Guten Tag from Deutschland!

I thought I might blog a little from Germany, but it just hasn't worked out that way. For the first few days, while we were in Munich, an internet connection was hard to come by. The hotel offered wireless, but it was €30 a day. I love the internet, but not that much!

Now that we are at the math conference, we have a wired connection in our room (the receptionist looked at Morgan and me and said, "only one connection, not two.") but we still haven't used it all that much. It's strange to be 8 hours ahead of the US - when I wake up in the morning, there are a lot of new posts from people but then pretty much nothing changes over the course of my entire day while all the Americans are sleeping. As I'm posting this, it's 11:45 AM for me, which means it's 3:45 AM in Denver.

Anyhow, I thought I'd poke my head in and say that we are having an amazing time. I am posting some pictures to my Flickr, but I've taken so many photos that I'm still only putting up ones from our very first full day in Munich.

There are 4 of these lions in front of the Residenz in Munich. You rub their
heads for luck - but only 3 of the 4. You don't want to be greedy!

We had busy, full days in the city and then we came here to what is practically the middle of nowhere in Bavaria, which has actually been a perfect respite from the running around. Although being in the middle of nowhere certainly doesn't mean there's nothing to see! We are here for a couple more days, then back to Munich to explore a different part of the city. Then all too soon we'll be on our way back home.

Travelling together

While we have had some setbacks to some of our travel plans lately, we are taking a trip to Munich in the next week or so.  We will be there before and after a weeklong math conference I am attending in Irsee.  This is actually a big milestone for us because, for one, it is our first big trip together, and two, it will be Ursula's first time out of the country.  We are very different from each other in the way we handle travelling, and this seems to be magnified by the fact that we are travelling internationally.  It is interesting the way we are both preparing for the trip.

Kloster Irsee - pretty nice digs for a math conference.

The travelling we have done together so far has been pretty informal - a weekend in Portland, a week in Austin, a road trip to Yellowstone - all relatively nearby destinations, none lasting longer than a week.  And, while there have always been differences in the way we pack and prepare, planning this trip has made it much more apparent.  I am pretty low-key in terms of my trip preparations.  I usually make a short list of things I really can't do without, throw some clothes in a bag, and I'm off to the airport.  Ursula describes herself as a "stressbasket" when it comes to travelling, which I disagree with (maybe I agree when it comes to dealing with airport security, but that's different and somewhat justified).  She is, however, very deliberate.  She has been working on lists, having me work on other lists, preparing maps, researching transportation, sketching out rough itineraries, and just generally getting everything figured out.  Which is totally awesome - definitely better than trying to figure it all out while we're there - but is not what I am really used to.

Chinese Pagoda beer garden in the Englischer Garten - sounds like a must-see.

I know that some of it is her personality; she is spontaneous, but she wants to also make the most of her time there.  But the biggest part of it is how excited she is; we both are, really, but it's different.  I was fortunate enough to spend a few weeks in Europe a couple of years ago, but since she has never travelled outside of the U.S.,  it means a lot to her to not miss anything we will regret not having seen.  The funny thing is that I think it is rubbing off on me a bit.  It is incredibly exciting to be researching different things about Munich, from the restaurants, to the different neighborhoods, to the important landmarks.  It feels good to have a big list of places we can check out, and we can pick and choose what is really important while we are there.  The planning is something that is really cool to do together, and I think it makes the trip a little more meaningful.

The Long Haul

I asked Morgan a week or so ago if he felt any different when he's out and about now that he's married. He thought about it for a minute and then said, "no, not really." I have to admit, I was a little surprised. He said that he's felt like he was "taken" long enough that it wasn't really a change to him.

I do feel different, though. It's hard to explain or justify, and while I wouldn't say that I feel any more committed to him than I did before the wedding, I do feel more visibly committed to him. We have rings. We have the same last name. We are "husband" and "wife" instead of "boyfriend" and "girlfriend." We would have to go through legal outlets to change what we are to each other. Maybe it's more feeling like we're perceived differently than we were before.

With all the talk about divorce rates and proclamations that marriage is dead, it can sometimes seem like the act of getting married is pointless except from a dry, legal standpoint. The media loves doom and gloom - whatever blah blah statistic of marriages end in divorce, and blah blah percentage think getting married is hopelessly outdated. But for all the publicity the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Maria Shriver story about a marriage ending after 25 years receives, there are the stories like Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly if you look for them. (While he is on the final shuttle mission, he has taken her wedding ring with him and left his with her on Earth. And that's not even getting into how much he's stood by her since her shooting.)


Statistics be damned - I'm in it for the long haul, whatever that may entail. I can't wait to see those anniversaries start to stack up. My grandparents made it to 46 years, and although we're getting a later start, it might still happen, right?

Life is Still Good

While our previous entry highlighted some of the disappointments we've gone through since the wedding, I wanted to shed some light on the other side of the picture.  The trip to China falling through was definitely hard to take - we had done a lot of planning based on being there for the next year.  And it was hard to get through; Ursula has been wanting to go to China for so long, and I felt like I had really let her down.  But we did get through it, and while spending another year in Denver isn't what we would have hoped for, we are making the best of it.

