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