The Final Weekend

Hey. So. I had originally planned to use this day, Saturday, September 10th, as a day to revel in the city, and bid adieu. UNFORTUNATELY, when I entered the city centered, I was met with THIS mess:

A SEA OF PEOPLE!!! AAAAAHHHH!!!!!

So. I didn't get to walk around very easily or quickly. QUITE A HEADACHE! And I didn't even know this was going on! NOBODY TELLS ME ANYTHING! Either that, or it could be because I don't speak German that all the notices and warnings of goings-on escape my attention. Sigh. This event today which had swallowed the city whole was some sort of Red Bull-sponsored biking thing. Think x-games, but only for bikes, and it was a trail that went through the entire city. Map of the course:

Oh, and my camera wanted to tell me that the little golden plaque
to the left was a face. "Um, NO, facefinder, you are WRONG!!"

So all those last-minute souvenirs will have to wait. ;-)

Also, this is the last time to tell me what you'd like me to bring back to you. Leave a comment, and I'll acquiesce to your request.

Thursday evening after work, I went out to dinner with Herr Willner and his family (wife, daughter, and daughter's bf). To a chinese restaurant. And honestly, that evening, talking German the entire time, was the most fun I'd had in one evening during my entire stay. :D Oh, and I had a chance to snap a pic of the restaurant sign. Quite a hoot:

hahahahahaha

 Toni M., one of Ben and Corey's coworkers at Leoni in Kitzingen, had an extra ticket to the Nürnberg Ice Tiger's last preseason game last night (professional ice hockey). OF COURSE I SAID YES!! It was fun. I bought a hat, and Toni let me borrow one of his many many jerseys.

Heeey, Toni!

THE MASCOT!!! after this picture he
"smooched" me  on the cheek.

And tomorrow, the last day in this final weekend, I might just pack up my stuffages. And live off a pile of clean clothes for the final three days. :D THE END IS NEAR.

An End to the Family

...visit, that is!

Alright. I’m getting exhausted from blogging 5+ months worth of stuff for all you kiddies to read, but I know that I must persevere!! Therefore, I’m sorry for lack of quality from this point on.

All of this is written in bits an pieces, so I’m sorry for the discontinuity.

Saturday (waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in August somewhere, when they visited), I join Mom and Dad for breakfast at their hotel. It’s probably not allowed, but since they’re paying for Karin’s breakfast and she never eats, we figure it’s okay if I pick up the slack. I tried my best! We left shortly thereafter and headed towards Baden-Baden, which is sort of at “the beginning” of the Schwarzwald. As we got closer and closer, things started to look more and more French. We stop for about 25 minutes to run over to a café named “Koenig.” COOL. Then we spend 75 minutes trying to escape Baden-Baden (apparently a tunnel that we needed to get through was closed off, so the GPS lady was no help at all).

We come to Freiburg. Which is pretty much the heart and soul of Schwarzwald. Sorta. We drive into the pedestrian zone, but it looks like through traffic is permitted. Check in to the hotel, dump our stuff in our rooms (ALSO in the attic with no elevator! I am CURSED!!). Karin and I had windows which opened to the skinny alleyway, while mom and dad’s room had prime windows facing the street.

((EPIPHANY!! I never want to write my blog entries while I’m at work A) because that’s not what I’m supposed to do at work, and B) the keyboard is too high for me to be comfortable typing for extended periods of time. I really really like my computer’s feel to it as I type. AND SO, when I get home from work, I don’t feel like blogging, so it was a catch-22 (or something). Maybe an endless cycle of irony. Anyway, back to my story.)

Clock tower

So we get back to the car to try to find parking. Here’s where things got hairy. So we’re putzing along... continuing on eastwards from a point of origin which google maps tells me is actually at 47.993414° N, 7.850524° E. The road narrows. The pedestrians are looking more and more like beasts from the Black Lagoon, hungry for human flesh. The buildings lean in closer. Then the road disappeared. No really, it kind of disappeared. We stop. It seems like everyone is staring at us, and we can’t tell whether we’re allowed to drive forwards anymore, because NOWHERE IN GERMANY IS THERE AN ADEQUATE AMOUNT OF ROAD SIGNS!!!! So dad backs up a little bit, and goes up the hill to the left. Following a car. Or what we THOUGHT was a car. We go that way, before any of these pedestrian monsters try to eat us. We pass a monument. Wow, this really is a pedestrian zone. HOW did we get here? Oh well, might as well forge ahead, and hope we bust through it. Hey! Here’s a street! Hmm... it has tram tracks on it... Oh well! LET’S DO IT!! And all this time, we’re trying not to get run over by the trams, or drive into the gutter water troughs, or hit a pedestrian, and ALL THIS TIME, I’m cowering in the back, freaking out because I’m pretty sure that we’re not allowed to be driving where we’re driving. Long story short (...too late), we survive. And park. And walk to Hausbrauerei Feierling.

Note: The water trough thingies which are located where the gutters would be on pretty much every street in the downtown area of Freiburg used to serve a purpose. Something about there being either no fire brigade, or the houses were SUPER flammable (they flammed easily), so these troughs provided anti-fire measures. Also, if you stopped a couple water gutters up, the street would be flooded in no time flat.

Yes, this is their REGULAR Bier. It's
unfiltered, so that's why it is cloudy and
looks like a wheat beer. SO YUMMY!!

As we order, I repeat what my family says in English, to the waitress in German. I didn’t realize how rude that might have seemed until she walked away. Oops. So I drink my wheat beer. And it is delicious. And we eat our food. Equally delicious. And then, time stands still when I get my Feierling beer. Because: It. Is. GLORIOUS!!!!!!! Honestly, it was the best beer I’d had since being in Germany. So yummy. The only thing I can compare it to, in the states, is a better version of Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat. Seriously. So I’m feeling good, and when the waitress comes over to talk to us again, I didn’t even bother to translate anything into German. Haha. We take one more walk around, get some Häagendazs ice cream, mom tells me to inform the worker that there’s a hair in the display item (mission accomplished), and return to the hotel, victorious.

Duckies, swimming in one of the
gutter/water troughs which are
ALL OVER in Freiburg!

Wooden wall carving. I want one.



Flying Buttresses!!!



Sunday. What happened Sunday? I know that we drove around, checked out the cathedral pretty thoroughly (where my camera decided to kick the bucket), raided the souvenir shop (where I got an awesome satchel/bag/purse thing!!!), drank some hot cocoa (channeling the essence of cocoa bean... it was that bitter), and then left! The next eon was spent winding through the mountains of the Schwarzwald and the clouds and rain. It was very beautiful! Pretty sure dad drove the wrong way. But in his defense, he did take the shortest path to the Shell station. Point for dad!

And theeennnn..... I think we went to Hummelsteiner Park? The Biergarten? No, my previous blog tells me that we did that on Friday. Sooo... AH YES!! We sat down in the Biergarten area of the hotel where my fam was staying, and we all had one last Bier together in Germany. Aahhh!! :D And petted the kitty. The end. Then they left me :(

Thus endeth the visit by my famileee.

Family, Part II

Sunday Mawnin. Breffast! There was a small child in the room which wailed every 14 minutes, like clockwork. Highly annoying. And apparently, Karin never eats Breakfast. We check outta there, then something glorious happens. Sitting in the car, waiting for mom and Karin to wrap things up and join us, Dad and I notice that, on the car’s LCD display, there’s a button that says NAV. And immediately I start banging my head against the dashboard. WHY?! Why couldn’t we have seen it before?!?! The british lady calmly tells us how to navigate towards the castles, and we all hang on her every word, eyes wide open in delight.

