Good Versicherung

So long, and thanks for all the Wurst.

2007-08-09T19:51:00.000+02:00

This is probably going to be my last post on Versicherung. I have been back in the States for a week now. It has been the typical rounds of doctors appointments shoved into very little time before I head back to school- which will commence on Wednesday morning.

I have found, just like when I got to Germany, that I have not been affected too much by 'culture shock', or in this case 'reverse culture shock'. This is not particularly surprising, since Germany and America are not that different culture-wise. The things that I have noticed the most since returning are little things: waiting for a host(ess) to seat you at a restaurant, having people bag your groceries (as much as I wish they would not), getting carded to buy alcohol, being able to pop down to the grocery at random hours, shopping on Sunday... The list could go on and on, but I will spare you. The things that I have found the most amusing is that I am having trouble responding to people in English- again little things- 'Thank you', 'Excuse me', etc... I noticed the other day at the pool that when a little boy asked me if the water was warm or not, I had to pause a second and think about what he asked and if he was speaking to me. Just like I had to when some one came up to me and asked a question in German when I was not expecting it. I do have to say that it is rather weird to be back here and not really feeling all that different from when I was in Germany. It feels exactly as it does when I am back at my parents house in between semesters.

Other than that, it has been the same old routine back at my parents house between semesters: getting used to Arizona time (which means I generally get up quite early...), pretending to clean up my room (in this case, unpacking and getting ready to pack again), watching the Twins on television (my favourite thing about my parents' house: they have the MLB Extra Innings package, so I get to watch ALL of the televised Twins games), working on my various crocheting and cross stitch projects, and last, but probably (definitely) the most frequent, getting yelled at for not helping out at a house that I do not feel as being my home, and getting into silly arguments with my father over stupid things, because I do not feel like I should do anything when I am on holiday. Granted, everyone else in the house has other views, since they do not see me as being on holiday when I am here. All understandable, since this is where they have lived for the last three years, but I have not lived here (in the long-term sense) and have no connections here except for the people living in this house. Sad, but unfortunately very true.

I have posted the remaining photographs that were taken in Europe. These do not yet include the picture my mother took with her camera when she was in Braunschweig, but I will eventually get them posted as well. These include pictures from our afternoon in Bad Harzburg, my day trip to Bremen, as well as my trip to Potsdam when I was in Berlin a couple weeks ago.

Overall, I will say that I had an amazing time in Braunschweig, despite the doldrums of the first couple months. Once I finally got settled and met people and started getting out and doing things, things evened out and I started having a good time. It was really sad saying goodbye to everyone I met in Braunschweig, since it is likely that I will never see any of them again. I will hopefully see some of them again, since I will be in Europe again. I am hoping that I will be able to get some sort of job in Europe at some point. But at this point I am just concentrating on getting through my last year of engineering school, and the joys of the job search.

If you feel like continuing to read by mindless blathering, I am hoping to pop in every once and a while to my other blog, Fifth Dimensional Tesseract. Thank you for wasting/spending your time reading my blog. I hope that it was some times entertaining and insightful.

Until we meet again, EMH.

Auf Wiedersehen...

2007-07-31T05:41:00.001+02:00

...well, not quite yet. I still have a bunch of photographs to upload and more writings to do. However, I do only have a hand full of hours left in Germany. I did not get a whole lot of sleep last night and I am looking at more than twenty solid hours of travel, before I am finally back at my parents house. Hopefully all goes well, and my large amount of luggage does not manage to kill me. Talk to you again on the other side of the Atlantic.

All things come to an end.

2007-07-24T20:30:00.000+02:00

I am now in that weird transition period. The one that comes when one chapter of your life is closing and the next is starting, but the first has not quite ended yet and the next has yet to start. Because of this, I am bout to be in a some what melancholy mood for the next weeks. It was brought on today by a couple things 1) Today was my last day at work 2) Today was my last day of crew practice. It had not really hit me until I was on the way back from crew that I really liked the people here, and it will be sort of weird never seeing them again, after so much contact for so long. OK, yeah, I knew that I liked them, but I did not think that I would necessarily miss them when I go back to the States. I guess that times like these teach you things about yourself.

The next week will be filled with paperwork, packing, cleaning, and probably not a little boredom. And a lot of good byes and introspective thinking. I am nearly as nervous going back to the States as I was before coming to Germany. They (yes, the infamous they) say that you can never go home and even if I was not convinced of that fact after moving from the Cities, I am sure that I will find plentiful evidence of this when I get back to the States. This is all a part of living, so I expect that this will not be the last time that this will be illustrated to me.

But, after such a lugubrious post, I will end with some things that I am looking forward to:
- Reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the flight home. (I am not even going to buy it until later this week, so there is no temptation to crack it open and get sucked in before I leave.)
- Seeing my Once and Future Flatmate and other friends again.
- Spicy food.
- An oven.
- Getting back to regular workouts. (Yeah, I am that mental.)
- Getting to watch a Twins broadcast on television, and not just the day games.

Two weeks...

2007-07-14T21:06:00.001+02:00

... since I last wrote and until I leave for the States (well, a little more than two weeks left). It is pretty crazy that I have been here for six months and in a short time I will be back in the States and back at school. I am not really sure how I feel about it, but I am sure that you will find out when I do.

Things are winding down. I am in the midst of my two week study break from work. I had my Finite Elemente Methoden exam on Thursday. I will just have to say that I do not want to talk about it. Yes. It was that bad. I will be ecstatic if I managed to pull off a three on that one. (A three is sort of equivalent to a C in the States. Top is a 1.0.) The hope is that Flugmedizin will go a little better.

I was in München last weekend. It was a lot of fun- driving on the Autobahn at 240 km/h. (You can do the math if you want to know what that is in mph.) And that was just getting there. Photos from our visit to the Olympic Park can be found in the München link. It does not seem like I took any other photos. But most of those were at Biergartens anyway. Funny story: We had just arrived at our hostel and were on our way out again when I saw this guy who sort of looked familiar and was giving me a funny look. Turns out that some of the other Purdue engineers in the country, who are studying at Karlsruhe, were visiting Berlin at the same time that I was, and we were staying in the same hostel. Pretty coincidental.

Next weekend I am going up to Berlin (yes, again), but this time I will be heading out to Potsdam on Saturday and then probably the Zoo on Sunday. I am looking forward to it. And I will be sure to post an absolute ton of pictures. I love Potsdam and Sansouci is one of the most gorgeous parks that I have ever seen.

As well as the München photographs, I have posted the pictures from the Staffelrudern in Hamburg. I have also added to the album called Nature. I took pictures on the way to the Thune (as far as I can tell, think the fish) boathouse am Mittlandkanal, as well as the boathouse and Kanal itself. (More water and boats. Believe it.)

More pictures

2007-07-01T22:33:00.000+02:00

Sorry, I have been neglectful again. Things are crazy busy. But, I have taken the time to finally upload photos from the Ostsee camping trip (as usual, accessible by the link on the left). And, if you are at all familiar with my photography style, you will be surprised to find out that there are actually people in these pictures.

I was in Hamburg for the Staffelrudern yesterday. That was cool. I will eventually get those photos uploaded as well.

But hopefully these will keep you occupied until I can sit down and actually write something.

Finally France

2007-06-17T17:50:00.000+02:00

OK, I am finally getting to tell you all about my visit to Paris a couple weeks ago. Overall it was quite interesting to be in Paris, the city much proclaimed by many. I have to say that I was not particularly impressed. I do not know why that is. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that I do not really speak the language, or because so many people told me that they did not really like Paris Or perhaps it is because I do not have as much of a connection with Paris as I do with, say, London, New York City and Berlin. The Once and Future Flatmate said that she was not surprised since the two of us ‘tend toward the Anglophilic side, and you can’t love both France and holly old England, can you?’ As true as that might be, it would have been nicer to have liked the city a little better. Oh well, you cannot like every city you meet, even if it is in Europe.

Other than that, Betsy and I are quite lazy when it comes to being tourists. We did all of the requisite Paris tourism things: Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Louvre, Champs Élysées, Arc de Triomphe, the Tuileries. I have to say that Notre Dame was quite cool, I had no idea that it was on a little island bit in the middle of the Seine. The river– surprise, surprise– was the highlight of the trip for me. We spent quite a while walking along the Seine, and it was quite nice.

One amusing thing is that in Place de la Bastille there is a restaurant named Indiana. Of course I took pictures of it. The pictures, by the way, are now uploaded and can be accessed by the link call ‘Paris’ to the left. I may or may not ever get around to annotating the pictures, but, if you ask me, most of them are pretty explanatory. Either you will recognise the landmark; or if it is a gardeny area (and by gardeny, I mean tan gravel – probably another reason why I was not too enchanted with Paris was the lack of a nice green garden to sit on, except at the Tower), it is probably the Tuileries; and if it is a body of water, it is the Seine. Another note about the pictures, if you bother looking at them, you can see that I was up to my usually trying to be artsy antics. Sorry in advance. I also seem to have been quite taken with the Tour d’Eiffel, despite that fact that it is really quite ugly.

There is not much else to tell about our weekend in Paris. As I said, we are sort of on the lazy side. Keep an eye out for the next post, whose subject will be the week before last, while I was on holiday while my mother was here.

Sometimes you wonder what people were thinking.

2007-06-16T18:37:00.001+02:00

Then again, sometimes you really, really, really do not want to know. At all. I know I said that I would start with France, but do you remember hearing about that American tourist who decided to go for a walk in Nürnberg without any clothes on? He claimed that he thought that Germans did that all the time. At the time I wondered where this guy had gotten that crazy idea. Well, maybe he had talked with the guy that was seen this afternoon walking along the Mittland Kanal northwest of Wenden-Braunschweig. He was not wearing a stitch of clothing. Luckily he was on the opposite side of the Kanal from where three guys and I were rowing. The boys, of course, thought that it was hilarious. And I, naturally, thought that I am always the lucky one. (Read: Oh my God, I think I have been scared for life... again.)

Two weeks later...

2007-06-14T14:08:00.000+02:00

Yes, It has been two weeks since I last posted. Sorry to the very small un-named number of you that rely on this site to pass your boredom (though I really am not sure how this blog qualifies for boredom alleviation- more like boredom induction) while at various activities (read: work). It has been a busy couple of weeks, and I promise to start bringing this site up to date. For a quick overview of the things that I will be updating you on: Paris, Mother's visit, second trip to Berlin and a ton of new (and old) pictures that I have not gotten around to putting up online yet. So, be patient for just a few more days, and this weekend (which is free for once) you will get your fix of my larks on the continent.

Am Ende der Maifeiertage

2007-05-28T14:44:00.000+02:00

Today is the last of the Maifeiertage (May – mostly Easter-related – holidays). Since the first of May, there have been three holidays: Maifest, Himmelfahrt, and Pfingsten (May Day, Ascension, and Pentecost). Since Maifest and Himmelfahrt occurred on a Tuesday and a Thursday, respectively, they also included Brücketage – bridge days between the weekend and the holiday, that, while not officially off, most everyone took off anyway. So, in summary, the month of May had two four-day weekends and one three-day weekend.