We have actually been doing a lot of really fun things lately.  A few weeks ago, it was National Parks week, so we went to Rocky Mountain National Park for the first time.  The weather was amazing; it was still pretty cold up there, but we had sunshine, and there were some awesome clouds hanging over the tallest mountains that made them seem to just blend in to the sky.

I love how you can't tell where the mountains end.

More recently, with the weather getting warmer, we've been doing some fun things around Denver.  We checked out the Art Walk on Santa Fe, where all of the galleries open their doors to the public.  There was an especially cool light and sound exhibit with a bunch of homemade instruments to play and some videos projecting on the walls.  We have also been travelling around the city following the Food Networks Great Food Truck Race, where a bunch of food trucks from all over the country are in town competing for something or other.  This has been really interesting, because the locations are all rumor-based.  We've had some really great food from a couple of the trucks, and plan to check out a couple more today.

The Crab Burger from the Lime Truck was incredible! And so was the Truffled Cheesesteak!

So we are regrouping as far as our plans for the future - I still have a little ways to go to finish my degree - but we are having fun, and making the most of our time here.  We will keep everyone posted about our plans as they come along.

Hard Times

We've been absent from this blog for over 3 weeks, and I apologize. We have no intention of abandoning it. Nor of being gone for so long in the future, either.

A few things were holding me back from posting. I wanted to get the last of the thank-yous into the mail (they went out today). I wanted to have something to post about. More precisely, I wanted to have something to post about besides the news we got earlier this month, because it wasn't good news.

But here I am, and here's the news: we're not going to China.

It seems like most people I talk to experience some sort of setback shortly after getting married. I don't know if it's a coincidence, if it's a case of noticing all the blue cars on the road because you've just bought one, or if it just looms more significantly in your mind because now you're married, but whatever the reason, it seems to be a common theme. Maybe it's because as soon as something negative happens, you find yourself thinking, "I just got married, isn't everything supposed to be great for at least a little while? Honeymoon period, anyone?" Life, of course, doesn't work like that.

Shortly after we returned home, Morgan went to the head of the department and asked what was going on with the China trip. He was told that the school in China had decided they wanted to use mostly their own faculty to teach their courses and therefore, the trips were off. Oh, hey, Mr. Department Head, thanks for letting us know. It's not like we have to plan out the next year of our lives or anything.

It was a huge disappointment for both of us. It came at an extra-unfortunate time when everything should have been sunshine and roses, but more than that, it was the first disappointment we would weather as a married couple. How would we deal with it?

The answer for the first couple of days was "in our separate corners." It wasn't how I wanted to do it - isn't the proper thing to do to pull closer together, the two of you against the world? - but I just couldn't bring myself to express all the emotions around it for fear of making Morgan feel worse. Because, trust me, he already felt bad enough. I can't really speak for him, but I suspect that in the less rational corners of his psyche he was worried that I was going to be mad at him for false advertising. As if he had promised me this and then pulled the rug out, instead of having it pulled out from under both of us.

After that initial period, we were able to talk about it and share the anger, disappointment, frustration, and feelings of "now what?" (And "now what?" is a big question, but we're working out the answers.) The near future isn't going to happen where we thought it would, but that's all right. The location might be different, but the overall vision is the same: we'll be together. We'll figure it out from there.

Yay, pictures!

As Ursula mentioned, there are a few loose ends to take care of before the wedding is officially over.  Well, one big one can be crossed off that list; we have our wedding pictures!  We think he did a great job; it was tough narrowing down the 717 pictures to our 240 favorites.

As you can see, we are a very happy couple.

You can find the big gallery here.  I really can't express how happy we are with the photos; we found our photographer John Leestma through an ad on craigslist, which felt like a little bit of a gamble.  But really, everything worked out wonderfully. So check them out and let us know what you think.

On another note, today marks exactly a month from the wedding.  I still feel incredibly lucky, and I know that feeling won't be going away anytime soon.  We still have a few more things going on before Ursula considers the "wedding phase" to be over, then I suppose it's on to the "honeymoon phase"!

Loose Ends

I won't feel like the wedding phase is truly over until three things happen:

1. We get the professional photos (by the end of the week, I hear),
2. We get our thank you notes out (working on it), and
3. All my name-changing stuff is done (working on that, too).

This photo doesn't have anything to do with anything,
but I like entries to have photos, and this is pretty.

I applied for my new Social Security card last week on Monday, and it arrived in Saturday's mail. I thought that was pretty amazing. As Morgan mentioned in his post, we went to the DMV and that's in process. I may have to wait on that to get the bank straightened out, but I still need to look into what documentation they actually require. In the meantime, I'll be applying for a passport - the first one in my life.

I can't believe I'm finally going to get a passport and actually get out of the United States. I have technically left the country before, but I only went to Vancouver and Victoria, British Columbia. It was years and years ago, before you needed anything other than a driver's license to enter and leave Canada, and it was pretty much the US except cleaner and with "eh" on the end of sentences.