View from the courtyard at Hohenschwangau.

The line to the ticket office was a mile long! AAAaaaaahhh!! Though it goes quickly enough. One of the girls behind us in the snaking part of the line looked exactly like Kelly, one of Karin’s high school buddies. We survived anyways, and climbed the lesser mountain to tour Hohenschwangau. This was the older castle, and unlike Neuschwanstein, its construction was completed, and people actually lived here for a long time. The artwork in this castle depicted legends, some of which were true. (Neuschwanstein’s artwork depicted Wagner’s operas.)

After the tour, we had a couple hours to kill before our tour of the other castle, so we messed around in the souvenir shops, and had lunch/dinner in the biergarten (where we totally creeped on the people at the table next to us who had an ADORABLE baby). For some reason, I was reading my watch wrong, and thought we didn’t have enough time for much, and we split into teams, one to get the food, one to get the beer. Then, when I realized that we actually had an hour-and-a-half, I ran over to tell dad, in the food line with Karin, and he said “Well in that case, I’ll have a beer!” The food was good, and it was fun to further teach my family in the ways of the German “Prost!”

Properly prosting.

Tower of Nürnbergers

Castle. Home. WITH a navigation system. It was so lovely. When we rolled into Nürnberg, there was no extra bed in Mom and Dad’s room like they had requested. Karin can come and sleep on a couch in my apartment! No problem! But more immediately, we were all hungry. Mom had found an interesting biergarten in one of her guide books, so we went there to check it out. When we got there, the place was empty, and there was just one waiter guy, cleaning a table. I walked up and asked if the kitchen was already closed. He said almost, so order quickly! We get the menus, choose, and when he comes back, we tell him, but then he says “We only have this and these. Everything else is impossible.” So we ordered a This for 4 people, and it turned out to be a tree/tower thing of Nürnbergers, which are tiny bratwursts. They were grilled, boiled, smoked, or white, and they were DELICIOUS!!! The tower also had sauerkraut and potato salad and stuff. It was so delicious. So then, after a tutorial to dad to not tip a lot (because they don’t expect it! Plus they get 10% of the bill anyways, whether you tip them anything or not.), I led my fam the circuitous way back to the car, and grew insanely proud of my city. :]

During the week while my family was here, I worked every day, as usual. While I was at work, they were free to roam. For one, they have the means to do so, (a car, and money, the lack of which prevented Erik (and presently, Mel as well) from venturing out on his own when he visited) and there were only so many places we could all go as a group in the evenings. So all I can document here are our escapades in the evenings!

Us, in the Hauptmarkt, with the Frauenkirche
in the background

Monday, I took them to the biergarten in Whörder Wiese. The super cheap, ballpark-esque biergarten. Most biergartens in Germany have menus and waiters, but this one was super low-maintenance buffet-like. I have mentioned it before, since I’d been there twice before: once with Erik, and again when Bridget, Justin, Corey V, and Ben last visited Nürnberg. I once again ordered the “Drei im Weggla,” the three Nürnberger wursts in theeee most deeeelicious roll EVAR!! Dad got the grilled Fleisch, which turned out to be very very good. When Karin tried to order her Radler, the barman seemed tickled. Karin, do you remember what he said? I can’t. :( After feeding, we walked from the park and crossed what seemed like the width of the Altstadt and stormed the castle! The gates were closed! Rats. But the rest was open, so I got to show them the viewpoint, and the imperial gardens! We even found a door in the wall open, so for the first time, I was in the wall around the city! But then a groundskeeper of the castle found us and threw us out into the cold.

Bar Füßer

Tuesday, Dirndl Day!! I find the green plaid one that I loved earlier, and re-compare it to the light blue one I also liked, and get the blue one because its stripes were bigger and less likely to enduce cross-eyed-ness. Mom also helped. Though, unfortunately, they didn’t have the cheap necklaces in blue. :( Once we emerged, victorious, we headed over to dine at Bar Füßer. Good German Fun. :D They brew their bier in-haus. It was alright! Though it tasted a lot like Budweiser. (I think… man I forget if it was this beer or the beer at some other place.) After dinner, I take them to the irish pub where Corey and Ben and I watched the FCN.1 vs. Bayern-München Fußball game. I buy everyone a Fransiskaner Weißbier, and much enjoyment was experienced.

Wednesday, Mom and Dad dropped Karin off at my place, and they go off to have a lovely anniversary dinner at Nassauer Keller (super swanky place with nice music and suits of armour as decoration!), which is in the basement of the only remaining tower of many, which used to house one family each and serve as their line of defense against attackers. Karin and I spend the time watching trashy TV, where we take much pleasure in yelling enthusiastically at the idiotic characters. I also make spaghetti.

Rotbier!

Thursday. Once again, into the Altstadt! This time, we are waylaid by a rogue souvenir shop, where I apparently bought 14 postcards. We dress our wounds, assess damages, pick ourselves up and move on. When we walked places, it usually ended up being Karin and me in the lead. More often than not, Karin or I would glance back only to find that mom was 100 yards behind us, trying to photograph something. It became comical for us, and Karin would shout in mock-fury “she’s fired!!!” For the record, mom was probably fired a total of 300 times over the course of the whole visit. :D We make it up to the Albrecht Dürer Haus. Dürer was a super famous Renaissance painter dude. The tour of the house is run by a woman dressed in period clothing, posing as his wife, and it goes through, telling about the life of the painter, the construction/arrangement of the house, life back then, and the art/trade of painting in the Renaissance era. The only tour on that day was in German, so we got to carry around nifty (read: jenk) little audio guide thingies. Both people attending the entrance were very pleasant and jovial Germans! When they joked around with dad, I was dumbstruck and wanted to shout, “You’re not acting like real Germans!! Snap out of it!!” After our self-driven tour, we stopped in at Hausbrauerei Altstadthof, and I introduced them to the Rotbier (rot=red). And THEN…. SCHÄUFELEWÄRTSCHAFT!!!!! This is the restaurant whose specialty is Schäufele. We gorged ourselves on pig shoulders, and it was delicious! Also mom got a beer thrown at her. By the waitress. On accident. Oops.

Friday, not much was done. A bunch of pictures were taken of Karin and me as we wore our dirndls, followed by a visit to Hummelsteiner Park Biergarten, then all parties went to sleep.

Prüfeld

We began the testing process in earnest! Or at least, we established a testing area and contraption. It is exciting to finally be doing something tangible! Months of theoretics and number crunching is coming to life. With that said, I’d forgotten just how guess-and-check testing can be. Herr Rectanus and I first went down to the set-up Tuesday and were introduced to it. There, we asked the guys running the environment to move around some of the parts, and to add another. We came back today, and ran it, just to see if everything was in order. Yet another thing wasn’t right, so we discussed with the Supervisor what we could do, then we left them to do it. Waiting, waiting, waiting. So at 1:30 yesterday, here’s the exciting part, I went to the Prüfeld by myself and held my own! Granted, I could tell that the guy who’s building/tweaking this testing object for us was trying to talk more clearly with me. Because one second, it was fine, then an older guy walked in and started pointing at and poking the set-up and talking a mile a minute in heavy Fränkisch, and our guy responded in kind. Sigh. But anyways, the moral is that I survived a half hour of real work in German on my own!!!