Since this is the last official day off in a while, I figure I should stop procrastinating (by now you should know that this is one of my more prominent qualities) and really say something of substance on this forum, instead of the random bits of fluff that I have been posting lately – all of those holidays are hard work, and do not lead to a lot of free time for extensive blogging. Speaking of which, I will eventually get around to uploading the pictures that were taken at Maifest of the burning man, etc, and other random pictures that have been taken, most notably, at the Autostadt in Wolfsburg, where I went on the last holiday weekend. I also hope to get some pictures of the Bootshäuser (Boathauses) and around the city at some point, but it had been scattered thunderstormy for the last couple weeks, so I never get around to getting out to do it…

Just to bring you up to speed on things here: I have just about two months left before I head back to the States. I am just about done with my main project for work, and have a large internal report to look forward to writing in the next month in a half. Crew is going crewingly, last week we were able to get out in an eight and it felt really good to be sweeping again after months of scull (there might still be hope that I will not lose my newly found stroke from last semester). This week is Excursionswoche (Excursions week), hence there is no class and I am off to Paris on Wednesday and then my mother will be coming in on Monday for a week. (I have twenty Urlaubstage – (paid) holiday days – I might as well use them.) Then I am back to the grind, finishing up the last bits of things that need to be done before I leave.

Better than a Ham Sandwich

2007-05-20T16:37:00.000+02:00

If any of you are familiar with my novice coach's favourite sentence 'A ham sandwich could row that seat better than you.' (He had some other favourites, but they were not sentences, nor repeatable.) Then you might be interested to know that a Ham Sandwich is running as a write in canidate for Prince William County (Virginia) Commonwealth Attorney. Saying that Hamilton 'Ham' Sandwich, Esq. 'will perform with the same skill and tenacity as the current office holder, and best of all is incapable of engaging in personal vendettas against political enemies.'

Pachelbel

2007-05-19T22:09:00.000+02:00

Here is a fabulous rant on Pachelbel's Canon on YouTube.

PS: You would think that I would post more with this four day weekend. Oh well, maybe I will get around to writing something tomorrow.

Boiler Up!

2007-05-13T16:21:00.000+02:00

CONGRATULATIONS!!!

To the Purdue University Crew Team, for an outstanding preformance at the Dad Vail's Regatta this year! We swept the Varsity Eight Races, and the WJV boat got bronze in their race! I wish I could have been there in person, instead I was here in Deutschland following the results getting posted on the web. Here is an article on row2k.

This is a Technical University you say?

2007-05-13T16:16:00.000+02:00

If you are ever wondering what kind of university you have found yourself at, the easiest way to figure it out is to go to the nearest wall with flyers posted on it, and look for something similar to this:

No matter where you are, what country or language you speak, there is one thing that is ubiquitous when a bunch of geeks are in close proximity to each other.

One perspective...

2007-05-06T17:31:00.000+02:00

The following excerpt was taken from an article in Slate about an obscure correlation between presidential popularity and the strength of the dollar (both of which, at the moment, are quite weak):

"The dollar today may buy fewer BMWs and Prada shoes than it did in 2002,
but it buys about the same amount of Chinese-made microwaves, T-shirts, and
toys. And yes, Americans who suddenly find travel to Europe prohibitively
expensive might be expected to come home enraged. But most of these
travelers already hated Bush. An August 2004 poll showed that voters with passports preferred John Kerry to Bush by a whopping 23-point margin."

This is another illustration of something that I have noticed for quite a while, and since living in Europe, I have found even more striking: the people more likely to travel abroad are the ones who are the most dissatisfied with America-- be it politics, culture or whatever. You will very rarely find your stereotypical American living in Europe, for any amount of time. Some of them might do a little travelling, but they are still more likely to stay at home. Which is one reason why it is so sad that they are the American stereotype. But, as with all stereotypes, they are the ones that stick out and, hence, are the one that are noticed as opposed to their quiet, respectful, culturally oriented counterparts. All of the Americans that I have met, who are living in Europe, lean strongly to the left and are just as appalled at the state of American politics and foreign policy as the majority of Europe.

In my opinion, this can all be traced to the fact that the people who choose to live abroad are more open to foreign cultures and people, and are not impressed with themselves in the world as American citizens, but find more value in being citizens of the world. Which leads to Europeans saying (as one of my colleagues has complained) that they never get any real Americans, just the ones who do not act like how a lot of Europeans think that Americans should act.

Informationsaufnahmemöglichkeit

2007-05-05T21:11:00.000+02:00

The above is a word taken from my Flugmedizinvorlesung (Flight Medicine lecture), and really, in the scheme of things, it is not that long at all. One thing that you must know about Germans, is that they love to make up words. It is quite acceptable German to stick together a bunch of words and make a new word out of them. This is so de rigueur, that they have their own word for ‘made-up words’: das Kunstwort, which itself is a compound word of Kunst ‘art’ and Wort ‘word’. That direct translations just about sums up about how Germans think of making up words: To them, it is an art form.

In case you are wondering, the title word is made up of Information ‘information’, Aufnahme ‘reception’ and Möglichkeit ‘possibility/potential’, which renders it as being a really fancy way of saying the possibility of receiving information. This word could have been taken farther, as the phrase that it came from was Informationsaufnahmemöglichkeit des Menschen ‘the potential for receiving information of people’ when it could easily have been Menschensinformationsaufnahmemöglichkeit ‘the human potential for the reception of information’. All of that, packed into one word. Ah, the power of Deutsch.

PS: Today is Cinco de Mayo (thin’ko day My’o, as opposed to sink’o day Mayo, since I am learning Spanish from a Spaniard and not a Mexican… though it is a Mexican holiday…) and Derby Day (der’by day, as opposed to dar’by day, but, since the Queen is visiting, the latter might be acceptable... though it is Kentucky...).

Addendum

2007-04-30T17:06:00.000+02:00

Joe Mauer: Hot catcher or hottest catcher?

I had to share this with all of you. Speaking of the Chairman, did I ever tell you about the time that Joe Mauer dated this a girl on my swim team? Let's just say that his taste in females was not too great then, and it does not seem like it has improved since....

Walpurgisnacht, Hexennacht, Maifest and Beltane

2007-04-30T16:51:00.000+02:00

I have finally gotten around to writing this post, which has been rattling around in my brain for a few days. One of the reasons why I am finally getting around to posting it is because I am procrastinating studying for Español and Flugmedizin. But, since I have had a four day weekend, which continues tomorrow, I am not too worried about having time in which to study.

Reason for the four day weekend: Today is 30 April, which means tomorrow is 1 May, which means that tonight is Walpurgisnacht (the Night of the Witches) and tomorrow is Maifest. This also means that tomorrow is German Labour Day, which means NO WORK. And since no one goes to work tomorrow, no one goes into work today. Which, unfortunately for hungry students short on time, also included the main Mensa (cafeteria). There is a decent history of Hexennacht here, but, in summary, the witches are supposed to be meeting on the Brocken (the highest mountain in the Harz) and do whatever it is that they do. The most notable thing about this is that the Brocken is not very far from here and Braunschweig is the closest larger city. So this is a fairly big deal here. My student residence has a huge Maifest party, so I am probably not going to get too much sleep tonight (whether I go to the party, or not).

Of course, if you had not made the connection, Walpurgisnacht is named after the saint Walpurga (there is a good Anglo-Saxon name for you) and it is, incidently, also the name for the first section of Goethe’s Faust. Which (the saint, not Faust) also leads to the fact that it is a catholicised version of a old pagan festival, known as Beltane in the Celtic world (and lot of other things elsewhere) and symbolises the final coming of spring and the triumphing of light over dark (as opposed to Samhain (Hallowe’en) which is the beginning of winter, where darkness over comes the light).

But, what is really comes down to, is a built-in excuse for the Germans to have a huge party and not go to work for a couple days to recover from said party.

In other news, as there always seems to be some: everything is coming along smoothly, class is class and work is work and crew is crew. One thing of note is that I have decided to expand my blogging, and, once I am back in the States, I hope to continue this blogging thing. So, in preparation for that, I have made another blog by the name of Fifth Dimension Tesseract, which you can find a link to here. The first entry at that site explains a little bit of my goals for that blog, so you can go there and read it, if you would like. If you have any other ideas for topics on the blog or anything else, let me know.

In sporting news: After having a terrible week last week, the Twin’s bats came alive and they took two games out of three in Detroit. Hopefully they will keep up the good work after their off day today.

And you are lucky, oder? I managed to keep today’s post to just over five hundred words, instead of over one thousand as I have been recently.

When U was spelled V, how could they tell the difference between U and V?

2007-04-23T21:34:00.000+02:00

I am sure that you all have been wondering the exact same thing. If you have any theories, feel free to share.

As you are all aware, I am sure, this last week has been a rough one. As I have said before, events like these show us how connected we are. It also reminds us to keep our friends and family close, and when you are far away from both, it makes it double difficult to deal with some of the reactions; especially when the media is chock-a-block with coverage so you cannot get away. As the days progress, I find that I am listening to music a lot more than I had been previously and I only listen to a little bit of the news before I have to turn it off. And that is just the news magazines. I have not been able to listen to any of the interview/talk shows on NPR at all.

While I was off in emotional numbness, many things have been going on here, so I figure I will bring you up to speed:

Crew has started with a bang, rowing five days of the week. This is very exciting, since it gets me out of the flat more in the evening. (Though this also means that I am not quite as likely to sit down and write a post, do not worry, I will work on it… not that I have ever really been that regular.) The Twins managed to sweep the Mariners and then go down to Kansas City and loose the series to the team that is pretty close to an automatic last in the division. I am now taking beginning Spanish as well as Flugmedizin (roughly, flight medicine, but you knew that, right?).

The circumstances of my taking Flight Medicine is a little round about. I do not know if I had vented any of my frustration at my academic advisor at Purdue to you, but to sum it up, he ignored me for two months until I got my mother to call him. It all comes down to the fact that I had been trying to figure out if I needed to take any classes while I was here for two (TWO!) months. And he never replied. Then, after I ‘pulled out the big guns’ (direct quote from Prof Wms.) and finally broke the stalemate, he tells me that it would be nice if I did take one class here. I nearly lost it. I had been trying to get this information out of him for two months and he finally tells me a week and a half after the semester starts. Let us just suffice to say that I was royally teed (speaking of royalty, did anyone not hear that Prince William and Miss Kate Middleton broke it off and then about Willie’s boozing spree? If so, you win a prize for being able to pick you media outlets a lot better than I…). Anyway. This news led me to frantically figure out what class I should take (that had been another issue, nothing was really fitting), which led me to discuss it with my ‘overseer’ at work, which led us to finding a little class called Luft- und Raumfahrtmedizin—did I mention that we found this class at 1:30 Friday afternoon…when the class started at 2:05? And I was at the airport? Well, let’s just say that that was the quickest bike ride to campus that I have even pulled off. The normally thirty minute route took me less than twenty. All of the rushing turned out to be not needed, since it ends up that the class will actually start at 2:30 (and go until 5:30—long time for German listening). And that is how I came to take Flight Medicine, which, luckily for me, only started last Friday (a week after other classes) because it only meets every other week, because it is taught by a doctor who works for Lufthansa, and has to come down to Braunschweig special to teach the course. So I did not miss any class, and it only meets twice a month.

Now that you have heard my rant about Prof Wms., what else is there that I can relate to you? Mario moves to Berlin this week. And if he does not get his act together he is going to leave the things I borrowed from him when Dad was here here. His sleeping bag is going to do him a lot of good on my book shelf. Spring is really here. The wild flowers and later flowering bushes are popping up everywhere. Including the dandelions. Hopefully I will be able to get out and take some pictures of the lovely greenery this weekend.

I am sure that you do not want to read any more of my rambling at the moment, so I will leave you with the Worldwide (but really Europe-wide) Security Status Report:

The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have raised their security level from ‘Miffed’ to ‘Peeved’. Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to ‘Irritated’ or even ‘A Bit Cross’. Londoners have not been ‘A Bit Cross’ since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been re-categorized from ‘Tiresome’ to ‘A Bloody Nuisance’. The last time the British issued ‘A Bloody Nuisance’ warning level was during the great fire of 1666.

