There have been two heavy rain showers today (and some hail), but the sun has been out inbetween. On Wednesday, one of our roommates invited us to a cookout, but we had to cancel because of a storm. This is what it looked like outside our window:
But within about an hour, it looked like this:
As for the rest of the week, we visited Leipzig's Weinfest in the main square. We sampled some wines and also listened to a jazz band. It was nice to recognize the words to some of the songs; several of their songs were in English. The band had some awesome hats with sunflowers on them and one of the members decided to perform a solo while standing on a table:
It was a pretty awesome festival. We were slightly younger than the target audience, I think, but we fit in pretty well.
One of our roommates is moving this week and had a going away party to celebrate. His party was on the first day of summer, and he cut down a tree so that he could dance around the Maibaum (May tree or May pole). It was highly amusing!
This week Bryan and I also found an "English" store. They sell a lot of tea and also some packaged food from England. The best part is that they have a lending library of books in English. I joined right away (it was 5 Euros) and have already read three books. When you are finished reading a book, you just exchange it. I am determined to make friends with the shopkeeper by the end of the summer!
Have a good weekend, everyone. We'll leave you with some random pretty photos from the week:
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