Sequence of testing events:
Meet with Paul and Ebert, discuss issue.
Meet with Sicherheitsüberweisung guy and Rectanus, get safety passes.
Meet with Paul and Rectanus, outline desired test, hand over contraptions and orifice plates.
Meet in the test field, ask for a second pressure manometer to be installed.
Meet in the test field, digital flow rate meter is not working.
Meet in the test field, second pressure meter registers negative, ask for the system loop of oil to be shortened to eliminate this error.
Meet in the test field, realize that the pressure meters are in the wrong place, ask for them to be moved.

Aaaaand that’s where we stand, right now. Waiting, waiting, waiting. This step is proving to be tricky, due to the connections of the parts. The guys who are helping us, as well as this room they’ve got us in, remind me of the maintenance department at Aurora. Both places have the same equipment, machines, components, tools, and smell (lubricant oil/grease and metal shavings). Speaking of smell, there’s been a couple times where I walked through the upper lever of the assembly, and caught a whiff that reminded me strongly of Aurora. When I looked around, I was not surprised to find that I was standing right next to the motor painting booth!! (For those of you not familiar with my time at Aurora, while on co-op there, I had to walk past or through the paint department in order to go anywhere. So the smell of commercial paint is very familiar, and, dare I say, home-like.)

Family, Part Won

I get the feeling that, in the USA, wheat beer is looked upon as a not very manly beer choice. I said as much to a fellow ICP student and he said “yea i suppose so. but thats because most americans are stupid, uncultured, and dont appreciate anything different other than the normal watery beer they drink called pee.” Here in Germany, manly men order wheat beers whenever they darn well feel like it. That’s the way it should be.

The last week in July, the excitement was building towards Friday, for when Mom Dad and Karin were coming to visit! They rented a car, but had no way to contact me once they were here, so we agreed to meet up on my way home from work. As in, I leave work at 4, walk down the street, and they intercept me before I get to my apartment. It worked pretty well! I could see mom’s face peering out through the window of the car from 50 yards away, and I had to chuckle. MY FAMILY’S IN TOWN!!!! (Though it’s pretty much only half of my family, I’m still pumped that they’re here.)

Salzburg!

Very first thing we did? Bakery. After a visit to my apartment to finish packing and whatnot, and sending emails to myself with a google map picture of our route to Salzburg, and copy-pasting the written directions into a note on the iPod, we ate our baked goods, and then set off. I was navigator! Since it was my iPod which had our directions. I must say, the car ride down was uneventful. After a missed exit, we didn’t have to go too far out of our way; since Salzburg is a pretty big city, there are several exits. Using my handy-dandy map app, I helped us cross the city and get to that B&B mom was looking at. WELL, the lights were off and the sign said Full Up, so no dice. We checked another cute little place, but much closer to the city center, and nobody answered the door. So we circle around to the Holiday Inn we passed on the way in. Full. Check across the street, in the Mercure. Full. BUT, there’s ANOTHER Mercure around the corner, and they have rooms available! Sweet! At this point, it was probably around 10:45 PM. Mom’s Rick Steve’s Germany book had a couple food places listed, which were open late. There was one a block-and-a-half away! YAAAY! We walk there through a light rain. This place was adorable. I wanted to take it home with me! We need cool little pubs like this back home. To heck with the sports bars. I want brick walls and wooden framing EVERYWHERE!! The tables had all been re-surfaced, but you could tell how ancient they were because the table legs looked pretty beat-up by generations of Austrians continually failing at scooting their chairs in. Their kitchen was closed. Rats! So we ordered beers. They were Lecker.

Prosting like 'muricans. Note in the background the awesome Bar decor...

Like mother, like daughter. Cursed with red cheeks.

The next day, we were going on a Sound of Music tour, and we learned that they would pick us up from the hotel if we asked them. Well, getting mom’s email account on my iPod was not working, so we sent an email through mine, thinking that if we didn’t hear back before 8 AM Saturday, that we would just go ahead and try to find parking around where the tour office is.

Gazebo!!!!!! THE Gazebo!

Saturday. Breakfast was fun. Pointing out all the german-ities about it all to the rents and the seeeester was also fun. Check out. Drive over to city center. We miss the office the first time, so we had to drive through the suuuuper skinny windy street of the altstadt to loop back around, to actually see it, then we loop around AGAIN, then dad drops us off, and goes to park somewheres. The Sound of Music Tour thing was 5 hours long and very fun! It was a super small tour, and we took it with one other couple (Jim and Tonya) who lives in Arizona. So the vehicle we used was a yellow van that screamed “BOB’S TOURS!!!” Our tour guide was a british lady named Sandra. She was very fun to listen to! We learned a ton about The Sound of Music, including the real story, fun facts about the movie (the real Maria appears in the background of one shot!), interesting things about the actors and actresses and directors and whatnot, all the while driving around and visiting recognizable spots from the movie. One stop was the lake that was behind the house in the movie (the real house did NOT have a lake!), the gravel path where the bus dropped Maria/Julie Andrews off, a field where we could spin if we wanted to, a luge track (? FUN!!), a stop to get soup (where the view would have been amazing, if it hadn’t been rainy cold and cloudy and misty everywhere in the mountains), the church in the movie where they got hitched (but not in real life… that place is off-limits to tourists), and a dirndl and lederhosen shop! Karin bought her dirndl there, but I didn’t because there was a gorgeous one in Nürnberg that I saw when the boys were getting their L-hosen, and I want THAT one. We had a marvelous time! Though we did run late, almost too late; Sandra had to apologize over and over to somebody squawking (By the way, that might be the first time in my entire life that I have typed or written the word squawk. Funny word.) at her over the phone. We walked through some sort of garden, and over the river and up the street towards the car.

THE REASON FOR THIS PICTURE: Lederhosen man in the background.
Awesome.

So, Saturday afternoon, we set off towards Füssen and the castles! We find the highway, and start going west. The road maps were no help at all. At an exit, we try to raid an information booth, but it was barren of helpful infos. Luckily it was next to a burger king. LUNCH! We make a pit stop further on, and kauf (buy) this super sweet road map of Germany. Altogether, we decide to drive through Munich over to route 17, which is the Romantic Road. I was reading my book all through Munich, and it sounded very harrowing, navigating only using the maps. By this point, mom was lamenting that she had turned down the chance for a gps. Oh man, could we have certainly used that!!! But anyways, we finally get to Füssen, and their informational booth has information on local lodging and a telephone so you could call them and ask about rooms. WELL. A bunch were full up, and a couple had only ONE double room, and FINALLY, we found a place that had a room for four peeps. “Would you like to make a reservation?” “YES PLEASE!” Since I had no map in my iPod for Füssen (there exists no such map for this app), I took a picture of the map that the booth provided, and tried to use that to navigate over to the hotel. Well, this map doesn’t denote which roads are only walking paths, and roads aren’t prominently marked with their names, so after turning around twice (or was it three times? Can’t remember..), we finally pull up and check in and relax. Earlier, looking for a car-tastic path to this hotel, we drove by the restaurant that Tonya and Jim had recommended, so we decided to walk there and eat, make merry, and then go to sleep.

Immer vorwärts mit der Arbeit!