Also, the French government announced yesterday that it has raised its terror alert level from ‘Run’ to ‘Hide’. The only two higher levels in France are ‘Surrender’ and ‘Collaborate’. The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France’s white flag factory, effectively paralyzing the country’s military capability.

It is not only the English and the French that are on a heightened level of alert. Italy has increased the alert level from ‘Shout Loudly and Excitedly’ to ‘Elaborate Military Posturing’. Two more levels remain: ‘Ineffective Combat Operations’ and ‘Change Sides’.

The Germans have also increased their alert state from ‘Disdainful Arrogance’ to ‘Dress in Uniform and Since Marching Songs’. They also have two higher levels: ‘Invade a Neighbor’ and ‘Lose’.

Belgians, on the other hand, are all on holiday as usual, and the only threat they are worried about is NATO pulling out of Brussels.

The Spanish are all excited to see their new submarines ready to deploy. These beautifully designed sibs have glass bottoms so the new Spanish navy can get a really good look at the old Spanish navy.

It is not terribly charitable and not really even all that true (even stereotypically) to some of the countries that it mocks. However, the first bit and the last two bits just about make up for the other bits. To fully disclose, I found this lying about the printer room at work (incidentally, also my office) and it was, in my opinion, obviously written by an American, or some one quite Americally oriented. And that is not just because the spellings are American and not British.

Another Update....

2007-04-19T20:47:00.000+02:00

I found out today in an email from the Purdue Crew President, that one of the victims at Virginia Tech, Kevin Granata, was not only an alumnus of Purdue, as I said on Tuesday, but he was also an alumnus of the Purdue Crew team... Best wishes to all of the families and people more directly connected to the massacre than I, but this just goes to show how closely this world is intertwined. Also, good luck to both the Va Tech crews and Purdue crews this weekend at SIRA's. Boilers: Kick some major SIRA's butt. BOILER UP!

Something to Lighten the Mood a Bit...

2007-04-18T22:18:00.000+02:00

I found this online, much like all the others of its kind, but still quite amusing.

You've studied abroad in Germany if:

1. You have sorted your garbage into at least 3 garbage cans and you know the difference (or should know the difference) between "Gelbe Säcke" and "Restmüll".
2. You have ever drank: a Maß, Meter or Stiefel of beer.
3. You have ever had or not had "lust" to do something.
4. You get excited that CNN is in English.
5. You know what a Döner is, and you've eaten more than one in the same week from a different "Imbiss" each time.
6. You've been to Oktoberfest.
7. You've worried before about catching "the last Strassenbahn" home.
8. You've ever been stressed out at the grocery store while checking out, and have noted that you will never take "baggers" for granted ever again.
9. You've enjoyed the ablility to walk down the street/ride the strassenbahn/hang out in public
drinking a beer or other alcoholic beverage.
10. You've watched the Simpsons in German and hated it.
11. You've ordered more than one Kugel of Eis a day...everyday...
12. You've laughed at someone trying to say "squirrel".
13. You know what a "Klo" is and you've gone "auf" one.
14. You know what the "German Stare" is.
15. You know what DB stands for.
16. You've ever explained to someone what a "pinata" is.
17. You've ever visited the local gas station on a Sunday because it's the only thing open.
18.You know the difference between Milka and Ritter Sport.
19. You know what a WG is, and have lived in one.
20. You've ever been totally confused on how to open any and all windows/doors/locks.

Sad, but pretty accurate. I will leave it to your imagination to decide which of these has befallen me...

Update:

2007-04-17T22:26:00.000+02:00

This tragidy comes even closer to home than I previously indicated: Two of the professors who were killed were graduates of Purdue.

Gun control, or not to gun control? That is the question.

2007-04-17T22:07:00.000+02:00

As you can probably surmise, I am writing this post in response to the recent happenings at Virginia Tech. It is always hard to come to terms with the facts of life when things like this happen, and I have found it harder now that I am away from my friends and family and have no close friends here in whom to confide.

The massacre at Va Tech comes even more close to home, since I have several connections to the school (colleague studied there, know a couple kids who currently study there, crazy novice men’s coach from freshmen year went there….). Even more disturbing—to me at least, I have no idea if there is any significance to it. I will leave that to the FBI—is that (from what I can tell from the news coverage from both here and in the States) the largest group of students killed were in that class room in Norris Hall (an engineering building that seems to have housed a part of the School of Mechanical Engineering that did more Aerospace related work) and those students were in their German class.

Being a very rational type of person (there is a reason that I ended up in engineering), I know that these facts are probably not related, just the victims of wrong place wrong time, but there must be a reason why that particular building and room were targeted, since human beings, even mental ones, can never be completely random. And I know that it is just pure happenstance that I have so many random connections with the event.

What I find even more inconceivable (Inconceivable!), is that the Bush administration still thinks that there is no need for stricter regulations on fire arms. Yes, I know the circular argument of: well, the bad guys have guns so I need to have a gun also, so I can protect myself. There is also the thought that if one of the other students in the class had a weapon on them then they could have stopped the rampage. This thought, however, is almost scarier than what happened yesterday (and at Columbine and at Red Lake and at Austin and too many other places in what seems to be increasing frequency). I would definitely not feel safer if the random kid sitting next to me in class was carrying.

In my opinion, it would just escalate until no one felt safe unless they are carrying a weapon and that would be a very, very, very scary world in which to live.

I do not have any specific statistics or what-not to cite, and I do not really feel like doing any intensive research on the subject at the moment (yeah, yeah, how can you expect people to believe what you say, if you do not back it up with substantiated information, well, tough, this is basically a personal blog, so I can come up with unsubstantiated arguments when I feel like it) but I would certainly feel safer in a country with tighter gun control, and I believe that there is some evidence somewhere to back this up: that in places with tighter control on guns, there is less gun violence. And in a strictly analytical-causal approach, that makes perfect sense; fewer guns = less gun violence.

Those are my not carefully edited and randomly organised thoughts stemming from yesterday’s incidences. On a happier note: I changed the tire on my bike by myself; I am taking Spanish twice a week, we will see how that goes; and crew goes into full time tomorrow.

Finally!

2007-04-15T14:05:00.000+02:00

I have finally posted the London pictures. I did not take a whole lot, due to the real dislike of looking like a tourist. But those that I took are up now. As is typical, the one day that I really took a lot of pictures it was cloudy. Luckily though, the only cloudy day of all eight.

That, my friend, is a Teapot.

2007-04-11T22:10:00.000+02:00

So, if you could not guess by this post, I am back in Deutschland. I had an absolutely AMAZING week in London and I think that the best way to tell you about it is to go day by day:

MONDAY: While planning for this trip I kept having to remind myself that a trip to this foreign country did not involve so much pre-planning, since every thing is in English in England—go figure—meaning I would have no trouble figuring things out. On the flight over, at the airport, on the train and the tube I got this little jolt when it struck me anew that the advertisements were in English and most of the people around me were speaking English. Frankly, it was a really weird feeling to feel so astonished that I could understand what people were saying in my native language.

TUESDAY: Did the whole tourist thing—London Eye (I did not go on it), Parliament, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Saint Margaret’s, Harrod’s (I bought some tea—for some reason I felt sort of bad free loading on their amazing interior), Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, Wellington Square. Very touristy—most of my pictures are from this day (see the link to the left). If it was within walking distance of the south bank of the Thames, we hit it. The only day that it was cloudy and mizzling—typical for the day that I am taking pictures.

WEDNESDAY: While Shana had coffee with some friends, I spent most of the day at the Victoria and Albert Museum. To all of you who said that I should go there if no where else, were right. It is an amazing museum, however I was not as impressed with the clothing exhibition as I thought I would be and some of the galleries I would have like to see best were closed. (They seem to be in the middle of an exhibit remodelling.) After being museumed out (I was at the V&A from 11:30 until sometime after three), I got a picnic lunch and went and sat in and wandered around Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. I also got a start on the sun burn that I am currently sporting.

THURSDAY: Another great day in a week of great days. Shana and I went out to Notting Hill and wandered around. Man, those are some amazing houses. We also walked down Portobello Road. And before you ask, yes, I had the song from Bed Knobs and Broom Sticks stuck in my head for most of the afternoon. Such is the way my brain likes to work. After Notting Hill, we made our way down to Covent Garden. From there we wandered down through Trafalgar Square and passed Whitehall on our way back to the River, where we wandered down in the opposite direction from Tuesday and saw the Globe Theatre, the Millennium Bridge and Saint Paul’s Cathedral. After that wander we went to a play. It is called Landscape with Weapons and the main reason we went to it was because one of Shana’s favourite characters from a show called Green Wing (a British medical comedy-drama a la Scrubs) was in it. And, of course, because when you are in London, you just must see a show. As it turned out, it was the premiere and the play was quite interesting—it is about a scientist’s moral dilemma in the development of technologies that could be used as a WMD: Quite interesting to me, since the scientist was an engineer working on swarming UAV’s (unmanned aerial vehicles). Hence, he worked in the aerospace/defence sector. Hmmm, what am I currently attempting to get a degree in?

FRIDAY: Friday was concentrated shopping day. We went to Oxford Street and made our way down that street. After some partially successful shopping (I bought the aforementioned teapot as well as some books—Victoria’s Wars, Ireland Awakening- sequel to Dublin, and The Interpretation of Murder. I will let you know what I think of them as I read) , but did not see any clothes along what I was looking for), we headed down to Tower Hill to the last of the major attractions that we had not hit: the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. Those are two quite imposing structures. It was also Shana’s last day in London. This was very sad, but since she is in medical school, it is probably good that she went home to revise for her exams.

I will pause in my daily recounting here to say that it was really, really great to see Shana again. I had not seen her since the last time I went to Saint Paul (i.e.: A criminally long time ago.) We stayed at Shana’s friend, Alison’s, flat on the east side of London. The tube station that we used was Bromley-by-Bow which manages to remind of both Lady Catherine de Burgh and one of my favourite nursery rhymes, Oranges and Lemons* . After Shana left on Friday night, Alison was kind enough to let me continue to sleep on her couch, since I had three more days left in the city.

SATURDAY: Really the most amazing day, and great timing on my part. From the first time I got on the Tube, I noticed that they were advertising The Boat Race. After inquiring as to what that was, I found out that this was none other than the boat race; otherwise known to Americans as the great duel of the crews from Cambridge and Oxford. I cannot even begin to explain how overjoyed I was when I realised that I was going to be in town for the event. So, I spent all of Saturday down in Putney on the banks of the Thames working on my sunburn and watching one of, if not the, most historic races in the history of sport. Let me tell you, the number of people who where on the banks of the river was amazing (there are a couple pictures of across from where I was sitting to illustrate this, and I was only at about half way… not the starting line or the finish). Granted most of them where there for the party and I heard one group on the Tube back say that they had managed to miss all of the race, but it was still amazing to see that many people there. The whole thing was also broadcast over the radio and television all over the world. Evidently it was aired for the first time this year live in the States on ESPN. Way to go crew. I think we owe a lot of that to the amazing performance of the men’s national squad at the Olympics in 2004. (By the way, I have I ever mentioned that I have also met the US Men’s Olympic Eight? Yeah, yeah, you know how much I like to brag.) Anyway, in case you are curious, Cambridge won both the second boat race as well as The Boat Race. Which is good, since they were heavily (both literally and figuratively) favoured and Oxford has won the last two years.

