Farewell dinner

At -91 hours from liftoff (from Frankfurt airport), my colleagues threw us a farewell dinner at the microbrewery Andresbräu near the research center tonight.

They also gave us a few presents: a photo album of all the group members (with a title "My sabbatical at IK" on the cover), a DVD about Karlsruhe with narration in "four" languages: English, French, German (Hochdeutsch), and Badisch (which is the local, hard-to-understand dialect), and Wahre Geschichten by humorist/cartoonist Loriot.

Then the "big" surprise came. They also got us six beer steins from my favorite microbrewery Vogelbräu across town. I was shocked by their generosity, and drinking beer out of one of these steins will certainly bring back a lot of the good memories from this past year. The problem now is to pack and transport them back to the US.