Although, it certainly helps if the bossman is in town... After his two-week Urlaub (vacation), he was back in the office last Tuesday (July 26). I was looking forward to that day so I could show him my progress and see about moving forward with my project¹. Well, everybody else in the department seemed to share the same sentiments. So while every tenured engineer attacked his desk constantly with discussions, questions, and small presentations (as well as all the recreational banter that seems to happen a lot here), and also while he was summoned to a landslide of meetings and whatnot, I figured it would be better for his sanity that I wait for him to come to me. I knew he wouldn’t forget me, seeing as I only had the one task for the entire two weeks he was out, coupled with the fact that he can see me from his desk, and has to walk past me whenever he walks in and out of the room (or even anywhere else… it’s a pretty big room, and I’m in the middle and he’s at the far end).

So, eventually, Thursday late afternoon (July 28), he sits with me for 30-45 minutes, and Ebert comes over and we discuss what progress had been made on the orifice project, that we’ve established what we need to test, with what parameters, etc. Nothing huge can be done on that for two weeks, since it will be Ebert’s turn to go on vacation. Then Ebert was dismissed, and Willner and I discussed my progress on my other project. Before he left for vacation, I had given him the correct numbers needed by the customer. He wanted to explore the options for roughly estimating these numbers and how accurate it would be. This would be in case someone else asks for the moments of inertia for a different motor, enabling us to avoid bothering the fellows downstairs (with the 3D modeling software and the capability to actually find these moments of inertia) from their normal, much more important engineering duties. I did so, and that day (Thursday) he decided, looking at my numbers, that it was too rough of an estimate to field future requests.

He told me that he is hesitant to email the customer with the original information without the means to repeat this “feat” in the future, because he’s worried that, since we did it this once for them, they’ll want the same info for another motor, and we’d have to jump through the same hoops again. 1) the hoops weren’t that difficult to jump through in the first place, 2) the fact that the customer asked for this information WAY BACK IN FEBRUARY is extremely troubling to me. I don’t know if that’s because I’m new to engineering, or if I’m an American. But that’s so typically German, to be 1500% sure of things before moving forward.

So anyways. Monday, I got to meet two new guys. This made sense, since on Friday, Nik Svendensen came around and spoke to everyone for one last time, since it was his last Arbeitstag her at Siemens, as the Danish intern. So Monday, his replacement came around, Hendrik Jensen. Super intense red hair, wearing the bluest shirt I’ve ever seen. Went cross-eyed just looking in his direction. He seemed nice. AND, we had a new intern here on my floor, though I didn’t catch his name. I think it’s the start of a new shift of interns… something to do with semesters.

Tuesday, just before Willner leaves, he says to me "we'll talk tomorrow morning!" So I panicked, and started doing a flurry of work on my froo-froo documents (read: support documents) for my excel sheets, since those were the only items of real work I had on my itinerary. And I made much progress. It was glorious. I hadn’t felt that kind of lit fire underneath me since I was at Aurora. So I got my stuff done. I love panic. BUT, come Wednesday morning, it turned out that he just wanted help for the co-op evaluation schtuff. Ah. Awesome. I explain a few terms for him, and he explains to me that, though he knows he should be doing this on his own, he doesn’t want to grade me unfairly. All he knows is the German way of things, and “I don’t know how you do it in America.” Fair ‘nuff. And how considerate! So we schedule to do that Thursday at 9:30.

Later in the day on Wednesday, Herr Rectanus comes to me and says that we have a safety meeting sometime tomorrow, and that he’d send me an email confirming it. Rectanus is standing in for Ebert while Ebert’s on his vacation. Okay! I get the email, and it’s scheduled for Thursday at 9:30. Sigh. Double booked.

Thursday, I do the safety meeting, and so does Herr Rectanus, since he hadn’t had it before either. We get the written ones, his German, mine English. I swear I was gonna fall asleep. After about 10 minutes, Rectanus gets up and fetches the powerpoint about it, and goes over it with me. At one point he goes, auf Deutsch, “This is so clear that it’s almost stupid to say it.” Yep. We call that common sense.

                        1. contacting this customer about what we’ve finally concluded about these moments of inertia

Today's Blog Post. The REAL one!

Not that the other one I posted today was fake, but this is the one that I was planning on posting. The other was a (happy?) mistake.

This weekend was fun! I originally didn’t have anything planned but another lazy weekend in which I could gather strength for the upcoming weekends when family and friends will be visiting, BUT, as last week progressed, people started making plans. First, Justin and I were talking about the Harry Potter movie, and how I was going to see it on Tuesday in the english speaking theater. And he decided that he might be coming in town, and also wanted to see the movie, so there HA. Then I told Bridget what he was doing, and she decided that it was indeed a brilliant idea, and she wanted on board!! Even though she had seen the movie already. But she HADN’T seen Nürnberg yet. So she and Speer were coming. Then the twins (Ben and Corey, both working at LEONI, which is why we call them the twins) were interested in coming and watching the movie and hanging out Friday night, though they had to be somewhere Saturday. THEN, it turned out that the twins could stay Saturday night, TOO! PARTY WEEKEND! Haha. All these shenanigans were ALMOST enough to distract me from the fact that this was the weekend at home when the FIRST EVER Pub Golf outing was being held in Bloomington. And that was sort of the birthday celebration for Erik. Double sadness. But anyways. I get off of work Friday at 5, call Bridget, and she says COME TO THE HBF NOW!! And the following sequence of events, with no time inbetween, went: hang up, buy tram ticket, collect change, turn around and board tram. Phew! Great timing! We go to the biergarten in Wöhrder Wiese to meet up with the boys and have delicious Nürnberger wurst things in a DELICIOUS bread roll. The beer was okay. Since it had been raining for practically the past WEEK, a few lakes had sprung up in the park. It was hilarious watching all the kid bikers ride slowly through them, though one almost fell over when it was deeper than he thought, LOL.

Then Wukie led the way to the movie theater he had found that was huge and legit, and SO unlike the cute little podunk theater I had found to watch POTC. But the only english version this place had was in 3D. Poo. Oh alright. But wait, we don’t have enough unreserved seats available. Wait five minutes, then they’ll be freed up and you can try again. Awesome. So of course there were two chunks of seats that were freed up, and we jumped on them! The 3D glasses were HUUUUGE!!!!!! Dude. But hey, that’s actually a good idea, since I was unaware of them (for the most part) and they weren’t annoying the entire movie. Speaking of the movie. Meh. It was alright. Made me miss the books. So much more intense. Well anyways, then, we went to O’Shea’s Irish Pub! This place with an awesome atmosphere. Makes me so happy.... next time I’m there (and there WILL BE a next time) I’ll take a peeekchur. So, I’m in Germany, in an Irish pub. What do I order? A British beer, of course! Isn’t Newcastle Brown Ale English? Oh well, it made my statement hilarious, so I’m keeping it. So there, ha. After that, we walked clear across town to another bar that wukie had in mind to check out. Super tiny and super packed. I was not happy. I think after that, most of the other bars were closed, so we just took the bus home.

Wukie said we’d start our outing at 10. Ha. Woke up to an angry alarm clock, confused about my location. Hop in the shower, while Corey and Bridget were still asleep on the couches. Hop out of the shower, get dressed, and C&B are STILL asleep! Whaaaat. I made eggs for everyone. Nom. Then we got over to wukie’s. At 11. Oh well. Wukie’s apt was nice! Like mine, his was initially unfurnished when he moved in, but he had seen fit to equip his more fully. He had an actual bedframe (plus mattress), desk, shelves, and short clothesrack which he had assembled. The couch came “from upstairs.” We walked to the bakery, nom-ed on a couple baked goods. And walked forever until we got to Dutzenteich Park. Wukie walks fast. And it’s hard to tell just how fast he goes! I think it’s because he has minimal upper body movement, which is deceptive.