SUNDAY: And if anything could top off Saturday, which I do not think anything can, my activities on Sunday come pretty close: I went to a couple Easter services at Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Which, I have to tell you, is an amazing structure. After church, I continued my sunburned ways by sitting along the river and reading and snoozing.

MONDAY: I took my last day in London slow. I did not have anything planned, so I slept in, watched a TV Agatha Christie movie, purchased provisions for my bivouac at Stansted Airport, and then made my way to Green Park (near Buckingham Palace) to further acquaint myself with London’s many and beautiful parks and read and snooze. A nice lazy day, and since I hate feeling like and looking like a tourist, it suited me just fine.

MONDAY NIGHT/TUESDAY: My journey back to Braunschweig started at ten o’clock Monday night, since my flight left too early for me to get to using the Tube, and the last train to the Airport left at 22:55. I spent a not too sleep-filled night on the floor at the Stansted Airport with at least hundreds of other people. I was quite amazed at how many people were there so late. But it did put me in mind of the article on NPR last year on young people staying overnight at London’s airports because the cheap flights went out early in the morning. Now why does that sound familiar? I got back with no snags, and was way too tired to make it into work like I had been planning. So I spent all of yesterday catching up on my blog reading and on everything that was going on while I was in Happyland.

To summarise my first England experience: AMAZING. And I am trying to figure out the way to get back the fastest and I am thinking of switching to banking or law, since there are not too many engineering firms in the city…. Well, I can dream, at least.
* This is the closest I could find to the rhyme as I know it. In the version I am familiar with the last lines read: 'Here comes a copper to put you to bed, Here comes a chopper to chop of your head'. Here and here are a good history and alternate versions, but, again, not quite the same words as I know.

Sport

2007-04-01T12:39:00.000+02:00

BBC Five is amazing. They do live sport commentary for the Swimming World Championships—on the radio. It is not the entire meet, but they come in for the finals of some of the more well known swimmers; i.e. Michael Phelps’ 400m IM race (which he won, while I am writing this post, his seventh gold medal—he was trying for eight, but his 4x100m FR was DQ’ed in prelims due to a false start by Ian Crocker—and broke yet another world record; his fourth individual and fifth over all for the Championships). The only down point that I have found is that they do not stream the EPL matches, due to stupid broadcasting contracts. In other swimming news, Ian Thorpe has denied all allegations of doping after a sample that he gave before he retired last year was found to contain high levels of testosterone (a similar situation and possibly the same sort of test, it seems, as the Floyd Landis debacle at last year’s Tour de France). From the reports and the news conferences, Mr. Thorpe is very angry about the leaking of the test results to the press before the inquiries were finish. Understandable I think, because Ian Thorpe has always been an advocate for clean racing, and it is truly unimaginable that Mr. Thorpe would have cheated.

In other sport news: Today it Opening Day! The Twin’s season opener, however, is on Tuesday, when they play the Baltimore Orioles. We (or you, since I will not see it) will see Carlos Santana, Boof ‘because I like Boof better than John’ Bonser, and Ramon Ortiz. That leaves the rockiest part of the rotation: Sidney Ponson, our amazing Aruban tank, and Carlos Silva. I will not say anything about Silva, but if you really want to know feel free to read all about the general feelings on him here—scroll down to the posts from Thursday and Friday (29 and 30 March). Despite our shaky pitching rotation, the field starters are looking decent. The squad is strong at catcher and first base, of course, with hometown, AL Batting Champion Joe Mauer and his pal and roommate, AL MVP Justin Morneau. The rest of the infield is filled out by Luis Castillo at second, Nick ‘Piranha’ Punto at third, and Jason Bartlett at short—let’s hope that the beginning of this season goes better for Jason than the beginning of last years. The outfield is not horribly spectacular but it is solid: Rondell White in left, Torii Hunter in centre, and Michael Cuddyer in right. To fill out the twenty five man roster are Jason Kubel and Jeff Cirillo as DH options, Mike Redmond and Chris Heintz backing up catcher (third string catcher to keep Joe rested with that stress reaction in his leg), Luis Rodriguez for infield backup, filling out the Jason-trifecta is Jason Tyner backing up the outfield. The bull pen is more than solid, per usual, and is as follows: Joe Nathan, Jaun Rincon, Jesse Crain, Dennys Reyes, sidewinder Pat Neshek, and Matt Guerrier (you can choose how to pronounce that one—I prefer the French version).

In my own analysis of the roster, I have found that the Twins’ Opening Day twenty five includes ten men with a first name starting with J. This number becomes eleven if we count that Boof was born John. My own personal hopes are that Silva continues his crap from Spring Training, and that the Twins’ management quickly sees this and brings up Matt Garza, who’s only reason for not making the starting rotation, is that he pitched better this spring than three of the starting five, and Gardy wants to wait and see which will be the worst. Let’s hope for a speedy conclusion to the pitching rotation woes.

In other news, I am debating on whether or not to get MLB Radio, so I can listen to the games—most likely archived, since most of the time they will be playing while I am sleeping. I think that I might get it when I get back from holiday, since they have a five day trial period and there is no point being on that trial when I cannot listen anyway.

I am also disappointed that Florida won last night. Hence, Ohio State better do better in the basketball championship against Florida than they did in the football championship. It would be completely unbearable if Florida 1) managed the first repeat since Duke in 1991 and 2) they were champions in both football and basketball in the same season. In women’s Final Four action, an excellent match up for my family: North Carolina versus Tennessee.

I will be leaving for a week in London tomorrow afternoon. I will not be posting while I am there, and I do not know if I will write any posts to post when I return, but I will definitely be taking a ton of pictures (which is why my computer is probably coming—thought I have not decided on that front yet) which I will upload on my return next week. Until then, happy Holy Week and Easter.

PS: I could not pass up adding this image of Michael Phelps in an underwear commercial for some sort of Speedo-made underwear. My first thought on seeing this picture was: 'Speedo makes underwear?'

PPS: Have I mentioned that I had a long conversation with Michael Phelps and Klete Keller when Purdue hosted the US Open Swimming Championships last year and that we ended up going out to one of the local bars after the meet? Yeah, went out with some of the best swimmers in the world. We hung out until the wee hours of the morning. I do not know if I will ever be able to best that experience. My co-lifeguard Aprile Kasperles can corroborate this account, as she was with me when the guys asked, however, since she is not twenty-one, she was unable to accompany us.

Schloß und Schlauch

2007-03-29T22:37:00.000+02:00

The opening of the Schloß-Arkaden in Braunschweig has been all of the talk at work. One colleague actually went this morning before work (the Grand Opening was a six this morning), he was able to give us his opinions during Kaffeepause. He was not particularly impressed, but, he grew up in Braunschweig and is very, very, touchy about everything that changes the landscape of the city (cityscape). Hence, he is predisposed towards prejudice.

The Schloß-Arkaden is a huge shopping mall, that has been built near the site of the old Braunschweiger Schloß of Heinrich der Löwe, which was destroyed during the War. The most exciting thing about the new Schloß is that it is an actual reproduction of the original structure, and uses some of the original stone, I think. Another key thing is that, in diverging from general German practice, the mall will be open all weekend. And by all, I mean all. As far as I can tell, the mall will be open from Friday all the way through until Sunday. This includes the night, which they have been advertising as Moonlight Shopping (yes, in English) since at least the beginning of February.

I will eventually get down to that part of town and take a picture for you, but I will wait for all of the fervour to die down. I was taking a bus that went by there yesterday (on the way to a basketball game, more on that later) and there was a huge amount of traffic and people in the area. *

The basketball game: It was the New Yorker Phantoms Braunschweig versus Ratiopharm Ulm and the reason I was there was that the International Office got free tickets.

The Braunschweig side has such a lovely name because one of the richest men in town is the owner of a quite successful clothing store name New Yorker. Let's just say that I do not think anyone (bar of the Dominatrix/Brothel/Goth set) would be caught dead in any of the outfits that I have seen advertised around town, but, after a little tooling around their website, I guess that I can say that the rest of their clothing seems be a little more main stream. Anyway, as you can guess, the Phantoms part of the name follows from that. The have an incredibly silly looking mascot, which is a guy dressed as a 'phantom': ie. in a black muscle-y outfit with a black cape and a white mask. I tried to find a picture, but I was unsuccessful in my attempt. I nearly died of laughter when I first saw him. Add that to the Phantom of the Opera music and the fact that Phantom was a memorable part of my senior year in high school (band trip to NYC, including seeing the musical on Broadway... not to brag or anything.) and I was dying.

Other than the hokey mascot, the game went well. At least, it did go well, until two minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, when Braunschweig was up by at least ten. We will just suffice to say that once we hit overtime, it was looking like an interesting mirror to the Tar Heel's loss to Georgetown on Sunday. Or so I hear, since I was not privileged to watch that particular game as noted in a previous post.

And now it is time for me to got to bed, since staying up late on the Internet is no way to kill my sleep deprivation-- the presence of which I am not sure of, since I get at least eight hours of sleep a night. (Yay flex time and nothing else to do with my life.) Hopefully tomorrow my bike will be fixed. (Yet another flat tire, this time the back one. So completely dead that I had to go and buy a new inner tube-- Schlauch auf Deutsch, that word has a nice roundness to it...) I had the tools and other necessities to fix it to-day (except for the colleague from whom I am borrowing the bicycle and the one who does the fixes), but I was too chicken to try to do it myself, since I have never taken the back tire off of a bike before, and, knowing my luck, I would have killed it. Forever. And, as old as it is, it does not deserve the fate that is me trying to fix things. I know what you are thinking: 'Isn't this girl majoring in engineering?'. Answer: 'Yes, but there is a reason why I did not choose mechanical, and remember: I am not fixing the aeroplanes and space ships, I am just designing them. And there are IT guys who can fix the computers.'

Countdown to London: Four days.

* Update 01.04.2007: Here is an artists rendition that I found online, the foreground being the Schloß and the hinter-part being the rest of the shopping mall.

How to make WET into WEST (other than adding an 'S')

2007-03-25T21:20:00.000+02:00

Spring has finally sprung here. Hopefully it will last. Along with it has come Summer Time (a much better name than Daylight Savings Time, if you ask me). So, for you edification, the following is a list of time differences between some key locations and me:

-Greenwich Mean Time (Universal Coordinated Time): +2 hours
-Purdue (Eastern Daylight Savings Time): +6 hours.
-Minnesota/Houston (Central Daylight Savings Time):+7 hours.
-Colorado (Mountain Daylight Savings Time): +8 hours.
-Arizona (Mountain Standard Time = Pacific Daylight Savings Time): +9 hours.
-Kuala Lumpur: -6 hours.

The other thing that I like about Summer Time is that it turns WET into WEST (Western European Time —> Western European Summer Time).

Also, I have finally gotten my pictures uploaded to a site where you can look at all of them at your pleasure: Lots of random shots of random things—typical me photography. In this case, it is probably a good thing I decided to be an engineer, instead of a professional photographer. Hopefully at least one or two of the pictures is good enough that your time was not wasted looking at them. Some of the pictures you have seen already (like the first half of the Nature album and most of the Braunschweig album), but many are new; including the Berlin album and the second half of the Nature album, pictures along the Oker which I took this afternoon.

No more streaming basketball for me since CBS only streams the first three rounds, which makes me sad, but is much better for my sleeping habits. Crazy Carolina game the other night—I was up until 05:15 at least they pulled it out and won. Florida is currently leading the Oregon Ducks. Hopefully this game is the reverse of their other ones (trailing until mid-second half and then picking up their play enough to win the game), and they lose. UNC plays Georgetown tonight. I am wearing my Carolina shirt in support.

Countdown to London: 9 days.

How to exit the building.

2007-03-23T18:37:00.000+01:00

This might not be the more in depth that I promised last time, but what can you do? I had a great long weekend with my father. He was here from Saturday afternoon until Wednesday morning. We spent Monday in Berlin. It was great fun. I will post some of the pictures I took sometime this weekend. Sunday and Tuesday we spent wandering around Braunschweig, including the Herzog-Anton-Ulrich Museum—the local art museum, which, if my memory serves me, is one of the oldest art museums in Europe and houses quite a few lovely paintings from the Dutch Masters period (1600’s to late 1700’s), including some Rembrandts. They also have a gallery with a huge amount of porcelain and other pottery objects. (Grandma and Grandpa: Fürstenberg porcelain in the Rococo style.)

Oh yes, happy belated Spring. The weather here decided to gift us with about six centimetres of snow and then cold, cold rain for the first two days of spring. However, the weather is looking gorgeous for the next week, getting back up into the fifties and sixties.

More travel updates: I have gotten in touch with my friend in Scotland, and she will be in London on Monday week, so I have booked a flight and will meet her there. (I am going to England! Finally!) I will stay for just over a week, which will include Easter Sunday; I am hoping that I will be able to go to my first Easter Service since going to university at one of the great Cathedrals. If any one has some suggestions about day trips out of the city, let me know.

There was just a knock on the door (quite unusual, since I have few visitors, and those that do come, I know are coming, and they generally call me before hand), and there stood a pizza delivery guy who was having some trouble exiting the building. There is a small trick to getting out; you have to turn the handle before you push the door and not just push like a normal door. Anyway, this guy could not figure it out and came around asking for help. I do not know if my door was the first he tried, or if he had gone down the other hall way, but I guess that is what I get for being one of the only people living on the ground floor.

I am looking forward to staying up basically all night to watch basketball. Carolina plays at three in the morning my time. I did not stay up last night to watch the games (had to go to work), but I am sort of sad that I did not, since the two South-bracket games were only won by one point and Kansas only bear Southern Illinois by three. Too bad the Vols lost. Oh well, better luck next time. Hopefully tonight’s games will prove to be just as good.

That is all I have to say for now, but I will post those pictures this weekend. Go Carolina!

Untitled

2007-03-18T22:23:00.000+01:00

It has been quite a while since I last wrote. This is mostly because it has been sort of crazy. So, I will give you a short recap:
-- New computer is now up and running with internet. I am really liking it. I am also more impressed with Windows Vista than I was expecting to be. Not liking Internet Explorer 7 as much though.
-- Posters arrived in the mail last weekend, while I was out rowing, and then the Post managed to loose the package until they finally found it on Friday.
-- Dad arrived yesterday, we had a great time in Braunschweig today, and we will spend the day in Berlin tomorrow.
-- Crewing three day a week until the semester starts after Easter.
-- Amazing weather last week, but it got typical German nasty (like it was when I first got here) yesterday. Just in time for Dad to get here. As I said, typical.
-- Carolina has been cruising through the bracket, with some great play.
-- Purdue has just lost in the second round, but they played a great game against Florida, and were ahead for most of the game, until they pulled a typical Purdue and lost it towards the end of the second half. Overall it was good game and will give the team something to build on for next year.
So, there is a recap of the last ten days or so. Sorry it was so short; things have not been particularly interesting. Later this week, I will sit down and write a little more in depth. I promise.

Water in Various Forms.

2007-03-05T22:40:00.000+01:00

It continues to rain here, but not as much as before. Instead of it raining all day, we get scattered rain showers. Shortly after I left work this afternoon, the sky opened up in a veritable deluge. Before I was out of the security gates, I was soaked and getting pelted with what felt like hail. (It probably was not hail, but there was a very, very heavy head wind, driving the rain into face.) If you remember from three sentences ago, I said that these where scattered showers, so, as I was being drowned, I also had sun glaring in my eyes. This made me think: sun, rain… rainbow? So, I stopped my bike and turned around. And, lo and behold, there was one of the most gorgeous full-arc, double rainbows that I have ever seen; a brilliant double rainbow against a dark cloudy sky. I wish that I had had my camera. But I did not. So you, and I, will have to do with my description of it.

And that was just the beginning of my adventure. I found out that the crew team here gets together a couple times a week for strength training and a little water time on the weekend. Strength training happens on Tuesdays, so I decided that I would check out the way to the boathouse. The greater Braunschweig area is laid out like a wheel (the main city of Braunschweig) with a bunch of spokes (the main roads) ending in, or following along, little Stadtteils (which the dictionary defines as quarters, like the French quarter of New Orleans, but I would say that they are more like satellites). Basically, they are little towns that function inside the city of Braunschweig. I live along one of the spokes, the airport is at the end of that spoke, and the boathouse, which is in Thune, is at the end of the next spoke counter-clockwise around the city centre. I thought that I had figured out a way to get from work to the boathouse, using one of the outer ring connexion roads. Unfortunately, the way I chose did not have a bike line, and I was not about to ride my bike on the edge of a narrow two lane road. So, I decided to turn around, and go the way I might take if I were coming from home, which cuts through some farm land/ wildlife preserve to the next spoke. I was able to find my way through a neighbourhood to the spoke, and started following it out of town. Unfortunately, at one point I continued following the main route (which curved to the port on the Kanal), instead of going straight, like I was supposed to. This was not a huge problem, I made it to my goal (after going quite out of my way—think taking one leg and the hypotenuse of a triangle, instead of taking the other leg—and heading through industrial/car sales area of the Hafen). From there (it has been an hour since I left work) I made my way home in less than thirty minutes, along the way I was supposed to have come in the first place. After all of this excitement, I decided that I will take the bus, at least in the evening, when it is likely to be dark, since the lamp on my bike has broken, again. The reason I did not just decide to take the bus in the first point is that the bus takes even longer to get from one point to the other, because you have to take one spoke down, take the street car, then get on another bus up the other spoke. But, since bus and streetcar riding is free, I will take that route when I go out there in the evening.

If you happened to miss the basic message in that long paragraph, I do not blame you. Here it is: CREW!! WATER!!

In case you really would like to know what I am doing around here, other than taking long bicycle tours of the northern section of the city and breaking electrical equipment, I will let you know that I went downtown on Saturday and bought some books. (I am quite excited: The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury, as you can probably tell, it is a Dan-Brown-esque religous-y thriller. Dublin by Edward Rutherford, when I got it, I thought that I had only read part of one of his other books (The Princes of Ireland), but, evidently this is actually the book of which I read the first couple chapters—same book, different name? Needles to say, I hope that I get a little farther this time. And, last but not least, Watching the English by Kate Fox. This is a book that I am very excited about, it is an amusing recount of a modern day anthropologic study on the English people—what make the English different from other groups of people.) I looked at some posters and decided that I was really not into any more Lord of the Rings poster, or any Pirates poster, and especially not any posters of nearly (mostly) naked women (if you have been into the room of any college aged male, you know what kind of poster I mean). That prompted me to go online that evening and find some quite excellent (and quite cheap for being shipped from Raleigh, North Carolina) posters of football players. With the help of the Once and Future Flatmate, I was able to pare it down to three posters: The Pride of England, depicting six of England’s best footballers; a poster of Michael Ballack, a German national who plays for Chelsea; and, an excellent poster comprising mostly of the bare torso of David Beckham. You did not seriously think that I would buy football posters with out getting one of Becks did you? Well, I almost did not, but, for nefarious purposes of our own, we decided that this one had to be purchased—it was also cheaper than a picture of Andy Roddick, Roger Federer, Tim Henman, or any of the rowing related posters. The online store (which touts itself as the largest poster store in the world) actually had a few Twins posters: of Corey Koskie, Joe Mays and A. J. Pierzynski—none of which actually played for the Twins for at least two or three seasons. No wonder they were on sale for about five bucks. (They also had a poster of Doug Mientkiewicz, but it was after he caught the last out of the winning game of the World Series for the Red Sox.) With all of this online ordering, I will let you know that both the posters and my new computer should be here by the end of the week, or early next week at the very latest.

Soapbox: Enterprise High School

2007-03-03T14:16:00.000+01:00

This has to do with the tornado at Enterprise High School in Alabama. I am really tired of hearing people say that it is the school's fault. Here is my opinion:

The school did exactly what any other school would do when it kept the students at the school. Every school policy that I have known, the school is more likely to keep students longer than send them home early when severe weather is threatened. This is due to many facts; working parents, transportation, etc. I agree completely with the school in its decision, because, in general, it probably was safer for the students to stay at the school. How were the administration supposed to know that the tornado will come right over their school? They had no possible way to know this. And how could they know that the storm would strike in such a way that would damage the structural integrity of the building? Again, they had no way to foresee this. As I heard one student say, on NPR, he probably would not have heeded the storm warnings if he had been at home. Hence, he was, in principle, safer at school than at home.

It is a tragic event, and I have strongest sympathies for the students that lived through it, for their families and the families of the eight who did not live through it, for the teachers, and for the entire town of Enterprise, Alabama, but the school administration should not be blamed for this catastrophic occurrence. If anyone needs to be blamed, blame the Jet Stream and the particular mixture of elements that made it possible for the violent storms of last week to take place.

"This, madame, is a faithful narrative of every event in which we have been concerned together..."

2007-02-27T20:16:00.000+01:00

The following is a faithful transcription of every thing that I wrote whilst I was without the use of my computer:

It is currently 21:25 on Friday, 23 February 2007. I am sitting at the large table in my room; with my back to my computer. I am writing this by hand. Do not worry, your eyes have not mislead you: I said by hand. The reason for this [as you already know, due to my earlier posting] aberration is that my computer finally lost its battle with terminal hard drive warping, brought on by a dysfunctional cooling system thanks to the ineptitude of Dell. For the record: Because of this, I am never going to purchase a Dell again. (On a side note, a song by Herbert Grönemeyer, very popular German crooner, that we had to sing in German class in high school is currently playing on the radio.)

As I was saying: Never again Dell. This was a great machine, and because of business decisions made by Dell, I have had to put up with a dying computer for the last two years and a half years (note that they computer is not quite three years old). At first this was not too bad, just a Blue-Screen-of-Death every once in a while, until it finally escalated to the current issues. Fortunately I have been able to nurse the poor thing along, hoping that I could get it to last through university, as it got increasingly worse. And, instead of dying some time inconvenient last semester, it just had to hang on long enough that there was no hope of getting things fixed before I left the country. It just had to wait until I was out of the country, where the warranty does not hold. And, even better, I still have at least two months on my warranty.

Things like this are completely typical for me. It is a good thing that I am not superstitious, because if I were, I am sure that I would be hunkered down somewhere, waiting for Armageddon. This is just the crowning glory of what has been a chain of interesting events, that, if I had been State-side, would have just been a passing phase that I would have looked at as being rather amusing. Since I am abroad these things tend to pile up a little bit, and, while trifling, are a little more irritating. ‘Good grief,’ says Charlie Brown. No wonder. If my luck continues like this, I will take up ‘Good grief’ as my mantra.

I am now getting powered into reviewing-my-options mode – similar to the mode that our esteemed president was in at the time of the State of the Union Address. Hopefully my reviewing process will yield better fruit than his “process” of review did.