Frisbee in the park. Walked around the structure which was supposed to be Hitler’s attempts at luring the olympics to Nürnberg. Then we walked to a huge open concert-like space, where a live orchestra and an opra singer were practicing. She was wearing jeans. Bamf. It was wicked awesome. Then the orchestra played the can can. HAHAHAHA. We left to go to Wukie’s apartment, and walked through a neighborhood that just blew my mind. Epicly. I was thinking it was a mix between Germany, America, and Rome. Don’t ask. So after walking soooo much, we all went up to Wukie’s apt, and sat down to rest. Wukie didn’t sit down. Odd. And five minutes later, he was like alright, let’s go! And nobody moved. It’s like, dude, take a BREAK! AND a chill pill!!!

Well anyways, we eventually got underway, and walked through downtown. Stopped somewhere for a beer.

I’m boring myself with this. But I’ll keep on keeping on, just cuz that’s what I’m supposed to be doing here. Plus there’s a chance that you might NOT be bored.

This place served red beer. Amber, I think. And since it was in a clay bierstein, I had to take them at their word, because it was dark to my eyes. Whoever thought of first serving beer in a glass or other transparent vessel was BRILLIANT! I like being able to see my beer. If I have to choke down the swill, I want to be able to appreciate it visually as well! By golly. This place was right next to the place which did the tours of the undergrounds of Nürnberg! So we stopped in and asked about tour times. But then we decided that of the three things that we still wanted to do today, seeing the castle, touring the underground, and going to the lederhosen shop, we definitely wanted to see the castle. So, we elected to do that first. Blah blah, walk around the castle, blah blah, decided that the twins REALLY wanted to buy Lederhosen, blah blah, we go there. I find a bench to sit on and rest my feet, and relax, and almost fall asleep, thanks to that half liter of beer I had consumed. They looked adorable when they tried on their lederhosen and plaid shirts... Though Ben’s arms were too long. He has the same problem Erik does, where in order to get a shirt that fits the arm length, it is usually too large around the torso. Or with a shirt that fits the torso, it is way too short in the arms. Komisch. Even Justin got another shirt to go with his lederhosen that he already bought, so I decided that I should do a little shopping too. I didn’t buy anything yet. That will come, in time, and definitely before I leave. But I have decided that I kinda want a plaid one. I like plaid. And here in Germany you see it EVERYWHERE!! I like that part, lol. Makes me fit in. :D By the time we were done there, it was too late to go to the underground tours. Awwww. Rats.

Schäufele!!!! YUMMY!!!!!

Then we split up, Bridget and I to go to my apartment, where I called Erik. The boys went to Wukie’s apartment to drop off their wares, and so Corey could actually pick up his luggage so he could make himself presentable upon waking up in the morning, since he had to go to the airport to pick up his girlfriend and her parents on Sunday. Well, it took the boys quite some time to get there, all except for Wukie, and they hung out for a few minutes. We finally go to leave, and Corey’s standing in my kitchen and asks “So, whose Snickers are those?” Erik had left nearly a full bag of snickers here, and I put them on the kitchen table thinking my roommate would eat them. “Oh, they’re Erik’s, and I don’t like them, so they’re fair game.” Upon saying this, all three boys swarmed the Snickers. It was quite hilarious, especially since Ben was outside and almost to the stairs when I said this, and came running back inside! Lol. So we take the tram to where we changed lines and waited for the next 9 for about 15 minutes, just so we could get off at the next stop. We honestly could’ve walked that distance in the same time. So we’re standing there, on the phone with Wukie, who now tells us that the place we are eating at is right around that area where we waited for forever. OOPS. And that he might not be able to hold down this 6 person table all by himself much longer. Double oops. So we man up and walk the rest of the way. This place is called Schäufelewirtschaft, and all it serves is Schäufele. Super yummy. I walked past it weeks earlier when I went a couple weeks ago to check out the hotel mom dad and Karin will be staying in this upcoming week-and-a-half. They serve a red beer, too! Some of us got the red beer, and a couple got the dunkel. Well, the dunkel looked slightly red, which made the red look a little like wheat. Halfway through, Nathan gets a text from a couch surfer he’d been in contact with about hanging out tonight, and runs outside, and comes back in with Marlena (at least I think that’s what her name was), a girl from France who’s in town visiting her relatives. Cool! We were headed out, when the hostess lady comes over and we all pay, and then she asks where we’re headed. To another bar! She says that’s nice, and proceeds to tell us about some tragedy that happened in some other night club or bar where a kid shot some people, and I may have heard something about a bomb, but I can’t be sure. She finished the story. Then she’s like, “have fun!!” yeah, okay.

At the English Pub

We found a cat running around!! Corey, feeling
separation anxiety from his cats hat home, was super
worried about it, and even called the number on its tags.

We get to the altstadt, then walk over to an irish bar, which was overflowing, and we all stand there like, No way are we going in there. So we go to the English Pub a few blocks over. And as soon as we walk in, we hear a million voices speaking in English with British accents. It was lovely! All day, the twins had been lauding Gutmann beer, so of course when we saw it on the menu, we all wanted to try it. But I saw the Murphy’s Irish Red, and decided to continue the trend for the day, which was apparently “Drink Red Beer!!” so that’s what I ordered. Bridget was right behind me and ordered the Gutmann wheat beer, and apparently the tap was out after they drew it for her. Oops! Sorry boys. So we all sat down and asked Marlena to teach us some French. She asked us what we wanted to know. We were all quiet, thinking about it, and one of the boys blurts out “Where’s the nearest bar?” And we all had a bear of a time trying to repeat the French mess that came out of her mouth. It was hilarious! The boys played darts there, because they had a real dart board! Not the plastic cheap darts that can be found everywhere. Or rather, CAN’T be found everywhere, since darts is kind of a rare species here. But THIS was the first real dart board with which contact was made. Wukie at one point walked Marlena to the bus stop. And we eventually all walked home. I don’t know why. Why couldn’t we use the NightLine? Shrug.

Corey got up and left at around 9 in the morning. I told him to wake me so that I could see him off or something like that. It turned into me blinking at him, grunting, then shutting the door after him. Followed by diving into my pillow for another three hours. Yes, this weekend was a fun one. :D

And just this evening, the entire engineering department went out for a night on the town!! (read: dinner at a biergarten.) The drinks were on Siemens. How nice! It was all delicious. I ordered a salad. My first outright vegetables since I can’t remember. And don’t worry... I googled ecoli+germany today and didn’t get any recent articles, so I think it’s over. And I was in luck, since I ended up sitting next to two people who weren’t native to the Nürnberg area, so I could understand them completely! Yaaaay.

The Missing Blog Post

Well. Sorry. But it seems I forgot to write a blog after our women's team lost the world cup championship game. I don't know what happened, but I realize that I managed to write something on my school's blog, so I will copy and paste it here. Seriously, seriously, don't know what happened. Weird. Anyways! Here is the missing post!

Posted on 6/19 (I know, right?!):
Well, as it turns out, there was construction on the road to the Women’s World Cup. (corney, but my post previous to this was "Road to the Women's World Cup, so it makes sense! Quit laughing!!!) We played Japan at 8:45 PM local time Sunday night. It was a good game! Really, it was! Though, the japanese team was so very polished with all their passes, and it seemed that if a pass of ours got intercepted (which happened a lot), all the progress we’d just made would be erased in a heartbeat. They are very excellent ball handlers, (Should that be ball footlers?) so they would play keep-away with our ladies all the way down the field, until one of ours hulked up and went into a berserker rage and took away possession on grounds of pure adrenaline. That’s how the game went the entire time, back and forth, back and forth. We had some very close shots on goal, and should’ve scored three goals in regulation instead of just one. As fate, fortune, and luck (the dumb kind) would have it, the game went to PKs, whereupon we just simply fell apart, and Japan won. Which they earned, and even needed, but I still would have liked for us to win. Oh well.

On to more boring topics!

Morning light is a glorious thing. Soft and gentle. And refreshing. I’ve always marveled at the huge difference there is between dawn and dusk. At first, you’d think the two would be the same, no? Same angle to the earth and all… But you can tell that, as the sun is falling, the sunshine is clearly exhausted. Mornings are fresh and lovely. I like to enjoy them. If I can ever wake up early enough.

Garbage trucks are an alarm clock’s best friend.

I was walking to work, and I had a revelation. I was waiting for the “okay to walk” signal, when I looked around and asked myself how life would be here if I were 100% fluent in German (as opposed to 0.5%)? Or in other words, how would you like it here if it were an English-speaking city/country? Conclusion: I could love it here! I like this new perspective, it makes things so much more pleasant!

I wonder if people at work are starting to not believe me when I ask them to slow down when they talk. When the thing that I want to say is simple enough, I blaze through the sentences. And I’m starting to pick up on the little speech abbreviations and word mash-ups that these frankisch folk seem to do so often! So at one point, it’s clear as mud, and in the next second, I might find that I have a squeegee to combat said mud. With such a sporadic pattern of clarity, in which I understand completely, I really do wonder if people think I’m jerking their leg. Because I’m really not. Maybe I should fake it, and dumb down my German when I talk. Here’s a common occurance.
Them: lightning fast German Frankisch gibberish
Me: blank stare. Shift weight, shift eyes, and then mumble “…könnten Sie wiederholen, bitte“ (could you please repeat yourself)
Them: blähblähblähblähbläh
Me: Blank stare. Blink. Sigh inwardly. Sputter, “tut mir leid, aber Sie sprechen sehr schnell. Noch mal bitte, langam?“ (I’m sorry, but you talk very fast. Once more please, slowly?)
Them: Könnten… Sie… mir… die… Nummern… geben? (Could you give me the numbers?)
Me: (said somewhat quickly) „Ja klar! Ich habe die Nummern gerade gerechnet. Whelche Nummern wollen Sie genau haben?“ (Yes, of course! I have just calculated the numbers. Exactly which numbers would you like?)
Them: caeoicnaöoweimfwaeofiaewoiaöefiancaweu
[Me: NOoooo! That’s not what I meant! I take it back! I take it baaaaack!!!]

Alarm Clocks and Soccer

THURSDAY: After almost as many nights spent here as in the USA in the past week, I now conclude that it was easier dealing with the jet lag going back home. Simply because by the time I woke up in the morning in the states, it was already daylight in Germany. As opposed to waking up at 6 AM this morning in Germany and wanting to die. Why would I be insane enough to wake up at 6, you ask? To skype with the boy. But he had fallen asleep and seemed near death, so since I probably looked the same, we agreed that it was a bad idea, and both went back to sleep. I made the mistake of setting my alarms for 30 mins and an hour later. That was stupid. As a result, the next time I looked at the clock, it said 9:50. AWESOME.

TUESDAY: At least in the anecdote above, I set my alarms again. Today I was not so lucky. Let me begin by saying that I was in bed, head on pillow, eyes closed at a reasonable hour last night, namely, a little after 10. So when I wake up at 6, eight hours of sleep should be enough to tide me over until the next night, right? WRONG! My alarm goes off at 6, I fuzzily remember that Erik was going to try to stay awake (to skype) until midnight, but that it wasn’t likely he’d be up (due to a late-night tangle with the laundry he had on Sunday night, resulting in a mere four hours of sleep). I open my computer in a daze. Surprisingly, I’m lucid enough to sign out and sign back in to Skype (to “refresh” my contacts list). I lie back onto my [monsterously huge] pillow, and grow even more out of it, and when 6:26 rolls around and still no Erik, I close the computer and bury my face into my pillow. THREE-AND-A-HALF HOURS LATER... I wake up again, and see that it’s 9:47. AWESOME. Although this time, I didn’t shoot out of bed and get ready in a whirlwind. My body was not capable of such involved and complicated maneuvers. I promise you, if anyone had seen me lurch out of bed or try to put my shoes on, they would have thought I was drunk. I got almost 12 hours of sleep! Why was I having so much trouble!?!?

Although, I DID enjoy dreaming about Rothenburg after I fell back to sleep again, even though I was riding around in a self-propelled mining cart on tracks, as the small baby I was carrying was giving me lip, and generally being rude to me.

And this morning, it was once again rough getting up. I tricked myself into getting out of bed by promising myself Rockstar. Little did I know, I didn't really mean it. But at least I got up on time! :D

I was finishing dinner Sunday night when I finally remembered that USA was playing Brazil. OOPS! So I sat down to watch in the 20th minute. My roommate Mary hung around sporadically, rotating studying (for a humongous test she had today, Wednesday) and watching the game. I was having a grand ol' time, yelling at our players to be smart(er), and yelling at Marta and her minions to quit whining and being jerks. Mary had been in her room for about the last 10 minutes in OT, so when I started yelling in exuberance over our super last second goal (!), she ran out to see what the deal was. THAT GAME WAS SO COOL!!! Well, scratch that. For the vast majority of the game, it was frustrating. I was watching in German, so what I think the deal was with that penalty kick was that the refs all simultaneously fainted before the kick, and when they came to, our goalie Hope Solo was celebrating and Brazilians everywhere were whining, so they made up a nonsense call and said Solo left the line. (Anyone, PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong.) Which is RIDICULOUS, she shuffled directly to her left, and NEVER left the line. Even the people at work on Monday were telling me it was bogus, and that in the men's games they allow the goalie to cheat soooo much more than what Solo did at that point. But anyway, in soccer, the ref is Supreme Ruler of All that is Breathing, Green, or Spherical, so when Marta (grrrr, smolder smolder smolder) made that goal, I wasn't too pleased. And I was even angrier when, two or so minutes into OT, a Brazilian player, WHO WAS CLEARLY OFFSIDES, passed to Marta who scored. I was supremely upset with soccer. But hey, it's not over til the fat lady sings. And I was urging our ladies on so intensely, eyes riveted to the screen in the final stoppage time, hope rising with every yard that Carli Lloyd and Christie Rapinoe ran closer to the goal, and I couldn't have torn my eyes away if I wanted to, when Rapino hit that beautiful cross (or whatever the soccer-literate call a kick across the field) to the far post, and BANG-BANG. Header into the net by Wambach. Just like that, and we were tied! And THAT'S when things were exciting. Goals happen so rarely in soccer, that goals are practically precious. And all the waiting and pent-up emotion and appreciation for how tough it is to score all collide and all the fans lose their collective minds. THAT'S why we americans find soccer fans all over the world to be crazy fanatics. And we can't stand all the waiting in between goals, and we just wanna see somebody MAULED!! Well, not really. But I know for Erik, that's probably why he'll never truly like the sport. All the running running running running and nothing to show because the game ended 0-0, and that's alright, because both teams did a MARVELOUS job setting plays up and getting situated, and it was a beautiful overall attack and it was a good try. Yeah, but who wins?! Well, that mentality aside, I think the thrill of finally making that goal, or seeing an excellent goalie in action (my position, at one point in my brief career as a fall recreational league soccer player) is enough to keep me interested. In soccer, that is.