Speaking of politics. As much as I enjoy following politics (why did I not major in poli-sci? – Do not ask me, I have yet to figure it out), I am already starting to get worn out by the constant presidential/Hilary/Obama coverage. You would think that it was currently January 2008 and we were gearing into the first round of primaries. It is my hope that every one will chill out over the summer and we will not have constant coverage of who is running for president. And, frankly, if the media focused more on who WAS NOT running for president, it would take a lot less time. [Except, that would include Al Gore, and every one has a lot to say about Al Gore.]

Enough of politics (who talks about that stuff anyway?). If anyone is keeping track: I had an altercation with a door today. It won, of course, as the doors always do. I will never understand why I have so much trouble with things like door handles, especially the lever kind. (Note: German door handles are all levers, I have yet to see a knob.) You would think that, since I just used the door handle to open the door, I would know where the handle is and manage to keep my arms from getting caught on it. Apparently not.

25 February 2007
I will begin today’s commentary by relating an observation of mine from sometime last week. First, I will tell you that the DLR has some programmes for school children, and once a week or so, two teenaged boys, not older than fifteen can be seen getting lunch in the canteen. On the day in question, as I was taking my tray to the kitchen, I noticed that these two boys were sitting at a table. They were finished with their meal, since the table had nothing on it. This was not remarkable in itself, except for this one detail: What were they doing while sitting at the table? They were not talking, or doing any conversing with each other. They were sitting at the table, playing there handheld gaming things. [I recently heard the PSP mentioned in an article, and this is what they were playing]. I tell you this because it was completely something you would see teenaged boys doing, but it was so out of place in a company cafeteria that I could not help but chuckle when I saw them.

Now, if you ever had any doubt, you know how awkward a story tell I am, and why it is probably good that I have recognised this and do not harbour any wish or have my heart set on (using two well worn clichés) being a writer. Truthfully, this journal (ok, yeah, I have succumbed to the craze, it really is a blog, but since I am currently composing this with pencil and paper, humour me.) is the most non-lab-report/technical writing that I have done since the research paper days ended in early high school (oh, how I miss those paper days…).

Another amusing thing. The student residence that I am living in has a ‘clubhouse’ on the premises that has a little bar in it. They put flyers up in the buildings to try to get people to come. This week’s flyer says (translated, of course) that most of household accidents happen at home. It then shows a Venn-diagram like picture, all filled in and captioned: Household accidents at home: 100%. At the bottom of the flyer is says, Better that you are not at home. This is quite a persuasive argument, and completely factual.

27 February 2007
That is the end of my… ok, not so faithful narrative, but you got the gist. I will now update you on what has been going on since. We were able to get my computer to function again by taking out the hard drive and then putting it back in again and pushing it very firmly into the case. Not so technical, but it worked. I am still going to get a new computer, I have had quite enough of this one. This one will get sent home with my father when he comes in a couple weeks, and will finally get sent to Dell. (By the way! Dad is coming! He has a meeting or conference, or something like that, in Norway, and is coming to see me a few days before that. We are going to go to Berlin, and maybe San Souci in Potsdam.) In summary: I have a working computer which will make finding a new one a lot easier and I will be able to stay in contact with the world until the new one arrives.

Breaking (Broken) News

2007-02-23T09:28:00.000+01:00

Those of you who have been acquainted with my computer these last couple of years know that it has been suffereing from a terminal form of hard drive failure. Well, as you might expect, it seems to have finally made its final spin. Last night, the ominous clicking started, so, as usual, I turned it off to save it from further distress. After a resting period, I attempted to reboot. To no avail. The bootable hard drive 0 is not to be found. Future options include trying to figure out if Dell will help, even though I am over seas, or, waiting for my paycheck to come in, and just replacing the poor soul. May it rest in peace.

President's Day and Karnival

2007-02-19T20:39:00.000+01:00

Background for the amusing anecdote of the day: There are restrooms on each floor of the building I work in at DLR. They are located in the area where the stairwells open up to each floor, which is also the crossway between sections of the building. This area is also enclosed by fire doors on both sides. One computer that I work on is on one side of this area and the other computer is on the other side. Hence, I am frequently crossing through this area. Now that the scene has been set, here is the amusing anecdote of the day: Today, as I went through this area (every five minutes I think) I noticed that there was a workman doing something in one of the restrooms (they do not have doors yet). It looked like, at one point, that he was painting the ceiling. The reason that this was amusing is because he did not have a light on. Usually the workmen will bring up a light to hang somewhere while they work, but this guy was working away on what ever he was working on… in the dark. You might not wonder as to why I found this slightly diverting: how are you supposed to see what you area painting if you cannot see the surface that you are painting. Beats me, but this guys seems to have it down.

Moving on. Today is President’s Day. Happy for those of you who are off work and school, and not so happy for those of you who are not. Tomorrow is Mardi Gras and the day after is Ash Wednesday. Which means: we are in full Karnival swing. Well, not really here, in the north of Germany, but if one goes a little south and east into Nordrhein-Westfallen and Köln and Düsseldorf then you would have had today, and perhaps tomorrow off as well, but for only the purpose of revelry. Braunschweig did have a parade yesterday and I have been told that it is the largest Karnival parade in the north of Germany.

On Saturday I managed to take myself down into the inner city and take some pictures for your edification. I also bought a pair of everyday shoes. This will take off the great burden from my running shoes, which is good, since while looking at shoes I looked at running shoes and comparable shoes to mine were some where around 100 € which is way more than I am willing to pay for running shoes.

On to the pictures…

These pictures are of what is left of the Burg 'Dankwarderode'. Which was the castle of Heinrich der Löwe. As you can probably tell the Lion was his symbol. The statue is a replica of the original, which is now in the museum that Dankwarderode has now been turned into. Benches such as these are all

around the Cathedral which was founded by Heinrich. The following pictures are of the Cathedral. You can sort of get the idea. The other pictures are other scenes from the Burgplatz and streets that branch off of it.

On the other side of the Burg is the Altrathaus of Braunschweig, it is quite an imposing structure.

I also made it out to the area where I work and took a couple pictures. I did not want to get too close to the airport. You never know who will accuse you of taking pictures for some nefarious purpose. The picture on the bottom is indeed the airport building. You can see air traffic control sitting on top of it. In the

pictures to the above that, you see the hill that the DLR compound sits on. My building is toward the back next to the airport building and is just along the runway... very distracting for aerospace engineers to have an excellent veiw of all planes and helicopters taking off and landing.

Now, since my computer is having issues, I will stop here before I loose everything. I also have more pictures of the woods. But, since they look like woods, I figured that if you want to see them, you will let me know. Speaking of which, if you would like an electric copy of any of the pictures you see on here, or you would like to see the other pictures that I have not posted, just let me know.

Next up: Avian Influenza

2007-02-16T21:29:00.000+01:00

To start off with, I would like to thank everyone who sent me Valentines. The Reese's’ heart lasted maybe half an hour and, as soon as I find some tape, the beautiful rose card is getting hung on the wall; my first wall decoration, by the bye. (I really need to do something about the white spans of the walls…)

I am sure by now that you have heard about the Peter-Pan-Peanut-Butter-Salmonella Outbreak. All I have to say is: THAT IS MY PEANUT BUTTER!!! (Please look to the right. That is my jar of peanut butter. Seriously.) I get sent this wonderful jar of peanut butter last week. And now I find out that I really ought not to eat any more of it. That makes me very very sad. I now have to wait for another jar to be sent from my mother, if she can find a jar in Bannerpole that does not start with the product code 2111 (as mine does). Though it might be interesting if she could not, because that would mean that the grocers have not taken it off the shelves. In which case, we could sue. Which might be, as I said, interesting.

So now, within the last week, I have found out that I have had a close call with Salmonella poisoning, as well as Consumption. (How a person can go for three (yes, three) months, with contagious TB without thinking of going to the doctor is beyond me. Especially when this person is a mechanical engineer, so supposedly he has some sort of brain in there—unless it has been rotted away by excessive Halo playing… but that is a whole other issue, and, since I have no idea who this kid is, except that I had a class with him last semester, I will not venture further into his mental capacity.) I now ask this question: What will it be next week? h5n1?
Or maybe the black plague. Which ever, I will be sure to tell you about it.

Also, last week was Fashion Week in New York City and this week was Fashion Week in London (on to Paris next week and Milan after that). Now, tell me, is this at all attractive? Feel free to zoom in on her face... try really really scary. Not to mention what-ever-it-is that she is wearing. A walking skeleton in an oddly shaped dress made out of some one's old bomber jacket.

On a completely different topic I would like to quote to you from Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach Third Edition by Daniel P. Raymer, pages 364 and 377, respectively:

“All real wings operate somewhere between 100 and 0% leading edge suction.” Really? That is a quite interesting statement, I had no idea that you could have more than one hundred percent or less than zero percent of anything. Oh well, maybe this is some thing that I have not learned yet, since I am but a mere undergraduate engineering student and not the Writer Of An AIAA Textbook. Who, by the way, dedicated his tome to ‘all who taught’ him. Which includes C. T. Sun of Structural Analysis fame. I will not say more, other than that he was probably one of the worst professors that I have ever had, but, since I was only taking Structural Analysis I, he was not inclined to think us intelligent enough for his condescension.

Continuing with a comment Mr. Raymer made about the necessities of making a grid for a panel method CFD code: “Rather than a brick wall appearance, the unstructured grid looks like the work of a demented spider attempting to capture your aircraft!” (One of many exclamations in this book. Completely unnecessary for a technical text.) Let us just say that, for the most part, engineers should stick to being engineers and writing boring engineering manuals and leave the riveting writing to their more scintillating, non-technical counterparts. This is a book on Aircraft Design, not a novel.

Stick it in the Pot on the Way to Bedlam.

2007-02-13T21:28:00.000+01:00

So, Purdue has called a snow recess. Amusing things always happen when I am not around. But, the crew team still has practice, which is completely typical. Maybe they will go out for a run on the golf course like we did last year in the middle of a blizzard (for which they did not close the school).

I have discovered one of my favourite German words. The word is Eintopf which is a stew or soup (an item always served on Thursdays (also known SchniPo Day, because some sort of Schnitzel and Pommes (French (or should I say… Freedom? Oh wait, that was so 2004) Fries) is always served)). If separated into its two parts Ein and Topf and literally translated one gets In and Pot. So, a stew is just something that has been thrown into the pot.

Other than that, Purdue is trying to drive me to Bedlam, and, despite the fact that I do really want to go to London, I do not think that that is the best way to achieve it. Hopefully their scheme to get me kicked out of school and out of Germany (thanks to saying my tuition is due two weeks before the loans are supposed to be disbursed and telling me that I should be tested for Consumption because some random kid wandered around campus for three months with TB.). Luckily I have a wonderful mother who is taking care of all of the mess for me.

My internet connexion is also trying to drive me mental. For periods on and off I cannot get any where online (in my web browser), but my radio stream and my IM, for the most part, work fine. Go figure.

Also, it looks like we might actually get a weekend with little to no rain (and maybe even some sun!), so if the forecast holds, I will be going into the city to get some pictures of the great buildings.

Handball, Football, and REAL Football.

2007-02-10T13:06:00.000+01:00

Yes, I have been procrastinating. So, since it is the weekend now, I will take a minute to up date you on what has been happening this week.

As I told you previously, I was invited to a Super Bowl party on Sunday. It was very long. Starting at noon and I did not go to bed until five (the game ended at four). What was very interesting was that the championship game for the Handball World Cup (nothing compares to Football in Germany, but Handball comes in as a distant second). The Cup took place in Germany and the Germans ended up defeating the Poles to win the Championship. So, that was very exciting. One interesting thing that I saw was that Aljazeera was one of the sponsors of the match.

Fast forward a hand full of hours to midnight thirty. The Super Bowl game finally starts. And guess who the colour commentator was for the German broadcast. None other than the most famous American football player in history… who am I kidding? It was totally Boris Becker, one of the best tennis players ever. And the only reason I could see that he was the colour was because he lives in Miami. Since we got a German feed, there were no Super Bowl adds, and, from what I have been hearing, I do not think that I missed a whole lot. We got to sit through a whole ton of TV timeouts and see what the players do between just about every play (they play so many advertisements). There were some interesting crowd shots, the funniest being when a kid, who what sitting behind his father, tapped his dad on the shoulder farthest from the kid (you know the drill, I am sure), and the father completely fell for it and looked around. It was funny mostly because it was caught on television. The game really was not that good, even though Peyton won. After some shakiness at the beginning, baby Rex fell into his normal routine, and the Colts got it together (after Mr. Perfect proved that he is not actually perfect after all).

In some more exciting football action, I went to a second tier Bundes Liga match yesterday. FC Köln at Eintracht Braunschweig. While rather damp, and not the best football I have ever seen, the atmosphere was amazing. It sort of reminded me of the Purdue Student Section at Ross-Ade times five thousand. And, even though Eintracht dominated the entire game, and had way more chances on goal, FC Köln won 1-0, on an own goal by one of Braunschweig’s defenders. Which was too bad. But it was still amazing to watch live European football.

Other than that, I have been having issues with my internet. I can listen to streaming radio for the most part, and talk to people on IM, but I cannot get the web browser to function. While annoying, it is not too bad, since it comes back eventually and everything is happy.

I hope all of you in the Midwest have not frozen to death and those of you in the Southwest are enjoying your balmy weather. We had about three to five centimetres of really wet snow on Thursday, but it all melted again on Friday, leaving some very large attempted snowmen on the green and in the middle of the path.

Yes, More...

2007-02-01T20:21:00.000+01:00

Yes, this is actually the cereal I bought yesterday. Why they think that something called Choco Blop would be appetising is beyond me.

Since these get published the most recently first, you will get to read this before you get to all of the pictures that follow. I guess that is good if you just want to get the news without all of the fluff.

With out further ado... the news update:

I have finally managed to collect all of the necessary documents to finally finish all paperwork with the DLR. This is happy. I am steaming along on my first assignment; I have started running my first rounds of CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) code, and we will see how it all turns out, and if any conclusions can be drawn from it. We will see.

Other than that, there is not a whole lot to say. It is still rainy, but not quite as cold as it was last week. Super Bowl on Sunday (yay for staying up really late for a game that begins at one in the morning); and if it is not too rainy, I might look around down town... there are some amazing buildings, so do not worry, more pictures will come...

Speaking of pictures....

Photographs II: The Walk Through the Woods

2007-02-01T19:39:00.000+01:00

My building (there are two others identical to it just to stage left) and some trees that were blown over by the storm the other week.

The trees, again. They are on the other side of a little stream that runs next to the path just outside my building.

The beginning of the path through the woods and a pile of logs (one of many in the wood) that are the remains of all of the trees that got blown over.

A path coming off of the main one. They have finally barricaded it off. For obvious reasons.

Coming up on the lake.

The lake.

Some nice views near the lake.

A fork in the path (sorry, at this point, I do take the one more traveled) and just down from where I enter onto Waggumer Weg. (Which was an actual road at one point.)

The large head. I have no idea what it is there for.

A little block just behind the head. The lion is the symbol of Heinrich der Löwe(1129-1195), the founder of Braunschweig, and hence the crest of Braunschweig.

Waggumer Weg. Did any one say.... Hobbit?

Further along Waggumer Weg. The railing was killed by a very large tree.

Back to the lake, you can just see it through the trees and another down tree, though I think its demise was not as recent as the others.

Debry and a little rivulet, the wood is full of these little streams.

Another downed tree, of a more recent demise.

The woods.

Photographs I and HARRY POTTER!!

2007-02-01T17:34:00.000+01:00

I am finally uploading the pictures that I took of my room and my route to work. And, I will be in Germany when the next Harry Potter book comes out (this will be the second time, since I was in Germany when the fifth one came out... bought it in Köln. Not the best way to see a city... Oh well), so there is no need to order expensive British versions from Amazon.co.uk. YAY! Anyway, on with the photographs.....

Part I: My Room

The Door. My room number and nom operandi.

View on entering (through the door) View from the other side of the room (by the window)

Pretty much the view of where the previous picture was taken and the view while sitting on the bed.

Looking into the bathroom (that has a stainless steal floor)

The wonderful proximity between the bed and the shower. As you can sort of see, the glass between the two is 'opaque'. All I have to say is that it is a good thing that this is a single occupant room....

I will post my walk to work in the next post.

Chapter V: In Which I Can Get on the Internet

2007-01-30T17:57:00.000+01:00

As it states above, I now have internet at my flat, and I will be able to post more regularly, instead of inundating you with scads at once.

22 January 2007
I hope that not too many of you stayed up too late finishing homework that you should have been doing while procrastinating and reading my last missive. Hopefully this one will not be as long, and hopefully I will have internet by the time you read this (by the end of this week *cross fingers*) and so it will not encompass nearly two weeks of my ramblings. Let me get you caught up on what has been happening this week…

I have again been called ‘un’- American, or rather, this one guy at work is totally stunned that I come from America, and probably thinks that I am a little crazy. My damnation, according to him, is a follows: I walk forty-five minutes to work, and forty-five minutes home (“An hour and a half of walking, do people back home know you do this?” Oh, if he only knew some of my friends…;-D); I speak a foreign language (yes, completely shocking for an American); and I know something about German food (well, that sort of goes hand in hand with learning a language, I have yet to meet a language class that does not introduce the subject of food as soon as they possibly can (and I have started four languages…) “Hello, my name is ___ and I like to eat (insert name of food here).”). In this case is was that I had had Döner-Kabab before and that I was not at all afraid to eat Currywurst for lunch (basically an hot dog type sausage, drowned in curry catsup (we will talk about that later) with some curry sprinkled on top. Quite tasty, if you like curry catsup (which all catsup is here, I have yet to see any other kind of ketchup, spelled in any variety here, and that includes my previous visit in high school). The one problem I have discovered with curry catsup is that it gets cold (it is always served warm) and congeals very quickly, making a nasty soggy cold blob of any french fry doused in it (everything is always drowned in curry catsup) that was not fortunate enough to be eaten quick enough. And that is my lament on curry catsup.

Speaking of lamenting, Lothar (the guy from above), laments that they never get normal Americans here. By normal he means fast-food-eating-fat-lazy-….you know. But what he really wants are some good gun-toting-beer-guzzling rednecks. I think he spent too much time at Virginia Tech (which is where he studied in the States). This was all brought on when I said that I had not yet been to a Mickey D’s or Subway or Burger King since being here and that I really had no thoughts of going, because I do not really like fast food that much.

Anyway. Other than that, I have discovered the wooded way to work (‘over the river and through the woods….’) and I must say that I feel very much like a Hobbit. I will take some pictures of it, and hopefully this post is accompanied by some of them. The only problem is that it is quite muddy (since it has been raining, again) and my shoes are a mess, which means when I try to do my knee exercises and core in the morning, my floor gets quite dirty. Despite the mud, the forest is wonderful, and I cannot wait for it to get less muddy so I can go explore it. Also, there are a lot of down trees from last week and all of the paths are not quite clear yet.

We are still having issues with paperwork, but hopefully we have gotten it all sorted out. I shall get my bank account tomorrow, which leads to internet!!! And then you can hear form me on a more regular basis, instead of weeks with nothing and then *splat* a ton, and then get my visa stamped on Wednesday morning, which leads to being able to sign my contract and me getting paid, so I can pay rent. I have endeavoured to start a list of all of the things that I have needed for paperwork here, so that future students can, hopefully, be guided by it, and not go through quite as much trouble as I have gone through.

And, before I forget… GO COLTS!! Hey hey! What an amazing Super Bowl this will be, at least for school, trapped right between the two, maybe not so much for the coasts… oh the poor networks. I will hopefully be able to watch it, as Dennis is hosting a Super Bowl party (complete, I am told, with PlayStation and Madden 2007, if it can be found, otherwise, it will have to be Madden 2001 *tear*). He is obsessed with American football, and sneers at REAL football. (Sounds like some one should be hit with a ‘Are you sure you are European?’ or really ‘Are you sure that you are not from America’).

That is the news for now, please stay tuned to any further updates…
I mean: Get to work on your sono-thermo-hydrolo-fusion-mass-transf…. um… get back to your neutrons, they are missing you.

26 January 2007
Update: I have a bank account, I have a visa, I have a work permit, and I have a contract. I officially start on Monday, and, if I am lucky, I will have internet shortly thereafter.

An amusing thing that I have noticed is that they have Star Date here. (A five minute daily show about astronomy and astrophysics topics that they play on some public radio stations.) They call it Stern Zeit. I first heard it earlier in the week, and what tipped me off what that they played the exact same music. I will now have to coordinate with my mother and find out if they talk about the same topics on each day. But I found that to be quite amusing.

It has finally become winter here. The temperature has been between -8 C and 0 C (umm…. So about 20 F – 32 F). We also go some snow yesterday, and when I left for work this morning, it was also snowing, and just before I left for my apartment, we were getting almost white out conditions out at the airport. Which, by the way is really cool, the building I am in is directly next to the airport building, so we are parallel to the runway. We have an excellent view of the few aeroplanes and helicopters that are taking off and landing.

My next note will come when I have Internet, unless something irresistible comes up, in which case I will write sooner.

PS: I finally finished Emma. It was better than I expected, but it will still not be my favourite, which is Northanger Abbey. Of whose amazing-ness I was reminded when I finished it the other day...

Rain, Beckham, Tea, Bureaucracy, and more Rain.

2007-01-19T10:09:00.000+01:00

I do not yet have internet, but since I am not on clock at work yet, I will take this moment to upload all that I have written in the last ten days. I hope that you have a while...

And let the saga begin:

10 January 2007
15:37:40 MST: Denver International Airport

On the way to Denver, it just sort of hit me: I am on my way to Germany for six and a half months. That is sort of a long time. You think I would have thought about that before, but these things do not really come to you until you are actually en route. I am still nervous (predictably), but that is mixed with a little excitement—a real adventure, all on my own.

The airport in Phoenix is still swarming with people from Ohio State and Florida. (What a horrible game that was, and way to go Big Ten for being completely typical and losing most of the bowl games). My flight was full of people returning to Columbus.

My flight to Denver went off with out incident, though it did take me over a half and hour to get through security. Too many people do not pay attention to the world and knew nothing about the liquids, gels, etc thing. Every time some suspect showed up the TSA person would have to stop the entire line and have some one come over and double check what they saw, and if there was still a problem, then some one else would have to come over to remove the bag from the scanner. At one point, while I was near the front, all four open lines were stopped, luckily they decided to cancel the problem on mine, I was able to get through a little faster.

I had forgotten how incredibly large the Denver airport is. In terminal A alone, there are ninety-nine gates and there are three terminals. I arrived in terminal B and had to take a train to terminal A, from which my flight to Frankfurt will be leaving. There is definitely a lot of snow in Denver. Luckily the next storm is not supposed to come through until tomorrow night, so no being snowed into DEN for me.

Hopefully I will be able to write a little bit on the train tomorrow.