Which is why I'm completely pumped for our game against France here in a couple minutes. I've also got it good, because the games here in Germany are broadcast on normal programming, so I am available to watch it. I've got it even BETTER in the sense that since I'm in the same country where it's taking place, so all the games happen at reasonable hours for me, as opposed to the games at the men's world cup last year, which took place during work, and I'd have to keep the gametracker thing up on my computer. And I could read a sentence ever two minutes about what happened. So enthralling. Wooo. But HERE, I can watch it! On TV! After work! YAAY!

And here I leave you. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Baaaaack in the USA!! (for the weekend)

I AM SAFE! It’s wild to think that, a mere 22.5 hours ago I was still sitting on the back porch at the farm, eating food (leftover from 4^th of July feast (on the 3^rd)) visiting with family (also leftover from the 4^th of July).  And now I sit back in my apartment in Nürnberg. Dude.

THEY INCLUDED TWIX IN THE LUNCH PACK!!!
SOOOOO HAPPY!!!

Friday’s traveling was rather uneventful. I was everywhere that I needed to be, at the appropriate time. I took the fast train to Frankfurt because A) I didn’t need an extra hour of public transportation added to the entire day of traveling I had ahead of me, and B) I like sleeping in. On the 8 hour flight to Washington Dulles airport (in D.C.), I sat next to Roy, an electrical engineer who was travelling on a business trip. He was pleasant. It was a very weird sensation, returning to the U.S. but I was super ecstatic! We were ALL funneled down into a customs area. When I got my first glimpse of the crowd that was gathered there, I was overwhelmed with love for my fellow countryman. 45 minutes later, I was overwhelmed with hatred for U.S. airline security policies. For some reason, IT TOOK FOREVER!!!!! But then I survived, and left all those peons in the dust. But I was still in a pleasant mood, because hey, I was comin’ home!! At the gate, since it was a regional flight I was to take next, there were three slated to depart from this same gate all within 10 minutes of each other. WELL, the Jacksonville flight was having trouble getting their stuff together; 15 after their slated departure time, they STILL didn’t have a crew!! Apparently they eventually found the B-team, which would have to suffice, and they were sent on their way. Then the guy (Indian fellow) called for the next flight to board to Peetsburgh. And THEN it was Day-ton’s turn. Our stewardess was extremely fun, witty, and engaging. She blamed her gregariousness on it being her last flight. “Turn your cell phones to OFF Off off, or else Rambo’s coming for you!” And later on in the spiel, she said “Do not tamper with the smoke detector in the bathroom, or else who’s coming for you?” and we all answered “Rambo!” She liked us! I sat next to a man (never got his name) who worked for BWI Group (?) as an industrial engineer. Said he travels maybe an average of 18 months a year! Eek! But he was super easy to talk to, and the entire hour-and-a-half flight from D.C. to Dayton, I didn’t read a single page of my book, or listen to a single song on the iPod. And I’m okay with that! :)

Mel and Grace were waiting to ambush me when I walked out of the gate. “Ambush” is too strong of a word, so perhaps they could’ve been waiting for me like this:

Grace and Mel (L, R)

And Grace was NOT as calm as that picture would lead you to believe. I was attacked several times. Goodness gracious. :) Seeing as I didn’t sleep too much on the marathon flight, I was resorting to hyperactivity to keep myself awake, and I must confess, we left quite a message on one of our AWOL roommate’s voicemails. Hahahahaha. :D They were kind enough to drive me home to pick up Miss Daisy! If there’s definitely one thing I miss about being in Germany, it’s being in control of my own transport (i.e., driving). And if there’s definitely a second thing I miss, it’s SKYLINE!!! Which is where we head to next. And I was satisfied.

Saturday morning, Wedding morning. All is well, except for being disoriented when my alarm clock on my iPod goes off at 8:30, except I forgot to change the time zone of the iPod, so it actually went off at 2:30. Oops. Erik shows up at the Tux at 9:25, demanding to know why I wasn’t ready at 9, when he CLEARLY picked 9:30 over 9. So I said, had he picked the earlier time, I would have been ready earlier! Silly boy. Time was spent collecting all the little things I had left behind me in the whirlwind I created during the one day pack-and-leave frenzy back in March.

We two, in our finery

I, Danielle, Emily Cost (hee hee hee! :D),
Megan, and that man (eek!) is Bobby Cost

Emily’s wedding: lovely, beautiful, and catholic. And as we sat down, I remembered that I had forgotten to tell Erik that she was catholic and that we’d have to sit through a mass in addition to the ceremony. Needless to say, we were BOTH surprised when the entire ordeal ceremony only took an hour! From the church, we went to a Wendy’s that was on the way to the reception hall, and got vanilla frostys.... mmmmmmmmmm :D We get to the reception hall, and the DJ starts playing music until the bride and groom get there. I remembered that I had neglected to Erik that there would be a lot of country music at this reception. Or at least more than he would prefer (which is zero). Haha, oops. There were a lot of people there who I hadn’t seen since high school! Okay, maybe not “a lot,” but a couple. Jeannette and her family told me they had placed bets on whether I would be wearing a dress or slacks. Kristen told me that she wanted me to get tipsy so she could hear me say that I liked hugs. It was fun!! Food was eaten, disgusting American beer was drank, and pictures were taken. :D I was very happy to be there and sharing in the celebration!! In no time, it was 6 PM and the party was over. Sadness. So I drove Erik back to his car on Moerline, and headed to the Farm to visit the Fam! Uncle Jack and Aunt Penny were grilling ribs and whatnot. Everyone finally got alltogether at the Farm, and the sun set at a reasonable hour. (not this 9:45 nonsense as in Germany) I exhausted my reserves of energy at 10 PM, and went to bed halfway through the fireworks.

And slept for a solid 10 hours. I think. George was a pleasant roommate this time. Either that or I fell asleep as soon as I hit the pillow, thus rendering his pleas for attention ineffective. Hmm, I’m thinking it was the latter. Food started getting to the house around 2, and people started getting there around 3. Erik’s dad (who works at Sam Adams downtown) brought a small cooler of beers from the plant. Among them was Sam Adams East-West Kölsch! Umlaut and everything! Before you ask, OF COURSE I had one! And for a split second after you take a sip, it does indeed have that bland, angry tang that is characteristic of the Kölsch Bier of Köln!! Not my favorite, but it was genuine nonetheless! I also had a regular Sam Adams, as well as Hardcore, a hard cider (get it? Haaaa...). So I was feeling good by the time we got around to playing Bocce ball after dinner.