11 January 2007
12:25:45 West European ST: Some where between Frankfurt and Braunschweig

The flight to Frankfurt did not start boarding (or planing? Since getting off is deplaning? *shrug*) until the time we were supposed to be taking off, but the prevailing tail wind was so strong that we still arrived over an hour before schedule. I had an aisle seat, and no one was sitting next to me. Everything went without incident, except for the last couple hours of the flight, after which I had lost my neck pillow. Luckily it was located before deplaning, no worse for being dropped in the aisle on the way to the lavatory. (I never do seem to remember to take it from around my head before I get up, especially when I am half asleep.

Once getting to Frankfurt, things were a little more arduous. The guy at the passport check heckled me for quite some time about the fact that I did not have a visa, when everyone else (both at TUB and Purdue and the airport) told me that I would do that once I arrived in Braunschweig. He kept telling me that he knew the law and the stupid people in the Amerika did not know the law… yada yada yada…Germans ;-D. Anyway, as is in evidence he let me through anyway, telling me that ‘Next time I need to get a visa, because entering without one is a criminal offence, and I should never do it again…’ but it is really so horrible as he made out, why did he let me into the country? Anyway, whatever the deal is, I am on my way and a visa will be acquired upon my visiting the international office, hopefully tomorrow.

Once the Heckler was done with me, I found my suitcase without incident, made it to the train station, purchased a ticket (at which time I realized that my check card was missing, more on that later), made it to the subway and the train; where I am now sitting, about two hours away from my final destination. I was able to make the train before the one I was planning to take, but I decided that I would rather sit around in Braunschweig, if necessary, than sit around in Frankfurt and risk some other disaster befalling me. Better to get to the destination and wait.

The check card. I noticed that it was missing, and immediately thought ‘Oh shit. Where did I leave it? Or how had it managed to fall out of my wallet, since I barely was able to crush it in there in the first place?’ I had been in the country less than an hour and I have already lost something, great. I continue with the task of purchasing a train ticket (thankfully the Visa was still there) and making my way to Braunschweig, since there was nothing I could do until I had a phone or access to the internet.

I pull out my computer, to start writing this entry, and I decide that I am sort of hungry. I had purchased some snaky items in Denver, for such an eventuality. As I am digging around for the cashews I see the edge of the receipt from the purchase. And it hits me: Maybe I did a typical me and STUFFED THE CARD IN THE BAG WITH THE RECEIPT. So I dug into the bag a little farther, and Lo! there was my check card. Huzzah. So my first crisis was averted, and all that needs to go right now is me successfully meeting Mario at the train station in Braunschweig.

13 January 2007
It is two days since I last wrote. My internet is not working yet, so I will have to wait until I meet with the building super on Tuesday. Until then, I will continue to write, with hopes of eventually being able to post.

After all of the trouble I kept getting myself into on Thursday, meeting Mario at the train station was no problem at all. We were scheduled to meet with Dennis, with my key, at 16:30, but he never showed up. He said he had a doctor’s appointment, but did not manage to inform us of that. So we got to go over to campus in the cold rain and wind (very similar to West Lafayette weather, actually) and stand in the Altgebäude for fifteen minutes, asking random people if they were Dennis.

After deciding that Dennis was not there, we went back to Mario’s apartment to wait and call Dennis when his class was over at 18:15. We finally met with him, and were able to get into my apartment.

My apartment: way nicer than the one at school (though no Catie L). It seems like they just finished remodelling: everything is very new and it smells sort of like paint. I was not expecting it, but I have a bathroom and a little fridge and range in my room, which is exciting, because I thought that it would be communal.

Yesterday I unpacked and then went on a Catie-esque walk ;-) (ie: really long). I walked down towards the city and then back again. It was a lot of fun walking around and taking everything in. In the evening, we went out to a thrift shop and got some basic homey things: pot, pan, utensils, broom, etc.

I am still not quite accustomed to the time here, I went to bed at ten and then woke up randomly between three and four and then managed to sleep until ten this morning. I certainly have been getting more sleep lately than I usually ever am able. I am sure that the bliss will not continue.

This afternoon I went to the market and got some more basic kitchen essentials: milk, sugar and tea. (I also got some more cheese, bread and some cereal (yes, cereal)). There was quite a debacle while putting away the carts, because, of the three rows, two had a different style cart in them and one did not have another cart in it. (I have to explain here, that to use a German shopping cart, you have to insert a 50 cent or 1 Euro piece. When you put you cart back, you get you coin back.) And since everyone wanted their coin back, there was quite a to do, as you can imagine. It was quite amusing, and since I did not have anything else to do, I stuck around until the problem was solved. (With the input of many a bystander, and finally the summoning of a store clerk.)

(By the way, I have a phone now. Send me an email if you want to get the number.)

15 January 2007
Happy Martin Luther King Day, and while all of you were off work and school (I will not start on my opinion of that), I had my first day of work today.

After some confusion as to which building near the airport I was to go, it was all figured out (with a couple of almost panicky phone calls to Mario), and I arrived at the correct location only five minutes late.

My day at work was longer than I intended, however, a lot of it was being shown around the place. I spent the rest of my time trying to figure out a programme and programme in it in VBScript. Which work out fine, until I realized that VBScript does not have arcsine functions, of which I was in need. Hence, I had to start all over again, in Jscript, which gave me quite a headache, because it would not function correctly. Luckily, just before I gave up, it decided to be happy. So I packed up and went back to my apartment.

Side note: German keyboards are very complicated, they have two different Alt keys, as well as Fn and Ctrl keys, and most every key on the keyboard (which is much bigger than the American Standard) has options for all of these. Though some of the keys are in interesting positions (from my perspective) I found it much more useful than the American keyboard.

My meetings with the International Office and the building super are tomorrow. Hopefully this means that my visas, work permits, and internet will be figured out. It is amazing how much time internet and television take, especially when you have not a whole of anything else to do. I can live without the television, but it would be really nice to have the internet. I never realised how much I depended on it. With the lack of modern media distractions, I have finished my book on Mr. Darcy’s perspective on the Pride and Prejudice story (which was very interesting), I have also finished Sense and Sensibility and I have started the real version of Pride and Prejudice. Yes, it does seem like I am on a Jane Austen kick, but it was the most economical (as far as weight, space, and number of stories) thing to bring. Luckily, there are still seven more stories left in that volume (if you count Emma, which I still have never been able to get through), as well as a book about the myths of the Bible, left for me to read. And if that all gets read, there is always my Aerodynamics textbook… ummm, fortunately I will not have quite as much reading time, since I will be at work at least part of the day, and I think I will start running, once I get my knees back up to shape.

16 January 2007
DAVID BECKHAM IS COMING TO THE US. He must be mental. (This information, I heard while in the International Office, said in German, so I was not too sure that is what I heard and was then confirmed while talking to my mother on the phone this evening.) Catie, we have a new task: Go to LA to see a Galaxy game. Good thing they have always been one of my favourite MLS teams (yay Kobe Jones).

17 January 2007
I was informed today that I do not look like a ‘typical American girl’. I am not really sure what a typical American girl looks like, but I guess I might be able to take it as a compliment. More bureaucratic blah today: To get a visa, I need to wait on my work contract, and because of some issues with that, hopefully it will be done on Monday, and because I do not have a visa, I cannot get a bank account, and because I do not have a bank account, I cannot get internet, because, evidently you have to pay, or make some sort of security fee, or whatever. So it means that I will not have internet for at least a couple more weeks, since the International Office is only open on Mondays and Wednesdays, so I will have to wait until next Wednesday to go back to them to turn in my paperwork with my contract. AAHHHH!!! This is insane. Though it would be nice to have access to my email and be able to communicate easier with people at home, I can live for a couple more weeks with out the ‘Net, it would just be something else to do while I am in my room. I gets dark quite early here, the sun starts setting around four, and I would go walking, but I do not really want to do that in the dark, so, that leaves me with about six hours in the afternoon with which to try not to eat all of my food, work on my cross stitch and read, all with the constant background of my music. When I am done typing this, though I am going to surf the German airwaves and see what they have to offer. (My music, as much and as varied as it is, is starting to get old.)

I successfully managed to do my laundry today. Nothing died and I did not break the washing machine or the dryer. The other good thing about that is that I have clean clothes now.

19 January 2007

As a postscript, I will add that my paperwork will hopefully be finished on Monday, when I will be able to get a bank account and thence, internet at my apartment. We had quite a large storm last evening, many trees were blown over and there was a lot of nice lightning.

I have not died...

2007-01-18T10:12:00.000+01:00

I have not fallen off off the edge of the world, but I am having trouble with some paper work, which means I do not have internet at my apartment yet. I am still writing, and I will post the entirity of it when I get internet, which will hopefully be by the end of next week.

Insomnia...

2007-01-08T06:47:00.000+01:00

It has been a long time since I had trouble sleeping because of excitement and nerves, but lately I have been feeling like it is the night before the first day of school. Since I am unable to sleep, I thought that I might do something semi-productive.

I have started getting ready to pack. My goal is to take only one suitcase and my carry-on. We will see how successful I am. Other than that, everything is set. My flight leaves from Phoenix on Wednesday. I then have a layover in Denver before the ten and a half hour flight to Frankfurt. From there, I will take the train to Braunschweig, where I will be picked up by Mario, a former exchange student to Purdue, with whom I have been corresponding. Then to my apartment.

I technically have an official minder, whose name is Dennis. Dennis is supposed to be picking up my keys and things to my apartment, but I have only corresponded with him once, and have no idea when I will be meeting him. Unless Dennis manages to find his email soon (his only email to me seemed to be a little on the scatterbrained side) and let me know when and where we can meet, I might be keyless. I hope that this will not be a large deterrent, since I am living in a University apartment and presumably they will have an extra set of keys.

I have been requested to be at the DLR at 10:00 am Monday morning. However, I will only be working part-time, so I will have ample time to explore the city and the University; as well as brush up on my German, which I have been sorely neglecting for the last two and a half years. Since I do not think that talking to yourself in German qualifies as keeping in practice. Especially since my German conversation was never very good. Luckily I think most of the work at the DLR is done in English, so I will have plenty of time to work on my German before attempting to take classes in it.

My plan is to write a bit while I am travelling, to keep track of my thoughts on the trip before I become overwhelmed (‘You can be overwhelmed and under whelmed, but can you just be whelmed?’) with the events of arriving in Braunschweig and getting settled into my apartment. If I do manage to keep to that plan, I should have a chain posting from the long trip sometime on Friday or Saturday. (8:00 am MST Wednesday to 4:00 pm Germany time Thursday equals 24 hours by car, plane and train from Flag to Braunschweig (ahhh!!), if I am correct in thinking that Germany time is eight hours ahead of Mountain Standard Time)

The Beginning...

2007-01-05T02:30:00.000+01:00

It is currently just under a week before I leave for Germany and I will not be back to the States until the end of July, just in time to head back to school. I decided that an interesting way to share my experiences with my family and friends in the States was to create an online journal. Taa daa! Here it is.

I suppose that I can start by explaining where I am going to be and what exactly I will be doing (as far as I know right now, that is).

I will be living in the city of Braunschweig, Germany. In English-speaking countries, it is also known as Brunswick. Braunschweig is located in North-Central Germany, a little southeast of Hannover and west-southwest of Berlin, also known as the little red smudge on the map to the right. Braunschweig is home to the Braunschweig Technical University (TUB) and a branch of the Deutches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR) which is the German Aerospace Centre, an institute similar to that of America’s NASA. In the impending months I will be working at the Aerodynamics Institute at the DLR as well as taking a class or two at TUB.

As of the moment, that is about all I know of the particulars, but surely I will be able to apprise you of more details when I arrive in Braunschweig and become acquainted with my life there.