Monday wasn’t much to speak of... Getting stuff together, Kroger-ing for provisions :D, and visiting with family until 4:30 (or so) when Mom Dad and I set off for Dayton airport. An hour-and-a-half later, we were still on the highway, I had already consumed my Big Boy (and vanilla root beer), so I was unoccupied, and starting to get rrreally really anxious that we hadn’t seen an airport yet. So in order to maintain my sanity (and that of my fellow passengers) I stopped talking after a short while. We stopped at a gas station and asked directions, and the guy dad asked turned around and pointed south down the highway in the direction from whence we came. Sigh, of course. But at least we had a definite direction now! 20 minutes later, we see a sign for the airport AND I-70, both at the same time. Incredible. On the way north, we saw NEITHER ONE. We were so confused, but we followed the airport sign just the same. And I made my flight. Chicago O’Hare is HUMONGOUS!!! So was the plane. I was worried, at the gate, that I would have to sit next to the huge group of schoolchildren, but they were at the front of my section in the plane, and I was just one row in front of the crew’s quarters, so I could hear them being real people, occasionally. I like American Airlines! Because the movies and such were much more user friendly than on United Airlines (or whatever airline I was using on my initial flights to and from Germany); I actually got to pick WHEN the movies started! And because they had such a good selection of movies that I actually wanted to see (as well as Tetris! Yeah, you read right, we could play GAMES on this flight!! WIN), I saw three movies and a tv show episode, and didn’t sleep at all. Not my smartest choice. So we touched down (after a moment just after landing, when the momentum of the plane lurched to the left for a second, and my stomach twisted and I pictured us all somersaulting on the runway. Guh) in London.  Another huge airport, but not as open as O’Hare, so it wasn’t as visually impressive. I sat there comatose (but still awake!) for an hour until we boarded this scary-looking jenk little airplane from British Airways. I don’t like chex mix. Landed in Frankfurt. Customs chap asked me where I was going. Last time (in March) the guy asked me what I was doing. Do they ask different questions each time? Regardless, I was taken aback. And also unlike last time, I wasn’t intimidated by  customs, having been through it a GRAND total of four times since March. Also kein Angst hier! Once the luggage FINALLY dropped onto the belt, I wandered for a grand total of 10 seconds until I realized I wasn’t in the main terminal. Took the fast train to Nürnberg. I was so ready to crash, but The Devil Wears Prada was there to comfort me. But only because it was a book, and very well-written. I finally got to Nü-town, finally got to my apartment, finally reached the top of the steps, and the first thing I did was collapse onto my bed. Aahhhh... The rest of yesterday evening is foggy, though I do remember checking Facebook, and being reminded by Karin to call our mother. Oops. This was 15 minutes before I wanted to go to bed. [As I stated before,] It seemed unreal that a mere 22 hours earlier, I was still talking to Uncle Eric, Aunt Diane, and Aunt Amy on the back porch of the Farm. So I called mom. I don’t remember much of the conversation, other than at one point I realized that she was talking an awful lot! How could anyone have so much to say at one point in time? Craziness. But I did, I think, manage to have an okay conversation, and we hung up, and I lost consciousness.

I “officially” woke up today at 6:30 (to the iPod; I missed my first alarm at 6), but napped/sprawled around in bed until 8. I still made it in to work on time! Woot. I was coasting until 10:45, when I started struggling with sleep. Then came lunch, and the fight got harder, so I had COFFEEEEEEE!!! With lots an’ lots of sugar. Nom. And that did the trick. As though it had slapped me, and screamed “YOU ARE IN GERMANY!!! Now wake up and ACT like it!” Or something like that. And I didn’t have a problem with latent jet lag for the remainder of the day! I got home from work (after standing 16 minutes and 41 seconds in a horrendous line at the post office!!), took a shower, and tried not to get distracted as I typed this blog post. Seeing as I got the first part of it done yesterday when I arrived (so THAT’S what I did all evening! Let’s play a game: whoever guesses correctly at what point I stopped writing last night, that person gets a fine prize! Hint: the part I wrote today should be more coherent.), I only had a portion of this to write, so it should not have taken me six hours. Goodness. Whelp, here ‘tis! :D

Bees, Lights, Food, Grammar, Caffeine, Blood, and Spelling. Could I BE more random?!

I woke up to my alarm, then heard an angry buzzing. It sounded like a huge fly drunkenly attacking the window trying to get out. Then I fell back asleep for about half an hour, came drowsily back into consciousness, and the buzzing sounded like a stream of water coming from the faucet in the bathroom and heavily landing on drain. And I exclaimed, "gosh, why is there SO much WATER?!" then I realized where I was and what was actually making the noise. I went to the window, and it was a bee! Failing miserably in trying to fly through the window. It was extremely single-minded in executing its "full steam ahead" attack plan against the window panes. It was slightly comical, lol. I rescued him, at any rate.

I like it when they leave the lights off at work. Especially in the morning, when all the blinds are most of the way drawn (to reduce glare on the computer monitors), because if the lights are on, it seems like winter: too artificially bright for the time of day and a little bit claustrophobic. Whenever I'm in a setting where the inside lights are the main source of illumination during the day (such as while it's super cloudy or stormy or wintery outside), it takes me back to elementary school. Don't know why. But I can guess that it's because we had inside recess in these cases, so I especially hated the über-illuminated classroom walls at that point in time. Just a thought.

Once again, I bought a pastry to eat at Frühstückspause, and what happens? They FEED us at work! At least this time I could leave the pastry off until lunchtime, since I packed my lunch. Brilliant plan? Yes, but only if I ever GOT hungry enough for lunch, which didn’t happen at all. You see, I decided to not let all these tenured engineers trample me on the way to the food this time, and I finally got the weißwurst instead of the leberkäse. Two weißwurst, plus one Butterbrezen (soft pretzel with butter in the middle . . . a butter sandwich!!! Better than Mayonnaise sammiches, but not much . . . haha!), plus one orange lemonade = full belly. I would have preferred the leberkäse, anyways!

Speaking of Weißwurst. Apparently one is not supposed to consume the skin. I ate half of one wurst, then looked around, and the others were peeling the skin off of the wurst before eating it! Oops.

Willner came to me once with the document whose English translation I corrected. He had a few questions, one of which brought up the subject of ending a sentence with a preposition. Ohh boy. He thought it was okay, and I very adamantly told him that it was grammatically wrong to do that. He was confused, because he thought it was right. Since it goes against everything that was said by every literature teacher I’ve ever had, I said no. It is wrong. And he looked down at the paper and said, “Okay. I go home now…” He was laughing as well, so I didn’t worry too much. :D

The coffee must have been strong today. Herr Bengl usually gets coffee, and I got a whiff of it. Whoo boy. That was enough caffeine for me to drive away the post-lunch drowsiness! Jeepers.

Had a bloody nose at work again, but this time the girl who sits in the corner (and who before yesterday I hadn't seen at work in about a month-and-a-half... NO clue why) came into the bathroom when I was in there, and we spoke for the first time. lol! and when she left, she asked something about them happening often, and I said the nosebleeds happen a lot, and she said whaaaaat, and left. I checked my nose, and the bleeding had stopped! And the girl re-entered the bathroom with an ice pack, and I was like Thanks, but it's done already. Good thing, too, since I wouldn't have had a clue about what to do with the ice pack.

Ashamed Admission of the Day: I never really knew how to really spell the capital of Kentucky. I was devastated to learn today that it's spelled Frankfort. Despair.